by Sarah Govett
Taking the torch, however, almost made me abandon the whole thing. We’ve only got one torch in the house – this ancient, wind-up thing. Yesterday morning I took it from the hall cupboard and hid it under my duvet. Wow, the master of concealment. The one good thing about having parents who are really into kids doing chores is that they never tidy my room or make my bed or anything. Anyway, last night, a fuse or something blew and the whole flat was plunged into darkness. Mum went to try and see what had happened but obviously couldn’t see anything without a torch. Which wasn’t too much of a big deal – until she started blaming Dad. Dad’s brilliant but pretty disorganised so when stuff’s missing, chances are he’s put it somewhere stupid. I think Mum was probably just tired and everyone’s pretty tense at the moment what with me about to leave and everything – but she went MENTAL at Dad and he started shouting back that he hadn’t touched it and that she shouldn’t always blame him and then he stormed out the house. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen them properly fight. Mum abandoned fixing the problem till morning and fetched some candles instead. At least I now know where the matches are.
I can’t see anything. My vision’s turned into a weird haze with a halo of light round the edge and I desperately want to scratch the itch in my eyes but the doctor said this might make part of my cornea fall off. Nice. I’m going straight to bed. Tomorrow perfect vision awaits.
Mum’s taken me to have my eyes lasered. It’s her and Dad’s present to me. They’d always said I had to wait till I was eighteen and ‘mature enough’ to decide if it was really what I wanted. Apparently, what with everything that’s happened, they think I’m ready to decide now. Obviously, I said yes please. This might sound really superficial but I’d been properly worried about my eyesight messing up our rescue mission. I couldn’t exactly wear contact lenses out there as you need super clean hands to put them in and lenses get scratched and fall out at rubbish moments. Sometimes they even get ripped and a little piece gets stuck in my eye and Mum has to invert my eye-lid with a cotton bud to get it out. Grim. So that left a rescue mission in glasses that make me look really rough and again could just fall off and break leaving me a stranded mole. It’s not surprising that there’re no stories about massively short-sighted people getting ship-wrecked. Robinson Crusoe got sand in his contact lenses. And then he accidentally sat on his glasses. And then he died.
The surgery took less than thirty minutes and I tried not to think of what was going on as the laser cut open my cornea. I tried not to think of Daisy lying on a bed like this as they cut into her brain, trying to ‘upgrade’ her into a freakoid. Turning her into a vegetable.
Then the laser started its reshaping bit and this smell rose into the air like burning flesh. It was exactly the same smell as the woman on the Fence and I gagged.
Jack’s mum is horrific and should never have been allowed anywhere near kids let alone to have one. I went to see her this afternoon. I thought I could snoop around and find out more about Jack’s stepdad’s trucks, the ones they’re transporting the prisoners with.
She only opened the door after I’d rung the bell literally twenty times. I must have interrupted her 3pm gin session.
She looked puzzled and a bit annoyed to see me but quickly tried to adjust her face to kind and concerned. She’s a rubbish actor.
‘Hi, Mrs Hicks,’ I said. She’s taken her new husband’s name. ‘I came to say how sorry I am, about Jack I mean…’ I could feel tears welling behind my eyes just at the mention of his name. This was going to be harder than I’d thought.
‘Yes. Thank you, [pause] Noa.’ Oh, my God. I think she actually forgot my name for a minute. ‘We’re all cut up about it.’ But she didn’t look that cut up. Unless you count a possibly bigger bra size sliced into her chest. ‘I only wish I could have gone with him, but… ’ and then her voice trailed off and she gestured limply around herself as if the door and entrance hall were sufficient reason for her to stay behind.
Bitch.
