The Poison Garden

by Alex Marwood

  ‘I thought,’ Sarah says, finds herself stammering, ‘it would be nicer. You’ve got a lovely outlook, and a decent wardrobe.’

  Eden’s eyes flash at her.

  ‘She should have the bigger room,’ says Ilo, and walks into Alison’s. Lays his box down on the desk, sits on the bed. Eden says nothing, but walks into the other and closes the door.

  It will get better, Sarah. It’s day one. It will get better.

  17 | Sarah

  They’re fascinated by the footbridge. But then, they’re fascinated by everything, with very little distinction, like a toddler spotting a pigeon in a zoo. A puzzled look crosses one or other of their faces five times an hour, because they literally know nothing. It’s lucky, really, that the school couldn’t take them till half-term, as their goggling astonishment at everything they saw – piercings, cats’ eyes in the road, post boxes, trains, washing machines, blue hair, Marmite, the sea, pugs – would have marked them out for bullying in an instant. She took a couple of weeks’ unpaid leave before the half-term holiday to get to know them, and in the hope that she could introduce them to enough of the world that they don’t attract too much attention when they have to navigate it without her.

  It’s only partly worked. Merely crossing a bridge is something special to them. Though the bridge is, in its way, a special experience. Looking down onto the windy chasm of the motorway is a strange sort of time-travel experience. It makes you feel, as juggernauts blast past beneath your feet, like a Stone Age hunter finding yourself in the land of dragons. Ilo stops and leans on the railing for so long that she almost tells him to hurry up. But then his curiosity sparks a curiosity in her. I’ve never actually done that, she thinks, and climbs onto the ledge that supports the railings beside him.

  It’s a unique sensation, she discovers: the puffs of air that hit the face when even a small car whizzes beneath them, the fact that that sort of speed is so unnatural, so beyond anything one would experience in nature, that when you watch you can actually feel your brain adjusting to fit the phenomenon in with the surrounding reality. Eden climbs up on the other side of her and she has to fight a strong urge to put out an arm to stop her tipping over, as though she were a toddler.

  ‘How fast are they going?’ Ilo asks.

  ‘Oh, I’d think somewhere between seventy and eighty.’

  ‘Miles an hour?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He doesn’t seem particularly impressed. ‘An asteroid enters the earth’s atmosphere at 45,000 miles an hour,’ he says.

  ‘Apophis,’ says Eden.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘It’ll pass inside the orbit of our communication satellites in 2029,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ says Ilo. ‘And that might alter its orbit enough that it hits us the next time round.’

  ‘Goodness!’ she says. ‘And when will that be?’

  ‘2036,’ they both say complacently.

  ‘But obviously most of humanity will be long gone by then,’ says Eden.

  ‘Yes, but it’ll be a long winter,’ says Ilo.

  ‘Come on,’ Sarah says. She’s getting used to this habit they have of spotting the links between things they see and world-crushing phenomena. It doesn’t mean anything, really. It’s just a reflex, like crossing yourself when you see a magpie. ‘We don’t want to be late on your first day.’ And he climbs down obediently, though he casts a look of regret over his shoulder.

  She looks at them. Funny creatures. Is there more going on beneath the surface, or are they really this calm? Helen says to be patient. ‘It’s early days,’ she says. ‘They need to trust you first.’ Maybe the daily counselling they’ve got arranged with her will help; teach them, at least, to open up. She finds it hard to know what to do when most of the time they treat her like a pleasant stranger, not the friend she’d imagined she would be. She would have a better idea of how to be around them if they treated her the way all the kids at the school do – like the enemy.

  And talk of the devil: they turn the corner and run smack into Marie Spence, and Lindsay, her morning bodyguard. It’s not that surprising. She lives on the Canaan Estate, in one of the houses the Congregation sold off in the Noughties, her parents’ matching red Jags in the driveway and a swimming pool where the rhododendrons used to be, so she’ll inevitably take the same route to school if she’s walking. But Sarah wishes that today had been one of the days her father decided to give her a lift; that the children’s first experience of their schoolmates didn’t have to be her.

