The Poison Garden

by Alex Marwood

  She stands. The room erupts again. Thunder in her ears, part pulse, part deafening noise. Lucien, all smiles, presses his palms to her cheeks again, then enfolds her in a paternal, masterly hug. He smells of soap and wood smoke. And some rich woody fragrance that she doesn’t think originates among the flora of north Wales. When he lets go, he manoeuvres her round to face the crowd. She sees her friends from the Pigshed, applauding. Her mother’s hands clasped in front of her face, in prayer position.

  Lucien raises a hand. His people sit. It’s funny, thinks Romy, that I don’t have to say anything myself. But I suppose it makes sense. I may feel special, but all I’m really doing is becoming a part of the great totality. I’ve a long way to go before I’m important enough to speak. And part of her feels glad, for she’s not sure that her voice would work. She looks up at Lucien and feels a glow of love. She feels energised, electrified, changed. Ready.

  A chair is placed at the front of the stage by two of the Cooks, in front of the Family. Beside it, a little table. On its surface, the large shears they use for cutting sinew in the kitchen, the clippers, a small blue bag. She steps away from Lucien and takes her new seat, hearing the thud thud thud in her head. And then Vita is there, bending down to her, smiling into her face and planting a light, rose-scented kiss on each of her cheeks. They smell so good, the Leaders. ‘Congratulations, Romy,’ she murmurs. ‘Welcome to the world.’

  Romy sits. Bows her head while Vita removes her coronet and lays it gently on the table. Then Vita takes the shears, brushes Romy’s mane of thick, shiny, waist-length hair off her face, coils it around and around her hand until it is taut, and turns her into an adult.

  * * *

  * * *

  She has never felt so naked. She longs to put a hand up and feel the shape of her skull, run her fingers over her moleskin scalp. So this is how my mother felt, she thinks, but without the shame. Her warm blanket of hair, protection against the cold, has been tied with a ribbon and dropped into the blue velvet bag. She will never see it again. Vita replaces the coronet. It itches and prickles, the newly exposed skin tender as a baby’s. She will wear it, nonetheless, until it begins to wilt, and then the Cooks will take it away, hang it on a chimney wall to dry, wrap it in tissue paper and give it to her for her box, a souvenir of her great day.

  She doesn’t know it, but her eyes look huge. Bambi eyes.

  19 | Romy

  2009

  At the end of her Assignment Ceremony in the Council Chamber, Vita stays behind when Uri leaves, with some pretext of Women’s Talk that sends him hurrying for the door. Then she closes it behind him and turns to Romy with the sweet smile they see too rarely these days.

  ‘Are you happy?’

  Would it matter if I weren’t? thinks Romy. But she smiles back and pronounces herself delighted. In a way, she is. She’s not to be a Farmer or a Launderer or a Cook. But nor is she a Healer or an Engineer. She is to live outside the Hierarchies. Attached to the Healers but not of them. Special, and yet not. Medical Horticulturalist: the only one in the compound. Always just on the outside, looking in.

  ‘It’s not the end,’ says Vita. ‘Understand that. We can’t just make you a Healer, not straight away. We made your mother one, after all, and she let us down.’

  ‘I’m not my mother,’ says Romy.

  ‘No,’ says Vita. ‘And you can earn your place.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘How?’

  ‘By proving that the trust we’ve put in you is justified, Romy,’ says Vita. ‘There’s hardly anyone in the compound, especially not one your age, who gets so much trust.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, meaning it a little more as she thinks about the estate, the farm, the moorland, the woods. It will all be hers. As long as her work is done, as long as they can see that her work is done, she will be able to go wherever she chooses. Maybe one day she will even get to go out among the Dead and see their world, for she is to apprentice with the Beemaster as well, taking care of the hives that remain when he takes the others out into the world to pollinate orchards and market gardens and great fields of flowers and bring back the foreign honey. Honey is life itself. The Cooks use it in the kitchen and the Healers keep it sealed up in sterile jars, as an antiseptic for dressing wounds.

