Margaret Atwood - The Year of the Flood

Behind the others, the green tree-leaves open, swallow. Gone now. All of them. She can’t spot the place where the woman tumbled: the weeds are too tall. Should she go out and look for her? No. It could be a decoy. There’d be three against her one.

She watches for a long time. The crows must be following them – the men, the one in khaki. Aw aw aw aw. A trail of sound, off into the distance.

Will they be back? They’ll be back, thinks Toby. They know I’m in here, they’ll guess I must have food in order to have stayed alive this long. Also I shot one of them: they’ll want revenge, it’s only human. They’ll be vindictive, like the pigs. But they won’t come soon, because they know I have a rifle. They’ll have to plan.

No men. No pigs either. No liobams.

No bird woman.

Maybe I lost my mind, thinks Toby. Not lost. Temporarily misplaced.

It’s bath time; she’s up on the roof. She pours rainwater from her collection of smaller bowls and pans into the largest bowl, soaps herself, hands and face only: she won’t risk the vulnerability of a full bath, because who knows who may be peering? She’s in the midst of sponging off the suds when she hears the crows making a commotion, close by. Aw aw aw! This time it sounds like laughing.

Toby! Toby! Help me!

Was that my name? thinks Toby. She looks over the railing, sees nothing. But the voice comes again, right close to the building.

Is it a trap? A woman calling out to her, a man’s arm around her throat, a knife to the jugular?

Toby! It’s me! Please!

She blots herself with a towel, slides into her top-to-toe, shoulders the rifle, makes her way down the stairs. Opens the door: no one. But the voice again, so near. Oh please!

Left corner: nobody. Right corner, nobody again. She’s just outside the garden gate when a woman comes around the building. She’s hobbling, she’s thin and beat up; her long hair’s across her face, matted with dirt and dried blood. She’s wearing a spangled body suit, with damp, tattered blue feathers.

The bird woman. Some freak from a sex circus. She’s bound to be infected, a walking plague. If she touches me, thinks Toby, I’m dead.

“Keep away from me!” she shouts. She backs up against the garden fence. “Fuck off out of here!”

The woman sways on her feet. She has a gash on her leg, and her bare arms are scratched and bleeding – she must have run through brambles. All Toby can think of is the fresh blood: boiling with microbes and viruses.

“Piss off! Get away!!”

“I’m not sick,” says the woman. Tears are running down her face. But they’d all said that in their despair. They’d said it, pleading, holding up their hands for help, for comfort, and then they’d turned into pink porridge. Toby had watched them from the roof.

They’ll be drowning. Don’t let them clutch you. Don’t let yourself be that last straw, my Friends, says Adam One.

The rifle. She fumbles with the strap: it’s caught in the fabric of her top-to-toe. How to fend off this festering hotspot? Yelling’s no good without a weapon. Maybe I could bang her on the head with a stone, thinks Toby. But she doesn’t have a stone. A good kick in the solar plexus, then wash my feet.

You are an uncharitable person, says the voice of Nuala. You have scorned God’s Creatures, for are not Human beings God’s Creatures too?

From under the mat of hair the woman pleads: “Toby! It’s me!” She crumples, falls to her knees. Then Toby sees it’s Ren. Beneath all the dirt and mangled glitz, it’s only little Ren.

Toby hauls Ren inside the Spa building and dumps her on the floor while she locks the door behind them. Ren is still crying hysterically, in great gulping sobs.

“Never you mind,” says Toby. She takes Ren under the arms and pulls her upright, and they stumble down the hall into one of the treatment cubicles. Ren’s a dead weight, but she’s not very heavy, and Toby manages to hoist her onto a massage table. She smells of sweat and earth, and blood somewhere, and another smell: something’s decaying.

“Stay here,” says Toby unnecessarily: Ren isn’t going anywhere. She’s lying back on the pink pillow with her eyes closed. One of those eyes is black and blue. AnooYoo Soothing Aloe Eye Pads, thinks Toby. With Extra Arnica. She breaks open a packet and applies them, and adds a pink sheet, tucked in at the sides so Ren won’t fall off the table. There’s a cut on Ren’s forehead, another on her cheek: nothing too serious, she’ll deal with those later.

She goes into the kitchen, boils up some water in the Kelly kettle. Most likely Ren’s dehydrated. She pours hot water into a cup, adds a little of her cherished honey, a pinch of salt. Some dried green onions from her dwindling stash. Carries the cup into Ren’s cubicle, takes off the eye pads, sits her up.

Ren’s eyes are huge in her thin, bruised face. “I’m not sick,” she says, which is untrue: she’s burning with fever. But there’s more than one kind of sickness. Toby checks the symptoms: no blood oozing from the pores, no froth. Still, Ren could be a plague carrier, an incubator; in which case, Toby’s already infected.

“Try to drink,” says Toby.

“I can’t,” says Ren. But she does manage to get some of the water down. “Where’s Amanda? I need to get dressed.”

“It’s okay,” says Toby. “Amanda’s nearby. Now try to sleep.” She eases Ren back down. So Amanda’s in this story somewhere, she thinks. That girl was always trouble.

“I can’t see,” says Ren. She’s trembling all over.

Back in the kitchen, Toby pours the rest of the boiled water into a bowl: she needs to clean away those bedraggled feathers and sequins. She carries the bowl and a pair of scissors and a bar of soap and a stack of pink washcloths into Ren’s cubicle, folds back the sheet, and cuts away the grubby outfit. It isn’t cloth, it’s some other substance, underneath the feathers. Stretchy. Almost like skin. She soaks the patches where it’s stuck on so she can peel them off more easily. The crotch has been torn away. Cripes, thinks Toby, what a mess. Later she’ll make a poultice.

There are abrasions around the neck – rope burns, no doubt. The gash on the left leg is what’s festering. Toby’s as gentle as she can be, but Ren winces and yelps. “That fucking hurts!” she says. Then she throws up the salt-and-sugar water.

After she’s wiped away the filth, Toby starts washing the leg wound. “How did you get this?” she asks.

“I don’t know.” Ren is whispering. “I fell down.”

Toby cleans out the gash and puts some honey on it. Antibiotics in it, Pilar used to say. There ought to be a first-aid kit, somewhere in the Spa. “Hold still. You don’t want gangrene,” she says to Ren.

Ren giggles. “Knock, knock,” she says, “Gang grene.”

The dirty covering’s all stripped away, and Ren has been sponged. “I’ll give you some Willow and Chamomile,” Toby says. And Poppy, she thinks. “You need to sleep.” Ren will be safer on the floor than on the table: she makes a nest of pink towels, eases her down onto it, adds extra padding because Ren can’t make it to the bathroom, she’s too weak. She’s hot as an ember.

Toby brings the Willow mixture in a small glass. Ren swallows, her throat moving like a bird’s. Nothing comes up.

There’s no use trying the maggots yet. Ren needs to be coherent for that, able to obey instructions: no scratching, for instance. The first thing is to get the temperature down.

While Ren sleeps, Toby sorts through her store of dried mushrooms. She chooses the immune-system boosters: reishi, maitake, shitake, birch polypore, zhu ling, lion’s mane, coryceps, ice man. She puts them in boiled water to soak. Then in the afternoon she prepares a mushroom elixir – the simmering, the straining, the cooling – and gives Ren thirty drops of it.