by K. L. Kettle
At five I was sent straight from Madam Hyde’s Surrogacy to the kitchens for my prenticeship. Three large floors below the dorms, all dented and blackened chrome, dedicated to making food for the ladies Above. The cooks prepared elegant meals, banquets, snacks, anything Above wanted, to order.
For the ladies: tagines and rice, pickled fruits and breads, sweet sauces, melting meat, cheeses and fruits and ice cream.
For us: protein shakes, scraps and peelings. All the nutrients a growing boy needs.
The cooks sent the junior prentice boys to collect ingredients grown in the Agro tunnels further beneath us. Food growing under the huge lamps the Foundations built. There were shelves of plants, caverns of animal pens, grain grinders, rooms that bloomed with salt crystals as big as my head. They treated the food better than us, I thought.
The ladies’ orders came down huge pipes. More senior prentice delivered boxes and trays up the backstairs, or via dumb waiters spiralling into the Above. One day I could be a delivery prentice! Maybe I could see the sky! So, whatever the cooks ordered me to do, I tried to be a good boy, not to put a foot out of line, or at least to never get caught. Tried to be like all the rest of the boys, scraping this, packing that, washing and stacking and learning.
You came later, when I was ten.
Viktor Perrault: the boy who broke into the kitchens to steal leftovers and was sent to work for the cooks as punishment. Saints, did they take it out on you! Never known a boy bear so many beatings. Never thought we’d be friends. Never dreamed it. A bad boy like you would never bother with a good boy like me. By the time you got to the kitchens, half the boys there had already heard about you.
You arrived on my birthday; the cooks didn’t feed me that day but I didn’t complain. A new mouth to feed, they gave you my dinner. When they weren’t looking, you gave it back.
You didn’t want to get fat, you said, but I knew: you were being kind.
Kind.
I’d heard the word but how do you know what it means until you feel it? It made old bread taste softer, warmer; made lumpy protein shakes dance with sweetness (strawberries!); made crusty cheese rind melt, as precious and bitter as chocolate. I tried to make each mouthful last for ever. It was the first time I didn’t feel alone.
You were about the same age as me but you’d been kicked out of four prenticeships by then, almost one a year! There are over twenty houses, you explained at dark-hours when we curled up to keep warm in the slop room of the kitchen. Each house had designated floors and ran everything in the Tower. Maybe you’d get to work in them all, you joked. You told us the kitchens were part of the House of Entertainment. You knew so much! You could list all the houses and the women that ran them and the prentice programmes that boys could be in. Even when the other kitchen boys got bored, I stayed up, kept asking questions.
I wanted a prenticeship at the House of Life, I told you once, trying to sound clever. “That’s where they make us, you know,” I said. “You, me, our brothers, even the women. Like magic.”
“The Gardener doesn’t take boys into prenticeships,” you said.
“Gardener?”
“The Chief of Life, Lorraine Dunn. And it’s not magic. She grows people in pots, that’s what I heard, like plants. That’s why they call her the Gardener.”
Your last prenticeship almost stuck: the House of Air, vent maintenance, which is how you got so thin, you said. Had to stretch out like thread to do that job, but, “Oh, the secrets I know.”
You leaned in, whispered close. “There are tunnels that can take you to the end of the world! Vents that climb to the moon.”
Now that you were in the House of Entertainment I’d said, maybe you’d make it out of the kitchens and be a theatre prentice, or even get into the House of Maintenance and end up cleaning! Cleaning prentice got to visit the Above. “If you’re really good, you might even get moved into the House of Expression and work for Madam Cramp; she’s the kindest, the cooks say. You could be a muse, a model, maybe even a seamster at Cramp’s.”
“I’ve got other plans,” you said.
In the dark-hours, the cooks made you sleep on the floor on the far side of the room, near the rag-wrapped heat pipes. After five years, all my good behaviour had earned me a spot by the door, where the air was fresher.
Two weeks into your prenticeship, you stepped over me as you snuck out.
What if you never came back?