  She’s Abi Knowles all over again, thinks Sarah, remembering her own nemesis, her own adolescent misery. They’re part of every ecosystem, and God, I wish they weren’t.

  ‘Morning, miss,’ Marie says pertly. She is wearing rattling silver bangles – lots of them, layered – and big hoop earrings that dance against her cheeks. Her feet, for the journey from house to school, are clad in spike heels so high that to Sarah her arch looks vertical. More drag queen than teenager. But still she’s confident that Marie won’t look back at teenage photos and feel as bad as Sarah does when she looks at the pudding-basin haircut and the apron-pinafore combinations that feature in her own.

  ‘Who’s this, miss?’ asks Marie. She has no fear of adults, and no respect, either. She probably doesn’t even know Sarah’s name. It’s not as though lowly office drones figure much in her world.

  ‘This is Eden Blake, Marie,’ she says. It’s bound to get out that the children are related to the staff eventually, but no point in cursing them with that by actually announcing their relationship on their first day. ‘She’s starting in your class today. And this is her brother, Ilo. Eden, Ilo, this is Marie, and Lindsay. Eden’s going to be in your year. I’m sure you’ll be making her welcome, won’t you?’ she adds, and the bright tone she attempts sounds a lot like pleading.

  Marie’s eyes scan up and down Eden, then Ilo, then Eden’s clean-scrubbed face and knee-length uniform skirt again, and her upper lip curls. Whatever the disappointments of her adult life, Sarah is grateful every day that she never has to be a teenager again.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Marie to Eden’s unbranded trainers. A hand comes up and flicks the shiny red extensions.

  * * *

  * * *

  ‘Who was that?’ asks Eden, as they turn the next corner. She sounds neither impressed nor apprehensive.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about them,’ says Sarah, more confidently than she feels. ‘There’s a Marie in every school.’

  ‘How does she walk in those shoes?’ she asks.

  ‘God knows,’ says Sarah. ‘She’ll have to change out of them when she gets to the gates.’

  ‘Ah,’ says Ilo, ‘that’s why she has such a big bag.’

  Well, it sure as hell doesn’t have any books in it. ‘I know. You wouldn’t have thought it was worth the effort, would you?’

  ‘She has very long eyelashes,’ says Eden.

  ‘They’re not real,’ says Sarah. ‘She gets them glued on once a month. By the end of the month they’re shedding down her cheeks like spider’s legs.’

  * * *

  * * *

  Helen is waiting on the steps as they arrive, dressed in her full soft-jersey-waterfall-cardigan professional counsellor gear, lots of pockets for Kleenex and large round breasts for weeping on. ‘Hi, guys,’ she says. ‘Ready for the fray?’

  They go inside and Sarah is glad that she’s spent so much effort and money on acclimatising them to crowded places in the past few weeks, for without it they would probably be frozen to the spot right now. The pre-registration cacophony is enough to make a healthy adult quail. The air is rich with that particular heady smell that comes off a body old enough to be using deodorant but not old enough to have discovered independent washing, and the air reverberates with shouts and screams. They hover just inside the doorway to let themselves adjust, and she feels Eden’s speedy breathing. />
  ‘It’ll be okay.’ She attempts to sound reassuring. ‘You’ll get used to it, I promise.’

  They set off through the surging bodies to the corridor that leads to the principal’s office.

  Before the End

  2009–2010

  18 | Romy

  2009

  Boys become men at thirteen. For girls, it’s more of a moveable feast. Romy gets almost a year longer in the Pigshed than Eilidh does. Their low-protein, low-fat diet tends to delay puberty for the girls of the Ark in comparison with their contemporaries among the Dead. But she’s fourteen, and she has finally become a woman. She secretly finds it a bit icky that so many people should be so interested in her bodily functions, but everyone seems so excited, so pleased for her, that she keeps the thought to herself. Besides, she’s been bored, locked up in the Pigshed, waiting, and she’s wild to find out what she will become.

