CHAPTER 17

Emma

‘No … No … Hell no … What even is that?’

Emma had blagged the wi-fi password from the avocado orchard owner, and was sitting cross-legged on the homestead porch, checking her phone.

Loko squatted beside her, handed her a mug of tea.

‘Success?’ he said.

‘In terms of quantity of responses, yep,’ said Emma. ‘In terms of quality, nuh-huh.’

‘Your friend is — unusual looking.’

Emma glanced at him. ‘Not as open-minded as you thought you were?’

‘Oh, the universe is always conspiring to humble one,’ said Loko.

Maybe, thought, Emma. But not necessarily the one sitting next to her. He had self-confidence to spare. And that was from another who wasn’t lacking. Not that her parents had brought her up to be full of herself. They just didn’t believe in being fake. False humility was a lie as much as making shit up, and so was skirting around the truth. If you couldn’t say it straight, then you probably weren’t living straight. Emma’s folks had a healthy distrust of people who weren’t direct.

‘What I meant was that your friend has a very specific look,’ Loko went on. ‘Which might bring a certain type of person out of the woodwork.’

‘Priests and cannibals,’ said Emma. ‘Prehistoric animals.’

She sensed his puzzlement, and the undertone of resentment that always accompanied it.

‘Song by Shriekback,’ she said. ‘They were big in the ’80s. Still big in Hampton nightclubs.’

‘I prefer jazz.’

Good thing they didn’t have access to a stereo, then. Emma would rather listen to a dentist drilling her own teeth.

‘And what news of your other project?’ said Loko.

‘Huh?’

Emma had got distracted by a photo of what appeared to be a girl with a fur collar. Nope, it was two rats, curled around her neck. Actually, if you looked past all the piercings, the girl wasn’t bad looking. She could go in the ‘Maybe’ file.

Loko reached over, removed the phone from her hand.

‘Priorities,’ he said. ‘Focus.’

‘I’ve done my bit,’ said Emma, beckoning for her phone. ‘Mission completed.’

‘We need to gauge the response, too. Find out if and how people are taking action. No measurable effect means the mission is a failure.’

‘Someone else should do that,’ said Emma. ‘If it’s me, it’ll look suspicious.’

‘You were born and brought up in this community. People will expect you to be concerned about what’s going on round here.’

Actually, the majority of people round here still saw Emma as Jacko and Mac’s little girl. They had perfect recall of when she ran naked on the beach as a three-year-old. They’d seen her drop out of university and flit between part-time gigs. Her mates from school thought she was a laugh, a girl who could party, who could hang. Dev — well, judging from his phone message, he currently saw her as Beelzebub incarnate, though he’d get over it soon enough. No one in Gabriel’s Bay took her seriously, which was partly why she’d left. Seemed that attitude was catching.

‘What counts as “action”?’ said Emma, trying not to show how irked she was.

‘Council investigations, prosecutions,’ said Loko. ‘But also civilian acts. Organised protests. Other more — spontaneous —demonstrations of disapproval.’

Emphasis noted. Meaning not entirely clear, but Emma could make an educated guess as to what fell into this category.

‘Anything already planned?’ she said.

But the other pickers were coming out from the kitchen now. Break was over. Back to work. The ten of them were expected to pick around twenty thousand avocados over the course of an eight-hour day. If Emma ever felt like eating guacamole again, she’d be smashing those green bastards with extra vigour.

Loko picked up her untouched mug of tea, tipped it out on the ground. Started to head back into the kitchen to put the mugs in the sink.

‘Phone?’ Emma held out her hand.

‘Do you need it?’ he said, with a half-smile.

No, but it was hers and she wanted it back. Even in her mind, that sounded childish, and besides, she didn’t really want to have this fight. Partly because it was a waste of time and energy, but also, if she were to be totally honest, because she didn’t want to find out how far Loko would go to win. Better to be relaxed. Or pretend to be, anyway.

‘Nah, stick it in my bag,’ she said, and with a backward wave, jumped down the porch steps. ‘See you in the forest of denial.’

No way he’d know System of a Down. Put that in his jazz pipe and smoke it.

End of the day, Emma drove Loko back to the Wood Sprite camp in her brother’s shit-box old Nissan. Harry, knowing he had no chance of selling it on, had on one door painted the top-hatted bluebird from the mega-racist old Disney flick, Song of the South, above a flowery scroll that said ‘Bluebird of Crappiness.’ Never a truer word. But it was a car, and there was no other way Loko could get to work if she didn’t drive him. Be nice if he offered to pay for petrol, but Emma hadn’t asked outright, so who was she to carp?

