White and Other Tales of Ruin (13 page)

“
I’m looking for a man called String.” We are hurrying through dusty yellow alleyways. Shots herald the death of a few more rioters. My utterance seems melodramatic, to say the least.

“
I know. Why else would you be here?” Jade does not turn around, but I guess that she senses my surprise. I can almost see the satisfied grin on her face. I bet she grins a lot, at other people’s misfortune. Her long hair swings between her shoulder blades as she rushes us through the twisting byways. She seems to know her way; either that, or she has me completely fooled.

Someone jumps into our path, a snarling, scruffy man with Sickness growths around his mouth. Jade stumbles to a halt and I walk into her, grabbing her hips to steady us both. The stranger begins shouting, gesticulating wildly, pointing at the air, at his forehead, almost growling as he motions towards me. Jade shakes her head, very definitely, confidently, and the man shouts again. I can see something in his eyes — the glint of madness, the desperation he must feel at the unfairness of things — and smell his degradation in the air; sweat, shit, aromas belonging nowhere near a comfortable, civilised human.

He is mad. He is ruined.

For a couple of seconds, I fear his madness will infect me. Indeed, this seems to be his motive, for he lunges past Jade, hands clawing for my throat.

She punches him in the gut. The movement is smooth and assured. He falls to his knees, gasping for breath and unconsciously adopting the same attitude as the hundreds of people at the harbour minutes before. He leans over until his forehead hits the dusty path, then his whole body shudders as he once again gasps in foul air. A smudge of muck sticks to his sweating forehead as he looks up at us.

“
Do we go now?” I ask, but Jade disregards me completely. She whispers to him, indicating me with a derisive nod of her head. In the jumble of conspiratorial words, I hear String mentioned more than once. At each utterance of his name, the grubby man jerks as if given a minor electrical shock. I wonder how a name could invoke such a reaction.

Fear. Respect. From what I know, and what Della told me, these are the two things that String would revel in. One commands the other, both ways, and in the end it does not seem to matter whether he is good or bad.

Jade looks up at me and smiles her confident smile again. “We can go now.”

“
What did you say to him?” I ask as we pass the man, still kneeling in the dust, eyes apparently staring at some point a few metres behind my head as I pass him.

“
We can go now, “ Jade repeats, effectively denying me any explanation. I suddenly wonder whether I really want to follow her.

From the harbour — now several hundred yards away by my reckoning — comes a more sustained burst of rifle and machine-gun fire, and then a stunned silence. Jade seems unconcerned.

I wonder how much higher the pile on the harbour will be by morning.

iv

“
In Here,” Jade says. I follow her through a narrow doorway and we feel our way along a twisting, oppressive tunnel. I hear the scampering of tiny feet, and wonder whether they are rats or lizards. When we emerge into the courtyard, I am struck by the sight of beautiful pots of flowers, hanging from every available space on the balconies above us. Then I realise that the flowers are painted onto roughly cut wood, which in turn is nailed to handrails and windowsills. The revelation depresses me enormously.

The buildings rise only three storeys, but they seem to lean in close at the top as if the perspective is all wrong. I look up for a few more seconds, but still there is only a small, uneven rectangle of sunlight filtering down from above.

“
Is String here?” I ask.

Jade laughs. “Don’t flatter yourself, buddy. Did I say I’d decided to take you to him? Hmm? If I did, I’ve sure forgotten it.” She opens a door in one corner of the courtyard and disappears into shadow. I follow and watch in embarrassment as she strips off her shirt and splashes her bare chest and shoulders from a bowl of water.

She glances at me, amused. “Surely you’ve seen a naked woman before.”

I cannot help myself. I stare at her breasts and feel a stirring inside which has been absent for so long. She seems to be doing it on purpose, teasing me, but she excites me. She’s arrogant, confident, brash, intriguing ... invigorating.

