The Biggerers

by Amy Lilwall

  ‘Eat it,’ he said. ‘Crunch it down! It’s yummy.’

  She picked the pill up and put it on her tongue. A taste filled her mouth that she didn’t recognize. It wasn’t the same as flakes; flakes were completely different; so different that she wasn’t hungry for flakes any more; all she wanted was more of these pills. She sucked, hard. The orangeness bounced over her tongue, down each side of her neck, over her shoulders, her back, her breasts, her tummy; like putting on her humcoat on a cold day. She shuddered. Mmm. It tasted like the best thing she would ever ever eat… But wait. She wasn’t supposed to eat it. It had to come out again, and quickly. She thought about the kind of cough she’d have to do in order to get the thing into her nose. Gosh, that would hurt. Maybe she could eat this one, then definitely snort the second pill tomorrow. Surely one wouldn’t be so bad?

  ‘I can see that you’re enjoying that!’ Len laughed.

  The sound of his voice stopped her tongue from sucking; the orange rock was getting smaller. No. They would not win this fight with a yummy tasting piece of stone! The back of her throat sucked the pill upwards and at the same time she coughed through her nose, putting her hand over her face as the pill came shooting towards the end of her nostril. Her eyes watered and she held her breath as another cough fluttered at the back of her throat.

  Len flicked his eye back at her. ‘What did you do? Show me your hand.’

  Bonbon opened both hands. They were empty.

  Len looked back at the screen. ‘Why are you experiencing pain?’

  More flutters. Bonbon’s head jerked as she held back the cough.

  ‘Are you choking?’ Len frowned and poked a tube through the bars. Bonbon’s eyes widened; it was that mean metal insect! She turned to run towards the back of the cage just as the end of the tube lit up. Oh… it was just a light. She stopped and watched it as it searched this way and that.

  ‘It’s not on the floor. Open your mouth.’

  Bonbon opened her mouth as Len shone the light inside.

  ‘Must have gone down the wrong hole.’ Len flicked off the light. ‘Drink some water when you get back. I keep telling them that we should use injections to avoid all of this choking business; but there’s some law…’ he tailed off. ‘I’m going to send you back now. Tomorrow I’ll remind you to chew it, just like you do with your flakes.’ He reached behind her head and unclipped the metal square, closed her cage door and waved goodbye. ‘Jinx’ll be up with you shortly.’

  The shutters came down again and the cage swerved and lifted. Bonbon hung on to the side with one hand and snorted the pill into the other hand. She folded her fingers into her sticky palm until the cage reached its slot back in the corridor; mmm, maybe she would lick her hand… Just one tiny lick.

  The shutter disappeared into the roof of the cage and Bonbon looked into her hand. Hmmm… What would she do with it now? She glanced up to see the faces opposite watching her; cheeks pulled backwards by the metal bars.

  ‘I coughed the pill into my…’ she tried to say, holding up the pill between her thumb and finger so they could see. But her mouth was making shapes. The shutter on her cage slammed back down again and pushed her towards the back wall. Was it Moira already? Was the cage being cleaned? She scrunched her hand shut and covered it up with the other one. Surely they couldn’t know about that? The shutter was sucked back into the walls. Brightness filled the cage again. The sound of biggerer footsteps tap-tapped their way back along the corridor. Jinx lay at the front of the cage. Her eyes closed and her hands curled over her chest in a weird way. Spit bubbles formed and popped on her lips and the marks of a metal-legged insect speckled her shins and thighs.

  Jinx! Bonbon tried to scream, skidding to her side and falling to the floor. ‘Jinx!’ she managed to whimper as the lift door at the far end of the corridor opened and closed. ‘What have they done to you, Jinx? My poor, poor Jinx. What have they done?’

  Jinx’s eyes rolled towards Bonbon’s and her mouth made noises that didn’t sound like words, but more like noises that Bonbon made when she was lifting something really heavy or when she was just getting up in the morning.

  ‘Help!’ Bonbon called. ‘Help me! Jinx is ill!’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ called someone.

  ‘Can she speak?’

  ‘Is she awake?’

