‘Someone get Miss Hope!’ she cried, and Sabitha’s best friend in the world, Martha Tilly, nodded and ran off towards the Hedge School building. Sabitha continued screaming, weeping too, and the other children drifted close but not too close – she was an injured thing after all, they didn’t want to upset her further.
Bruno turned away, finding support on the iron fence that surrounded the Hedge School and its grounds. He was shaking, couldn’t control his limbs, breathing incomplete, telling himself: just calm down now. It’s fine. All be fine. She deserved it. And there’s not a thing I can do now, anyway. No way to be taking it back. Wouldn’t even want to take it back!
But no amount of talking to himself, trying to rationalise things, could overcome visiting terrors. He felt deadened and triumphant at the same time. Glad he’d done it, but regretted the fuss it would cause. Bruno felt dominated by the act. As far as anyone else was concerned, he would now be that Bruno Atlas, the boy who punched the Marshall’s daughter. Another title to add to the list: Bruno Atlas, Son of a Hero! Bruno Atlas, Son of the Last Man to Die at the Hands of the Rebels! Bruno Atlas, the Boy Who Tells Lies …
A breeze fussed with his hair. He reached instinctively for the medallion he’d taken to carrying with him, freed from his Owl-Sentry, from around his father’s pocket-watch: silver chain, silver half-moon like a narrowed, suspicious eye, small silver storm-petrel in the centre. After ten turns the metal was still without scratch or dent. Beyond the fact it had been his father’s, something about its untainted endurability gave him comfort.
Then he heard a shout behind –
‘Bruno Atlas! What in the name of Pitch have ye done now, ye nasty little boy?’
Miss Hope, he thought dully, and then folded, opening his mouth to let the gush of his stinging insides splatter the playground.
‘Yer father would be rightly-ashamed,’ Miss Hope told Bruno. ‘If he was seeing how ye are now and what ye’ve been doing these days with all yer disagreeing contrariness, he’d be right to disown ye! What could Miss McCormack possibly have come out with to warrant being beaten so violently?’
‘I didn’t beat her, I just—’
‘No excuses and none of yer usual backchat – just an answer!’
‘She said that my da—’ began Bruno. He stopped. He glanced at the Cat-Sentry poised on Miss Hope’s desk, heard the low purr of clockwork tucked inside its slim body, watched the slow twist of its winding key between sharp ears. Bruno took a breath and continued: ‘She said me da wasn’t a right-real hero. And that I shouldn’t be thinking meself any better than anyone else.’
Miss Hope looked at him, then folded her arms.
‘And?’ she said. ‘What is so rightly-awful about that, Master Atlas? If ye’re so keen on the truth in our classes (with all those impertinent questions all the time) then I would’ve thought ye wouldn’t mind being told what so many are thinking, oftentimes.’
Bruno didn’t reply.
Alone in the classroom together but not alone at all. Miss Hope’s words were a lure. She wanted him to lash out and then the Cat-Sentry would sense it, jerk to life, gobble his words, recording them and taking them to the Elders and he would be whisked away, excluded for the good of all from ‘rightly-decent’ society. It had happened to others.
For a long time, children had been disappearing. Bruno tried to decide on an exact time, but of course didn’t know. How long? Months or turns? He was unsure, but just knew it, felt it, most acutely in more recent times – the classroom was emptying, and not just from children Coming-Of-Age and leaving. Children who’d spoken ‘indecently’ (too much about the past, talking of things that should’ve been Forgotten, Temperate Thomas’s order to Forget expanding to consume all past things, not just those who’d died) went and weren’t seen in Hedge School again. No one knew where they went. Bruno imagined them kept indoors by mortified parents; locked-in lives, small shames. So Bruno couldn’t speak or he’d risk punishment or removal, and he didn’t want to give Miss Hope the satisfaction of either.
Miss Hope followed Bruno’s gaze to the Sentry. Then a smirk from her.
Bruno thought, to hell with it!
‘Ye don’t know what me da would think or feel,’ said Bruno, ‘coz he’s dead. I remember him – he died for Pitch End. So don’t act like ye can even know anything about his feelings, ye stupid oul bat!’
Shouldn’t have said it, he thought straightaway. But, like punching Sabitha, knowing he shouldn’t have done it wasn’t the same as wishing he hadn’t.
