Neands 2: Neands, #2

charlie

Some mornings you forget.

You wake and for a few moments it could be a normal day. You grab breakfast, not thinking about anything other than that first mouthful. Then the outside world returns like the tide, washing away your forgetting until the constant hum of anxiety has recoated everything.

Worse are the mornings you wake from bleak dreams to a bleak reality with a trapped feeling that follows you on long aimless walks and the hard-out runs that used to empty your mind. It clings to you when you dance with friends, and in your most lonesome solitude.

But the very worst mornings are when you can’t get out of bed. The thing you want to escape will be everywhere, so what’s the point? You make yourself get up, moving reluctantly, telling yourself that even if the old normal is gone there are still things worth living for. Sometimes you find those things. I find them with Pru and Ivy. A laugh, a smile, a dive into the sea that ends up a bellyflop. I find them in Pru’s touch and Ivy’s stinging humour.

I’m lucky.

I’m lucky because some mornings I feel hope. Those are the best mornings. I’ve learned to cling to those precious moments, to stretch them until they break and the new world and the Neands living in it come flooding back in.

em

ONE

Miro and a younger kid were playing in a corner of the lunchroom. Other kids watched, sideways, nervous, smiling like old people recalling an ancient memory. The air was heavy with steam and grease, with wafting detergent smells, dish sounds and the mumble of the washing-up team. On their knees, with pieces of cardboard they’d torn into tiny skateboards, Miro and the kid were doing finger tricks and flips across the floor and up the wall, making the sounds of the wheels and the clacks of their boards with their mouths. I wanted to tell them to stop, but Miro’s eyes gleamed under his dark fringe as if his soul hadn’t been crushed by everything we’d lost and all the crapness that had replaced it, so I just watched. Banking every second.

‘What are you girls doing?’ The guard closed in from the side.

I caught the burned-wire fumes of his anger as I moved towards them, trying to steer the guard away before Miro made it worse.

I was too slow.

‘I’m not a girl,’ said Miro, simple and matter of fact. He flicked his fringe back from his eyes, puzzled by the guard’s mistake, oblivious that it might have been an insult. He looked so young and naive, for a moment I thought the guard might laugh and walk away.

Stupid me.

The guard brushed me out of the way, his wide Neand mouth twisting. His eyes were bloodshot and his breath scorched the back of my neck. ‘We better cut that girly hair then.’

‘I like my hair,’ said Miro.

My little brother was the kid who kept putting his hand in the fire expecting something different to happen each time. Look at that pretty fire. Ow, that hurt. Look at that pretty fire. Ow, that hurt. That was him. He was always shocked when things didn’t happen as he expected, but he never learned.

The Neand guard looked incredulous. We never talked back. His anger drenched him in hot sweat, and in the cold room tiny wisps of steam clung to the top of his head.

‘He didn’t mean it.’ My voice sounded tiny.

The guard hauled Miro to his feet by his hair.

I tried to grab his wrist, but I could have been an insect for all the difference I made.

Miro’s body followed his hair like he was trying to minimise his pain; his skater memory kicking in. He knew this was going to hurt, but he wasn’t going to show it. His eyes locked on mine, challenging me to back him up, say he was right. He did like his hair. He wasn’t a girl. He’d told the truth.

‘Scissors!’ The guard barked at me.

My throat closed in. I couldn’t move. Anything I did would only make it worse.

All the kids in the lunchroom were silent, still. Tables were half-cleared, soapy water dripped from half-washed plates. The smell of fear rose from millions of tiny pores. One little boy started to snivel. An older girl put her hand across his mouth.

‘Scissors!’ The guard’s moustache almost disappeared up his nostrils, his open mouth so wide I could see the darkness inside. I imagined it pouring out into the lunchroom, coating the dozens of us who were too scared to move, hating ourselves almost as much as we hated him.

‘Scissors or I’ll tear it out.’ He spun around, dragging Miro by his hair.