  ‘She’s awake but she’s really hurt. I don’t think she can walk…’

  As she answered, the two ribbons appeared from the black box. ‘Go AWAY!’ she shouted. But the ribbon landed on Jinx, sending out all its legs to walk over her body, being careful to feel the weirdness in her wrists and the insect footprints on her legs. ‘She’s ill, you horrid, stupid, thing!’ screamed Bonbon as a dose of flakes gushed into a pile behind her. The thing folded its legs into its body and was sucked back inside the clippy square. Bonbon fell to Jinx’s side, holding her weird hands together and stroking her face with the edge of her fist, the pill still melting inside it, then gasped as her hair froze to her cheeks. Water had fallen on them like a cold blanket. A whole bowlful. Bonbon jumped up and smacked the ceiling with the knuckles of her pill-holding hand. ‘What was that for?’ she shouted at it. Her feet slipped on the floor as she jumped; the floor, the soaking wet floor – how on Earth would they sleep on that? she thought as she looked behind her, then in front… Oh! Jinx had propped herself onto one elbow and with her other hand was wiping water out of her eyes.

  ‘Oh Jinx!’ Bonbon fell to the floor next to her again. ‘Are you better? Can you talk?’

  Jinx blinked hard. ‘I think so.’ She looked around. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘You’re back in your cage, Jinx. With me, Bonbon.’

  Jinx was quiet for a moment as she looked around. ‘But where, Bonbon? Where are we?’

  Bonbon stared, her mouth open ready to tell Jinx where they were, but Jinx knew where they were; she knew. Why should she have to tell her again? She already knew the answer. The door of the cage rattled as Mop and Loop unpicked the lock. ‘This is serious,’ said Loop as he climbed inside. ‘How much do you reckon they’ve given her?’

  Mop crouched down in front of Jinx. ‘What happened to you, Jinx? Can you remember?’

  Jinx rolled onto her side and rested her head on her forearm. ‘Will you stroke my hair for me, Bonbon?’ she asked. ‘I’m sleepy.’

  ‘Of course I will,’ replied Bonbon, already picking wet strands out of Jinx’s face. ‘Do you want to eat some flakes?’

  ‘No. Just want sleep.’

  ‘She’s been drugged,’ said Ed as he swung into their cage. ‘She must have refused to clap.’

  Loop put his hands on his hips and shook his head. ‘Silly girl,’ he muttered. ‘Silly brave girl.’

  ‘No!’ said Bonbon. ‘No! She definitely clapped! I was with her. They told us that we would be separated if she didn’t clap, and she finally gave in.’

  ‘Well, why is she like this then?’ asked Mop.

  ‘They keep changing the rules.’ Loop crouched down and looked at the air just in front of his face. ‘How are we supposed to fight if they keep on changing the rules?’

  ‘They make ’em they can change ’em,’ said Piddle as he heaved himself in.

  On the inside of Bonbon’s head, she stood in the arms of the She-one, watching as Jinx tried to struggle out of her grip to go to Chips; an enormous arm swooping over her on its way to an ear. An ear that had just been screamed into. ‘It isn’t because she wouldn’t clap,’ said Bonbon. ‘It’s because she wouldn’t talk.’

  The others stared at her.

  ‘What?’s popped up all along the corridor until Mop silenced them by asking: ‘She knows how to speak in front of them?’

  ‘No,’ said Bonbon. ‘I’ve only seen it…’ She stopped to remember: the laughter, the green humcoat, in the She-one’s arms. ‘I’ve only seen it three times. And it was just noises not words. One time it was just laughter and even I managed to laugh with her.’

  Loop got to his feet. All four lit
tlers stared first at Bonbon, then at Jinx who slept in Bonbon’s lap.

  ‘She had too much emotion,’ came a voice that Bonbon had not yet heard. ‘Emotion is the link between body and mind, you know. The body that is the human race is linked by communication, it needs to speak and be heard; emotions communicate…’ The voice took a scratchy breath. ‘I heard about a bear who was so sad that his body died. Emotions need to be communicated or else the body goes bad.’ The voice breathed again.

  There was a pause. Nobody clapped or even moved. The four littlers in front of Bonbon stood frowning, each holding a finger over his lips. The voice continued. ‘And one might make that mistake if he has only his own body to think about; but not when he feels responsible for so many others.’

