by Tim Lott
“The Institute. You know. The … the … City Community Faith School.” She pronounced the words with a tinge of sarcasm.
It was as if a light had come on inside the policeman’s head. “So you’re one of those, are you?” He sat down again. “I know the place you’re referring to. You’re a very lucky girl to be there. The Controller is respected throughout the City for his achievements in solving the juvenile, outsider and antisocial problems. It is a good place, that’s for sure. A place where you will learn discipline. Education. Training. Respect.”
“But that’s what I’m trying to tell you,” said Little Fearless urgently. “It isn’t a school or anything like it. It’s a prison. A terrible place. There are rats, and we eat food that makes us ill, and everyone is given a number instead of a name, and we have to work all day long and there are no toys and hardly any books and no one is free to say what they think. Your daughter is lost and miserable.”
“I have no daughter,” said the policeman again, firmly.
“We are all miserable,” continued Little Fearless, ignoring him. “No one in the City can know what it is really like. No one tries to come and see. We need to be saved. We need our families.”
On and on Little Fearless talked. Although he was writing none of this down, the policeman nodded as if he was listening very carefully. Little Fearless talked nineteen to the dozen, and the stories poured out of her like tears. She told him how the dormitories had virtually no windows, and no heating; and how the X girls hit them with leather straps; how they could be locked in the Discipline Block for days on end; and how no one was ever allowed to leave and then when they did leave no one knew what really happened to them. The policeman carried on nodding and nodding, until Little Fearless had finally finished all that she had to say.
“That’s quite a tale,” he said softly.
Little Fearless almost wept with relief and gladness. “I knew you’d understand,” she said, grabbing his hand. “After all, if you are part of Tattle’s family – that’s what we call her at the Institute because she chatters so much – then you are part of my family too.”
The policeman gently removed her hand from his. He glanced down and a look of faint distaste crossed his face. Blood from the cut on Little Fearless’s hand had stained his skin, colouring a patch of it crimson. He gave a shiver and stood up.
“Family? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Like I said, I have no daughter.”
“That’s not true,” said Little Fearless stubbornly.
“Not a daughter, anyway, that I could call a proper daughter,” said the policeman, his voice taking on a note of disappointment and self-pity. “Not a daughter that made her father proud by behaving like a good Cityzen. Not a daughter that did anything but break the rules, stay out after curfew, say things she shouldn’t, steal cars and drink narcobevs.
“Not a daughter that would allow herself to be raised properly, not a daughter that would listen to what her father said. Not a daughter that believed in Eidolon or respected him or feared him. I didn’t have that daughter.
“But that’s OK, because the City Boss knows how to make silk purses out of sows’ ears. He knows how to make rude, difficult chatterboxes into law-abiding Cityzens who will do what they need to do so that this great society of ours can work properly.”
“But you haven’t been listening,” said Little Fearless, anguished. “It’s not a school or a place of re-education. It’s a workhouse; it’s slavery.”
“You are a small child, and you are talking rubbish,” snapped back the policeman, rising from his chair and his face flushing red. “You know nothing. You are selfish, like all children. You only know about what you want, not what is necessary.”
“But … she’s your daughter,” said Little Fearless plaintively.
Tattle’s father looked down at her, his face momentarily etched with some emotion Little Fearless couldn’t make out. It appeared first as anger, then seemed to fade into something like despair. When he spoke again, Little Fearless had to strain to hear him.
“I would have lost my job, see. The Insurgency and Antisocial Acts from the City Boss meant that parents had to be responsible for their children. And I would have lost my job, because I’m meant to be enforcing the law. Maybe I would have even gone to prison myself, and what kind of life would it have been for her then? At least now, she’s having a good education, and learning about Cityzenship, and being looked after—”
Little Fearless practically shouted at him. “But it’s a lie! She’s not being looked after. She’s treated like dirt. We all are. Can’t you see? We are innocent, and you are all just looking away!”
Instead of responding, the policeman gazed stonily at Little Fearless, his lips pursed, and then suddenly he turned on his heel and walked towards the door.
“Good words make history; bad words make misery.”
He shut the door after him, leaving Little Fearless alone, and returned to his desk.
It was cold in Little Fearless’s cell. The room was damp, and she was exhausted and hungry. She still wasn’t sure what to make of Tattle’s father, or what he was going to do. Maybe what she had told him was so serious that he had to fetch other policemen to hear it, and didn’t want to risk her running away.
She waited and waited, but he did not come back. After a while she drifted off to sleep. She dreamed of the Sunlands, the place she had seen in Stench’s photo and then on the vidscreens in the shop. There it was never cold, and there was a shining blue sea, and families that loved one another gathered together happily on the beaches, and they all looked after each other and never let anything terrible happen.
At one point in the dream there appeared a huge ice cream van made of dull grey steel that played nursery rhymes as the children queued up to buy cones and ice lollies. There on the beach in the Sunlands, out of place because of its grim exterior, it played:
Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop! goes the weasel.