Miro looked like a dog on a choke chain, trying to keep it from shutting off his air. I could see the resistance fading from his eyes. My brother was strong, he was bloody strong for thirteen, but he was still a little kid. ‘Em,’ he mouthed. But even hanging by his hair, with his feet bouncing off the ground through two more full spins, Miro didn’t cry.

‘Scissors!’

The guard might as well have been calling for a pavlova. We’d been banned from having sharps after a couple of kids had used scissors to self-harm. Apparently, we weren’t allowed to hurt ourselves. Only the Neands were allowed to do that.

A second guard used a knife to hack between the guard’s hairy knuckles and my little brother’s scalp. The guards were laughing, their pupils large, their eyes glistening and hungry, when the knife sliced into Miro’s skin and blood welled like oil on the side of his head.

Miro didn’t cry when he hit the ground, or when he touched his naked scalp and his hand came away red. He didn’t cry when the guard kicked him for not crying, or when they made him clean up his own hair and wipe his own blood from the floor. He hated them too much to cry.

I thought his hatred might get him through.

Maybe he was already asleep that night, wrapped in the privacy of his musty grey blanket, and his tears surprised him. Alone in his narrow wooden bunk, in a bare-walled room that amplified his pain, the sound carried to the girls’ dormitory, burning a hole through my heart. I lay in my own too-narrow bunk wishing it would burn the whole place to the ground.

I’d imagined escaping since the day they took us. The violence, the bullying, tormenting us as we cleaned and punishing us when they dirtied our just-mopped floors, leering at the older girls ... and worse. Every single moment was another reason to escape. Even the food (which we cooked for ourselves) was enough to make you want to run.

And if you had a brother or sister, it was a hundred times worse. Watching the bastards strap my little brother to a chair the first time was way worse than when they did it to me.

But you live through it. You line up for food. You clean the toilets. You wear the stupid clothes and learn not to react. And you watch the hope slowly disappear from the eyes of the kids around you.

I could live with my own humiliation, but I never got used to the screams – the sounds of kids’ nightmares and them waking to worse; the bruises, limps, and cut lips they brought to breakfast. Every night I worried it would be my brother bleeding into his plastic breakfast tray. And a few days after the haircut, it was.

He was carrying his tray to the boys’ table when a guard’s foot went out. He laughed as Miro stumbled, laughed as Miro’s fast feet found their balance, laughed as Miro’s tray tipped his beans and white toast, cereal and milk, and sugary fruit drink down his trousers. But when the mess hit the floor, the guard drew his stick.

When the stick cracked against his head, Miro went down, his nose exploding as he hit the ground. By the time I got to him, he’d peed himself and was lying in a mess of blood and milk and tears and piss.

‘I’ll clean up,’ I said.

The guard was still laughing that hungry, lip-licking laugh Neands have when one of us is hurt. I wanted to launch myself at him, but someone did that once and we never saw them again. Miro needed me here, alive.

It was time to stop dreaming about escaping and to get the hell out of here.

• • •

‘Hold the window, Miro,’ I hissed.

‘It’s you, Em. It’s you being noisy.’

It wasn’t, but I wasn’t going to argue. The guards’ toilet block stank of bleach and Neands and I was trying not to imagine what would happen to us if we were caught.

‘Just put it down quietly.’ I could hear my voice heading up an octave. ‘Please?’

‘They won’t hear me over you, Em.’

There was never any point arguing with Miro. His elephant brain never let anything go.

I slipped the edge of the spoon under one of the thin pieces of metal holding the next pane in place, hoping the three sections of louvre window would create enough of a gap to climb through, and that it wouldn’t be too far to the ground outside.

‘I don’t think we should do this, Em.’ Miro touched me gently on the arm. ‘What if they catch us?’

Miro was losing his guts. Who wouldn’t in this place?

The second pane made a slow scraping sound as I slipped it out.

‘One more.’

‘You’re too noisy,’ he said. ‘They’ll hear us.’

‘They might hear us, brother of mine, but they won’t catch us.’

