Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  There was a weather Warning that day, so to start with we were all indoors. The children were watching the pay-TV and I was feeding the hens on the shut-yard. It was about nine a.m. Suddenly my mother came out and stood at the edge of the yard. I remember how she looked at me: I had seen the look before, and although it was never explained, I knew what it meant. In the same way she appraised the hens, or checked the vegetables and salad in their grow-trays. Today there was a subtle difference, and I recognised the difference too. It seemed I was ready.

  ‘Greena,’ she said. She strode across to the hen-run, glanced at the disappointing hens. There had only been three eggs all week, and one of those had registered too high. But in any case, she wasn’t concerned with her poultry just now. ‘Greena, this morning we’re going into the Centre.’

  ‘What about the Warning, Mum?’

  ‘Oh, that. Those idiots, they’re often wrong. Anyway, nothing until noon, they said. All Clear till then. And we’ll be in by then.’

  ‘But, Mum,’ I said, ‘there won’t be any buses. There never are when there’s a Warning. We’ll have to walk.’

  Her face, all hard and eaten back to the bone with life and living, snapped at me like a rat-trap: ‘So we’ll walk. Don’t go on and on, Greena. What do you think your legs are for?’

  I tipped the last of the feed from the pan and started towards the stair door.

  ‘And talking of legs,’ said my mother, ‘put on your stockings. And the things we bought last time.’

  There was always this palaver. It was normally because of the cameras, particularly those in the Entry washrooms. After you strip, all your clothes go through the cleaning machine, and out to meet you on the other end. But there are security staff on the cameras, and the doctors, and they might see, take an interest. You had to wear your smartest stuff in order not to be ashamed of it, things even a Centre doctor could glimpse without repulsion. A stickler, my mother. I went into the shower and took one and shampooed my hair, and used powder bought in the Centre with the smell of roses, so all of me would be gleaming clean when I went through the shower and shampooing at the Entry. Then I dressed in my special underclothes, and my white frock, put on my stockings and shoes, and remembered to drop the carton of rose powder in my bag.

  My mother was ready and waiting by the time I came down to the street doors, but she didn’t upbraid me. She had meant me to be thorough.

  The children were yelling round the TV, all but Daisy, who was seven and had been left in charge. She watched us go with envious fear. My mother shouted her away inside before we opened up.

  When we’d unsealed the doors and got out, a blast of heat scalded us. It was a very hot day, the sky so far clear as the finest blue perspex. But of course, as there had been a weather Warning, there were no buses, and next to no one on the streets. On Warning days, there was anyway really nowhere to go. All the shops were sealed fast, even our three area pubs. The local train station ceased operating when I was four, eleven years ago. Even the endless jumble of squats had their boards in place and their tarpaulins over.

  The only people we passed on the burning dusty pavements were a couple of fatalistic tramps, in from the green belt, with bottles of cider or petromix; these they jauntily raised to us. (My mother tugged me on.) And once a police car appeared which naturally hove to at our side and activated its speaker.

  ‘Is your journey really necessary, madam?’

  My mother, her patience eternally tried, grated out furiously, ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘You’re aware there’s been a forecast of rain for these sections?’

  ‘Yes’, she rasped.

  ‘And this is your daughter? It’s not wise, madam, to risk a child — ’

  ‘My daughter and I are on our way to the Centre. We have an appointment. Unless we’re delayed,’ snarled my mother, visually skewering the pompous policeman, only doing his job, through the Sealtite windows of the car, ‘we should be inside before any rain breaks.’

  The two policemen in their snug patrol vehicle exchanged looks.

  There was a time we could have been arrested for behaving in this irresponsible fashion, my mother and I, but no one really bothers now. There was more than enough crime to go round. On our heads it would be.

  The policeman who’d spoken to us through the speaker smiled coldly and switched it off — speaker and, come to that, smile.

  The four official eyes stayed on me a moment, however, before the car drove off. That at least gratified my mother. Although the policeman had called me a child for the white under-sixteen tag on my wristlet, plainly they’d noticed I look much older and, besides, rather good.

