From the Neck Up and Other Stories Read online

  Lucas touches the drying paint with one finger. “Of course, you’ve never been out there since it all went wrong, so you don’t know. And you’re right: the mind is a funny thing. But, trust me, we don’t eat babies.”

  “All right.”

  “Not my lot, anyway.” He turns away from the picture and scans the shelves.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “Listen. This whole thing. You and I both know it’s not going to work.”

  For a moment I think he’s talking about us – him and me – but he continues, “There won’t be an agreement. Stephan was wrong, and he’s beginning to realise it. He’s given the order to collect as much produce as we can and then get out of here before Blossom Farm get tired of pretending to negotiate and send in their army.”

  “They have an army?”

  “You really don’t get who you’re dealing with, do you? Blossom Farm have these domes all over the world. They’re rich enough to buy people, governments, whole countries. Raising an army is not going to be a problem. All it will take is a little time, and they really don’t care if they lose this entire place and everyone in it, so long as they send the message that they don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

  He spits the word out, and I finally see that it’s become a meaningless word, describing nobody in this situation accurately.

  “But they picked the Winery as a target,” I say. “They knew it would be empty and that it’s the easiest part to rebuild. It shows they’re not totally—”

  Lucas shakes his head. He lowers his voice even though there’s nobody to overhear. “They didn’t blow up the Winery. We did.”

  “What?”

  “We blew it up. To show Blossom Farm that we’re serious. Stephan thought it might make them negotiate, if they understood we have the capacity to destroy this place. And still they won’t talk to us. I’ve been out there, holding up signs, trying to get a response. It was the final bluff, and it didn’t work. So now it’s time. Starting tomorrow, everyone will be asked to pick their areas clean. And then we’re going to try to escape.”

  “You’ll take all the fruit? Every bit?”

  He touches my arm. “Not the plants, Mel, not the plants. It can all grow again. You’ll be left in peace. Stephan can see it now – that it’s not worth the effort to try to reason with these people.”

  “You talked him round?”

  “He trusts me. And not everyone is intent on bloodshed.”

  “Don’t say any more,” I beg. He puts his hand to my old face and I’m ashamed of my tears and my wrinkles. My pouched eyes, no doubt, contain emotions it would be easy to mock.

  “Are you afraid?” he says.

  Yes, I’m afraid. Of what will come next, and of what I have to do.

  “Don’t worry,” says Lucas. “One day, one harvest, and I’ll be gone. Things will go back to normal.”

  I’m afraid of that too.

  * * *

  Knowing that everything will end makes time move in a different way. I go to bed and Jim isn’t there. Lonnie says he’s at some sort of important meeting and goes about her business in a daze, climbing into her pyjamas and settling down into their bed. She doesn’t seem to miss him. In the silence, in the dark, we sleep.

  In the morning, Lonnie and I go to the refectory, and Stephan explains that everything will be harvested today and moved to a safe location to protect the fruit in case of further attacks by Blossom Farm. The workers nod. I see one with a bruised face, another holding his arm in an awkward position, and the intruders are no longer sitting down. They stand against the walls, alert. The illusion of working together is so thin you could blow it away with a single exhalation. Maybe that is why we all seem to be holding our breath.

  After breakfast I take Lonnie to her section and then go to mine. Gregor is at the water cooler. His hands tremble as he raises a cup to his lips. Crates on trolleys have appeared next to the plastic chairs. I steer one to Melons and look around me.

  I pick everything, no matter how small or green. I pick the swollen and the shrivelled, ripening or with the promise of much growing to do. The first crate fills. The plants surround me, brushing my face as I work, tickling my neck. Just before midday, I reach the area where Mr Taylor was buried. I put my hands to the soil and tell him what I’ve been thinking of since my last painting.

  “I think you really wanted to help that man. I think you were trying to tell me not to call security, that day, with that flick of your eyes. I think you wanted to save that baby. I don’t know what happened to it.”

