From the Neck Up and Other Stories Page 3

  “You can ride with me,” he says.

  “That’s for management.”

  “I’m not management.”

  “I thought you said you were in charge of Sector K?”

  He doesn’t respond. I walk the entire way. At some point, in the corridors, he abandons the buggy.

  * * *

  I don’t like the way Lucas holds Daisy’s bandaged hand, as if he has a right to touch her and she would not have minded. The fact that she is dead does not change my feelings about this in the least: to touch someone, you should definitely have their permission.

  He stays very still, sitting on the side of the bed, just as I did a few hours earlier. The empty plates, stained orange with bean juice, have a strong smell that fills the room. I wish I had returned them to the refectory.

  “At least she didn’t die alone,” he says.

  “We all die alone.”

  “I’ve seen a lot of deaths and some of them were better than others.”

  “Then you weren’t seeing them properly,” I say. “Are you trying to thank me for staying with her? Or blame me for going back to work afterwards?”

  “I’m not saying either of those things,” he says.

  How incredibly easy it is for him to make me feel angry. What makes a good death, and what makes a bad death? Who is he to decide?

  “I think you should go now,” I say. He looks up at me as if he might refuse, but then he puts down Daisy’s hand and stands up.

  “I’ll get a crew to come by and take her – the body – away.”

  “No hurry.” I step back as he passes, folding my arms over my chest. I’m determined not to look at his face, but I can’t help myself – I need to see what’s there. The rough surfaces of his cheeks, the plain of his forehead, and more: there is something I recognise in his eyes and in an uncontrollable instant I feel my expression change to mirror his. It’s a great task, then, to hold on to my emotions until he’s gone, but I manage it. And then I’m alone.

  The sound spills out of me and uncurls to fill all corners of the room. It’s a deep, low growl – the equal and opposite of the alarm that led to this moment, but it means the same thing. Danger is here. It is breaking down the doors, ripping its way through my warm, safe places, bringing an icy wind.

  God. Now there’s a name that has not graced my lips for many years, but the concept comes back to me easily and I curse it. God, fate, everlasting life, whatever: I curse it all, in my head, while the sound coming from my open mouth winds down to nothing.

  I get up. I pull the blanket over Daisy’s head, taking care not to look at the mouth that I am not allowed to kiss.

  How long will it take Lucas to come back, with others in tow, for disposal duty? I’m not sure. I have the feeling that time isn’t running right anyway. Outside the bedroom it is sprinting in circles, hands around the face of an ancient and unstoppable clock. But not in here.

  I kneel down and reach under the bed for my stacked glass slides, carefully searching through them until I find the one I want. Four black lines topped with a curve for a handle. A paint pot. And underneath, one word: Eurydice.

  * * *

  Slide 32

  The arrival of new workers always upset her.

  They had been given fresh clothes, but they still wore the outside world in their expressions and what Mel saw there was pinched, and cold, and desperate. But those expressions never lasted long. They all sank into the stupor of the warm and well fed. The mind was always so keen to forget.

  The new ones were dotted between the familiar faces in the common room: Miriam and Barry doing a jigsaw puzzle; Gareth strumming something cheery using big open chords on his battered guitar. He had attracted a crowd, who mumbled through the familiar lines of the few songs he was able to play. They all sang along, and all angst disappeared and soon everyone would go off to bed with a smile.

  Mel sat alone, digging the dirt out from under her fingernails, and considered what to paint next. She painted many aspects of her past, capturing a range of experiences, trapping them on glass so that she did not have to feel them anymore. She never wanted life to feel fresh and newly opened; she didn’t want anything else to happen that might take her attention away from the past.

  She thought about being left with only melons to paint and the idea made her smile. To paint a melon – yes, she should do one, at least. A big, round, juicy one, for posterity. She got up and left the noise of the common room behind, taking her time down the dimly lit corridors, the floor level solar lamps glowing so yellow that they reminded her of candle flame. A real fire – that was another thing she should paint. A fire like her father used to make. How easily subjects were coming to her tonight.