Peering from behind the stove, I watched you hunt through the shelves, finding as many pieces of paper as you could – scraps of tickets from orders, notes from the cooks. You pushed them into a piece of cloth you’d stitched to the inside of your trousers. Then you found a large pan that shone so bright you could see your face in it. The cooks had really had a good go at you earlier that day. Your grey skin was almost purple with bruises but still, there you were, practising all thirty of your smiles.
Any day now you’d earn enough merits to make it into the House of Boys. You’d do all the dirty work; you’d take the beatings over the demerits; you’d do whatever favours you had to, to earn the merits you’d need to climb the floors. You were going to show them, you said. And I believed you when you told me that you were going to change the world.
There’s a memory I’m trying hard to forget ringing in my ears when the lights turn on in the dorm. The morning after the garden, my life before the House of Boys feels a long way away. It’s been hours since I gave up on sleep, last night playing over and over, making it harder to pretend it didn’t happen. Still, I grunt, pull the sheets over my face and turn in my bunk.
“Mornin’.” Stink yawns. He’s hanging upside down over the side of his bunk above. Justin Reed; when he arrived in J-dorm ten months ago, he introduced himself as Stinger but we all call him Stink because of his terrible breath. He scratches at his blond shock of hair and tongues his bad molars. “You were shoutin’ in your sleep,” he says, poking at my shoulder. “Something about a deal?”
“I’m fine,” I lie, and roll over, trying to ignore him.
“We all heard you clatter in. Did the Chancellor ride you blind?” Stink ignores me ignoring him. He keeps poking. When I smack his hand away, he drops down on to the floor and pushes himself right into my bunk. “Seriously, the fogging Chancellor, brother! What happened?”
“Nothing.” I grit my teeth.
“Come on, ’fess up!” says Stink, pulling the bedclothes away. The cold air stings as I curl up, hug my knees.
Someone on the other side of the room throws a cup at him. Stink does not do quiet. It clanks on the metal frame and lands with a thud at his feet.
“Shut it, will you? Some of us still want to sleep.” That sounds like Rodders. Our resident style guru. Thin as a pipe after a year of practically starving himself, he’s polished the perfect smouldering look (he says) to bag the best guardian. Half the time he’s staring in a mirror, pouting and screwing up his eyes like he’s holding an ice cube between his butt cheeks. Rodders’ given name is Jarod, but no one calls him that. For most boys, the names that High House give us don’t matter; it’s the ones we earn that we use. No one has given me a nickname yet, at least not one that’s stuck.
“This is important,” Stink says, throwing the cup back.
Rodders swears as he dodges it.
“So was she nice? I heard she’s reeeally beautiful.”
Stink doesn’t even know what the word means. “You mean rich,” I groan.
He grins a wide, crooked-toothed, stop-messing smile. “You stumbled in like a hooch-head at two in the morning. Threw up in Jipper’s slippers.”
So that’s why my mouth tastes as if something died in it.
“We talked,” I say. That part’s true, after all.
The strip lights flicker, harsh and blue. Every boy in the dorm groans as they pull themselves up from where they lie, stretched out in their bunks like slabs of drying meat. The beat of the morning drums echoes through old speakers. Chattering and whispered conversations start up as
the other thirty-three J-dormers drag their feet out of bed, scratch and stretch.
The usual games begin. Jig and his boyfriend Jag roll out of the bottom bunk near the door. Opposite, Joe pulls the covers over his head. Beau, whose given name is Jamaal, in the bunk above Joe, starts to pile as much of his stuff as he can on top of his bunkmate until Joe has had enough and throws it all off. Rodders is doing pull-ups while his bunkmate Woody, the new boy, searches for his clothes as they’re thrown from bunk to bunk. Jeb starts folding notes to his latest crush (it changes every week – right now it’s a boy in D-dorm; last week it was some girl in his appointments). The air fills with the comforting early-morning fug of hair oil, deodorant and farts.