Little Fearless was in the queue getting closer and closer to the front. Soon she would have a vanilla ice cream and she would share it with her family, who were waiting for her on the beach.
Then, to her surprise, the bells of the ice cream van changed. The sound thinned and spread, until it wasn’t bells at all.
It was a soft, hollow whistle.
Gradually, and with a shock, she realized that she was no longer asleep. Her eyes were open, and she could see the walls of the cell. But somehow she could still hear the nursery rhyme. “Half a pound of tuppenny rice…” Then the song changed. Now the tune was “Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?”
With a sinking, sickening feeling, she realized that it was the Whistler. The Whistler was in the police station. And there was another voice too – dry, scratchy, bloodless. She rushed to put her ear against the door.
“And this girl,” said the voice, “what does she look like?”
“You had better come and see for yourself,” responded the policeman.
Little Fearless looked around her in panic. There was no way out other than the small barred window. This prison was old and had been built for adults, so the bars seemed quite wide to the eyes of a child. And Little Fearless was very small for her age. She quickly pulled the chair over to the window and climbed up on it and tried to squeeze through.
The bars were too tight. She couldn’t get out.
She pushed and pushed. It was so tight on her chest that she could hardly breathe. No good. She was stuck. She pushed and pushed, until she felt she would start to bleed.
Moments later, the Controller burst into the cell. Right behind him came the Whistler and Lady Luck, tossing her silver coin, and finally the policeman.
“Where is she?” the Controller snapped at the policeman.
“I – I – but she was here!”
The Controller whipped round, white-cheeked
and narrow-eyed. “You’ve let her go, you stupid man.” Now his voice was cold and harsh.
At that very moment, Little Fearless was listening on the other side of the window. With a final push she had managed to pop through the bars and drop to the muddy street below. She decided she didn’t want to hear any more. She ran.
The Controller had previously been the picture of politeness and respect that the policeman had expected. Now he spoke to the policeman as if he were a dog.
“My colleague the City Boss will hear about this, you can be sure. I’ve never seen such incompetence. You are scum, man. You are worthless. A liability to the City. A waste of the Corporations’ money.”
The Whistler marched up to the cell window and peered out into the darkness. But Little Fearless was out of sight. She began to whistle grimly.
Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town,
Upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown,
Rapping at the window, crying through the lock,
Are the children all in bed, for now it’s eight o’clock?
Lady Luck spat on the floor, caught her coin, looked at it, and shook her head.
“What did this girl look like?” barked the Controller to the policeman, who was now completely taken aback.
“Well … she was very dirty; it’s very hard to say … barely like a girl at all.”
“That tells us nothing, Officer. This is very important. There must have been something that might enable us to identify her.”
The policeman thought about the blood on his hand and the lock of his daughter’s hair. Then he thought about the girl’s blue eye and her brown eye shining from her filth-encrusted face like glowing lamps of life. He thought about his own daughter, and a stab of pain and regret shot through his heart. Then he looked right into the Controller’s pale, papery face and tinted spectacles.
Then he said, very firmly, “No, nothing at all.”
“Nothing?”
“No. Nothing. Now I will have to bid you good evening. I have a great deal of work to do.”
The Controller stared at him in a blind fury. But the policeman did not flinch.
“You haven’t heard the last of this,” spat the Controller. Then he turned on his heel, muttering, and stormed out. Lady Luck and the Whistler scowled and followed him.
The policeman watched them go, then let out a deep, sorrowful sigh.
Later that night, in bed, he did not sleep well at all, but dreamed of the girl with no name, reaching for him, touching him with her blood, and asking for help; and of his lost daughter, though he could hardly remember her face. In his hand he clutched a tiny lock of hair, all through the night, as he shifted restlessly, stumbling blindly through his dreams.
After squeezing through the bars, Little Fearless ran as fast as she could. Despite being cold and tired she ran in even, strong, determined strides. She frequently consulted the rough map that showed her the route to Angel Square, where the laundry delivery and collection depot was, fighting off panic and trying not to lose her way.
Angel Square was in the oldest part of the City. It had existed for hundreds of years, before the City Boss, before the Ten Corporations, before Freedom Square, before Eidolon became the official god of the City. In those days, there were no gods. There were only men and women who worshipped human powers, and who were not so afraid of life and death that they needed to keep busy all the time, and invent gods to make themselves feel safe and good.
Little Fearless ran down dark streets, cobbled alleys, wide avenues. She had but one thought in her mind. To get away from the Controller and the Blackhats who had surely been set on her tail by now.
It was well after eleven o’clock when she stumbled into a wide open space. The map was unclear, and she was tired. She wasn’t sure where she was, but it was one of the seven squares. Unlike Freedom Square, though, there were few lights and no people. When Little Fearless looked up, with no artificial light to cloud her vision, she could see great clusters of stars glittering in the sky. Stargazer, who knew about the heavens, had once told her that they pumped out starlight and gravity in vast, everlasting waves that moved the planets and filled the universe, holding it together in an infinite, beautiful and ever-expanding web. Little Fearless felt a shiver of terror at the vastness of it all, then a ripple of ecstasy at its mystery and beauty. She suddenly felt that she wasn’t outside it, looking heavenwards, but the heavens were somehow inside her. That her skin was not a barrier to everything but a bridge linking her to all that there was. All things were one thing; and all events, one event. She felt that she was part of an infinite unfolding that was complete and perfect.