  Her first thought, when she sees the stain, is why did it have to happen in winter? She even considers, briefly, hiding it until the spring, but the prospect of another long winter in the Pigshed, waiting to start her life, reading Shakespeare and Dickens and Tennyson to while the hours away while Teachers who are now no more educated than she is concentrate on the little ones – and the danger, of course, of being caught in a lie – are worse than the prospect of the sudden exposure to cold and life in a woollen beanie hat that adulthood represents. So she goes to Ursola and tells her and gets swept immediately into the overwhelming current of adulthood.

  Preparations for her ceremony are hurried, for Lucien likes it done while the girl is still bleeding. And the embarrassment is so profound that she swears, deep inside, that no one will ever know such detail about her again. She shows on Monday, and her ceremony is scheduled for after evening meal on Thursday. The Cooks rustle up a batch of honey cake and the Farmers slaughter a dozen of the chickens that have passed laying so that everyone will have a taste of meat, and three flagons of cider come up from the vaults, for everyone to toast the new adult. The Healers scout the hedgerows and the herb garden for flowers and foliage for her coronet: not such an easy task in November. In the end they find penstemons and campion and pennyroyals, and wind them all up with stems of fragrant evergreen bay. Not the prettiest crown, but she is pleased, for it will dry well, and there’s something pleasingly witchy about bay.

  The women come for her at the Pigshed at four o’clock. At the door, they place the coronet on her head and lead her across the farmyard to the Bath House. Inside is a whole bathful of hot water, dried rose petals floating on the surface. A hot bath all of her own, no recycled water, no one waiting to follow her and cursing her if she lingers and lets the water cool. A roaring fire in the hearth, a bar of special lavender soap that’s usually reserved for sale to the Dead, now her own to keep. A towel warming on a clothes horse in front of the fire and a dress laid out on a chair. She feels like a queen.

  Even more so as she walks through the dining hall with Vita, once Counting Off is done, in her new linen dress. She sees her mother, one hand on her collarbone, gaze at her as though she wants to hold the image in her mind forever. Her little brother lets out a whoop at the children’s table and is hushed by the adult sitting with them; but she manages to throw a shaky smile in his direction and sees him catch it. He’s the thing she’ll miss the most about the Pigshed: the way he still bounds around her like a puppy, the way they often understand each other without the tedium of having to speak.

  Then she looks up at her destination and has to remember to breathe.

  Lucien, seated at the High Table among his children, watches her as she makes her way towards the steps. Leans to his side and says something into his daughter Zaria’s ear. Even from halfway across the hall, Romy sees the colour rise in Zaria’s face. She stands, stalks up the table and throws herself into a chair next to Jaivyn. Then Lucien is standing and waiting for her, smiling, smiling all the time as she walks. She feels his ice-blue eyes run over her, taking in her woman’s body, and blushes to the roots of her hair.

  ‘Sit, my dear,’ says Lucien, and points to the chair beside him. She sits, and Vita places herself on her other side. She wishes she felt more honoured, less conspicuous. Her seat is more throne than chair. It has a padded base, arms, and a back. You can lean back and let the wood take the weight from your spine. After fourteen years of benches, it’s certainly a novelty.

  ‘Welcome, my child,’ he says. ‘And welcome to womanhood.’

  He helps himself to a piece of bread and tears it between his fingers. Romy is too nervous to eat. She picks up her water glass and takes a drink, and her hand is shaking. Vita, sitting on Romy’s other side, puts a hand on her shoulder and smiles into her face. ‘Don’t be nervous,’ she says. ‘It’s a breeze.’

  Romy gives her a wobbly smile.

  ‘I’m very practised,’ says Vita.

  ‘I know. It’s all the people,’ Romy confides.

  ‘That you see every day.’

  ‘They’re not all watching me every day.’

  Vita raises an eyebrow. ‘So you don’t like being the centre of attention, then?’

  ‘Do you?’

  Vita blinks. ‘Sometimes one has to accept things one doesn’t enjoy for the greater good,’ she says. ‘We all do.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Romy.

  ‘You will be surprised by what you can do, when it’s necessary.’

  ‘I hope so,’ says Romy.

