I'm With the Bears (14 page)
The moment we enter, the sound of this particular crowd is “To Cut a Long Story Short.”
Sharice gives a whoop that is very uncool, very unCrip, and makes me think, Dalek, I love you.
We head for the toilets and do our make-up, side by side. I am quivering. There's nothing quite like an eyelid brushed with fear. Sharice helps me get the blusher right. (Screw Planet Earth.) I put on my hat, she adjusts it. Then she takes me by the hand and leads me to the dance floor. Fah fah fah fah fashion!
Everyone looks, and I mean
everyone
.
Five minutes, then it's over. But they are the best five minutes of my life (so far).
Jack runs in and shouts, “Crips!”
“They followed us!” I say. “You set this up.”
I look at Sharice, expecting to see her smirking. She looks terrified.
“No!” she says. “I'd've known.”
You can't act that kind of fear.
Three major dogs scrabble down the stairs. Legs follow them, legs attached to Crips.
Say hello, wave goodbye.
“Come on,” I shout, grabbing Sharice by the hand.
We always have a getaway. This time, it's through a ventilation duct in the kitchen. Someone spent two days screwing a ladder into the aluminium. And that someone was me.
Jack leads the way. I let Sharice go after him. The footholds hold. A major dog sprints into the kitchen. I'm up off the ground, but it still gets its teeth into my trousers. Again.
I try to climb, but the dog's really heavy, and it's not letting go.
Then I hear a bang, a real one, and the dog falls down in its own red splatter.
“Come on,” shouts Sharice, sticking the gun back into its hiding place.
“Thanks,” I say.
We make it out onto the street, harlequin and me, and we peg it back to her flat.
I don't know why, but we laugh all the way.
“What about the bullet?” I ask, when we finally get our puff back. We're on her sofa. “Forensics and whatnot. They'll come for you.”
“That wasn't my weapon,” Sharice says. “Officially.”
She gets it out and shows it to me.
“Got it on a raid the other week,” she says.
I'm almost as impressed as I was by the make-up.
“How did they find the club?” I ask.
“Don't know,” she says. “But it wasn't us.”
“How can you be sure?”
“They'd be here already,” she replies with a smile.
This seems logical.
“What shall we do now?” I ask.
“Looks like it's another quiet night in,” she says.
We sit and stare at the television, screen the color of a dead sky.
by David Mitchell
Of all the folktales collected by the authors in the Autonomous Kurdish Region during 1998â99, the following modification of the Thoms-Bredon Cluster 14b (
On the Inadvisability of Geronticide
) [Narr. Ukbar Kishkiev /male /c.75 yrs /farmer /Guurjev Valley /1999 /trans. Avril Bredon and Bruno Thoms from Kurdish] illustrates best how an archetypal wisdom-narrative (one found in cultures as diametric as West Greenland Inuit [La Pointe & Cheng 1928], the Solomon Islands [Daphne Ng 1966] and Central African Republic [Coupland-Weir 1989]) can be mutated by the host-culture's folkways, topography and belief-hierarchies:
Here's a story I had from my wrinkled old aunt, who used to tell it as she worked on her loom,
click-clacketty, click-clacketty, click-clacketty
. Once upon a time there was a land called the Country of Youth where it was the law to give every man and woman a bottle of sleeping poison on the morning they turned sixty years of age. “The Elderly,” said the law, “have used up their allotted time. Why should we feed those wrinkled parasites while young, vigorous workers go hungry? Nature Herself culls the old: and we should, too.” And so, from the lowliest ragman to the Emperor himself, dwellers of the Country of Youth put their affairs into order ahead of time, and drank the poison before the sun set on their sixtieth birthday. The village or ward headman would then write the words “Honourably at Rest” on the family register. But woe betide any violators of the law! Offenders were hanged alongside their eldest child, and the whole family was dubbed “Parasites” and chased away. Little wonder that the Sixty Years Law was very, very seldom broken.
