“Yes, that is him. Paranoia. The government tells us we are in danger, it tells us the Manna users hate us, they want to take over the world, and everyone must stop them. And, of course, we know some Manna users do want power, they are violent, they do not care who they hurt while they are taking what they want. But that is just a tiny number, tiny, compared to all Manna users. Good Manna users have to hide, pretend they are normal, not help someone who is bleeding on the street in case someone sees and they get tagged. It is a bad time, Yoni. A bad, bad time.”
“But it doesn’t have to be this way. If people stand up for what’s right…” Joni thought about the incomplete picture she had of her father. Mum had warned her to be on her guard with strangers, to avoid speaking about Dad as far as possible. She knew he was a Manna user, but something more than that. Mum had promised to tell her the whole story, but when? Joni knew how hard it was for Mum to talk about Dad, but she had to know. She had to know why Uncle John and Kate (or Martha, as members of the community sometimes called her) looked at her that way sometimes. Sadly, pitying, lovingly, but also curiously. As if they were waiting for her to do something. Maybe something that would scare them. Or perhaps she was just being ridiculous. She looked at Odd. He was still speaking.
“But how often do people stand up for what is right, Yoni? It is so much easier to look the other way, tell yourself it is important to protect your family. How can you be worrying about other people’s families? Who can be so brave? I do not know. It is easier in books.”
Joni decided to take a risk.
“I don’t know much about my father,” she said. “I never met him.” Joni was used to speaking about Dad this way. People assumed he must be dead and didn’t ask many questions. But Odd just waited for her to go on. So, she did.
“He wasn’t like other people. He had something people wanted, he was powerful. But he never asked for it.”
Joni paused. This was already more than she’d spoken about her father to anyone other than Mum, Uncle John or Kate for the whole of her life.
“He and Mum, they had to hide. Change their names. Everyone wanted something from him. Some wanted him dead. But he wanted to help people. I think he would still be helping people now if he could.”
“What was his name, this Mr Patel?”
Joni shrugged. She wanted to say her father’s name to someone. Make him feel more real.
“Patel is my mother’s name. His name was Varden. Seb Varden.”
He looked at her, his expression hard to read. She looked back. Neither said anything. Then they were kissing, and Manna users, tagging, riots, even the woods and the rain that had begun to patter onto the branches above them, faded into the background until there was just her, a boy, and a kiss.
The last morning of the course was the best and worst day of Joni’s life so far.
The best bit came in the morning. Joni had packed her clothes back into her suitcase, said her goodbyes. The group were exchanging addresses, emails, social media nicknames. Joni hung back a little. She had Mell’s number in one pocket. In the other was Odd’s London address and cell phone number. He had laughed when she said she had no email address - in fact, no internet presence at all. Then, when he’d realized she was being serious, he’d written his email down anyway.
“One day you will be joining civilization, you know. Can’t hide away on your island for the rest of your life.”
He’d kissed her again. He’d kissed her a lot during the last two days, even risking being seen on a couple of occasions in the hotel itself. But nothing had felt like the first kiss. Joni imagined that was how it must always be with first kisses in relationships. It was always good, but it could never compare to the first time. Not that she would ever have another relationship, of course. Because this was true love.
Joni didn’t know then that she’d got relationships backward. They didn’t start at the peak, then plateau. They were supposed to get better. She didn’t realize until much, much later why that first kiss had felt quite so intense. It was because Odd had known then that there would be no relationship.
He had been kissing her goodbye.
As Joni made her way to the downstairs room that Rae had used all week as an office, she was surprised to see Mell coming out, her expression grim, her eyes slightly puffy and red-rimmed.
“Mell? Are you ok? What happened?”
Mell shrugged off her attempt at a hug and looked at Joni, sniffing loudly.