Knackered after picking five million effing avos, Emma had slept in Loko’s borrowed tarp-hut every day after work, instead of crashing at her parents’ house. Since she turned legal at sixteen, her folks had never questioned her about her sex life, trusting her to take care of herself, make sensible decisions. They knew she had a bloke now, and they knew as much about him as everyone else in Gabriel’s Bay did — which was only marginally less than Emma knew herself, though she’d be pushing shit uphill to expect full disclosure. They hadn’t asked to meet him, again figuring that she’d introduce him when ready. Emma had never had a serious boyfriend before, and she imagined that her folks saw Loko as yet another passing flingship. And she had to face it — that was all it was, all it could be, given his choice of life.

Cue refrain from The Sound of Music: how could you pin a moonbeam or hold a cloud, or whatever those nuns were squawking on about. Sidney loved that movie, and had brainwashed her boys into loving it, too. Emma had watched it so many times, it bordered on babysitter abuse. But that was the romantic ideal, wasn’t it? Find a man, settle down, have a gaggle of singing children …

‘Do you think we should have picked up curry for the others?’ she asked Loko.

‘They wouldn’t expect us to.’

‘We should contribute, though. I’ll ask if we can take a few of the bruised avocados.’

‘Good luck with that,’ he said. ‘Even bruised avocados can be sold.’

‘Is everyone who owns a business a grasping shit in your book?’ she asked.

Loko grunted, as if the question made him impatient. But he answered calmly enough.

‘The system allows people to exploit others. Whether they think of it as exploitation or not.’

Emma hadn’t told Loko much about her parents, probably for this exact reason: they were white, middlish-class, and as a salaried employee (her mum) and employer (her dad), also cogs in the capitalist wheel. But that didn’t mean they didn’t care about social inequality and the environment, or that they were anti welfare or tax breaks for the poor. It didn’t mean they were the enemy.

‘My dad owns a business,’ she said. ‘He pays an OK wage.’

‘But he doesn’t get to say what an OK wage is,’ said Loko. ‘The so-called “market” decides that. The market decides what work is worth remunerating, and how much those workers should be paid. Do you really believe that a person who devotes their life to caring for the disabled is worth less than the CEO of a tobacco company, whose product kills millions every year?’

Emma didn’t believe that — how could she? She’d seen first hand how the work her commune team was doing had made a difference, improved society, yet they still struggled for funding. The system was fucked up, that was true. But it was hard to see her dad as the system’s pawn, its enabler. Hard to see Jacko Reid as anything but fully in charge.

‘I’ll ask for the avos tomorrow, anyway,’ said Emma. ‘Don’t ask, don’t get.’

Following the path from roadside carpark to campsite in the dark was tricky, and required concentration and torches. Usually, the camp was quiet at this time, the evening meal having been eaten early, while there was still light. But when Emma and Loko entered the clearing, the fire was blazing, and all the Wood Sprites were around it, laughing and drinking what looked like cider. More likely, it was Darius’ homebrewed nettle beer, which was surprisingly pleasant. The Wood Sprites didn’t usually allow alcohol into their camp, but the nettle beer got brought out on special occasions. Emma and Loko had been welcomed with it. She wondered what they were celebrating now.

‘Hey! Come and join us!’

A smiling Rua held his arms wide to greet them. Seated on the log next to him was a young woman who looked vaguely familiar. Emma thought she’d seen her at the plant collective stall, or perhaps the farmers’ market. She had a feeling the woman had something to do with astrology. Had that look about her. Dip-dyed hair. Lots of beads.

Emma felt uncomfortable eating bought curry in front of everyone, so she quickly stashed it in the tarp-hut and hurried back to the fire. Loko had no such shame; he was eating the curry out of the container with his hands, Indian style, using the naan as a scoop.

‘So what’s up?’ Emma asked Rua.

He put his arm around his companion’s shoulders and squeezed. She was pink-faced with fire heat, pleasure or embarrassment. Maybe all three.

‘We’re pregnant!’ Rua announced.

A cheer went up around the group. Mugs were clinked together. Darius uncorked another bottle of nettle beer, and poured a mug for Emma and Loko.

Loko waved his away.

‘Thanks, but I’ll stick with water.’

To Rua and his lady, he said, ‘Congratulations. A child is a very special blessing.’

