The Dying Fall

Chapter 3: Savannah

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Chapter Three: Savannah

Carrie tried not to look at the clock as she dismantled the toaster. If she got this job finished before three-thirty, she’d make her quota for the day. Quotas had gone up last month and she couldn’t afford to not meet hers—especially now they needed every single penny she could earn. If she began missing her targets, not only would it affect her pay packet, but it would get her bumped down from electronics to plastics, paper or glass. She’d only got into the electronics unit because she had a good head for disassembling and sorting components in electrical appliances and could do so forty seconds faster than anyone else. If she lost her position, she’d lose any chance of smuggling anything of value out of the Plant, and there would go her source of bud money.

Today hadn’t been a fruitful day: it had been nothing but hairdryers, food-blenders, curling tongs and kettles on the line. It was just as well, she supposed, since her supervisor, Hoggins, had been on the floor most of the afternoon, walking up and down the work areas, poking about on the benches and making notes on his data pad. Catching one of his team filching from the line would probably make his day. There was nothing he loved more than filing paperwork on employee misconduct; form-filling was all that really justified his senior position and pay.

Carrie glanced up to look out for Hoggins’s stocky, white-overalled form and saw him on the balcony outside his office, leaning on the rail and casting a slow gaze over the disassembly floor. Carrie sucked on the inside of her cheek as she teased out the last thread of nichrome wire from the toasting rack and deposited it in the appropriate bin, before chucking the metal rack in another. She looked up again just as the clock switched over to the half-hour and the buzzer sounded.

After tidying her tools into their box and locking it up, she pulled off her goggles, mask and gloves, and shoved them into the pockets of her overalls, before stretching her back and shuffling towards the exit. Following everyone else into the locker room, she stripped off her overalls, folded them into her locker with the tool box key, and re-laced her work boots.

“How is it Monday again?” Kayla groaned, zipping her coat up over her baby bump and then shoving her hands into her pockets. She shivered gently. “It’s getting cold already too.”

“It’s always cold here,” Carrie said, pulling on her hat and jacket.

They hurried out of the locker room and joined the queue at the pay desk. Carrie could tell from the murmurs travelling down the line that the new quotas had hit most people’s pay packets pretty hard. She knew she wasn’t going to get her full wage this time: she’d missed several quotas in the first couple of weeks after the new targets had been issued. With the fine and her recent illegal purchase, the timing was typically shitty and inconvenient. But then her life was fully of shitty inconveniences: like the fact that living costs wouldn’t be stretched quite so tightly between her and her mother if her dad and sister were still around to bring in a wage each. But with one a fugitive and the other dead, there wasn’t much that could be done about it.

When she and Savannah were little, her mother had been given a reduction on the rent; but once Savannah had turned eighteen, they’d had to start paying the full amount. Savannah’s wage had been just enough to cover the extra cost, and, although they’d had a rota for who could wash their hair in warm water once a week, and had to wear extra layers indoors for half the year, and were never quite satisfied with porridge for breakfast and vegetable stew for dinner, they’d managed to get by. And then, when Savannah died, Carrie had stepped into her shoes, taking her place at the Recycling Plant, and become the second bill-payer in the house.

Usually, she had a little left over from her monthly pay to save up for the occasional hit, bought on an occasional Saturday morning from Nano. But occasional hits had soon become regular hits and she’d started sneaking scraps out of the Plant every week to sustain her habit.

As she watched the clerk count out her wage and seal it in a brown envelope, the realisation that she definitely wouldn’t be getting another new bud for a couple of months made her cold all over. Eight weeks is not that long, she told herself. You’re just going to have to make this new MIX last.

Carrie signed for her pay, took the envelope and shoved it into the front of her waistband, under her jumper and next to the green cloth bag. She followed Kayla through security to the yard, where their bus was waiting. Slumping onto a window seat, Carrie watched out of the grimy glass as Kayla stopped to chat to one of the guys in their section, rubbing her belly with one hand as she chatted and laughed. After a minute, Kayla touched the guy on his arm and then boarded the bus. She sat on the seat next to Carrie and leant back as she tried to get comfortable. Carrie wasn’t sure why Kayla always sat next to her; she was only going to complain for twenty minutes that sitting over the wheel made her want to pee, and then she’d have to move to let Carrie out because Carrie’s stop was in the town square, and her own wasn’t for another thirty minutes after that.

