by Tim Lott
“How?” said Tattle, Beauty, Stargazer and Soapdish, all together. Their voices echoed around the dingy tiles of the toilets.
“Tears,” said Little Fearless. “I need tears.”
The girls looked blank.
“This is a house of nowhere. A house of misery. We have nothing here. All we have is tears. Thousands and thousands of tears. The girls cry themselves to sleep.”
Little Fearless thought she heard the door to the toilets opening, and paused. But it was a door slamming elsewhere in the laundry. The clock on the wall showed that they had been in there three minutes already. But they were still alone – for the time being.
“What we have to do is collect all the tears. We’ll put them in this perfume bottle that I found in some rich lady’s coat in the laundry and I’ll take them to the City.”
She reached into her pocket and took out a small bottle made of crystal glass, shaped like a teardrop. The label on the bottle said Apatheia.
“No one could ignore so many children’s tears,” continued Little Fearless. “So, every time you cry, every time you hear someone else cry, I want you to collect the tears and put them in this perfume bottle. Squeeze out pillowcases and handkerchiefs. Then, when it’s full, I will take the bottle into the City. When they learn how wretched we are, our families will come and save us.”
Tattle, Beauty and Soapdish looked doubtful.
“But who will you give the tears to?” said Stargazer.
Little Fearless turned to Beauty and fixed her with a gaze from her eerie, sorrowful eyes.
“Beauty. I know you think your parents have given up on you. But I don’t believe it. They are our last chance. They’re rich. If they find out what is happening, then they’ll be able to do something for sure. They’ll have the power to bring the Controller to his knees. Please. Can’t you let me go and look for them?”
Little Fearless gazed imploringly at Beauty. But Beauty just looked more proud, obstinate and haughty than ever.
“The tears – they will believe the tears, Beauty. Don’t say no, just out of pride.”
Beauty looked at Little Fearless, at her filthy face and clothes. For a second, she imagined how hard it would be to try to find the courage to escape the Institute, not once, but three times.
Now the other girls were looking at her too.
“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” she snapped furiously.
A door opened and a voice rang out – one of the X girls.
“Come on, you lazy dirtbags. You’ve been in there six minutes. Get back to work.”
“Sorry, boss,” said Little Fearless, briskly. “We’re coming out right this minute. Stargazer has been sick and we’re helping her.”
“Stargazer’s always sick. She’s a lame duck. Just get out here. You’ve got one minute.”
The X girl slammed the door behind her. All eyes turned back once more to Beauty.
“It’s no good,” said Tattle. “She’s not going to do it.”
“Never mind,” said Soapdish, touching Little Fearless’s arm. “You tried. We will always be in debt to you.”
“Oh, shut up, all of you,” snapped Beauty. With that she took out a pencil and a scrap of paper from her pocket, and scribbled something. Soapdish peered over her shoulder to try to see what she’d written, but Beauty squirmed away. She kept writing as they left the toilets and headed back to their machines. On the way, Beauty passed the table where they wrote out bills and letters to the customers. She lifted an envelope, slipped the piece of paper into it, and sealed it shut.
“For their eyes only,” she said quietly.
“What?” said Little Fearless. The others stared.
Beauty wrote an address on the envelope then thrust it fiercely into Little Fearless’s hands. “I won’t let you all down. Take my parents your bottle of tears. See if they care. It won’t do any good. But at least you’ll have learned something about the way people are.”
A Bottle of Tears
Apatheia –
because you care about yourself.
Perfume advertisement
That afternoon, all the Y and Z girls were punished again.
Instead of beating them, or locking them up, the Controller once again did something unexpected. He forced all the Y and Z girls to wear identical clothes, in the way that the X girls did. He didn’t buy them new clothes, naturally. That would have cost far too much money. Instead, he took all their ragamuffin, rainbow-coloured, raggle-taggle clothes, orange and pink, blue and violet, green and dandelion, check and striped, spotted and patterned, filled the great laundry vats with grey dye, and put them all in, load after load. When they came out, they were the colour of an evening sky on a cold, rainy winter’s day.
