by Tim Lott
“I’ve checked it throughly,” said Stench nervously.
“Throughly?” said Bellyache.
“I mean, thoroughly,” stumbled Stench. Inside the container, Little Fearless rolled her eyes in despair at Stench’s foolish slip of the tongue. “No problems.”
“Problems, don’t talk to me about problems. You don’t know the meaning of the word. All right, let it through. God, it stinks. My nose is very sensitive to smells. I hate…”
Little Fearless couldn’t hear anything else because of the noise as the great gates of the Institute creaked open. Her container moved a little way further. Then it stopped again.
She was outside. Despite the stink and the danger she was in, she couldn’t help but feel excited. She had never been outside the gates since she was a small child. Now she felt suddenly sure that she would find Tattle’s father and the terrible secret of the Institute would be revealed.
She felt the whole container start to rise up in the air. Machinery on the back of the lorry was lifting her and the container up, higher and higher. She braced herself. Then the container was turned upside down, and she felt herself tumbling through the air and into the lorry. Briefly she saw a dark shape standing beside the lorry, which she assumed was the driver. She noticed in the blink of an eye that he had a small scrubby beard and a thin white scar on his cheek.
Her fall was broken by a dead cat. She burrowed down into the rubbish. The rest of the trash from the remaining containers was emptied on top of her. A small but heavy piece of rusty machinery crashed down on her head. She was stunned and felt her forehead. When she took her hand away it was stained with blood. But she didn’t feel any pain. She was too excited, because the vehicle had now started to move. She was heading for the City.
The lorry rocked to and fro as it drove away from the Institute. Surprisingly, Little Fearless found herself getting used to the smell. Now a disturbing fact occurred to her. Was the battered, out-of-date map in her pocket going to be enough to help her find the police station? She could hardly remember anything about the City, let alone find her way around it.
The lorry continued at a hectic pace for about twenty minutes, and then it stopped. She heard the man with the beard and the scar get out of the cab at the front of the lorry. She heard him humming to himself, then the sound of water splashing on the ground. The man must have stopped to relieve himself by the side of the road.
Little Fearless made her way to the back of the lorry and carefully stuck her head out. There, spread out before her, in the last of the fading twilight, was the City.
Now was her chance, perhaps her only chance. If she didn’t get out of the lorry now, she might be taken to somewhere so far outside the City she wouldn’t be able to get back in – or worse yet, be discovered and returned to the Institute before she had a chance to find Tattle’s father.
Suddenly her thoughts were rudely interrupted. The engine had started again. She held her breath, closed her eyes, flexed her muscles, and with a heave pulled herself up and over the edge. She fell to the ground with a bone-shaking thud. Just in time. The lorry shot away down the empty road into the gathering darkness.
Little Fearless opened her eyes. All around her were streets and gardens and office buildings and parks and cars and trees. She fumbled in her pocket for the map. The City was arranged logically and geometrically around seven great squares. Most main roads led into one or other of these squares, so Little Fearless, keeping her beret pulled down low, hurried down the road she was on towards the centre of the City. Once she was in a square, she should be able to find her way around easily.
But before she could reach a square, she turned a corner, and stopped suddenly.
There was a shop with a large glass window that was clean and brightly lit. Inside, there were around thirty vidscreens, all beaming out an identical image.
The image showed four members of a family. They looked familiar somehow, but Little Fearless couldn’t work out why. The picture was black and white. The children went to school looking glum; the mother and the father worked, and looked tired. Little Fearless could not hear the words, but she did not need to, because at that moment, large orange words appeared on the screen: Are you Nowhere?
Then the screen changed. It was no longer black and white; instead there was a bright sun, and yellow sand and blue sea behind. It dawned on Little Fearless that it was remarkably similar to the photograph Stench claimed was of her family. Then, with a stab of amazement, she saw that the faces were identical to the faces in Stench’s photograph. She blinked in astonishment. It made no sense.
She carried on watching. Instead of looking tired, the family were now playing and hugging each other. They were running in and out of the sea, and laughing, and were all perfectly brown and happy. Then the screen froze into a perfect copy of the picture Stench had given her, right down to the sandcastle and the rubber ring and the family in exactly the same pose with their arms around one another. Words appeared on the screen again, this time flashing like fairy lights: Then be Somewhere. Come to the Sunlands, by the sky-blue sea, where nothing is black and white. Then the picture shrank slightly, and an invisible pen wrote Our holiday in the Sunlands in the white border.
Little Fearless realized that the photograph Stench had given her was not a genuine photo at all, but some kind of leaflet or advert. Stench had probably found it in the rubbish and made up a story about it, then begun to believe her own story. She felt a sudden stab of sympathy for Stench – so desperate for her family that she could make up a whole history out of one saved advert.
