by Alex Marwood
‘Even if you’re the One?’
‘Of course.’
‘Even if it’s my sister?’
‘Don’t worry, Romy. We’ll be friends always, I promise you.’
‘You didn’t have to just stand there and let him … ’ says Romy, and feels herself welling up as well. Turns away to hide her face. ‘He didn’t have to do that to me.’
‘No,’ says Eilidh, ‘he didn’t. He’s horrible. Boys are horrible. I think he was showing off to Uri.’
‘Well, that’s grown-up,’ says Romy, and up-ends her trug of weeds onto the compost. Turns back and starts walking towards the bed to pull out another load.
‘He’s not grown-up,’ says Eilidh. ‘He’s just a stupid boy.’
Romy is afraid of what will happen in the End. They all are – the fear ripples through the compound every time there is news of the Outside – but realising how easily Jaivyn overpowered her has made her realise how great the danger will be. As civilisation collapses and the cities empty, they will be facing thousands of Jaivyns, however well hidden the compound is.
I need to be ready, she thinks. I can’t be like Eilidh and just drift along thinking everybody’s going to be nice. Uri’s right, we do need Guards – but we need to be able to fight back ourselves, as well. Against invaders, but also against the Jaivyns within our walls. I need a weapon. In a couple of years, I apprentice with the Blacksmiths. A knife. That’s what I want. A knife so when Jaivyn Blake comes for me I can stab his grasping hands. Everyone gets to make something useful. There’s no rule that says it can’t be a knife. And I can make the handle when I learn to be a Carpenter, before I make my graduation box. It’ll be all made by the time I’m ten.
A long time. But you need to plan, if you’re going to survive.
Eilidh follows her and kneels down next to her, starts plucking weeds too, and dropping them in the trug. ‘I didn’t make the rules, Romy.’
‘It’s not fair, though,’ she says.
‘Life isn’t fair,’ recites Eilidh, automatically. ‘The universe is cruel and unjust.’
Romy sits back on her heels and looks at her. ‘Do you even want to be the One?’
Eilidh shakes her head. ‘Of course not. But if I am, if I’m called, I won’t have a choice.’
‘But do you think you will be?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘And nor will Jaivyn.’
Romy thinks about this. ‘I think Uri thinks it’s him.’
‘Really?’
‘He scares me,’ she confesses. ‘He’s so … ’
‘Yes,’ says Eilidh. ‘I know.’
‘Are they all like that?’ asks Romy. ‘The Dead?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Eilidh. ‘But I’m glad I don’t live out there if they are.’
‘Of course, Eden could be the One,’ says Eilidh, generously, as they wash up their tools. ‘It could just as easily be a girl.’
Yes, thinks Romy. And if my sister is the One, they’ll have to accept me then. ‘Eden,’ she says. ‘So that’s her name?’
Eilidh gives her a beaming smile. She’s felt the shift, knows she’s forgiven. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It’s good, isn’t it? A good name for a Leader. It’s pure, and strong.’
10 | Somer
December 2002
Her bruises are healing, but the fear remains, self-recrimination ringing round and round. Solstice. I know about solstice, what happens if you’re stupid.
I’m sorry, she tells the universe, I’m sorry. I knew to stay in the light, and still I didn’t. Please don’t punish me further. Please let it just be a nasty moment, something I can turn my back on and forget. Don’t let there be more. Please don’t let there be more.
Somer is on duty in the Infirmary with Ursola when they bring Lucien’s daughter Farial Blake in from the Pigshed. She’s one of their regulars, for she’s a strangely clumsy child, always running into walls and falling on her face. She was here two weeks ago for a nasty cut on her foot, so Somer doesn’t feel any surprise to see her here again.
And then she sees her face, and her own fears are wiped from her thoughts.