  Bonbon stared towards the front of the cage, then at Loop and Piddle until enough silence passed in front of them that she was sure the scratchy voice had stopped talking. When their eyeballs rolled back to Jinx again, Bonbon asked: ‘Who was that?’ A little girl wandered into her mind, put her hands above her head, turned in a circle and laughed. The littler inside Bonbon’s head also laughed with a voice that Bonbon didn’t recognize, then turned towards Bonbon; his body sprouted white hair, paled and wrinkled, and changed from a body like Chips’s to a body like hers. Her hand lifted and reached out towards the voice.

  The others stood, holding their heads and muttering words to themselves, their lips making sounds that had just been spoken; their mouths bending into shapes of different words… Bear, emotion, sad… They were memorizing what had just been said. Maybe she should be doing the same thing? But she’d said something about Jinx. She’d said that Jinx could talk because she had too much emotion. What had she meant? Bonbon’s eyes flicked towards the front of the cage again. ‘Can I see you?’ she called through the open cage door.

  ‘Yes!’ the voice answered after a while, sounding happy. ‘But it’s five to eleven.’

  ‘Time!’ called the clock-watcher.

  ‘Come and see me when Moira has gone.’

  Mop, Loop and Piddle looked at each other. ‘What does she mean?’ said one. ‘I don’t know,’ said another as they walked back to the door and climbed down the cages, jumping the wire squares two at a time.

  ‘I’ll lock them in!’ called Ed.

  ‘Who was that speaking, just then?’ asked Bonbon.

  ‘That’s Windy,’ Ed replied. ‘She’s the only Batch Eight that I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Batch Eight?’

  ‘Mmm-hmm,’ he nodded as he locked the cage door. ‘She knows a lot of things but she doesn’t like to talk,’ he said through the wire bars. ‘She keeps telling us that there’s no point.’ He leaned closer and dropped his voice. ‘Do you know what? I think she’s right.’ Smiling, he ducked back into his cage.

  Bonbon looked down at Jinx and stroked both of her cheeks before moving her head from her lap to the floor. ‘Windy,’ she repeated, lying down in front of Jinx so that the shutters wouldn’t bash into her and wake her up.

  An enormous brown thing that was too big to be a cat, and had too many legs to be a bird, wandered into the centre of her head. White points peeked out of either side of its mouth. It wiggled its nose and butted it against another brown, fluffy tummy… A bear, said her littler, her guide. With her name, she thought; the bear’s name was Bonbon, and as she thought it, her eyes blurred and spilled over. Inside her head, a hand picked up a pen and started to write a letter. A letter, a letter… Hadn’t Len asked her something about a letter? She was sure that he had. She was sure that it was one of those stupid questions he’d asked her earlier. And she had no idea how to answer it although he even asked her twice just to make sure. ‘They haven’t surfaced yet,’ he said. ‘I’ll only give you one pill today.’ And then… Shit! Bonbon opened her hand. The pill had almost gone. She scraped what was left of it onto the floor of the cage. Moira’s sucky machine could have that, she thought, wondering if her hand was orange as the black shutters came down.

  Moira talked her way up the corridor, and back down it again, laughing as the lift doors closed behind her. As soon as she had gone, cages clicked open and legs and bottoms shimmied down to the floor.

  ‘I should stay here with Jinx,’ said Bonbon as she leaned out of her cage and looked down. ‘She’s still sleeping.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave her to sleep? called the girl who reminded her of Blankey.

  ‘I left Piddle last night,’ said Osmo.

  ‘We have things to talk about,’ said Mop.

  ‘Are you still coming to see me?’ said the funny scratchy voice.

  Windy! thought Bonbon. Windy’s voice pulled her to the edge of her cage, as if there was something outside that she really wanted, like flakes when she was hungry or a pile of string on string day; why was that? Maybe because the voice was so strange. Maybe because Bonbon wanted to see the face that went with it, this strange scratchy voice. Or could it be because… She thought of the white and wrinkled one again. Because they’d seen each other before.

  ‘I’m coming, Windy.’ Bonbon bent over Jinx’s ear to whisper that she would be back later. Jinx slept with her mouth squashed open by her own arm. Bonbon kissed her on the nose and started to climb down the cages, her tummy pulling her back upwards until the back of her throat started to burn. ‘I’ll go back to her later, I’ll go back to her later…’ She inhaled and exhaled the words as her body worked hard to keep her hanging on to the wire doors.

  At the bottom she tried to pant quietly. The conversation had already started. This time, the blonde one, who reminded Bonbon of Blankey, stood in the middle to introduce the subjects with another littler who had short black hair and tile-white skin. The tile-white one noticed Bonbon and watched her while the other spoke.