  But I do know. They did the things we don’t talk about here.

  They killed it. And then I’m guessing they put it under the soil too. We are workers, and assets, and finally we are fertilizer. We are stupid enough to do it all for the sake of a hot meal and a bed because we think that matters more than being a person.

  I pick the nearest melon. It’s a good one: large, and round, and warm. I scrabble at it with my fingers, but my nails are too short to penetrate it. It won’t open for me. I take my paintbrush from behind my ear and stab the end without bristles into the melon.

  The smell is divine. The juice drips down over my hand; I lick it off, and breathe in and out, in and out, in great gasps. Memories of my grandmother’s garden are so strong, so vibrant. I hear the drone of bees, the weight of warm, real sunshine on the back of my neck. The things I have painted on glass are only shadows of these tastes and touches. I haven’t remembered a thing correctly.

  I stab the melon again and again until it makes a sucking sound and splits into ragged pieces. My hands are drenched; the liquid soaks into my sleeves. The seeds are wet and glistening in its gash. I scoop up flesh, and eat, and eat, feeling moisture in my mouth and on my cheeks. It will stain me orange and I don’t care. I eat.

  The dome shudders.

  I put the seeds in my dungaree pockets, even though they try to slide through my fingers to find the soil. I go back to picking my melons, and I fill the crates, and listen to the strange noises that mean we have reached the end.

  * * *

  I work hard and fill five crates. When I’m halfway through the sixth, Lucas finds me. He looks so calm.

  I walk to meet him, and he says, “You need to wipe your face.”

  I feel my mouth turning up at the corners, and I grin, grin like only a girl should.

  He lifts his hand and smoothes his sleeve over my mouth, not gently, rubbing at the corners. “There,” he says. “That will have to do.”

  The dome shudders again, as if it is being picked up and shaken. I hear shouts, from what seems like very far away, but I don’t care.

  “Are you ready?” he says.

  “For what?”

  “To leave with me.”

  I never expected this. Never. Even when I dreamed of something like this, I knew it made no sense. I can’t think of what to say, what to do. When words do come they are ridiculous ones.

  “I’m so old,” I tell him, even though I don’t feel it at that moment.

  “I told you. We’re going to stick together. I know how to survive out there and you know how to make things grow.”

  “I don’t. I can’t make anything grow. Apart from melons.”

  “You’re picking one hell of a time to argue about this.”

  The shouts are louder. There’s a new sound, too, like someone tapping out a rhythm, fast, with a high drum. Is that gunfire? I’ve never heard it before.

  “Come to the Winery,” he says. “We can get out that way. Bring some melons. I’ll fetch some supplies and meet you there. We have a chance, since they’re attacking from the main gate. I’ve come up with a way to move fast.”

  “You’ve been planning this for days.”

  “Since Stephan suggested this whole thing. He said to wait for someone who could get us in, and then we found Daisy. It was my responsibility to get her to trust us. But she made me trust her instead. And she told me that the only real d
ifference between people is whether they’re willing to hurt others, or try to help them.” His calmness is a mask. Underneath it I glimpse – what? Pain. Fury. And then it’s gone. “Listen. Stephan has ordered us to burn the place down. He wants to make some great statement to the world. If it’s not for anybody, then it’s for nobody. I don’t want to be part of his statement. Do you?”

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  “Great. Then I’ll meet you at the Winery. Say you’ll be there.” He pulls me into his arms. I’m so lucky, I think, so lucky, when the world I knew is about to end and so many will die, and here I am just being lucky with my boy wrapping his arms tight around me for no reason I can understand.

  “I’ll be there,” I say.

  He steps back. “We need to get going. Give me the code.”

  “What?”

  “The code. For the storeroom door. There’s no time for us both to go. I can move more quickly alone.”

  I’ve been such an idiot. Such an idiot.

  To think he could be a friend, a real friend, someone who sees past the way I got into this place, the life I’ve lived, and the wrinkles on my face.