The girls didn’t think this was much of a punishment. But again, they were wrong.
The Controller had started out with nine hundred and fifty girls who weren’t quite sure who they were. Then he had all their hair cut off, so it was hard to tell the difference between them – which made it harder for them to believe that they were really themselves. Now, with all their hair the same length, and all their clothes the same colour, it was harder than ever. Sometimes the only way they knew each other was by the letters and numbers on their metal bracelets. So more and more they used these rather than the names they had invented for one another.
As for Little Fearless … well, most of the Y and Z girls had guessed by now that she was the one who had escaped. And a lot of them were angry with her. She would probably have been given away very quickly, if it wasn’t for one of the biggest unspoken rules – in fact, the biggest rule of all – among the girls: you didn’t snitch on one another. The Controller’s spies worked hard, but they couldn’t find any proof. There was simply rumour. Stargazer, Soapdish, Tattle and Beauty were the only Y or Z girls who knew for certain that it was Little Fearless who had escaped. Partly to avoid suspicion falling on them, and partly because they just wanted to fit in with everyone else, Tattle, Soapdish and Beauty joined in the complaints about Little Fearless.
“She’s gone and got us all in trouble again,” said Tattle. “I mean, she’s my friend and all. I’m not attacking her, or anything.”
Then she attacked her.
“But, you know, I don’t just go running out of the Institute every time I feel like it. I mean, I like Z73. But I’m more her friend than she is mine, if you get what I mean. I’m not about to dump her because she’s done a few silly things that have made us all miserable. All the same, she needs to be shown that this has got to stop, for all our sakes. If it was her that escaped, of course, which I can’t know for certain.”
Then, by distorting her face and hunching her body up, she impersonated Little Fearless. She reached into her nose with one finger and pulled out an old muddy piece of tissue that she had hidden there earlier. It looked like an enormous piece of snot. All the girls laughed cruelly at her clever, heartless imitation.
“Why are you putting us through this, Z73?” snapped Beauty. “Everything’s getting and uglier and uglier. I can’t wear pretty clothes any more. When I look in the mirror it’s hard even for me to tell how beautiful I am. I look just like everyone else. I look as bad as you. And you’re a Z girl while I’m a Y girl. Sometimes I wonder why I’m your friend at all. It doesn’t really work having friends with different letters.”
Soapdish was very unhappy that as an incidental part of the punishment there was less of everything – food, clothes, relaxation time – and that meant there was hardly any soap, so everything was getting dirtier. She hated mess, and blamed Little Fearless for the rising tide of grime.
“Why escape and then come back again?” she complained. “All you’re doing is making yourself unpopular and making us completely miserable. Next time you go, stay gone. For all our sakes.”
At this, Little Fearless looked shocked. She felt she was losing her friends – all except one.
Stargazer would not hear a word against Little Fearless. If she h
eard anyone say anything bad, despite her shyness, she would pipe up.
“Leave Little Fearless alone. She’s braver than anyone. She’s worth more than all of you put together.”
Time passed. Soapdish, Tattle and Beauty lost interest in the bottle of tears, so it was left to Stargazer and Little Fearless. It took twelve thousand, seven hundred and three tears to fill it. Winter had fully settled in now. The days were short, and the girls had to work by low voltage bulbs that gave out a muddy brown light. Frost rimed the flat roofs of the halls in the Living Block, and sheeted the scrubby grass in the exercise yard as indiscriminately as it did the lush green turf in the Controller’s garden.
It was months since Little Fearless had last left the Institute. A few days after the bottle was filled, one Sunday afternoon, when just about everyone was beginning to forget that anyone had ever tried to escape, Little Fearless went to see Stench.
The X girl was looking quite downhearted, scrabbling among the rubbish, and she positively glared at Little Fearless when she appeared.
