“You hungry, Scraggy?”
I opened the carrier bag and fished out a yogurt I’d got from the bin what seemed like hours ago. I dipped the stale bread Scrag had brought back earlier in the yogurt and gave it to him. My stomach was in too tight a knot to eat anything.
I huddled in the corner of my shed, nodding to the spider that sat vigilantly waiting for its dinner to arrive. I was a popular kid, wasn’t I? A dog and a spider were my best pals and I was pretty sure the spider would eat me if it could. I tried to be positive but sometimes I hated my life. I wished Bert was still here.
He was one of the good guys, Bert. Seriously, he didn’t need to take me on, but he had – he even gave me an education of sorts. He taught me to read from library books. I’d hide in the squat, waiting for him to come back with treasures. Bert loved these books about a kid wizard called Harry Potter. We read them over and over. When we found Scrag, shivering in an underpass, Bert wanted to call him Fang, after a big dog in one of the stories. He looked like a Scrag to me though, so Scrag he was.
Bert was brilliant at reading stories. And telling them. I knew he made stuff up because the stories changed so often. Once he said he’d found me under a gooseberry bush when he’d been out rambling. And once he said I’d been given to him by an emperor penguin during an expedition to the South Pole. I don’t even know if that’s where emperor penguins live. The worst story he told was that I’d come from the kitchen of a crazy chef who’d chopped my hand off with a meat cleaver.
That one gave me nightmares for a while.
I gave Scrag another bit of yogurty bread. He chomped through it then flopped in a dusty beam of sunlight that had found its way through the grimy window. I made a pillow out of my coat and lay down next to him, scratching the top of his head. He licked my hand.
“You’re a good boy, Scrag,” I said.
It was so warm I dozed off. I was woken by a buzzing noise near my head. In my sleepy haze I thought I was being attacked by bees, but as I came round properly, I realized it was coming from the plastic bag of stuff I’d nicked. I rummaged through.
It was a phone.
I hadn’t nicked a phone.
What would I want with a phone?
Who would I call?
I dropped it like it might burn me and it carried on buzzing against the floor.
Someone had planted it on me.
It had to be that idiot in the car, when he’d tried to grab my bag. Or maybe that one on the beach. The one I’d bumped into.
I went cold. You could trace a person with a phone. They might be on their way right now.
I leaped to my feet. “Scrag. We’ve got to go.”
I’d walk somewhere – anywhere away from here – and dump it.
I picked it up and it stopped ringing. A message flashed up:
Answer the phone, Shem. There’s a good lad.
He knew my name.
How?
How did they know who I was? What was I to them?
Bert had told me about kids disappearing off the streets. He’d always warned me to stay close to him or the Death Eaters would get me. I thought it was because he was so paranoid about the authorities taking me away, but I was pretty much an adult now. Wasn’t I?
One way or another, that phone meant trouble. I dropped it back in the bag, grabbed my rucksack and said to Scrag, “Let’s go.”
The further away that phone was from my shed, the better.
Mariya made a massive fuss of cleaning up my cut and wrapping it in a ridiculous comedy bandage. By the time she’d finished, Miss Lilly said she had to go but that I should look up the school on Google.
“It’s called Whitman’s. I think you’ll like it – it’s by the sea.”
She leaned forward to kiss me goodbye and I was briefly lost in the cloud of soft scent that surrounded her.
Mariya took me back to my room and left me with a beaker of C-plan and my slate. I asked Notitia to find Google. A blank page popped up with the word GOOGLE made of interlocking coloured letters, twisting in and out like a Rubik’s cube. I wasn’t sure how it worked, so I just said, “Find Whitman’s School.”
The slate flattened down and a list appeared. I poked at the top result and it took me to a page for the school.