I hadn’t left and clearly wasn’t about to so she invited me in. I asked if I could see Jack’s room one more time and she said to ‘make myself at home’ then wandered back into the kitchen, not caring where I went as I knew she wouldn’t. I know I was supposed to be hunting for info in the room Jack’s stepdad uses as his study, but I couldn’t resist going into Jack’s room anyway, to be close to his things, to him. I pushed open the door and choked. It had been completely cleaned out. His drawings stripped from the walls. The Florrie Fox poster gone and the hole replastered. I’m not saying she should have kept his room completely untouched like some creepy shrine, but come on!
Anger steeled me. I crept down the hall and pushed on the door to the study. It was unlocked. I guess Jack’s step-dad didn’t need to worry about his wife poking around – that would require a bit more lucidity, a bit less gin. Where to start? There was a central desk (large, mahogany – our old headteacher, Mr Daniels, had one just like it. Must be the kind that men who have feelings of inadequacy buy to make themselves feel more powerful). It was surrounded by bookshelves full of files and boxes of what looked like receipts. On one wall was a massive chart – all rows and columns with random photos of trucks and people attached – old movies catch-a-serial-killer style. No legible words on it.
There’s that phrase, listening ‘with one ear out’. I most definitely had both ears out and on high alert as I riffled through file after file looking for anything relating to prisoner shipment details. Nothing. Damn. I froze as there were footsteps in the hall. Staying frozen until there was the sound of a toilet flush and the footsteps padded back to the kitchen.
I looked round the room. I couldn’t give up. The chart caught my eye again. Scanning the rows and columns more closely, it became clear that it was a calendar. There were no recognisable words but certain dates had certain letter combinations on them. It had to be a code. Today and tomorrow were blank but the next square had RX1 written on it.
There was one place I hadn’t looked. The desk had a drawer.
I tried it.
Locked.
I peered round the door into the hallway to check Jack’s mum wasn’t on her way back. In case alcohol was some major laxative. She wasn’t. The only sound was the murmur of the TV from the kitchen. I rattled the drawer again. It wouldn’t come loose but the fact that there was any movement at all meant that the lock had to be weak. Nothing too high tech. I took a brass letter opener from the top of the desk and ran it along the crack at the top of the drawer. It stuck in the centre. I moved it left and then right again. Click. Tentatively I pulled at the handle. The drawer opened.
And then I found it. At the bottom of the drawer. A file, helpfully labelled ‘Prisoner Transport’. The Ministry commends you on your discretion, Mr Hicks. The file contained the address of the transport hub along with drawings and specs of the trucks. Mr Hick’s amateur attempts at code were translated.
Next to RX1 was scrawled the departure time and number plate of the truck. It was supposed to have twelve prisoners on it.
In two days time we had to be on it too.
Packing and packed lunches. It sounds like the name of a terrible old-people-bonding movie but it was actually an OK day. No, I’ll be honest, a great day.
We leave tomorrow, Monday. My bag’s ridiculously full as I’ve had to pack loads of stuff for my imaginary life at the FES too – my Scribe, writing stuff, uniform.
Mum and Dad both made sure they weren’t working so we could spend some ‘proper’ time together. Mum made a picnic and we took it to People’s Park and lay on rugs made out of old curtains. The grass was uneven and there were little boats on the rugs that, if you squinted and defocused your eyes so everything went a bit pixelated, looked like they were actually bobbing up and down. Mum had used a gingerbread-man cutter to cut out perfect little men-shaped sandwiches like she used to when I was really small and a bad eater, and I felt all choked up inside. We then obviously had to eat all the cut-out leftovers – we wer
en’t exactly going to throw them away!
After lunch we played Frisbee and Dad was predictably and reassuringly malc at it – he even ran into a tree at one point – I mean how do you not see a tree? And it took everything inside me to remember why I was doing this. Why I was lying to these people, why I was leaving them.
We talked all afternoon and evening. About everything and nothing. It was perfect. Then I had a bath and when I got out and came back into my room I found Mum sitting on my bed. She seemed a bit stiff, a bit straight and I thought – Oh God, she’s looked through my bag, she knows, she knows. But then she cleared her throat and started to speak and I realised she wasn’t talking about the Wetlands, she was talking about me and Raf, ‘going to be spending more time together’ and ‘intimacy’ and I roared with laughter and relief. I told Mum we didn’t need to have THE conversation and she looked even more relieved than I did and gave me a huge hug.