I reach into the hole under my mattress, out of habit, to check my stuff is still there. I made a cloth bag in the kitchens like you had. Pulling it out, I empty it under the sheets. There are some things for trading, sweets, old pens with most of the ink still working. Then there’s the note I never gave you and the little paper man, the one made out of mushed-up pulp. He fits in the palm of my hand and he’s always breaking. I stuck him together with some glue from the med-kit in Father Jai’s office, so he’s not like he was when you first made him, but I’ve still got him.
Stink punches me in the shoulder through the sheets and swears as I emerge into the light. He throws my clothes at me before Jipper can ambush me and chuck them down the garbage chute for ruining his slippers.
“Pants and shirt. The essentials for any good, hard-working boy,” Stink chirps. “Maybe, since the Chancellor reserved you, you think appointments are beneath you?”
“No,” I groan, tidying my stuff and waiting for him to look away before I stash it back under my mattress. If it wasn’t for the appointments, I’d not have earned a single merit against my debt. I’d have been in the mines long before my first chance at auction. “Give me five, won’t you?”
“You mean you’re not leaping out of bed with abandon at the thought of waiting hand and foot on our beautiful benefactors? Jude Grant, you shock me!” Stink holds his hand to his breastbone in mock horror. “Why not change the habit of a lifetime and enjoy this?”
“Because I’d rather be in bed, maybe?”
Stink laughs. He turns to shout to the rest of the dorm. “OK, brothers, hand it over!”
“What?” I sit up as they start throwing things into the middle of the room – their most tradable items: scraps of paper, notes from appointments, stolen food, make-up, pills.
Stink winks. “Just took a little bet that you’d be grumpy, even after your night with the Chancellor.”
Stink can be kind of annoying. Fifteen, square-faced and naturally blond like you – which is pretty rare – odds are he’ll get a buyer this year. He tells me he was rented by some new debutante his own age, a mid-floor girl called Quinn. She’s already booked up two of his appointment slots today so they can keep snogging. He would get one of the young ones. Lucky sod.
Climbing from my bunk, I stretch. The low ceiling feels lower than ever.
“So I heard this story…” Stink is picking up his haul. He tries to catch my eye.
“Hit the showers, will you? I need a break.” I’m walking away but I do sort of like his company, not that I’d tell him. Stink trots behind, talking so fast he might burst. So I listen. I nod. Number seven, encouraging-but-not-too-much, as we hop into our shorts and walk past our brothers rolling from metal bunks.
“Fogging hell, you’d think they’d turn the pipes on,” swears Rodders, banging the radiator beside his bed. “Don’t they know what this does to my pores!”
“The House of Boys will keep you safe!” Stink yells, repeating what the House Fathers say whenever we complain about the cold. It’s easier than saying the heating has been diverted to keep the ladies warm. “Like rare wine,” he concludes.
“Wine can be kept cold,” Rodders sneers. He catches up, cleaning his specs. “I shoulda stayed on working with the boiler prentice; at least it was bloody warm!” He slips on his lopsided glasses and wraps a frayed excuse for a towel round his shoulders, rubbing his hands over his goose-pimpled arms as he heads out to the shower.
Stink is still waffling on with a story about a kid in G-dorm who managed to get his hand stuck down the drain as we dress. We then line up and file out through the low concrete space of the basement, down the dark corridor towards Father Jai’s office. There we’re meant to collect the keys to our allocated appointment rooms above, on the ground floor.
“Sooo…” Stink keeps asking. “What happened?”
Of course I’m not going to tell him.
“So it’s a run then? Good.” That’s what the Chancellor said as she picked up the gun.
“No.” Double no. By now, she probably thought I was like one of the pinheaded women in the Surrogacy. “You … you think she’s the only one,” I stuttered, my mouth stumbling over words as my brain ran too fast. “She betrayed you, didn’t she? You think she’s the only one?”
That was how I got her to listen.
“You’re right, she’s not the only one.”
“I … I can help!”
“Help?” She laughed.