Girls of every skin colour smiled warmly at me. Behind them sat a building like a block of vanilla ice cream crowned by a caramel-wafer roof. I wanted to pinch it up, to make it 3D, but my big bandaged thumb got in the way. There were links to pages about everything the school did – sport, drama, music, science – and videos of girls from all over the world talking about how much they loved it there. Nerves crawled through me. It looked a million miles away from any school I belonged in.
I rolled my shoulders, trying to shrug off the tension that was building at the thought of trying to mix with the beautiful, talented, rich girls that went to Whitman’s. I wondered if I could ask Google about my old school. Then, like a bolt of lightning to my stupid brain, I realized I could ask Google about Stacey. Maybe even find the story she’d sold about us?
Before I could do anything though, Benjie came in.
“Your heart just had a little flutter. Is everything okay? You’re due some blood tests; we might as well do them now.”
I groaned. He must have seen a spike in my heart rate through the stupid cuff on my arm. For the first time since they’d woken me up, I longed for a bit of privacy. They could literally see my pulse race when something rattled me and they could walk in and out of my room whenever they wanted.
I covered my irritation with a joke. “Are you sure you’re not a vampire, Benjie? The amount of blood you’ve taken from me makes me very suspicious.”
“Cheeky monkey.”
I pulled up my sleeve, muttering, “I’m fine. I was just worrying a bit about school.”
“Better safe than sorry,” Benjie said.
I looked out of the window while he took a few vials of my blood.
When he’d gone, I stared at my slate. Was I ready to read what Stacey had said? And would Benjie be in and out every two seconds if I did? Some instinct meant I didn’t want him to know. Or maybe I didn’t want Miss Lilly to know. She’d made it pretty obvious she didn’t approve of Stacey.
Instead, I distracted myself. I said, “Notitia, how do you get white teeth?”
There were thousands of results – from natural methods with lemon and baking soda to actual bleach – and there were horror stories too; enamel stripped off teeth, gums so damaged that teeth fell out and a kid who’d burned an actual hole in his throat.
Grim.
I could maybe have a go at the lemon thing though. I didn’t want to look like a total dork at the new school. If I went. I wanted to have another look at the school but the stupid bandage was making it hard to navigate the pages. My thumb didn’t even feel sore, so I pulled it off.
And there was nothing. No cut, no blood, nothing. No sign that a shard of sharp china had been buried in my skin less than an hour before. Maybe there was something in the cream Mariya had put on that helped it heal? I mean, I was in the future. They were bound to have made some advances. I smiled at the over-the-top bandage. Seriously, they couldn’t have cared for me better if I was actual royalty.
I made sure I put the bandage back on properly after I’d finished with my slate. I didn’t want them to think I was ungrateful.
I walked and walked – right across town into Hove. I walked until I found a street where it was bin collection day. Perfect. They could take the stupid phone and incinerate it. I lifted the lid off someone’s bin and the thing bleeped another message. I’d been ignoring them ever since I’d left the shed and I didn’t want to read it now.
I dropped it in the bin. Trace that, pigs.
Scrag was really panting. The walk had worn him out. I knew he needed a drink but I didn’t want to go home. I mooched about a bit and spotted a little fish pond in someone’s front garden. I opened the gate.
“In you go, boy.
Fill up.”
The dumb dog jumped in the pond and within seconds a woman was out the front door and yelling at me, “What do you think you’re doing? Keep your dog under control! Get out of my garden!”
Yada yada yada.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, doing my best impression of Draco Malfoy’s dad. “He momentarily slipped his lead. Do come along, Scrag, there’s a good dog.”
He climbed out of the pond and gave himself a good shake all over the woman’s nice dry legs.
“Well!” she said, but we were already gone, so I didn’t get to hear the rest.
“Scrag, my friend, you are hilarious.”
He yipped agreement.
We were fine, me and Scrag, totally fine. If people would just let us be. It wasn’t like I ever bothered anyone. I never had much to do with any other humans. I knew you couldn’t trust them.
As we walked, I remembered something I’d buried deep down.
