Mr Grigio stops chewing, blank-faced. Julie looks uneasy. ‘Remember that little shrub we had in our living room back east?’ she says. ‘The one that looked like a skinny little tree?’
‘Yes…’ her dad says. ‘What about it?’
‘You loved that thing. Don’t act like you don’t get gardening.’
‘That was your mother’s plant.’
‘But you’re the one who loved it.’ She turns to me. ‘So Dad used to be quite the interior designer, believe it or not; he had our old house decked out like an IKEA showroom, all this modern glass and metal stuff, which my mom couldn’t stand– she wanted everything earthy and natural, all hemp fibre and sustainable hardwoods…’
Mr Grigio’s face looks tight. Julie either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.
‘… so to fight back, she buys this lush, bright green shrub, puts it in a huge wicker pot, and sticks it right in the middle of Dad’s perfect white-and-silver living room.’
‘It wasn’t my living room, Julie,’ he interjects. ‘As I recall we took a vote on every piece of furniture, and you always sided with me.’
‘I was like eight, Dad, I probably liked pretending I lived in a spaceship. Anyway, Mom buys this plant and they argue about it for a week — Dad says it’s “incongruous”, Mom says either the plant stays or she goes—’ She hesitates momentarily. Her father’s face gets tighter. ‘That, um, that went on for a while,’ she resumes, ‘but then Mom being Mom, she got obsessed with something else and quit watering the plant. So when it started dying, guess who adopted the poor thing?’
‘I wasn’t going to have a dead shrub as our living room’s centrepiece. Someone had to take care of it.’
‘You watered it every day, Dad. You gave it plant food and pruned it.’
‘Yes, Julie, that’s how you keep a plant alive.’
‘Why can’t you admit you loved the stupid plant, Dad?’ She regards him with a mixture of amazement and frustration. ‘I don’t get it, what is so wrong with that?’
‘Because it’s absurd,’ he snaps, and the mood of the room suddenly shifts. ‘You can water and prune a plant but you cannot “love” a plant.’
Julie opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it.
‘It’s a meaningless decoration. It sits there consuming time and resources, and then one day it decides to die, no matter how much you watered it. It’s absurd to attach an emotion to something so pointless and brief.’
There are a few long seconds of silence. Julie breaks away from her father’s stare and pokes at her rice. ‘Anyway,’ she mumbles, ‘my point was, Perry… that Dad used to be a gardener. So you should share gardening stories.’
‘I’m interested in a lot more than gardening,’ I say, racing to change the subject.
‘Oh?’ Mr Grigio says.
‘Yeah, ah… motorcycles? I salvaged a BMW R 1200 R a while ago and I’ve been working on bulletproofing it, getting it combat-ready just in case.’
‘You have mechanical experience, then. That’s good. We have a shortage of mechanics in the Armoury right now.’
Julie rolls her eyes and shovels beans into her mouth.
‘I’m also spending a lot of time on my marksmanship. I’ve been requesting extra assignments from school and I’ve gotten pretty good with the M40.’
‘Hey, Perry,’ Julie says, ‘why don’t you tell Dad about your other plans? Like how you’ve always wanted to—’
I step on her foot. She glares at me.
‘Always wanted to what?’ her father asks.
‘I don’t — I’m not really…’ I take a drink of water. ‘I’m not really sure yet, sir, to be honest. I’m not sure what I want to do with my life. But I’m sure I’ll have it figured out by the time I start high school.’
What were you going to say? R wonders aloud, interrupting the scene again, and I feel a lurch as we swap places. Perry glances up at him — at me — frowning.
‘Come on, corpse, not now. This is the first time I met Julie’s father and it’s not going well. I need to focus.’
‘It’s going fine,’ Julie tells Perry. ‘This is my dad these days, I warned you about him.’
‘You better pay attention,’ Perry says to me. ‘You might have to meet him someday, too, and you’re going to have a much harder time winning his approval than I did.’
Julie runs a hand through Perry’s hair. ‘Aw, babe, don’t talk about the present. It makes me feel left out.’
He sighs. ‘Yeah, okay. These were better times anyway. I turned into a real neutron star when I grew up.’
I’m sorry I killed you, Perry. It’s not that I wanted to, it’s just—
‘Forget it, corpse, I understand. Seems by that point I wanted out anyway.’
‘I bet I’ll always miss you when I think back to these days,’ Julie says wistfully. ‘You were pretty cool before Dad got his claws into you.’
‘Take care of her, will you?’ Perry whispers up to me. ‘She’s been through some hard stuff. Keep her safe.’
I will .
Mr Grigio clears his throat. ‘I would start planning now if I were you, Perry. With your skill set, you should really consider Security training. Green shoots coming through the dirt are all well and good but we don’t strictly need all these fruits and vegetables. You can live on nothing but Carbtein for almost a year before cell fatigue is even measurable. The most important thing is keeping us all alive.’
Julie tugs on Perry’s arm. ‘Come on, do we have to sit through this again?’
‘Nah,’ Perry says. ‘This isn’t worth reliving. Let’s go somewhere nice.’
We’re on a beach. Not a real beach, carved over the millennia by the master craft of the ocean — those are all underwater now. We’re on the young shore of a recently flooded city port. Small patches of sand appear between broken slabs of sidewalk. Barnacled street lamps rise out of the surf, a few of them still flickering on in the evening gloom, casting circles of orange light on the waves.
‘Okay, guys,’ Julie says, throwing a stick into the water. ‘Quiz time. What do you want to do with your life?’
‘Oh, hi, Mr Grigio,’ I mutter, sitting next to Julie on a driftwood log that was once a telephone pole.
She ignores me. ‘Nora, you go first. And I don’t mean what do you think you will end up doing, I mean what do you want to do.’
Nora is sitting in the sand in front of the log, playing with some pebbles and pinching a smouldering joint between her middle finger and the stub of her ring finger, missing past the first knuckle. Her eyes are earth brown; her skin is creamy coffee. ‘Maybe nursing?’ she says. ‘Healing people, saving lives… maybe working on a cure? I could get into that.’
‘Nurse Nora,’ Julie says with a smile. ‘Sounds like a kids’ TV show.’
‘Why a nurse?’ I ask. ‘Why not go for doctor?’
Nora scoffs. ‘Oh, yeah, seven years of college? I doubt civilisation’s even gonna last that long.’
‘Yes it will,’ Julie says. ‘Don’t talk like that. But there’s nothing wrong with being a nurse. Nurses are sexy!’
Nora smiles and pulls idly at her thick black curls. She looks at me. ‘Why a doctor, Pear? Is that your target?’
I shake my head emphatically. ‘I’ve already seen enough blood and viscera for one lifetime, thanks.’
‘Then what?’
‘I like writing,’ I say like a confession. ‘So… I guess I want to be a writer.’
Julie smiles. Nora tilts her head. ‘Really? Do people still do that?’
‘What? Write?’
‘I mean, is there still like… a book industry?’
I shrug. ‘Well… no. Not really. Good point, Nora.’
‘Sorry, I was just…’
‘No, I know, but you’re right, it’s dumb even for a fantasy. Colonel Rosso says only about thirty per cent of the world’s cities are still functioning, so unless the zombies are learning how to read… not a great time to get into the literary arts. I’ll probably just end up in Security.’