  My knife will be useful, she thinks. I’m glad I made it. I shall need a sturdy blade, to harvest tough stems. A blade and a spade and an eye for ripeness. I’ve learned the plants already; that’s why they’ve chosen me. All that time I’ve spent in the physic garden, the lessons I learned from Somer, the books I carried with me everywhere: I may not be a Healer yet, but I shall at least be a Someone.

  She is to take charge of the physic garden. But more. Romy is to be both forager and protector. She is to cover the whole of Plas Golau with her observant eye, ripping up Destroying Angels as they sprout, plucking out the hemlock, the ragwort, the henbane, the bryony, the water dropwort, the nightshades: everything poisonous to livestock as well as humans. She is to carry bags for the good, the bad and the in-between, and bring the latter two to Vita for disposal. Vita disposes of all the poisons herself, since the accident when two people collapsed after inhaling the fumes from burning rhododendron.

  She can earn her way into the Infirmary, they have assured her. Do her job well, be diligent, be tireless, bring home the analgesics and the antipyretics, the unbroken cobwebs for clotting wounds, the docks to soothe the rashes, the mints to settle stomachs. The poisons, as well. Many poisons are also medicines, of course. The plants that both cure and kill must come back to the Infirmary with her in a basket, as undamaged as she can manage. And bring them back well enough and one day, one day, Romy, we will trust you to do more.

  ‘I need you to do something for me, Romy,’ says Vita. ‘We’re old friends.’

  Romy glows.

  ‘Lucien is very tired,’ says Vita. ‘Caring for us all, making decisions for us all, worrying for our future – it takes it out of him. Do you see?’

  Romy nods. ‘He is so good to us.’

  ‘I do what I can to ease his burden.’ Vita sighs. ‘He can’t be everywhere, but nor can I. And people – some people – they’re not as loyal as they should be. We need to work together. You know that. We’re only as strong as our weakest link.’

  Romy falls quiet. Sometimes, in the dormitories, in the kitchens and the corridors, she has heard rumbles of discontent. Complaints, contempt, bad words about their peers. It’s the fact that she was still a child, of course. People forget that children have ears.

  ‘I need you to be my eyes, Romy,’ says Vita. ‘You can be anywhere. That’s the great privilege of this position. I need you to be my ears. People see me coming and they change. You, they won’t even notice.’

  Romy gulps, nods. Vita wants her to be a spy. The price of her freedom will be spying on her comrades.

  ‘I don’t want you to denounce,’ says Vita. ‘Not that. I’m not asking you to have people punished. It’s just for me. So I know. So I know when there’s a problem beginning. So I can do something to help. Do you understand? Just pause, when you’re near, and listen. To the Farmers, the Blacksmiths, the Teachers. To the Guards, down in that house away from all the rest. I can’t be everywhere. Just listen, when you can.’

  The Guards. She’d known that they were going to come up. The unease between Vita and Uri is ever more noticeable: The flow of words that stops when the other comes within earshot, the tiny jerks of the head that indicate offence. She wants me to watch the Guards, she thinks. And she’s not surprised.

  * * *

  * * *

  The first hill frost has settled while she’s been indoors. She gasps as she pulls open the door to the Great Hall, begins instantly to shiver in her silly thin dress, her naked scalp exposed to the blasting cold. The dormitory she shares with seven other women – she stopped sleeping in the same quarters as her mother when she was seven years
old – is two hundred yards away. It’s an old wooden chalet beyond the courtyard wall that used to be the home of a single counsellor back in the days when Plas Golau was a prison for troubled teens, and she’s privileged to be there rather than in the old potting sheds where Farmers like her mother live. But she is barefoot, and it never occurred to anyone to bring a coat for her from the Bath House, and the air is cold, and once she’s beyond the courtyard wall she will be all alone in the dark.

  She holds on to the banister as she descends the Great House steps, for the stone can be icy on a cold night. And when she hits the gravel she starts to run, eager for the warmth awaiting her.