  This was all about the code. All of it.

  I should hate him.

  But he has been so kind to pretend this way, and make me believe it. We might both be painters but he has a lightness of hand that I have never possessed. One can only admire the brushwork.

  “9200,” I say. I repeat it, to make sure he’s got it.

  “Right,” he says. “See you at the Winery.” He takes my hand, and squeezes it. “Thank you.”

  Once he’s gone, I feel very tired. Tired enough to sleep. To shrivel up and be done. I lie down for a while among my melons. For a while, I think nothing will ever make me move again.

  But then a woman walks into my area. The woman who sharpened her knife at my table and took my room away from me.

  She’s holding a petrol can; it’s heavy, and bumps against her leg as she approaches my plants. That’s what makes me stand. Not that it’s her, but that she’s brought so much petrol along to do the job.

  She sees me but doesn’t stop. She chooses a spot near the areas I have only just impregnated recently, delicately placing pollen on my brush and easing it inside the flowers. She unscrews the petrol can and begins to pour. The clear fluid drips from the leaves.

  “Stop,” I say.

  “Go to the common room,” she tells me, without even bothering to look at me. “That’s where all your lot are meant to go. Didn’t your supervisor tell you?”

  “Stop.” She ignores me. I try to think of anything I might say that would change her mind. “If you keep killing everything there’ll be no plants left in the world.”

  “That’s rich,” she says, “coming from your lot.”

  I move closer to her. The smell of the petrol is strong and sharp in my nostrils. “What lot?”

  “You all fucked it up and now you get to act like the keepers of the flame for some imaginary future where we’re not knee deep in fucking snow.” She shakes her head and then stares at me, and I see that hatred again. The unique way that the young despise the old for the things we did or didn’t do frightens me like nothing else I’ve seen.

  “So just let it all burn?” I ask her.

  She frowns and puts the can down near the door. She hasn’t doused many of the plants. I get it now: she’ll only use a small amount in each area. Once a few plants are alight, the rest will catch easily enough. That one can of petrol could burn the entire farm. Who knows how many she’s already done?

  “I don’t get it,” she says. “Why you lot would agree to this, this hoarding, rather than try to save us all. But that’s it, isn’t it? Choices. You made yours.”

  “Did I?” I ask. I don’t remember making them, exactly, so much as following the paths that were presented. And nothing ever quite seemed like my personal responsibility. Not in the way that these melons are my responsibility. Not in a way that I would bleed for.

  “Look at what you left us with,” she says. She reaches into her jacket pocket and pulls out a box of matches. I’m too slow and I can’t think of anything more to say. She moves back from the soaked plants, strikes a match, and throws it.

  They catch so quickly that the air makes a popping sound and within moments the flames are high and orange and flickering through my plants, touching them and making them twist and writhe and shrivel. Black smoke gushes upwards. My stomach does the same and my mind, oh my mind hurts so much I can’t think anymore, I can’t bear any more. I walk to the door and pick up the can of petrol. I was right. It is heavy. Then I go to her: this woman who thinks I should have solved all her problems before she was born.

  She doesn’t think me capable of such a thing, so I surprise her when I throw petrol over her. I don’t know exactly what I’m expecting to happen. I’m not sure how it does, really. She turns to get away from me, and although she is not very close to the flames they jump through the air to her face and her arms and then she writhes and wriggles, just like my plants. She screams and screams and crashes through the area, and I feel my thoughts turning away from the horror of her. I put down the can and collect my trolley, making sure the door shuts behind me when I leave.

  I trundle out to the reception area. Her screaming is so loud, even out here. Gregor crouches behind the water cooler. He peers out at me.

  “You need to start again,” I tell him. I suspect it’s a thought he never quite grasped. I have to raise my voice to be heard over the screams.

  Onwards, down the corridor. People run, and their terror is bothersome. I swat at them, shoo them from my path. The taste of the melon lingers.