He took the pane and I climbed up to get at the third, my knee on the sill, my other foot on the edge of the toilet. I wasn’t quite high enough, so I stood up on my toes and the toilet seat twisted, my foot went sideways and my knee slid off the sill. I caught the window frame with both hands, but the spoon hit the floor like a gong.

‘Shit.’

We froze, thinking how much worse it would be if they caught us trying to escape. But there was just the sound of our own breath.

At least the spoon hadn’t fallen out the window.

‘Pass me the spoon.’

Miro handed it to me without speaking, our hands touching in a flicker of apology.

We used to fight like cats; now all we had was each other. People sometimes thought we were twins. We did kind of look the same, even though I was nearly two years older. After years of hand-me-downs from my older brothers and wanting to be like them, I kind of looked like a boy. When I was nine, I’d even tried to get everyone to call me M instead of Em, but Dad got pissed off. Now I could be called M for Martian for all anyone here cared.

Miro and I had had the same haircut for years. Mum used to cut it. Long, straight, messy, with a fringe, like the guys in that band the Ramones. It was useful to have hair like that in the ‘home’ – boyish and androgynous. It meant the Neand guards had mostly left me alone. I swear, they looked at the other girls like they were shopping.

‘Good!’ I said under my breath, loosening the third one, and then brought Miro into the conversation I was having with myself. ‘Take this. Last one. Hurry up.’

He took it around the corner. I heard it clink against the others.

He didn’t come back.

‘Miro,’ I hissed.

Nothing.

‘Miro?’ I waited, wondering if he’d done something nuts like stop to use the toilet. If he had, I was going to kill him.

‘Miro?’

‘What, Em?’ He joined me at the window like he’d been there the whole time. ‘I can’t see the ground,’ he said, squinting into the darkness. ‘It looks like it goes on forever.’

He was right. We’d never been allowed down this end of the building. It could have been six feet to the ground or it could have been twenty. I hoped it wasn’t so high we’d break something when we landed.

‘Do you want me to go first?’ I asked. ‘Big sis duties.’

He nodded, his eyes glistening in the moonlight.

‘Okay then, watch and learn.’

Head first would have been easiest, but pretty dumb since I didn’t know what was at the bottom. A ten-foot fall onto my head on a concrete path would be the wrong sort of escape.

Using the window frame to take my weight, I stepped onto the toilet cistern, wiggled my legs out, slipped down to my bum, and sat there staring out into ... what? Escape or injury?

I leaned back, whispering, ‘Miro, you’ve got to climb out how I did. Okay? I won’t be able to help you.’

‘Okay, Em,’ he whispered.

I looked him hard in the eye and pushed myself out, twisting to catch the sill with my hands. I hung down the outside of the building trying not to think too much. And then I let go. A short drop to a grass bank so steep my legs went out from under me. I fell backwards, rolling down the hill, trying not to make a sound, and landed on a concrete path at the bottom, trying not to breathe too loud, checking I wasn’t broken.

Then the toilet flushed.

It was the loudest toilet I’d ever heard, roaring into the night like a waterfall.

Idiot. Miro must have used the flusher as a step.

I lay there waiting for lights and guards and alarms.

Nothing.

‘Em?’ Miro’s scared, pale face was framed in the window, caught in a dull splash of moonlight.

‘Hurry,’ I hissed.

His face disappeared. Then his feet and legs poked out, and soon there was the dull thud of boy landing on lawn. I should have known he’d manage to stay on his feet. I sensed he was about to say something and shook my head, catching his hand, and hurrying him to the edge of the compound. We tucked into the tight space between the fence and a small shed that hummed with electricity.

Hard against the fence, in complete darkness, I whispered, ‘You okay, bro?’

‘Yeah,’ he answered. ‘But Em, I wish I hadn’t put the spoon in my pocket.’

My heart sank. ‘Did it cut you?’

‘No, Em, it’s a spoon. But I’m going to have a bruise.’

‘Nothing you haven’t had before,’ I said. ‘I wish you hadn’t flushed the toilet.’

‘I had to.’

‘Why?’

‘I had to poo.’

