Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam

I think that’s enough of the story of Zeb for tonight. Look, the moon is rising. It’s your bedtime.

I know you don’t have beds. But I have a bed. So it is my bedtime now. Good night.

Good night means that I hope you will sleep well, and wake up safely in the morning, and that nothing bad will happen to you.

Well, such as … I can’t think what sort of bad things might happen to you.

Good night.

She’s tried to be discreet, sneaking off alone every night after she’s told the Crakers their story, then joining Zeb once out of eyesight. But she’s not fooling anyone, or anyone among the humans.

Naturally, they see it as funny. Or the younger ones do — Swift Fox, Lotis Blue, Croze and Shackie, Zunzuncito. Even Ren, probably. Even Amanda. Romance among the chronologically challenged is giggle fodder. For the youthful, lovelorn and wrinkly don’t blend, or not without farce. There’s a moment past which the luscious and melting becomes the crusty and wizened, the fertile sea becomes the barren sand, and they must feel she’s passed that moment. Brewing herbs, gathering mushrooms, applying maggots, tending bees, removing warts — beldam’s roles. Those are her proper vocations.

As for Zeb, he’s probably less comic to them than puzzling. From their socio-bio vantage point, he should be doing what alpha males do best: jumping the swooning nubiles that are his by right, knocking them up, passing his genes along via females who can actually parturiate, unlike her. So why is he wasting his precious sperm packet? they must wonder. Instead of, for instance, investing it wisely in the ovarian offerings of Swift Fox. Which is almost certainly that girl’s take on things, judging from the body language: the eyelash play, the tit thrusts, the hair-tuft flinging, the armpit display. She might as well be flashing a blue bottom, like the Crakers. Baboons in spate.

Stop that, Toby, she tells herself. This is how it starts, among the closed circles of the marooned, the shipwrecked, the besieged: jealousy, dissention, a breach in the groupthink walls. Then the entry of the foe, the murderer, the shadow slipping in through the door we forgot to lock because we were distracted by our darker selves: nursing our minor hatreds, indulging our petty resentments, yelling at one another, tossing the crockery.

Beleaguered groups are prone to such festering: such backbiting, such infighting. At the Gardeners, they’d held Deep Mindfulness sessions about this very subject.

Ever since they’ve been lovers, Toby has been dreaming that Zeb is gone. In real life he is in fact gone while she dreams, as there isn’t enough room for both of them on Toby’s single-bed-sized slab in her broom closet of a room. So in the middle of each night Zeb sneaks off like someone in an ancient English country-house farce, groping in the darkness back to his own cramped cubicle.

But in the dreams he really is gone — gone far away, nobody knows where — and Toby is standing outside the cobb-house fence, looking down the road, now overgrown with kudzu vines and choked with parts of broken houses and smashed-up vehicles. There’s a soft bleating sound, or is it weeping? “He won’t be back,” says a watercolour voice. “He won’t ever be back.”

It’s a woman’s voice: is it Ren, is it Amanda, is it Toby herself? The scenario is sweetly sentimental, like a pastel greeting card — awake, she’d be annoyed by it, but in dreams there is no irony. She cries so much that her clothes are damp with tears, luminous tears that flicker like blue-green gasfire in what is now becoming the darkness, or is she in a cave? But then a large cat-like animal comes to console her. It rubs up against her, purring like the wind.

She wakes to find a small Craker boy in the room with her. He’s lifted the edge of the damp sheet that entwists her and is gently stroking her leg. He smells of oranges, and of something else. Citrus air freshener. They all smell like this, but the young ones more.

“What are you doing?” she asks as calmly as she can. My toenails are so dirty, she thinks. Dirty and jagged. Nail scissors: put them on the gleaning list. Her skin is coarse beside the pristine skin on the hand of this child. Is he glowing from within, or is his skin so fine-grained it reflects the light?

“Oh Toby, you have legs underneath,” says the boy. “Like us.”

“Yes,” she says. “I do.”

“Do you have breasts, Oh Toby?”

“Yes, I have those as well,” she says, smiling.

“Are there two? Two breasts?”

“Yes,” she says, resisting the urge to add, “so far.” Is he expecting one breast, or three, or maybe four or six, like a dog? Has he ever seen a dog up close?

“Will a baby come out from between your legs, Oh Toby? After you turn blue?”

What is he asking? Whether non-Craker people like her can have babies, or whether she herself might have one? “If I were younger, then a baby might come out,” she says. “But not now.” Though her age isn’t the deciding factor. If her whole life had been different. If she hadn’t needed the money. If she’d lived in another universe.

“Oh Toby,” says the Craker boy, “what sickness do you have? Are you hurt?” He puts up his beautiful arms to hug her. Are those tears in his strange green eyes?

“It’s all right,” she says. “I’m not hurt any more.” She’d sold some of her eggs to pay the rent, back in her pleebland days, before the God’s Gardeners had taken her in. There’d been infection: all her future children, precluded. Surely she’d buried that particular sadness many years ago. If not, she ought to bury it. In view of the total situation — the situation of what used to be thought of as the human race — such emotions ought to be dismissed as meaningless.

She’s about to add, “I have scars, inside me,” but she stops herself. What is a scar, Oh Toby? That would be the next question. Then she’d have to explain what a scar is. A scar is like writing on your body. It tells about something that once happened to you, such as a cut on your skin where blood came out. What is writing, Oh Toby? Writing is when you make marks on a piece of paper — on a stone — on a flat surface, like the sand on the beach, and each of the marks means a sound, and the sounds joined together mean a word, and the words joined together mean … How do you make this writing, Oh Toby? You make it with a keyboard, or no — once you made it with a pen or a pencil, a pencil is a … Or you make it with a stick. Oh Toby, I do not understand. You make a mark with a stick on your skin, you cut your skin open and then it is a scar, and that scar turns into a voice? It speaks, it tells us things? Oh Toby, can we hear what the scar says? Show us how to make these scars that talk!

No, she should stay away from the whole scar business. Otherwise she might inspire the Crakers to start carving themselves up to see if they can let out the voices.

“What’s your name?” she says to the little boy.

“My name is Blackbeard,” says the child gravely. Blackbeard, the notorious murdering pirate? This sweet child? A child who will never have a beard when he grows up because Crake did away with body hair in his new species. A lot of the Crakers have odd names. According to Zeb, Crake named them — Crake, with his warped sense of humour. Though why shouldn’t their names be odd, to go with their general oddity?

“I am very happy to meet you, Oh Blackbeard,” she says.

“Do you eat your droppings, Oh Toby?” says Blackbeard. “As we do? To digest our leaves better?”

What droppings? Edible poo? No one warned her about this! “It is time to go and see your mother, Oh Blackbeard,” says Toby. “She must be worried about you.”