‘We don’t have a Boss. There’s a ruling cadre. It’s much more progressive. We were cited by the national government as an example! Imagine that! But there’s not much they can do to help us, when it comes to caching food. Still,’ she smiled at her new friend. ‘It means I’ll be able to pick the father.’
‘How do you mean,’ Issa asked, ingenuously, ‘pick the father?’
Ay
ş
e explained: ‘I mean, it doesn’t have to be the Boss! I can choose whichever boy I like!’
Issa nodded slowly at this. It seemed to her a marvellous, a spacious and illuminated thing. Choice! ‘Do you have a boy in mind?’ she said.
‘Oh, one or two,’ laughed Ay
ş
e. ‘But I like to keep them dancing attendance. You don’t want to give it all away. It’s hard enough in this world, being a woman, and a longhair woman at that. You need to make the best of what you have. What about you? Where are you going?’
‘New York,’ said Issa.
‘Where’s that? I don’t know where that is.’
‘It’s away in the west,’ said Issa, and that was information enough.
After a while, Ay
ş
e agreed to buy the bottle of water they’d shared for twenty cents. It was four-fifths full. ‘And I’ll get forty cents for it from the right buyer. As much for the bottle itself, as the water. Are you sure you won’t feel ripped off?’
‘Do you have a bag you could let me have?’ Issa asked, thinking of the other bottle she was going to have to carry. ‘A plastic sack, or something?’
‘A plastic bag and fifteen cents for the bottle and the water,’ offered Ay
ş
e.
‘Deal.’
When they parted it was dark, and all around people were clutching one another to keep warm through the night. Some few had sheets of cloth or plastic, but most did not. The sky was the colour of the deep water beneath the ocean. The Milky Way gave no energy to the blood. Issa pushed on for another mile or so through the night air before she had to stop from exhaustion and lie down. The thought had occurred to her: What if Sergei comes after me? He might do. And he would ask himself: Which way would she go? Not south into the mountains, or west or east into the wilderness, but north to the Black Sea. So he would come up this road, with his gun, and his unpredictable rage, looking for me. But as she lay down, and pulled her arms inside the body of her shirt, and tucked her legs tight against her tummy underneath the material, she thought to herself: He would never have the gumption. And then she thought: And even if he did, how could he spot me, amongst all these people? The sheer populousness of people was her shield. Her prop and stay. Her sword and spear.
She slept.
In the morning she took a drink, just to moisten her mouth, and walked on; slowly at first, but more energetically as the sun warmed her head. The sky was pale blue; white trilobite-shaped clouds crawled, occasionally intermitting the sunlight and causing Issa to slow. But by midday she came over the crest of a hill and at last saw the Black Sea. It was so beautiful a sight her heart danced upwards like a flame. Water, as far as the horizon!
She stopped for a rest and took a long drink from her bottle in honour of the sight of it. There were no fences forbidding access (the water was brine, of course). She could see the new road, a fat concrete line linking the eastern and western horizon. The old road, clearly visible under the water, ran alongside, as if in spectral homage.
She watched the sea for a long time. There was something hypnotic in it, in the mélange of illumination and shadow. The magic eye. There were no hawks. There were neither hulks nor icebergs. Nothing dropped violently down from the white sky. All that happened was that the Black Sea butted its blue head gently against the shore, and the wind went all in one direction, endlessly, above it, and people sprawled in the sun. Earth and sky. Suds on the surface of the atmosphere were clouds, erratic and baggy or tight as bolted cloth.
The sun set and there was no sun.
The following day, with almost all her water drunk, she walked westward. She talked to a few women, and ignored, or rebutted – or in one case wasted valuable energy fleeing – sexual advances from idle men and boys. The main event of that day was passing over a river. The river flowed in a ragged-sloped valley through land the colour of burnt toast. The road passed over it, a flat slab of concrete.
