Forbidden Fruit (6 page)

‘Freegans.’ She giggled again. ‘Like I said. I’ve finished the cheese, what’s next?’

‘Salami,’ I said, handing over a few feet of mild Hungarian and leafing cheese into bread. Jules had a customer with one of those ominous blue forms, a summons, so I stacked and cut and stacked and cut until I ran out of bread. Jorgen relieved Daniel as the crowd began to die down. The old men were no trouble, usually. They lived the quiet life of rodents under the bushes and tried not to attract any attention. And they died, under the bushes, and were taken away and buried unidentified, because not even their brain-damaged colleagues knew who they had been. They weren’t interested in drugs or sex anymore, having no need of syringes or condoms from such as Jorgen. I always felt very sorry for them.

Just as we were about to start again, there was a sound of voices singing. They were in key and in harmony, and they were singing—rats!—a Christmas carol. But it was an old one and I didn’t mind it so much, coming across the rainy dark among the trees.

‘Pretty,’ commented Jorgen. I thought so, too. Daniel and I put on gloves and took up our rubbish bags, so that the council should not be affronted by dropped wrappings and lost plastic cups, though the old men rarely left anything, squirrelling away all manner of things in case they should come in useful.

The singers came into view as we cleared the site of a few paper bags and the odd (empty) bottle. Now they were dancing to a strange, off-beat drum and were rapping ‘I Singe of a Mayden’. It was the very first time I had heard medieval rap. Or possibly hip hop or indie. I am an ignoramus when it comes to modern music.

‘I singe! (thud) Of a mayden!’ shouted the lead man, ‘Who is! (thud thud) Matchless!’ Thud, rattle, thud, thud.

They were a sight. Dreadlocks flying, Birkenstocks bouncing, boys in long dresses, girls in military gear. Every possible haircut from marine number one to flowing locks to shiny bare painted scalps. All happy, though not apparently stoned or drunk.

‘Who are you?’ I asked as they came closer.

‘Freegans!’ shouted the lead man. He was gorgeous. Slim, almost naked under a white caftan, Jesus hair, sandals on his feet. Happy-clappies, perhaps? I braced myself for a wave of enthusiasm and a lecture on how much God loves me.

None was forthcoming.

‘We made soup,’ said a stout girl in an army shirt. ‘Lentil and vegie.’

Now Sister Mary is very picky about what she will accept to feed the poor, and I cast a look back at her. But she had tripped down the steps and was beaming at the strange crew.

‘Nigel!’ she said. ‘God love you. I don’t know how you manage in this heat.’

‘We’ve got the river,’ he said. Private school boy with fine diction. ‘Camp down on the shore. They haven’t moved us on yet. And the leftovers at the Vic market are very superior. Better than Prahran, I think. And much friendlier. I believe you have been training them, Sister.’

Two young men hauled a big aluminium pot forward and carried it into the bus to decant into the serving pots. It smelt very good, rich and meaty.

‘Not just vegie, then,’ I commented, stowing my rubbish bag and gloves.

‘For ourselves,’ said Nigel, ‘we only eat vegan food. But for the poor—that is different.’

‘Or if it is free!’ exclaimed a small girl in a Buddhist T-shirt.

‘Because we’re freegans!’ said several others.

They reeked of patchouli oil and wood smoke, they were clean and cheerful, and they cared for the poor. What was there to dislike? I could feel Jorgen bridling though. Their philosophy had not impressed him.

‘Free?’ I asked.

‘We dive the dumpsters,’ explained Nigel, as his sweating acolytes returned with the empty pot. ‘Lots of free stuff there. We scour the markets after closing time. We dress from the rubbish bins, we eat what the world provides. Gaia is tired of users. She needs people who clean up after the wasters, like Tasmanian devils eating road kill. We are vultures, hyenas, carrion crows …’

‘Maggots,’ mumbled Jorgen, loud enough to hear.

Nigel was not disconcerted. ‘And from our maggot form we shall hatch into creatures with wings!’ he said without even a pause. I was enchanted.

Jorgen went back to the bus, mumbling under his breath. Janeen was standing next to the stout girl with her hands clasped, a picture of girlish adoration.

‘But don’t you get sick?’ asked Jules.

The stout girl snorted. ‘We don’t eat the rotten stuff. We carry it back to compost. When the cupboard of the world is bare, we eat only fruit and vegetables. When it gives us a whole tray of lamb chops, as it did tonight, we build a fire and feast.’

