The Biggerers

by Amy Lilwall

  Meredith lowered her eyebrows and nodded.

  ‘Anyway. I would ask him things and he would answer in Morse code. We went on like that for months – it was quite a good little system! Before he got taken away, Nemo told me many things about what it was like to be him. He told me that the time he had spent with me had been like waking up slowly. When he first arrived, he knew nothing of where he’d come from and why he was living with me. In fact, for a long time, he believed that he had always been living in my understairs cupboard. But gradually, his mind started to, well, open up, if you like. He would look at new objects and his brain would give him the word for that object. He would feel new fabrics and know what they were, he would smell new smells and know what they were. One day, I came home from the stables with that synthetic sawdust on my trousers; you know the kind. I brushed it off in the hallway and went about my business and two hours later I found that he had collected up all of the sawdust, put it in his basket and appeared to be smelling it, piece by piece, and stroking it to his cheek. “It smells different,” he said to me. “It smells different but this is exactly what we had.”

  ‘“What who had?” I asked.

  ‘“Me and the others, at the place I lived before I lived here.” He looked at me with an expression so human that I understood immediately something important had clicked. “I remember it.”

  ‘“But… Of course you remember it; you lived there for the first two years of your life!” I said.

  ‘“Two years?” He was shocked. “Was it really two years?”

  ‘“Yes,” I said. “That’s what I was told.”

  ‘“But I’d never even realized I’d lived anywhere but here.”

  ‘It was then that I began to suspect that all littlers were given some sort of memory suppressant before leaving the centre. I asked him to tell me exactly what he could remember. He told me about a small glass tank, roughly the size of his basket and tall enough to jump around in. He told me that he remembered feeling hot and looking around him to find that he was lying in a pile of littlers, all of them naked and sleeping. His hair was long and he even had a beard. When he looked through the glass, he couldn’t see anything except white walls and a ceiling. There was a door on the left with a round window, and a door straight ahead with nothing. Sometimes, shadows would darken the window and when this happened, he and the others would watch the shadows and even talk to them. He remembered thinking that the shadows were nice, but they never said anything back.

  ‘He told me that another vision kept popping up in his mind: another littler with a huge distorted face was being taken away and Nemo was holding his arms out to her but the lid of the tank was shut. He watched as she screamed, reaching back towards the tank then fell silent, her head looking everywhere around the tank except at them. He banged on the glass, but she didn’t notice. The handler did something to her and she flopped, unconscious, in his hand. Then the handler laid her on a trolley and wheeled her through the door on the left with the round window, his shadow filling up the window for a moment before going away. Nemo watched the door for a long time as he realized the truth about the shadows. He and the others never spoke to them again, instead they huddled together every time they saw one. He remembered being taken away himself, screaming and reaching back towards the tank expecting at any second to be injected and taken through the door on the left; but he wasn’t. He was carried through the door right in front of his tank and as soon as he was through it, his hair was cut and the hair on his face was taken off with some zappy thing that hurt so that he shouted. The handler injected him in the neck; after that, he couldn’t shout any more. He couldn’t say anything. Then all he remembered was waking up in a room that wasn’t home and seeing me peer into his tank. Now this is the strangest part.’

  The man pointed two fingers up towards the ceiling and looked from left to right. ‘He told me that he recognized me straight away and was so pleased to be going home. I asked him where he recognized me from, but unfortunately his development hadn’t reached that part of his recollection. However, during our time together, we worked on theories and ideas about the elusiveness of his memory and he believed that there had been a stage before the glass tank. A stage where all he could remember was knowing; he had known a phenomenal amount of things about… well… life. He would continually repeat this, backing it up by saying: “Now all I have is someone else’s knowledge, there is someone in my head telling me everything that I used to know.” He would repeat this so often that, although I listened, it lost its meaning. Until one particular day.

  ‘I had bought a present. A real gardening book for my great-niece. Later, I found Nemo standing in my herbaceous border holding a leaf to his nose. “This is mint,” he coded to me, and he seemed extremely pleased about this.

