The Swimmers by Marian Womack

Author:Marian Womack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

13

And so it was that I found myself in that beautiful place, wild, untouched. But without any of the freshness of how Pearl’s hair had smelled that morning, the morning of our union. Here, everything was too much, everything was dying a little in its extravagance. Everything was provisional as well, things made of other, older things, handed down, repaired a thousand times: a piece of string, dark with dirt, that I would pull to summon the servant girl. I would follow its progress, rudely nailed at the angle between the wall and the ceiling. Everything was exactly like that, felt reused, made up of discarded things. Up in the Settlement everything was built with a specific use in mind, a finality. Everything was clean, neat, hygienic, and took up the least possible space.

Here, there seemed to be an overabundance of purpose, a surplus, an extravagance of time. I asked Pearl about it. She said she did not understand what I meant; surely reusing was a good thing, not a bad thing. We never had that problem; we would send down what we didn’t want any longer, and produce a new, improved version. She laughed at this, and her laughter reminded me of the servant girl’s.

I wanted to explain how we did things up there, but I was sure she would laugh some more. I knew that she had already made up her mind about how life in the Upper Settlement was, fixed ideas that had already stuck inside her head. She did ask questions sometimes, and I always tried to answer her as well as I could. But I could see that nothing I said had any effect on her. She was surprised that we could live without animals.

‘You once told me that animals are the thing you are most scared of,’ I replied.

‘Yes, it is true. My father taught me to fear them.’

‘Why?’

‘You could not understand.’

‘But we have animals up there!’ I protested.

‘Yes, but your animals are domesticated, engineered to be easily tamed. Our animals are not like that. Do you know what some people say?’

‘What?’ And there it was, as with most of our conversations: for they always tended to end in some kind of reproach to those above, some mismanagement or unfair thing that we had done. I was not disappointed.

‘That there are some that could never have mutated like they did; and that they are experiments, creatures that you have tried to put together. And when they didn’t work, or they didn’t fulfil your purpose, or even if you just didn’t like how they turned out, you set them loose on us down here.’

‘You are intelligent, Pearl, and educated. It is not possible that you believe such nonsense.’

‘Is it, Arlo? Is it all nonsense?’

‘You can’t possibly believe that we experiment with animals and send the ones we don’t like down here.’

‘So what do you do with them?’

‘With what?’

‘With the ones that turn out badly. Because if you bio-engineer species all the time, there must be some experiments that don’t work.

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