Cigarettes were on the points system, some kind of cheap knock-offs. It was mostly just the Essos who could afford them. Li had never been a smoker but she understood Megan was sharing something that had cost her. The chemical hit to her lungs was thin and harsh. It made her jittery and then calm, dulling her headache. The smell had none of the richness of tobacco she remembered – it didn’t remind her of anything much. What it did was mask the stench from the dump. Megan said Sumud and New Flinders both used it, so it kept expanding across the No Go between the precincts. She said in the hot season you could pass out from the smell.
Megan knew all kinds of things. She’d been Transit security for three years and she got on with people. Supervisors, drivers, even management. Some of the labour treated her like she was the enemy and that made it harder for her to do her job.
I knew you weren’t going to be one of them, she told Li.
Some of the other Essos had come to Transit looking for work. Megan had been picked up off the highway, same as Li. People got assigned according to their history, their abilities. Megan had done security before, for a container farm that went under. She carried herself right, had some combat and weapons training.
That doesn’t make me an arsehole, she said. I didn’t put my hand up.
A lot of Essos were like Megan. They remembered people’s names, they joked around with them, went as easy as they could on the searches. Vouched for people when they were too sick to work. The Essos had their own compound, better food, hot water, but some of them had people they cared about in the labour compounds too. Megan’s younger brother worked in the medical-supply facility. She’d been trying to get him upgraded to security for two years. She didn’t see him much because women didn’t guard the men’s compounds.
Li liked listening to her. Maybe that was what Megan got out of it. She didn’t want sex, or at least she hadn’t asked. It wouldn’t have mattered much but Li preferred this.
Megan was quiet for a while and Li focused on a scavenger bird circling outside the fence. A bird was good. There were so many of them around Transit because of the dump. Too many at once reminded her of the lake, but she only had to look at one.
Sometimes she worked the smelter, or on the crushing machine, feeding in CRTs and monitor glass to be shattered in a grey cloud and then carting the debris to the skips for dump transport. Sometimes the glass dust was too thick to see the woman next to her. Sometimes she tasted blood. Her eyes and throat stung from the PVC and the flame-retardant but she couldn’t smell the lead, couldn’t feel it quietly accruing in her soft tissue, settling in her bones.
The medic had said she might not walk easily again. The damage was too sustained – the tearing and breaking on top of the sprain that she’d walked on for so many days. But she didn’t have to walk far now. Just from the sleepbox to the van, the compound to the food shed. The medic said her blood lead level was up and asked if she was following procedure. Li thought about the decontamination block where they hung their overalls and showered at the end of their shift. The water was heated on the complex’s power supply because hot water was more effective. She liked the warmth, the feeling that the shift ran off her and went down somewhere below ground with the other shifts. Except the water was recycled like everything else. They all went round and round.
When she thought about Matti’s horse now, her certainty was gone. Had she ever looked at it again, after the first time? She could only remember touching it. Why hadn’t she looked? She tried to hold the horse in her mind, there on the salt pan, the hot belief of it, but all she could see was a piece of wood.
Scheduled break. Li, Camila, Susanna and Trish were out in the loading bay, sharing gum. They got one meal on shift, usually readybars, so the gum helped. They got counted off before and after break and there were two Essos out there with them but mostly they left them alone. Li and Trish lay on their jackets on the concrete with their legs up on the bench – Trish had varicose veins.
When there wasn’t a wall of trucks in the way, they could look north from here and see the No Go’s perimeter fence and the highway outside it. Today they looked back the other way instead, beyond Transit, to the dump. On a cold, still day like this they hardly noticed the smell.
Camila said, Tammy says you could walk to Sumud in four hours.
The women on the dump shift had a clear view of both precincts’walls from the southern face of the dump. They said if you were working up high enough on a clear day, you could see the tops of buildings inside Sumud.
Trish said, You wouldn’t make it. Dogs’d get you.
Or you would, Susanna said, and they’d shoot you from the top of the wall. There’s no gate anyway.
Li put another quarter of gum in her mouth to bring the taste back. She closed her eyes to ease her headache and listened to Trish chewing. Most of Trish’s points went on gum. She’d found God and given up smoking years ago, back when you could still get cigarettes without any special kind of trade. Still missed it. She’d told Li that every time she lit a match she tasted nicotine.
What do you reckon it’s like? Camila asked. Inside?
Better than outside, Susanna said. Better