One of Miss Hope’s hands scrambled to her chest and lay there. Her eyes darted from Bruno to the Cat-Sentry, which hadn’t moved, not even a twitch.
‘How dare ye!’ she managed to say then. ‘I really don’t have a notion what we’re going to do with ye.’ And though the usual trace of injured martyrdom was present in her, Bruno saw too the other side of Miss Hope emerging: anger.
‘Not a clue!’ she cried.
This last word was accompanied with a palm slapped on the table and Bruno saw the rest of the tables in the draughty classroom leap from the floor, hang for a blink, and then drop. Bruno’s heart began to thrum – Miss Hope had used her Talent. Almost no one in Pitch End was allowed – the Elders of course, and some other generally esteemed members of the community.
He tried not to look at her. He focused on the high, barred windows that held strips of dull sky; on the sounds of subdued play outside – silence, then a low laugh, footslaps and then the weight of more weary silence; on the chalkboard behind Miss Hope’s head, its black clouded with the ghosts of past lessons, on the Elder Advice stencilled tall and dark on white-washed walls: ‘Routine is the Enemy of Rebellion! Too Much Time Makes for Too Much Trouble!’
‘All yer daydreaming,’ Miss Hope was saying, her breathing shallow. Bruno dragged himself back to her. ‘Wouldn’t surprise me a bit that ye weren’t listening in this morning’s Definitive History lesson.’
Bruno glanced at the Cat-Sentry. Still no movement, despite all the things: the volume of Miss Hope’s voice, the use of her Talent, the mention of Definitive History – that should have piqued its attention.
‘Pardon me, Miss Hope,’ said Bruno, ‘but I was paying attention rightly.’
And he meant it. The chance to learn some small shred of Pitch End’s history – however garbled, ludicrous – was all that Bruno found interesting in Hedge School.
‘Is that right?’ said Miss Hope. ‘Well let’s be putting that to the test, Master Atlas.’ Once more using her Talent, the long, flat steel ruler that lay on her desk lifted, sliced through the air and slotted into Miss Hope’s waiting fingers.
Bruno swallowed.
‘Hold out your hands,’ said Miss Hope.
Bruno didn’t move.
Miss Hope hoisted one eyebrow.
Bruno had to hold out his palms, up and open, too innocent-looking and too pale. He fought a mounting tremble in them.
‘First question,’ said Miss Hope, and she extricated one sheet from the mass that lay on the table – the catastrophe of Pitch End Definitive History. The sheet was marked with a diagram like a family tree, illustrating the twelve generations of lighthouse in Pitch End. ‘Lighthouse number four,’ said Miss Hope, ‘how was it rightly and so violently destroyed in the year +41?’
Bruno knew the correct and true answer, knew it without thinking. But the answer in his mind was not Miss Hope’s desired one.
‘Well?’ said Miss Hope. She gripped the ruler more firmly.
‘Lighthouse number four,’ began Bruno, ‘was destroyed in the year +41…’
Bruno closed his eyes and struggled with himself. The words Miss Hope needed, the ones that would save him from punishment – he knew those well. But they were nonsense to him, illogical. Lies. He had a source all his own; one that he believed, knew as more truthful than any Miss Hope had.
He wet his lips, and said, ‘It met its end by…’
‘Go on,’ said Miss Hope.
Bruno op
ened his eyes, decided, and told what he knew to be the truth: ‘It met its end because one of the Elders, Elder Dishonest, brought it down with his Talent coz he wanted to murder that farmer who—’
He managed no more – the spill of words, the tide of truth, ceased with Miss Hope bringing the ruler down across his palms. Pain detonated everywhere, not just in the hands but his whole body, set blazing as though he’d dropped into cold water. He wanted to rush his hands to his chest, cradle and protect. But he didn’t. Didn’t want to give in.
‘The correct answer now, Master Atlas,’ said Miss Hope.
Bruno watched the tremble – not in his hands but Miss Hope’s. Heard it too in her voice. What he’d felt in the playground after striking Sabitha McCormack – what had made him retch – was infecting Miss Hope. But she mastered it quickly, fed off it. She could take comfort, Bruno thought, in the idea that what she did was the ‘right thing’. For his own good.
‘The right-real answer,’ Miss Hope said, raising the ruler for a second time.
