Show Stealer

by Hayley Barker

  “Spare us some change,” he calls out as we pass.

  There are more people after that. Curled up in doorways, like him, the stench of urine announcing their presence, or walking towards us, grabbing at us as we pass.

  They all have the same empty, crazed look in their eyes.

  “Who are they?” I ask Jack as we run. “Pures or Dregs?”

  “Neither,” he answers. “They’re in limbo, poor devils.” He slows his pace a little and talks as he runs along next to me. “They’re Pures, probably, or they were once. Pures who, for whatever reason, lost their way. Maybe they’ve committed a crime and they’re on the run, like us. More likely though is that they’re just broken in some way … mentally ill maybe, or the victims of some kind of tragedy or loss they can’t recover from.”

  “Why can’t they get help?”

  I thought all Pures lived in a land of milk and honey. I thought they lived in paradise.

  “If they come forward, and ask for medical or financial help, or somewhere to sleep for the night, they’ll be written off,” he replies. “The Pures don’t want people like these guys messing up their world, making it look less than shiny and perfect. They’ll have their status taken away, be immediately classed as Dregs and, once you’re a Dreg, there’s no going back. That’s why they’re out here; they’re hiding from anyone who might discover them. They think it’s a better option than life in the slums.”

  “And is it?”

  He looks at me with a shrug. “There’s not a lot in it as far as I’ve seen.”

  He was a Pure, once. He had a job. He had a home.

  It dawns on me all over again what they’ve sacrificed for us, Jack and Ben: the police detective and the minister’s son. They’ve turned their backs on the life they knew: a life of easy comfort, a life of privilege, to stand up for us, to stand beside us.

  Where does Jack belong now? And Ben, where does he belong? They too are in limbo. Are they Dregs now, like us, or are they the same as these desperate creatures, clutching at us as we pass?

  No. They are neither of those things. They have defied the labels branded on them at birth. They are heroes, both of them, my heroes, and they belong with us.

  The ache for Ben fills me up. I hope he’s OK. What will they do to him? What if I never see him again? I can’t lose him. Not now.

  I push the thought away. I can’t think like that; I’ll crumple to the ground in a heap if I do. I have to focus on running, on staying safe. For Greta.

  We reach the battered wooden fence which segregates the slums from the rest of the city.

  “We can’t go through the main checkpoint; we’ll have to duck in along here somewhere. If we keep walking along, we should find a gap sooner or later,” Jack says. I can see what he means. It’s a ramshackle fence, rotting wood, slumping inward on itself.

  “I thought it’d be more secure,” I say. “The Cirque fences were all electrified. Surely any Dreg who wants to could jump these, or kick them in.”

  Jack nods. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you, and they do, from time to time, but why would any Dreg want to leave the slums, unless it was for work?”

  “To escape!”

  “To escape to what? Where would they go? What would they do?”

  I think about it. He’s right: there’s nowhere for a Dreg to run to, nowhere safe to go. None of us have money, none of us have passports. At least in there, behind that fence, they’re away from the Pures.

  We run along the perimeter, looking for an easy opening. Within seconds, sirens sound, louder and closer by the second.

  Jack starts kicking at the fence in front of him. I join him, and then Greta does too, her little leg booting it as hard as she can. It’s so old and rotten that it gives way easily; a whole panel splinters in half and you can see through the gap into the slum beyond.

  “Climb through,” Jack says. “Quickly!”

  I scramble through. A splinter of wood catches my arm and scratches it. Greta slips through next, passing Bojo gently through the gap to me first, followed by Jack, who carefully slots the wood back into place.

  We press against the fence, panting, eyes wide, as the sirens get closer and then pass by.

  I look around, curious and apprehensive.

  Huge mounds slope up on either side of us, dotted all around the outskirts, like mountains. The stench alone – a rotten, cloyingly sweet smell – is enough to confirm that they’re rubbish dumps. It’s a smell that makes Greta’s nose wrinkle and bile rise in my throat. There are dark shadows hovering over each one: fuzzy, moving clouds. Flies, I realize as one lands on my cheek and I brush it away in disgust. Crows and magpies, pecking away busily amongst the rotting litter, pause to look down briefly at us before resuming their scavenging ways, and fat, gleaming rats slink brazenly along. Around the corner, a bigger figure emerges, hunched over, rooting through the rubbish. It’s a human being, a tiny, dirty boy rummaging for scraps. He looks at us with dark, hollow, disinterested eyes. Further away, on the other huge heaps, I can see more children doing the same thing.

  In front of us, stretching as far as the eye can see are thousands and thousands of tiny, ramshackle dwellings. At least I think they’re dwellings, it’s hard to tell. They’re all falling apart, all leaning on each other exhaustedly. Corrugated iron, wood, cardboard, a slumping metropolis of poverty and decay.

