Jam Read online

  “Must be the fresh air,” I said, finally.

  “She knows something,” muttered Angela dangerously. “It’s only a matter of time before she lets something slip.”

  I coughed. “She might slip faster if you didn’t keep yelling questions in her face.”

  “Well, what would you suggest? Find someone to seduce her and find out if she talks in her . . . sleep?” Her voice became thoughtful towards the end of her question and she cocked her head, scrutinizing my face. “Travis, have you ever considered—”

  “NO. Definitely, never, no.”

  DAY 4.3

  —

  Once we were back inside, Angela wandered off in pursuit of her own agenda, and I returned alone to the department-store entrance, hands in plastic pockets. On the way, it struck me that the entire gloomy atmosphere of the settlement seemed to have had another layer of shadows painted over it. Murmurs of fear and unrest drifted up from the food court among the usual constant background rustling of bin liners.

  My bags were getting whiffy again, so I gathered them up and took them to the laundry. While waiting for my turn, I noticed Princess Ravenhair standing at the store entrance, fretfully watching the people around her, fidgeting with imaginary rings on her fingers. To my surprise, her face brightened when she saw me approaching, and she pushed through the crowd to greet me.

  “Hi. Travis, right?” she said, so quickly the words blurred together. “You were on Sergeant Cuddles’s detail this morning, weren’t you? Is he all right?”

  “Er, sure, he’s fine,” I stammered, caught off guard. “I mean, he hasn’t gotten any less dead.”

  “He’s dead?!” cried the princess, clapping her hands to her cheeks.

  “Well, probably,” I said, flustered. “I’m pretty sure the jam ate him. I might be remembering it wrong.”

  “They’re saying everyone’s getting eaten by the jam when they try to go outside,” she said, voice quavering. “People are getting really scared and angry and they’re all looking to me for answers and I don’t know what’s going on!” She took a deep breath. “They’re saying that Crazy Bob has lifted his divine protection!”

  “Really?”

  She thought about it. “They were probably being ironic. Oh, god, I can’t even tell anymore.” She sat down on an empty ceramic plant trough and buried her face in her hands. “I can’t believe Glenn’s dead.”

  “Glenn?”

  She caught herself, screwing up her eyes in self-disgust. “Sergeant Cuddles. He was one of the first. The original founders of . . . of all this, along with Lord Awesomo and me.”

  “I thought you said Lord Awesomo was already here when you arrived?”

  She seemed embarrassed. “Well. The thing is. Me and Gerald and Glenn, we all used to post on the same Internet forum. We had this really long thread about what we were going to do when the apocalypse happened. We were all going to meet up here and live off the shops. We kind of assumed it would be zombies, though.”

  “I think a lot of people did,” I said, nodding.

  “I don’t think any of us know what we’re doing anymore,” she said, the volume of her voice decreasing gradually. Then she started crying. Not loudly, not the whole wailing thing; she just covered her eyes and shuddered silently into her palms.

  I stood twiddling my thumbs for a moment, uncomfortably aware that something was expected of me but lacking the confidence to commit myself. Eventually, inch by inch, I began to sit down beside her, extending my arm for a tentative shoulder pat.

  “I just wish I had Whiskers back,” she moaned.

  My face instantly reddened. I aborted the sitting attempt and returned to standing and fidgeting.

  “Sorry, I don’t mean to unload on you,” she said, recovering and wiping away some dribbly snot. “I dunno, I guess it’s just because you’re new. It’s nice to talk to someone who’s got no idea what’s going on.”

  “I definitely am that,” I sighed. The laundry guy thrust my plastic bags back at me. I balled them up under my arm. “Erm, I have to go into the store . . .”

  “Oh, sure, I’ll come with you,” she said, hopping to her feet and deftly overlooking my attempt to break off the encounter. I noticed a lot of the plastic people were giving me slightly hostile looks now that I was escorting their princess. Many of them were still wearing opaque plastic bags on their heads, though, so I might have been projecting a bit.