“It’s all right for you, it all just comes pouring out, doesn’t it? Some of us have to work hard, you know, we sweat blood to come up with one sentence that doesn’t sound like tired crap. Well, Miss shit-for-brains in there thinks I might be better off as a trolley-dolly for British Airways. Apparently,” raising her voice now, “I have the tits for it. Well, FUCK YOU.” This last was delivered as she half-ran down the corridor.
Joni stood alone for nearly a minute, wondering if she wanted to go in or not. Did she really want to find out that Rae thought she’d make great flower arranger, or perhaps an accountant? Could she bear someone stomping on her dreams? The problem was, she respected Rae’s opinion. She’s read some of her work and the prose was tight, spare and powerful. Joni cared what she thought.
She took a deep breath and knocked on the door.
“Miss shit-for-brains is now in session,” came the reply. Joni went in.
As she headed back to the hotel lobby to pick up her bag, say her goodbyes and wait for the taxi that would take her back to the station, she felt as if she were floating. Rae had been direct and unflattering, as she had promised. She had started with Joni’s weaknesses: an occasional tendency towards flowery prose, which needed to be reined in, a preponderance of dark metaphors, the occasional unnecessary adverb, a slightly simplistic black/white, good/evil world view which could only be partly excused by her age. But…but. A strong voice, a cohesive style, an inexhaustible curiosity and a willingness to learn.
“You’re a writer, Joni. Whatever else you may be, you will always be a writer. It’s obvious. As plain as the nose on my face. Don’t look quite so happy. You’ll need to feel the lows as well as the highs if you ever hope to move anyone with your words. Good luck.”
Fifteen minutes later, as Joni reached the lobby, found her bag and started scanning the faces for Odd, she didn’t realize how quickly she would be feeling the lows to which Rae had referred.
She couldn’t see him in the lobby, so Joni left her case and went outside. There was a gravel turning circle directly outside the hotel’s old-fashioned brass-framed doors, and it was full of parents’ cars, picking up their offspring before returning them home for Christmas.
As she walked along the line of nose-to-tail cars, Joni smiled at all the hugging going on, the shouts of greeting. She was still smiling when she saw the back of Mell’s head. She was standing by a tree. There was a hand stroking her hair while its owner was enthusiastically delivering what looked more like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation than a kiss. Funny, Mell had never mentioned a boyfriend. Then the kissing couple disengaged for a moment, before finding a new position, the hand moving from her hair to one of her breasts.
Joni stopped smiling as the familiar blonde curls came into view. Then those blue eyes locked with hers and she turned and ran, stumbling as she made for the hotel. Blinded with tears, she headed upstairs and flung herself into the nearest restroom, finding the furthest stall and locking the door behind her.
She waited there for an hour before drying her eyes, going back to the lobby and calling another taxi to replace the one that must have given up and gone.
There were no cars at all left on the drive. As she watched, a coach crunched across the gravel and came to a halt. The door opened, and about forty children emerged, whooping, laughing, screaming and running around the lobby, pursued by tired -looking adults. Joni saw the taxi. She picked up her bag, walked out of the hotel and climbed into the back of the car. The driver set off. They passed the tree where Mell and Odd ha
d been kissing. Joni didn’t look.
10
It wasn’t until she had flung her luggage into the overhead rack, slumped in a seat, spent half an hour crying and almost as long sleeping that Joni calmed down enough to become aware of the tingling sensation. Even then it took a long time for her to recognize what was happening, what it meant.
The ticket collector had taken one look at her red face and tear-streaked cheeks and said, not unkindly, “Eh, well, pet, if it’s over a bloke, don’t waste your tears. Most of us are complete bastards.”
To her relief, the train was quiet and her carriage was almost empty. She knew it was likely to take on more passengers at the various stops between Haltwhistle and Newcastle, where she would have to wait nearly two hours for the bus north.
She watched the countryside go by in a blur. The blur wasn’t due to the speed of the train, rather the state of the windows, which looked like they hadn’t been cleaned since Year Zero. The monotonous green-brown view of the landscape, the gentle swaying of the carriage and the metallic clatter of the wheels had a soporific effect on the exhausted Joni, and she slipped into a dream.
