Rise & Shine Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  Rise & Shine

  Rise & Shine (cont’d)

  Acknowledgements

  RISE & SHINE

  Patrick Allington is a writer and editor. His fiction includes the novel Figurehead, which was longlisted for the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award, as well as short stories published in Meanjin, Griffith Review, The Big Issue, and elsewhere. His nonfiction and criticism have also appeared widely. Patrick is a former commissioning editor of the University of Adelaide Press. He has taught politics, communications, writing, and editing, most recently at Flinders University. He lives in the Adelaide foothills with his family.

  To Zoë, Thomas, Millie, and Laura

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409, USA

  First published by Scribe 2020

  Copyright © Patrick Allington 2020

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  9781925849769 (paperback)

  9781925938364 (ebook)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  ‘The world is so dreadful in many ways.

  Do let us be tender with each other.’

  — Katherine Mansfield,

  letter to Dorothy Brett, 14 August 1918

  The end, when everything seemed lost, turned into the beginning. And in the beginning, there was Barton and Walker. No one who survived could really say whether it was a single big catastrophe, or a series of smaller messes, or if it was just the slow grind of excess. Probably it was all of that. Maybe Russia dropped a bomb on San Francisco. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe the Nile became poisoned. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe the last of the ice caps turned yellow. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe Vitamin C turned out to be carcinogenic. Maybe it didn’t. Governments of all brands, the UN, the anti-UN, the World Bank, FIFA all spoke loud and long about what needed to happen, but by then no one could tell information from lies.

  The details hardly matter now. The earth, pushed past its limits, began to eat its own. Most of the eight billion victims died over a period of a few months. Quickly, slowly: these things are relative. Living another day, and another, depended on who you were and where you were. The survivors tried to eat and drink in the same way that they always had, even as they saw carp floating in rivers, even as dust invaded cities and towns, even as rain pierced skin, even as the tides went wherever they wanted.

  Barton and Walker, friends since childhood, dragged themselves around their city — the city that became Rise. They looked for but never found loved ones, joined small bands when it seemed safe to do so, abandoned them at the first hint of violence, skirted fires (except when they needed to try to boil water), avoided dirty lakes where no lakes had previously sat, and took their chances by swallowing what they could scavenge.

  Picture them — Walker looking like a boy but for his height, Barton already looking like herself — slinking through the centre of the city, drawn by rumours of a supermarket intact under the rubble. They are filthy. Their clothes are rags. The stress of their situation, the city’s situation, the planet’s situation, is etched on their faces. They are alive, unlike their parents, their siblings, most of their friends, but they know — they’ve talked about it, reconciled themselves to it — that they shouldn’t be and that they won’t be soon.

  They find no supermarkets that night. There are none left to find; there is very little of anything to find, other than rumours and innuendo. But they do encounter a small group of people who have surrounded a shirtless man who sits on the ground in the middle of the faded bitumen road. The man wears a see-through bandage that covers one hand and runs all the way to his shoulder. He shakes his arm, which looks distorted under the plastic bandage.

  ‘I can’t feel it,’ he says. ‘I can’t feel my arm.’

  Barton crouches in front of him and takes a knife from her pants. ‘It’s okay,’ she says to the man.

  ‘Give her a moment,’ Walker says to the crowd, some of whom have slipped their hands into pockets, fingering their own weapons. There is no rule of law now, other than one-to-one negotiation.

  Barton makes a careful cut into the bandage at the shoulder end. She puts the knife away, easing the tension, and begins — slowly, slowly — to unravel the plastic. The arm reveals itself, withered by burns, covered in bruises and lumps, and hanging loose as if the bone has turned to rubber. Now that Barton has removed the bandage, it’s apparent that the man’s wrist is so twisted that his hand faces the wrong way.

  Something about this man captivates the crowd. Not just the arm or the way he continues to swing it about, but all of him: his spirit, his hopeless resilience. They stare at him, frankly. He lets them. Walker glances at Barton. Her hand rests on her belly and she has the oddest look of hope — and, almost, contentment — on her face. She meets Walker’s gaze. Sees his puzzlement.

  ‘Look again,’ she whispers. ‘Look harder.’

  He looks. He feels. And he begins to understand.

  ***

  Cleave was the only person left on earth who looked back, and she did so constantly. Almost absently. No one else in the city-states of Rise or Shine dared indulge the past, except for fleeting glances, a few minutes at a time at most. To dwell on the Old Time, to think about everyone and everything lost, to remember the way the world hovered brazenly on the precipice of disaster for so long before it all unravelled: no one, except for Cleave, could bear it.

  It wasn’t that Cleave cared less than the rest of them. But she had a job to do and she had no time for emotional turmoil. She often asked herself how anyone from the Old Time could possibly have been surprised by what happened. She didn’t think people were stupid, on the whole, but she did think they were malignantly complacent.