‘I love you, Noa-bean.’
‘Love you too, Mum. I’m going to miss you so much.’
‘Me too, but we’ll see each other in two months, at half-term, OK? Dad and I will come and visit then, first chance.’
And then I started crying as the chances of my still being alive in two months let alone being safe back in the Territory were approaching a big fat zero per cent. No one’s ever managed what Raf and I are planning. It’s like I’ll coast along fine and then the reality of what we’re doing will hit me like a sucker-punch. Mum looked a bit surprised at quite how upset I was getting. She probably thought I was getting my period or something.
I’d told Mum and Dad it’d be easier on everyone if they didn’t walk me to the bus stop as that’d be too similar to before, to when I was getting shipped off to the Waiting Place. They agreed, wanting to spare me any unnecessary pain.
I left our apartment block, weighed down by my stuffed backpack and, my head elsewhere, walked splat into Marcus, our friendly neighbourhood policeman-come-killer.
‘Careful, love,’ he smiled. ‘Can’t get to college quick enough?’ All his generation still called it college. FES clearly wasn’t that catchy. I forced my lips to curl up in a return smile. Nothing must seem unusual. Nothing report-worthy. Just another student keen to start studying again.
I turned right and walked in the direction of the bus stop, the way Marcus expected me to go. A couple of blocks later I doubled back on myself and snaked down alleys and minor roads to meet Raf at the junction of 2nd and 5th Street. God I was pleased to see him. Be held by him. He kissed me and my fear subsided. We could do this thing. Together we could do anything. Ducking into an alley we riffled through our bags and got out everything that was unnecessary, everything that had been for show. I joked that hours later some people might wander past a random pile of textbooks and uniform and think, ‘what the hell?’ But Raf said we couldn’t leave the stuff out to be discovered like that. That it’d look really weird and suspicious and that someone might report it and then they might look into students going to Greenhaven. So that meant we had to spend the next few minutes pushing everything down through the slats of a drain cover. ‘Fundamental Principles of Chemistry’ nearly didn’t fit and I had to bash it quite a few times with the heel of my shoe before it joined its friends on the way to the sewers.
We also sprayed ourselves head to foot with mosquito repellent. Who knew what was going to happen at the other end? Otherwise we would be bound to be bitten as soon as we emerged from the truck and that would really suck. Ho Ho.
Getting to Hicks Transport depot wasn’t too hard. We had to keep going east for about a mile – down 5th and then right down 12th. I had memorised it from a map. We walked with heads slightly lowered so we’d be less easy to identify on CCTV. And we made sure we walked purposefully. That was the key. Meant we were less likely to be stopped by police. But my heart still went crazy every time we passed one. If they searched our bags, found our survival stuff, they’d label us Opposition in a flash. And we’d seen what they did to Opposition.
The mouth of the depot was a huge iron gate set into a brick wall. An open mouth. Five trucks sat on the tarmac; more were lined up inside – under a domed hangar structure – all with the wheel and ‘H’ stamped on the side. We were in the right place. We had just under an hour to find the right truck and climb into the storage compartment at the back left that we’d identified on the specs I’d taken from Jack’s stepdad’s home office desk drawer, before they loaded the prisoners on. The dimensions meant it’d be a tight squeeze but we should definitely both fit, our bags too.
Peering round the edge of the wall we checked the number plates of the outside trucks.
No match.
Damn. Had I messed up? Copied down the information for the wrong day? We had to get inside – into the hangar. But how? We didn’t exactly have super-spy training. How was I supposed to do some sort of sprint/combat roll manoeuvre when I could barely manage a somersault? I should have tried harder in gym. And then take out the guards? I didn’t know where people’s pressure points were and there was no way I was going to be snapping any necks. Just the thought made me want to gag.
