Fierce September (16 page)

I picked up my bag and went into the bedroom. Vima’s bed was a mess. I began to make it, then wondered if she’d bothered to change the sheets, but changed them anyway from a pile of clean linen in the cupboard. I made up the other bed for me. Unpacked my clothes. Put my book on the table between the beds.

There had to be somewhere to wash sheets and clothes. Towels too, and Wilfred’s nappies. I opened every door in the place before I found a panel in the kitchen that slid sideways. Behind it was a tub and the same type of small spinner we had in the Centre for drying. I washed the sheets and the tumble of towels and baby gear dumped in the tub, glad everything was made from the fabric that practically washed itself. By the look of the number of nappies, Wilfred would be running out of clean ones any moment now.

I was starving. It was well past midday. Perhaps Vima had eaten an early lunch – but Wilfred must surely be due to wake unless she’d fed him in the office and I hadn’t heard him. I decided to cook a meal anyway. As Willem had promised, there was plenty of food in the pantry. I chose pasta with a vitamin-enriched sauce of tomato and beef mince. It took ten minutes to prepare and cook.

Where was Vima? Would I have to drag her out of the lab by her hair?

Just then the door opened and she came in holding Wilfred, who was crying in great gasping sobs. I leapt for him before she could drop him as she gaped at me, open-mouthed.

‘Yes, I’m real. I’m here to look after you – and about time somebody did, I’d say.’ I bossed her around, making her sit in the easy chair, pulling over the stool for her feet before handing Wilfred back to her. Now it was she who sobbed, not her son.

I made her a drink of hot chocolate and brought tissues to mop her face. When Wilfred finished feeding, I took him, changed him and walked with him on my shoulder until he burped.

‘Will he be okay on the sofa while we have our lunch?’

She nodded, watching while I settled him.

‘He smiled! Vima – that was a real smile!’

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I saw it.’ She rubbed her hands over her face. ‘I don’t know why you’re here. Or how. Or anything. But I think you’ve just saved my life.’

She frightened me when she talked like that. ‘Well, I don’t know about you, but if I don’t eat soon I’ll be dying of starvation. Stay there. I’ll bring food!’

But it looked as if she couldn’t have moved if she tried.

I put the plate of food on her lap. ‘Eat. Go on, it’s easy – just pick up the fork.’

She complied, but I kept watching her, nagging at her when she looked to be falling asleep.

‘Good,’ she muttered when she’d finished.

‘What have you been living on?’ I could see that she hadn’t had the time or energy to prepare even these quick meals.

‘Snack bars. Sick of them. Only got a few left.’ Her head dropped forward. She was asleep.

I picked Wilfred up. He grinned at me again. ‘Gorgeous kid, aren’t you?’ His skin had darkened now to the colour of the latte Magda had made for us in our first Outside cafe. ‘Come on, I’m thinking you could do with a bath.’

He liked the water. And I got wet. The only clean clothes I could find for him were those I’d washed earlier. How dumb of Willem to dump Vima here with a tiny baby. If he ever got mad at me again, I’d let fly at him over this. He could well have killed them both.

Wilfred fell asleep almost as soon as he was dried and dressed. I put him down in the cot jammed in the corner of the bedroom. He deserved better than this, I thought.

Vima hadn’t stirred. I knew I should wake her, send her back to work. But to heck with that. She wasn’t going to be much use, tired as she was.

I did the dishes as quietly as I could. The floor needed sweeping, but I would do that later. I wouldn’t do anything which might disturb her – though it looked as if it would take a trumpet to wake her. I picked up my book and settled on the sofa to read
Cinderella
.

Were the ugly sisters like Marba? Were they like him in that they just didn’t understand how other people felt? I started the story again. No, they were nasty. Marba was never nasty.

In my mind, the fairy godmother became Grif, and she had just turned the rats into coachmen when there was a violent hammering on the door.

‘Vima! Where the hell are you?’ a man’s voice bellowed.

She muttered but didn’t wake. I rushed to the door and wrenched it open. ‘How dare you!’ I shrieked, all the fury I felt at Willem going into that yell. ‘You lot have just about killed her. You get the blazes out of here and let her sleep!’

