Paradise [Draft 1]

Chapter 9: 1 Samuel (8028)

Chapter 9: 1 Samuel (8028)

The Bridal Shop down on St George Street was boarded up. Whatever had happened to it, had happened on a night when Samuel had been out of town. These days he spent most of his time driving slaves from the Stadium out to their new homes and had not been back to his flat in three days. These were not his regular duties. He was supposed to be driving priests around Evermarch, but since his trip to Goldengreens he went out of the city more. He didn't care for it.

When he did get a night off, he was spent it in his flat, occasionally watching the TV, occasionally reading Evermarch newspapers, but mostly watching the street outside his window, like a nervous cat watching a sleeping dog. From as high up as he was, he could see a good stretch of St George Street and the roofs of the houses beyond, and when it wasn't raining, he could even see the steeples of the Evermarch churches, shimmering in the zonal haze.

What kept his interest though was the activity of the muta down at their ugly brick watchtower. There was a barb-wired barricade blocking the street to road traffic and the black clad morality police had all but killed the trade of the shops for fifty yards on either side. They harassed anyone that came anywhere near them and while they hadn't carried guns to begin with, they were armed with thin bamboo canes that they used to issue out summary beatings to any man or woman who was not following the correct modes of dress or could not produce satisfactory identification. One warm evening a Land Rover full of soldiers had drawn up and talked to the muta. Samuel could not hear what was being said, but he could see the soldiers forcing their way into the watchtower then taking away some papers and four people the muta had been detaining. The next morning, there were more muta than before, and two of them carried pistols on their hips. Something was obviously brewing in the Delta.

Des had been coming and going a lot over the last month. She kept her own schedule and was vague about where she was and what she was doing when she wasn't around. When her pains hit her, she would come around to Samuel's flat and lie on the sofa, groaning and complaining.

'It's just period pains,' Samuel would say.

'How would you know,' she would reply. 'You wait until you feel the agonies. Ask your Bishop why it is fair that all the women of my family are punished like this when we did nothing wrong?'

He was beginning to think there was something in it, because the day that Des turned up at his flat there was an outbreak of a similar affliction in half the women still at the Stadium.

Des was on the sofa, her feet up in front of the television, eating his food and drinking his mango juice.

'I see many women with the same as you at Angster,' he admitted as he sat down beside her.

'I tell you,' she sighed. 'When women can't hide it, it can be seen. Any drop of blood from the house of Abimelech in a woman's veins and her womb be fast closed.'

'But just sometimes?' wondered Samuel. 'It comes and goes? I can't make any sense of it, that's the truth. You look ok to me now, woman.'

'I feel better,' she admitted. 'I tell you to ask your friend the bishop. How is it fair? They say when they put a Canaanite to death, the whole tribe be punished. And no one knows how it works. No one willing to talk about it.'

'I don't talk to the bishop,' said Samuel knowing that he was not being entirely truthful. 'I'm just a driver. I tell you, now that Angster Stadium is back open, its filling up faster than we can empty it. People are just going there themselves. Turning their own selves in. People been living in holes, dey hear you can be fed at the stadium. More people every day.'

'Where you bin all night anyway?'

'I take three up into the hills today. Thorman must be making a tidy profit outta all these new slaves, seems like. One thief robbing another thief.'