  We stand there, taking it in. The great London slums.

  When the Pure Protection laws were first passed – the ones that categorize people and their rights according to race and background – the Pures didn’t want Dregs living alongside them any more, polluting their lovely city, so they kicked them all out of their homes. The trouble was, they still needed them close enough to keep everything running in the manner to which they were accustomed: to keep the sewers functioning, the trash collected, the roads built – all the jobs the Pures deemed too lowly for themselves, so they commandeered miles of green belt land and piled everyone in.

  They did the same thing in all towns, but the London slums are the most notorious, for lots of reasons. They’re over twenty-five years old now and there obviously hasn’t been any cash spent on them since they first vomited them out.

  I can’t really remember much about my own slum; I was only five when they took me away. I wonder if it looked like this place. It’s probably miles away from here, but I don’t know. I don’t think my mum ever told me the name of where we lived and, if she ever did, I’ve forgotten it. I’ve always told myself I’ll find my way back one day but, even if I had the chance to start looking, I wouldn’t know where to begin.

  Once my eyes have adjusted, I think I can make out movement from inside some of the shacks, and then we hear shrieking voices and a group of shabby children run past, kicking a can and laughing.

  “What do we do now?” Greta asks, her lip trembling.

  Jack shakes his head. “Not much we can do,” he says. “We’re going to have to go and ask someone for help.”

  BEN

  The officers in front of the car are silent as we move slowly through the heavy city traffic. We don’t make our way south, towards my old house, and we drive straight past the grinning, gleaming PowerHouse monument, so they aren’t taking me to my mother’s office either.

  I stare up at the huge image of Hoshi as she glares down at me. The image has been manipulated, of course – all of the beauty and grace that make up Hoshi erased with the touch of a button. Her eyes are narrow splinters of cold hard flint. Her mouth is set with aggression. It isn’t her at all. It’s a million miles away from the girl I know.

  I look away. Where on earth are we going? At first, I think we’re heading towards the prison, that they’re going to lock me up straight away, but we drive past that too.

  The traffic eventually eases as we make our way out of the city and on to the open road.

  We drive up a steep hill and then dip down again, and that’s when I realize where we’re heading.

  A huge archin
g dome soars up from the trees, shooting lines of red and white cascading down from the top hypnotically. I stare at it, stare at the other buildings which rise up around it as we get closer. More domed roofs, orange and green and pink and purple, like delicious swirled sweets.

  My blood runs cold.

  We knew it was happening, of course we did. We’ve been on the run, but we haven’t been on the moon. As soon as the arena burnt down, the government made plans to rebuild it, plans to construct a bigger, better, permanent Cirque, here in the capital city. I think it was their way of claiming victory, their way of snubbing all the protesters and campaigners who came out against the Cirque. They secured land on the outskirts of London, acres and acres of land, and they started rebuilding it. Permanent structures this time: A bigger, better, bolder Cirque, the posters said, with a few magic tricks up its sleeve.

  As we approach, a helter-skelter looms in front of me, rising up over the fences and, in the distance, an enormous big wheel towers over everything. It’s not enough any more to just have the shows and the side stalls – there’s a fairground now too. No, not a fairground, a theme park: vast, expansive.

  I think of everything we’ve been through, Hoshi and Greta and me.

  We blew up the arena. We escaped. So what?

  They killed Amina, the person Hoshi loved most in all the world – strung her up in the arena and auctioned off her parts on the internet to the highest bidder. They killed Priya – the first person in the world to ever tell me the truth about anything – and turned her into a zombie, there to be used as target practice by excited thugs with their shotguns.

  What did they die for, Amina and Priya?

  Nothing. We achieved nothing.

  The Cirque has picked itself up, dusted itself off and risen up, bigger, better, stronger than ever.

  People will go on dying in the name of entertainment, just like they always did; there’ll just be someone new at the helm.

  Still, whoever it is can’t be as bad as Silvio Sabatini. I shudder just thinking of him. At least we destroyed him. They’ll never be able to take that away from us.

  “Why have you brought me here?” I call out, as the car rolls ever onwards.

  The officers ignore me.

  We pass a road sign. The Cirque, it says. Two hundred metres.

  “Stop the car!” I shout.

  We turn left, past a huge plastic clown face grinning inanely at us as we pass, its wide eyes moving from side to side, and proceed up a long driveway, past the huge empty car parks until we reach a wall, covered in bright three-dimensional images of lions and elephants and acrobats and more clowns.

  The officer driving the car winds down his window, tapping a code into a panel outside. The wall moves then, and I realize it’s not a solid wall at all; it’s a pair of huge double gates. They swing slowly open, the action apparently signalling the start of music.

