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Nobody gives a hoot,
Nobody gives a hoot,
And that is why we're down the chute,
Cause nobody gives a hoot!
All his shower songs were negative in this way, though he sang them cheerfully, in his big Russian-bear voice.
I had mixed feelings about Zeb. He could be frightening, but also it was reassuring to have someone so important in my family. Zeb was an Adam -- a leading Adam. You could tell by the way the others looked up to him. He was large and solid, with a biker's beard and long hair -- brown with a little grey in it -- and a leathery face, and eyebrows like a barbed-wire fence. He looked as if he ought to have a silver tooth and a tattoo, but he didn't. He was strong as a bouncer, and he had the same menacing but genial expression, as if he'd break your neck if necessary, but not for fun.
Sometimes he'd play dominoes with me. The Gardeners were skimpy on toys -- Nature is our playground -- and the only toys they approved of were sewed out of leftover fabric or knitted with saved-up string, or they'd be wrinkly old-person figures with heads fashioned from dried crabapples. But they allowed dominoes, because they carved the sets themselves. When I won, Zeb would laugh and say, "Atta girl," and then I'd get a warm feeling, like nasturtiums.
Lucerne was always telling me to be nice to him, because although he wasn't my real father he was like my real father, and it hurt his feelings if I was rude to him. But then she didn't like it much when Zeb was nice to me. So it was hard to know how to act.
While Zeb was singing in the shower I'd get myself something to eat -- dry soybits or maybe a vegetable patty left over from dinner. Lucerne was a fairly terrible cook. Then I'd go off to school. I was usually still hungry, but I could count on a school lunch. It wouldn't be great, but it would be food. As Adam One used to say, Hunger is the best sauce.
I couldn't remember ever being hungry at the HelthWyzer Compound. I really wanted to go back there. I wanted my real father, who must still love me: if he'd known where I was, he'd surely have come to take me back. I wanted my real house, with my own room and the bed with pink bed curtains and the closet full of different clothes in it. But most of all I wanted my mother to be the way she used to be, when she'd take me shopping, or go to the Club to play golf, or off to the AnooYoo Spa to get improvements done to herself, and then she'd come back smelling nice. But if I mentioned anything about our old life, she'd say all that was in the past.
She had a lot of reasons for running off with Zeb to join the Gardeners. She'd say their way was best for humankind, and for all the other creatures on Earth as well, and she'd acted out of love, not only for Zeb but for me, because she wanted the world to be healed so life wouldn't die out completely, and didn't it make me happy to know that?
She herself didn't seem all that happy. She'd sit at the table brushing her hair, staring at herself in our one small mirror with an expression that was glum, or critical, or maybe tragic. She had long hair like all the Gardener women, and the brushing and the braiding and the pinning up was a big job. On bad days she'd go through the whole thing four or five times.
On the days when Zeb was away, she'd barely talk to me. Or she'd act as if I'd hidden him. "When did you last see him?" she'd say. "Was he at school?" It was like she wanted me to spy on him. Then she'd be apologetic and say, "How are you feeling?" as if she'd done something wrong to me.
When I'd answer, she wouldn't be listening. Instead she'd be l
istening for Zeb. She'd get more and more anxious, even angry; she'd pace around and look out our window, talking to herself about how badly he treated her; but when he'd finally turn up, she'd fall all over him. Then she'd start nagging -- where had he been, who had he been with, why hadn't he come back sooner? He'd just shrug and say, "It's okay, babe, I'm here now. You worry too much."
Then the two of them would disappear behind their plastic-strip and duct-tape curtain, and my mother would make pained and abject noises I found mortifying. I hated her then, because she had no pride and no restraint. It was like she was running down the middle of the mallway with no clothes on. Why did she worship Zeb so much?
Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody -- a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.
The other thing I disliked so much at the Gardeners was the clothes. The Gardeners themselves were all colours, but their clothes weren't. If Nature was beautiful, as the Adams and the Eves claimed -- if the lilies of the field were our models -- why couldn't we look more like butterflies and less like parking lots? We were so flat, so plain, so scrubbed, so dark.
The street kids -- the pleebrats -- were hardly rich, but they were glittery. I envied the shiny things, the shimmering things, like the TV camera phones, pink and purple and silver, that flashed in and out of their hands like magician's cards, or the Sea/H/Ear Candies they stuck into their ears to hear music. I wanted their gaudy freedom.