  ‘“Yes,” I said, not thinking much of it.

  ‘“But the littler inside my head didn’t tell me,” he said. “I read about it in the book.”

  ‘I was so shocked at what he’d just said that we went back to the opened book and I made him read the page to me. He did. Word for word he interpreted the paragraphs with his dots and dashes. I was astounded. He asked me where all the books were – why weren’t there any other books in the house? Like most people, I sold all of mine during the Paper Boom, so from then on I allowed him to read on the internet. That, unfortunately, was our downfall. As he read, he wrote. As he wrote, he discovered. As he discovered, he grew angry, believing he was human and entitled to the same freedom of communication as other humans.

  ‘Last week, two representatives from that awful company came to my house. They told me they were following up evidence of slanderous behaviour that had been localized to my address. I tried to tell them that it was me but they wouldn’t believe it. They turned on their silly apparatus, which located him in the understairs cupboard. They were shocked as they opened the door to see him standing straight and strong, frowning up at them with so much… So much hatred. Again, I tried to reason with them but he had already communicated so much in that one look. “It’s no good,” he coded to me. “I have described all of my memories online and they are frightened because they know all that I’ve said is true.” As soon as they saw him coding they packed him away in a carry-case and told me that they had to take him back to the centre urgently. I was about to open my mouth, to tell them that this was inhumane and they couldn’t gag individuals like this, when I heard the dots and the dashes escape from the carry-case – silence, they said. Ironic really; our warning message being used in that situation. “Will I see him again?” I asked.

  ‘“We’ll try our best, Sir,” was the answer. And he was gone.

  ‘I searched everywhere online for his blog, but I can only guess it’s been erased by the company.’ Mr Willis searched the floor then turned his head up to face the audience. He stood fiddling with his own fingertips, his eyes blinking out wettish shines.

  Meredith got up and walked over to him. She put a hand on his shoulder. Mr Willis looked at the hand. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just that… He was my best friend,’ he said to her.

  She nodded and tipped her head to one side. ‘Will you be taking questions at the end?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Willis.’ She looked back at the group. ‘I have recorded other stories of this nature but generally people are too scared to come forward and tell them as Mr Willis has done this evening. I think we owe him a round of applause.’

  Clapping and yeses filled the room.

  The rip of Tupperware lids released cake-smell into the room. Tupperware, her Nanna had a stack of it. Susan looked around, wanting to put her hands on her hips but changing her mind and pulling down the front of her jacket instead. She was the youngest there, probably. Except for that woman with the hair. She looked for the face that had caught her eye; there it was: a fox tail by the tea urns, just in front of Mrs Lucas. The tail rose into the air as the head it was attached to dipped to watch her hands as they dispensed te
a. Susan watched. The woman looked like she was listening to the conversation between Mrs Lucas and Meredith. Meredith nodded as she noted everything onto paper. Onto paper! Ha! Susan thought of all the stories Meredith must have recorded and how much paper that would have taken. Where on Earth had it come from? She stepped forward to watch the pen as it skied a winding path down the paper.

  ‘You must think we’re all so old!’ laughed the grey-paisley lady.

  ‘Sorry? No… No, not at all.’

  A few heads turned to smile.

  ‘We are,’ said a gentleman, pushing his glasses up his nose, a red-velvet biscuit between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Oh… I…’ Susan struggled. ‘Yes, actually. If I’m honest, I was thinking that I am probably the youngest.’

  Another lady nodded seriously, grey ringlets swinging next to her ears. ‘You are. The irony is, at one point they – that awful company – were aiming their marketing at elderly people, to give us a bit of companionship. At this rate we’ll end up alone again!’ she half-laughed. ‘That’s probably why they think they can win this.’

  Susan smiled at the word ‘they’. It had long been considered politically incorrect to use it as a term of generalization. She’d always found that ridiculous.

  ‘No,’ the others agreed.

  ‘They do what they like. They make out that the surplus older population need company and looking after, but it’s all lies. It’s a business, that’s all.’