Jade turns away and finishes washing as if I’m not there. She starts to unbuckle her trousers, but I have a sudden twinge in my chest and go out into the courtyard to sit down. A few minutes later she reappears, unperturbed by my sudden bashfulness. She is carrying a bottle of wine in one hand.

I have not tasted wine for months. The last time was that night at Della’s, when she told me about String. The last time I saw her. “Wine,” I mutter, unable to keep a hint of awe from my voice.

“
Ohh, wine,” Jade mimics, taking a swig from the bottle. I feel that we should be using glasses, but such luxuries died out during the early years of the Ruin. I gladly take the proffered bottle and drink from it myself. I do not bother to wipe the neck. Jade could have TGD, Numb-Skull, QS ... anything. But I’m dying anyway. What’s another fatal disease to such as me? It would be like sunburn to an Ebola victim.

“
Where are we now?” I ask.

Jade throws me an amused little smile — condescension seems to be her forte — and takes back the bottle. “Globally, we’re fucked.”

“
I meant where are we, here, now. Your place?” I cannot keep the frustration from my voice.

“
No, not my place. I don’t live anywhere, really. I stayed here for a while when I first came to Malakki, then after...” She trails off, looks away, as if she had almost said something revealing.

“
After...?” I prompt. She takes another swig from the bottle and I stare at the new shirt, clinging to her still damp skin like an affectionate parasite. Her nipples are trying to break through. I think of the growths on my own chest, slowly killing me.

“
After I went to String, I was going to say.” She stares at me, but I sense that she is really looking at something far away.

It hits me all at once. I realise that ever since Jade had led me from the troubled harbour, I have been doing little but complaining and asking questions of a person I do not know. Her avoidance of many of my queries frustrates me, but I did not have to come with her, did I? She had offered her help like a latter-day Samaritan — a breed of person that seems to have all but vanished, swallowed into the gullet of mankind’s folly — and I had willingly accepted. She had very probably saved me from a bullet.

With a painful flash of clarity, I imagine my own body on that grotesque heap on the harbour; my pale skin splitting under the sun, gases belching to join the overall smell of the dying town, eyes food for birds and rats and street kids. Diseased or not, the dead are all alike.

I had decided to live. This girl might just help me.

“
String cured you?”

Jade gently places the bottle on the stone surround of the lifeless fountain and pops the buttons on her shirt. She slips it from her shoulders and holds it in the crooks of her elbows, her gaze resting calmly on my shocked face.

I stare at her breasts. They are small, pert, the nipples still pink and raised from her recent cold wash. Her skin is pale, but the smoother area between her breasts is paler still, almost white. I feel a twinge in my own diseased chest, then stoop forward to look more closely. All sexual thoughts — teasing my stomach, warming my groin — vanish when I see the scars.

“
Do you think I’m attractive?” Jade asks, and there is a note of abandonment in her voice which brings an instant lump to my throat.

“
I ... yes, I do. But...” I point at her chest, realising the absurdity of the situation for the first time — an attractive woman, revealing her breasts to me on this hot afternoon, sweat already glistening on the small mounds. And my reaction, to point and gulp my disbelief like someone seeing a do-do for the first time in centuries. But maybe that’s what she wants.

“
I wasn’t a few weeks ago.” Jade sighs, lifts her shirt back onto her shoulders and sits on the fountain wall. I see her mouth tense, her face harden, and she reaches for the bottle. But she cannot halt the tears. They are strange, these tears. They clean the grime from her face, but they seem dirty against her skin. Her mouth twists into an expression of rage, yet she seems to be laughing between sobs.

I step towards her and hesitantly hold out my hands. It’s a long time since I’ve held a woman, and I feel clumsy with the gesture. She waves me away and takes another swig of wine, spitting it into the dust when a further spasm of laughter-crying wracks her body.

It takes a few minutes for her to calm down, a time in which I feel more helpless than I have in years. She cries, laughs, drinks some more, but her initial rejection of my offer of comfort has hurt me. I feel foolish, being upset by this denial from a stranger. But I really wanted to help.