  “How’s your spider?” she asked as we climbed the stationary escalator, patting the box I still held in my free hand and making Mary start resentfully.

  “Good,” I said, noncommitted.

  “It really is huge. What breed is it?”

  “It’s a Goliath . . .” I mentally dropped a massive cast-iron weight on my words just in time. “Goliath . . . eater. Goliath eater. Because they eat things.”

  “Yes, what do you feed it?”

  For some reason it was the only thing that I could think of on the fly. “Milkshakes.”

  “Milkshakes?”

  I was committed, now. “Fat and protein. It’s really good for them. For their webs.” Inspiration struck. “The one thing you mustn’t ever give them is meat. They don’t eat any meat in the wild. Can’t digest it. They get all their protein from beans and coconuts and biting through the tops of milk bottles.”

  She seemed satisfied, if a little baffled. Thankfully she changed the subject herself. “Isn’t that your friend?”

  By now we were back in the housewares section, in the wide thoroughfare that led to our campsite, and Tim was walking towards us out of the furniture department. His head was uncovered and he was wearing a particularly eye-catching set of bright yellows presumably borrowed from Don’s bag reserve. With his mouth set into a thin line, he carried an extremely large and heavy-looking high-backed leather armchair into the center of the clearing. He planted it down, then turned it to face him and climbed onto the seat, placing his hands on top of the backrest like a lectern.

  Satisfied, he stepped back down and picked up a long, narrow lampshade. I watched him curiously as he mounted his chair again and held the narrow end of the lampshade to his lips.

  “Brothers! Sisters! Citizens of all colors of plastic!” he boomed through his makeshift megaphone. “Gather round and hear me now!”

  A cheering mob of revolutionary insurgents failed to throng around his pedestal, but a few heads turned.

  “Have you lost faith in the current administration?” continued Tim, gaining confidence. “Do you live in fear of execution for committing something you didn’t even know was a crime? Do you want to live in a society governed in the name of freedom and equality, rather than irony? Well—”

  “What are you doing?” said one of the six or seven curious plastic people who had gathered nearby, a tall young man in whites and blues standing with his arms folded.

  “I’m starting a political rally,” said Tim, lowering his lampshade for a second.

  “An ironic political rally?”

  “No, a real one. Completely unironic. That’s kind of the point.”

  “Oh, right.” He nodded thoughtfully, but didn’t seem to quite grasp the concept. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  Tim raised his lampshade again. “Lord Awesomo doesn’t want you to realize that this society is not sustainable,” he declared. “Tinned and packaged food will run out. We can’t scavenge forever. We need long-term solutions in place now. It’s going to take a lot of determination and hard work, but together—”

  “How much hard work?” said a newcomer, clad entirely in black.

  “A lot,” clarified Tim testily.

  “Oh. Well, I don’t really like doing hard work. I think everyone should do all the hard work for me so I can sit around doing whatever I want. I think I deserve it because I’m so great.”

  Tim blinked a few times. “Are you being ironically reprehensible?”

  The plastic man laughed patronizingly. “Course I am, dude. Chill out.”

&nbs
p; “So you are willing to do hard work?”

  A moment’s silence passed as he considered this. “Nnnnnno.”

  “Well, that’s not irony, is it?” snapped Tim, his patience fading. “Irony means the opposite of what you’d expect. What you just said was just an unusually candid statement of reality.”

  There was a hostile grumbling among the ranks. Some of the plastic people started unironically hissing. Someone blew a brief raspberry. I glanced at Princess Ravenhair. She was watching Tim intently, something approaching infatuation sparking in her eyes.

  “Listen,” said Tim, returning to script. “We can’t go on like this. This is bigger than any of us. I’m talking about the future of the human race! That’s not your property to be messing around with! It belongs to your children. And your children’s chi—”

  “I hate children,” announced a heckler.

  “Yeah, stupid little bastards,” said another one. “Always sitting behind me on long flights.”

  “I think they should all be tortured and killed in internment camps,” said the ironically reprehensible guy proudly.

