Chapter 13

Tracey and Buttercup wandered along in the dark Gomorran landscape, their shadows cast forward by the light of the nearly full moon, able to see that on this side of the border as on the other there was evidence of the detritus of war. They were both very tired and both felt thoroughly abused. Buttercup was finding the pain between her legs a particular agony for which she was grateful for Tracey's devoted love, as she grasped her lover's hand. Tracey herself tried to keep out of her mind both her feeling of relief that she hadn't been blown to pieces by mines on the Buggery side of the border and her apprehension that it might still happen on the Gomorran side. She didn't know what she'd expected on arrival in Gomorrah, but she knew it hadn't been yet more of this anxious loneliness and fear, and this feeling that she had left one hell only to arrive in another which so far promised no better than that which they'd left. The pain in her own vagina and arse, though less than that of the more absolutely abused Buttercup, still made her feel weak and helpless.

Eventually, after several hours of directionless wandering away from the border, the two girls had to succumb to their exhaustion. They moved out of the open air, where at least they could see where they were, into the forbidding shadows of a copse, where a crater and the remains of a fire-bombed jeep reminded them that war was still not that far behind them. They rested together, relying on each other for warmth and comfort, each being a pillow for the other's weary head, too exhausted for Tracey to make love to Buttercup: an ambition which had so often surfaced in her thoughts as she admired her lover. And soon they were asleep, too exhausted to care anymore. Occasionally, Tracey thought of Sharon. Was her friend even alive? She wondered. Or had she been brutally raped and murdered by the Gomorran soldiers as she'd witnessed them treat the Buggery soldier?

Tracey was awoken by Buttercup, who was gently stroking her hair. She lifted herself up on her elbow and looked around her in the bright sunlight at the desolate, parched countryside, initially convinced that she was still in Buggery, and that her memories of the day before had been nothing but an unpleasant nightmare. Buttercup kissed her sadly, but lovingly. Despite her anxiety, Tracey smiled. "At least we're still alive."

Buttercup returned the smile, on a face whose beauty was badly marred by a growing bruise on her cheek and a cut just above her eye. She glanced down at her crotch, where Tracey could see a small trickle of blood that had emerged from her vagina. "Not just alive," Buttercup said with a sadness,. "but together!"

She sat up, and grasped her knees between her arms, slightly shuddering from a despair that Tracey recognised in herself. "Now, we've got to make a new life together in Gomorrah. And first we've got to find some other people. And just hope that they aren't as brutal as the border guards."

Despite their weariness and hunger, the two girls lifted themselves up, and walked out into the open. Behind them they could see the line of the border defences and, beyond, the battered landscape of Buggery. Ahead was just more desolate, broken ground, broken by the odd copse and decaying tree, and no evidence of human settlement. But they walked on, their feet aching on the harsh uneven ground, their skin burning in the morning heat, and their hands clasped desperately together.

It was only after several hours of wandering, broken occasionally by rests on the odd boulder, where Tracey felt acutely her lack of cigarettes, that they came to anything that resembled habitation. And a sorry squalid landscape it was too. A kind of shanty town of tents and buildings of cardboard and corrugated iron. And amongst it they could see the odd figure wandering naked amongst the buildings. As they got closer, they realised that all the figures they could see were women, all of them naked and all looking a little scruffy even in their nudity.

Buttercup bravely approached one woman, letting go of Tracey's hand, who reluctantly relinquished her grip. The woman had long poorly combed hair to her waist, a very hairy vagina which stood out as a broad triangle of fur between her legs, and had shaved neither her legs nor under her arms. She made the two girls seem peculiarly even more naked than she, with the short stubble of hair on their own vaginas, and the slowly growing hair on the rest of their body.

"Greetings," said Buttercup. "We're refugees from Buggery. We're looking for somewhere to live."

The woman looked at them without surprise, and not especially welcomingly. "I guessed as much. You're not the first refugees to come this way. And I guess you've also been made suitably welcome by the border guards." She brushed her nose with the back of her hand, leaving a small smudge on her nose. "Heaven knows why you should come here. To Gomorrah. There are women from Gomorrah who are so desperate to leave, that they become refugees in Buggery. But at least you're alive. And you've still got all your limbs, I see. You don't know how lucky you are. Many refugees who come here, came off much worse for wear than you have."

"Can you help us? Do you know anyone who can give us food and shelter?" persisted Buttercup, despite this rather unencouraging introduction.