Bruno said nothing. The words she wanted crawled up his throat in readiness, but he still couldn’t and wouldn’t and didn’t speak them.
‘I can’t say a right thing,’ he said.
‘Pardon me?’ said Miss Hope, narrowing one eye.
‘I said that I can’t be saying anything because nothing I say will be right.’
‘How can that be so, Master Atlas? Ye know right-well the correct answer. Two and two equals four, does it not?’
Bruno nodded.
‘And this is just the very same. Just give the correct answer. By the mountains – I’m no monster! And as yer teacher I can ask no more than the truth from ye.’
Clever, thought Bruno. Pushing, just like Sabitha had. He knew all Miss Hope’s efforts were aimed at making him feel like the stupid one, like his way of looking at things was the wrong way.
‘Fine,’ he said at last, realising that the lie would cost him nothing so long as he knew it as a lie, never truly believed it. ‘The demise of lighthouse number four was as a result of the rightly-nasty and opportunistic attempt on the Mayor’s life by one of the Rebels. The bullet from the Rebel rifle ricocheted off one of the pillars of the town hall, hit the back of a jellyfish in the Sea of Apparitions and struck the lighthouse, shattering the glass … and that was that.’
Miss Hope’s nostrils flared.
‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s not entirely correct.’
The ruler fell on his palms again and again and again and Bruno shut his eyes during, wishing himself out of his body, away from pain, far even from Pitch End…
‘The right-real answer perhaps,’ said Miss Hope, stopping, Bruno hearing the exhilaration in her breathing, ‘but the very wrong attitude. And the way we say things is just as important as the content of them, is it not?’
Bruno opened his eyes. He didn’t look at his hands.
‘No,’ he said, his voice breaking. ‘It’s the truth that matters, not how I say some lies.’
‘Is that so?’ said Miss Hope.
Bruno waited, and then said, ‘It is so. And you know it too, not so deep down.’
Neither of them moved. Bruno kept his hands steady, palms throbbing, still expectant of more. Bruno looked into Miss Hope’s eyes, blank as frozen puddles, and refused a waver in his gaze. And he knew their thoughts were the same.
‘You should never have done it,’ said Bruno. ‘I know the truth about the lighthouse because of that book, and we’d know more of the right-real truth if you’d never have burned it when—’
‘Silence!’ Miss Hope hissed, and she didn’t strike him but instead took her hands to the ears of the Cat-Sentry. Her eyes were shut and her narrow body shook. Bruno thought her almost breakable.
‘Why is it, Atlas,’ she said between deep breaths, ‘that ye always say the things ye should just be keeping in yer head, and then only think what ye should be saying?’
Bruno didn’t reply – she hadn’t been the first who’d said this to him.
‘Go,’ said Miss Hope, ‘and I don’t care what ye say or do with yerself now. I wash me hands of ye. Ye can only go on like this so long. And I for one will not shed a tear on the day the Elders and Enforcers come for ye.’
‘I’m not afeared of them,’ said Bruno, his voice struggling with a sob.
Miss Hope replied with eyes still closed and hands still clamped over the Cat-Sentry’s hearing, in a low whisper: ‘Ye right-well should be. And no made-up stories, no Tall Tales are gonna be saving ye then.’
V
The Tall Tale of the Dishonest Elder
At ten turns old Bruno saw words he shouldn’t have in a book he shouldn’t have found: a book of stories. And he found it in a place he shouldn’t have been. He thought of it ever after, referred to it in the privacy of his own thoughts, as the Day of Discovery.
The only printed words Bruno knew were those in Jack Pitch’s The Wrath: every Pitch Ender’s guide, standard-issue, given at birth. Everything (‘And more than anyone should be looking to know or learn!’ said the Elders) was detailed within those scarlet covers, all clear and no-nonsense. So to discover a different book – to discover anything other than the usual and the approved in Pitch End – took searching, going places you weren’t supposed to. But first, you had to find time.
On the morning of his Day of Discovery Bruno stood in his back garden, sweating. Swelter Season, wide sky stale and blue-bland, not a cloud, the wider world of the town closed off because all action was dictated by the Work-Dial, a stone disc on a stone stump with an iron needle two-hands high, top and centre. Like The Wrath, all Pitch End households had one. After time had been taken from them when Bruno was five turns, the Work-Dial was how the townsfolk were told what to be doing with themselves.
