Margaret Atwood - The Year of the Flood

I lived with Lucerne and Zeb in a building about five blocks from the Garden. It was called the Cheese Factory because that’s what it used to be, and it still had a faint cheesy smell to it. After the cheese it was used for artists’ lofts, but there weren’t any artists left, and nobody seemed to know who owned it. Meanwhile the Gardeners had taken it over. They liked living in places where they didn’t have to pay rent.

Our space was a big room, with some cubicles curtained off – one for me, one for Lucerne and Zeb, one for the violet biolet, one for the shower. The cubicle curtains were woven of plastic-bag strips and duct tape, and they weren’t in any way soundproof. This wasn’t great, especially when it came to the violet biolet. The Gardeners said digestion was holy and there was nothing funny or terrible about the smells and noises that were part of the end product of the nutritional process, but at our place those end products were hard to ignore.

We ate our meals in the main room, on a table made out of a door. All of our dishes and pots and pans were salvaged – gleaned, as the Gardeners said – except for some of the thicker plates and mugs. Those had been made by the Gardeners back in their Ceramics period, before they’d decided that kilns used up too much energy.

I slept on a futon stuffed with husks and straw. It had a quilt sewed out of blue jeans and used bathmats, and every morning I had to make the bed first thing, because the Gardeners liked neatly made beds, though they weren’t squeamish about what they were made of. Then I’d take my clothes down from the nail on the wall and put them on. I got clean ones every seventh day: the Gardeners didn’t believe in wasting water and soap on too much washing. My clothes were always dank, because of the humidity and because the Gardeners didn’t believe in dryers. “God made the sun for a reason,” Nuala used to say, and according to her that reason was for drying our clothes.

Lucerne would still be in bed, it being her favourite place. Back when we’d lived at HelthWyzer with my real father she’d hardly ever stayed inside our house, but here she almost never went out of it, except to go over to the Rooftop or the Wellness Clinic and help the other Gardener women peel burdock roots or make those lumpy quilts or weave those plastic-bag curtains or something.

Zeb would be in the shower: No daily showers was one of the many Gardener rules Zeb ignored. Our shower water came down a garden hose out of a rain barrel and was gravity-fed, so no energy was used. That was Zeb’s reason for making an exception for himself. He’d be singing:

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 listening 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.