We were forbidden to make friends with the pleebrats, and on their part they treated us like pariahs, holding their noses and yelling, or throwing things at us. The Adams and the Eves said we were being persecuted for our faith, but it was most likely for our wardrobes: the pleebrats were very fashion-conscious and wore the best clothes they could trade or steal. So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got their knowledge that way -- we caught it like germs. We gazed at that forbidden worldly life as if through a chain-link fence.
Once I found a beautiful camera phone, lying on the sidewalk. It was muddy and the signal was dead, but I took it home anyway, and the Eves caught me with it. "Don't you know any better?" they said. "Such a thing can hurt you! It can burn your brain! Don't even look at it: if you can see it, it can see you."
14
I first met Amanda in Year Ten, when I was ten: I was always the same age as the Year, so it's easy to remember when it was.
That day was Saint Farley of Wolves -- a Young Bioneer scavenging day, when we had to tie sucky green bandanas around our necks and go out gleaning for the Gardeners' recycled-materials crafts. Sometimes we collected soap ends, carrying wicker baskets and making the rounds of the good hotels and restaurants because they threw out soap by the shovelful. The best hotels were in the rich pleebs -- Fernside, Golfgreens, and the richest of all, SolarSpace -- and we'd hitch rides to them, even though it was forbidden. The Gardeners were like that: they'd tell you to do something and then prohibit the easiest way to do it.
Rose-scented soap was the best. Bernice and me would take some home, and I'd keep mine in my pillowcase, to drown out the mildew smell of my damp quilt. We'd take the rest to the Gardeners, to be simmered into a jelly in the black-box solarcookers on the Rooftop, then cooled and cut up into slabs. The Gardeners used a lot of soap, because they were so worried about microbes, but some of the cut-up soaps would be set aside. They'd be rolled up in leaves and have strands of twisted grass tied around them, to be sold to tourists and gawkers at the Gardeners' Tree of Life Natural Materials Exchange, along with the bags of worms and the organic turnips and zucchinis and the other vegetables the Gardeners hadn't used up themselves.
That day wasn't a soap day, it was a vinegar day. We'd go to the back entrances of the bars and nightclubs and strip joints and pick through their dump boxes, and find any leftover wine, and pour it into our Young Bioneer enamel pails. Then we'd lug it off to the Wellness Clinic building, where it would be poured into the huge barrels in the Vinegar Room and fermented into vinegar, which the Gardeners used for household cleaning. The extra was decanted into the small bottles we'd gather up during our gleaning, which would have Gardeners labels glued onto them. Then they'd be offered for sale at the Tree of Life, along with the soap.
Our Young Bioneer work was supposed to teach us some useful lessons. For instance: Nothing should be carelessly thrown away, not even wine from sinful places. There was no such thing as garbage, trash, or dirt, only matter that hadn't been put to a proper use. And, most importantly, everyone, including children, had to contribute to the life of the community.
Shackie and Croze and the older boys sometimes drank their wine instead of saving it. If they drank too much, they'd fall down or throw up, or they'd get into fights with the pleebrats and throw stones at the winos. In revenge, the winos would pee into empty wine bottles to see if they could trick us. I never drank any piss myself: all you had to do was smell the opening of the bottle. But some kids had deadened their noses by smoking the butt ends of cigarettes or cigars, or even skunkweed if they could get it, and they'd upend the bottle, then spit and swear. Though maybe those kids drank from the peed-in bottles on purpose, to give themselves an excuse for the swearing, which was forbidden by the Gardeners.
As soon as they were out of sight of the Garden, Shackie and Croze and those boys would take off their Young Bioneer bandanas and tie them around their heads, like the Asian Fusions. They wanted to be a street gang too -- they even had a password. "Gang!" they'd say, and the other person was supposed to say, "Grene." So, gangrene. The "gang" part was because they were a gang, and the "grene" stood for "green," like their head scarves. It was supposed to be a secret thing just for their gang members, but we all knew about it anyway. Bernice said it was a really good password for them, because gangrene was flesh rot and they were totally rotten.
"Big joke, Bernice," said Crozier. "P.S., you're ugly."