  The corridors were empty. They curved around the domes to link everything together in loops and twirls that had once made her dizzy. It had taken her months to learn the patterns of the pathways, but now she did not need to think about the route to the storeroom. She could have found it with her eyes closed.

  Mel reached the door and entered the code on the keypad. It clicked open and the drop in temperature hit her as she stepped over the threshold, into the darkness, where the metal shelves ran in high rows, holding crates and containers that were once essential to the running of Blossom Farm. Signposts, stacked in the far corner, back when the place had wanted to be found. But the only thing that interested Mel was the paint. The tins filled up the shelf on the back wall and she was always relieved to see so many of them: like a promise. And in this place, where only a wall separated her from the outside, she could hear the wind. It howled with lonely pleasure. She felt she understood it.

  * * *

  Outside, a woman was waiting for her. She was round and creamy and gave the impression of being filled with something heavy. None of the shock of the new sat upon her, although Mel had never seen her before. She felt certain she would have remembered somebody who seemed so much more real than the rest of the place.

  “You’re from up north, right?” the woman said.

  “No,” said Mel.

  “I saw you in York. That meeting. You spoke about fuel prices, and then it all kicked off. Twenty years ago.”

  “No,” said Mel again. “I’m from Portsmouth. I was. From Portsmouth.”

  “That’s only down the road.” The woman looked at the paint tin, and Mel decided to answer no more questions.

  “Excuse me,” she said, as the woman said, at the same time, “I followed you.”

  “What?”

  “From the main room. The jigsaws, the guitar. You slipped out. You looked like you were going someplace better. You should cover your tracks if you’re not meant to be in there.”

  “I am allowed to be in there. I have permission.”

  “Great! Good for you. Privileges.” The woman reached into the pocket of her knitted cardigan – no doubt made by the endlessly creating brigade of Sue, Poppy, Alicia and Geoff – and produced a small stuffed bear. “This is Eurydice.” She made four syllables of the name.

  It was the mixture of accusation and charm that befuddled Mel to the point of actually smiling. “Hello Eurydice,” she said, taking herself by surprise.

  The woman leaned forward conspiratorially. “She can’t actually speak,” she said. “Nobody gave her a mouth. I made her when I was a little girl and I didn’t think she needed one back then.”

  “You could make one for her now.”

  “Oh no. I don’t think she’s actually that bothered. There’s nothing that facilitates the abdication of responsibility so much as not having a mouth in the first place.” She said this long sentence in one breath like a well-rehearsed speech, and Mel felt a sudden bond, as if she had more in common with this person than with anybody else she had met in such a long time, even from before coming to the farm. If those words were a test, Mel felt certain that she wanted to pass it.

  “Have you been allocated an area yet?”

  “Me, or Eurydice?”

  “I’m assumin
g your beautiful lost soul of a bear will get to be a lotus-eater.”

  “Yes, you’re probably right. The Winery, they said. But no room allocations yet. We’re meant to bunk down in the big room tonight.”

  “The common room,” Mel said. “You won’t get any sleep in there. Come on. You can stay with me.”

  “Will you tell me what that tin is for?”

  “No,” said Mel, and the smile she received in return was an affirmation. Yes, she passed the test. She passed the test on that day, at least.

  * * *

  Three of them come for the body. Two men and a woman. Lucas is not among them. They have a dirty trolley that usually takes seedlings from the nursery to the sectors and they lay her on that, keeping my blanket over her. It’s fine. I don’t want it anymore, anyway.

  When people die here—

  When people die here there’s a process, but that seems to have been overturned. I didn’t give it much thought before, except that the process made sense. Everything worked in a certain way. But these new young people know nothing of it and don’t care to ask. They set off down the corridor with Daisy, and I follow along behind until one of them turns around and says, “Get back to work. There are mouths to feed.”

