The MaddAddam Trilogy (51 page)

“Amanda knows how to steal things,” I said to Bernice as we trudged back to the Wellness Clinic. I meant this as a peace offering, but Bernice only grunted.

I knew I couldn’t really take Amanda home with me like a stray kitten: Lucerne would’ve told me to put her back where I found her, because Amanda was a pleebrat and Lucerne hated pleebrats. According to her they were ruined children, thieves and liars all, and once a child had been ruined it was like a wild dog, it could never be trained or trusted. She was afraid to walk along the street from one Gardener place to another because of the pleebrat gangs that could swarm you and run off with anything they could grab. She never learned about picking up stones and hitting back and yelling. It was because of her earlier life. She was a hothouse flower: that’s what Zeb called her. I used to think this was a compliment, because of the word
flower
.

So Amanda would be sent packing, unless I got Adam One’s permission first. He loved people joining the Gardeners, especially kids – he was always going on about how the Gardeners should mould young minds. If he said Amanda should live with us, Lucerne wouldn’t be able to say no.

The three of us found Adam One at the Wellness Clinic, helping to bottle the vinegar. I explained that I’d picked up Amanda – “gleaned” her, I said – and that she wished to join us, having seen the Light, and could she live at my house?

“Is that true, my child?” Adam One asked Amanda. The other Gardeners had stopped work and were eyeing Amanda’s miniskirt and silver fingers.

“Yes, sir,” said Amanda in a respectful voice.

“She’ll be a bad influence on Ren,” said Nuala, who had come over. “Ren is too easily led. We should place her with Bernice.”

Bernice gave me a triumphant look:
See what you’ve done!
“That would be fine,” she said neutrally.

“No!” I said. “I found her!” Bernice glared at me. Amanda said nothing.

Adam One considered the three of us. He knew a lot of things. “Perhaps Amanda herself should decide,” he said. “She should meet the families in question. That will help to settle the matter. That would be fairest, no?”

“My place first,” said Bernice.

Bernice lived in the Buenavista Condos. The Gardeners didn’t exactly own the building, because ownership was wrong, but somehow they controlled it. It had “Luxury Lofts for Today’s Singles” on it in faded gold lettering, but I knew it wasn’t Luxury: the shower in Bernice’s apartment was clogged, the tiles in the kitchen were cracked and gap-toothed, the ceilings oozed when it rained, the bathroom was slick with mildew.

The three of us went into the lobby, past the middle-aged Gardener lady on security duty there – she was busy with some snarled-up macramé craft object and hardly noticed us. We had to climb six flights of stairs to get to Bernice’s floor because the Gardeners didn’t believe in elevators except for old people and paraplegics. There were forbidden objects in the stairwell – needles, used condoms, spoons, candle ends. The Gardeners said pleeb crooks and thugs and pimps got in at night and used the stairwell for nasty parties; we’d never seen any of these, though we’d once caught Shackie and Croze and their pals drinking wine dregs in there.

Bernice had her own plastikey; she unlocked the door and let us in. The apartment smelled like unwashed clothes left under a dripping sink, or like other kids’ plugged sinuses, or like diapers. Through these odours drifted another one – a rich, fertile, spicy, earthy aroma. Maybe it was wafting up through the hot-air vents from the Gardener mushroom beds in the basement.

But this smell – all the smells – seemed to be coming from Bernice’s mother, Veena, who was sitting on the worn plush-covered sofa as if rooted there, staring at the wall. She had on her usual shapeless dress; her knees were covered with an old yellow baby blanket; her pale hair hung limply on either side of her round, soft, whitish face; her hands lay curled slackly, as if her fingers were broken. On the floor in front of her was a scattering of dirty plates. Veena didn’t cook: she ate what Bernice’s father gave her; or else she didn’t eat it. But she never tidied up. She hardly ever spoke, and she didn’t speak now. Her eyes flickered as we went past her though, so maybe she saw us.

“What’s the matter with her?” Amanda whispered to me.

“She’s Fallow,” I whispered back.

“Yeah?” Amanda whispered. “She just looks really stoned.”