  A figure steps into the gateway and bars her way. It’s Uri.

  Romy skids to a halt ten feet away, eyes him suspiciously, unsure whether to go back or forward.

  ‘Hello, 143,’ he says. ‘A word, if you don’t mind.’

  Among the Dead

  November 2016

  20 | Sarah

  There’s a toilet at the back of the staff room, and although there’s a general one much closer to her office she tends to use this one, because a toilet used by adults is always going to be more fragrant than one accessed by several hundred children. She likes to use it in the middle of the second period in the morning and the first after lunch, when most of the staff are in classrooms or meetings and the coast is likely to be as clear as it ever will be. A strange inhibition left over from her upbringing: that the sound of other people sharing the space makes her bladder freeze. The relief when she’s out in public and finds a disabled toilet is always intense. As a child she would run home in lunch break simply to pee, and then – oh, the fear that she might be too late one day – to change the bulky towels with which her mother preserved her putative virginity. You don’t shed inhibitions like that overnight.

  Ten a.m. and she’s sitting on the toilet when the sound of the outer door opening makes her muscles clench. She checks her watch. Another twenty minutes until the next changeover. She has time to sit it out.

  ‘... who it was?’ asks a voice as it passes through the door. A woman, with another. Not all the staff are teaching all the time, of course.

  ‘I should think someone on staff with kids in the school, don’t you?’

  ‘Careless talk costs lives.’

  ‘Little pitchers have big ears.’

  ‘True. Anyway, whatever. It took three weeks but the cat’s well and truly out of the bag now. Tricia says the phone’s been ringing all day.’

  Tricia. The principal’s PA. Something wrong, clearly.

  ‘It’s ridiculous. It’s not like either of them was implicated. They’re hardly, you know, going to be poisoning the water supply.’

  Oh, hell. This can only be about one thing.

  ‘Try telling that to the parents.’

  ‘I know, I know. It would help if they weren’t so weird, though, wouldn’t it? Have you got them in any of your classes?’

  ‘The girl.’

  ‘I’ve got both. Do they ever take their eyes off you for one second?’

  A shiver-laugh. ‘No! It’s freaky! It makes me feel like I must have my skirt tucked into my knickers!’

  ‘Oh, I think Ben McArdle would let you know if that were the case!’

  ‘Or Marie Spence.’

  ‘God, I wish someone would poison her.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  The doors either side of her cubicle close and lock. I could make a run for it now, she thinks, but toilet gossip – so unguarded – is the best chance for information that she’ll get.

  ‘Poor sods,’ says the voice to her left, ‘they don’t stand a chance, really. Even without everyone finding out. I mean, she’s a bit weird herself, isn’t she? Who’s going to show them how to be normal?’

  ‘Oh, I know. Scurrying around like a squirrel, apologising all the time.’

  Sarah’s cheeks burn. It is never a privilege, hearing how other people see one. You don’t have the first idea! she screams inside her head. How brave I have to be every single day just to leave the house.

  ‘Isn’t she part of that Congregation lot on the High Street?’

  ‘Is she? Well, the apple doesn’t fall far.’

  ‘Imagine,’ says the voice to her right, ‘you get freed from one cult and they put you straight back into another.’

  ‘It does seem tough.’

  ‘What does Helen say?’

  ‘Oh, you know Helen. All “I daresay”s and “maybe”s. You’ll never get a judgement out of a therapist.’

  ‘And in the meantime we get to deal with the fallout.’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe we need another bullying assembly or something?’

  ‘Oh, please God, no. It was bad enough after the last one when half of Year Nine decided they were non-binary.’

  ‘Yes, but I do feel sorry for them. That Marie’s a stirring little minx.’

  ‘What’s she done?’

  ‘Says they smell, says the girl has a thing for her, keeps asking people if anything’s gone missing from their locker while staring at them. The usual.’

  ‘They don’t help themselves, though, do they? All that walking around together like he’s her bodyguard or something.’

  ‘And the clothes! What was she thinking?’