The vision left her as suddenly as it had visited. She tore her eyes away from the sky and looked around. It was peaceful, and barren, and cold. There were no signs anywhere to tell her where she was. She searched the gloom for some sort of clue. Gradually she made out three unmoving shapes about fifty feet away. She walked towards them, and as she approached they became clearer. She could see a wing, a leg, and then a shoulder. Were they giant birds? Were they frozen, mutated people?
A few seconds later, she was able to make them out. Three marble angels stood in the middle of a dry fountain.
She was in Angel Square.
The angels were old and broken-down. Not angels of heaven, but the dreams of men and women, carved into stone in the vain hope that they would not be lost or forgotten. The statues were not meant to represent supernatural beings. They were emblems of the human spirit. Little Fearless imagined they had once had beautiful faces, but now their features were blurred by wind and rain, by time and neglect.
She squinted in the darkness. She could just make out the names carved on the plinth beneath them. The three angels were called Truth, Courage and Compassion. These seemed very old-fashioned words. Corny, even. Little Fearless had no time for fancy words like that. She’d have been more convinced that the angels represented something real if they had been named Doubt, Cruelty and Revenge. Or Anger, Confusion and Indifference. These seemed to be the powers that ran the world.
Nevertheless, the forgotten, crumbling angels fascinated her; but she had no time to gaze for long. She had to get back to the Institute before it was too late – before all the children were turned out of their beds and her absence was discovered. Her only hope was that the Controller would think there was no rush to bring forward the nightly inspection. After all, how was he to guess that she was going to return, having gone to all the trouble of escaping?
Her eyes scanned the edges of the square. On the north side, as Stench had promised, she saw there was a large white van, the back doors open, with the inscription CITY LAUNDRY on the side. Little Fearless saw that the van was shivering as if from the cold. The engine was on; it was ready to leave. She began to walk fast towards the van. She could make it. It was dark, and nobody could see her.
She heard a noise – another engine running close by. It made her start and look around like a skittish cat.
Twenty yards further along from the laundry van was a holiday coach, trimmed with chrome and shining clean. It was parked under the sulphurous light of the only street lamp in the square. Although the coach was empty, there were welcoming lights inside, and soft, comfortable-looking seats. The luggage hold was open, and on the front it said: TO THE SUNLANDS. Little Fearless stared. It was as if the coach itself were beckoning her. It would be simple for a small girl like her to hide in the luggage compartment and hitch a ride away from the City to a place of warmth and freedom.
She hesitated – but not for long. She couldn’t stand to think of all the other girls being punished for her crime – as they surely would be if her absence was confirmed. She felt determination well up in her, remorseless, like a tide of molten rock, cooling and hardening as it rose to a crest. She ran to the laundry van. Inside, there were at least a dozen giant wicker baskets, all filled with dirty clothes from the City. She heard voices approaching, and she threw herself into the basket nearest the doo
r and covered herself with dirty clothes.
Almost immediately, the rear doors closed and the van started to move. The smell, although nowhere near bad as the rubbish lorry, was sour and stale. Little Fearless used a soiled sweater and a rumpled shirt to try to wipe herself as clean as she could. She looked at her watch. Eleven thirty. She knew the bed check was at midnight – if the Controller hadn’t got back from the police station already and turned all the girls out of their bunks.
The journey seemed to stretch the minutes out unbearably. She imagined melting clocks with snails dragging the hands. She felt sure time back at the Institute was being drawn by galloping stallions. She didn’t believe she could possibly make it back before midnight, but when she finally felt the van come to a stop outside the Institute, then slowly make its way inside, it was still only ten to twelve.
Before the engine was even turned off, Little Fearless was out of the van. She closed the doors carefully behind her so no one would suspect that it had carried a stowaway. Then she ran the fifty yards in the darkness back to the Living Block, and slipped in through the door of Hall Seven. It was all shadows and cold air. She could hear two cats fighting in the distance, and the low whistle of wind mingled with the cats’ cries made everything seem strange and disturbing.
As the minutes and seconds ticked away, she made it to her bunk, threw off her beret and clothes and hid them under her mattress, hoping she would be able to slip them into the laundry the next day. Her ragged pyjamas were under her pillow and, almost falling over in her hurry to get into the trousers, she pulled them on and climbed up into her bunk. She had left a damp flannel there earlier on, and she wiped her face and hands with it to get rid of the worst of the dirt. Then she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep.
Then she heard a small, timid voice from the bunk below her. “Little Fearless?”
Stargazer was awake. Despite her gruelling work, she had not fallen asleep. Instead she had watched the stars through the tiny skylight, and waited for Little Fearless to return.