by Sarah Govett
‘I’m sorry but I have to leave,’ I explained. ‘I have to find Jack.’
‘When you’re stronger.’
I started to protest but was instantly cut off – by Annie’s voice and my already buckling knees. God, I’m a weakling now.
‘No arguments. You won’t last the journey. Rest here a week. You’ll help, but nothing too strenuous, and we’ll teach you how to survive. We’ll ask any passing traders if they have information. Then you can find your friend. Ben will take you to the water purifiers.’
And there was something so calming about the way Annie spoke and took charge that I didn’t argue any more. I wonder if she’d been some sort of doctor or healer back in the Territory. Not some bogus crystal gazer or anything but someone who was just totally OK with their place in the universe.
My curiosity ate at me so I turned back to ask her.
‘We try not to talk of the past here,’ Annie replied, a smile softening her refusal to answer. ‘If you look back you stay trapped. We have to look forward. Always forward.’
The water purifiers were a revelation. Just beyond their perimeter fence was a collection of big old baths and tanks and what were probably old animal feeding troughs covered in tarpaulin. Ben, lanky with gapped grin of a face and tight afro curls, explained how it worked and it was genius. You fill the bath/tank half full of saltwater and put a smaller empty pot inside (taking care that no saltwater gets in it). You then tie a tarp tightly over the top and put a big stone on the tarp just above where the empty container is. Then leave it for 24 hours. The pure water evaporates off in the heat, leaving the salt bit behind. The vapour then hits the tarp where it cools and condenses. The drops pour down where the tarp is depressed by the rock so they drip into the empty container filling it with pure water. The system had been invented by one of the first recruits, Matt. I said something like, ‘I thought the Ministry made it really difficult for scientists to leave the Territory.’ Ben seemed to find this hilarious and his face turned into a massive pair of dimples and white teeth. I could have fitted my little finger in the gap between his front two. I didn’t obviously because that would have been really weird, but once the thought had entered my mind it was difficult to shake.
‘Matt’s not a scientist,’ he managed to get out between spluttering laughs. ‘I probably shouldn’t go into this, you know, ’cos people don’t really talk much about life before. It’s not best not to dwell, you know?’ Then his laughter stopped and I caught a flicker of sadness in Ben’s eyes. Maybe a chasm is a better word for it. A sadness so deep that I wondered what he’d seen. What he’d suffered. Everyone here must have their own private abyss.
Ben gave a little head shake before continuing, like a wet dog, but I guess it was memories rather than water he was getting rid of.
‘Matt’s just a normal kid. He failed the TAA something like six years ago now and came out here with his dad who was a priest. Quite a high-up priest I think.’
Here’s where I was worried that Ben was going to say Matt had been shown the way by God in a miracle and it was going to turn out that we’d stumbled into some weirdo cult town. But he didn’t. Apparently Matt had got the idea just by watching water drops condense on part of the metal fence that was sticking out of a saltwater pool one hot day. He’d tasted the drops, realised it was pure water, and a few weeks of experimenting later, had come up with the bath-tub design. They’d then traded the design with other settlements in exchange for information on superior seaweed drying techniques and so on. Matt was on some trading mission now.
‘With his dad?’
‘No, his dad died from malaria a couple of years back. Now, let me show you the salt pools.’ And there it was – death of someone’s parent to salt pools without breaking stride. Death out here was mundane, expected. Like rain or the occasional cold. I caught Raf’s eye and saw that he’d noticed it too and been humbled by it.
Apart from carrying the buckets over to the salt pools and lugging them back full to start the whole process, the work wasn’t that hard. And it was nice to have a task. A doable task that your brain can focus on. It seemed to shut down all that other background chatter going on in my head. And looking at Raf, I could see that he needed it too. The worry lines started to soften in his face, as if it was being ironed, and he even kissed me mid-task. And it was only when we kissed that I realised we hadn’t done this for days and I’d missed it so much.