  ‘Mmm,’ the others agreed.

  Susan looked into her cup and thought about her own great-grandmother who had been left in a home until she died. They went to visit her once a month when she was a child. Nanna was always in the same chair, with the window behind her, and would tell them the same things each time. Her mother used to say that she was ‘losing her marbles’ and how sad that was. Susan remembered thinking that poor Nanna had nothing else to say; she’d heard nothing new, nobody really spoke to her. ‘Can we at least turn the chair around so she can look out the window?’ she remembered asking, one day.

  Susan looked over towards Mrs Lucas. ‘Will you all be here for the next meeting?’ she asked.

  They nodded. ‘And you?’ two of them asked at the same time. Then apologized to each other for interrupting.

  ‘I should think so, yes.’

  ‘Have you had yours taken away then?’ asked the man with the glasses.

  ‘Not yet. Oo yum, thank you.’ Susan smiled as the ringlet lady offered her some shortbread. ‘But it could happen at any time. We just have to do what Meredith said and try to stick together.’

  The circle of people nodded and mmmed.

  ‘No, no, dear. I’m quite sure.’ Mrs Lucas’s voice came wafting over Susan’s shoulder. ‘It wouldn’t be one of mine, would it? It’s blonde!’ she laughed. ‘I know that so much can be done with DNA these days. Do you really think you can help?’

  ‘Well,’ said Meredith, tweezing something into a small tube. ‘We are trying to collect as much DNA as possible, for various reasons. Apart from anything, it all counts as evidence of existence. But in your case, it might actually help us to find Blankey.’

  ‘Right.’

  Meredith smiled at Mrs Lucas before turning to the room. ‘Okay, everyone!’ She put the blue tube down next to a tea urn. ‘Thursday, same time, same place… And don’t forget,’ she held one finger in the air, ‘no communicating in public.’

  It was no good. She had to breathe. She made the tiniest hole in her lips and let the air tiptoe out then in again. Bonbon was pressed up into a corner between the door frame and the wall. She was sure that bits of her were sticking out; but he hadn’t seen her. Maybe she had been hidden by the stool. Maybe he had noticed the open door and not noticed anything else. Shit. What now? Ahead of her was the room. Chips had been pushing that three-legged thing from that direction. ‘The stool,’ said the old littler who stood inside her head. Right. Stool. Thanks, Old Littler. How about something useful like what on Earth was she supposed to do? The doorway to the next room loomed before her again. She turned back to the door where Blankey was and peeked through the gap that its hinges made. A big bottom hovered above the underside of brown clumpy shoes. He was looking under the bed. She breathed down into her belly and ran into the next room, stopping when she was well inside and looking wildly around it. White walls stretched up from orange flowers that were trapped in weird carpet. Her heels fizzed and tingled on it as she skidded and stopped. Bugger. It was empty. Completely empty! Nowhere to hide. She scuttled behind the door and looked through the crack into the hallway.

  ‘Oh, Tilda!’ she heard as Chips’s he-one came out of the room and disappeared into another at the other end of the hallway. Rushing water could be heard, and continued to rush as the biggerer reappeared with a cup in his hand and padded back into the bedroom. ‘Tilda, Tilda, Tilda…’ he whispered with each step, looking at the cup to make sure he didn’t spill what was inside. He was bringing water to Blankey. That was good; maybe he wasn’t so nasty… But what was Tilda? Bonbon watched. Nothing happened. She sat down on the floor and let her legs curl behind her; maybe he would go soon and they could all leave…

