by Ann Halam
She had been drinking water, but she hadn’t eaten anything since before Donny died. She had no appetite, but she opened a tin and forced herself so that Uncle wouldn’t be worried. The sun dazzled through the branches of the acacia. Tay felt as if she was falling apart, dissolving into the hot whiteness. She decided she’d better start walking again. She must keep on. That was all there was left. Everything else was gone.
“I knew there was something wrong with me,” she said. “When I was a very little girl I knew, because of the blood samples and things. When Donny was a baby I noticed he didn’t have to have bits of him sent away to the labs: that’s how I knew. I was afraid it meant I was going to die. Then they told me I was a test-tube baby, and I was sad, but I thought it was okay, really. And then they told me I had no father, and I still thought it was okay, because it was a great achievement and a medical benefit, and I don’t remember everything they said, but . . . Then I saw the headlines in the newspapers, and I don’t know why but I suddenly felt so awful.”
She had tried to keep her fears to herself because she knew that Mum and Dad loved her, and she didn’t want them to feel bad. But now everything had been stripped away. She had nothing left but the truth.
“Maybe it’s because I know I can’t have a normal life. They say Lifeforce will protect me, but they’ve told everyone about the clones now, and of course people will find out who we are, me and the other four, and come after us, and make our lives a misery—”
The heat was so fierce that her sweat had dried up. She sat down in the crackling grass, under the dazzling sun. She ought to get into the shade. . . .
Uncle was there, watching her sadly.
“Do you know what a clone is?” she said. “It’s the artificial production of an embryo that is genetically identical to a preexisting organism. But clones happen naturally all the time. Identical twins are DNA clones of each other, as identical as me and Pam. Plants that grow from cuttings are clones. But human beings are supposed to be different from each other unless they are born twins, and I’m not different from Pam. You know what that means? It means I’m not a human being.” She looked at her hands and realized that under the brown, dirty skin there must be wires and little tubes. She imagined that in each of the tiny little tubes there would be a face. It would be the face she could see in a mirror, but it didn’t belong to her.
“I wanted to ask them, Why did you do this to me? But I can’t ask them why, because there isn’t any ‘me.’ I’m not a real person, I’m a thing.”
She dug in her pocket, pulled out her knife and opened it.
Uncle drew in his breath with a worried ssushhing noise.
“Don’t be scared, I’m not doing any harm. I just want to see the wires.”
She held out her left hand and sliced the knife blade down. She didn’t feel any pain. She couldn’t feel pain, she was only a clone. She couldn’t see the wires, so she lifted the blade to slice again. She wasn’t trying to hurt herself, she just wanted to see the truth. She was so absorbed in what she was doing, she yelled aloud when something suddenly grabbed her. It was Uncle. She struggled, crying and yelling . . . but Uncle was much stronger. He took the knife.
“Give it back!” she screamed.
The great ape bared his teeth at her. He threw the knife so that it flew away in a wide arc, and it vanished. He held Tay’s right hand to his furry cheek, crooning at her gently.
Blood dripped from her cut palm. Now it was hurting.
“Oh, Donny. Donny. Mum and Dad. Clint . . . You’re all gone. I’ll never see you again!”
Uncle put his arm around her and raised her to her feet. She wept against his shoulder as he led her to a patch of shade. There they sat, huddled together, until the dusk.
Then they walked, until it was very dark.
They rested, until it began to be light: they walked, until the sun was hot. Tay talked to Uncle, and Uncle talked to her. She knew he spoke. He told her that the two of them must not die, they must live and keep going, because otherwise nobody would know. Tay told him about sitting in the car park in Kandah City with Donny, the day Donny came home from the summer holidays. She had felt as if she was a package—with something not human inside. She was still a package, but now she was a package carrying all the people she loved.