Sometimes a tiny bit of food when you’re really hungry just makes you feel hungrier. I think it’s the same with information.
I made it my mission to hunt down the four kids that had been taken in just before us, to see if by any miracle they’d met Jack and had any news of him. It was dinner time and they were sitting together in the Barn. Sea kelp and fish all round. It was actually delicious. The group on food duty had gone fishing instead of hunting today and said the sea trout had basically leapt into their hands. I felt a bit weird eating it, but everyone assured us that fish out here is safe. That the salt in the brackish streams stopped any of the evil bacteria growing. And fresh fish was an extra special treat, we were told. Normally it’s the stored and salted type. I looked at the four kids more closely. None of them had been at Hollets. I started interrogating them. None had walked this way with Jack. I was getting that sinking, drowning feeling again when one of them, Mike, suddenly looked up. He was clearly a bit of a slow thinker as you could see the memory sort of drift across his forehead and the rusty cogs turn.
‘Tall and ginger with a bashed-up body?’
My heart literally stopped beating. Someone had seen Jack. I felt this stupid, intense jealousy that Mike had seen Jack and not me and had to fight it back into the reptile part of my brain. Mike said everyone who failed got taken to a Holding Centre after the Waiting Place and then they got bussed out from there. It was at the Holding Centre that Mike had talked to Jack. He’d noticed him ’cos Jack had looked so wrecked – Mike had been worried that the guards were massively violent and would beat him up next. Jack had apparently laughed and said the guards were sadists but that wasn’t how it happened.
‘How did it happen?’ Mike had asked.
‘…Let’s just call it girl trouble,’ was Jack’s answer.
‘Seriously? Hope she was worth it.’ Mike had been incredulous.
‘She was. She is,’ Jack had replied.
They didn’t get put on the same bus so Mike has no idea where Jack would have gone when he got to the Wetlands. What direction he went in.
And that’s all I know.
But I went to bed with the words, ‘She was. She is,’ ringing in my ears.
Day two at the Peak – that’s what everyone here calls the settlement, and it started with a shower. Well, a marker pen line on Raf’s bag and then a shower. Raf and me are now sleeping in one of the bigger older buildings. It’s basically a dorm for people without family. The morning bell rang and I pulled on my clothes (under my blanket – I’m still not used to all this public living) and started heading towards the Barn for breakfast. Sam, who seems to be head of dorm, grabbed my arm as I passed him.
‘Showers first,’ he said and pointed towards an iron shack down a path to the left.
It seemed more like an instruction than an invitation, but I wasn’t about to complain. I approached the shed eagerly. A shower! They had managed to invent some genius way of purifying water so my brain was racing with images of solar-powered hot water and shower gel made from the extract of some local shrub. I’m a denser. The ‘showers’ involved standing naked in a small shed while someone threw a bucket of salt water over you and then someone else passed you a strip of what looked like and probably was old curtain to dry yourself. At least there were separate men’s and women’s.
I must have got some ridiculous expression on when I came out as Raf emerged at pretty much the same time, took one look at me and cracked up.
‘What did you expect?’ he teased. I obviously didn’t tell him. I did tell him about the pervy gi
rl who watched me ‘shower’ and dry. Raf said it was the same in the men’s, but they weren’t being pervs. They were meant to be there. To check for mosquito bites. To see if anyone needed quarantining. In case they hadn’t self-declared. Although the air outside was warm and the strip of curtain/towel had dried off most of the water, I still shivered.
I’m now a teacher! Well, assistant teacher. Annie’s assigned me to help with the kids. School’s compulsory here for everyone under twelve, after which you start helping with all the different jobs that keep this place going.
I feel really old in the role of teacher. And that’s one weird thing I’ve noticed. There really aren’t many old people at all. A few younger kids, loads of teens and people in their twenties but then it really tails off. Not much in the way of grey hair and without hair dye and plastic surgery high on the list of priorities you can be pretty sure there aren’t any ancients in camouflage.
