‘Go ahead,’ said my mother. ‘It won’t bite.’
I prodded it again and the stone seemed to leap into life. A picture appeared on it, but not flat and painted, lit up on one whole side of it, and moving, and speaking.
It was of girls, six or seven of them, and a bit drunk. ‘We all think you’re crazy,’ said one of them. ‘But we still love you.’
Then one of them sang off key: ‘The only man that could ever move me, was the son of a preacher man.’
And another said, ‘Not a preacher, dumbass, a Quaker.’
Then the picture froze and faded away.
‘It’s a memory stone,’ my mother said.
‘Who are they?
‘Friends from before.’
‘Before what?’
‘Before I met your father.’
I don’t think my mother was prepared for what that stone made her feel. She was curt with me afterwards. I remember what the stone says so well because I used to go up and listen to it on my own sometimes.
The stone was like no other object in our house — or our town for that matter. So flat and smooth, there was no workmanship in it. It was perfect, like a thing that had grown up from a seed. And yet somehow, it held a piece of my mother’s own past, a fragment of the life she had left behind her to come with my father.
Those girls in the memory stone are all dead by now. And everything they had is dust. One of them has lipstick on that’s smudged and it looks like she’s been kissing. I wonder about that kiss. Was it a he or a she? Was it a friendly peck on a cheek, or something more passionate? Is that him, standing just out of view, but casting a shadow over the wine-glasses, and getting a sidelong glance from her, a twinkling look, right before the stone goes dark? I can’t begin to contemplate everything that’s been lost. It’s too much for one small brain to take in, but I think about that kiss.
12
MY PARENTS NEVER spoke of the past, and me, I never took much interest in it. The past had nothing to teach me. The beginning of the world and my birth seemed like the same event. For me, the world began with water dripping off wet sheets in the sunlight. I was the creator, blinking my eyes to make night and day. And I was Noah, arranging my chipped hardwood animals in the dust of the arctic summer. I taught my family language, and I was the first human to set foot in the wilderness at the bottom of our vegetable patch.
But now I know different.
I thought I was born into a young world which was aging before my eyes. But my family came here when the world was already old. I was born into the oldest world there was. It was a world like a beaten horse, limping with old injuries, and set on throwing its rider. And my parents, who claimed to love plain workmanship and the clean forthright language of the Bible, behind them was a world of memory stones, and planes, and cities of glass that they wanted to unknow.
There’s plenty of things I’d like to unknow, but you can’t fake innocence. Not knowing is one thing, pretending not to know is deception. While me and Charlo and Anna were playing in the dirt like fools that think they’ve found Eden, and the other settlers were congratulating themselves on having the foresight to land up in a perfect corner of our damaged planet, the world they left behind was unravelling. What arrogance made us think we were far enough to be safe?
*
We didn’t know it at first, when that first starving woman fell dead outside the grocery store, but it seemed like half the world was on the move.
By the time I was fourteen, our city had close to doubled in size and there were shanties on the outskirts that seemed to grow every day with new arrivals who brought stories of flood, pestilence, and war. Our city felt like the hub of a world in chaos instead of somewhere obscure and insignificant, way out on the spinning rim of a calamity we had no power to control.
Only the desperate travelled in summertime. It meant they’d given up all hope of a harvest and were travelling in the heat and dust, trying to scavenge food as they went. Some of them were settler families who had been flooded out of homesteads to the south, but most were from much further away: Russians, Uighurs, Chinese, Uzbeks, all rail-thin, with ancient, withered faces, even their little ones. Some were too sick to be helped. The things these people were fleeing made the world my parents had left seem like paradise.
In those early days, my father and the largest number of the settlers saw these people’s coming as a test of their doctrine. They welcomed the incomers like lost kin.
I remember one exhausted Uzbek family who were billeted at our house when I was nine or ten. The parents scolded their children for snatching at the food as it was set down on the table. The mother picked at her meal in a restrained, delicate way as though she was too proud to admit to her hunger.
She could speak English and she translated for the others as my mother made small talk about the life she had left. It was things I had heard a thousand times and never paid any heed to, about the rich hiding behind a wall of money, and streetlamps blocking out the starlight, and strawberries in the cooler in February, and noise, and dirt, and incivility, and I’ll never
*
The people who came at first were not of a bad kind at all. They were placid with hunger and eager to work. What was strange was how resentment got stoked up by our charity. With nothing at all, the first incomers threw themselves on our mercy. When the edge was off their hunger, they looked around and wondered about our spare rooms, and the food that was being kept by for trading and planting, and it rankled with them.
The more dangerous ones began to show up later. They were fewer in number and travelled in wintertime. That was only common sense. The winter roads made for better going, and you had summer and fall to provision yourself for the trip. They arrived in better shape. One or two had cars. Most had guns. That was common sense too, but it didn’t make them any more welcome. They tended to squat the outskirts of the city. At night, you could see their cooking fires. Many of them were deserters. They were young, and even the best were changeable and still smarting from the indignities of the battlefield.
So there we were, settlers who had forsworn the old world only to have it fetch up on our doorstep. Us on the one side, and the desperate and dangerous on the other. It was like two different species colliding: the world that had a choice, and the world that had none. The strains between us were ratcheting up in secret. And even those who noticed it, didn’t like to admit to it. The trouble lit slow, like one of those lazy damp-leaf fires in autumn.
*
The summer I was fourteen, some Russian boys were squatting a barn that belonged to a settler family called the Tumiltys. Mr Tumilty had said two of them could stay, but ten came, and they ended up in dispute over it.
One night in August, the barn went up in flames and eight of the boys were killed. They’d been drinking and cooking shashlik among the hay-bales, but a rumour went round that the fire had been set on purpose. The dead boys’ angry friends went round to Tumilty’s farm and broke his windows. When he came outside to speak with them, they roughed him up. He had a weak heart and died on the spot.
The boys lit out, but the ill-will stayed round the place. Settlers complained they felt unsafe. Incomers were spat at, and some shopkeepers refused to take the little tickets that were doled out to the poorest of them to buy food.
Families that had been friends for years fell out over the way the incomers were getting treated. People dropped away from church, or set up rival meetings. It became clear that our city was tearing itself in two.