Suddenly the commercial was interrupted by a news burst of the kind they were made to watch at the Sunday Gathering. A picture appeared of a tall, well-groomed, smartly dressed man who smiled in a grave, reassuring way as he talked directly to the camera. A caption flashed up: City Boss insists: “Terror will be defeated at any cost.” Then the picture of the man disappeared, to be replaced with other images – people being forced into trucks at gunpoint, maps of places Little Fearless did not recognize, and people running down the street and being chased by Blackhats. There were flashes from bombs and lights in the night sky. Then another caption appeared on the screen: Security forces closing in on Oroborous after new wave of bombings.
Little Fearless began to wonder about Oroborous once more. Did he even exist? No one seemed to know what he looked like, and no one knew where he was. Was he evil? Or was he a hero, like the woman she once thought was her mother had claimed?
A distant clock struck eight o’clock. Little Fearless abandoned her reflections and carried on walking. After a while, she became aware of a great commotion of noise and bright lights ahead. She had hoped the road would lead her into one of the main squares; and, sure enough, she found herself in a vast square with a giant flashing neon sign in the centre that read FREEDOM SQUARE, picked out in the colours of the City flag and raised high on metal poles.
Little Fearless nearly fell backwards at the sheer intensity and pandemonium of the sight. Around the neon sign were four great shiny black obelisks with inscriptions under them. One said FREEDOM, another COMMERCE, a third PROGRESS, the last one WORK. They were illuminated by great spotlights fixed at their base. Dominating the edges of the square were more enormous signs, great banks of lights on all sides, exhibiting the flashing symbols of the Ten Corporations.
She took the tattered map out of her pocket and checked it in the flickering lights. It seemed that Tattle’s father’s police station was only ten minutes’ walk away, to the south. Checking her silver watch, she started hurrying down the avenue that the map told her would bring her, sooner or later, to the police station. She walked fast, relieved to escape the brightness and clamour of the square.
She walked past rows of houses, each one brightly lit. In nearly all of them, whole families were gathered around enormous vidscreens watching adverts, and occasionally, between the adverts, what looked like games in which people won money, or incomprehensible sports, or half-
naked singers writhing and undulating to some unheard music.
Eventually, after she had walked along about fifteen streets, turned right through an alleyway then left down a short avenue, she saw a light sticking out from a wall and, underneath the light, letters which she could just make out. They spelled out one word: POLICE.
Little Fearless felt elated – and anxious. What if Tattle’s father wasn’t working that night? What if he arrested her anyway, not believing her story? What if they had already discovered she was missing at the Institute and there were Blackhats out looking for her?
She glanced through the glass door of the station. There was a tall man behind the counter with a large, neutral, round face, a wide, fleshy nose and a shock of curly blondish-brown hair that was cut very short at the sides but quite long on the top and swept back from his forehead in a kind of wave. But what struck Little Fearless was his ears. Just like Tattle’s, they stuck out slightly, and the lobes were wide and flabby, like purses of flesh. It was unquestionably Tattle’s father.
Her anxiety evaporated, and hardly able to breathe with excitement, Little Fearless rushed up the steps and through the door.
The building had the suffocating stillness of somewhere completely deserted. There were no distant echoes of voices, no clatter of approaching or receding footsteps – none of the background static that seemed to fill every corner of the Institute. The desk behind which the policeman sat was high and stretched from wall to wall of the waiting room. Being unusually small, Little Fearless could not see over the top. Thus when she finally interrupted the soft insulation of silence, the expression on the face of the policeman was one of puzzlement.
“Excuse me,” she said.
The policeman looked all around him, but could see no one. He looked up and across and behind and in front. To him the police station appeared empty.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Excuse me, please. I have some very important information.”
“Information? Information? What do you know? Who told you? Who are you? Where are you? Are you from the Church? Are you from the City Boss?” The policeman sounded as if he was panicking slightly. Again he looked up and across and behind and in front. But this time he also looked down. What he saw made him frown.
He thought it vaguely resembled a young girl. But instead of looking like one of the girls in the City – who were, for the most part, neat, well fed, well behaved and had combed hair and brushed teeth – this girl, if girl it was, looked more like something that had fallen out of the back of a rubbish lorry.
Which, in fact, she had.
Her purple beret, peculiar enough in itself, was stained with grease. Her face was covered in gunk and grime, and her clothes were simply bizarre. She had remnants of food between her teeth, and tufts of matted hair sticking out from under her beret.
When he spoke again, his voice was sterner and even slightly angry. He gazed down at Little Fearless from what seemed to her to be a great height. “And who,” he said, “or what might you be?”
Little Fearless was taken aback. Although she was used to being treated like little more than an animal at the Institute, she had always assumed that things were different in the City, and that here people treated each other with respect and consideration.
“Please, sir,” she said with a slight edge of annoyance in her voice, “I am a girl.”
“A girl?” The policeman raised his eyebrows, touched his wide, fleshy nose and studied the creature in front of him very carefully. It was true – she did vaguely resemble a girl. He’d once had one of his own, and this … thing did look more or less similar. He could see that her hands and face, under the muck, were small and delicate. And her eyes – her eyes were huge and extraordinary, one as blue as the polar ice, the other as brown as the earth on a newly turned field.