"Yeah. Sure. I know how to help. But don't think I can help that much! I don't know what you foreigners expected, but you're not gonna find much luxury here."

She led them through a maze of tightly packed huts and make-shift dwellings to a rather larger wooden shack near the centre of the settlement. They walked past small dogs, innumerable chickens and several cows and goats; along paths worn down by feet; past other women similarly naked and unshaven. This was a village in desperate need of a hairdresser, Tracey reflected. She was also aware that there were no shops or even market stalls. What sort of dump was this? The woman left the two girls outside the shack while she went in. "I won't be long," she promised.

A few minutes later she emerged with another woman who was probably in her early forties, and who, like all the other women they'd seen, was naked, hairy and unkempt. She had a proud bush of hair obscuring her crotch which crept onto her thighs and half the way to her navel. Her dark brown hair was long and bushy, and showed no evidence of having seen a brush or comb. She smiled at the two girls with rather more warmth than the woman they'd first met.

"Hello. Glad to meet you. I'm Delta Seven Oh Nine Three, but you can call me Delta. I've been elected Welfare Officer for our village. I guess you're refugees here. Come inside out of the sun. Please."

Buttercup and Tracey followed Delta, lowering their heads as they passed through the rather low door. The room inside was very sparsely decorated, with just a wooden frame bed and a few cushions scattered about on the floor. Delta sat on the edge of the bed and signalled to the girls that they should recline on the cushions.

"So?" Asked Delta after the formalities of introduction were over. "What brings you to Gomorrah?"

Delta did not appear at all surprised at Buttercup's account of why she had escaped from Buggery, but was quite startled when she discovered that Tracey had been a tourist. She needed a little explanation as to what a tourist was. It was clearly neither a word nor a concept familiar to her.

"So people from your country regularly travel to other countries and then leave after only a week or two. And you visit places like Buggery. I don't think we have any 'tourists' in Gomorrah. In fact, we don't have many visitors at all. Gomorrah's a kind of international pariah. I don't believe it has very many foreign friends at all."

"Why's that? Is it a horrible regime like Buggery?" wondered Tracey.

"Well, in fact it's a democracy. And quite a free democracy. But women aren't allowed to vote, and whichever government comes in seems to compete with each other to maintain the state of sexual apartheid which distinguishes this country."

"Sexual apartheid?" queried Tracey who'd never heard of the word before. "What's that mean? Is it some kind of kinky perversion?"

Delta frowned. "You seriously don't know what it means? But that's why no one in the world recognises the Gomorran Republic. It's when women don't have any rights, and men have all the rights they care to elect for themselves."

"Rights?" wondered Buttercup who was having quite different difficulties in understanding what Delta was going on about.

"You know: the right to own property; the right to vote in state or local elections; the right to education; the right to roam freely without help or hindrance; the right to travel on men only public transport or to enter men only zones; the right to bear and bring up your own children; the right to protection by the law from abuse and harassment; the right to be treated the same as a man."

"You mean you have to rights for all that?" wondered Tracey whose knowledge of politics was limited to knowing who the prime minister was, and even then she wasn't always sure. "I thought that was just natural."

"It obviously is where you come from. And it's because women in Gomorrah don't have rights that all the other governments in the world won't ever talk to the Gomorran government or even recognise its right to exist. We don't have the rights to possess anything: not clothes, not land, not anything. They just about tolerate us living in villages like this, because otherwise all the women would die from exposure and starvation. And then the men wouldn't be able to have sex, bear children or have cheap labour. And even then there are some who'd begrudge us even this much."

"So, how do you live?"

"Well. We can live off the common land, which is all the crap land that the men don't want. We can sell our bodies. And we can work in the factories and as servants doing all the chores which men think are beneath them. But we have to be careful where we go and what we say. And we mustn't ever complain. That's about it. Anything else we do is strictly speaking illegal."

"What sort of things are they?"

"There are unofficial schools which we've set up to educate the girls as soon as they're dumped on us. Which is from birth, where they just get left on the ground for us to find and look after. The boys, of course, are immediately looked after by the state. No one knows who their real mothers and fathers are. Once a woman's given birth, she's turfed out of the state hospital and expected to fend for herself. There are unofficial committees which look after our own welfare, and make sure women aren't left to die when they're ill or disabled. There are unofficial hospitals, unofficial local governments and unofficial housing committees. We women look after ourselves. After all, if the men won't do it for us, who else is there for us to turn to except ourselves?"