  Without even a glance at the sky, my mother marched forward. (It’s true there are a few public weather-shelters but vandals have wrecked most of them.) I admired my mother, but I’d never been able to love her, not even to like her much. She was phenomenally strong and had kept us together, even after my father canced, and the other man, the father of Jog, Daisy and Angel. She did it with slaps and harsh tirades, to show us what we could expect in life. But she must have had her fanciful side once: for instance, the silly name she gave me, for green trees and green pastures and waters green as bottle-glass that I’ve only seen inside the Centre. The trees on the streets and in the abandoned gardens have always been bare, or else they have sparse foliage of quite a cheerful brown colour. Sometimes they put out strange buds or fruits and then someone reports it and the trees are cut down. They were rather like my mother, I suppose, or she was like the trees. Hard-bitten to the bone, enduring, tough, holding on by her root-claws, not daring to flower.

  Gallantly she showed only a little bit of nervousness when we began to see the glint of the dome in the sunshine coming down High Hill from the old cinema ruin. Then she started to hurry quite a lot and urged me to be quick. Still, she didn’t look up once, for clouds.

  In the end it was perfectly all right: the sky stayed empty and we got down to the concrete underpass. Once we were on the moving way I rested my tired feet by standing on one leg then the other like a stork I once saw in a TV programme.

  As soon as my mother noticed she told me to stop it. There are cameras watching, all along the underpass to the Entry. It was useless to try persuading her that it didn’t matter. She had never brooked argument and though she probably wouldn’t clout me before the cameras she might later on. I remember I was about six or seven when she first thrashed me. She used a plastic belt, but took off the buckle. She didn’t want to scar me. Not to scar Greena was a part of survival, for even then she saw something might come of me. But the belt hurt and raised welts. She said to me as I lay howling and she leaned panting on the bed, ‘I won’t have any back-answers. Not from you and not from any of you, do you hear me? There isn’t time for it. You’ll do as I say.’

  After we’d answered the usual questions, we joined the queue for the washroom. It wasn’t much of a queue, because of the Warning. We glided through the mechanical check, the woman operator even congratulating us on our low levels. ‘That’s section SEK, isn’t it?’ she said chattily. ‘A very good area. My brother lives out there. He’s over thirty and has three children.’ My mother congratulated the operator in turn and proudly admitted our house was one of the first in SEK fitted with Sealtite. ‘My kids have never played outdoors,’ she assured the woman. ‘Even Greena here scarcely went out till her eleventh birthday. We grow most of our own food.’ Then, feeling she was giving away too much — you never knew who might be listening, there was always trouble in the suburbs with burglars and gangs — she clammed up tighter than the Sealtite.

  As we went into the washroom a terrific argument broke out behind us. The mechanical had gone off violently. Some woman was way over the acceptable limit. She was screaming that she had to get into the Centre to see her daughter, who was expecting a baby — the oldest excuse, perhaps even true, though pregnancy is strictly regulated under a dome. One of the medical guards was bearing down on the woman, asking if she
had Insurance.

  If she had, the Entry hospital would take her in and see if anything could be done. But the woman had never got Insurance, despite having a daughter in the Centre, and alarms were sounding and things were coming to blows.

  ‘Mum,’ I said, when we passed into the white plastic-and-tile expanse with the black camera eyes clicking overhead and the Niagara rush of showers, ‘who are you taking me to see?’

  She actually looked startled, as if she still thought me so naïve that I couldn’t guess she too, all this time, had been planning to have a daughter in the Centre. She glared at me, then came out with the inevitable.

  ‘Never you mind. Just you hope you’re lucky. Did you bring your talc?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘Here then, use these too. I’ll meet you in the cafeteria.’

  When I opened the carton I found ‘Smoky’ eye make-up, a cream lipstick that smelled of peaches, and a little spray of scent called I Mean It.

  My stomach turned right over. But then I thought, So what. It would be frankly stupid of me to be thinking I was naïve. I’d known for years.