Bert had come back from the beach one day. He’d sold a couple of wooden seagulls and he was in a really good mood. “Come on, Shem,” he’d said, “let’s go down the pier and get fish and chips.”
It was so rare for him to take me out, even when it was dark, that my stomach had hiccupped with nervous excitement. When we’d got down there, there was a massive queue. Bert was a bit jumpy, his eyes darting all over the place. I could tell he regretted bringing me with him, so I looked around for something to distract him.
I saw a kid on his own, maybe ten or twelve – about the same age as me. He was scruffy too. I thought he might be a street kid. He was hanging out by the slot machines, waiting for some drunk to leave his winnings in the bottom. I pointed him out to Bert.
As we watched, some man grabbed the kid by the elbow and steered him out of the arcade towards a black van. A side door slid open and an arm came out and dragged the boy inside. No one but us seemed to notice.
I looked up at Bert, whose face was as white as the chalky cliffs. “What’s he done? Why have they taken him? Were they Death Eaters?”
Bert nodded sharply, pulled me into his side and quietly left the queue. We headed back to the squat without our chips.
I tried to ask him about it later, but he said nothing, just clammed up tighter than a rich man’s wallet.
Maybe they weren’t all stories, Bert’s tall tales. Maybe those same people were after me. Only it didn’t make any sense. There hadn’t been laws about vagrancy then. Or had there? I was such an idiot. I didn’t know anything.
The sun beat down. The heat was making me feel ill. I wanted to get out of the glare for a while, so it was a proper stroke of luck when I came across a library. There used to be quite a few libraries when I was little. I hadn’t seen one in years. I never got to read unless someone left a book in a bin or on the beach. I looked inside the building. I had a vague idea they had public computers in libraries. Maybe I could do a search for the vagrancy law? That way at least I might know what I was dealing with.
It was lovely and cool and quiet inside. A small bank of computers sat in a corner, so I headed over to them. Someone coughed. Not a normal cough, an attention cough. I looked around and smiled at the librarian.
She raised her eyebrows and nodded at Scrag. I groaned inside – she was going to kick us out. Or Scrag anyway. I didn’t want to be separated from him, not after the morning we’d had.
I whispered, “He won’t be no trouble. It’s too hot outside for him.”
Right on cue, Scrag lolled his tongue out and started panting his head off.
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t make the rules.”
She wasn’t going to budge. So much for checking the computers. I dug in my bag for an empty bottle and said, “Can I fill this up at least?”
I knew she had to let me do that. All public places were legally obliged to let you fill a water bottle.
She took it off me and went into a little room behind the desk. When she came back, she tried to hand me half a pack of biscuits as well.
I stared at the biscuits, thinking it must be a mistake. She pushed them into my hand and said, “Have you got any money?”
I shook my head.
She rummaged under the counter and pulled out twenty quid. “It’s not much but maybe it’ll help a bit.”
It had been a long time since anyone had been that kind to me. I felt my eyes filling with tears. And then I wondered what she wanted in return.
“Just take it,” she said. “I have a son about your age. I hope someone would look out for him if he was in trouble.”
“I’m not in trouble,” I croaked past the lump in my throat.
She raised her eyebrows and looked at my shoes. They were a bit broken. And mismatched. One was a tennis shoe and one was a trainer. Neither of them were very pretty.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome, but you can’t stay here with the dog. Take care now. Stay away from the main streets and be careful who you talk to – not everyone’s nice.”
“Yeah, I know.” Then I had an idea. Instead of the computer, I’d just ask her. “Do you know anything about a new vagrancy law?”
Her face clouded over. “An absolute disgrace if you ask me.”
So it was true: there was a new law. That must have been who those idiots were – government thugs. I flushed with relief that I’d got rid of the phone but then had a new panic. Was that the sort of thing a government employee would do? Plant a phone on someone? I bit my lip. Maybe it was. What would I know?