A great scrum of longhairs packed the riverbank, like ants on honey. Issa tried to get down to the water and fill her bottle. Down towards the sealine there was some order amongst the longhair masses, but as she tried to penetrate the press to get to the water a tall man demanded she pay a toll. Wishing not to spend her fifteen cents if she could avoid it, Issa came away and instead tried to get at the free and flowing water upstream. But here the crowd was bad-tempered and aggressive. She eventually got down the side of some gritty rocks and reached down to hold her bottle in; but it was only half full when a beak-nosed woman tried to snatch the vessel from her, and it was all she could do to scramble away. The whole thing was so energy-intensive that, after scuttling half a kilometre further along the rocks, she had to lie down in the sun, the bottle underneath her body, and spread out her hair. After that she left the road and mounted the southern slope, until she found an empty spot with a reasonable angle on some sunlight. All around her, people were settling, or settled, like puffins on a cliff-face.
She was close to a man, who sat with his knees pulled in at his chest, staring out to sea. Normally she would stay clear of engaging conversationally with a man, but the way this fellow shyly held back from approaching her endeared him to her. After a while she asked him his name. When he didn’t reply, she turned to look properly at him, and saw then that he was dead, motionless, his eyes hemmed by a living, clotted mascara of flies.
She found another place to rest.
By the time she properly had her energy back it was late afternoon. She walked a few hours, picking her way along the western highway. Occasional cars passed, their horns set to head-denting levels of loudness to try and clear a path through the milling pedestrians. The sound of their engines accelerating when they broke through to clear freeway was a monster hound growling fit to rend meat with its jaws. And then, diminishing into the distance, leaving behind the sound of waves lapping at its new coastline, hungry in a different and more implacable way.
Issa chatted with another pedestrian, called Alia. She was going to Trabzon because she had heard that there were Christian missionaries who handed out free water and vitamin pills in return for listening to a sermon. ‘And if you can convince them you’re pregnant, they take you off to a special hardfood facility and stuff you for a year and a half with ice cream and roast chicken.’
This didn’t sound very likely to Issa, but she didn’t want to contradict Alia, a tiny, fidgety woman with wrists thin as breadsticks. ‘Are you pregnant?’ she asked her.
‘No,’ she replied, ‘but that’s easy enough to arrange. First I want to check the story about the ice cream and the chicken is true, though, before I get myself into that interesting condition. I haven’t saved anything up for a baby. My cousin got pregnant by accident, and it killed her.’
‘How?’ asked Issa, experiencing that familiar unease at her lack of anything except intellectual curiosity in the face of such a horrible personal circumstance.
‘She did her best,’ Alia said. ‘She lay in the sun all day, and she
drank
a lot, ate as many insects and dirt and grass as she could. But the baby just drained all the meat out of her arms and legs, and she got so that her eyes bulged like her skull was trying to shit them out of their sockets. Then she couldn’t keep the baby going, and lost it, and there was a lot of blood. Then she got hot and shivery and died.’
There was a long silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Issa, in a neutral voice.
‘I wasn’t especially close to her,’ said Alia, looking out to sea. ‘And people said it was her fault for getting pregnant in the first place. But I don’t think that’s fair. It shouldn’t be a crime, getting pregnant.’
‘No,’ agreed Issa. ‘Not a crime. Not a death sentence.’
‘Ah!’ said Alia suddenly, pointing out to sea. ‘
There’s
a raft!’
It was a foreshortened dark rectangle, away near the horizon, like a black rug laid over the water. The sun was low in the sky, so Issa sat down with Alia and watched it. It moved gradually to the shore; as it came closer Issa could see how crowded it was.
‘I’d love to get on a raft,’ said Alia. ‘The open sea!’
‘It looks rather crammed,’ said Issa. ‘And I thought you were going to become a Christian and get ice cream?’
‘Oh,’ said Alia, ‘it pays to keep options open, don’t you think? And there’s no harm in dreaming. We could be dead tomorrow.’
‘A morbid thought.’
‘I was speaking to a woman from Batumi who said that they’d invented a new disease, especially for longhairs.’
