The original novel Oracles and Miracles was written by Stevan Eldred-Grigg in 1988. It was a best seller, adapted for radio and stage, and has most recently been performed in Hollywood in 2019.
Helen Mae Innes added a few zombies and a lot of gore.
Helen Mae Innes added a few zombies and a lot of gore.
Sample
Ginnie
Me and Fag was born on the double bed Mum and the old man slept in. The old man had sent one of the boys to run down to the hospital and get a midwife. Not long after she turned up on her bike Mrs Palto, a friend of Mum’s, got a whiff and turned up too. It was a Saturday night early in 1929. That is, we started to be born on the Saturday night, though we didn’t make our final appearance until the Sunday morning. Mum had no trouble at first, till I was born but then she had a lot of trouble over Fag.
Fag heard about it for the next thirty years.
‘And I nearly died having you,’ Mum would say. ‘Yes, and what I went through having you. If I hadn’t of promised Mrs Palto the blood bag to chew on I’d have died.’
And so on, etcetera, etcetera.
Mum chose our names. The old man didn’t seem to have much say. I got Janet, Janet Feron, but because I had a lot of ginger hair they called me Ginnie for a nickname and from then on Ginnie was who I always was.
Fag’s name was Daphne, but she never got called Daphne, she was always just Fag. I don’t know why.
After we was born we were put in a drawer in a duchesse, cause Mum didn’t want Mrs Palto coming back at night to suck out our brains before we even had any.
‘Not that it did much good, yous useless tarts,’ Mum would say.
Mum had cleared the old man’s socks and long-johns out of the drawer and put us in. Of the Monday the old man went back to work. He was a labourer and at that time he was in work. Mum had no choice but to let Mrs Palto stay to help look after us. Once we was all cleaned up she was alright with us.
‘Ach Margaret,’ she said to Mum, ‘it has been hard for you but you vill come right now, and your little twin girls will be your reward.’
Mrs Palto had been infected after the war but she hadn't turned into a biter. She was what some people called a hunch. She had the tell tale stoop of someone who’d caught the virus but never become a biter. As long as she had a drink she was okay, she wouldn’t attack. Mr Palto drove a cab around town looking for fares to pay the rent or to take home to bleed for his wife’s tea in exchange for a free ride, depending on what was more pressing that day. Mum had to watch out though and remind her now and then to keep her gnashers away from friends and family. No one really trusted a hunch.
‘I was cursed the day my own mother tried to eat me,’ was what Mum said in reply.
This was something we heard years later from our older sisters, who of course had their ears glued to the bedroom door.
Fag
Ginnie and I often talk about our childhood. Now that we’re women ourselves, with houses, husbands, children, mortgages, now that our legs have swollen up with varicose veins and our tits have dropped down to our bellies, we think we should look at our childhood, lift the scab off our memories and have a look at the stuff underneath. It’s a long time ago now, after all. Our childhood was a long time ago, those things are over and done with.
Well they’re not, of course. The past is still living, it’s inside us, making us what we are, whatever that is. Mum said that. She even said it about the biters, she said there was still something of their past alive in them, so if they had that then we did too. But at least the actual things that happened, the things that make the living past, are in a box we’ve buried, like Mum.
Though the stuff in those boxes does keep getting out and roaming around. Being dead and buried isn’t what it used to be.
Ginnie
It was in a house in Simeon Street, in Spreydon. Mum and the old man had been living there a year or two, and after me and Fag was born lived there a few years more. It was an old house, what you called a cottage, or biter bach since the verandah across the front made it so easy to surround and if the biters got into the dark corridor down the middle you were really done for. There were four rooms out the front and at the back under a drop-down roof was the kitchen, which was where we lived most of the time. Mum would stand there keeping an eye out for biters. If she saw one she’d scream ‘bloody biters in the yard!’ The boys would have to go out clear them away, if Mum kept watching, or chop them up if she didn’t. One of the front rooms was what Mum called the dining room, though it was practically empty and according to my older sisters the previous owner had been eaten in there so we wasn’t too keen on being in it. Then there was three bedrooms. We had about four people in a bedroom. Outside at the back there was a shed with a copper, and a dunny with a wooden seat, a tin and a hatchet.