“Ethan’s such a sweet lad,” Kayla said.

“He fancies you,” Carrie replied shortly.

Kayla laughed, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and scrunched up her nose so that her nose stud lifted slightly—but she didn’t deny it. Carrie was fairly sure that, despite being four months pregnant with the child of a man who had no interest in being a parent, Kayla would find a replacement father for her baby quite soon. She’d started working at the Plant the same time as Savannah and, somehow, nearly five years later, after taking a fifty-minute bus journey twice a day and staring single-parenthood in the face, she still had a youthfully determined optimism. Carrie both admired and was baffled by her attitude; in comparison, she felt ancient: weary and world-worn to the bone. Perhaps it was just that she and Kayla were of different temperaments. Perhaps Carrie was just naturally cynical. Or perhaps it was just that she was destined for tragedy. She was pretty certain she would never have the future Kayla had. She was barely clinging on to normal life by her fingernails—it wouldn’t take much to push her over the edge and into prison or a morgue.

Kayla chatted most of the journey: sometimes with Carrie, sometimes with the girls sitting across the aisle. Carrie didn’t join in and only half-listened, her attention mostly lost on the chorus of a track she’d got high to in bed last night, which replayed over and over in her head. She tried her best to focus on the conversation around her, but the tune and rhythm kept distracting her and she had to stuff her hands into her pockets, wedge her boots against the ledge at her feet and suck hard on the inside of her cheek to stop herself from tapping or humming along.

She was relieved when the bus pulled up in the square and she could step down onto the pavement and start her solitary walk home. Keeping her head down and striding at a brisk pace, she arrived home warm and a little out of breath. She knew she should be home alone, but she still checked downstairs to make sure her mother wasn’t home early before she went up to her room. Throwing open the wardrobe door, Carrie found a jumper that had been a hand-me-down from Savannah and reached into the right-hand sleeve, where she found a sock with a knot tied in the top. Taking out the sock and loosening the knot, Carrie reached inside and took out her controller and MIX bud. She shoved the controller into her jacket pocket and put the bud in her right ear, under her hat. Tying up the sock again, she stuffed it back into the sleeve of the jumper, shut the wardrobe door and headed back downstairs.

She paused in the hallway to listen once more to the silence of the house, and then went into the kitchen. Depositing her wage packet in the ‘money tin’, Carrie grabbed a torch from a drawer and took it out to the shed. Standing in the doorway, she stared into the gloom for a moment, sizing up the task before her. Contrary to what her mother had told the DEW inspector, none of this was Savannah’s. None of it was illegal either. Most inspectors threw a quick glance at the boxes, bags and piles of household junk and ticked it off as legitimate. This last inspector would probably have done the same if it hadn’t been for the plastic bottle. The presence of rogue plastic automatically necessitated a thorough investigation, but the mention of a ‘dead daughter’ had been enough to postpone the check for a few days. It was unclear whether it was a tinge of pity or the potential hassle of uncovering a hoard of plastic bottles that had persuaded the DEW inspector to give them a second chance; either way they had to make the most of it.

Carrie squeezed the controller in her pocket and took a measured breath as the first track began humming in her ear. She pulled on her gloves, stepped into the shed and began moving the gardening tools into a pile on the lawn. Once she’d put aside the items she knew they had to keep, she opened up the first box and began sorting through the contents. Much of the stuff was old tools and clothes that belonged to her father. The very day he had left, her mother had boxed up his belongings and put them in the shed: out of sight, out of mind.

Carrie remembered that day like it was yesterday. She’d been home sick from school when her father had come home, wild-eyed, out of breath and unsurprised that her mother had found his paraphernalia behind the backboard of the saucepan cupboard. He had stood and stared at it all—strewn all over the kitchen floor—and blinked helplessly, like a rat emerging from a sewer. Carrie remembered her mother’s furious, repeated cry of ‘You promised!’ and her father’s unconvincing ‘Molly, I’m sorry...’. There had been a ten minute stand-off between them, and then her dad had gingerly placed a wad of notes on the kitchen table, planted a hurried kiss on Carrie’s forehead, and left.