I asked Ben about this at breakfast, ’cos I’d expected more, oldies that is. I know some parents of kids who fail do selfishly choose to stay in the Territory but a significant number do come. I mean six came with the four kids who arrived most recently. So where were they all? Ben was quiet for a while then mumbled something about the older ones finding it harder to adapt. They were more likely to forget their mosquito repellent or couldn’t handle the raids, the foraging for food and stuff. Ben’s dad had only lasted four years, he said. His mum was still here though. She was the school’s headmistress he said proudly.
There are seventeen kids in the school. What’s crazy is that means they’ve all been born out here so this is life as they know it and I can’t quite imagine what that must be like. Never to have seen a light bulb, been to a shop, seen 360 degrees of dry land or gone to a school with actual desks. I was worried they might be like some sort of vicious feral animal, and they did look a bit scary at first in their clothes sewn together from old material or curtains or sofa covers – whatever had been salvaged from the old buildings. But they were still basically kids, kids who’d seen too much fear and death. That is not something you should get used to.
Maggie, that’s Ben’s mum, introduced me to the class. The lessons were in the Barn after breakfast had been cleared away. I thought the lessons would be just on, I don’t know, fire building, water purification, edible plant identification, that sort of thing, but while that was obviously stressed, there was way more than that. There was Storytelling, Maths for trading and working out if we had enough supplies, Art with different coloured clays being painted onto canvases made from plaited dried reeds, Music from wooden instruments that looked a bit like recorders gone wrong and singing. I was blown away. I asked Maggie about it.
‘What’s the point of this?’ I said. I’m embarrassed by my question now, but that’s what I said. Maggie wasn’t offended. Amused if anything. ‘Why teach Art and Stories at all?’ I blundered on. ‘They’re not exactly going to have lots of books to read or galleries to go to. Why not just focus on survival? And then, why even have school? Couldn’t they just follow the older ones around and learn how to do things, like I’m doing with Ben and you?’
Maggie said it came back down to what Annie had said. Humanity not just humans. Otherwise what were we surviving for?
‘And what could be more precious or worth saving than childhood?’
And the kids were great. The idea of learning being fun seemed as weird to me as an alien language. We come in peace x2 minus three and the life cycle of plasmodium. At Hollets you learnt stuff to pass exams. You didn’t care about the content, you just tried to cram it into your head and hoped that the next nugget of knowledge wouldn’t push another fact out. But these kids seemed to like school. Maybe even love it. And not because they were complete losers or had a lead plugged into the back of their neck brainwashing them, but because I guess stuff can actually be really interesting when you’re not then going to sit a life-or-death exam on it. OK, so they weren’t saints or anything. They often talked over the teacher and one girl spent so much time drooling over this boy that she clearly had a massive crush on that it was embarrassing, but the overall atmosphere was different.
Talking of different, one of the girls, Cara, had this super strange look I’ve never seen before. Her skin was really chalky white and her hair was white too. Not ash blonde or white blonde or even bleached blonde. Just white. Which doesn’t make any sense in an eleven year old. From the back, you’d think she was a skinny little old lady who happened to be into skipping. I thought that maybe she was an albino. At school we once had a pair of albino mice in the lab. Come to think of it, Mum’s work always used albino mice too, maybe because white mice seem somehow cleaner and more scientific than grey mice and less like you’ve just found them in a trap spreading disease in someone’s kitchen. But the albino mice had bright pink eyes and Cara’s eyes are green.
Cara kept checking her watch and then left the lesson halfway through. No one seemed to think this was unusual. She didn’t even ask Maggie for permission and it wasn’t like she sneaked out or anything as Maggie turned to look at her and nodded goodbye. And this is when it gets even weirder – a few minutes later she was replaced by a boy, Elias, who looked like he had bleached olive skin and a shock of curly white hair. I tried to ask Maggie about them but she got all angsty and clearly didn’t want to talk about it.