‘Bounty!’ enthused Nigel. ‘But we do not want to deprive the poor by our gleaning, so we make soup for Sister Mary.’

‘God is well aware of what you do,’ Sister Mary assured him.

‘We are the only free people,’ Nigel said in farewell. ‘But to come along with us you must leave everything behind and worship the Goddess!’

‘Nigel,’ asked Daniel, ‘have you seen this girl? Really pregnant. Her family wants to know how she is.’

‘I don’t recognise families,’ said Nigel loftily.

But a young man in a heavy-metal T-shirt said, ‘She was here, with a boy about the same age. Scared as hell. Wouldn’t go out until after midnight. Jadis was feeding her lots of tofu and said she was too thin.’

‘Too thin and too stressed,’ agreed Jadis, who was dressed entirely in bright blue streamers and feathers, now rather depressed and waterlogged. ‘Told her to wait to see your nurse, I reckon she was close to delivery. The boy stayed with her all the time. Then he went off for a couple of hours, came back and they both ran away. Sorry,’ she said to Daniel. ‘Did her parents really lock her up like she said?’

‘Yes, they did,’ he replied soberly. ‘But I think they will be more amenable now.’

‘Whatever,’ shrugged Jadis. ‘But if you find her, tell her Jadis is thinking of her.’

‘I will. Where did they go?’

‘Parted from us in Collingwood just before we got the order of the boot,’ said Nigel. ‘Five days ago now, as you mortals count time. Farewell!’

Then they were gone, rapping to ‘I Sing of a Mayden’ again.

‘Well,’ I said.

‘They are very virtuous,’ Sister Mary said, getting back on the bus.

‘And I am so relieved to have escaped a rave on how I must immediately come to Jesus,’ said Daniel. ‘Oops, sorry, Sister.’

‘God still loves you, Daniel,’ she replied serenely. Nuns are very good at serene.

‘That is his function,’ replied my beloved. ‘Rats, as Corinna would say. Five days! Where would they have gone from there?’

‘They might have come into the city,’ said Jules.

‘We will look out for them,’ said Sister Mary. Serenely.

Daniel got back into the driver’s seat and the bus lumbered on.

We got to Flagstaff as Janeen confronted Jorgen, the nurse.

‘What’s your problem with the freegans?’ she demanded. Not meekly. I was amazed.

‘Beggars,’ he shrugged. ‘You heard that boy’s voice. Good school, all the advantages. Thrown away. Disappointing his parents.
He’s the leader. The others would go back to the real world if it wasn’t for him. Vegans are fakes. Artificially restricting their diet out of smug self-importance. I have no patience with them.’

‘Jorgen!’ Janeen drew a breath in outrage.

Just then we stopped at Flagstaff in the middle of a fair-sized riot and her comments remained, regrettably, unsaid. I hadn’t heard a good denounce for ages.

My wish was to be gratified sooner than I had thought, however. The core of the fight—which had formed into that ring with the battlers in the middle which means that you can identify a pub fight from the air, if necessary—appeared to be two grown men, not the bunch of tearaway teenagers I had expected. The tearaways were in the crowd, cheering on both men without fear or favour. They didn’t care who won. They just wanted blood.

Disliking humanity more than usual, I grabbed a ladle. Janeen did the same, in case someone took advantage of the riot to attack us directly. Daniel took off his light jacket. Sister Mary sighed and walked straight out of the bus and through the onlookers, pushing them gently aside. Jorgen took a step towards the fight and was held back by Daniel.

‘What are you doing?’ raged the lint-haired man. ‘You can’t leave an old lady alone in that!’

‘We can if she’s Sister Mary,’ said Daniel, still holding onto his shoulder.

‘You coward!’ snarled Jorgen. I was beginning not to like him a whole lot.

‘Just wait,’ soothed Jules. ‘And watch. We’ve seen this before. She is protected by the divine, by God himself.’

‘And a really hard-working guardian angel,’ I supplemented.

The crowd was falling away from Sister Mary’s progress. Not only falling away but also walking away, executing a nonchalant
stroll which said that whatever was happening at Flagstaff tonight they were not and never had been part of it. And had only vaguely heard of it.

‘If we tried to do it, we’d be sausage meat,’ commented Daniel.

‘Or that paste which Mr Selleys makes to fill the gaps between floorboards,’ added Jules, with a nice sense of metaphor.