Emma almost choked on her beer. As far as she’d been aware, Loko thought the world was dangerously overpopulated and would benefit from a good plague. But she couldn’t call him out on this now. Rua and his pink-faced baby mama were ecstatic to be creating another drain on the world’s resources, and who was she to kill their buzz?

Now she thought about it, it made sense that Loko was only being polite, too. For one, you’d have to be a complete arsehole to rain on these people’s preggo parade. Plus, Loko needed the Wood Sprites onside. He needed allies. And followers.

‘Do you have a name yet?’ Emma asked the couple. That’s what you did in these circumstances, wasn’t it?

‘If it’s a boy, he’ll be Kale,’ said Rua.

‘As in “curly”?’

‘It’s one of Jupiter’s moons.’ Rua shrugged. ‘But the plant’s cool, too.’

‘If it’s a girl,’ said the baby mama, ‘she’ll be Elara. Another of Jupiter’s moons.’

‘Pretty,’ said Emma.

Silently, she wished double-X chromosomes on the foetus. It could thank her later.

‘The baby will be birthed naturally?’ said Loko.

Emma forbore from giving him a WTF look. Her mum had told her enough stories for her to know that barely any birth turned out as planned, and that labour was insanely painful. You might want to give birth in balmy azure seas surrounded by dolphins, but odds were you’d be on your hands and knees yelling for drugs as soon as the first proper contraction hit. All births were different, but the one thing they had in common? Yep, everyone giving birth was female. Guys could be a hands-on support crew, but ultimately they did not have to experience the equivalent of squeezing a pumpkin out of their fundament. Which meant, in Emma’s firm opinion, that they had minimal say on how the birth should roll.

‘We’re keen to try hypno-birthing,’ said Rua. ‘It gets rid of all the fear and tension, which means no pain. Celeste’s mum has a friend who’s been training up on it.’

‘Beautiful,’ said Loko. ‘Natural birthing can be profoundly spiritual, for you and your child.’

Good thing about nighttime, Emma thought. No one can see you roll your eyes.

But to be fair, she didn’t object to what was being said. How people chose to give birth was none of her beeswax. And if Loko was spouting platitudes to be kind, then what of it?

No, she knew what rankled was that everyone was in agreement. The vibe around the fire was that motherhood was the greatest thing, uplifting, transformative — necessary. It was like it was some great sacred tradition that couldn’t be violated.

Emma hadn’t given much thought to whether or not she wanted children — she was twenty-three, for Pete’s sake. Her environmental friends had all sorts of reasons why breeding was bad: overpopulation, climate change, and the fact Stephen Hawking said humans only had another hundred years, if they were lucky. And Emma had personal reservations, too. She didn’t want to give up her freedom, become tied to one spot. She didn’t necessarily want to be in a permanent relationship, either.

But what it boiled down to, she knew, was that she objected to doing what was expected. She didn’t like being judged, and judgement came with both options. Women who chose not to have babies were seen as dooming themselves to a life of incompletion, of failure. If they did not — or could not — use their bodies to duplicate life, then they died with their work only half done. They were empty vessels.

And women who did had to subsume their identities and become Mother with the capital ‘M’. Mothers, not fathers, were judged for how their children behaved, how well they achieved, whether they were fat or skinny, bookish or sporty, gay or straight. You couldn’t win.

Nope, no one was going to dictate to Emma how she used her body, and she had plenty of time to make up her mind about which way she’d go. And if that certainty came late and she missed the boat, body clockwise, then so be it, tough cheddar. She’d have made the most of her life, lived it to the max.

Emma took another swig of nettle beer. Highlighted by the fire, Loko looked dark and dangerous, and — alcohol on an empty stomach, no doubt — sexy as hell. Emma knew there were plenty of women around the world who’d crawl over glass to be in her position, to jump whenever he lifted his little finger. But she also knew that what drew Loko to her was that she wasn’t blindly obedient. Sure, she had guts and determination, but more importantly, she showed initiative. The website had been her idea, and she’d made it happen. She called the shots in her life. She was in control.

Emma caught Loko’s eye, and nodded towards the tarp hut. He smiled. Invitation accepted. Strategic withdrawal from the celebrations to be executed in five, four, three …

She called the shots.

Forget about the future. This was living. This was exciting. Tomorrow, she’d skip playing yenta for Devon and get stuck back in to the other project. Because Loko was right — the job was only half done. And Emma intended to prove that no one else could complete it better.