‘Please don’t tell anyone when you leave,’ was all she’d say, a tremor of emotion in her voice. ‘Don’t tell anyone they’re here.’
I didn’t see Raf till dinner in the Barn. It was the longest we’d been apart for ages so I literally tore over to him and flung myself around his neck. He didn’t even look embarrassed, he just grinned right back at me, all semi-tame wolf. And then we just talked and talked about our days, both so excited.
Raf’d been on mosquito repellent duty. Apparently mosquitoes don’t like the smell of lavender. Crazy, I know. Lavender, urrrghhh yuck whereas blood, mmmm mmmm. He and this girl Emma and three others had spent the morning collecting loads of sea lavender growing in an area about an hour’s walk from the Peak. Raf said it had been properly beautiful. From a distance the ground had looked purple there was so many flowers, and the air was just like inhaling a scented candle.
‘Sounds amazing!’
‘The collecting bit was awesome but the actual making bit was grim.’ But Raf’s massive grin told me that, grim or not, he’d loved it.
They’d had to build a fire using this cool timber box thing and then they made a big vat of oil by melting animal fat, mainly stripped from seagulls and rabbits – there aren’t exactly any essential oils available! The lavender flowers are then added to the oil and stirred around with a massive stick. The lavender oil which contains the smell bit then enters the animal oil and hey presto – mosquito repellent! Raf’s eyes were sparkling at the sheer ingenuity of it all. He was just buzzing.
They poured the finished product into bottles and every house, well shack, got one. He’d had to deliver them at the end of the day. Although what had been a bit strange, he’d said, was that when he knocked at the entrance to the iron shack three doors down from the Barn, this girl, aged about ten, had answered with a shy smile that she didn’t need any repellent thank you. I said that maybe she’d got an extra bottle last time, or maybe she hadn’t understood properly. I mean ten’s still quite young, but Raf wasn’t convinced. He said there was something a bit different about the girl.
‘This is going to sound stupid and it was probably because it was dark in the doorway and everything but she looked like she had completely white hair.’
I jumped in there with details of my school day and Cara and Elias but was quickly distracted by Ben coming over.
Ben said that tonight Raf and I get our own shack. I’m so excited. The two guys who normally sleep there have gone on an ‘extended foraging trip’, which basically means they’re searching for bigger animals like sheep or cows or even beached dolphins, so we’ve been allocated it. There’s padding on the fl
oor that’s going to feel like absolute luxury, and even proper hooks for hanging our mosquito nets.
‘Space to … move around,’ Raf said with a wink and a squeeze of my hand. Oh my God. I think we’re going to actually do it. I’m pretty sure that’s what Raf was meaning. I knew this moment would come, but I’m not sure that I’m quite ready, which sounds crazy as I’m crazy about this guy.
Then I thought of an obstacle. An end-of-discussion obstacle. ‘We don’t have any … you know, well, you know…’
Raf’s answer was to riffle around in his backpack and pull out a condom. My face must have been all WHAT?!! How presumptuous are you!?!?!?!?!?! Because he had the good grace to turn bright red and look super embarrassed.
‘It’s not what it seems,’ he spluttered.
‘Really?’
‘They’re supposed to be really useful as part of a survival kit. They can carry up to two litres of water, keep kindling dry and form the elastic part of a catapult.’
We hadn’t used them for any of that but still, I had to give it to him for ingenuity.
I think Daisy would say ‘go for it’ as that was her motto for life, but that was about snogging. This is a far bigger step.
In books and movies sex with someone for the first time is always amazing. Particularly if you love them. This magical experience where your bodies meld together and you get carried to heavenly planes of ecstatic bliss.
I hate books and movies. They LIE LIE LIE! Sex for the first time is rubbish. It’s awkward and painful and embarrassing. Nothing fits, you don’t know what to do or how to move and you’re so worried that the other person thinks you’re a right amateur that the chance of actually enjoying yourself is less than zero. Either that or it’s just me and I’m rubbish at sex. Either way – aaggggghhhhh!