Jaana and I laughed with relief while the children were already sitting aside, having some private girly conversation. My fear that Ruby and I had missed the others was finally gone. More pairs started making their way to us in various intervals then and I immediately noticed that Jaana wasn’t the only one whose emotions got the better of them. I heard various versions of my own words, or fears, that maybe we were the last ones left in the world, completely alone. We were reassuring each other, shaking hands, introducing ourselves and swiftly forgetting each other’s names because there were so many. By late afternoon there were so many of us that the peak with the upside down tree resembled an anthill.
Mark must have been off in his estimates by at least a hundred. I wasn’t crazy enough to try to count the heads in this mayhem, but I figured that the final number would be closer to four hundred.
No wonder Ruby and I had to wait for the others to arrive. To accommodate all these people, the farms and orchards must be really far!
The adults stood in small groups talking while their children and grandchildren were either sticking to their side or–for the most part–making up their own groups. They were laughing, chattering, running around, zigzagging between the adults, showing each other their favourite toys.
What are we going to do? Nobody had voiced this question out loud yet, but it was in the air and as time went on became more and more urgent. Where would we put all these people? Where would we get enough food to fill their stomachs? It turned out that everyone had brought food for a few days for themselves and their young, so the priority turned to finding a safe place to stay. I figured that after meeting everyone, nobody could bear the idea of returning back to their basement hideouts.
“There is a factory,” a black man of roughly my age said in a loud voice, “about three kilometres from here. It looks big enough for us to sleep there tonight, before we decide what to do next.”
There was a general hum of approval in his proximity, and then the news of the factory travelled outwards to the people on the edges of our gathering.
“What if… not everyone’s here?” Jaana asked. “Maybe some people didn’t make it here on time, and we’ll walk away from them now?”
The black man spoke again. “True. We’ll send a few people back here to stand guard first thing tomorrow morning, how about that?”
I shared Jaana’s obvious relief. I didn’t like the idea that I’d get here late for some reason and find only stomped grass instead of survivors.
The adults gathered their children and modest bags, and when the black man and his grandson walked out towards one of the hills, the others simply followed him. Like soldiers following their general.
“Grampa, is it a chocolate factory?” Ruby asked with sparkling eyes as we were marching in the survivors parade.
I couldn’t blame her for connecting the word “factory” with chocolate, her and I had watched the film about Charlie just before flying to New Zealand. Nor could I begrudge her wanting some actual candy after six months in isolation, during which her Grampa’s food experiments totally failed to provide any.
“I don’t know,” I smiled sympathetically, because I would also not mind a bit of real chocolate. Or liquorice sticks.
As it turned out, the factory was making clothes instead of chocolate products, to Ruby’s great disappointment. Various uniforms for manual workers, basic grey or with reflective stripes, summer and winter types. It was a huge two-story building. The ground floor with a high ceiling seemed to be partly a warehouse for completed garments, partly filled with massive machines and tanks which, if I was not mistaken, were making and dying fabrics. The first floor housed wide desks with sewing machines. The room’s layout reminded me of a classroom, all that was missing was the teacher’s desk with a blackboard and some chalk.
There was a pile of clothes in various states of completeness on each desk, untouched since the seamstresses had left it there on their last day of work, to finish “later”. Did the people in the factory know they’d never come back here, that none of their pieces would ever be finished?
When we moved all the chairs to one side, there was enough space in the aisles for all of us to squeeze in, just about. Surrounded by the hum of four hundred people, we all unanimously made our beds on the floor, using the piles of clothes from the desks to create makeshift beds.
We were probably lucky that they weren’t making or storing anything edible here which would have definitely attracted unwelcome guests, but luckily there was no smell of rotting bodies inside. The main door was kicked out of the hinges and there were a few broken windows on the ground floor, so at least a handful of people had sought refuge here during the pandemic, but it must have been only temporary. I assumed that when all hell breaks loose and one is trying to escape infection and get something to eat, a clothes factory isn’t the right place to linger.
An unusual sound rose through the thickening darkness, and all heads, adult and children, turned towards it. Many people even stood up.
Someone close to us was playing the guitar. It stunned me, and for a while I was completely still, just listening to a children’s lullaby which was soon accompanied by a young woman on the other side of the room, singing. What was going on?
Ruby stretched her neck