“
I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ve had a rough few weeks.”

“
You could have fooled me.” I say it quietly but it makes her giggle, and that makes me feel good. After a pause during which a group of old women shuffle through the courtyard, and Jade procures another bottle of wine, I ask the question. “Will you tell me?”

She waves at a fly, wine spilling down the front of her shirt like stale blood. Then she nods. “I’ve been going to help you since I saw you on the harbour. It’s obvious why you’re here. Do you have growths?”

I nod. “The Sickness.”

“
I had it too.”

I nod again, glancing at her chest as if I can see the smooth scar through her shirt. “So I guessed.”

“
And, yes, String cured me.” Her American accent has almost vanished. As if she is speaking for everyone.

“
He’s genuine, then? I’d heard so many stories that I’d begun to think he was a myth. A hope for the new age.” I look down at my feet and cringe when a spasm of pain courses through me, as if the Sickness itself can sense a danger to its spread.

“
There is no hope after the Ruin,” Jade says, though not bitterly. “Not for mankind. There’s personal hope, of course. There always will be as long as there’s one person alive on the planet. Human nature, animal instinct, survival of the species, no matter what the odds. That’s why String does what he does. But mankind was fucked the minute the Ruin set in.”

“
The crop blight?”

She shakes her head. “Long before that, I reckon. How about the fall of Communism?”

“
Why that far back?”

She shrugs. “Just my personal opinion.” She looks at the front of my shirt, a glint of concern marking her voice. “You need to see him soon, I think.”

I look down and see blood seeping through the material, spreading like ink dots on blotting paper. One of the growths has split and started spewing my life out into the heat, and I have the disturbing feeling that our talk of cures and hope has encouraged it. My personification of the Sickness makes it no easier to accept.

“
How does he do it?” I ask. It’s the question I have been yearning a positive answer to since the Sickness first struck me.

I see something then, a shadow of an emotion pass across Jade’s face. It is only brief, as if a bird had passed across the sun and cast its silhouette down to earth. If I knew her better, I could perhaps discern what that look meant, decipher from her tone of voice what sudden thought had made her blush and twist her hands in her lap.

She tilts her head slightly towards me, and I think of Della. “I don’t know,” she says. I nod, reach for the wine. Maybe later I can ask her again.

“
Will you take me to him?”

“
Yes.” The answer is abrupt, definite.

“
Thank you.” I smile and feel a warm glow as my cheer is reflected on her face.

“
But first,” she says, jumping up, “we eat. Then, we drink some more wine. Then, we sleep.”

“
Can’t we go now?”

She shakes her head, motioning for me to precede her into the building. She slams the door shut behind me and flicks on a light, revealing one large room with bed, fridge, curtained bathroom area and an old computer monitor with a picture of a goldfish glued across its redundant screen.

“
Why?”

“
It’s nearly dark, one.” She holds up a finger to count the point. “It’s about twenty miles up into the hills, two.” Another finger. “People are hungry, three. It’s got pretty bad here. Last month they ate two Frenchmen.”

I am unsure whether or not she is joking, but the implication of what she has said is so shocking that I can’t bring myself to question it. Instead, I sit on the edge of the bed as she goes about preparing some food. She does so in silence, only occasionally humming some vanished tune under her breath. I watch her moving about the room; lithe, confident, her body echoing her surface personality. Underneath, I am sure, there is still a lost person.

We eat. Old salad and a sausage shared between us, but I am ravenous and the food tastes gorgeous. I wonder where I am going to sleep.

v

In the dark, memory fails me.

For a whole minute I believe that the hand caressing my stomach belongs to Della. I cannot bring myself to talk. I fear that this will taint our friendship with jealousy and resentment, but I want it so much, have
always
wanted it. Della must know that. I cannot lie to her, and even lying by omission seems impossible.