When Lucerne and Zeb first took me away from the Exfernal World to live among the Gardeners, I didn't like it at all. They smiled a lot, but they scared me: they were so interested in doom, and enemies, and God. And they talked so much about Death. The Gardeners were strict about not killing Life, but on the other hand they said Death was a natural process, which was sort of a contradiction, now that I think about it. They had the idea that turning into compost would be just fine. Not everyone might think that having your body become part of a vulture was a terrific future to look forward to, but the Gardeners did. And when they'd start talking about the Waterless Flood that was going to kill everybody on Earth, except maybe them -- that gave me nightmares.
None of it scared the real Gardener kids. They were used to it. They'd even make fun of it, or the older boys would -- Shackie and Croze and their pals. "We're all gonna diiiiie," they'd say, making dead-person faces. "Hey, Ren. Want to do your bit for the Cycle of Life? Lie down in that dumpster, you can be the compost." "Hey, Ren. Want to be a maggot? Lick my cut!"
"Shut up," Bernice would say. "Or you're going into that dumpster yourself because I'm shoving you in!" Bernice was mean, and she stood her ground, and most kids would back off. Even the boys would. But then I'd owe Bernice, and I'd have to do what she said.
Shackie and Croze would tease me, though, when Bernice wasn't around to push back at them. They were slug-squeezers, they were beetle-eaters. They tried to gross you out. They were trouble -- that's what Toby called them. I'd hear her saying to Rebecca, "Here comes trouble."
Shackie was the oldest; he was tall and skinny, and he had a spider tattoo on the inside of his arm that he'd punched in himself with a needle and some candle soot. Croze was a stumpier shape, with a round head and a missing side tooth, which he claimed had been k
nocked out in a street battle. They had a little brother whose name was Oates. They didn't have any parents; they'd had some once, but their father had gone off with Zeb on some special Adam trip and had never come back, and then their mother had left, telling Adam One she'd send for them when she'd got herself established. But she never had.
The Gardener school was in a different building from the Rooftop. It was called the Wellness Clinic because that's what used to be in there. It still had some leftover boxes full of gauze bandages, which the Gardeners were gleaning for crafts projects. It smelled of vinegar: across the hallway from the schoolrooms was the room the Gardeners used for their vinegar making.
The benches at the Wellness Clinic were hard; we sat in rows. We wrote on slates, and they had to be wiped off at the end of each day because the Gardeners said you couldn't leave words lying around where our enemies might find them. Anyway, paper was sinful because it was made from the flesh of trees.
We spent a lot of time memorizing things and chanting them out loud. The Gardener history, for instance -- it went like this:
Year One, Garden just begun; Year Two, still new; Year Three, Pilar started bees; Year Four, Burt came in the door; Year Five, Toby snatched alive; Year Six, Katuro in the mix; Year Seven, Zeb came to our heaven.
Year Seven should have said that I came too, and my mother, Lucerne, and anyway it wasn't heaven, but the Gardeners liked their chants to rhyme.
Year Eight, Nuala found her fate; Year Nine, Philo began to shine.
I wanted Year Ten to have Ren in it, but I didn't think it would.
The other things we had to memorize were harder. Mathematical and science things were the worst. We also had to memorize every saint's day, and every single day had at least one saint and sometimes more, or maybe a feast, which meant over four hundred of those. Plus what the saints had done to get to be saints. Some of them were easy. Saint Yossi Leshem of Barn Owls -- well, it was obvious what the answer was. And Saint Dian Fossey, because the story was so sad, and Saint Shackleton, because it was heroic. But some of them were really hard. Who could remember Saint Bashir Alouse, or Saint Crick, or Podocarp Day? I always got Podocarp Day wrong because what was a Podocarp? It was an ancient kind of tree, but it sounded like a fish.