The house didn’t belong to Mum or the old man, of course. It belonged to people that lived in a big house nearby, people of the name Moneygall. They were toffs. She had big bosoms and wore yellow cloche hats and a long string of teeth beads round her neck. Her husband wore stiff collars and a gold dagger on his hip. I thought he was King George but really he’d been captain on a boat. He had farms and houses all over the place, which he rented to people.
Mum hated the Moneygalls, but was frightened of them too. ‘Don’t touch the wallpaper,’ she’d say. ‘It doesn’t belong to us. The landlord will come and turn us out and we’ll be nothing but food for biters.’
She always seemed scared of landlords. The rent money was always put away first, no matter how hard up we was.
‘You have to have a roof over your head and bars on the windows,’ she’d say.
So even if there was no food in the house, there was a house for there to be no food in.
When old Moneygall came to inspect the place, which he did every now and then, Mum would be in a frenzy. The toilet had to be scrubbed and disinfected, the blood on the back steps had to be scrubbed, and that. Mum was always very polite to him, always keeping a few of us kids in the background, cause I think she probably got the house by not saying exactly how many kids there were. When me and Fag was born there was eleven of us, not counting Jimmie who’d been eaten the previous summer. Then after me and Fag there was another baby, then another one a couple of years after that. So in the end there was thirteen kids in that one house.
Not that all of them was kids anymore. By the time me and Fag was born some of the boys already looked like great big slobbering flesh eaters. Jock and Eddie were so big they kept banging their heads against the top of the kitchen door
‘Fucking door,’ Jock used to say. ‘I’m gonna bust the bloody thing down one day.’
Jock busted a lot of things.
‘Watch your bloody language,’ Mum would say. ‘Mouth like a bloody biter.’
Which made no sense because it was the biters who didn’t talk much. But Mum never did say anything that made much sense.
Fag
The trouble with Ginnie is that she can’t really see much further than her own nose. She hasn’t read much, that’s her trouble, she doesn’t know enough words. When she left school to go to the factory she just stopped looking at words, she just made do with the ones she had and didn’t bother to look for any more.
‘What’s the point of steering clear of the braindead all this time if you act like you’re just as thick as them?’ I said to her one day.
‘What makes you think it’s an act?’ she laughed.
Me, well of course as Eddie used to say about me, I’d read brown paper if there weren’t any books. So when I look at the past I can bring more knowhow to the job than Ginnie can.
Not that she isn’t good at it. Ginnie looks at something, she looks at it hard, and she says, well now did it happen that way or am I remembering it wrong? Was it really like that? Were those my actual feelings?
But of course she’s trapped. She hasn’t got enough words to describe things, so she’s trapped. Mum says that about the biters too, that they have the feelings but not the words.
Ginnie thinks that if she can just manage to work out exactly what happened and how she feels about what happened, and what sorts of dreams and hopes and smokes and shadows and pus filled wounds came and went in her head because of those things happening, then she’ll understand it, she’ll know the past. We were born and grew up, she thinks. We were born in what the toffs called the City Beautiful, the City on the Plains, the Garden City. We were kids. We grew up.
Not knowing that a thing is more than just the sum of its substance and shadow. More than just the body parts and blood.
A trap, for example, is a trap. Whether it’s a man trap, a biter trap, or one of your own making.
I, on the other hand, well I can reach up to my brain and help myself to the words up there, leaf through the volumes and say, oh yes, that throws some light on the thing, and of course, yes, that was what you might expect, given the time, the place, the circumstances … You need a lot of words, though.
And you need to keep your brains intact, inside your skull where they belong, to store your words in.