  ‘Firstly, we have to go through everything we have ever known up until now in order to preserve our memories,’ said the-onewho-looked-like-Blankey. Everybody clapped to show that they agreed. ‘Then we will move on to new things. When Bonbon and Jinx are ready, we shall discuss what has happened to them today, as well as the fact that Jinx can talk.’

  The crowd clapped again.

  ‘Bonbon doesn’t know where to go, Fola, shall I take her?’ said the tile-white one.

  The-one-who-looked-like-Blankey, Fola, turned her head towards Bonbon and nodded. ‘Yes, and I’ll finish here.’

  The tile-white one stepped around shoulders and over legs, bringing her knees up high as she made her way towards Bonbon. When she was really close, Bonbon noticed that her ears turned into a point at the top.

  ‘I’m Lamb,’ she said, smiling and holding out her hand. ‘Windy’s cage is right at the end.’

  Bonbon looked at the hand before deciding to squeeze it with her own. ‘I’m Bonbon,’ not taking her eyes off Lamb’s ears.

  ‘I know you are,’ smiled Lamb.

  ‘You’ve… I mean… It’s only because your hair is short, um…’

  ‘My ears?’ Lamb took Bonbon’s hand and led her along the corridor.

  ‘Yes, I didn’t mean… I think they’re really lovely.’

  ‘My She-one picked out this design when I was being grown.’

  Bonbon thought for a minute then wrinkled her head. ‘What?’

  Lamb giggled. ‘Sounds horrible, doesn’t it?’

  ‘But can they… do that?’

  ‘The rich ones can.’ Lamb jumped over a gap in the tiles, the way that Jinx did when they were in the kitchen at home. ‘I mean, the very rich ones. But soon they’ll all be able to.’

  Being grown. The words repeated themselves inside Bonbon’s head. Being grown, being grown. The only time she’d heard the word ‘grow’ was when the She-one told the He-one to grow up, or when the She-one would tell them to be careful when they jumped inside the plant-pot. ‘It won’t grow!’ she’d say. It wasn’t true; the plant had got bigger since it arrived. That was because it was always growing, even though the She-one was worried that it wasn’t. Bonbon couldn’t reach its leaves any more, not e
ven if she stood on tiptoes. If she’d been grown too, did that mean that she’d been even smaller than she was now?

  Lamb looked at her. ‘Nearly there.’

  Bonbon started to ask a question then stopped. Then decided to all the same. ‘Was I grown, then?’

  ‘Well,’ said Lamb, ‘it’s one of the theories. I only believe that I was grown because my She-one used to talk about how she’d chosen my lovely ears.’ She said this as if she really believed that her ears were lovely. ‘Maybe you should ask Windy about things like this; she has lots of opinions about how we all came to be here.’ Lamb lowered her voice. ‘But she has to be in the mood to talk about them.’ She put her normal voice back on. ‘Here we are…’ They stopped and turned towards a cage that was at ground level. ‘Hello, Windy!’ called Lamb.

  ‘Hello, Lamb,’ came the scratchy voice as Windy emerged from the black at the far end of her cage. Her eyes fell on Bonbon and she stopped to squint at her for a minute.

  Lamb started to pick the lock on Windy’s door.

  Bonbon squinted back at the figure who stood on the other side of the metal door and reached out to hold on to it. Her chest was so jumpy that her mouth wouldn’t let her talk and air hissed loudly from her nose.

  Peering back at her with one green eye and one brown eye, through a face of brown lines that made Bonbon think of her own basket, was the white and crumpled one. ‘It’s you!’ said Bonbon. ‘I’ve been… I’ve been thinking about you!’

  Lamb turned to look at Bonbon, her head all wrinkled and her mouth upside down.

  Windy put her head on one side and smiled. ‘Have you?’

  ‘You were at the doctor’s!’

  The scratchy voice laughed. ‘I haven’t seen a doctor for years.’

  Bonbon’s smile fell. ‘Yes you have! It was definitely you!’

  ‘It was surely one of my sisters,’ she said. ‘We all look exactly the same.’

  The door swung open and Lamb stepped back. ‘I’ll go back now,’ she said. ‘You should come out this evening.’ She tipped her chin at Windy. ‘Good for your memory.’