  As Chief Scientist for what was left of humanity, Cleave’s job was to look back, to look forward, to look at the here and now. All at once. Aided by drones, robots, and four walls of autoscreens in the main room of her private compound, she observed and tended to the earth. By donning a headset, she could stay home but roam what used to be Shanghai, days before the fireball, and compare and contrast it with the concrete-studded swamp it had become. She could test the water for toxicity, for salinity, for pathogens. She could scan for signs of plant and animal life. Shanghai, the bottom of the former Pacific Ocean, the polar caps, the Amazon rainforests, a bend in the Volga River, a hamlet in the Hamptons. She could go anywhere, anytime. She saw everything.

  Cleave hadn’t stood in the same room as another human being for over twenty years. Her private compound was her world. She served the people of Rise and the people of Shine, but she could not share their space. She needed solitude to think. Because of this, she had long ago removed herself from the people she most loved. But she thought about them, her old friends with new names. When she was lonely — it didn’t happen often, but it did happen — and she needed to remind herself of the importance of her work, she thought back to the day they had founded the New Time. Walker, Barton: the two of them standing together, already eminent, a
little apart from Cleave and the others. Curtin, Holland, Hail, and her. The six of them gathered on a gentle slope in the foothills overlooking a city of rancid air and lingering fires and floods, the place stripped of plants and animals, even rats, the people bereft, sick, starved, bloody, dazed.

  ‘We’re going to need an enemy if we’re going to make this thing work,’ Walker had said that day.

  ‘I’ll be the enemy,’ Barton had said. She was the bravest of us all, Cleave thought.

  They’d been so young then, the six of them. Cleave knew it was plain good luck that they’d found a solution, even if Walker and Barton were a couple of geniuses. Thirty years later, all six of them were still alive. That was a miracle too, though, like everyone, Cleave had tumours to treat and joint pain to endure.

  ***

  In the pitch black, a plastic parrot began to whistle ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. It was a forlorn tune to start another day, less nostalgia and more a warning, a reminder that, in the Old Time, people used to love rain, used to open their mouths to it, used to dance in its muddy puddles, used to store and draw on its bounty. It was a reminder too that birds used to fly about. That they used to exist.

  The blackness began to ease, as if the parrot’s circling were the day’s energy source. On the reconstituted-plastic wall opposite the bed, the image of a tropical garden slowly appeared: glistening deep-green fronds, rustling in a gentle breeze. Impossible. It began to rain, but only on the image on the wall. Gentle but persistent strands of water ran from the ceiling to the floor.

  Between them, the plastic parrot and the fake rain woke Walker. That’s how it was every morning, now that he wasn’t capable of rousing himself at 4.00 am, ready to save the world for another day. He lay face down on the huge, hard bed: he dared not sleep on a mattress he might sink into, unable to get up. His naked body was indistinct beneath a cotton-like plastic sheet. He muttered gibberish, his words up-ended, as the parrot continued to loop the room. Finally, he raised his head groggily, let out a deep sigh — of exasperation and pain, to begin with, and then of resignation — and hauled himself off the bed. When his left foot touched the floor, he winced. When his right foot touched the floor, he cried out. As he stood, crooked, the parrot accelerated and flew straight at the wall above the bed. A small compartment opened for it, then closed, killing the birdsong. The rain eased. The wall of plants became a panoramic window, allowing Walker to survey the city-state of Rise, built on the shell of a city from the Old Time.

  He stood dead still, his profile a thin, wasted frame — sunken chest, raw nipples, grandstanding windpipe — staring at his city. His creation. His eyes were lost in their sockets and bloodshot, his cheeks pockmarked, his skin flaky and riddled with sores. Like a cruel joke, his gut was distended and hard. The private Walker was a devastating, inexplicable, pitiable sight.

  But as he woke fully, a task he found harder each day, he rallied. His features rearranged themselves into a look that conveyed eminence and calm. Yes, his nakedness told an undeniable, untellable truth. Yes, he was desperately sick. Yes, he was hungrier than he had ever been in his life, hungrier than he thought possible. And yes, he had dry-coughed through yet another night of half-sleep. But too bad. He had responsibilities, the first of which was keeping up appearances. It was no small thing. Step one of the day, he told himself this morning and every morning, was to get himself under control before anyone saw him. His mind as well as his appearance. What other choice did he have? He was Walker: everything depended on him. Well, him and Barton. He never forgot that the survival of the human race was so much her achievement, even if the people of Rise tended to downplay her role and tended, in a friendly but emphatic way, to look down on her city-state of Shine.

  Two more deep, searing breaths and his mind was ready. But he couldn’t fix his body by himself.

  ‘Enter,’ he said, speaking into his wearable, a thin silver-coloured band on his wrist.

  A door whirred open and four people scurried into the room. A woman and a man approached Walker first, each of them holding dry cloths. They did not greet him: Walker preferred silence first thing in the morning, because he wasn’t yet ready; because this routine was, he felt, a dirty secret; because until these people had done their work, he didn’t consider himself to be Walker.