‘You’re such a dick, Mir.’

I was laughing as I started to climb the wire fence. It was tall, like they have around sports grounds to stop stray balls hitting cars in the street, but the diamond links were big enough to get the toes of my shoes in and there was no barbed wire. They weren’t expecting us to try and escape. My body felt heavier on the way down and the wire pressed into my fingers like it was warning me not to run. Near the bottom, I jumped, staggering as I landed. And then we were running, sucking the warm night air into lungs that had been locked up too long, expecting lights, expecting sirens and cars and dogs and shouting, but there was just the sound of our sneakers hitting asphalt and the jagged breath of two out-of-shape kids.

‘What took you so bloody long?’ I panted.

‘When?’

‘When you were putting the last window down.’

‘I wrote Later losers in the dust,’ he said.

I could hear him giggling as he ran ahead and even though I was pissed off, I felt proud. After all the things they’d put him through, he was still Miro.

I smiled, imagining the guards when they saw how easily we’d escaped. The dust writing would make them even angrier. I stopped smiling when I thought about them taking it out on the other kids.

They’d pull them out of bed and line them up. Then they’d choose some as an example and take them into the room. The others would have to stay lined up, waiting, listening to the kids cry, scream, and finally whimper.

They’d done it to me.

They’d done it to Miro too, taken him into the room and connected wires to his head. Afterwards, his face had been set hard, determined not to cry.

Of course, I’d heard him later that night.

charlie

TWO

The top of the island was disappearing into the darkening sky, leaving the bonfire to carve out the closest parts of the night – the trees lining Paparetanga Bay, the oily sheen of the sea, the outlines of nearby boats at anchor. The smell of cooking, of the sea, of woodsmoke drifted across the bay. Huge bowls of food had been laid out on mats – ears of corn, fish wrapped in banana leaves, potatoes roasted in ashes. Faces aglow with the firelight, people talking and laughing, stuffing their faces with greasy fingers. Some starting to dance.

We’d been here on the island long enough that the outside world had become less real. Three weeks with the community showed us that it was possible to live away from the Neands. Staying here forever, pretending we were the last people on Earth would be so easy, but it didn’t feel right. Deep down I knew that if we left the world to burn, its flames would eventually find us.

So that night after we’d eaten, I followed Pru and Ivy down to the water to rinse our plates in the sea.

‘I think it’s time to go.’

Ivy was watching the teenage boys dancing, jostling each other and messing around. ‘Don’t spoil tonight, Charlie.’

There was a boy watching her back.

‘I think Josh likes you,’ said Pru.

‘Josh?’ spluttered Ivy. ‘Nah.’

Josh was older than us, with long dark hair hanging down across one eye. We watched as he said something to another kid. They broke away from their mates and came up to Ivy with their hands out. Ivy let herself be led into the throng.

Pru held her hand out to me. ‘If this is going to be our last night here, we should dance.’

I watched the other kids spin around the bonfire, eyes shining, and shook my head. But the lump in my throat wasn’t sadness. It was joy – a feeling I’d almost forgotten.

My dad used to quote an old poem about how we connect as people: ‘No man is an island.’ He always changed ‘man’ to ‘human’ though, because ‘It’s the twenty-first century, Charlie.’ I wondered what that ancient poet would say about humans today. I think, like Dad, he’d say the answer was in the poem. Finding sanctuary on the island had given us a chance to heal, but we weren’t islands. Pru, Ivy and I had people to find and questions that needed answers.

It was time.

Pru kissed my cheek and went to dance with Ivy, passing Longboat Ben as he wandered up from the fire. He stood quietly in his faded bucket hat, watching the dancers, his fingers working at ancient tangles in his beard.

‘There is so much loss.’ He spoke as though we were in the middle of a conversation.

‘Everyone’s lost someone,’ I replied.

‘Watching Ivy and Pru cast that off is miraculous. You should dance too.’

It felt like he had more to say, so I waited.

‘Jo and I had a daughter,’ he continued. ‘She’d have been your age. I suppose she still is your age, but she’s not our Isobel any more.’