In the dream, she was falling from a tree. She knew the tree, it was one of the tallest oaks on the island and had once been her favorite for climbing. She had stopped, abruptly, years ago, and although she continued climbing elsewhere, she had an almost superstitious fear of that particular tree. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d climbed it.
Her dream-self had no fear of the oak and had climbed a good distance into its branches before the dream properly began. When Joni became lucidly, consciously aware, she was upside-down, pulling herself along a branch, as confident and nonchalant as a spider monkey.
When she fell, the initial fear and disorientation were almost immediately replaced by a sense of curiosity and wonder. Her fall slowed, her stomach unclenched after the initial lurch when she had lost her grip. She opened her eyes. Her body was turning as she fell in slow motion. She looked up at the sky first, noticing—with a jolt of recognition—a piece of yellow rag tied around the branch from which she’d fallen. Then she twisted and looked down at the clearing below. She could see a small girl walking towards the main cluster of buildings on the island. She was wearing a white T-shirt. White with sunflowers. Another jolt of recognition, a fizz of memory. Joni twisted in the air. She saw another, identical figure, the sunflowers clearly visible on the T-shirt, frozen in mid-skip, heading toward the beach. Dream-Joni looked at her own T-shirt then as it rippled slowly in the wind, seeing the same sunflowers. She twisted again and looked directly below. A third girl, a fourth if you counted the falling Joni, was sitting at the base of the tree.
I remember this. I remember falling.
Suddenly the speed of the dream decided to align with real-world forces, and without warning, Joni’s lazy, sycamore seed descent turned into a plummet. She heard her neck break on impact. For a moment, although her body was facing away from the tree, her broken neck meant she was looking straight at the seated girl. She was looking at the seated girl at the same time as she was looking at her broken body through the eyes of the seated girl.
An announcement was made over the train’s tannoy and Joni was pulled into the hinterland between sleep and full wakefulness. She was only there for a couple of seconds, but it was long enough for her to remember why this dream seemed important. Why it seemed more than a dream. With the strange, slow clarity that can arise before the conscious mind is fully engaged, Joni remembered the other girl she’d seen in her room that day. The day she asked Mum if she could go on the writing course. And her unconscious mind cajoled her conscious brain to make the connections - and realize the dream hadn’t come out of nowhere: it was a memory.
She was fully awake, and—now that she was paying more attention to the tingling sensation—she became aware of a deep, rumbling tone underscoring the rhythmic metal dance of wheels on tracks. The sound wasn’t external, it had an intimacy which was both familiar and unnerving.
Joni had grown up with a child’s fantasy of being different, special, chosen. Because of the mystery surrounding her father, she’d never quite grown out of it. If Dad had wielded some strange power, how was it possible that she could be so…normal? She’d done the math. She had been conceived before Year Zero. Two months before. There was no reason why she wouldn’t be able to use Manna. But she remembered what had happened when a User had tried to cure her glandular fever. Her body had rejected the Manna completely. She remembered the sensation. So, not only couldn’t she Use, but she couldn’t even be helped by other Manna users. Great. Sub-normal.
She felt a frisson of fear. If this wasn’t Manna, what was it? She could feel a build-up of power inside her, like a massive subterranean generator coming online. And as she turned her attention fully toward it, she felt the significance of the moment like a physical pressure. She only half-believed something was about to happen. But she knew, if it did, that nothing would ever be the same again.
For a moment, she hesitated. But only for a moment.
Joni closed her eyes and focused on the tingling. At first, it was hard to do. Other thoughts started jostling for attention, insistent and distracting. Initially, she fought against the distractions, before remembering her daily Innisfarne meditations. She tried to shift her mindset, allowing the distracting thoughts to exist without feeding them.