  He forced himself to keep his eyes open. Although he didn’t enjoy them working up close, putting their hands all over him, it seemed disrespectful to their honest and necessary work not to watch and appreciate it. He lifted his arms perpendicular to his body. The woman wiped the skin of his right side with a cloth, starting at his head and working down. The man started at his left foot, then right foot, left ankle, then right ankle, and worked his way up the legs. The woman and the man cleaned in silence, briefly nodding in solidarity to one another when they met at Walker’s midriff. Walker noticed, and it occurred to him for the first time that they might be seeing each other outside of work. What a way to meet a partner, he thought to himself: while anointing a shell of a man.

  Once the woman and the man were done, a nurse began dressing the sores and scabs on Walker’s body. Walker had a team of health professionals on call, a necessity he found self-indulgent and in contempt of everything he’d fought for in his life. They were led by Curtin, who now hunched close to Walker, attempting to replace the worn-out patch on his chest so that she could check his vital signs. As the Chief Medical Officer, Curtin kept the whole of Rise alive. If at all possible, she kept them healthy and kept them from worrying too much about themselves. She presided over the system that kept in check the tumours the population all had, she watched illness and muscle-pain trends, she monitored grief levels, she examined the causes each time a citizen of Rise died. But these days, she spent more and more of her time with one patient. Walker hated that this was so. He did not want a personal doctor. Curtin had more important things to be doing, so far as he was concerned. Yet Curtin was clear: ‘Now is not,’ she told him often, ‘a good time for you to die.’

  She found a piece of Walker’s skin that was healthy enough to accept a new patch. But Walker raised a hand to hold her back.

  ‘Not today,’ he said. ‘Please.’

  There was no quaver in Walker’s voice when he spoke, Curtin noted, in contrast to his sleep-time voice, which was full of moans and mutterings. Even in his current state of disarray, Walker’s waking voice sounded like a choir from the Old Time. He sang the song of reassurance, of ‘we’ll get through this’. Curtin felt a surge of admiration for her old friend. But she wasn’t taken in.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, pushing the patch onto his skin just south of his right nipple. ‘Got to be done.’

  Curtin stepped back a pace and watched the nurse continue to dress the sores. She doubted that Walker could last much longer: she knew more about the passage of this top-secret illness than anyone else in Rise. She worried that he would die — that she would fail to keep him alive — but she worried just as much that he would live on, his mind a fog, his delirium messing with his legacy. She knew she had to do what she could — just as Walker was always pushing on — and help him in whatever ways she could for as long as she could.

  ‘Must you hover?’ Walker asked her.

  ‘I must,’ Curtin said.

  ‘Couldn’t you leave me in peace for a few minutes, if you’ve finished poking and prodding?’

  ‘I’ll go when I’m ready. A couple of those sores are showing signs of infection.’

  Walker sighed, but he was more irritated at himself than at Curtin. He had broken his own rule by speaking during this distasteful ordeal. How could he ask for discipline and forbearance from others, his ever-patient inner circle, if he couldn’t manage it himself?

  The nurse glanced back at Curtin, a worried look on his face. The two of them crouched down next to Walker’s groin, examining a particularly nasty sore, murmuring to each other about infections and pus and dust. Walker, despite hi
s best efforts at serenity, or at least neutrality, began to tap his foot.

  ‘Stand still, please,’ Curtin said.

  ‘That’s easy for you to say: you’re not being examined. What are you grinning at?’

  ‘It’s good to see you making a fuss,’ Curtin said. She murmured and pointed. The nurse shot a dart of white powder into the wound. ‘Good. But there too,’ she said. ‘And there. One more. That’ll do.’ She stood upright and said to Walker, ‘We’ll need to do that every three hours for a couple of days.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ he said.

  She drew nearer. ‘It’s seeping. And it’s sitting close to a tumour.’

  The man and woman who had wiped Walker clean now placed a loose white shirt over his head. It had buttons on the front — pure decoration — and a zip that ran from hem to armpit. As the woman eased the zip up — carefully, to avoid a scab that had finally hardened — the shirt inflated with air, filling out Walker’s wasted frame, squaring his shoulders, and hiding his bloated stomach.

  The man, meanwhile, helped Walker step into a pair of loose trousers, and then swabbed his feet in cloth. Walker stepped into a pair of soft shoes with hard soles. The fact that he managed it by himself gave him confidence that this was going to be a good day.

  A final touch: the man took a fresh cloth and rubbed, ever so gently, the sores and scabs on Walker’s face, scalp, neck, hands, and wrists. Within a minute, his exposed skin glowed with the appearance of good health.

  Walker was finally ready for the day: the well-toned, still-handsome, universally loved ageing saviour, fully dressed, fully lacquered, fully himself. His belly lay in swollen anonymity beneath the shirt. His sores and scabs fought the antiseptic powder in silence. His brain ached but was as sharp as ever.

  Walker dismissed the woman, the man, and the nurse one at time by gripping their hands in his, nodding briefly, bowing slightly. Curtin clapped her hands on his puffed-up shoulders, and they leant into each other, foreheads kissing.