cat / lyn

The rain was only minutes away – I could smell it. I tried not to panic, but soon my walk broke out into a run. I tried hard not to tug too hard on the handles of the plastic bags I was carrying – now would not be a good time to drop everything I’d spent so long scavenging. To turn up, exhausted, heaving and empty-handed would surely result in some form of punishment from the Guardians. I could hear the rusted tins and flaking cardboard rustling together in the bags as I ran as fast as I could. I heard the distant roll of thunder and smelled the acid on the wind.

On the horizon, past the abandoned shells of concrete, I could make out the tall infrastructure I called home. It had originally been a ‘football stadium’ – though what one of those had been before the Floods, I had no idea, and I wasn’t sure any of the Guardians even knew, either. All I knew for sure was that it was huge enough to fit in what must be around fifty thousand people. There were still patches of grass in the middle where people used to play this game of feet and balls, but most of it had been ripped out to make way for corrugated iron walls and unstable, makeshift homes. They piled them high on top of each other, with rackety bridges connecting the higher levels, effectively making a multi-storey mini-city. In the middle was a sort of courtyard, where the grass was dead and trampled into the dry mud but used as a meeting place twice a month, where the Guardians and the Highers talked about supplies and justice-keeping. As a Citizen, I was supposed to know nothing about those sorts of runnings, but Rachel, my sister Cathy and I always snuck into the courtyard and hid behind the chipped brick half-walls to hear what was happening. Of course, for the juicy details you had to be an Upper Guardian or a Personal. They got to meet with the President himself in the Box Office once a week.

Fortunately for my life, I managed to reach the Stadium in time. A few droplets managed to sizzle the soles of my shoes, but that was about it. At the turnstiles I gave in my bags and they nodded me through when I showed my pass. I rushed straight home to get out of my itchy work-clothes. They were apparently designed to give you some leverage in case you get caught in the rain – about three more minutes than usual to find adequate shelter, which was concrete; not much else could withstand the rain except the huge canopy that was now folding out over the Stadium roof, barely skimming the highest of the slum flats, as more and more rain drops spattered down. Supposedly, some kind of scientist living in the Stadium in one of the first post-War generations had developed a gel to coat the canopy, and another scientist had found out a way to harden it and make it permanent so that it only needed to be re-painted every other year. I’m not one for paying too much attention in our repetitive history classes, but our friend Tom is a true pre-Floods fanatic. He knows extensive amounts about wars that happened even before the Floods. According to him, current day is something like three thousand years ‘AD’. I have no idea what that stands for, but apparently it means ‘after the birth’ of a man people used to worship right up until the Floods. I think Tom’s mother must opt in to the Leftovers scheme and the treated food makes him crazy.

Our flat is on the second floor of the city, which is the level most of the Citizens live on. Newcomers, not that there are many these days, are often located on the top floors if there is any space, and I remember one meeting on of the Highers mentioned development of the ‘U-levels’, which Rachel thinks is a new underground estate-building project. Rachel was a newcomer herself, and is located on the top floor. I always tell her how much I’d love to live up there with her, but she says living with her brother’s Vertigo doesn’t really do the view justice. After changing out of my overalls, I brushed through my hair and splashed my face with water, which seemed a lot colder than usual today and more… fresh. Then I started the climb up the stairs and sloped bridges to the top floor of the city. Since the walls of the flats are made out of corrugated iron sheets, there are often holes in the walls where the sheets join up. From the holes came noises of arguing siblings and laughing couples, and the smells of bubbling vegetable soup wafted up from the communal kitchens below. As I reached the fifth floor, I could see over the top of the Stadium walls and out over the horizon. It felt like I could see for miles, like I could see the whole world. Tom always says that the skyline would have been much more impressive back before the Floods, when there were much taller buildings – taller, even, than the Stadium itself. But from what I could see, there was only piles of rubble and the occasional standing house with hollow window frames and missing roofs. The only reason the Stadium had survived the Floods and the War was because the government had seen it all coming and had prepared huge heavy-duty glass domes to seal in buildings that could hold large quantities of people. How the Dome was eventually destroyed or removed, no one knows. All of the survivors are long gone, and all we have left are rain-stained journals. There used to be so much technology, but no one has been able to crack what is left of it. The consistent black-outs don’t exactly help, though.