“Huh,” said Stench, and looked away.
“What’s the matter, Stench?” asked Little Fearless, sympathetically.
“What’s the matter, Stench?” muttered Stench, mocking Little Fearless’s voice. “What do you think is the matter, brat?”
Little Fearless noticed that although Stench’s words were as unpleasant as they always were, her tone was not quite as resentful and bitter. There was a reason for this. Stench had been amazed and relieved that Little Fearless had not given her away to the Controller, and a part of her that had not been lost, a part of her heart that had not rotted away through loneliness and neglect, even admired Little Fearless for it.
“I haven’t got the faintest idea,” said Little Fearless, for all Stench was doing was what she usually did and loved to do best, which was to forage among the rubbish for precious things.
“You agreed with me that there was treasure hidden in the rubbish,” said Stench accusingly.
“Because there is,” said Little Fearless simply. “There always is.”
“Ever since I have been in charge of these tips,” said Stench, “I have not found a single piece of gold, one lousy rotten credit, one stinking piece of silver of any kind.”
“Of course you haven’t found anything,” said Little Fearless.
“What do you mean?”
“How could you possibly find them without the Device? X46 never found anything until she got hold of that.”
Stench blinked. “I thought you said she was X45.”
“Yes, yes. X45,” said Little Fearless, cursing herself in-wardly for her stupidity. “There’s so many numbers I get confused. Anyway. Everything will change once you get hold of the Device.”
“Well – where is it then?” said Stench furiously.
“Like I told you when I came back, the shop had run out. But there was a sign saying they were getting new stock in. Hundreds of them. Next time, I know I could get hold of it.”
“This is a waste of time,” said Stench, turning away.
“Is it?” said Little Fearless. She reached under her coat and brought out the most precious thing in the world to her.
It was the golden locket which held the picture of her real mother.
Stench’s eyes lit up. She grabbed the locket and examined it. Little Fearless felt a wrench in her heart more terrible than anything she had felt before. She felt she was giving up the very last part of what was truly herself. She rarely cried. She always thought that if she started she might never stop. But now she turned away from Stench, and a tear fell from one of her eyes. The blue one. It fell to the ground next to an old discarded brown sock and a half-empty can of rat poison, and disappeared into the frozen earth.
Stench, not noticing, gave Little Fearless a smile. “Very nice.”
“This is the last thing I was given by X45 in return for getting her the Device,” said Little Fearless, wiping her eyes. “Just let me try one more time to steal the Device for you. Just one more time. That’s all I ask.”
Stench thought, but not for very long.
The following Saturday, Little Fearless crept out of her bed and got dressed and ready to leave the Institute. It was one of the coldest nights of the year, and the wind was pitiless. She had only a few minutes to get to the rubbish tips, where Stench was waiting. In her pocket was the bottle filled with the girls’ tears and the letter from Beauty to her parents.
Just as she was about to set off, she felt someone tugging at her sleeve. It was Stargazer, staring at her wildly.
“Stargazer. You must get back to your bed. You’ll attract attention.”
Stargazer kept hold of her. “I’ve got a peculiar feeling inside me, Little Fearless. I think I know why there were only nine hundred and ninety-nine girls in my vision. It was because you weren’t there. And you weren’t anywhere else either. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Little Fearless stared at her. For one of the few times in her life she felt a stab of genuine fear. She believed in Stargazer’s powers of vision and prophecy. She felt what she said about the end of the Institute was bound to come true. But she hadn’t thought that it might mean the end of her own story.
“Please don’t go this time,” pleaded Stargazer. “I know everyone’s families are out there and will come sooner or later. You’ve been so brave, but you can stop now. Come back to bed, Little Fearless. The wind is too cold.”
Little Fearless looked at Stargazer, and glanced for a moment at her own empty bed. She had placed two pillows under the sheet in order to trick anyone who didn’t look too closely into believing that she was in bed. She returned her gaze to Stargazer and did her best to give her a cheerful grin.
