“What if they check me?”
“You’ll be with me.” Zack sat back on his stool, pushed his shot glass towards Ronson’s side of the bar and tapped his fingers. “I’ll take another.”
Ronson slipped the card into his trouser pocket, trousers that were perhaps once brown, but were now a mixture of rust red and black from dirt. He wiped his fingers over his lips, pursed and contracted by the wonder of possibility. He picked up the clear unmarked bottle and poured another Moonshine without looking at Zack. After setting the bottle down he scanned his fingers, brown and scaly, encrusted with years of filth. He ran his fingertips over his forearms before they eventually found their way up to his face, resting on his scars. “But they’ll know. They’ll know that I don’t belong. They’ll take one look at me and they’ll know it.” He covered as much of his scar with his hand as possible, his fingertips resting into the scarred shut eye socket, his palm against his cheek as if he was still shocked at the thought of what had happened to him. “They’ll never let me pass.”
“Listen,” said Zack taking a sip from the beaker. “It’s true. It’s obvious that you weren’t there originally. Even if you were unlucky and still somehow got that scar that you’re trying to hide from me up there,” he said, pointing above ground, “it would still be impossible that people wouldn’t remember you. Wear this,” Zack said, taking off his deerstalker hat. “This’ll cover most of it.” Ronson positioned the hat and traced the outline of it against his skin. Zack couldn’t help but smile when Ronson realised that the scar was almost covered. It was as if the hat could turn back time. Time that neither of them counted anymore. “You see?” Ronson nodded, smiled, and filled up Zack’s glass before grabbing a dirty cloth and mopping up some sort of spill that wasn’t really there.
Zack picked up his third Moonshine and swivelled around on the old barrel. He heard Ronson say that he would go and get the trade and Zack nodded in agreement. But Zack’s attentions were already elsewhere. There was a woman with a child, a boy about ten, maybe eleven years old. The boy’s cheeks were the same sullen grey of the clouds outside, a mixture of light and dark as the shadows cast on the hollows of his face. He sat listlessly on a chair at the woman’s side, his hands dropped into his lap. He didn’t move or cry. He noticed Zack looking at him, and Zack smiled, waved to try and get him to respond. The boy half smiled, revealing a set of brown teeth, and perhaps if Zack’s eyes didn’t betray him, a set of shrivelled and receded gums. Some of the teeth were missing. It was the radiation. Zack ran his tongue along the back of his own full set. The smooth, intermittently interrupted sensation of enamel against flesh reminded him that in some ways at least, he was one of the lucky ones. It was hard to remember that sometimes, but it was true.
There were also a few other men, single men sitting balanced on tables or makeshift stools. In one corner a woman with dirty blonde hair tied into a topknot, and who might or might not have been Roxanna, was chatting up the liveliest of the drinkers. One of the other men was sitting on an old tea chest and Zack mused that the man looked like a cast member from one of the West End shows that used to play not so far from here. He looked like he should break into song.
In the far corner with her head resting on the wall, there was a girl that looked out of place. She didn’t belong here. Her clothes were too clean, her face a shade of flesh rather than dirt grey. Her skin actually looked pink. Pink in the cheeks, as if she was healthy. He watched her a while as she sat with her back against the wall, her head tipped to the side. She was stationary, mentally somewhere else with the only exception her foot, which was moving to a beat, something he hadn’t seen in years. She was feeling something, as if she was listening to music. Her hair was also blonde. But it was nothing like the other woman in the bar. It looked clean. He imagined that it might smell like rosemary or sage, but then realised that such ideas were just words now, and that he had no idea what rosemary or sage even smelt like anymore.
The girl was young, and actually looked it. He hadn’t seen something this perfect, something that looked so much like life before the war in so long. The sight of her was addictive, and before he was aware of what he was doing, he was moving towards her, absorbed in the vision of the past. She realised whilst he was still approaching, and she straightened herself up in the makeshift tea chest chair.
“Hello,” he said, awed as if he had seen an angel descend to Earth. “Can I sit with you?” She didn’t say anything but she moved back on the chest and nodded her head. She pulled her sleeves to cover her hands. White clothes, actually white, he thought as he spotted them, not grey or brown or green from mould. White. “I’m Zack,” he said holding out his hand. He sat on a metallic box at her side. She watched his gesture as if it was an infection moving towards her, even edging further back. She didn’t offer her hand in return. Zack dropped his hand in his lap, embarrassed, so he shuffled the box underneath him for a distraction. From up close her skin was almost translucent, like a new and alien race. People just didn’t look like this anymore. “I haven’t seen you here before.”
“I’ve seen you.” She was staring at him from behind an unbreakable wall of judgement. Under her scrutiny he felt the onset of an unreasonable sense of shame as he looked down at his finger tips and his dry dusty skin. He dragged his palm over his hair, still messy from where he had pulled the deerstalker hat from his head. “I’ve watched you in here before. You’re a trader, aren’t you? You take things from people.”
Her direct approach captured his tongue, sucked him dry of words. It was true that he was a trader, and he was waiting for Ronson to provide his reward for the illicit water ration card. But it seemed that she had already made up her mind about him, and her conclusion wasn’t favourable. This angel before him had judged that his intentions were selfish, that he was a chancer who was out for himself, and that he had no place in the heaven from which she came.
“I trade things, yes,” Zack finally managed, his hair now smoothed into place after a lot of effort. “But for something that people want.” He felt a desperate urge to justify himself, to prove to her that he was good. That he wasn’t what she had assumed. “For things people need.”
“What about the things they have to give up? What is he going to give you? Free drink? Drugs? Or maybe he is giving you something he needs. Something he can’t afford to lose, but doesn’t have a choice.” She pulled her hands in close to her armpits, her shoulders hunched up. “Isn’t life comfortable enough for you already up there,” she said, tipping her head towards the ground level and above, “without taking from the people down here?” She was about to stand up when he reached out and took her hand. She snatched it back but the shock of his touch was enough that it stopped her in her tracks.
“Don’t tell me you don’t do it too,” Zack said. “What are you trading? Everybody trades because there is no other choice in New Omega.” He knew as soon as he had finished saying it, the emphasis all on the you, that he had implied that she was trading herself. He wished he could take it back, but there was part of him that thought that she deserved it. She had been quick to judge him too, so why should he not judge her?
“What are suggesting?” she snapped.
He swallowed hard. “Look at you.” He figured once he had started, he might as well continue. “You must be getting extra rations. No way do you eat the shit I eat day after day. Got a deal with one of the Guardians, have you?” He looked her up and down, his initial admiration for her angelic presence banished by her harsh and unjust scrutiny of his actions. How dare she judge him? She didn’t answer, just sneered, her nose flared, the corners of her mouth turned down in disgust.