The sixth floor was the very tip of the city, and I reached Rachel’s door with a slight breathiness. I didn’t even have to knock, however, since Rachel opened it just as I got there. When she saw me, a smile lit up her face.

‘Just who I’ve been waiting for this whole day!’, she said. ‘Come on, I have something to show you.’

Confused, I followed her down the steps and bridges I had just trekked up, and we soon found ourselves among the bustle and steam of the communal kitchens. We walked through, dodging chefs with hot pots of boiling soup and pans of leaves being fried to ‘just crispy’, and walked out through the backdoor and into the gardening sector, where the grass that had been ripped up from the field had been relocated to use to grow fruit and vegetable. The gardening sector took up about an eighth of the Stadium, and the dirt rose in tiers all the way up the Stadium walls. At the bottom there were trees growing apples, oranges, lemons and limes, and the next level full of blackberry bushes. The very top levels contained underground veggies like carrots and potatoes. The greenery was so beautiful, and I was quite jealous of Rachel’s job as a gardener since it was such a contrast to going out every day and trying to find things to salvage. We’d heard, anyway, that, since there was not much more out there to scavenge, they would be relocating lone gatherers such as myself to other jobs and they would instead keep their teams of long-distance scavengers.

‘Here,’ Rachel said, thrusting a handful of dirt in my direction.

I hesitated, wondering why she was showing me dirt that I am nothing but surrounded by every single day, before taking the dirt into my own hand.

‘Smell it,’ she said.

‘Are you being serious, right now?’ I retorted.

‘Just do it!’ Her eyes were gleaming and glowing a vibrant green, reflecting the leaves on the trees a few tiers below.

So I took a timid sniff of the dirt and shrugged.

‘Can you smell that?’ Rachel said, almost breaking out into laughter.

‘Smell what?’

‘Exactly! The rain, the treated water – it smells of nothing!’

And she was right. Taking another whiff, I realised that the dirt didn’t smell tangy or acidic at all. I remembered back to the water in the flat today as well, and it had seemed so fresh and cool. Often, the chemicals that the Highers treated the water with left it tasting like the chemicals they used, and it wasn’t pleasant. Even though we had been reassured that the chemicals would have no effect on our health, I tried to steer away from drinking directly from the taps, and our mother had made ourselves a little water filter that somehow made it taste better. I wasn’t sure how she did it, but it was with leaves from the gardening sector or something.

‘What do you think it means?’ I asked, bewildered at the new possibilities this could be opening up. Was this the beginning of the progress that had slowly become stagnant over the past five years or so?

I thought back to the meetings in the courtyards and how the Guardians and Highers had been worried about our dwindling sources since scavenging was slowly becoming pointless. There were other cities out there, too, some of them had said, and soon it might even come to fighting over reserves. The generator in our Stadium was starting to burn out and there were no parts left to scavenge. I had worried about it for all of a week before they announced that lone scavengers like myself would be relocated. I was delighted that my days of hard labour was over, and that maybe I could get relocated to the gardening sector to work with Rachel, or the communal kitchens where my sister Cathy worked.

‘Things are changing, Lyn!’ Rachel beamed. ‘The rain isn’t as dangerous as we once thought! Who knows how long it’s been that way – this season has seen the biggest yields from the gardens we’ve seen in almost a decade.’

‘But I thought we were running low,’ I replied, turning over the information in my head. ‘The Highers in the meeting said that the Stadium security are on edge and they might have to tighten up on pass-checking.’

‘I don’t know what’s going on with the Stadium authority,’ Rachel shook her head as she rolled the mud around between her fingers. ‘But I know that times are changing, for better or for worse.’

* * *