  Tim’s lips were quivering like those of a vomiting man in the brief moment of unhappy reflection between heaves. Half the crowd was jeering and the other half was wandering off in disinterest.

  Then, to my surprise, Princess Ravenhair strode forward into the center of the impromptu forum. Everyone fell silent and turned to face her as if she were a glass breaking in a crowded bar.

  “Tell me more,” she said.

  Tim narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Are you ironically interested?”

  “No,” said Ravenhair with the gravitas of a royal proclamation. “I’m regular interested.” The murmuring returned with much less hostility, and the people rallied around.

  Now that someone from the popular clique had made it “cool,” Tim’s rally started gathering support. More and more people joined the crowd as Princess Ravenhair listened intently, perched demurely on a hastily retrieved box ottoman.

  I was surprised by how naturally Tim took to his public-speaking role—his last speech I could remember had been at a middle-school nativity play and he’d burst into tears after one sentence. Now, he discussed the supply issue and explained that, while prepackaged food was currently plentiful, farming crops was one of those things that you had to start doing some considerable time before it became necessary. He outlined his plans for rainwater catching and water recycling. He gave a short but poignant explanation of what irony meant—prompting one or two people to get nervous and walk away—and that “ironic” religiously inspired murder was still religiously inspired murder.

  After half an hour there was a commotion at the back of the crowd. Lord Awesomo had arrived, and his people guiltily parted before him like a plastic Red Sea. “What the hell are you doing?!” he demanded, before noticing Princess Ravenhair among the crowd. “Deirdre? What’s going on?”

  “I was just idly talking to myself,” said Tim, lent confidence by the crowd. “While standing on this chair. Some people happened to be passing and might have accidentally heard some of it. There’s no rule against that, is there?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” sneered Awesomo. “Like the Mongol hordes were just taking a Sunday drive through continental Europe. This is a coup or I’m Germaine Greer.”

  “He was just talking,” said Princess Ravenhair. Lord Awesomo glared at her in wordless astonishment. The crowd were watching them both intently, unsure where to place their loyalties.

  “And even if there might have been a slightly political edge to my stream of consciousness,” said Tim, now well into his stride, “surely the people have the right to choose how they want to be governed?”

  “No!” said Awesomo. “I was made dictator for life by divine order of Crazy Bob. Hail Crazy Bob!”

  A few people who were hedging their bets echoed the cry in an uneasy murmur, but it was clear Lord Awesomo had misjudged the general mood in the room. Most people returned nothing but a dirty look or, in one case, a cough that sounded suspiciously like the word wanker.

  “What?!” said Awesomo, hands on hips. “I’m being ironic.”

  “That’s not what ‘ironic’ means,” said the guy who had been ironically reprehensible earlier. He made no attempt to emphasize the word.

  Lord Awesomo’s eyes flicked madly around like a falling climber seeking a handhold. There was a moment’s tense silence before he turned smartly on his heel and walked away, mouth held firmly closed in token preservation of dignity.

  Once he was gone, the entire room seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. Taking it as read Tim’s little speech was over, the crowd separated and drifted away, talking to each other about their political options. A few members hung around to probe Tim on a few of his details and he responded to them all, wearing a large, immovable smile throughout. Princess Ravenhair just sat on her ottoman, watching him with a strange, satisfied smile on her face.

  Finally she got up and walked away without a fuss, but passed me on the way out. She touched my arm momentarily and said, “Thank you.” Only after she’d gone did it occur to me to ask her why.

  —

  Shortly afterwards I decided to slip away, and it was while picking my way through our campsite in homewares that I was startled by a voice. “You’re his friend, aren’t you.”

  Lord Awesomo was leaning comfortably on a refrigerator and watching me over his spectacles as I attempted to make my “bed.” He’d pronounced friend the same way one would pronounce amateur proctologist.

  “Whose?” I asked innocently.

  “Don’t be cute. That newbie doing all the rabble-rousing.”