Donny and Tay, and Dad, and Mum. And Clint, and Lucia, and everyone—
So many different memories, like different facets of a jewel. She held within her the last time she had seen Mum’s face . . . the last time she had seen her dad, grinning and waving as he counted the votes for the Saturday-night movie. She held within her Donny, and the way he had smiled the night when they had watched the fireflies. These memories were as good as DNA, they didn’t belong to anybody else, they didn’t belong to Pam Taylor. She remembered her dad saying, It’s not the DNA, it’s what you do with it. This must be what he had meant. She would never have thought it all out herself, she was too tired and thirsty, but when Uncle had explained it to her, she understood.
She walked. When it was so dark she couldn’t see, she lay down and slept. When there was light, she ate something and walked again. Uncle was always beside her, and for his sake she had to keep on. She had to eat, and persuade him to eat. When their water bottle was running dry, she wouldn’t have cared. But she had to look after Uncle, so she had to search until they found a pool where she could fill it.
They had long, serious conversations.
Sometimes they saw wild buffalo; or a wild pig family would charge out of the straw-dry grass and thunder away, curly tails in the air. Once there were helicopters in the sky: and then Tay and Uncle hid themselves. Maybe they walked two days, maybe for several days. Time didn’t have much meaning on the journey Tay was making. The numbers on the pedometer made no sense; she wasn’t sure how to tell east on the compass anymore. It didn’t seem to matter.
The second water hole was a churned and trampled mud patch in a dell among starved-looking trees, with a shrunken pool in the middle. Tay drank, and filled their bottle. Dimly, dimly, she remembered: the second water hole is near the coast.
“We’re nearly there,” she said to Uncle as she sat on a boulder by the side of the pool, in the first light of dawn. She tried to smile for him, and her parched, sunburned face cracked like a dry leaf. “You see, I told you. I’m a copy of a very remarkable person, and I have DNA memories all my own, and you are a very remarkable orangutan. We belong together, you and I. We’re both of us real people now.”
She walked again, until her legs gave way under her, and then she slept where she fell.
When she woke up, it was another day and she was completely alone. The water bottle was by her head. It was empty. The rucksack was beside her. She searched through it. There was no water, and no food except one battered trekking bar. Her mouth was cracked and sore, inside and out.
“Uncle!” she called. “Uncle, where are you?”
Her voice came out as a faint croak. The rolling burnt-gold grassland stretched away, empty to the horizon. The trekking bar had been soaked at the river crossing; and dried out again. When she opened the packet, straw-dry fragments crumbled onto her palm. She tried to lick them up but her tongue was too parched.
“Uncle!”
Uncle’s gone to fetch help, she thought. When he didn’t come back, she decided she’d better go and look for him. She had to lighten her pack, she was getting weak. She threw away everything except for the piece of Donny’s blanket and the radiophone. The sun was beating on her and it was hard to think clearly. She walked around in circles, holding the radiophone, and calling Hello, hello. Nothing happened, and she’d forgotten about the GPS beacon. The phone felt heavy, so she threw it away.
Soon I’m going to die, she thought. She didn’t mind. She’d tried her best. She hoped Uncle had made it through. He would have to be the one to tell their story.
Then she was walking across some flat ground that seemed strangely cooler. There was a roaring in her ears, a haze in h
er vision and the taste of salt on her scorched lips. She didn’t see the dark shape of the Lifeforce Land Rover come shimmering out of the heat until it was nearly on top of her. People jumped out of it. “Help me!” she croaked. “Please help me! Everyone’s been kidnapped. My mum and dad, and Donny and Uncle, and everyone. We have to find them.”
Suddenly the world was full of faces and they looked so strange—smooth skinned, no red hair. Noses that stuck out, thin cheeks and small mouths, and such weird eyes.
“Where’s Uncle?” she asked. “Did you find Uncle?”
“Uncle is okay,” said a voice that was magically familiar. “He found us. He’s safe.”