‘But if it’s Sister Mary doing it,’ said Janeen, back to being small and meek, ‘it’s like a kind of magic.’

‘It’s divine protection,’ insisted Jules. ‘The padre told me about it when I was a child in Lyon. Only saints have it. And isn’t Sister Mary well in line for sainthood?’

We had to agree. St Francis himself had been a rich and spoilt young man who had grievously annoyed the popes in his time. He would surely stand patron for her.

And now she was in the middle of the rapidly dissolving ring. Most of the spectators had gone. The few that remained were so comprehensively sozzled or drugged that they made no move as the diminutive nun climbed over them to reach the combatants, who were locked together in what looked to me like a death grip. She put one little hand on each arm, and pulled.

And they came apart, panting, shaking, suddenly cold, as though all their anger had been earthed through Sister Mary. They stumbled a few steps backwards, away from each other, staring, wondering what had happened to their fine killing rage.

‘Now we can be useful,’ said Daniel to Jorgen, and released the big man. Together they went to Sister Mary’s side and took a man each. They were similar, both stocky, dark-haired men with swarthy skin. Mr O’Ryan had a Portsea tan, obtained at a price from an indoor tanning salon. Mr Lake had obtained his from working in the open air all his life. They stood in heavy custody, looking astonished.

‘I know them,’ Daniel told the sister. ‘This is Brigid’s father. And this is Manny Lake’s father. The runaways. Though what they are doing here when they hired me to find their children, I do not know.’

‘Oh, ye of little faith,’ reproved Sister Mary.

‘I can’t just sit at home,’ whined Manny’s father. ‘My boy’s missing. And he’s a good boy, no matter what this bastard says.’

‘My daughter!’ wailed Mr O’Ryan.

‘You are both showing a lack of faith. Not only in the admirable Daniel, but in God,’ said Sister Mary severely. ‘God knows the fate of your children, and if He chooses, God and Daniel may bring them back to you. Hitting each other will not help. Now go home. May the Lord bless and keep you, and may the Lord make His face to shine upon you, and give you better sense.’

They went. That wasn’t the blessing as I remembered it, but it was a good one.

‘Daniel,’ Sister Mary called, ‘take the bus around to the other side of the gardens. It’s still raining, we’ve got people to feed, and—’

‘You are rather wet,’ I said. ‘Have you got a spare dress or habit or whatever? Have some soup at least, Sister. Or do you want me to worry?’

This was a low blow, as she would hate anyone to worry about her. She drank the thick vegie freegan soup, which she said was excellent, changed into another plain dress, revealing that nuns wore Bonds Cottontails, and allowed Janeen to towel her short white hair dry.

Meanwhile the crowd who had emphatically not been at the fight in the gardens flocked to the bus. This was a family site, full of soaked parents and soggy wailing children. We gave out a hundred tickets to the Star laundrette, nappies, formula and bottles, tins of baby food, a lot of polythene groundsheets
and almost all of the freegan soup. Little hands reached for the strangely deformed chocolate animals and I saw little faces smile. Poor people. Poor wet people.

Then we stopped at the Star, to make sure that there were no difficulties. It was stuffed with people, some of them seminude, all of them watching
Casablanca
in complete silence. The machines rumbled, the dry-cleaning machine chewed at soaked sleeping bags, and the faces were shadowed in black and white as the bartender played ‘As Time Goes By’ one more time. ‘You played it for her, now you can play it for me! Play it, Sam!’

Sam played it. This is one of my favourite films but I could not stay. The Ladies of the Night were leaning against the wall, chewing gum and keeping an eagle eye on the crowd. But this site wasn’t going to be a problem, as long as they had enough films noirs. One more stop, then Daniel and I would swap with Ma’ani and Meredith. For some reason I was knackered. This might have been why I didn’t immediately react when Janeen resumed her argument with Jorgen, whose temper had not been improved by being presented with three unrelated babies with summer diarrhoea.

‘Those freegans?’ she insinuated in her small meek voice.

‘Beggars and vagrants,’ he scoffed.

‘I was one of them. And vegans?’

‘Self-righteous neurotics,’ he sneered.

‘I’m one of them,’ she said.

And Jorgen didn’t say another word. We reached McDonald’s again and Daniel and I left the bus. The last I saw of them, Sister Mary was greeting Ma’ani, Janeen was looking small and meek, Meredith was demanding the latest on the fight at Flagstaff, and Jules was chuckling.