Our teachers were Nuala for the little kids and the Buds and Blooms Choir and Fabric Recycling, and Rebecca for Culinary Arts, which meant cooking, and Surya for Sewing, and Mugi for Mental Arithmetic, and Pilar for Bees and Mycology, and Toby for Holistic Healing with Plant Remedies, and Burt for Wild and Garden Botanicals, and Philo for Meditation, and Zeb for Predator-Prey Relationships and Animal Camouflage. There were some other teachers -- when we were thirteen, we'd get Katuro for Emergency Medical and Marushka Midwife for the Human Reproductive System, whereas all we'd had so far was Frog Ovaries -- but those were the main ones.
The Gardener kids had nicknames for all of the teachers. Pilar was the Fungus, Zeb was the Mad Adam, Stuart was the Screw because he built the furniture. Mugi was the Muscle, Marushka was the Mucous, Rebecca was the Salt and Peppler, Burt was the Knob because he was bald. Toby was the Dry Witch. Witch because she was always mixing things up and pouring them into bottles and Dry because she was so thin and hard, and to tell her apart from Nuala, who was the Wet Witch because of her damp mouth and her wobbly bum, and because you could make her cry so easily.
In addition to the learning chants, the Gardener kids had rude ones they made up themselves. They'd chant softly -- Shackleton and Crozier and the older boys would start, but then we'd all join in:
Wet Witch, Wet Witch,
Big fat slobbery bitch,
Sell her to the butcher, make yourself rich,
Eat her in a sausage, Wet Wet Witch!
It was especially bad about the butcher and the sausage, because meat of any kind was obscene as far as the Gardeners were concerned. "Stop that," Nuala would say, but then she'd sniffle, and the older boys would give each other a thumbs-up.
We could never make Dry Witch Toby cry. The boys said she was a hardass -- she and Rebecca were the two hardest asses. Rebecca was jolly on the outside, but you did not push her buttons. As for Toby, she was leathery inside and out. "Don't try it, Shackleton," she would say, even though her back was turned. Nuala was too kind to us, but Toby held us to account, and we trusted Toby more: you'd trust a rock more than a cake.
13
I lived with Lucerne and Zeb in a building about five blocks from the Garden. It was called the Cheese Factory because that's what it used to be, and it still had a faint cheesy smell to it. After the cheese it was used for artists' lofts, but there weren't any artists left, and nobody seemed to know who owned it. Meanwhile the Gardeners had taken it over. They liked living in places where they didn't have to pay rent.
Our space was a big room, with some cubicles curtained off -- one for me, one for Lucerne and Zeb, one for the violet biolet, one for the shower. The cubicle curtains were woven of plastic-bag strips and duct tape, and they weren't in any way soundproof. This wasn't great, especially when it came to the violet biolet. The Gardeners said digestion was holy and there was nothing funny or terrible about the smells and noises that were part of the end product of the nutritional process, but at our place those end products were hard to ignore.
We ate our meals in the main room, on a table made out of a door. All of our dishes and pots and pans were salvaged -- gleaned, as the Gardeners said -- except for some of the thicker plates and mugs. Those had been made by the Gardeners back in their Ceramics period, before they'd decided that kilns used up too much energy.
I slept on a futon stuffed with husks and straw. It had a quilt sewed out of blue jeans and used bathmats, and every morning I had to make the bed first thing, because the Gardeners liked neatly made beds, though they weren't squeamish about what they were made of. Then I'd take my clothes down from the nail on the wall and put them on. I got clean ones every seventh day: the Gardeners didn't believe in wasting water and soap on too much washing. My clothes were always dank, because of the humidity and because the Gardeners didn't believe in dryers. "God made the sun for a reason," Nuala used to say, and according to her that reason was for drying our clothes.
Lucerne would still be in bed, it being her favourite place. Back when we'd lived at HelthWyzer with my real father she'd hardly ever stayed inside our house, but here she almost never went out of it, except to go over to the Rooftop or the Wellness Clinic and help the other Gardener women peel burdock roots or make those lumpy quilts or weave those plastic-bag curtains or something.
Zeb would be in the shower: No daily showers was one of the many Gardener rules Zeb ignored. Our shower water came down a garden hose out of a rain barrel and was gravity-fed, so no energy was used. That was Zeb's reason for making an exception for himself. He'd be singing: