‘Like Ivy,’ Lark said, her voice soft.
Miss Margaret shook her head again. ‘It was different.’ She stood up, restless. ‘One day I was near the teachers’ sitting room. They were discussing her. Rachel was clearly a failure, they said. There’d been a couple of experiments with her design, attempts to create a particular version that hadn’t worked. It was fascinating, one of the outsiders said, a lesson well learnt. It was almost worth keeping her around to see if they could discover more. He was stopped then by another voice, calm and assured, cutting through his enthusiasm. Enough lessons had been learnt. They’d had similar difficulties with several others – a boy was named, along with the name of the neighbouring school. There should be no more time-wasting, the focus needed to be on those that were working. My name was mentioned. I was described as an excellent design, one that would certainly be repeated.’
Here, Miss Margaret stopped.
Her voice was quiet. ‘I wasn’t particularly assertive, nor was I skilled at being direct in difficult situations. When I overheard their conversation about Rachel, I didn’t do anything. If our roles had been reversed, I know Rachel would have walked straight into that room and demanded an explanation. She would have argued with them. She would have defended me.
‘I did neither. I just walked away. Four days later, Rachel was gone.’
Neither Lark nor I spoke.
‘When I asked what had happened to her, I was told she was sent to another school, one that was better equipped to assist her. I tried to search for her, but there was no trace. Communications were not so sophisticated then and wiping was relatively new – it wasn’t as frequently used or as effective as it is now. These days we would assume someone has been wiped. Back then I just didn’t understand how she could have disappeared.
‘I was anxious, concerned for myself. Despite hearing them say that I was an exceptional model, I was aware now that there were possibly dangers in failing, in not living up to expectations.
‘At the end of the school year, we had another dance. The boy that Rachel had been so attracted to still wasn’t there, but one of his friends was.’ Miss Margaret turned to me then. ‘His name was Marcus.’
It took me a moment to realise who she was referring to. My eyes widened as she nodded.
‘Marcus and I danced together. We each knew the other wanted to talk. He didn’t know what had happened to his friend Euan, and I told him Rachel had also disappeared. It turned out his friend had also been disruptive, difficult, questioning. There’d been doubts about whether he’d make an effective housefather for one of BioPerfect’s schools for boys. Euan had even said he wasn’t interested in the work, losing his temper frequently.
‘Marcus knew Euan was in touch with a group of subversives. When he told me this, he leant close, making sure that no one else could hear. Euan had been angry about the way in which his life had been circumscribed; he didn’t want to live as he’d been told to live. He’d shown Marcus some of the networks that he was in touch with, encouraging Marcus to join him.
‘I remember being so nervous and also secretly thrilled. It was as though a door had been flung open and I was peering around the corner. I didn’t want to be drawn into this world. I was terrified of being found wanting, of not being the perfect carer. I was horrified at having learnt that our lives were in someone else’s hands. But I didn’t want to rock the boat. And I was also good at what I was being trained to do. I enjoyed it. Yet I missed Rachel. I missed her terribly. And I was angry at how she’d been treated. It was all so confused.’
Lark’s eyes were fixed on Miss Margaret as she spoke and she reached for her hand.
Breathing in deeply, Miss Margaret continued. ‘I began seeing Marcus. We talked a lot about who we were, what it meant to have been designed. His parents had bought his design. They weren’t that rich, so they hadn’t aimed high. He was going to work with plants the old-fashioned way. He hoped to be a gardener at a school. He wasn’t searching for another life, but he was disturbed by the choices that were made on our behalf, the fact that our lives were not entirely our own.
‘He dabbled at the edge of the sieves, having some contact with various networks, but he didn’t seem to be deeply involved. Sometimes he’d show me a little, but he knew it made me uncomfortable, that I didn’t want to know too much.
‘When we came near to the end of our time at school, we began to talk about a life together. We could apply for work at the same place, perhaps try to get our own living quarters so that we could be together when I wasn’t required to stay overnight. Neither of us knew how this would work, we weren’t sure if it was done, but we were hopeful. He told me he loved me and I told him I loved him.’ Miss Margaret smiled, her eyes distant as she remembered.
‘One evening we were down by the water. It was a beautiful, warm night, the sky like cottonwool, the trees shifting gently in the breeze. We swam together in the river and I thought I had never been so content. Marcus told me he had a job interview. He had spoken to them about family living quarters and they had said it could be arranged when he married. “We could,” he’d said. “And children – we could have them too. Why not?”
‘I remember being surprised at his certainty in us, then delighted and then I had to tell him that it was impossible. I couldn’t have children. And as I uttered the words, their full import struck me for the first time. I’d been so young. It had never worried me before. I hadn’t even really thought about what it meant.
‘Marcus couldn’t hide his immediate response. I saw it – the disbelief, the disappointment, the anger, each colliding with the next. And then, right on their heels, the pretence. It was me he loved, not the possibility of a particular future. If we couldn’t have that, we would fashion something else. His reassurances failed. I, too, had realised that I wanted a child.’
Miss Margaret was still now, not looking at either of us as she spoke.
‘There, by the river, something in me solidified. Perhaps it was inevitable. I had been designed to interrogate, to question and to care. To have a sense of justice and fairness. All my teachings had encouraged these qualities as well. I began to feel increasingly angry about how we were treated – those of us who could not pay but were used as experiments – people like myself and all the Lotto Girls and Boys that followed.’
Lark and I listened in silence, both of us wanting her to continue.
‘I have more to tell you,’ she said, ‘but it will keep. For now, let me just say that, as your carer, I needed to get you away from that environment.’ She smiled at me. ‘Don’t stay cooped up in here. You’re free to wander around. It’s an extraordinary place and I know everyone will do their best to make you feel welcome.’
She kissed Lark on the cheek and turned to me, but I pulled away, still angry with her for bringing us here.
It was Hamish that I spent time with over the next few days, not Lark and Ivy. When I tried to discuss how I felt about Miss Margaret, Lark would dismiss me.
‘Has she ever hurt us?’ she asked. ‘She says it’s no longer safe for us at Halston. We’re not like Ivy but maybe we were also failing. I want to trust her.’
I wasn’t satisfied. It didn’t help that I saw so little of Miss Margaret after our conversation on that first day.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said on the few occasions I tried to talk with her. ‘I know you want to know what’s happening …’ She would get interrupted, called away by someone, or she would need to get to a meeting or respond to her mobie.
Lark spent her mornings helping Ivy mind the children. In the afternoons she would go to the music room and practise a piece she’d been working on for a concert. ‘Lila – she lives in the East Wing – wants me to sing after dinner one night. She’s organising an evening,’ she told me excitedly. ‘It won’t be for a little while, but that’s a good thing. It gives me time to get it right.’
‘Why?’ I asked her. ‘It’s not like anyone here would know any different.’
�
��They might,’ she said. ‘Besides, I want to know I’ve sung as well I can.’
I asked her if she’d forgotten that we were brought here without our consent. I asked her if she’d forgotten Wren.
‘Of course not,’ she said, hurt. She turned away from me, making her bed and leaving without saying farewell.
In the kitchens, Hamish and I talked. ‘We use as little BioPerfect food as we can,’ he told me. ‘Try this.’
He handed me an apple. It was small, misshapen, but sweet and crisp.
‘It’s good,’ I agreed.
‘Dad grew it.’
I told him I’d tried some of the fruit and vegetables Marcus had grown at Halston. I’d spent a lot of time with him in the gardens. Hamish promised he’d take me to him when he had a chance and suggested I wander down there myself if I wanted.
The first time I went Marcus wasn’t there. The second time, he was deep in conversation with Miss Margaret. I saw them before they saw me, talking like people who’d known each other forever. She laughed, her smile wide, her eyes alive. She still loved him, I realised as I headed back to the kitchens.
Hamish worked with a woman called Hazel. She was about four years older than me and did little to hide the fact that she found my presence irritating.
‘You may be used to having everything done for you,’ she said, handing me the waste to take to the disposal unit, ‘but it’s not like that here. We do everything on our own, without help from any of the Parents.’
I didn’t know what she meant.
‘We harvest our own water, make our own food and even deal with this without ReCorp.’ She pointed to the waste. ‘We all have to work. All of us.’
Hamish rolled his eyes behind her back, whispering to me later that Hazel wasn’t renowned for her social skills.
‘I’ll get you on prep,’ he said, indicating a slicing unit and various foodstuffs. ‘Even a pampered Halston girl should be able to cope with a bit of chopping.’
I narrowed my eyes and pointed a blade at him. ‘Careful.’ I grinned, glancing across at Hazel, who was doing her best to ignore me. ‘Any more cracks and I won’t be held responsible for my actions.’
Later, as we cleared up, I asked Hamish if he knew why we’d been brought here.
He shook his head.
‘Really?’
He smiled at me. ‘Believe it or not, you aren’t the centre of all conversations happening around here.’
Hazel laughed.
The next morning, Marcus took me to see his colony of bees. The hives were on the edge of the compound, past the learning rooms, the living spaces, the food-production halls. They formed part of the gardens that bordered the whole cluster, although ‘gardens’ was perhaps a strange word when they were so much more contained than the spaces I was used to.
‘It’s not much when you’ve seen Halston, I know,’ Marcus said, ‘but it’s something.’
He looked proud as he showed it to me – a series of glassed-in rooms, each filled with fruit and vegetables. There were tiny tomatoes, glossy purple eggplants, rough-skinned baby cucumbers and translucent green lettuces; walls with espaliered fruit trees – plums, apricots, peaches and pears; climbing beans, crisp snow peas and deep buckets of earthy potatoes.
There was also a flower room, filled with a crush of colour and beauty, silky petals folding over one another, a tangle of leaves and vines and, beyond that, the bees.
It was like a child’s datastream, I thought. Everything that was good in the world was clustered together here into one small space.
‘We’ve been in this place for a while,’ he told me. ‘It’s given the group a chance to really get growing. Last time they had to leave in such a hurry they couldn’t take much with them. It was before my time, before Hamish was born. His mother was part of the old community. She wanted him to grow up here, to be safe.’
I knelt down and buried my hand in the warmth of the earth, crumbling it through my fingers. I wished I could take images of this. It was so beautiful.
‘We can’t run any risk of you being found,’ Miss Margaret had told me when I’d complained of not having access to data. ‘No one here has individual data,’ she explained. ‘If you want it, you have to do it through one of the central ports.’
‘So there’s no privacy?’ I’d asked. ‘Everyone knows what everyone else is doing?’
‘Only if they care to look,’ she’d replied with a smile. ‘And it’s only data. You still have your own thoughts, your own words, touch, smell – these are all private ways of communicating in the flesh.’
‘Come.’ Marcus beckoned me through to where the hives were kept, boxes abuzz with activity.
I’d read about bees once at Halston, how their disappearance was part of The Breakdown, how they remained one of the greatest challenges for BioPerfect, only a small percentage of the synthetically manufactured hives able to survive.
‘You’d be stung if you went in as you are,’ Marcus said. ‘We’ll have to suit you up.’
The noise was deafening.
‘They don’t know you, so they’re bound to be angry – or suspicious at the very least.’ He smiled. ‘I’m still new to them myself. I’m sure if I took the time to have a chat with them, introduce you to them, they’d be sweet as pie.’
He pulled out one of the trays, showing me the comb, dripping and sticky.
‘Tried to get bees going at Halston but they always upped and left,’ he said. ‘They seem to like it here, though.’
‘What happens when you have to go?’ I asked him.
‘We take what we can. Sometimes there’s enough warning to be organised. Other times it’s sudden.’ He looked around him. ‘I’ve liked it here. It’s only been a few months for me, but for the others it’s been quite a few years – enough to make them flabby and content.’ He grinned at me. ‘Hamish says you’ve been spending time with him.’
I nodded.
‘He’s always lived here. I could never tell anyone at Halston about him and I couldn’t get leave to spend time with him because this is a secret.’ He waved his hand around. ‘This is all he’s known, the lucky boy. As soon as I took my retirement I had myself wiped and disappeared.’ He laughed, patting his stomach. ‘I seem to be here as solid as ever, but to all intents and purposes, I no longer exist outside this place.’
I picked a leaf from one of the plants and rubbed it between my fingers.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye when I left,’ he said. ‘I wanted to, but I also knew you’d ask questions – where I was going, what I was doing. I didn’t want to have to lie.’
I asked him who Hamish’s mother was, and he told me they’d met in the first year after school, when he’d been sent to work on a farm.
He blushed a little. ‘It was a rebound,’ he admitted. ‘I was still in love with Margaret.’ He bent down to snap off the dead bud of a flower. ‘Her name was Maya. She died a year after his birth – enviro sickness from a stint in ReCorp. She made me promise Hamish would be brought up by this community, and I kept true to that. I visited him as often as I could.’
Had he gone to work at Halston in the hope of reuniting with Margaret? I didn’t know and I didn’t feel it was right to ask him.
‘Margaret’s been busy since you arrived, catching up with what she needs to know so she can prepare you for all that’s to follow.’ He looked at me. ‘There’s a lot she still needs to tell you, and we’ve got to work on your immunity. All those years at Halston made you soft.’
I’d been taking the BioPerfect pills since we arrived. I didn’t seem to have had any difficulty adjusting to this environment, but it was too soon to tell.
‘What’s to follow?’ I asked.
He told me it was best to wait for Miss Margaret to explain everything to me. Details were still being worked out. He couldn’t give me the complete picture.
‘But this is me,’ I said to him, slightly hurt.
We were picking tomatoes together – the fruit like dro
ps of blood in our hands, glistening. He would keep some for their seeds, he told me, and take the others to the kitchens for preserving.
‘This is my life and no one is telling me what’s happening.’ I could feel the beginning of tears, the frustration building. ‘We’re expected to act like everything’s fine, like we chose to come here. But we didn’t. And Lark may be okay, but I’m not.’
Marcus sat me down near the water tank – the first I’d seen that didn’t bear a PureAqua insignia. Hamish had told me that water was the biggest difficulty. There was so little rain that illegal harvest was barely enough to survive. In the past they’d had to purchase water from the subversive networks at PureAqua, and with the amounts the community needed, it was difficult to escape detection for long. But they’d been lucky in this place. There’d been more rain than usual, which allowed them to stay for a while.
Marcus told me he knew I’d been unhappy, that I was missing Halston. He looked at me. ‘I liked it there too, aside from being apart from my son. It was a beautiful place and it gave me access to a lot of stuff we use here, and the facilities – well, you know what they were like. But this is home in a way that Halston never was.’
As I listened to Marcus I tried to imagine him as a young man in love with Miss Margaret. I asked him if he regretted any of the choices he’d made.
He considered my question for a moment. ‘Would I have been better off just doing what I was meant to do?’ He looked at the ground, rubbing the sunburnt skin at the edge of his eyes. ‘I had it pretty good. So did Margaret. In fact, there are a few of us living here who had it good in the place we came from.’
‘Including myself.’
‘Yes, including yourself,’ he agreed. ‘But for me and Margaret, there was a point at which we felt the crime was too great. We saw the sacrifices we were forced to make in order to conform. Margaret and I couldn’t have children. I know she’s told you that. We also saw children who didn’t meet BioPerfect’s expectations and were dumped. The rich ones were fine. They could go back to their homes and lead lives where they lacked for nothing. But others couldn’t.
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