  While we were finishing our hamburgers in the cafeteria, it did start to rain, outside. You could just sense it, miles away beyond the layers of protection and lead-glass. A sort of flickering of the sight. It wouldn’t do us much harm in here, but people instinctively moved away from the outer suburb-side walls of the café even under the plastic palm-trees in tubs. My mother stayed put.

  ‘Have you finished, Greena? Then go to the Ladies and brush your teeth, and we’ll get on. And spray that scent again.’

  ‘It’s finished, Mum. There was only enough for one go.’

  ‘Daylight robbery,’ grumbled my mother, ‘you can hardly smell it.’ She made me show her the empty spray and insisted on squeezing hissing air out of it into each of my ears.

  Beyond the cafeteria, a tree-lined highway runs down into the Centre. Real trees, green trees, and green grass on the verges. At the end of the slope, we waited for an electric bus painted a jolly, bright colour, with a rude driver. I used to feel that everyone in the Centre must be cheery and contented, bursting with optimism and the juice of kindness. But I was always disappointed. They know you’re from outside at once, if nothing else gives you away, skin-tone is different from the pale underdome skin or chocolaty solarium Centre tan. Although you could never have got in here if you hadn’t checked out as acceptable, a lot of people draw away from you on the buses or underground trains. Once or twice, when my mother and I had gone to see a film in the Centre no one would sit near us. But not everybody had this attitude. Presumably, the person my mother was taking me to see wouldn’t mind.

  ‘Let me do the talking,’ she said as we got off the bus. (The driver had started extra quickly, half shaking our contamination off his platform, nearly breaking our ankles.)

  ‘Suppose he asks me something?’

  ‘He?’ But I wasn’t going to give ground on it now. ‘All right. In that case, answer, but be careful.’

  Parts of the Centre contain very old’ historic buildings and monuments of the inner city which, since they’re inside, are looked after and kept up. We were now under just that sort of building. From my TV memories — my mother had made sure we had the educational TV to grow up with, along with lesson tapes and exercise ropes — the architecture looked late eighteenth or very early nineteenth, white stone, with top-lids on the windows and pillared porticos up long stairs flanked by black metal lions.

  We went up the stairs and I was impressed and rather frightened.

  The glass doors behind the pillars were wide open. There’s no reason they shouldn’t be, here. The cool-warm, sweet-smelling breezes of the dome-conditioned air blew in and out, and the real ferns in pots waved gracefully. There was a tank of golden fish in the foyer. I wanted to stay and look at them. Sometimes on the Centre streets you see well-off people walking their clean, groomed dogs and foxes. Sometimes there might be a silken cat high in a window. There were birds in the Centre parks, trained not to fly free anywhere else. When it became dusk above the dome, you would hear them tweeting excitedly as they roosted. And then all the lights of the city came on and moths danced round them. You could get proper honey in the Centre, from the bee-farms, and beef and milk from the cattle-grazings, and salmon, and leather and wine and roses.

  But the fish in the tank were beautiful. And I suddenly thought, if I get to stay here — if I really do — but I didn’t believe it. It was just something I had to try to get right for my mother, because I must never argue with her, ever.

  The man in the lift took us up to the sixth floor. He was impervious; we weren’t there, he was simply working the lift for something to do.

  A big old clock in the foyer had said three p.m. The corridor we came out in was deserted. All the rooms stood open like the corridor windows, plushy hollows with glass furniture: offices. The last office in the corridor had a door which was shut.

  My mother halted. She was pale, her eyes and mouth three straight lines on the plain of bones. She raised her hand and it shook, but it knocked hard and loud against the door.

  In a moment, the door opened by itself.

  My mother went in first.

  She stopped in front of me on a valley-floor of grass-green carpet, blocking my view.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Alexander. I hope we’re not too early.’

  A man spoke.

  ‘Not at all. Your daughter’s with you? Good. Please do come in.’ He sounded quite young.

  I walked behind my mother over the grass carpet, and chairs and a desk became visible, and then she let me step around her, and said to him, ‘This is my daughter, Mr Alexander. Greena.’