*
They don’t let the Littlies near the sharp tools, but no one gave a second thought to letting Farial take apple peelings to the horses until a shriek alerted them to the fact that one of them, in the rush for goodies, had trodden on her canvas-covered foot. A swarm of adults downed tools and ran to help. A badly trimmed iron nail in the horse’s shoe had pierced clean through the canvas to the skin, but the ground was mostly mud near the gate where she stood wailing, so to everyone’s relief no bones were broken. Vita cleaned and bandaged the wound and instructed everyone to look out for signs of sepsis, and let her limp proudly back to the Pigshed to show her peers. On Friday, her Teacher confessed to carelessness and the Blacksmith admitted sloppy work on the shoe, and they accepted their penalties and all was forgiven. Lucien is a forgiving Leader, and punishments are the same whether the infraction involves the Family or an ordinary person.
Two weeks later, Farial started to grin. Not the normal smiles they all wear to face the day, but something wide and weird and wicked that sent her peers scuttling into corners with howls of fear whenever it happened. She claimed she couldn’t help it, but even as she did so she seemed to be having difficulty articulating, and when the Teacher touched her forehead she realised that it was damp and hot.
Somer is faintly irritated that she has to haul herself from the chair where she’s rolling bandages and feeling her fear when the Teacher comes in, but then she sees the hobgoblin in her arms and leaps, her lower back twanging, to her feet. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I don’t know,’ says the Teacher. ‘Maybe it’s some sort of prank, but she genuinely can’t seem to stop. Even when I tickled her while she was doing it, her face didn’t change at all. I thought it would be best to be sure.’
‘Of course,’ says Somer, and feels the child’s forehead, though she can already see that her fringe is slick with sweat. ‘Well, she certainly has a fever,’ she says. ‘How do you feel, Farial?’
‘Head hurts.’ Her eyes suddenly widen until they are as round as cogwheels. Her lips pull back so far that Somer fears they will split and she grins and grins and grins.
Her teeth, Somer notices, are clamped together.
Ursola strolls over from the only other occupied bed in the ward. One advantage of their magnificent isolation is that outbreaks of disease are rare at Plas Golau. Someone fetched flu in with them, the winter solstice before last, and they worked round the clock for three weeks to keep the fever under control. But the population of Plas Golau is young and fit, by and large, and asthmatics never make it in through the gates, so they emerged triumphant at the other end of the epidemic with not a single death. But most of the Healers’ medical duties involve administering to cuts and bruises, the odd burn, the occasional broken bone. And, of course, growing and preserving medicinal plants for the days when nothing will grow at all.
‘What’s this?’ asks Ursola.
Farial grins and grins, and her eyes roll in their sockets. ‘Oh,’ says Ursola. She turns on her heel and runs to fetch Vita.
There will be no vaccinations in the Apocalypse. So of course there are no vaccinations at Plas Golau. Vaccinations, says Lucien, lead to a weakened bloodline, sluggish immune systems surviving where they would never have done so before. They must learn to live without them, to live more cautious lives. And, although it’s not really discussed, requests for vaccines for unregistered children would lead to inconvenient questions down in the valley. The adults, raised in the thoughtless indulgence of the Dead, will of course have been immunised in the normal run of authoritarian government interference. Not so the children. No measles vaccine, no mumps, no rubella. No whooping cough or scarlet fever. No tetanus.
Vita bustles through from the pharmacy, drying her hands on a towel as she walks. Takes one look at the child and orders her to bed.
Farial’s straining muscles collapse. Sud
denly, she is a skinny ninety-year-old in the body of a seven-year-old. Klimt, thinks Somer. Like a Klimt painting. She is pale and panting, and a little trail of drool slithers out of the corner of her mouth and drips onto the front of her tunic.
There will be no hospitals in the Apocalypse. Besides, in the Apocalypse a hospital is the last place you would want to be. No resident of the Ark has been to a hospital in twenty years. You know that when you come here, when you breed here. Survival is a matter of will, of fighting back and rising above, and, if death overwhelms you or your loved ones, that is part of the contract. Will there be room for the weak, when fire has rained from the sky?
Somer tucks Farial into bed, tries to feed her a glass of water. But her throat is hard as marble and she can barely swallow, the water dripping down and wetting the pillow. Most of Vita’s medications come in the forms of liquids. Tinctures, tisanes, drenches, pills and powders. All useless now.