Carrie hadn’t realised that had been his final goodbye. Even when the Patrol arrived an hour later to find her mother sitting at the kitchen table with her father’s ‘collection’ still scattered on the bare-board floor around her, Carrie had still expected that her father would come home again. The Patrol officers had bagged every last item, searched the rest of the house, and then left. Savannah had come home from school and they’d eaten dinner as if it had always been the three of them. Carrie had no recollection, from that point on, of anyone ever mentioning her father again.  Somehow, as the years passed, she figured out for herself that he wasn’t coming home: either because he was hiding from the authorities and couldn’t; or because he had been caught and punished, and wouldn’t; or because he was dead. All she knew, as the one certainty in her life, was that her mother would never forgive him.

After she had sorted the first stack of boxes—discovering her grandmother’s tea set, chipped and housing dead spiders, in the process—Carrie returned to the shed and grabbed the handle of an old, mouldy suitcase. As she went to lift it, the case fell open, spilling a pile of old tablecloths onto the floor. Carrie huffed, snatched up the first cloth and jumped back when something tumbled out of it and clattered on the boards. Crouching down, Carrie saw that the item was a book with a pale blue fabric cover but no title or image on it. Switching off the bud in her ear, Carrie picked it up, opened it to the first page and immediately sank to her knees as her sister’s handwriting leapt at her from the white paper in its familiar rounded scrawl.

At first, the words seemed like an alien script to her shocked mind, but slowly, as she skimmed over them several times, she realised she was reading a quote from Shakespeare:

‘If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

That strain again! it had a dying fall:

O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south,

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour!’

Carrie flicked over to the next page and a photograph dropped out onto her lap. A knot tightened in her chest as she saw a picture of her and Savannah, hanging around the neck of her father in the garden, taken just a few months before he had left. Flipping it over, she saw a date for just a few weeks before Savannah had died written on the back in pencil, and a symbol she didn’t recognise that looked like a capital ‘E’ but with its top stroke curled back on itself and its bottom stroke slanted steeply downwards. Perplexed, Carrie turned to the open pages of the book, hoping for some sort of explanation but found only more scribbled lines here and there, interspersed with doodles and random phrases in hand-drawn thought bubbles.

As she turned more pages, Carrie realised she was looking at Savannah’s journal—a secret outlet for her thoughts, feelings and inspirations. After about twenty pages, she stopped, suddenly frightened by what she might find beyond what she’d read so far. For a moment, she knelt with her hands trembling on the page and then she closed the journal with a snap, slipped the photograph back inside the front cover, and shoved it up the front of her jacket. Scrambling to her feet, she left the shed and bolted into the house and up to her room. She shoved the journal under her mattress and then backed against the chest of drawers, trying to calm her thudding heart.

She had known, of course, that her sister was a music addict. She knew that Savannah had bought buds from Nano and used the shed as a private place to hit up. It wasn’t something her sister had tried to keep a secret from her but the journal was tangible evidence that Savannah wasn’t just hooked on listening to the odd track. Amongst the records of track and bud lists, song titles and artists, Carrie had recognised familiar lyrics mixed with unfamiliar lines of poetry, entries that could only be about undersounds and sets of initials that were clearly code for something else. Finding something so personal brought Savannah’s presence directly to Carrie and she felt unsettled by it, as if someone had picked her up and shaken her so that all the emotions that had settled quietly to the bottom of the abyss in her heart were now loosened and floating in a chaotic rush inside her.

Carrie stared at her bed, fighting the urge to retrieve the journal and pore over its pages. Her mother would be home soon and there was still the rest of the junk in the shed to sort through. The room was already dimming with the early evening light and soon enough she would be working in the dark. She hooked the bud out of her ear and put it with the controller under her pillow. Once the shed inspection was over, she’d be able to return her illegal collection to its usual spot. She was pretty sure her mother checked her room sometimes, and there was no way she could afford to let her find Savannah’s journal, or the picture of her father, or they’d both end up on the log burner.

Something told Carrie that this find was significant: that it would provide her with answers to the questions she had about her sister. Savannah had always been very reserved and Carrie had never known the full extent of her addiction; but now she could access her sister’s innermost thoughts in a way she hadn’t been able to when she was alive. It stung a little that Savannah had never shared any of this with her, but then Carrie also understood why she hadn’t: the risk was considerable and even closest friends couldn’t always be trusted. In many ways, there was nothing lonelier than obsession. But in some way now, with her sister’s journal hidden under her mattress, Carrie didn’t feel quite so alone anymore.

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Next weekend: Chapter 4—A Proposition

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Author’s Notes:

I’m off to hug my sister…

Chapter 4: A Proposition, coming next weekend.

PJ