‘Follow me,’ Raf whispered.
‘What’s the plan?’ I whispered back, relieved that he was taking charge, relieved that he knew what to do.
‘Don’t get stopped.’
Not exactly a master plan.
A deep breath, five steps and we were in through the gate. We walked towards the hangar, hugging the brick wall to the left of the tarmac. No one had spotted us. There were no guards with guns. This was too good to be true.
It was too good to be true.
‘Stop!’ The voice cut through the air. ‘You two. Stop there.’ A massive man in a dark blue uniform strode towards us. There was no point running.
‘What are you doing on Hicks Transport property?’ he asked, picking up his radio, no doubt to call for back-up.
Raf opened his mouth, but I prodded him and took over. Tried the only thing that I thought could work.
‘We’ve come to see Mr Hicks,’ I said.
He raised an eyebrow.
‘I am … was … am best friends with his stepson and I wanted to see how he was holding up with Jack gone and everything.’ I put on my most pathetic-looking face. ‘Mr Hicks is always someone I’ve looked up to so much and I want him to remain a role model in my life,’ I swallowed. The man in uniform swallowed. He looked a bit, ‘What!?!’ at me, paused and then radioed Mr Hicks’ office. Jack’s stepdad’s voice, tinny and annoying, came back through the speaker.
‘Send them up,’ he said.
The man marched us forwards into the hangar. We clanged up a spiral of metal stairs after him and then along an open walkway into the office.
Mr Hicks sat behind another massive desk – how inadequate was this guy? – facing the huge window that overlooked the trucks below. He rose to greet us, sweeping a fat, sweaty hand through his ten remaining hairs before thrusting it in our direction. I tried not to flinch as I shook it. He dismissed the guard and sat down, leaving us standing.
He smiled. A forced, jovial smile.
‘Sorry about all the security,’ he boomed, clearly unable to judge suitable sound volume as we were only two metres away. ‘We’re doing some pretty serious stuff here at the moment and … (theatrical look stage left, stage right) … there have been break-ins.’
A strange look flitted across his face and I couldn’t meet his eyes. Had he noticed the forced drawer on his desk? Had Jack’s mum mentioned my visit? I had visions of him shutting the door and calling the police.
I was readying myself to run when he wrinkled his nose and reached down behind his desk.
‘Hot in here, isn’t it? I’ll just put on a fan.’
I released my breath. He wasn’t suspicious, he was just trying to work out why we smelt weird. I guess the mosquito grids mean people aren’t that used to being in a smallish room with two people covered in Citronella. He probably thought we were just two fifteen year olds who
had yet to discover deodorant.
He was back up again, smile still rigidly in place.
‘So, Noa (he dragged out my name like he’d just learnt about syllables: NO-A). How can I help you?’
I blanked. I had been going to ask him about Jack. To pretend to want advice on grief, but I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t keep using Jack and my real emotions as a pawn like that. But I had to say something. Every second I stayed silent was making our visit look increasingly weird. He was going to start asking questions. Why were we here exactly? Why weren’t we already on the bus to Greenhaven? Why were we skulking around trucks on a prisoner transport day?
Raf sensed the vacuum and stepped in.
‘Noa, you were saying you wanted to ask Mr Hicks about life at FES, at College,’ he prompted.
Mr Hicks puffed out his chest. He’d been to College (years before the TAA when it really wasn’t the same level of achievement. Of course he didn’t see it like that.) This was something he could ‘ED-U-CATE’ us about.
Mr Hicks started droning on and I pretended to listen intently, making all the right ‘Ahh’, ‘Yes’, ‘Uh-huh’ noises. Halfway through some spiel about studying hard but not too hard ‘heh, heh’, I turned to the window to hide a yawn and then it suddenly struck me how high up we were. What a good view of the hangar we had. I kicked Raf and spiralled my hand. An attempt at sign language for turn around. It probably actually means washing machine or something like that but it didn’t matter, Raf understood.