“I have to go, Stargazer. I have this feeling of … I don’t know what to call it. What-must-be, I suppose. I don’t know how I know I must listen to it, but I know I must be true to it, and true to the words on the locket. To be brave and to be myself. It might be dangerous, but it’s the last time I shall try. Like you yourself said, you only see possible futures, not all of them. Besides, I owe it to all the other girls. They have lost not only their hair, and their colourful clothes, but their very names, so that they hardly know who they are any more. I have to show them that they are truly real, and that the story has an end, and this is the only way I can do it.”
Stargazer shook her head sorrowfully. “But what if you don’t succeed this time? I can’t imagine what the Controller will do to us. I’ve heard the most terrible rumours. There are worse things, Little Fearless, than losing your name, your hair and your colourful clothes.”
“You know, Stargazer, in a strange way, I’m not sure that that’s true. Think about arithmetic.”
“Arithmetic? What about it, Little Fearless?”
“He keeps subtracting from us and subtracting from us, doesn’t he? Pretty soon, even if we’re still alive, there’ll be nothing left of us. Nothing worth saving, anyway. We won’t even be numbers any more. We’ll just be zeros, like the Controller himself. One thousand zeros.”
Stargazer seemed to think about this, and nodded. “I understand. But all the same, what if—”
“I won’t get caught, Stargazer. Even if I do, nothing will happen to the other girls.”
“How can you be sure?”
Little Fearless touched the stubble on Stargazer’s head where her beautiful hair had once been. Then she kissed her, once, on the cheek.
“I can’t. But it doesn’t matter. Because this journey is part of my story, and you cannot escape your own story, because it is who you are. Knowing is not in the head. It is not thought, or explained, but felt in your bones, and your muscles and your blood and your guts. You know that as well as me. Better. I have to go now. Goodbye, Stargazer.”
“But, Little Fearless…” muttered Stargazer desperately, clutching at her jacket.
Little Fearless gently shrugged her off, turned without another word and, not looking back, headed out to the ru
bbish dumps.
She was late for her appointment with Stench.
The moment she arrived at the rubbish tips, she guessed that something was wrong. Stench was standing there stock-still, eyes darting like a cornered fox – or perhaps a rhino at bay. As Little Fearless advanced, Stench spotted her and waved her frantically away. Immediately Little Fearless dropped out of sight behind an abandoned laundry basket. She peered gingerly round the side, praying she wouldn’t be spotted.
Then she realized that the danger wasn’t so much being seen as being heard. For what she saw made her want to laugh out loud.
A shape had emerged from the top of one of the rubbish containers. The shape got bigger and bigger. It was taller than it was wide, and covered in garbage, and on top of it there were layers of rotting vegetables. The shape was making a spluttering sound – and to Little Fearless’s amazement she saw that it was Lady Luck, covered in filth, and coughing and spitting as if drowning in slime.
If this wasn’t enough to send her into fits, another shape appeared next to Lady Luck. This one had a frayed sock hanging from one ear, several pieces of decaying cheese rind tangled in its hair and a cockroach moving at a stately pace across its forehead. It was trying to whistle, but what came out of its mouth was more like the sound of someone trying to breathe under three feet of mud. It was the Whistler.
Finally a third shape appeared: Bellyache, her enormous head covered in soup dregs.
Forlornly the three X girls climbed out of the rubbish container, almost unrecognizable under the layers of muck. Even Stench, Little Fearless noticed, was finding it hard to stop herself smiling. The three of them stood in front of Stench, panting and retching, trying to brush themselves off but just making the mess worse.
“Nothing,” said Lady Luck disgustedly.
“It was a stupid idea,” moaned Bellyache. “I don’t care what the spies say. No one is going to try and escape on a bitter night like this. I’m cold; I feel the cold more than most. This soup is rancid. I’ll never get the smell out. I hate my job. I wish I could have a holiday. It’s just not fair. I—”