63

TOBY. SAINT WEN BO DAY

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

No men. No pigs either. No liobams.

No bird woman.

Maybe I lost my mind, thinks Toby. Not lost. Temporarily misplaced.

It’s bath time; she’s up on the roof. She pours rainwater from her collection of smaller bowls and pans into the largest bowl, soaps herself, hands and face only: she won’t risk the vulnerability of a full bath, because who knows who may be peering? She’s in the midst of sponging off the suds when she hears the crows making a commotion, close by. Aw aw aw! This time it sounds like laughing.

Toby! Toby! Help me!

Was that my name? thinks Toby. She looks over the railing, sees nothing. But the voice comes again, right close to the building.

Is it a trap? A woman calling out to her, a man’s arm around her throat, a knife to the jugular?

Toby! It’s me! Please!

She blots herself with a towel, slides into her top-to-toe, shoulders the rifle, makes her way down the stairs. Opens the door: no one. But the voice again, so near. Oh please!

Left corner: nobody. Right corner, nobody again. She’s just outside the garden gate when a woman comes around the building. She’s hobbling, she’s thin and beat up; her long hair’s across her face, matted with dirt and dried blood. She’s wearing a spangled body suit, with damp, tattered blue feathers.

The bird woman. Some freak from a sex circus. She’s bound to be infected, a walking plague. If she touches me, thinks Toby, I’m dead.

“Keep away from me!” she shouts. She backs up against the garden fence. “Fuck off out of here!”

The woman sways on her feet. She has a gash on her leg, and her bare arms are scratched and bleeding — she must have run through brambles. All Toby can think of is the fresh blood: boiling with microbes and viruses.

“Piss off! Get away!!”

“I’m not sick,” says the woman. Tears are running down her face. But they’d all said that in their despair. They’d said it, pleading, holding up their hands for help, for comfort, and then they’d turned into pink porridge. Toby had watched them from the roof.

They’ll be drowning. Don’t let them clutch you. Don’t let yourself be that last straw, my Friends, says Adam One.

The rifle. She fumbles with the strap: it’s caught in the fabric of her top-to-toe. How to fend off this festering hotspot? Yelling’s no good without a weapon. Maybe I could bang her on the head with a stone, thinks Toby. But she doesn’t have a stone. A good kick in the solar plexus, then wash my feet.

You are an uncharitable person, says the voice of Nuala. You have scorned God’s Creatures, for are not Human beings God’s Creatures too?

From under the mat of hair the woman pleads: “Toby! It’s me!” She crumples, falls to her knees. Then Toby sees it’s Ren. Beneath all the dirt and mangled glitz, it’s only little Ren.