Bruno looked to the needle’s imperious shadow – it lay in one of the sections with the chiselled word WORK. EAT & DRINK – the three thinnest divisions on the surface of the stone disc – were separated by WORK and yet again, WORK … other than this, only SHUT-EYE.
WORK for Bruno meant Hedge School or, at weekends, house-WORK. For his mother WORK meant Official Mourning in the town hall with the other Widows of Pitch End. Saturday and Sunday she left a list for Bruno – things to be washed, ironed, scrubbed, dusted, emptied, washed up again. But he’d grown good at working fast, accomplishing things like chores quick. By midday on the Day of Discovery he’d finished all his mother’s orders. He was alone then, bored and curious.
Bruno went to his room and tugged the curtains closed.
His hiding habit had flourished: from under his bed, under a loose floorboard, he took his old Owl-Sentry. The Sentry had never worked as it should’ve, but it had been invaluable anyway. It still held safe the brass pocket watch of his father – unable to be opened, though Bruno had tried for long hours. Around it were crammed loose sheets, articles he’d snipped from the Pitch End Journal. He shouldn’t have had these any more than he should’ve had a pocket watch. Every night as Curfew drove townsfolk home, the shadow of the Work-Dial’s needle settling on SHUT-EYE, that day’s copy of the Pitch End Journal was left out on every doorstep. There surrendered, the journals were disappeared in the night and taken to the town hall (by Enforcers, Bruno had heard) and there destroyed (he’d also heard). This action was yet another Elder Order, to keep Pitch End firm in its Forgetting.
Bruno knew that if he was discovered not in the throes of WORK as the needle dictated, he’d be done. If he was found not doing as he should be and in possession of newspapers that should’ve been in the town hall and a pocket watch belonging to his Forgotten father, he’d be disappeared himself in the night, taken to the town hall and destroyed too. It was an oddly thrilling thought. He tried to care, worry a bit about horrific consequence, but couldn’t.
He laid out his kept articles, each as stiff and see-through as a torn fingernail, and read their headlines, wondering –
February 31st, Year +292
FARMERS SAY REBELS STILL THE CAUSE
OF SOGGY
CABBAGES!
TEMPERATE THOMAS SAYS:
‘IF YER CABBAGE SMELLS OFF, TURN ON THE SPOT FIFTEEN TIMES WHILST BOILING IT IN A
SAUCEPAN,
AND THAT’LL BANISH THE BLIGHT OF DR BLOOM
AND HIS REBELS FROM IT!’
March 29th, Year +293
FISHERMEN SAY THEY SEE SHADOWS TEN FEET TALL
AT SEA! TEMPERATE THOMAS SAYS:
‘DR BLOOM AND REBELS MAY BE RETURNING IN
DARKER FORM!’
April 1st, Year +294
SCREAMS HEARD FROM THE ELM TREE MOUNTAINS
AS PIGS
VANISH OVERNIGHT FROM EASTERN FIELDS!
TEMPERATE THOMAS SAYS:
‘DR BLOOM AND OTHER REBELS MAY BE
HIDING
UNDERGROUND IN
MOUNT TOME WITH STOLEN LIVESTOCK!’
Never easing and always at the approach of the Single Season War’s anniversary – the terror of the Rebels, gone but never Forgotten, never far. Bruno reread and reread, and longed to sift some truth from these things. All just words to frighten, or was there something beneath it all, truthfully?
He eased back, lay on the floor and gazed at the ceiling. He remained for long, silent, unknowable minutes. Again alone, bored and curious.
On that morning, a journey to the old house was the only thing for him.
The way back to his old home took Bruno towards the shore, then west. He’d see people on route, pass within earshot, hear them talk, but he’d been stopped never. Bruno had a way, he’d realised, of not being noticed. On the journey there were distractions that set the heart going (Elder words spoke from everywhere) – black on white, warning in the form of advice, admonishment in the guise of encouragement, comfort. Wrapped around lampposts or pasted across windows of derelict cottages or just airborne, proliferating and settling on rooftops, doorsteps, on lawns yellowed like old newspaper in the Swelter.
Tall Tales From Pitch End Page 3