  ‘I know! The shoes!’

  ‘And those smiles! They’re like ... puppets or something.’

  A flush on one side, a flush the other. The doors unlock.

  ‘Well, we shall see what we shall see.’

  ‘Yes, well, they’ll either carry on being freaks or they’ll learn to fit in.’

  Footsteps cross the floor and the door slams shut behind them. Sarah finally urinates, and burns with rage. They talk about my children like that, she thinks, and they don’t even wash their hands when they’ve been to the loo, the dirty bitches.

  21 | Romy

  Two years after my brother Ilo was born, four young men with backpacks full of explosives entered the London Transport system. They never left, and nor did fifty-two commuters who shared their bus and railway carriages. In Tokyo in 1995, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas on the subway, and twelve people choked to death on their own bodily secretions. In 1987, a mix of hair, skin flakes and grease, built up on the underside of an escalator, burst into flames and the rising tunnel funnelled the blazing heat straight into the faces of thirty-one people in the ticket hall of King’s Cross station. It took seventeen years to identify one of the bodies.

  Millions ride it every day, but just the thought of entering those tunnels sends a shiver down my spine. Father got hold of photographs from inside those train carriages and showed them to us on the dining hall projector screen. Blood and intestines, jagged metal, body parts, a handbag abandoned on a slatted wooden floor. Safe in Plas Golau, I never dreamed of putting myself at that kind of risk.

  There are buses to Finbrough. They go from a town called Reading. But the buses to Reading go from Heathrow, and Heathrow is two stops on the Piccadilly line from Hounslow West and the police will pick you up if you try to walk along the airport roads. It might as well be in Croatia. No amount of beta blockers and mindfulness and breathing techniques will get me through those tunnels. I went into the station concourse, and the rush of hot wind coming up the escalator felt like the very breath of hell, and sent me back into the flat for two more days. I’m not the person I was, baby. I’ve seen death, and it’s left me weak.

  So I try hitch-hiking. Somer used to do it all the time, she told me, with me tucked into a papoose across her breasts. We spent the summer after I was born on what she called the ‘festival circuit’, her running Chai Tea stalls and bacon sandwich stalls and delivering something called ‘e’ to tents while I crawled about in the mud under the laissez-faire eyes of people with dreadlocks and tattoos and feathers in their hair. It was
on that circuit that she met Vita, who gave her work in the Ark’s mobile café in August and took her to the Glastonbury house when the season ended in September. So, in the end, hitch-hiking is what made me. Made us. Brought us to Plas Golau.

  It’s surprisingly easy. I don’t have to stand for more than ten minutes on the A4 with a sign I’ve made from cardboard before a woman in a vehicle so grand I have to step up to get into it stops and throws open her door.

  ‘You really shouldn’t be hitching,’ she says. ‘I only stopped because frankly you look as if you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s not safe, you know. There’s all sorts on the roads.’

  ‘I know,’ I reply. I’m getting better and better at making up stories. ‘But the car broke down and I promised I’d take my grandmother to church.’

  ‘Well, that’s good of you.’ The seat is made of leather and I swear there’s a heat source somewhere inside. I settle back and feel my aching hips go aaaahhhh. ‘But I bet she wouldn’t want her granddaughter standing on the side of the A4 looking for lifts. I’m sure she’d be okay to miss church just this once.’

  ‘She’s in a wheelchair,’ I say. And this seems to satisfy her.

  She goes out of her way to drop me in Finbrough – she’s going all the way to Newbury to look at a horse, she says. I’m surprised there are no horses closer to London to look at, but perhaps it’s a special horse. She gives me a thing called an energy bar to eat as we join the M4 motorway, and asks when I’m due.

  ‘February,’ I tell her, which I think is about right. But I’m a bit appalled that she’s spotted it so easily. I’d thought the extra weight I’d put on was a good enough disguise, but six months is six months, I suppose.

  ‘Well, promise me you won’t be such a fool again,’ she says, and presses the accelerator to take us into the fast lane.