  He’s a tall man, bone thin. The other man and the woman both stop walking and stare at him. Something tells me this is the first time he’s assumed such a level of command, and he’s enjoying the sensation. They look at his enjoyment and say nothing.

  The only replies that come to mind are pathetic variations of, ‘You’re not the boss of me,’ and experience has taught me nobody emerges from such statements with any dignity. In fact, there’s no dignity to be salvaged here at all, no matter what I say or do. There are words that this man would be happy to throw at me, labels that would define me as less than him. I need to keep myself free from such words, but I also have to know what they’re going to do with Daisy.

  I choose my words so very carefully. “I just need to see her laid to rest, please.”

  “Want to sing a hymn or two, do you?” He laughs, and the woman lays a hand on his shoulder from behind, so gently. Ahhhhh, I see what this is: he has had such a hard life, she is telling herself as she touches him. He’s only known the toughest way to be, to survive, and he can’t express himself any other way, but he means well. She’s determined to back up his pain as the most important in the room. Oh, the difficulties of being such a strong young man in charge.

  “Fine,” he says, and the woman smiles at me as if she’s done me a favour. She’s hardly more than a teenager, and she’s already well practised in feminine idiocy.

  We start moving again. The woman checks a piece of paper, perhaps a map, as she pushes the trolley along. We cross through the sectors, working our way out to the grapevines and the Winery beyond, which would be a perfect place for Daisy. The corridors are mainly empty – it’s still working hours – and everything looks normal, apart from one buggy that has been overturned, onto its roof, like a practical joke without explanation. The men and the woman steer the trolley around it without comment.

  We pass through the Winery where the large wooden vats stand, and the smell is sharp and sour. Green bottles sit on a long trestle table, each one bearing a label that says Blossom Farm’s Finest Table Wine in curly letters with a picture of a bunch of beautiful grapes. The workers take care not to look straight at us; the way they know to avoid their eyes tells me that more trolleys have passed this way.

  Beyond the Winery there is a place I’ve never visited before: a corridor, crates of bottles piled against the walls, ending at a door. The lock has been prised free and dangles loose on two electrical wires. This must be how these agro-terrorists got in here, away from the cameras and the guards. An emergency exit, of all things, forgotten about. Except that Daisy found it, once upon a time. She did always love to explore.

  “Stay,” the tall man says to me.

  “Let her say goodbye?” says the woman.

  I think he won’t mind if I touch Daisy one last time. But here’s the thing: I don’t want to touch her, not here, not in front of them. Besides, I tell myself over and over, she’s dead, she’s dead. What does flesh on a trolley mean? It means nothing at all. Whatever happens next, it doesn’t matter.

  “No, it’s fine,” I say.

  “Let’s do this quick,” says the other man.

  The woman pushes the door, and when it doesn’t give the men join in, all three straining until it moves. A drift of snow tumbles into the corridor along with the freezing cold. Outside, I can see only white.

  The men take either end of the body and carry it out.

  “Why out there?” I say to the woman who stays behind, wrapping her arms around herself.

  “The snow will cover them,” she says. “I’m sorry, the ground’s too hard for a proper burial.”

  “So they’ll just leave her?” I stand beside her and look out at the afternoon, the sun already low in the sky. It’s not snowing right now; the drifts stretch away, so beautiful, and the cold is a hammer to my chest. I gasp and look around and see the men not far away. They are already coming back, leaving my blanket, the body wrapped within it, lying in a dip between two mounds of snow. In fact, it’s a field of regularly spaced mounds. Bodies, covered in white. Many bodies, making hillocks. The guards, the supervisors, and now Daisy.

  The woman grabs my arm and pulls me back.

  “Why?” I ask her, knowing I have only moments before the men return and she will no longer speak to me.

  “Why what? I told you.”