My own mother said Bernice’s mother was “depressed.” But my mother wasn’t a real Gardener, as Bernice was always telling me, because a real Gardener would never say
depressed
. The Gardeners believed that people who acted like Veena were in a Fallow state – resting, retreating into themselves to gain Spiritual insight, gathering their energy for the moment when they would burst out again like buds in spring. They only appeared to be doing nothing. Some Gardeners could remain in a Fallow state for a very long time.

“This is my place,” said Bernice.

“Where would I sleep?” said Amanda.

We were looking at Bernice’s room when Burt the Knob came in. “Where’s my little girl?” he called.

“Don’t answer,” said Bernice. “Close the door!” We could hear him moving around in the main room; then he came into Bernice’s room and scooped her up. He stood there holding her under the armpits. “Where’s my little girl?” he said again, which made me cringe. I’d seen him do this before, not only to Bernice. He just loved girls’ armpits. He’d corner you in behind the bean rows when you were doing slug and snail relocation and pretend to be helping you. Then along would come the hands. He was such a knob.

Bernice was scowling and wriggling. “I’m not your little girl,” she said, which could mean:
I’m not little
, or
I’m not yours
, or even
I’m not a girl
. Burt took this as a joke.

“Then where’s my little girl gone?” he repeated in a woebegone voice.

“Put me down,” Bernice shouted. I felt sorry for her, and also I felt lucky – because whatever I felt about Zeb, it wasn’t embarrassment.

“I’d like to look at your place now,” said Amanda. So the two of us went back down the stairs, leaving Bernice behind us, redder and angrier than ever. I did feel bad about that, but not bad enough to give up Amanda.

Lucerne wasn’t pleased to find that Amanda had been added to our family, but I told her that Adam One had ordered it; so what could she do? “She’ll have to sleep in your room,” she said crossly.

“She won’t mind,” I said. “Will you, Amanda?”

“No, indeed,” said Amanda. She had a very polite manner she could put on, as if she was the one doing you the favour. It grated on Lucerne.

“And she’ll have to get rid of those flashy clothes,” said Lucerne.

“But they aren’t worn out yet,” I said innocently. “We can’t just throw them away! That would be wasteful!”

“We’ll sell them,” said Lucerne tightly. “We can certainly use the money.”

“Amanda should get the money,” I said. “They’re her clothes.”

“It’s okay,” said Amanda, softly but regally. “They didn’t cost me anything.” Then we went into my cubicle and sat on the bed, and laughed behind our hands.

When Zeb got back that evening, he had no comment at first. We all ate dinner together, and Zeb chewed away at the soybit and green bean casserole and watched Amanda with her graceful neck and silver fingers picking daintily away at what was on her plate. She hadn’t yet taken off her gloves. Finally he said to her, “You’re a sly little operator, aren’t you?” It was his friendly voice, the one he used for saying, “Atta girl” at dominoes.

Lucerne, who was dishing him out a second helping, stiffened in mid-motion, the big spoon straight up in the air like some kind of metal detector. Amanda gazed at him straight-faced, with her eyes wide open. “Excuse me, sir?”

Zeb laughed. “You’re very good,” he said.

Having Amanda living with me was like having a sister, only better. She had Gardeners’ clothing now, so she looked like the rest of us; and pretty soon she smelled like the rest of us too.

In the first week I showed her all around. I took her to the Vinegar Room, the Sewing Room, and up to the Run-For-Your-Light Treadmills gym. Mugi was in charge of that; we called him Mugi the Muscle because he only had one muscle left. Amanda made friends with him, though. She made friends with everyone by asking them the right way to do things.

Burt the Knob explained how to relocate the slugs and snails in the Garden by heaving them over the railing into the traffic, where they were supposed to crawl off and find new homes, though I knew they really got squashed. Katuro the Wrench, who fixed the leaks and took care of the water systems, showed her how the plumbing worked.

Philo the Fog didn’t say much to her; he just smiled at her a lot. The older Gardeners said he’d transcended language and was travelling with the Spirit, though Amanda said he was just wasted. Stuart the Screw, who made our furniture out of recycled junk, didn’t like people much, but he liked Amanda. “That girl’s got a good eye for wood,” he’d say.

Amanda didn’t like sewing, but she pretended to, so Surya praised her. Rebecca called her
sweetheart
and said she had good food taste, and Nuala cooed over her singing in the Buds and Blooms Choir. Even Dry Witch Toby would brighten up when she saw Amanda coming. She was the hardest nut to crack, but Amanda took a sudden interest in
mushrooms, and helped old Pilar stamp bees on the honey labels, and that pleased Toby, though she tried not to show it.

