Wonders of a Godless World. Andrew McGahan
really recall exactly what had happened. The mountain had farted, and there were billowing clouds, and people had run away, and then she had turned and seen…
Seen what?
The doctor was talking again, but the orphan couldn’t focus and didn’t understand him. Then, with a last smile, he was gone. The night nurse slouched out too—how ugly he was in the daylight—and she was alone.
She stared at the ceiling, not sure what to do. If she was fine, then she should get up. But she felt drained and sore, and her room lulled her with its comforts. She was very fond of her room. It was in a little hut, off on its own behind the kitchen block. It was actually just an old storeroom, but it had a door that she could lock, and a window, and a cupboard, and a mirror on the wall. And there was a socket into which she could plug her radio—the only object she had inherited from her mother. She liked to listen to it at night, even if the noises it made were meaningless.
She flicked the switch on the radio now, but nothing happened. There was no power. The volcano must have damaged the lines. The orphan sighed, stretched her limbs, and rolled over to peer at the floor. Her clothes were strewn across the concrete. Whoever had undressed her hadn’t bothered to fold them or hang them over the chair. She felt sure it must have been the night nurse. She imagined his long fingers tugging at her underwear. Anything could have happened. A whole day and night were lost to her, and there seemed no way to get any of it back.
Except—there was somewhere…a stony place…cold…
The memory wouldn’t come.
Nor would sleep, no matter how drowsy she felt. The orphan climbed out of bed. Arms stiff, she pulled on her clothes and then went out to her front step, into the sunshine. And stopped short, amazed at what she saw.
Ash. It was everywhere, smothering the jungle, the grounds, the hospital buildings. She remembered the cloud rolling down the mountainside, and then white flakes falling from the sky, mixing with rain and turning into mud. Now everything was blanketed in a thin, gritty layer of the stuff, deadening to sight and sound, and a deep silence had settled upon the world, a hush after the great event.
Presiding over it all was the volcano. The orphan gazed at the rocky profile of the peak. Was the mountain different now? Was it fractured slightly, and slumped in on itself? Empty, that’s how it looked. The fires below had gone out. And there were no vibrations anymore, humming under her feet.
Even so, something about the volcano disturbed her. She imagined the upper cliffs bulging forward and overbalancing and toppling down. It was almost like something she had already seen. And again she seemed to remember a biting coldness, and a grey landscape around her, not of ash, but of rock and ice…
A dream? Perhaps. She felt half in a dream even now, her head thick. She stepped out into the ash, and heard it crunch underfoot, a distinct sound in the quiet. She walked around the edge of the kitchen block. A few people were visible—a cook crossing the compound, a woman from the laundry toting muddy sheets—but their movements were somehow muted by the ash, making them seem unreal.
Then she spied the duke, working in the vegetable garden. And at the sight of the old man, a larger fragment of her memory returned. Yes, of course, she had been with him when the volcano erupted. The duke, and the other three patients from the crematorium—they had been sitting in the sun. Then the tremors had started and the mountain had gone up, and the duke had run away. And the others?
Well, she wasn’t quite sure about the others…
She watched the duke. The garden beds were buried under ash, and he was trying to clear the ash away, but she had to smile because he was using a broom, and what he really needed was a shovel. Poor old madman. The garden was his special pride. It was actually maintained by the kitchen staff, but they didn’t mind him helping, even if he sometimes pulled out the vegetables instead of the weeds.
Then she saw that it was her broom, and her smile died. He must have stolen it from her cleaning cupboard. And he was ruining it. The ash was still muddy, and it was clogging up the bristles. That wasn’t funny at all. She strode up behind him. He was too engrossed to notice her, but when she laid a preventative hand on his shoulder, he whirled about suddenly, apparently enraged, the broom raised as if to strike.
The orphan took an involuntary step back. His eyes! Something blazed in them, and for a confounding moment the orphan felt that she was confronting a different man altogether. Emotions flooded out from him. An immense frustration. Humiliation too, at long-endured indignities. And a fury, normally cloaked deep beneath a mildness so regimented that nothing could break it, and yet burning so brightly now at the old man’s core that he wanted to take the broom and—
The orphan blinked, and it was just the duke again, as frail as ever, gentle, his eyes filled with tears. Her hand was out, demanding the broom, and he passed it over. Then, his head bowed in shame, he was hurrying away.
The orphan took a breath. What was that about?
She studied the vegetables and plants. His rage was partly to do with the garden, she had sensed that much from him. He thought that it had been befouled and ruined by the volcano. But in fact no serious damage had been done. The ash was not so thick as to choke out growth, nor was it poisonous. Indeed, it was like new soil, fallen from the sky. In time, the garden would be all the richer for it. Couldn’t the duke see that? Had his madness blinded him? Fertility still throbbed in the earth. This was no dead landscape, no frozen valley, no…
She caught herself, the duke forgotten.
What was it that she was remembering? What place?
It slipped away again.
She looked at the broom in her hand. Work! That’s what she should be doing! The hallways of the wards would be full of ash. She had been off duty for a whole day and night. There must be all sorts of chaos inside.
She set off towards the back wards, but halfway across the compound she slowed. She gazed about at the grey world. Was she missing something? A nurse passed by and smiled at her. The orphan stared at the woman in confusion. It was the same nurse who had told her to take the patients out into the sun.
Face blank, the orphan turned and made her away around to the rear of the laundry, to the spot where they had all been sitting when the eruption began. The concrete slab with the benches and chairs. Something had happened to her there—not only the eruption, but something else, something important.
All she found now was ash. It was heaped on the benches, and had buried the cement square. And yet—there were patterns in the ash. Lines and squiggles and smudges. They meant something, she was sure. Something disturbing.
Laughter startled her. She looked around, but at first could see no one nearby. And then—there, in the bushes by the fence, a huddled, dirty, ash-smeared figure was grinning out at her. It was the witch. Discovered, the old woman grinned wider and laughed again, then came scrabbling out into the open.
Memory stirred once more in the orphan. Yes—that was right, the ash and rain had been falling, and she had turned away from the volcano, and the witch had been there. Of all the patients, she was the only one who hadn’t been scared. The duke and the archangel had run away, and the virgin had been facedown in the mud, terrified. But not the old woman. She had been…excited?
Now the witch scurried over and knelt at the centre of the square. Several objects were cradled in her hands. She dropped them in the ash, then grinned over her shoulder and gestured for the orphan to come and see.
It was a heap of small dead animals.
The orphan saw birds, their wings crooked out stiffly. And mice, their tiny eyes shut. Even a lizard, shrivelled around its own tail. But all of them had been eviscerated, feathers and skin torn away to reveal their bones. And the witch was crooning happily as she prodded at them, her fingers bloody.
The orphan straightened in revulsion. Why had the old woman caught and killed so many creatures? Normally she was content with bones from the kitchen. Ah…but perhaps she hadn’t killed them herself. Perhaps she had just found