Someone had picked Tay up, or she had fallen down: she wasn’t sure which. A face that was like her own face grown up looked down at her. It broke into a photomosaic, hundreds of images, all the same face, all the same eyes, full of grief, looking at her with love and understanding. Tay began to cry, the sobs hurting her dry throat. Pam Taylor held her, in a hug that grew tighter and tighter. The babble of strange voices faded. Someone was dripping water into her mouth. She was a package, full of grief and loss, a terrible story that must be told, and after that a great blank—
But for this moment, she only knew that she was found.
for two days (she found out afterward it had been two days) Tay slept, and half woke, and slept again. She had been bathed and put to bed like a baby. She sipped broth and drank milk. The scorched, baked skin of her face and lips, and hands and feet, was cleaned and soothed. She was told later that when they’d found her she’d been barefoot. They’d found her boots where they’d found her phone: she couldn’t remember taking the boots off, or why she’d done that. Sometimes she heard voices, and sometimes she spoke to the people caring for her, but they didn’t come into focus. She dreamed a lot when she was asleep, but when she was half awake she couldn’t remember the dreams: she could only feel them there, vague and cloudy in her mind.
At last she dreamed very clearly that she was standing with Uncle at the eaves of the forest. Ahead of them was the lonely golden country of the savannah. Behind them was their beloved home. Both of them knew that once they had stepped out of the trees they would never, never return. The clearing in the beautiful forest would be gone forever, because they would start to forget. The great majestic trees, stately guardians of life: the butterflies, the caves in the outcrop, the singing gibbons in the bamboo stand, the silence in the deep green shadows. Everything would start to fade if they took one more step. But they had to go on because there was no way back, and if they didn’t go on, nothing new would be born.
We have to go on, Uncle, Tay murmured in her dream. We choose to go on.
Then she woke up. She was lying in a bed, under a clean white coverlet, and Pam Taylor was sitting in a chair beside her, holding her hand.
“Where’s Uncle?” Tay said at once.
“He’s safe,” said Pam. “You won’t remember, but I told you when we found you. It was Uncle who came to us. We’ve had to leave our mooring because the army isn’t in control of East Kandah. We’re out at sea. . . . Three days ago someone on deck saw an orangutan, wandering on the shore. We couldn’t believe our eyes: we came ashore and it was Uncle. Then we started looking for whoever might have brought him here. We thought of your phone, we traced the signal . . . and then we found you.”
“Uncle told you I was with him?”
Pam smiled. “Well, he didn’t exactly tell us—”
“Can I see him? Can he come and see me?”
“You can see him soon.”
There was something wrong. Tay could feel it. But she let the wrongness about Uncle go by, until she was stronger. She closed her eyes, then opened them again and looked around. The room was small, with greeny-white walls. There was one window, it was round and blue. Two shades of blue, with a gently moving horizon between. Of course, she thought. I’m on a ship. I’m on the Marine and Shore. It seemed right to be at sea. Between her past and her future. Between what had been and whatever might be.
“Is there any news of . . . of my mum and dad, and Clint and everyone?”
“No,” said Pam. “I’m sorry, no news yet. No bad news, no good news. The rebels are still in charge in Kandah River Region. No one can get near the refuge, and we don’t know where the kidnapped staff were taken.”
“We told you about Donny, didn’t we?”
“Yes,” said Pam, squeezing her hand. “Yes, you told us, darling.”
Donny is dead. My little brother is dead.
“Did you know the refuge had been attacked?” Tay asked, after a silence. “I expect you already told me, but I don’t remember. Tell me again.”
“We knew,” said Pam. “The first anyone outside knew of the attack was a call to Singapore. Mary and Ben had locked themselves in the telecoms suite. They were trying to save what they could of their work, and raise the alarm. They couldn’t get through to me, or to Kandah City: but they managed to get through to the Lifeforce headquarters building in Singapore. They were talking to Rei when—”
Rei Van der Hoort was the chief executive of Lifeforce and a friend of Tay’s parents. She heard the familiar name, and what Pam was saying became real. Something inside her closed up, small and hard. . . . She couldn’t bear to know what was almost certainly true. She couldn’t bear to hear Pam say There was an explosion. Not now, not yet.