‘We’ll need to get a feeding tube into her,’ says Ursola, ‘for the drugs. And another to keep her airway open.’
‘A tracheotomy?’ Somer is aghast. She’s learned the basic technique from books, but no one in the compound has ever needed the real thing.
‘Toughen up,’ snaps Ursola. Three years as a registered nurse has made her an invaluable member of the community. She may be No. 188 to Somer’s 142 in the arrival order, but still she is her superior. ‘It’s the job. She still has a chance to get through this. People do survive it.’
‘How many?’
Ursola turns away. Farial may be silent, but she is still conscious.
‘Sorry,’ mutters Somer, ashamed. Every job has its unpleasant aspects. It’s not all willow bark and lavender oil. She strokes Farial’s forehead with a damp cloth while Ursola goes away to put water on to boil, to sterilise the scalpels.
Beneath the sheet, Farial’s abdomen begins to rise off the bed as though hauled by an invisible winch. Somer can tell that she is trying to scream, but all that emerges from that carved white throat is a hiss of compressed air.
‘Someone needs to tell Lucien,’ says Ursola, and they stand in a row and stare at her.
‘I’ll tell him,’ says Vita, eventually.
In the morning, Lucien brings Farial’s mother, Luz, in to see her. Luz’s eyes are red, and no one judges, for, even in this Spartan world, the loss of the only child you will ever have is a heinous loss indeed. And Lucien’s eyes, too, are red, for, though he has many children, each life at Plas Golau is precious to him.
She is, at least, breathing now, with the help of the tracheotomy tube. And Vita has broken out some of the small stock of the opium she distils from home-grown poppies. They were concerned at first that the feeding tube would never survive the pressure of that clamping jaw, but one by one her baby teeth have cracked and been spat out, and no longer pose a danger. She lies drowsy and silent against a pillow and twists in and out, in and out of spasm.
Luz stands over the bed and gulps air. Somer feels inadequate, unequal to this task. If it were my child, she thinks. If it were Romy or Eden, I would want to die. I would want to die too. Then she thinks, Oh God, please let there just be Romy and Eden. Please let there be no more than the two of them. Please. I’ll do anything if you make me not be pregnant. And then she remembers that there is no God, and her gorge contracts.
Lucien lays a comforting hand on Luz’s shoulder. He is so kind. This loss must be exquisitely painful to him, but always, always, he is there first and foremost for his people.
‘Sometimes,’ he tells her, ‘accidents happen anyway. With all the care we take, with the best will in the world, they happen.’
The patient in the bed at the end of the room lost skin from her hand and thigh when a vat of boiling fruit slipped off its trivet as she walked past it. Jam boils at 105 degrees, and jam is sticky. It clings to the skin like glue. The burn has gone a full half-inch into the thigh, and Vita and Ursola had to spend more of the precious opium to operate and remove the dead flesh before it turned bad. She had her healing visit from Lucien a week ago. You don’t expect a second.
‘If I’d been there … ’ says Luz.
‘You couldn’t have been there,’ says Lucien. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
Farial spasms again, and her ribs snap like firecrackers. She is screaming inside, thinks Somer, and grits her teeth as the tiny hand grips her fingers so hard she is afraid her knuckles might dislocate. This is awful. It’s awful. Are we right to be keeping her here? Should we take her down to some cold, efficient, neon-lit hospital where nobody loves her?
‘They fight so hard, the young,’ Lucien says. And he looks up and meets Somer’s eyes for the first time since he arrived, and she sees no real spark of recognition. I am nothing to him, she thinks. Now I’ve had his baby, it’s as though I never existed. I’ve been paid off with a ring. And then she forces the thought away.
Vita lays a hand on Luz’s other shoulder. Somer watches them, feels their pain. There are tears on Lucien’s cheeks. It must help her, she thinks, knowing that they care so much. We’re their children, all of us. And she dismisses the flash memory of Lucien’s O-face in the firelight in his bedroom and tips a little more opium into the feeding tube.
‘You must stay with her,’ Vita tells Luz. ‘Stay with her all the time. We’ll set a chair up for you, make it comfortable.’
