She starts doodling in the dirt with one finger. Her smile is wistful, aimed at no one. ‘Things weren’t always so grim, you know, R? Dad has his moments, and even when the world fell apart we still had some fun. We’d take little family salvage trips and pick up the most crazy wines you can imagine. Thousand-dollar bottles of ’97 Dom. Romane Conti just rolling around on the floors of abandoned cellars.’ She chuckles to herself. ‘Dad would have absolutely lost his shit over those back in the day. By the time we moved here he was kinda . . . muted. But God, we drank some outrageous stuff.’
I’m watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don’t deserve them. Her warm memories. I’d like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.
‘And then Mom ran off.’ She pulls her finger out of the dirt, inspecting her work. She has drawn a house. A quaint little cottage with a smoke cloud in the chimney, a benevolent sun smiling down on the roof. ‘Dad thought she must have been drunk, hence the alcohol ban, but I saw her, and she wasn’t. She was very sober.’
She is still smiling, as if this is all just easy nostalgia, but the smile is cold now, lifeless.
‘She came into my room that night and just looked at me for a while. I pretended I was asleep. Then right as I was about to pop up and yell “boo” . . . she walked out. So I didn’t get the chance.’
She reaches a hand down to wipe away her drawing, but I touch her wrist. I look at her and shake my head. She regards me silently for a moment. Then she scoots around to face me and grins, inches from my face.
‘R,’ she says. ‘If I kiss you, will I die?’
Her eyes are steady. She’s barely drunk.
‘You said I won’t, right? I won’t get infected? Because I really feel like kissing you.’ She fidgets. ‘And even if you do pass something to me, maybe it wouldn’t be all bad. I mean, you’re different now, right? You’re not a zombie. You’re . . . something new.’ Her face is very close. Her smile fades. ‘Well, R?’
I look into her eyes, splashing in their icy waters like a shipwrecked sailor grasping for the raft. But there is no raft.
‘Julie,’ I say. ‘I need . . . to show you something.’
She cocks her head with gentle curiosity. ‘What?’
I stand up. I take her hand and start walking.
The night is still except for the primeval hiss of the rain. It drenches the dirt and slicks the asphalt, liquefying the shadows into shiny black ink. I stick to the narrow back-streets and unlit alleys. Julie follows slightly behind me, staring at the side of my face.
‘Where are we going?’ she asks.
I pause at an intersection to retrace the maps of my stolen memories, calling up images of places I’ve never been, people I’ve never met. ‘Almost . . . there.’
A few more careful glances around corners, furtive dashes across intersections, and there it is. A five-storey house looms ahead of us, tall, skinny and grey like the rest of this skeletal city, its windows flickering yellow like wary eyes.
‘What the hell, R?’ Julie whispers, staring up at it. ‘This is . . .’
I pull her to the front door and we stand there in the shelter of the eaves, the roof rattling like military drums in the rain. ‘Can I . . . borrow your hat?’ I ask without looking at her.
She doesn’t move for a moment, then she pulls it off and hands it to me. Over-long and floppy, dark blue wool with a red stripe . . .
Mrs Rosso knitted this for Julie’s seventeenth birthday. Perry thought she looked like an elf in it and would start speaking to her in Tolkien tongues whenever she put it on. She called him the biggest nerd she’d ever met, and he agreed, while playfully kissing her throat and—
I pull the beanie low over my face and knock a slow waltz on the door, eyes glued to the ground like a shy child. The door opens a crack. A middle-aged woman in sweatpants looks out at us. Her face is puffy and heavily lined, dark bags under bloodshot eyes. ‘Miss Grigio?’ she says.
Julie glances at me. ‘Hi, Mrs Grau. Um . . .’
‘What are you doing out? Is Nora with you? It’s after curfew.’
‘I know, we . . . got a little lost on our way back from the Orchard. Nora’s staying at my house tonight but um . . . can we come in for a minute? I need to talk to the guys.’
I keep my head down as Mrs Grau gives me a cursory appraisal. She opens the door for us with an annoyed sigh. ‘You can’t stay here, you know. This is a foster home, not a flop house, and your friend here is too old for new residency.’
‘I know, sorry, we’ll . . .’ She glances at me again. ‘We’ll just be a minute.’
I can’t endure formalities right now. I brush past the woman and into the house. A toddler peeks around a bedroom door and Mrs Grau glares at him. ‘What did I tell you?’ she snaps, loud enough to wake the rest of the kids. ‘Back in bed right now.’ The boy disappears into the shadows. I lead Julie up the staircase.
The second storey is identical to the first, except there are rows of pre-adolescents sleeping on the floor on small mats. So many now. New foster homes pop up like processing plants as mothers and fathers disappear, chewed up and swallowed down by the plague. We step over a few tiny bodies on our way to the stairs, and a little girl grasps feebly at Julie’s ankle.
‘I had a bad dream,’ she whispers.
‘I’m sorry, honey,’ Julie whispers back. ‘You’re safe now, okay?’