Free States

4. LA MUERTE TERRIO UN PRECIO

PRECIOUS MARY WAS not impatient to leave. She had discovered an interest in the vegetable garden and, with another woman called Bellpai’s, was planting in the assumption there would be some kind of new season. The garden lay behind the house, where it was most sheltered. Mary complained about the lack of sunlight, the clouds of dust which swam forever out of the north. ‘It seems like it’s the same clouds keep coming around,’ she said. ‘Like everything’s on repeat.’

‘Hope not,’ said Sam Oakenhurst, thinking of New Orleans. As a child he had played his favourite records until the phonograph’s machinery had started to show the strain. Gradually the voices grew sluggish and the music became a mixture of whines and groans until finally the records brought only depression, a sense of loss, a distorted memory of harmony and resolution. He sometimes thought the whole world was running down in a series of ever-widening, steadily dissipating circles. ‘I cannot believe that one thing cancels out another,’ he admitted to Precious Mary.

‘It’s like a roof.’ She looked at the sky. ‘Like a cave. We could be underground, Sam. Living on the innards of the world.’

Across the surface of measureless grey, past the end of their jetty, a couple of spots of colour floated. The spots moved as if with purpose but both Mr Oakenhurst and Precious Mary knew they drifted more or less at random around the perimeter of the lake, carrying with them an assortment of organic flotsam. Bones, feathers, twigs, tiny corpses made a lattice through which gleamed the dull gold and silver of the colour, blank round eyes staring out from a void. The colour seemed like a magnet to certain vegetable and animal matter. Other material it repulsed violently, not always predictably.

(We are the whole within the whole, Sam. Your ancestors knew that. And we are unique.)

‘I reckon Jack Karaquazian struck colour up on the Trace,’ mused Sam Oakenhurst. ‘But something happened that didn’t suit him. What the hell is that, Mary?’ He pointed out over the lake. Through the twilight a slow bulky shape was emerging. At first the jugador thought it might be the tapering head of a large whale. Then as it came nearer he realized it was not a living creature at all but a ramshackle vessel, shadowing the shore, a great broad raft about ninety by ninety, on which was built a floating shanty-town, a melange of dull-coloured shacks, tents, barrels and lean-tos. In the middle of this makeshift floating fortress stood a substantial wooden keep with a flat roof where other tents and packing-case houses had been erected so that the whole had the appearance of an untidy ziggurat made of animal hides, old tapestries, painted canvases, upholstery and miscellaneous pieces of broken furniture.

Observing what distinguished this floating junkpile, Precious Mary said: ‘Ain’t that queer, Sam. No metal, not much plastic ... ‘

‘And there’s why.’ Sam showed her the dull gleam of colour spilling up from under the raft’s edges. ‘She’s moving on a big spot. She’s built to cover it. You saw it. That kind of colour won’t take anything much that’s non-organic. It’s kind of like anti-electricity. They haven’t figured any real way of conducting the stuff. It can’t be refined or mined. It moves all the time so it’s never claimed. I guess these types have found the only use there is for it. Ahoy!’