  “I didn’t tell him to,” I protested.

  “Yeah, but you’re close to him.” I didn’t like the sound of that. “And now something’s been picking us off when we try to leave. Maybe you’d be in a useful position to explain how it might not be a whizzo idea to start sowing the seeds of political discord during a crisis situation. Maybe I’d have some nice rewards for someone useful.”

  I sighed. “I’d really appreciate if you left me out of all this,” I said meekly. “I’ve got a lot of stuff on my plate right now. I have a spider to think of.”

  Awesomo’s eyes narrowed. “You’re Travis, aren’t you.”

  I nodded. There didn’t seem to be any point in lying.

  “Deirdre mentioned you,” he revealed, almost accusingly. “She said you seem quite nice. The two of you seem to be becoming quite . . . friendly.” The word fell from his disgusted mouth like half-chewed spinach.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Are you her boyfriend?”

  He seemed startled by the question. “What? No!” he blustered. “No! Not at all. We’re just . . . I mean, I never . . .” he shook himself. “No. We’re good friends. Very good friends.”

  “Good,” I said. “I mean, that you’re friends. It’s good to have friends. She said you used to post on some Internet forum together?”

  “Do you think you understand her?” he said, confrontationally. “You think I’m the nasty one because I killed that guy? She’s done that too. Lots of times. She likes to make herself seem harmless, you know, the one who’s just going along with things, but she’s just being ironic.”

  I swallowed. “Really?”

  “She’s a user. She manipulates. She was always like that on the board. She got all of us to vote up some Buffy fan fiction she wrote for CreepyShutIns.com and it ended up getting into the daily top ten. She’s no different now. If someone has done something to her bird, I would not envy them, I tell you that.”

  A spider-shaped creeping dread ran a few laps around my stomach lining. “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, didn’t mean to bore you,” said Lord Awesomo, clapping his hands and standing upright. “If you’ll excuse me, I have some governing matters to attend to. That’s a very nice spider you have there, by the way. Goliath birdeater, isn’t it?”

  DAY 4.4

  —

  I lay awake that
night, staring at the ceiling, holding Mary’s box against my chest. If I rolled onto my side, I would have been staring directly at Princess Ravenhair’s sleeping area, and the Princess Ravenhair–shaped mass under the duvet.

  If I closed my eyes, and shut out the sound of crinkling plastic, I could almost convince myself I was back home in the flat. The traffic noise through my open balcony door was lulling me into a doze, and in the morning Tim would play some horrible music and Frank would tease me and maybe we’d all go out for lunch and life would be uncomplicated and no one would need to be executed for anything.

  I heard a shuffling sound in our campsite, the kind made by someone trying very hard not to wake people who might want them to stop doing the thing making the noise. I lifted my head off my pillow and saw a shadowy figure hunched guiltily in the center of our misshapen circle of pseudobeds.

  It could have been a thief or a murderer. I considered crying out. A thief would run away, but a murderer would murder me. On the other hand, the murderer would probably murder me if I didn’t, too. That was his whole thing.

  Thankfully the debate ended when the intruder experimentally flicked a pocket flashlight on and off, and in place of the hate-filled countenance of the assassin my imagination had furnished, I saw only the hate-filled countenance of Don Sunderland, putting his plastic bags on.

  “What’re you doing, Don?” I whispered.

  The flashlight beam came back on and hit me full in the face, followed closely by a hand, which clamped over my mouth. “Shhhh,” he hissed. “Go back to sleep. I’m leaving. Don’t get weird about it.”

  “Wmmm mmml ymm gmm?”

  He moved his hand. “What?”

  “Where will you go?”

  “To the Hibatsu building. Where do you think? Don’t see any rescues stopping by this plague pit. So I’m off. I’d say it’s been nice knowing you but I intend to spend the next few years trying to forget your names and faces.”

  Then he was gone, creeping off towards kitchenware on tiptoe, shining his flashlight whenever he felt there weren’t any sleepers near enough to be bothered by it.