  Goodbye, corridor. Goodbye, everyone. I’ve done my best but now it’s time to move on.

  I pass the living quarters, past my old room where the glass plates lie under the bed, undiscovered. I don’t stop.

  Around the corner there are two men in Blossom Farm uniforms carrying guns, and they point them at me, but I put my head down and mumble to myself and keep moving. The pretence of being a mad old lady seems to work. Who am I fooling? I am a mad old lady. I could do no harm to anyone, surely. They lower their guns. I crab along.

  Behind me, I hear a burst of running feet and then the air is hot and prickly. I smell burning meat, but I don’t turn around.

  A man yells, “Stop!” and still I don’t turn around.

  Nothing hits me.

  I keep going.

  I keep going.

  There’s a dead body just before the common room. It’s one of the terrorists. A woman. Why do people always look so young when they’ve just died? Perhaps it’s in the way her face has relaxed, just as Daisy’s did, and Billy’s. No more cares. An expression of emptiness only the young would wear.

  She leaks blood in all directions from the large tear in her abdomen, through the clothes and skin, so that tubes and coils have rushed, squeezed, and bubbled up. How did it all fit inside her to begin with?

  I can’t get around all the blood; I push the trolley through it and the wheels leave two red lines. Between the tracks I leave footprints of my clear red intent. I keep looking over my shoulder at them as I go on.

  The noise is growing again as I approach the common room. I keep moving, promising myself I won’t look up, but the flashes and the screams are impossible to ignore. I freeze, framed in the archway like an actress on a stage, and watch a war. The sofas and chairs are overturned, and the smell of burning is so strong. Drifting black smoke reveals and obscures the two sides in this war. I can’t tell them apart. There are only dead bodies and glimpses of people running and crouching; how can they tell if they’re trying to kill the right people? Of course, the uniform. Only the uniform makes a difference.

  I see Stephan, standing tall among his followers, wearing power like a warm cloak. But it’s not enough this time, it won’t stop the bullets, and he crumples up like a fallen hero from a painting. Is he dead? I don’t know. His magnificent control is gon
e, the fight begins to scatter, and spread, and turn my way.

  Someone grabs my arm and pulls hard. It’s Suroopa.

  “Come on,” she says, and tugs at me with a strength I never suspected she possessed.

  “Come on, wake up wake up,” she screams over another burst of gunfire, and I give in to her. But I won’t leave my melons. The trolley comes too.

  She takes me to the refectory, behind the serving area, where we find a huddle of familiar workers on the floor leaning against the stainless-steel cabinets. I know them all, which surprises me, as I’ve never thought of them much before and haven’t even had a short conversation with many. But I know them, just the same.

  Suroopa crouches and moves among them. I drop my trolley handle and do the same. They stare at the trolley and the melons.

  “I couldn’t leave them,” I explain. I don’t expect them to understand.

  But then I see them reach into their pockets, or into the white sacks they carry. Sue has raspberries and Zena has chillies. Geoff is there cuddling a cucumber and Barry has lychees. Plums, persimmons, pomegranates, a spiky-topped pineapple. There, at the end, pressing herself into the corner is Lonnie, holding out a luminous, waxy satsuma in each hand. We had satsumas at Christmas when I was little; why has that not come to me before? I should have painted it.

  The gunfire intensifies and there is shouting again. The smoke is thickening; why has the alarm system not gone off? It must not be working. Maybe the sprinklers are pouring down on our plants, keeping them safe from the flames.

  When it goes quiet Suroopa says, “They burned my courgettes.”

  The others nod. Someone wails for a moment. I have things I could say but I don’t.

  “Blossom Farm will soon deal with them,” Suroopa says. “Then we’ll grow it all again. Things will go back to normal.”

  I shake my head. “No, no, it will all burn. It will cost too much to rebuild.”

  “No, they wouldn’t—”

  I move away from her. I’m not expecting her to believe me, but there seems no point in pretending we can simply wait here for everything to pass us by.