“They were cut off,” said Pam. Their eyes met, and they understood each other perfectly. “Your mum and dad had said that the rebels were rounding up the staff, the apes had been released and Lucia had been shot. We got a call from Singapore telling us what had happened and that Rei had called the sultan, asking for help. . . . But the Kandahnese army was fighting in Kandah City, and that was all we knew, for two days. Then we heard that the rebels had made contact and the refuge staff were being held hostage. Ben and Mary had said that you two—you and Donny—weren’t on site when the attack came, you were at the caves. But the rebels claimed that they were holding everyone, including the white children. We believed them . . . until someone saw an orangutan on the shore, where no wild ape would ever be.”
“I expect they said they’d caught us to make you pay a bigger ransom. What about Clint? He saved our lives. Do you know where he is? Where did the rebels take him?”
“We don’t know. We’re trying to find out, now we know he was taken prisoner.”
Their eyes met again, with the same message. We know what’s probably happened to Clint, but we can still hope—
“We’ll have to be patient, Tay. I think the sultan is really doing everything he can to help us, but the refuge staff are not his only problem. The army is getting the situation under control again. But we are foreigners, and we’ve been told to leave, to get away from Kandah’s coastal waters because they can’t guarantee our safety—”
“But we’ll stay!”
“Oh yes,” said Pam grimly. “We’ll stay. If we’d left for Singapore when they told us, we wouldn’t have been here to find you. We’re going to keep the Marine and Shore as near to the coast as I dare, until I know. Ben and Mary thought that if we left, we might never be allowed back, and I let them stay. Lifeforce will maintain a presence here until I know what’s happened to them, and all their staff.”
Tay felt all the self-blame that Pam Taylor couldn’t put into words, because then she would cry: and she mustn’t cry. “You didn’t know the People’s Army would attack an orangutan refuge. You couldn’t have known that. It was crazy.”
“I should have known it was time to get everyone out. The alarm bells were ringing. I ignored them.” Pam shook her head. “But that’s my problem, Tay, not yours.”
“Is there a record of my mum and dad talking to Rei?”
“Yes, we do have a recording,” said Pam gently. “Of part of it, anyway. You’ll hear it one day: and you’ll be proud. But not right now.”
“No,” agreed Tay. She knew she couldn’t take it yet. “Not right now.” She swallowed
back the tears and lay quietly, thinking about the day that Donny had come home from school, and all the bruised and bitter thoughts she’d had. They were gone. She looked at the hand that was holding hers. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, she thought. All her life there’d been this grown-up person, Pam, who was such a true friend, who always knew how things felt, who was like a mirror. . . . Now she knew why. She understood, which is different from knowing the facts.
“When the story broke,” Tay said, “I mean, the ‘teenage clones’ story . . . I was very angry. I couldn’t help it. I thought I never wanted to see you again.”
“Every one of you has reacted differently,” said Pam. “All along. You’re the one who has surprised us most, Tay. You were always so cool and calm. But I knew how you must be feeling inside. I knew it would burst out sometime, and I didn’t blame you-—”
“I don’t want to hear about the others. That’ll make me feel weird again.”
“Tay, I’m sorry you have to be with me, if it makes things harder—”
“No,” said Tay, “I don’t feel like that anymore. When I was on the trek, alone with Uncle after Donny died, it all came out. How . . . I thought I wasn’t a real person, because real people are different from each other, and I’m only a copy. But DNA isn’t what makes you a person. It’s what you do. Dad said that. I have memories that are all my own, not yours. They’re the blueprint of being me, same as DNA is the blueprint that tells the cells how to develop.”
Pam was looking impressed. “That’s very good. A good way to think about it—”
“Yes.” Tay grinned slightly. “I didn’t make it up myself. Uncle explained it to me.”
“Uncle?”
“Yeah. He was wonderful. I thought I was saving him. . . . Now I know, of course. he was saving me. He let me help him, because he knew it helped me. He’s so wise. We had such long conversations . . . and we read the Shakespeare . . . and . . .”
Tay’s words trailed away. Pam nodded, smiling very kindly. There was something Tay wanted to ask, only she hardly liked to say it. She hesitated. “Would you mind . . . if I called you my mum? In m-my thoughts, I mean, not out loud. I know it would be stupid if I said it out loud. But j-just for a while?”