‘I’m sorry –’

‘Don’t be sorry,’ he interrupted. ‘We were all complicit. We’re a stupid suicidal species.’

‘I’m not,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘I’m not suicidal. Pru’s not. And Ivy …’ I watched Ivy run up to Josh and swing him in a violent circle, both of them laughing. ‘Ivy’s too angry to be suicidal.’

‘It’s too late.’

‘You don’t believe that,’ I said, telling myself I didn’t believe it.

‘It’s too late for Isobel.’

‘Maybe,’ I said slowly. ‘But we have to hope. Maybe they’re not all –’

‘All what?’ he interrupted again. ‘Arseholes?’

‘There are arsehole humans too,’ I said. ‘You said humans were complicit, but maybe they just couldn’t see what they were doing to the bigger picture.’

I almost said, maybe they were happy being islands. Instead I talked about my dad; how he was a scientist who’d spoken up too soon and too late; how a lot of the people who hadn’t listened then probably wished they had now. How I had wanted to be a scientist like Dad, that even if the qualifications no longer existed, I thought like one. I told him about Ngaire’s friend Bill, a scientist who’d been studying Neand biology. And how he’d left us a photo of his farm.

‘We’re going to find him,’ I said.

Ben wiped his eyes and smiled. ‘Ah, mate. I need to lay off the home-made whiskey. Let’s cast off our troubles and join the ladies, shall we?’ He grabbed my arm and danced me towards the fire.

By daybreak, the band had gone to bed and I was playing guitar. Pru and Ivy were still dancing.

charlie

THREE

The warm wind had just enough breath to keep us ghosting through the night. The sea was oily, with a slow rolling swell sliding in from the ocean, making our sails snap and crack against their lines. We gave the moonlit shapes of islands a wide berth. At the end of her watch, Pru woke me from a dream. The three of us were shipwrecked on an island of Neands. Pulling my pants up over my damp body, I could still smell them, see the hatred in their eyes. The sweat drying on my skin made me shiver.

A grey light began to edge away the darkness, and the colourless world became slowly visible – the grey sea, the smudge of distant land a different shade of grey. We were a tiny boat alone in a grey world, a world that had swallowed my mother, then my mother’s best friend Ngaire and Ngaire’s husband Alan. Alone at the helm, with Pru and Ivy sleeping below, I felt grey inside.

We were heading east and with the Earth’s slow roll towards the sun, dawn began to breathe the world back into colour, casting the sky and hills in reds and oranges, with shadows cloaking the valleys. Our sails captured the sun’s fire and my hands glowed against the varnished wooden tiller. Our stolen yacht pushed gently through a blue-black ocean I’d never seen before. The sky, the sea, the golden sail – it was a new world born into a brand-new day.

We were on our way to find an abandoned hippie community on a peninsula in the far north; the farm in Bill’s photograph. But we had no idea who or what we’d find there.

It almost hurt to hope.

• • •

Pru stuck her head back up through the hatch. ‘I’ve just heard the forecast.’

Rain? Storms? Wind from the wrong direction?

‘No Neands today,’ she said. She was laughing as she disappeared back down below.

I was eating cereal from a plastic mug as Pru let a fishing line run out behind us. She tied the rod to the steel frame on the stern of the boat and soon the reel started spinning out like we’d hooked the ground.

‘Fish!’ she shrieked. ‘Turn into the wind, Charlie. Ivy, find a net.’

I pushed the tiller across like she’d shown me, and with the sail flapping above our heads we almost stopped. The rod bent. Pru strained to hold it as the fish swam one way then the other, stretching the line taut across the dinghy we towed.

‘It’s big,’ she grunted. ‘Ivy? Net!’

‘I’m looking!’ yelled Ivy. She was biffing things out of hatches and cupboards.

When the fish swam sideways, Pru wound in the line. When it turned and pulled, she let it out a little so the line didn’t break.

‘It’s massive!’ she cried. ‘A kingfish. I can see it!’ She pulled, winding and pulling and winding.