My mouth ran faster than I ever thought it could; with every word, the pressure inside my head was getting lighter. “I’m a big earner; my appointments are always popular. And with … after tonight, more women will book. Every dinner, every tea service, every session, every day, the guests … they talk.” Grasping for something, anything – I had to keep her attention. “You … you have more enemies, don’t you?” I bet my life it’d get her interested if I had something to offer her that no one else could. “I can give you their names. Tell you what they say.”
“You think evidence from a boy has any weight in a trial? That’s sweet.”
“You don’t want a trial, though, right? You can arrest them, discredit them… You just need names.”
“True.” She looked at the woman at her feet. The dog snapped at her whenever she attempted to move. “With the vote planned –” the Chancellor was talking to herself now – “she’ll inherit her aunt’s merits, which makes her dangerous…”
The woman waved her arms. “No, no!” Her throat crackled. But the Chancellor wasn’t listening to her any more than the distant water, or the birds cawing above. She turned to me.
“I want Romali Vor exposed. To be specific, I want her out of the way.”
I stepped back, the energy inside me collapsing. “You want me to kill her?”
“Now, now, I didn’t say that. Unless you could…?”
I pictured the face of Romali Vor, the desperation, the pride, as she looked up at me from the edge of the stage.
“Jude?”
“I—”
Why did I hesitate? Romali Vor tried to get me arrested!
“So I was right, you do know her.” The Chancellor grinned like she’d unearthed some brilliant gossip.
“She… She just never said anything about you.”
“You know I’m convinced she’s been working with Lorri here, helping Hysterics infiltrate our walls … not that my friend would give her up. And I was at my most persuasive. Now, if Romali showed her true colours, she would reveal her treason. A handsome young man in need of a brave saviour would be just the thing.”
“But there are others!” It wasn’t a lie. I’ve heard them. Women who feel trapped like we do, who love men warded to others, who want to climb the floors but who can never be merited, who’ve gone hungry. Even they can be afraid; even they can lose everything. Not many, maybe one in every ten appointments, but it’s happening more often.
“Others?” The Chancellor laughed as if any woman could be unhappy under her care.
Why was I protecting Romali Vor? She’s not my friend. Not like you were.
“You think I’ll change my mind? You have my terms,” the Chancellor insisted, opening the gun, inserting a handful of bullets. Had it even been loaded?
“I need time,” I said. I wouldn�
��t promise something I couldn’t deliver. If Romali Vor had tried to get me arrested because she wanted to save the Chancellor, then there was no threat to expose.
“Two days then, by the talent show.” She was thinking fast too, I realized, working out what to do next. “I’ll send notice.”
“You’ll send someone?” I asked. “You’ll let Vik go?”
The beaten woman, tears pouring from her swollen eyes, shook her head. Maybe I should have come up with a better idea.
“If you give me what I want, then why not?” The Chancellor shrugged her soft shoulders. Then she clicked the gun and pointed it at the woman. I didn’t have time to close my eyes.
The air thumped with the sound.
The woman stopped moving.
My ears were still ringing as the Chancellor strode towards her kill. Her white dog, splattered red, sniffed at the body, before beginning to clean itself. The Chancellor pulled a circular brooch from the woman’s dress. The circle is the symbol of the House of Life, I remembered as her blood bloomed, spreading in a dark carpet over the green grass. The Chancellor had just killed the Gardener.
It’s not just still ringing, that shot. It’s getting louder the harder I try to shut it out, my limbs shaking with the memory of it as Father Jai starts the morning the same as always, with a lecture. Eyes popping, his jowly, overly made-up head bobbing at each boy that passes through his ‘office’ – a broom cupboard with a cut-down desk that threatens to be consumed by the piles of papers, old cleaning equipment and boxes that more important House Fathers have stashed round him.
We all have our place in the order of things, Walker says. Father Jai, who hasn’t had a decent sale in the auctions for as long as I’ve known him, is no exception. But today he seems to hold himself taller. The bottle of cloudy hooch, normally unstoppered on his desk, is on top of the cupboard. As I enter, I swear he actually winks one kohl-lined eye at me.