  He was only about twenty-two, and that was certainly luck, because the ones born in the Centre can live up until their fifties, their sixties even, though that’s rare. (They quite often don’t even cance in the domes, providing they were born there. My mother used to say it was the high life killed them off.)

  He was tanned from a solarium and wore beautiful clothes, a cotton shirt and trousers. His wristlet was silver — I had been right about his age: the tag was red. He looked so fit and hygienic, almost edible. I glanced quickly away from his eyes.

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’ He gave my mother a crystal glass of Centre gin, with ice-cubes and lemon slices. He asked me, smiling, if I’d like a milk-shake, yes, with real milk and strawberry flavour. I was too nervous to want it or enjoy it, but it had to be had. You couldn’t refuse such a thing.

  When we were perched in chairs with our drinks (he didn’t drink with us) he sat on the desk, swinging one foot, and took a cigarette from a box and lit and smoked it.

  ‘Well, I must say,’ he remarked conversationally to my mother, ‘I appreciate your coming all this way — after a Warning, too. It was only a shower I gather.’

  ‘We were inside by then,’ said my mother quickly. She wanted to be definite — the flower hadn’t been spoiled by rain.

  ‘Yes, I know. I was in touch with the Entry.’

  He would have checked our levels, probably. He had every right to, after all. If he was going to buy me, he’d want me to last a while.

  ‘And, let me say at once, just from the little I’ve seen of your daughter, I’m sure she’ll be entirely suitable for the work. So pretty, and such a charming manner.’

  It was normal to pretend there was an actual job involved. Perhaps there even would be, to begin with.

  My mother must have been putting her advert out since last autumn. That was when she’d had my photograph taken at the Centre. I’d just worn my nylon-lace panties for it; it was like the photos they take of you at the Medicheck every ten years. But there was always a photograph of this kind with such an advert. It was illegal, but nobody worried. There had been a boy in our street who got into the Centre three years ago in this same way. He had placed the advert, done it all himself. He was handsome, though his hair, like mine, was very fine and perhaps he would lose i
t before he was eighteen. Apparently that hadn’t mattered.

  Had my mother received any other offers? Or only this tanned Mr Alexander with the intense bright eyes?

  I’d drunk my shake and not noticed.

  Mr Alexander asked me if I would read out what was written on a piece of rox he gave me. My mother and the TV lessons had seen to it I could read, or at least that I could read what was on the rox, which was a very simple paragraph directing a Mr Cleveland to go to office 170B on the seventh floor and a Miss O’Beal to report to the basement. Possibly the job would require me to read out such messages. But I had passed the test. Mr Alexander was delighted. He came over without pretence and shook my hand and kissed me exploringly on the left cheek. His mouth was firm and wholesome and he had a marvellous smell, a smell of money and safety. My mother had laboured cleverly on me. I recognised it instantly, and wanted it. Between announcements, they might let me feed the fish in the tank.

  Mr Alexander was extremely polite and gave my mother another big gin, and chatted sociably to her about the latest films in the Centre, and the colour that was in vogue, nothing tactless or nasty, such as the cost of food inside, and out, or the SEO riots the month before, in the suburbs, when the sounds of the fires and the police rifles had penetrated even our sealed-tight home in SEK. He didn’t mention any current affairs, either, the death-rate on the continent, or the trade-war with the USA — he knew our TV channels get edited. Our information was too limited for an all-round discussion.

  Finally he said, ‘Well, I’d better let you go. Thank you again. I think we can say we know where we stand, yes?’ He laughed over the smoke of his fourth cigarette, and my mother managed her death’s-head grin, her remaining teeth washed with gin and lemons. ‘But naturally I’ll be writing to you. I’ll send you the details Express. That should mean you’ll get them — oh, five days from today. Will that be all right?’

  My mother said ‘That will be lovely, Mr Alexander. I can speak for Greena and tell you how very thrilled she is. It will mean a lot to us. The only thing is, Mr Alexander, I do have a couple of other gentlemen — I’ve put them off, of course. But I have to let them know by the weekend.’