‘Thank you,’ she says, and the words catch in her throat. No hospitals for Farial. We take care of our own, at Plas Golau.
Lucien stays a full hour, sitting quietly by his daughter’s bedside, holding her mother’s hand. When he leaves, he doesn’t return.
Farial takes four days to die, and they bury her in the chapel graveyard. After the burial, they never speak of her again.
Among the Dead
October 2016
11 | Romy
It is very quiet.
Not really. It’s just a completely different sort of loud from the rural sounds of Plas Golau. The sound of traffic outside, the rumble of the machines downstairs. I have the windows open, for the heat is stifling on a sunny day in October. Every minute or two, the roar of aeroplane engines as they soar so close to my rooftop that I feel as though, were I standing up there by the chimney of this two-storey building, I could reach out and catch a ride on the great black wheels that hang from their bellies.
Out on the pavements, coming in and out of the Underground, voices, incessant, day and night, far more disturbing than the mechanical rumbles. A jumble of accents, but one particularly harsh and prevalent, which I take to be the local flavour. Many voices speak languages I don’t understand. But London is one of those places where the whole world comes seeking the gold on the pavements, and two hundred and fifty languages are spoken here every day. I can’t wait to get away. Find my people, and get away.
Eden. It was her birthday last month, which will mean it will have been Ilo’s too, though we didn’t mark them. She will be fifteen. A ward of the state. My period of rest is up. I must make myself leave this noisy little sanctuary and start to look for them. Ilo’s only young. He’s strong and brave, but I’ve got to find Eden and make her safe, and I know he will understand. Now I have you, now you’re growing inside me. I need to make her safe, to keep you safe. But not today. The journey here – the speed, the dizzying distance, the million unfamiliar sights – has left me exhausted, and even glancing out of the window at all those passing strangers overwhelms me. Overwhelms me with fear, and overwhelms me with sadness. All those people. All of them, unaware of what the future holds.
Janet’s milk is good; the tomatoes are bland and textureless; the bread is woolly. I long for a proper tomato again, warm from the sun through the greenhouse walls, sweeter and more perfumed than a plum. I play with the television for a bit, and eventually find my favourite, a man called Jeremy, who shouts at fat people on channel 27. It was always playing in the rec room at the Halfway. Spencer said that it soothed them, seeing that people like us could get on the TV. It seems as good a plac
e as any to find out about the dystopia I am still learning to inhabit.
I have food for three days, if I eke it out, and then I must go out and brave the world. I never thought of myself as an anxious individual before, but I’ve found since I came out of the hospital that all sorts of things have become challenges to me. Melanie said that it wasn’t surprising, that PTSD is a powerful condition and I must learn not to be hard on myself. All very well for her to say. I have a baby to feed and a sister and brother to find, and that will take courage.
I find myself stringing out the actions of the day, filling the time to soothe myself. Washing up each plate and mug as I use it, making small snacks – a sliced tomato, a hard-boiled egg, a piece of toast made under the grill – one after the other rather than a meal. I unpack Janet’s box, arrange the soap-shampoo-conditioner I find in it on the shelf by the bathroom sink, put Melanie’s crockery away, string my spare sheet across the bedroom window to stop the people in the flats opposite looking in.
And then I allow myself to open my box. I’ve been looking at it sideways for a couple of hours, saving it, savouring the prospect. I have a strange feeling that once I lift the lid all the contents will simply vanish into thin air, like the dust of an Egyptian mummy.
I remember everything that’s in here. Of course. If your belongings are pared down to everything that can fit in a wooden box twenty inches long by a foot wide by ten inches deep, you don’t forget what you own. But oh, to feel them again. These little souvenirs of home. I take them out, one by one, and weigh them in my hands. Small things, vast memories.
A soap that smells of lavender.
Photographs. One of my mother as a teenager, maybe Eden’s age, face covered in thick make-up, black lipstick, black lines around her eyes like an Egyptian goddess. One of my mother and her family: an awkward photo, standing on a doorstep, parents behind, children in front. Mum maybe twelve, so I guess her sister Sarah, my aunt, is five.