Read Online Year of the Flood: Novel by Margaret Atwood - Free Book Online Page B

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:
Nobody gives a hoot,
Nobody gives a hoot,
And that is why we’re down the chute,
Cause nobody gives a hoot!
    All his shower songs were negative in this way, though he sang them cheerfully, in his big Russian-bear voice.
    I had mixed feelings about Zeb. He could be frightening, but also it was reassuring to have someone so important in my family. Zeb was an Adam — a leading Adam. You could tell by the way the others looked up to him. He was large and solid, with a biker’s beard and long hair — brown with a little grey in it — and a leathery face, and eyebrows like a barbed-wire fence. He looked as if he ought to have a silver tooth and a tattoo, but he didn’t. He was strong as a bouncer, and he had the same menacing but genial expression, as if he’d break your neck if necessary, but not for fun.
    Sometimes he’d play dominoes with me. The Gardeners were skimpy on toys — Nature is our playground — and the only toys they approved of were sewed out of leftover fabric or knitted with saved-up string, or they’d be wrinkly old-person figures with heads fashioned from dried crabapples. But they allowed dominoes, because they carved the sets themselves. When I won, Zeb would laugh and say, “Atta girl,” and then I’d get a warm feeling, like nasturtiums.
    Lucerne was always telling me to be nice to him, because although he wasn’t my real father he was like my real father, and it hurt his feelings if I was rude to him. But then she didn’t like it much when Zeb was nice to me. So it was hard to know how to act.
    While Zeb was singing in the shower I’d get myself something to eat — dry soybits or maybe a vegetable patty left over from dinner. Lucerne was a fairly terrible cook. Then I’d go off to school. I was usually still hungry, but I could count on a school lunch. It wouldn’t be