Seeder, Chapter Seven

7. Yarrow

Returning to West Flat on foot, Yarrow pays the price of bread. The Fresh Scum kids eye him askance, his dark skin like a fly in the cream. They think of themselves as so progressive, so radical, but they’re either as racist as lilywhite loyalists or super into telling Yarrow they’re down with his “exoticism,” as if his auroch is parked outside. The unionists recognize a blood kinship with him — he gets job offers and dinner invitations to meet spinster daughters — but they distrust anyone willfully unemployed, so their reaction is cool and annoyed. They address him as Blood, to indicate connection while implying the distance between.

Near the end of the line, Yarrow finds who he’s looking for. Phlox has no one’s trust and everyone’s affection. She’s welcome wherever she shows up. When he sees her in the breadline, she’s delivering the punchline of a dirty joke to a trio of unionists and two kids from the Radical Rust, eliciting sniggers from a prim loyalist woman at the edge of earshot. Phlox laughs loudest, like the peal of a churchbell. She puts a hand on a tradeswoman’s shoulder to support herself as she doubles over, and the tradeswoman looks at the hand as if her most prurient thought is written in the air. Yarrow sees the flush in the woman’s cheek, the quickening of her breathing. Phlox Ericles, thief of breath, breaker of hearts. She holds the woman’s eye a moment and Yarrow knows the woman sees it as a promise. They always do. But no one left in Phlox’s wake, Yarrow included, can say what they thought they’d been promised.

“Oh fuck, you shaved,” Phlox says when she sees him. “I hate it when you do that, it makes me feel like a pedophile.” She touches Yarrow’s smooth cheek, and his shudder is an echo of something gone.

“I had that appointment I told you about,” he says.

“Soldiers aren’t allowed to have beards? You’d think the army’d take take what they can get.”

“I didn’t want to stand out,” he says.

“We’ll miss you when you ship to the front,” says Phlox. “I’d call dibs on your valuables if you had any.”

“You look nice,” he says. Phlox prides herself on the precise quality of her tatters, the placement of every slash and iron pinning. She makes outfits from discarded army greys and stolen police uniforms, scraps of peasant burlap and Crown silk. I want to dress like Belovode, she told him. A piece of this and a piece of that, coming together in a way that’s not right, but coheres. Today, she’s dressed in a suitcoat of gunmetal velvet that hugs the angular lines of her torso and a green pencil skirt that runs in straight lines to her midshins where it meets the upper edge of polished black boots.

“I have work!” she exclaims, as if the idea just occurred to her. She leans toward Yarrow like a drunken conspirator and lowers her voice to a stage whisper. “Secret work, of which we must not speak.” She winks at the tradeswoman, who swoons. Phlox doesn’t notice, or doesn’t react if she does. “Which reminds me,” she says. She reaches into her messenger bag and pulls out four acorns like the one he planted in the recruitment office. She presses them into his palm, warm from hers. “I’m bringing them to Hothouse this afternoon, but I shouldn’t have them with me this morning. Hold them for me?”

Yarrow puts them in his pocket with the razor and the coin. Phlox brushes hair out of her face and looks down the breadline, which has barely moved. “I can’t wait the whole line today. I have a train to catch.”

“I can pick up something for you,” he says.

“Get me a dark rye? Something to put mustard on.”

“I’ll get you whatever’s left,” he says.

“Ideally, dark rye. Two, actually. I have family to feed,” says Phlox. “I’ll pay you this afternoon.”

Yarrow sighs. “I barely have enough for my own.”

“I am going to do work,” she says, slapping his cheek for emphasis, “and then I will have money” — another slap — “and I will not only pay you back for bread — dark rye, ideally, two — but I will bring you wine. Decent wine. The oak provides shade — ”

“ — until the buttonweed needs the sun,” he finishes. Phlox knows the aphorisms as well as he does; when she speaks them, the words are animated with a poetry that sings louder than faith. She knows it and isn’t above dropping in a saying to win an argument. Unlike Yarrow, Phlox knows which words and gestures to deploy when, which angle of smile beguiles a stranger or wards off a pharaoh. She kisses Yarrow on the cheek, checks the contents of her bag one last time, and heads toward West Flat station. The tradeswoman watches mournfully as she goes. Yarrow thinks of consoling her, telling her it happens to everyone sooner or later, and it’s better to feel warmed by the fire than to dive in and have to claw out covered in ashes and burns, but he isn’t sure. There’s a pleasure in burning, and ash is good for the soil.

He picks at the scab on his hand and eavesdrops, hoping to hear the Scum talking about the unveiling this afternoon. What he catches of their conversations is about fucking and politics, or fucking as politics. Fresh Scum imagine radicalism as one massive sex party, and when it isn’t, they make it into one. Every long-winded meeting on semantics and points of order, is followed by a drunk-up or an orgy. Phlox says no one is starving enough, and they won’t rise up until even the crusts are gone. The trade unionists at least rough up a pharaoh now and then. Yarrow doesn’t love thuggery as a tactic but it’s something. The scab on his hand is v-shaped, pointing down along his line of fortune. Dropping the acorn was his first true act, crossing from theory into the artistic disruption Phlox manages with ease. Weapons used to trigger aesthetic shock rather than kill. What will the line look like tomorrow? he wonders, realizing the question is wrong. Tomorrow there will be no breadline; none of us will be willing to wait.

The line trembles and breaks up. Something is happening at the far end, and while information takes time to travel, the need to flee moves instantly through the crowd. Pharoahs round the corner, shoving those who don’t get the message against the brick. Belovodi police wear blue and gold, with the tall rounded hats that give them their nickname. The city employs thousands, more than it needs, but most stay Barrack Town, spending tax money in the brothels and dive bars. They wait for excuses to swagger into East Track and Last East to rough up Blacks and immigrants, or wander into West Flat to extort drugs and blow jobs from the Scum. If they’re here en masse, there’s a reason.

I have a train to catch.

He hears Phlox’s words as he hustles the tradeswoman ahead of him down the block, away from the pharaohs and the city center. They’re clearing us out because the Train is coming through, he thinks. Urizen flusters at the sight of a breadline. Phlox gets one commission and the line has to go without bread.

His hands are on the tradeswoman’s hips, a two person conga, snaking through the panicked crowd. She stops, some sound in the scrum spooking her, and Yarrow turns back, too. The pharaohs have staffs raised, thick pieces of steel rebar rising and falling with sharp cracks and dull thuds. The tradeswoman takes off, running in the wrong direction. Yarrow watches the violence long enough for a pharaoh to take him down with swing to the back of the knees and a shove to the cobblestones. His hands are cuffed behind his back before he can reach the coin the recruiter gave him, and his cries of I enlisted, I enlisted! are swallowed by the pained screams of the crowd.