  Soon her legs were so stiff and achy that all she could think about was moving them. But the silence hung around her as if it were waiting for her to do something noisy; he would hear her, even if she moved just the tiniest little bit. She stayed in that position, eyes glued to the crack in the door. Eventually, her legs seemed to move on their own, fed up with being folded and twisted. Just as the lovely feeling of unscrunching them brushed up her back to her head, she heard a creak. Light from the room illuminated the landing as the door was opened wide enough for him to step outside. ‘You two must go back downstairs,’ he said. ‘Leave Tilda to get better. Poor Tilda… She needs lots of rest.’ He stepped out of the room. ‘Back downstairs with you.’ But he shut the door behind him before anyone could go back downstairs. ‘I have to get Tilda some medicine… What’s that doing there?’ He pushed the stool with his foot so that it fell away from the door; Bonbon watched as it rolled in a circle. ‘Where was I?’ He turned to go back into the room then turned away again. ‘Medicine for Tilda. That’s right.’ And he thumped down the stairs. Bonbon listened as noises came from below: plates got moved and doors swung open. Feet thudded across the carpet, a bottom sat down on the stairs. A glass of something got gulped down and something else got zipped up. Then, the front door rattled as it was pulled open, slammed shut again and there was silence.

  Bonbon turned and ran towards the staircase. Yanking her humcoat from the floor, she pulled it on and swung herself down onto the first step.

  CHAPTER 11

  She’d wondered if she’d ever see her there, or if she’d already seen her without realizing. But Mrs Lucas had made herself known, she thought, taking the little plastic tube out of her handbag. She’d asked about Blankey in her elderly voice, hoarse with what Emma fancied to be one hundred and thirty years’ worth of dust and cobwebs. And the woman she was with could well have been Susan Marley, although maybe she had simply been a great-great-granddaughter; or a carer… Emma had tried not to be so obvious about staring, but apart from anything else, another young person in the room warranted a stare. She shook the tube to see if there really was a hair inside; holding it up to the light; ah yes, there it was. A smile stretched her mouth then disappeared, like a jumping jack. Torn between leaving the hair there and picking it up, Emma had decided that the safest place for it was with her. Not that she’d ever need it. She had all of Blankey’s medical files… But she’d panicked and picked it up anyway. It was better off with her. Everything else stayed with her, after all, lurking behind her and tickling her between her shoulder blades. Waking her up in the night. She put the tube back in the bag and let her eyes scrunch shut.

  An image of little baby Blankey sharpened into vivid memory; sitting in the corner of her tank, her legs curled around beside her, bluish eyes staring into nothing as her tiny fingers overlapped e
ach toe over the one next to it. She looked lonely, as if she were mourning or pining or… some other fanciful projection of how Emma supposed she ought to feel. Emma had chosen her name from the list in the notebook; a floaty, dreamy, childish name; white with soft consonants, billowy likes the curls that covered the littler’s ears. Blankey. A pretty way to describe the void that surely gaped open inside her tiny tummy, Emma said to herself at the time; like a mother having her newborn taken away, without even knowing she had been pregnant.

  Emma touched an icon that hung in the air in front of her, entered a password and opened Blankey’s file. The thumbnail of the old photo sat in line with the other documents, two little blue dots beaming out of it – she’d been stunning. The news article striped along the side of the photo like a barcode, under the headline: ‘British woman dead in car crash.’ She touched the image again and it turned into a 3D head, as big as her own. The two women looked at each other. ‘Driver husband loses leg,’ read the last sentence.

  Emma hid her eyes behind her hands; what on Earth had she been thinking to send her there? She peeped through her fingers at her living room. It wouldn’t take them long to question why Blankey had been sent to the neighbour’s house; then to start digging around the rest of Emma’s files. Mrs Lucas had been on the list for well over a year. The fact that she was wealthy, and that her husband wasn’t doing too well health-wise, meant that she ticked all the right boxes; a budding A* client; a big, fat Euro sign. Of course, Emma saw her as a lonely old lady, who, like all the other lonely old ladies, would not be able to resist the virtual version of Blankey, a little being animated by 3D pixels and lasers that Emma sent her, that Emma targeted her with.

  Anyone who thinks that this product is capable of thinking, talking, acting or even looking like their lost loved one is very much under false illusions, Dr Peetzwelt had said during an interview. Any quest to be reunited with a loved one would be in vain as all of our samples are rendered anonymous as soon as the donor passes on. This wasn’t the case. Otherwise there’d be none of this crap about communication, but the chances were so small…