The Orchid Nursery. Louise Katz

I said, ‘Let’s go down where it’s dark dark dark,’ and he was scared, dead scared. And so was I, but I said, ‘We’re all goners – don’t you know we’ll all be dead soon? Death is by your side, your faithful friend and mine, always there to remind you to love what you have, take what you can …’ And my boy Asa found my secret. He found it because he looked, looked and felt with his clever fingers, touched me all over, all over, for a long long time, and tasted me, tasted me with his slippery lips, slippery dip, dip and sway, dip and sway, against his lips and his questing tongue so that I cried to him, ‘Never stop, I love it, I love you!’ and he, he said, ‘I love you, Pearl of All, my prize Pearl, my soft gleamer, light beamer in the dark …’

      And we met again, and again, and only ever where it was dark dark dark, out of sight from the eyes that pry and stare and look up and down quivering on their stalks, all wavery and damp, then the body follows, drawn along behind, drawn by the stalk. The eyes, the stalks, the stalkers.

      In the deep deep dark was where Asa and I lay together, his lean sweet hard body propped up on his hands looking down into my face, and his sly worm of a thing that can gather in on itself, then summon its nerve, become all hard, then slip into the secret place – yes, secret, my secret. None of those other horny little rodents got at it, and they won’t. Our secret. Oh, I opened up to him and he moved like an angel, bumping up against that curious part of me, that little cunny-bulby thing that was so soft and now so tight and round and hard, bumping up against his sweet cock, so we moved in unison … and then, evil jez that I am – what did I do? I made like the original sinner, like the Hag from the stories, the foul harpy in her swampy hovel with her suppurating sores and her fiery loins and her burden of guilt! I did, I did! I rolled him over and climbed onto his body, his eyes widened with the shock and delight – yes, delight! He’s not normal, no, he isn’t! He’s a Man among Men, anyone else’d be screaming for the guards, but not Asa. Asa was screaming for pleasure, only silently, and his eyes were on mine, and he held onto me like I was his only prayer, but silent we were, we were silent … moving together, a soundless storm, a noiseless sea … and here comes another silent breaker, and another …

      MICA

      5.

      A week passed.

      I was not summoned to the audience with the Brother Ministers, though I know Anapaite had been. And Opal. Opal!

      My Plea had not been accepted. I had not been chosen. How I wept when my name was not called! I supposed MaOblat had informed on me, told Tomander from Instruction & Destruction that I was yet to bleed regularly, or worse – told some other Propergander that I had been found wanting in one or more of the virtues of CHOM: Compliance, Humility, Obedience, Modesty. And I have tried so hard. Tried, and failed, imPerfect and still-fallen. Oh, what is wrong with me? Why Opal and not me?

      I could – and can – only comfort myself with the knowledge that there will be other Beseechings. I am young yet.

      And Pearl was gone. She said she would not Beseech, and if she had not, then how could she have been chosen for a vessel? Yet nobody has seen her since.

      More weeks passed and no word. I could not rest and my eyes grew pouchy, the skin around them blue; I could not perform my duties well, so distracted was I with wondering and fearing. I needed to know for sure. So that is how I came to plan and then to commit this criminal transgression.

      And now the last of the day’s light filters through the rain and the thick glass of the dome over the Orchid Nursery, its grace unequalled by any other of the marvellous works of Man. The soft pink falls upon me from above: the knowing touch of my GodFather – Blessed Be His Cock-and-Muscle, alive-alive-oh-oh ever amen – caresses the skin of my hand, my face, my throat.

      The walls of compacted earth reach to just above my head. They are the colour of the underside of very mature mushrooms, not quite brown for there is the faintest hint of now perished pink, and it is sweaty to the touch. To my right is another heavy door, behind which I assume lie the inseminated vessels of the gravidly successful womanidols.

      The wall opposite me, about fifty paces from the entry, is broken into a series of curtained recesses. This area is the one I seek. I know each recess contains a sacred object upon a pedestal: fecund but as yet unimpregnated womanidols who share the Sacrament of Creation with those Men chosen to bestow upon them the Seed-Bearing Elixir of Life. Womanidols, who live out their allotted time in perpetual and glorious sacrifice. O, paragons of grace! Exemplars of femininity!

      But inexplicably, here in this sacred citadel, I feel only dread. I know this feeling is heretical. I calm my breathing and tell myself not to be weak. But the chamber is filled with that terrible smell of rot and waste, so incompatible with its holy purpose!

      I gather my straying sensations and thoughts and bid them hold their peace. I can hear the susurration of breath from behind the curtain, and the faint and intermittent beeping of the electronic filters and feeders, and the sound of my own, disobedient, unhallowed heartbeat.

      I approach the cord that dangles at the edge of the row of niches and draw it across, slowly. Slowly, the heavy curtain pulls away from the secret place, and with the movement of the heavy fabric comes a dense exhalation of fetid air; the shit stink is concentrated and complicated with the smell of disinfectant, of sweet-scented ester and yeast. One by one the womanidols are exposed.

      Each is encased in a glass container of fine Craftsmanship shaped like an hourglass. The Vessels themselves are clad in tight garments of silk, a different hue for each: apricot, violet, rose, salmon-flesh, scarlet … Behind the masks that cover the upper part of their faces, I know their eyes are closed in silent prayer ongoing, for although the Properganders rule over us in the light, no order is possible without this complement of concentrated prayer below, in the dark earth, seedbed of creation.

      I remember the orchid excursion we girlies of Oblation had been taken on when we were only Minus-Nine from Attainment, for Grade 3 Styles of Reproduction. Of course we’d been gardening since we were Minus-Ten, and so knew about pollination and sexual reproduction, as demonstrated by flowers, aided by the agency of gardeners with their long, feathered, pollen-daubed sticks; we knew about the potential for Perfectibility within the constraints set by flawed nature. But this time we’d hiked much further afield to the nearer edges of Yellow Swamp which infiltrates Stone Plain at its middle, by BigAmass. ‘From the top of this tor,’ said MaOblat, ‘you can see far, almost as far as Hagovel, on a clear day.’ We shivered in thrilled horror at the idea of Hagovel where the cursed one lives out her days in miserable solitude. The House Mothers don’t keep the story of the Hag secret. She is an ugly truth for us to know about, useful to us as a moral lesson, an example of what can happen to disobedient, sexually profligate girlies and (wo)Men. Everyone knows her story.

      But we had a reason to be there: to find a perfect orchid, to witness first-hand that perfectibility is possible even in the mire. Indeed, in nature, all life, fair or ill, is spawned from corruption. We girlies were old enough to understand this – and also to realise that nature can be corrected. If nature is allowed to burgeon, untrammelled prodigies may be created from the filth, but if we take control of her the exemplary becomes the norm, not the freak.

      I was uneasy in that place with its oozes and tricklings and fishy stinks, its predatorial phantoms and shades who had been spawned in the moist, dark places by the matings of Lilith and her manifold demons. But we were in the care of MaOblat and two other Mothers from Dirt and Bark Houses; also a small posse of young foot-soldiers accompanied us so we felt almost safe from the influence of the fell phantoms with their reaching fingers and lidless, gobbling eyes and messy, noisome, un-pruned cockslots.

      It was a trip broken by a night in tents that we erected to protect ourselves from the rain, the night-eyes, and evil humours, so when the twilight came we stopped to unload our packs. As we did I saw, all around, the air seeming to congeal, and small greenish lights like the campfires of imps began