The kingfish’s silvery length was almost at the boat and it was tiring, losing the will to fight like some of the Homo sapiens kids at school, so worn down by the Neands they gave in to their bullies.

‘Finally.’ Ivy pushed past me with a net on a pole.

‘Get it under,’ cried Pru.

The kingfish thrashed the water white, digging deep for one last desperate fight. Pru was almost folded in half over the railing. When she held the rod out to keep it from swimming under the boat her hair touched the water.

‘Hold it over the net, Pru.’ Ivy’s biceps bunched and popped as she lifted, ‘Got it,’ she said, the pole bent almost to breaking. ‘Damn, it’s heavy.’

It took both of them to get the fish into the boat, and the moment it hit the cockpit floor, it flipped out of the net, crashing against the walls of its wooden prison. Pru and Ivy shouted at each other, dancing around its sharp spines. Pru dragged its head into the corner with the rod, then pinned it with her body. It lay still, watching us out of one blinking eye.

‘Knife,’ she said, holding her hand out.

Ivy passed her a knife and we watched Pru grab the fish’s head, flip it over, and push the knife through its gills to sever its backbone. It spasmed from side to side, gushing blood across the cockpit but Pru stayed crouching, her eyes focused on the horizon like she was giving it privacy while it died. A calm hand on it until it settled.

‘That’s done,’ she said quietly. ‘Get us back on course, Chuck.’

‘Aye aye,’ I answered, both excited and repelled by this primal Pru.

She unhooked the lure, and as she turned to put the rod away the fish thrashed again, hurling its body against the deck, spraying the cockpit with blood.

‘It’s still alive!’ screamed Ivy. ‘Pru, it’s still alive!’

Pru didn’t even look. ‘Just nerves,’ she said, as the spasms stopped. ‘I’ll fillet it,’ she said, ‘but you’re cooking, Ivy, and Charlie can clean up.’

‘Then who’s going to steer?’

‘I am,’ she said, grabbing the tiller and pushing it hard across. ‘Look what you’re doing, you’ve almost run us aground.’

We slid past a jagged rock. With the ocean foaming around it like saliva, it looked like a madman’s last tooth.

On our right, a mountain tumbled into the sea, waves breaking against its base. There was no beach, no bay, no safe harbour. I was glad we were passing in daylight.

‘Come on, Chuck. Easier to clean it up before the blood dries.’

‘Aye aye,’ I said again. I’d follow Pru to the end of the Earth, obeying her every instruction on the way. But she was getting a bit bossy.

By the time the fish was cooked, the cockpit was so clean you could eat off it. Pru lashed the tiller and we sat with plates of rice and fried fish in front of us. I paused, remembering the magnificent silver beast as it had flashed in the water, and mumbled a quiet thanks into my chest before I took the first bite.

‘What did you say?’ asked Pru.

‘Nothing,’ I answered, ‘just thanking the fish for its sacrifice.’

She snorted.

‘I did the same thing,’ said Ivy.

‘It’s a fish,’ said Pru, but she was smiling. She squeezed my arm. ‘Do you think the Neands would ever thank a fish?’

‘I don’t think they even think about other species.’

‘They thank their gods,’ said Ivy through a mouthful of food.

‘That’s just to make them feel better about themselves.’

‘If they’re God’s chosen people,’ Ivy said, ‘why are they so fricken angry?’

We finished eating in silence. The fish was good, but there was a saltiness to its flesh, like tears.

• • •

When we hit open ocean, the swell stretched out. We may have been far from the threat of the city, but as the wind built, the sea rolled unpredictably beneath us. I was struggling to steer as waves crashed against the hull, pushing us sideways and down.

‘Stop it, Chuck,’ snapped Ivy.

‘I’m –’ I burped. ‘I’m not doing it on purpose.’

The boat rose and dropped. I burped again, trying to swallow away the fishy aftertaste, trying not to throw up. Beside me in the cockpit, her dark hair tied back from her bloodless face, Ivy looked like I felt.

‘You two look