  The food arrives on platters, as it does in the main hall. They seem that little bit fuller up here, though. Not by much: an extra inch of potato here, half a dozen pieces of chicken there. Nothing that would be obvious from the tables below. When the platter arrives in front of her, she hesitantly takes a thigh with the fork and spoon laid on top, puts it on her plate and puts her hands into her lap while she waits for everyone else to be served.

  ‘Come on, child,’ says Lucien. ‘Have another.’

  She gapes. Never, ever in her life has there been a second piece of chicken. For the Farmers and the Builders maybe, at times when the work is especially intense, but not for the likes of her.

  ‘Special food for a special occasion,’ he says. Smiles down at her and jerks his chin encouragingly. Lucien has recently grown a close-cropped beard, and there’s a peppering of silver in among the golden hairs. She wonders briefly if this is some sort of test, but then she looks down the table and sees that there are two pieces on most of the plates. And Father doesn’t lie, she tells herself. He hates lying, so why would he do it to me? She takes a drumstick and adds it to her plate. Saliva floods onto her tongue.

  ‘So tell me, Romy, how old are you?’

  ‘Fourteen,’ she says.

  ‘A late bloomer!’ he says. ‘Never mind. Well worth the wait.’

  Romy goes scarlet, stares down at her plate in confusion.

  ‘Lucien ...’ says Vita, and she sounds as though she’s warning him.

  ‘Are you ready for your responsibilities?’

  ‘I hope so,’ she replies again.

  ‘And what will you be, do you think?’

  I want to be a Healer, she thinks. Please let me be a Healer. But she knows the right response, and she uses it. ‘I shall be whatever Vita and Uri say I should be,’ she says. She’ll find out soon enough. Vita and Uri will tell her her assignment in the Council Chamber when the feast is done.

  ‘Good girl,’ he says, ‘good girl,’ and he picks up his cutlery and begins to eat. ‘I should think,’ he says, ‘you can’t wait to grow up.’

  ‘Which is still in four years, Lucien,’ says Vita.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he says. ‘Plenty of time to look forward in.’

  There is butter on the winter cabbage. She never knew how delicious cabbage could be.

  * * *

  * * *

  The Guards have taken increasingly to taking their own evening meal togethe
r, in the new house they’ve had restored for their use by the reservoir despite Vita’s indignant protests, but Uri has come across to sit with the Family tonight, specifically because of Romy’s feast; there’s a three-line whip for the birth family, where feasts are concerned. He doesn’t look as though he’s relishing the experience. He sits between Eden and Heulwen, the two youngest, and eats without speaking. I wonder, she thinks, what they did that has made him not like them?

  The two girls look a bit cowed, sit with their elbows on the table and their hands supporting their heads as they stab at their food. Eden is toying with her food more than eating it. If she were down in the hall, she would be earning a stiff reproach from the Cooks.

  She looks across the table at Romy, and calls out, ‘So you’ve got your period, then? What’s it like?’

  Romy’s face flames.

  All the way down at the foot of the table, Eilidh shines her sweet smile on her and waggles her fingers in greeting; rolls her eyes to show she knows how she feels. And Romy feels better, because if there’s Eilidh she will always have support. Eilidh and Ilo will always be on her side, however embarrassed she is.

  And then the apples are eaten and Lucien pushes his chair back and rises to his feet. Romy’s stomach lurches. Childhood is over.

  ‘Today is a day to rejoice,’ says Lucien, and the room erupts. Banging on tables. Spoons on glasses. The Cooks bustle up the aisles dispensing cider and squares of honey cake. Everyone apart from the children gets a glass of cider and everyone will drink. Romy sits with downcast eyes, for even on this special day there will be people watching her for signs of vanity. Especially her, with the mother she has. But she can’t stop a little smile from playing on her lips as she blushes. Me. They’re cheering for me.

  ‘Tonight,’ continues Lucien, ‘we welcome one of our young to the challenges and responsibilities of adulthood. Tonight, she is no longer a child, but stands shoulder to shoulder with us all. Welcome, Romy Blake. Welcome to the future.’