“Why are you sucking up so much?” I asked Amanda.

“It’s how you find stuff out,” she said.

We told each other a lot of things. I told her about my father and my house in the HelthWyzer Compound, and how my mother ran off with Zeb.

“I bet she had hot panties for him,” said Amanda. We were whispering all of this in our cubicle, at night, with Zeb and Lucerne right nearby, so it was hard not to hear the sex noises they’d make. Before Amanda came I’d found all of that shameful, but now found it funny because Amanda did.

Amanda told me about the droughts in Texas – how her parents had lost their Happicuppa coffee franchise and couldn’t sell their house because no one would buy it, and how there were no jobs and they’d ended up in a refugee camp with old trailers and a lot of Tex-Mexicans. Then their trailer was demolished in one of the hurricanes and her father was killed by a piece of flying metal. A lot of people drowned, but she and her mother held on to a tree and got rescued by some men in a rowboat. They were thieves, said Amanda, looking for stuff they could lift, but they said they’d take Amanda and her mother to dry land and a shelter if they’d do a trade.

“What kind of trade?” I said.

“Just a trade,” said Amanda.

The shelter was a football stadium with tents in it. There was a lot of trading going on: people would do anything for twenty dollars, Amanda said. Then her mother got sick from the drinking water, but Amanda didn’t because she traded for sodas. And there was no medicine, so her mother died. “A lot of people shat to death,” said Amanda. “You should have smelled that place.”

Amanda snuck away after that because more people were getting sick and no one was taking away the crap and garbage or bringing food. She changed her name, because she didn’t want to be put back in the
football stadium: the refugees were supposed to be farmed out to work in whatever job they were told to. “No free lunch,” people were saying: you had to pay for everything, one way or another.

“What did you change it from?” I asked her. “Your name.”

“It was a white-trash name. Barb Jones,” said Amanda. “That was my identity. But I don’t have an identity now. So I’m invisible.” It was one more thing I could admire about her – her invisibility.

Amanda walked north, along with thousands of other people. “I tried to hitch, but I only got one lift, with a guy who said he was a chicken farmer,” she said. “He pushed his hand between my legs; you can tell that’s coming when they breathe funny. I stuck my thumbs in his eyes and got out of there fast.” She made it sound like thumbs in the eyes was normal in the Exfernal World. I wanted to learn how to do it, but I didn’t think I could work up the nerve.

“Then I had to get past the Wall,” she said.

“What wall?”

“Don’t you watch the news? The Wall they’re building to keep the Tex refugees out, because just the fence wasn’t enough. There’s men with sprayguns – it’s a CorpSeCorps wall. But they can’t patrol every inch – the Tex-Mex kids know all the tunnels, they helped me get through.”

“You could’ve been shot,” I said. “Then what?”

“Then I worked my way up here. For food and stuff. It took a while.”

In her place I would have just laid down in a ditch and cried myself to death. But Amanda says if there’s something you really want, you can figure out a way to get it. She says being discouraged is a waste of time.

I worried that there might be trouble with the other Gardener kids: after all, Amanda was a pleebrat – one of our enemies. Bernice hated her, of course, but she didn’t dare say so because like everyone else she was in awe of her. First of all, no Gardener kid could dance, and Amanda had excellent moves – it was like her hips were dislocated. She’d teach me when Lucerne and Zeb weren’t there. We’d get the music off her purple phone, which she kept hidden in our mattress, and when the card was
used up she’d lift another one. She had some flashy pleeblander clothes hidden away as well, so when she needed to lift something she’d put those clothes on and go off to the Sinkhole mallway.

I could see that Shackleton and Crozier and the older boys were in love with her. She was very pretty, with her tawny skin and her long neck and her big eyes, but you could be pretty and still get called a carrot-sucker or a meat-hole on legs by those boys; they had a bunch of sick names for girls.

Not for Amanda, though: she had their respect. She had a piece of glass with duct tape along one edge to hold it with, and she said this glass had saved her life more than once. She showed us how to ram a guy in the crotch or trip him up and then kick him under the chin and break his neck. There were lots of tricks like that, she said – ones you could use if you had to.