Now, outside a poor village between a bleak marsh and a blue forest in the Country of Youth, there lived a handsome young woodcutter called Haji. Haji's parents had both died of marsh-fever when he was a babe-in-arms, so the orphaned boy had been raised by his wise grandmother. As the old woman's fifty-ninth, and final, summer passed, Haji grew troubled.
Grandmother
, the young man reasoned,
spent her life caring for me, and teaching me everything I know. How can it be right that she is now tossed aside like a worn-out broom?
Haji built a cabin in the secret deeps of the blue forest. Shortly before harvest, when his grandmother was due to receive her sleeping potion, Haji revealed his plan. “Grandmother, there's a cabin for you in a safe place, in the woods. Please, go into hiding there.” At first the old woman refused, frightened of the danger to her grandson if the plot was discovered. But Haji was a determined young man. “The Sixty Year Law is a law of man, Grandmother: what about the law of God, written in our hearts?” Finally, the old woman was won over, and three days later, grim-faced Haji went to the headman's house with his grandmother's blood-soaked old robe. “I found this,” said Haji, “in the clearing where grandmother was checking our partridge traps. Wolves, I fear.” The headman was a lazy drunken sot who never dreamt the blood was from a suckling pig. Where, after all, could a white-haired old woman hide in the Country of Youth?
Well, summer passed, and autumn rusted the valleys. Raids by bandits over the mountain border had ruined the harvest in that region, so the Emperor decided that before winter closed the passes, he would raise a mounted army
A clattering pan on a stone floor tells me that Bruno is up. I bookmark my spot in our magnum opus, stow my precious reading glasses on the shelf, grab my stick and hobble down the hallway before he has the chance to hurt himself. By the exercise bicycleâused as a coat-stand for most of our marriageâBruno's trousers lay discarded. I smell, and then see, that he didn't use the privy. Another chore for the morning ahead: at least he didn't step in the mess like yesterday. In the kitchen Bruno is inspecting the fridge's innards, as if it were not a dead cupboard for turnips donated by Finbar but that cabinet of refrigerated wonders we all used to take for granted. “I was searching
every
where for you, Paola.” He calls me Paola on good days: on less lucid ones, he just gazes through me.
It's early, so I still have energy to say that I'm Avril, that Paola was his first wife, that Paola passed away many years ago.
“Why's”âmy half-naked husband blinksâ“the Internet down?”
“We've had no Internet for eight years, Bruno.”
For whose sake, I wonder, do I try to tether him to reality?
“How can I do research without Internet access?”
“Put this onâ” I take off my dressing gown “âit's chilly.”
He allows me to feed his limp arms into the sleeves.
I remember dressing Calvin when he was little . . .
. . . a balloon of grief inflates in my throat, and hurts.
Poor, poor Avril . . . shall we have a little cry?
Bruno frowns. “I'm expecting an email from Fran Worcester!”
Here we go again, forâliterally?âthe thousandth time.
“She's told the Vice-Chancellor to cut our funding, the witch!”
“Bruno, it's 2033: Fran Worcester's dead; the Vice-Chancellor's dead; our Uni was burnt by Rapturistsâ” I draw breath and wonder, as ever, where to stop?
Economics has eaten itself; dementia is eating you; climate change has crippled global agriculture; our government only has the means to hold the Cordon because Jīndà n-TransUral needs order on their farm.
Then I hear men outside, and horse's hoofs.
Must be Finbar. I grab my sheepskin cardigan.
On the ruckled yard that was once a patio, I find a cart made out of an old boat and car wheels, two Shire horses eating from a nose-bag, and one-two-three-four-five-six-seven strangersâall male. Where to begin? Two intruders are siphoning the paraffin from our tank into large plastic tubs; one perches on the Mitsubishiânow a henhouseâwriting something; another minds the horses; and the last three stand guard with guns cocked my way. Army hand-me-downs are in evidence, but the gang's piercings and insouciance all say “Casual Militia.” It's hard to guess ages in these feral times: the horse-minder might be as young as twelve or thirteen. They are unfazed by an elderly householder wielding a walking stick, and my sternest voice wavers, rather: “What's going on here, exactly?”