The man rubbed his eyes. ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘Your worst nightmare,’ I shot back. ‘Now beat it!’

Behind me, Vima staggered to her feet. ‘Must’ve fallen asleep. Sorry. Won’t happen again.’ She touched my arm. ‘It’s all right, Juno. I’m okay.’

Like the world outside was okay, for example?

The man was still shaking his head, as if I was something magicked up by the fairy godmother, when he and Vima left. He was an idiot. He and the other two she worked for. Why couldn’t they see she was a wreck? They were meant to be smart – couldn’t they see that if she collapsed in a screaming heap she wouldn’t be able to help them at all?

‘Idiots!’ I grabbed a cushion and booted it across the room. It only just missed Vima’s untouched cup of chocolate. I’d make her another drink, and I would stay there while she got it down her dumb throat.

I boiled the kettle, took a pot of tea into the office then yelled at her through the glass window. ‘Tea! Come and get it!’

Vima, now wearing the full protective livery, was sitting in front of a series of screens. She held up a hand. ‘Hang on a minute. Won’t take a sec.’ She got up, picked up a small dish with a wide lip that had something written on it. She slotted the dish into the machine at the back of one of the screens. Repeated the operation with five more dishes.

I poured the tea, not wanting to believe what I was seeing.

At last Vima got up, went out into the corridor to shed the suit and came into the office. She took the cup and sat down where she could still see the screens.

‘Vima – those dishes. They’re pathogen samples, aren’t they?’

She nodded.

‘So Willem lied. He said you wouldn’t be dealing with pathogens. He lied, didn’t he?’

She shrugged. ‘What’s it matter? The job has to be done. The only contact I have is putting them in and taking them out. Very low risk. And I’m careful. Very careful.’

How could anyone be careful when they were utterly exhausted? I kept my mouth shut and determined once more to do my job, which at that moment was to make sure she got enough liquids into her stubborn body.

Ten minutes later she stood up to go. ‘Wait till I get back in there. You mustn’t come into contact with anything from the lab, and the suit won’t be fully sterilised yet so it could have contaminated the other ones.’

I waited till she reappeared, suited and masked, in the lab.

She glanced up at me as I stood to leave. ‘Juno?’

‘What?’

‘Thanks. I don’t know … thanks.’

A
LL MY LIFE I’D LONGED for the chance to be alone, to be away from the scrutiny of others, but now that I was, I hated the loneliness, hated being shut up by myself. I thought about prisoners, wondered how they adjusted to such confinement. Right now, we were all prisoners. None of us was able to walk freely in the wind and sunshine.

I cleaned the apartment, but even working slowly I finished before two hours had passed.

The mini-comp was switched on but nobody called me. I tried calling Mother but she didn’t answer. I began surfing the net, searching for news of the pandemic. That was a shock: now even reputable news sites were speculating that we had brought the disease from Taris, while others were rabid in their blame. We should be sent back, they raged; we should be forced to nurse the sick but we shouldn’t be given protective gear. Then we’d start to understand what we’d done.

I couldn’t bear it. The government site made no mention of where the disease might have come from, but that was no comfort. It didn’t refute the rumour it had come from Taris either.

The talk icon flashed and I was relieved to switch over. It was Oban.

‘Juno! Are you with Vima? What’s happening? Is she all right?’

He looked worried, but his face relaxed as I told him why I was there. ‘Willem is dumb – lucky for him he’s not near enough for me to yell at him,’ I said. ‘But tell me about you. What’s New Plymouth like? What work are you doing?’

Oban ignored my questions. ‘I wanted to talk to you too. I wanted to tell you how sorry I am that Grif died – I know what she meant to you.’

His sympathy caught me off guard, and I blinked back tears. ‘Thank you,’ I said, but I couldn’t say more.

‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated softly, then he began to tell me about his new life. ‘I’m the guy who hands the tools to the engineer in charge of maintaining the sterilisation units at the hospital.’ He smiled at me. ‘You’d like New Plymouth. It’s pretty and there’s a mountain not far away.’