  “No. No. Don’t you understand? We’re not important. It’s the plants. You die and you go under the ground in your sector. To feed the plants. Out there—” I point at the broken door, the way outside that is swallowing our heat so greedily, “—is no good to anyone. The plants need the nutrients.”

  “You bury people under the plants?”

  “Of course. The nutrients. That’s where Daisy should be. In Strawberries. She worked Strawberries, in the end.”

  The men return and slam the door shut, then kick their boots against the corridor walls, flinging around snow. “It’s strange how quickly you get used to the warm,” reflects the tall one, and then he remembers me and assumes the tone of command once more. “Off you go, then,” he says. “Work.”

  And off I go.

  * * *

  There is an hour left to the day. I return to Sector K and find Lucas there, standing on my soil. He touches the fruit with his fingertips.

  The rage that comes over me can’t be contained, even though it is dangerous. I walk towards him with the plan to slap his face for something I can’t define. He sidesteps me, and then I’m deep in the tangle of the plants and my leg is caught. I fall to the earth. It’s easier to hit the soil than to hit him, anyway. It gives under my weight. It understands me.

  Lucas stands over me, hovering on tiptoes.

  “Go away,” I tell him, when I have enough control of myself.

  “Are you all right?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Can I help you up?”

  I don’t take his hand but after a while he squats down next to me. Here, in the green, it’s harder to hate him.

  “They put Daisy outside,” I say, to his knees. “It’s a waste. Tell them. Bodies go in the ground. Here.” I pat the soil and then meet his eyes. His youth, his newness, is so alien, like the wings of an insect or the bright yellow beak of a bird. “Here’s where I want to end up. Right here.”

  “You’d give everything to Blossom Farm.”

  “Not the farm.” Don’t they see it? They all act as if there are only institutions in this world and nothing else worth talking about, nothing else worth saving.

  “They don’t care about you,” he says, and I know he hasn’t understood.

  “Neither do your lot.”

  “No,” he says. “You’re probably right.”

  He sits down next to me. After a while he says, “This plac
e is too beautiful to survive.”

  “It’s the beautiful things that live on.”

  “Not anymore. Not out there.”

  “We’re not out there.”

  He shakes his head. “Daisy said you came in here before it got bad. That you were working in a private school and there was a special arrangement, friends in high places…”

  “Daisy said an awful lot to you considering she hadn’t said a word to me in three years.”

  He laughs. The sound is clear and strong. “Maybe she’d been saving it all up. Her need to talk about you.”

  Think clearly, I remind myself; this is no time to fall back in love with youth. “Please leave me alone,” I tell him. “I’ll take care of the melons. You can have the fruit, eat it, give it to orphaned children, dance round it in your underwear, I don’t care. But please leave me alone, and don’t come back into this area again.”

  “What are you afraid of?” he asks, and that undoes me. I put my dirty hands, fresh from the soil, over my face and whisper, “It’s not always about being afraid.”

  “Isn’t it?” he says, reflectively. When I take my hands away, I see in his eyes a lifetime of being afraid, more than any fair share, more than I have felt. Fear as a default setting – not just in waking hours but creeping into dreams, even the good ones. I have had moments of safety, of love, of comfort, and they have kept me going. I’m not sure Lucas has.

  “Did you really care about her?” I ask him. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. She seemed… real to me.”

  “Don’t tell me. She reminded you of your mother.”

  “She wasn’t anybody’s mother. Not like you.”

  “I never had children,” I tell him.

  “That doesn’t mean you weren’t a mother. She told me. You loved those kids. You fought for them. To get them away.”

  Yes, I did, I fought for them, and even though it sounds clichéd I can’t deny that I was all those children had in their difficult moments, and I did my very best by them.

  “It’s a good thing,” says Lucas, “to be a mother. But Daisy wasn’t one. I could see that as soon as I found her. People think I’m a follower. Lucas, who does what he’s told. When she got better, she started to talk to me as if I could make my own decisions. I’ve not felt that before. It’s a different way for people to be.”