I had absolutely no plan for how to keep me and Scrag out of trouble. I wanted to stay in the nice, safe library with nice, safe walls and the nice, safe librarian but she said, “You take care of yourself now.”
And I knew we had to go.
I felt better though. Little acts of kindness do that to you. Also – twenty quid. Twenty whole quid. I could buy us a hot dinner. And if you had twenty quid and a roof over your head, even if it was a shed, you weren’t a vagrant, were you?
As I drank my C-plan the next morning, I gazed out across the acres of grass to distant trees, and remembered that I used to run. I’d been in the school cross-country team. Not because I was good at it, but because no one else would do it. It was the one thing I did without Stacey.
I put my hand on the cool windowpane. I hadn’t felt the sun on my skin, or the wind in my hair for months. If you counted all the time I’d been asleep, it was years. I used to love filling my lungs with fresh air, my feet pounding the pavement, thudding new thoughts into my head. I knew my legs weren’t up to running yet, but I was in a gorgeous place with beautiful grounds – just to walk in them would be amazing.
I got dressed in my own clothes again and went to find Benjie. I asked him if I could go outside.
He hesitated. “I’ll have to check. There are press about and I know Miss Lilly thinks it’ll be best if your first dealings with them are under her supervision.”
“What do you mean, press?”
Benjie looked at me thoughtfully. “Laura, you’re a scientific wonder. The first known survivor of cryostasis. Or, if you prefer some of the more sensational headlines, a real-life sleeping beauty. The world’s press are very interested in you. Miss Lilly has done a pretty good job of keeping them under control, but you’ll be far more exposed outside. Miss Lilly absolutely won’t want any unauthorized photographs leaking out.”
I stared at him.
“You’re famous, Laura. Everyone knows about you.”
“Famous?”
He nodded. “Since you were revived, only Miss Lilly’s most celebrated clients have been allowed in – the ones who truly understand the need for privacy – and even those she’s only let back in recently. She’s turned everyone away to keep your recovery private.”
“She did that for me?”
He nodded. “You’re very special to her, Laura. She’ll do whatever she can to protect you from press intrusion.”
“Wait…you said everyone knows about me?”
�
�Pretty much. Unless they live under a rock.”
“So if I go to that school, will they know about my family?”
“Quite possibly… Laura? Why?”
I hated myself for it, but embarrassment crept up my cheeks in a blush. The ghost of Kelly Knight loomed its horrible head.
I whispered, “Benjie, I didn’t have a dad. My parents weren’t… I had two mums. They were gay.”
He looked completely confused.
I said, “Lesbians.”
“Yeah, I know what gay means, Laura. Why are you worried about that? Oh! Wait, I get it.”
He shook his head and then laughed. “Oh sweetheart, sorry, sorry. You’re worried what other kids will say at school? About you having same-sex parents?”
I looked at the floor.
“People don’t really care about that any more. We’ve had equal marriage laws for years.”
“What?”
“This is the twenty-first century. Most people aren’t worried about who you love. Anyone with any sense is far more worried about who you hate.”
“Really?”
“Really. Our prime minister is married to a man.”
I didn’t see how that was relevant. Margaret Thatcher was married to a man. And then the light dawned.
“The prime minister is a man? Married to a man?”
Benjie winked. “Doesn’t stop him being an idiot though.”
I felt a sudden surge of respect for this new decade. A spike of hope. It made me want to explore more, and if I couldn’t go outside, maybe…
“If there’s no one else here I could walk around the hospital then? Edna wants me to do more exercise…”
“Laura! For someone so tiny, you’re a bit of a bully. Okay, you can walk, but Mariya goes with you.”
“I don’t need a chaperone, Benjie. Besides, you’ve got your little needle spy in my arm. I’ll just walk up and down the corridors. Please?”
“Hmmm, all right, but on two conditions: the second you start to tire, you come back; and this floor only, young lady – that should be safe enough. Promise you won’t try to get through any locked doors, okay? You’ll get me shot if you go AWOL.”
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