‘Anywhere would be better than this place,’ I said, ‘though I’m glad I’m here all the same.’

‘How is she, Juno? Tell me the truth.’

The truth was not going to be what he hoped for, but he had to know. ‘I think she’s pleased to be working herself to exhaustion. I think she’s relieved to be away from Jov.’ I gulped, then rushed the words. ‘Oban, she still loves him. She knows there’s no future in it. She knows he’ll never leave Sina, but she still loves him.’

He sighed. ‘If only we could choose who we will love.’

‘And you, Oban? Do you still love her?’

He grimaced. ‘Oh yes. Always have, always will. Determined, pig-headed and maddening as she is.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. We all might die. Solve all our problems.’ He yawned and rubbed his face. ‘Back to work. Back to the fight. I’ll call again soon.’

I wished I could go back to the fight, but at least I was helping by looking after Vima – if I could keep that in mind, I mightn’t go crazy sitting about by myself doing nothing. I pulled a face. I wouldn’t lay any odds on it.

I washed the dishes, washed the clothes Wilfred had been wearing, chose what to cook for dinner: vegetable curry followed by feijoa sponge pudding. After that, the afternoon loomed ahead of me.

I sat down with my book. There were seven stories:
Rapunzel
,
Cinderella
,
Sleeping Beauty
,
Goldilocks and the Three
Bears
,
Little Red Riding Hood
,
Hansel and Gretel
and
The
Three Little Pigs
. I would limit myself to one story a day. I chose
Cinderella
again, reading it aloud, pretending I was reading it to Hera whose favourite story swapped between
Hansel and Gretel
and
Little Red Riding Hood
. But I couldn’t finish the story once the fairy godmother appeared, for she became Grif in my mind and I wept.

There were books on the net. I downloaded one by Jane Austen, but I couldn’t understand the life her characters lived. So I watched some of a movie of the book, which made more sense and made me realise how little I knew of the years that had passed before my birth. That world was so different.

Silvern called on the mini-comp. ‘Nothing to report,’ she said. ‘How about you?’

I gave her the account of my day.

‘Not exciting then?’

‘No. But Silvern – have you been checking the web?’

She shrugged. ‘Yeah, I know. It’s vile. Paz and me – we check it every day.’

‘You didn’t say.’

‘No point. Don’t need Marba fixing me with his beady eye and demanding to know why we look, what we deduce from what we find, and what do we think we should do about it.’

That made me laugh. ‘I’m missing him already.’

She flashed me an evil grin. ‘I’ll tell him. Then I’ll ask him if he thinks that means you want to marry him.’

But I didn’t care if she did tell him – not when there was a whole country full of young men out there. Even if they did all hate me for being from Taris.

‘Is Hera okay?’ I asked.

‘For goodness sake! You haven’t been gone a whole day yet! Of course she’s okay, even though her big sister’s an idiot.’ She stood up and walked towards her television. ‘I’m going!’

I hit the switch before she could get to hers. Why take her temper out on me? There were plenty of people in the Centre she could yell at if she was in a bad mood. Cow.

I slumped down on the couch, waiting for Wilfred to wake up, waiting for time to pass.

Mother called mid-afternoon. Yes, I assured her, I was fine. Everything was good. She told me an equal pack of lies: she was doing well, not grieving too much because she knew Grif would expect her to get on with life. The only true thing she said was how thankful she was to have Sina to care for. Trebe had calculated that the baby would come the next day, so they were busy getting the apartment ready for the birth. I asked where Hera was, and Mother smiled. ‘Brex has taken her up to the roof. Hera says Brex is her friend.’

When we finished talking there was nothing to do but wait.

I had thought Vima would be finished work for the day when she came in for the evening meal, but she went back to the lab and was still there when Wilfred woke at ten, wanting to be fed. I had to bang on the lab window twice to get her attention. She came into the apartment looking as if she were sleepwalking, and she fell asleep properly while she was feeding him. I didn’t wake her, just covered her with a blanket. When Wilfred woke again in the night I made her get into bed before I gave him to her. ‘Wassa time?’ she muttered. ‘Should be working.’