Now the girl reached into her pocket and brought out a scrunched-up piece of newspaper. She laid it on the desk in front of the policeman. He looked at it, puzzled.
“Why are you depositing rubbish here?” he said tersely. “This isn’t a tip; it’s an official department of the City Hall and the Ten Corporations.”
“It isn’t rubbish,” said Little Fearless. “Open it. You’ll see.”
The policeman poked at the newspaper cautiously, as if worried that it might contain something noxious or even explosive. He saw that there were what appeared to be a few strands of hair sticking out, and momentarily wondered if there was a dead animal in there.
“Why don’t you unfold it for me,” he said wearily, glancing at his watch. It was getting late, and he really didn’t want to be wasting his time dealing with every deranged ragbag that wandered in off the street.
Little Fearless, positively irritated now – had she come so far and braved such danger to be treated with such disdain? – pulled the folds of the paper apart so that the lock of Tattle’s hair fell out. The policeman squinted; Tattle’s hair was fair like her father’s, and in poor light hard to see properly. He took out a pair of spectacles from his pocket, put them on his nose, and then prodded at the lock of hair with a pencil.
“What is this?” he said, his voice as impatient as before. “Why are you here? What do you want?”
“It’s a lock of your daughter’s hair,” said Little Fearless quietly.
Much to her amazement, the policeman laughed. “You’ve gone too far now, young lady. I don’t have a daughter.”
“That’s not true,” said Little Fearless firmly. “Take the hair. Touch it. Smell it. Look at it. I know a father would recognize a lock of his own child’s hair.”
The policeman’s face seemed to screw up slightly, partly with suspicion, but also with curiosity. Tentatively, and with some reluctance, he picked up the hair with his fingers and studied it through his glasses. Then he brought it close to his face, and he smelled it. He looked puzzled and angry at the same time.
“Where did you get this?” he snapped.
Now Little Fearless was confused. She had been certain the policeman would have been amazed and excited to be brought a lock of his own daughter’s hair.
“Your daughter gave it to me, of course.”
Now she had the policeman’s attention completely. He looked down at Little Fearless with apparent fury. “I just told you. I have no daughter.”
Then Little Fearless spoke her name – Tattle’s real name. And at that moment, the man’s face changed. It was as if he had aged ten years in an instant. The anger dissolved, to be replaced by what looked like sadness and shame. Then he seemed to recover himself, and he looked down at her with a face blank and scrubbed of emotion.
“What is it that you want, exactly?” he asked flatly.
“I just want to tell you something. Something I’m sure you can’t possibly know, but you ought to know because it is so utterly important.”
The policeman took a deep breath and scratched his head. “Well, if you’ve got some very important information, you’d best come in,” he said calmly.
And with that, he picked up the small bundle of hair and put it in his pocket, then lifted up a part of the counter in front of him that was hinged and invited Little Fearless through.
Angels
Truth. Courage. Compassion.
Monumental inscriptions
in Angel Square
Little Fearless felt flushed with hope. Now nothing could stop the truth about the Institute being revealed.
As she walked through the gap in the counter, she caught her hand on a splinter of wood and a tiny scratch appeared on her palm, leaking blood. Without noticing, the policeman led her through to the back of the station, along corridors with overhead lights that were oppressively bright, until eventually they came to a small, gloomy room in which there were only two single chairs and a rickety table. The fact that there were bars on the window did not worry Little Fearless unduly, because she assumed that all the rooms in police stations had bars on them, to stop bad people getting away. But since she wasn’
t a bad person, the bars were clearly not meant for her.
As she sat down she was hardly able to contain her need to speak. It was as if she sought to exhale truth like it was the very breath of her life. The policeman sat in the chair opposite, and rather theatrically took out a notebook and a pencil.
“Right,” he said, shifting his weight about on the seat. “First I think you’d better tell me your name and where your home is.”
“Never mind that,” said Little Fearless. “I don’t really have a real name, and I don’t really live in a proper home. But the thing is—”
The policeman looked at her sharply. “Don’t have a real name? Don’t live in a proper home? Well, I don’t see how you can be a proper girl at all then.”
At this remark, Little Fearless suddenly felt crestfallen. She caught sight of herself in a dusty mirror on the opposite wall. What a miserable creature she looked. Perhaps she wasn’t a real girl, like the policeman said.
“What about your identicard? Where’s that?” he demanded.
Little Fearless blinked in the dim light. How could you have an identity card when you didn’t have an identity?
“I’m sorry, but I … I’ve lost it,” she said weakly.
The policeman gave a deep sigh. Then he closed his notebook and put it back in his pocket. “I think you’re playing a trick on me. If you can’t tell me your name and address, and you haven’t even got an identicard … well, I don’t see that I should waste my time listening to this so-called information about my so-called daughter.” And with that, he got up as if to leave.
Little Fearless spoke very quickly. “I don’t have a name. And I don’t have a home. But I do … live somewhere.”
The policeman hesitated, and nodded, waiting for her to go on.
“I come from the Institute.”
The policeman’s face seemed to be struggling with itself. “The Institute?”