It was like a soccer player Joni had seen once. Half the community had gathered around Innisfarne’s only TV set to watch a match which was considered significant in the world outside the quiet island. A man called George had explained some of the rules as the game had progressed, and, with less than a minute left before the end, Joni felt she had a fair understanding of what was going on. No one had scored a goal, despite numerous attempts, and, as the seconds ticked away, one of the teams had focused completely on defense, bringing all their players back into their own half and fending off every attack by sheer weight of numbers. George had explained this was a sound strategy, if a little frustrating to watch, as the defending team would win some sort of league if they didn’t lose this match. The attacking team had to score a goal if they wanted to win.
The player Joni remembered had lined up a free kick. He was a long way out from the goal. Too far, Joni had thought, but George had assured her it was possible for a great striker to score from that distance. Every other player had been forced to back away from him until the referee blew his whistle. When he did, the player had begun his run-up, but, as he did so, every player in the opposing team had sprinted toward him, shouting, looking for all the world like an advancing army intent on pulling him apart. But the player had taken his shot as if they didn’t exist and the ball had sailed over their heads, curling in the air before burying itself in the top left corner of the goal, thereby winning the match.
The slow-motion replay had fascinated Joni. She looked at the man’s face as he ran toward the chaotic scene: the snarling faces of the opposing team, the huge spotlights pinning their dark shadows to the artificial turf, the roar of tens of thousands of fans on their feet as the fate of their favorite team came down to one single moment. One single kick. And yet the player’s face was utterly calm, completely focused, clearly completely unmoved by everything that was conspiring to distract him. In those few seconds, he was just a man kicking a football to the best of his ability. He might have been doing it in his backyard, he was so relaxed.
Joni thought about the football player as she turned her focus inward and concentrated. But it was no good. Her brain seemed unable to screen out what wasn’t necessary. She kept seeing Odd’s face. And every time it appeared, she saw him kissing Mell. Over and over, her mind adding details she couldn’t have seen: his tongue sliding between Mell’s lips, his hands pulling her closer, their bodies pushed hard together, his fingers unbuttoning her shirt. Then she started imagining what might have come next. Did the pair of them sneak away? Find a quiet spot in the forest? Tear each other’s clothes off, franti
c in their desperation to feel naked skin against naked skin?
Joni opened her eyes again.
“For God’s sake, Jones, get it together,” she said, her voice suddenly loud in the quiet carriage. An old man she hadn’t noticed lowered his newspaper and gave her a look full of despair at the prospects of the younger generation.
“Sorry,” she said, and shuffled further along her seat until she couldn’t see him.
She remembered the football player again. Concentrate. Nothing else exists. She needed to narrow her focus to one event. She just needed to kick the ball.
She forced her mind away from Odd and Mell by focussing instead on that moment in her room when she had the newspaper lying on her bed, folded to show the advertisement for the writing course. She had read it over and over, getting increasingly excited. She had known she had to go. She had been preparing her arguments, as she was convinced Mum would be against it. Decision made, she had been about to get up, go and find Mum, ask her if she could go. She’d been sitting on the bed at the moment she’d made the decision.
As she remembered this, the low hum became more prominent. It wasn’t that it got louder, more that its constant presence became suddenly obvious as other thoughts were pushed aside. The tingling became more pronounced, too—almost painful— as her bedroom on Innisfarne appeared in front of her closed eyes, the details filling in on their own. She could see herself sitting on the bed. Then the hum became a roar, swelling within the space of one second, to a cacophony that overwhelmed everything, bringing darkness as it reached an unbearable peak of sound which shook her entire body.
Abruptly, everything stopped. The roar, the tingling. And, Joni realized, the sound of the train had stopped too. She could hear a blackbird’s song, the murmur of distant voices. Hesitantly, she took her hands from her lap and placed them next to her. She felt the distinctive padded patchwork quilt she’d had on her bed for as long as she could remember.
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