‘Disease?’
‘Sure: makes your hair fall out and your skin come up in blotches, red and black. Kills you in days.’
‘They invented this?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who are “they”?’
‘Oh, you know,’ said Alia. ‘The wealthy, I guess.’
In the morning the two walked on together and by noon they were at the outskirts of Trabzon. The town sat in a series of linked wide concavities in the coastline, the remains of the old harbourfront clearly visible beneath the chemically blue waters. The town itself was fenced, of course, and longhairs were discouraged; although, resting after her walk, Issa watched one crocodile of longhair women, dressed in black, showing IDs and being permitted through. There were the usual dusty crowds of longhairs loitering on the scrubland outside the fence.
Issa rested, and got talking to a group of Georgians. Their talk was all of the new bioweaponry, targeted specifically to attack longhairs.
‘They hate us. Ever since Flowrida.’
‘Flowrida was worse for us than them!’ one man said. ‘Tens of thousands of our kind died at Flowrida’.
‘Florida,’ Issa corrected. ‘And what happened in Florida anyway?’ A few glowered at her, as if she had made a joke in bad taste.
‘It goes back further than that,’ said another Georgian, a young woman with very wide-spaced grey eyes. ‘It goes back to Triunion.’ Everybody murmured their agreement. It was the opinion of everybody that Triunion was where the problems had started, and the blood-deep hatred of the wealthy for the longhairs was born. Issa, not wishing to invite mockery by admitting she didn’t know what Triunion signified, held her peace. ‘They treat us like animals – they treat us worse than animals,’ said somebody. ‘Then they mustn’t be surprised if we act like animals – and devour them.’
Somebody asked her where she was headed.
‘New York,’ she told them.
There were gasps, some laughter. ‘Good luck! But what will you do there, little longhair lady?’
‘It’s mine,’ she explained. ‘I own that city.’
People nodded, hugged their knees to their collar bones, adjusted their hair to gain the best purchase on the light.
That evening, as most people were settling for the night, Issa overruled her exhaustion and explored. The guard was changed on the gate; the day soldiers carted away in a landcar, the night guard brought in. Issa wandered towards the sealine. The lights itched and shivered on the water. One tall white-lit glass skyscraper, visible round the bay, looked to be built on the foundations of a trembling, watery, inverted version of itself. Flitters passed through the city’s sky. An eerie mix of sounds, blended into a clanging, choral, mumbly noise. A hundred thousand people with money, folk who owned things and ate hardfood, going about their lives in the young night.
Issa found a place where the fence had been underdug, and thought about sneaking into the town. But she couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do in there.
The next morning Alia went off with three of the Georgians, and Issa made her way around the south of the city, up and down an arthritic topography of hills and descents. She passed many derelict and semi-derelict houses and innumerable longhair bodies, variously prone, supine or upright. Her own throat was dry as sand, as thorny as a kaalbush. Her insides felt bleached. Little sips from her bottle did not alleviate the horrible sensations, so, impulsively, she drained the last of her water. The relief was temporary, of course, as it always is. By the end of the day the inside of her throat was again dry rubble and dust, except that now she had no water at all. She sat on the roof of a Neoclean shrine – two solid planks of concrete set into the rise of the gradient, leaving a space below into which people came and went – and stared at the sea. Strange how beguiling the sea is to look at.
She dreamt that night, or else it wasn’t a dream but a genuine ghostly visitation, that Rageh sat beside her, with his ridiculous cranium like a crimped-rim ear trumpet. ‘Will you go on a raft?’
‘I don’t see how I shall get on one,’ said Issa. Either in her dream, or in real life, she started weeping. The tears were exhaustion, and weariness, and physical suffering (for her throat’s lining felt like a hot puff pastry). But as soon as she started crying, she stopped: for crying made her feel foolish, and weak, and she didn’t like feeling either thing. ‘I may die of thirst this night, or tomorrow,’ she said.