“We ownin' vis jooce Ol'lady,” states a jowly one in pungent dialect.
“You can bloody well
un
own it, and pour it back again!”
“Nohcandu Ol'lady. DisGov's requissyin' illegal stockpiles.”
“This âstockpile' is our
legal
quota. Less than five hundred liters.”
“More'n elsewheres now'days 'tis.” This gunman is pocked with smallpox. “S'tember's tanker's a No-Show at Terminal. Norf o'Cordon, I seen folk get spiked for a ten-liter placky o'jooce.”
Spurt by spurt, my paraffin is vanishing: I resort to bluff. “Listen: Captain Oscar Boru of the District Government happens to be my son-in-law, and if you know what's good for you . . .”
Their swapped smiles take the steam out of my sentence.
The one on the Mitsubishi speaks. “Mrs Bredon, am I right?”
I'm surprised by his cultured tone. “ âProfessor' Bredon.”
“Your neighbor,” he nods toward Finbar's, “gave us your name. He reckoned the lads would be less trigger-jumpy once we knew you're no threat.” He's about thirtyâthe age Calvin would beâand his demeanor (and Chinese Burberry flak-jacket) mark him out as leader. “Regarding Oscar Boru, Professor: you must be the fiftieth nearest and dearest of the good captain we've spoken to this week. The joke is that Boru's our main customerâeven the DG platoons are zip out of fuel. Hinterland's hogging every last drop.” He slaps the plastic tanks. “This'll shore up law and order.”
“You're gangsters,” I fix his eye, “without official sanction.”
“Official,” he tilts his head left and right, “unofficial: come
on
.”
“Thieves and thugs,” I grip my stick, “plain and simple.”
“Fink
we'
re fugs?” The jowly lieutenant's smile is what Bruno used to call “Post-Dental Age.” “Juss ya wait fo'va Jackdaws.”
He's trying to scare me. We live south of the Cordon.
The trees clack and grunt. A horse urinates.
“This fuel's ours,” states the leader. “Go back indoors.”
“Would
you
take orders from trespassing bandits?”
“Look,” he says, “nobody wants to hurt you, but our jobâ”
“
You
look, Che Guevara: winter's round the corner; my husband and I are in our sixties and we
need
that fuel; so if you think of yourself as a human being, listen to your conscience and put it
back
.”
“Y'oughta gra'itood,” says a siphoner, “w'aint takin' y'eats.”
“Sixty years' a crack o'whip,” says another. “I'll dead by sixty, I'll.”
Their lack of compassion is stony and without cracks.
I address the leader. “You're committing an immoral act.”
“Here's morality: oil's at three thousand dollars a barrel, in those dwindling zones where prices still mean anything. And we've got dependents, too. Our children will be manning the Cordon, ten years from now. This fuel improves our chances of having a future, of sorts.”
“That's justâ” what's the right word? “âsophistry.” Oh, what's the use? It's over their heads. “You won't get off the Peninsula. We look after our own out here.”
“Oha fink we
will
get off okay.” Jowls cocks his semi-auto.
“Whassa Sophie's Tree, Wyatt?” asks the boy with the horses.
“ âSophistry',” says the platoon leader. “Waster lingo. It means âslick bullshit.' Greek etymology, right, Professor?' He mocks my condescension. “My mum was aâ” he opens sarcastic quote marks “âa âlexicographer'.”
Sycamore leaves scurry around our ankles, rat-like.
“So you have a mother, too?” I change tack. “Tell me, ifâ”
There's a panicky yell of “Va top winder! Sniper!”
Swing and a swivel and a blur and weapons clickingâ
I turn around: Bruno is struggling to open the back window.
“Don't shoot!” I'm an old woman shouting in an awful dream where air is noise and my voice is feeble. “We don't have anyâ”