  It’s the same music as before, gaudy hurdy-gurdy circus music which once, a lifetime ago, filled me with excitement but now fills me with dread and fear and loathing. Waves of panic rise up inside me.

  “Stop the car!” I cry again. They just ignore me. I try the door. It’s locked. “Stop the car! Stop the car!”

  There’s nothing I can do.

  I don’t want to be here. I should never have let them take me. Once I’d seen Hoshi and Greta and Jack were gone, I should have just shot myself.

  We’re in a huge open-air entrance hall lined all across with ticket booths, gleaming and new and unused. In the middle of them, a huge sign flashes its greeting in bold neon lights.

  Welcome to the Cirque! it declares. The Show Must Go On!

  HOSHIKO

  We make our way hesitantly towards the shacks, Greta and me behind Jack, Bojo bounding along at Greta’s heels. It’s eerily quiet everywhere; I suppose most people are out in the city working, doing all the jobs the Pures think are beneath them – the dull ones, the dangerous ones, the dirty ones. There are people here though, I can feel them. A million eyes, hidden away, watching us.

  I keep my gaze on the ground. I don’t remember ever feeling so shy and uncomfortable. The mud beneath our feet is squelchy, even though there’s been no rain for a couple of weeks.

  When we reach the outskirts of the shacks, Jack stops.

  “I think it might be better if you two go first,” he says, “and I hang back a bit.”

  The dismay on Greta’s face must match my own. The media might say we’re fearless renegades, but it’s not true. I really don’t want to do this: find the nearest stranger in this place and ask them for help.

  How can they help us when they’ve got nothing themselves? And why should they?

  “Why?” I ask him.

  He grimaces. “I don’t look enough like one of them, that’s why. I’m nearly forty-two years old and I’ve still got all my teeth. My hair hasn’t fallen out, and I’m still fairly strong, even after a year on the run. As soon as they look at me, they’ll see a Pure.”

  My heart sinks further.

  Jack’s told me all about the slums. He told me and Ben that they were the one place we could never run to, the one place we should never hide, not with Ben and Jack being Pures. Even the police, armed with their guns, avoid the slums if they can help it, Jack says. The Dregs are left to their own devices here, and there are far too many hungry, angry, desperate people for it to be a place where anything good happens.

  Greta squeezes my hand.

  “We’ll do it together,” she says.

  I look down at her and my heart swells. She’s recovered from her panic already: she’s ready to do whatever she has to. She always was the bravest of us.

  “What are you going to do?” I ask Jack.

  “I’ll be behind you. I’ll keep my head down and try and stay in the shadows, if I can. I’ll keep within hearing distance though. If you need me, shout.”

  As we start walking, I glance behind me at Jack, skulking along behind us. He’s wearing a beanie hat and he’s adopted that slumped, defeated look most of the Dregs have, but he was right; he does look different to the Dregs. Of course he does – he was born in another world.

  Jack never talks much about his life before. One night though, back in the early days on the run, he told me and Ben about what happened to him to make him the way he is – so brave and loyal and good.

  We were camped out in the woods. It was a really cold night and we made a fire and sat there, talking through the night while Greta and Bojo curled up in the warmth of the flames and slept.

  Jack said being out in the woods reminded him of his home, when he was a kid. His parents owned a big farm and a lot of land, but his mum died when he was young and his dad was always busy overseeing the management of his estate. Nobody had much time for Jack, so he was shipped off to boarding school.

  “I was pretty much left to my own devices in the school holidays,” he said. “I could roam around as I pleased, as long as I kept out of the way and didn’t cause any bother.

  “There was always a lot of manual work to be done, which meant a lot of Dregs – working in the fields, clearing out the livestock, that kind of thing. Mostly people would come and go – we were always especially busy at harvest time – but there were some families who lived on site, in cottages my father gave them in exchange for labour.

  “There was a Greek family living in one of the homes and the oldest boy, Andreas, was the same age as me. Ever since we were little kids we used to play together, down in the fields and woods. I spent every waking minute with him if I could. It wasn’t allowed, of course, but nobody paid much attention to things like that on a rural farm in the middle of nowhere.

  “When you’re young, you think days like that will last for ever. It didn’t matter that he was a Dreg and I was a Pure, or that his dad was a serf, working long, hard hours under the heavy hand of my father.”

  His eyes filled with tears when he said that. He stopped for a while, and stoked up the fire. Then, when he sat back down, he
started speaking again.

  “Andreas was my best friend. I lived for those days when it was just me and him, free and wild. We would fish together, and build camps out in the woods, and then, when our stomachs told us it was time, we’d go back to his cottage and scrounge some food. His family were as different to mine as it was possible to be. There were seven of them living in that tiny place: Maria and Alesandro, the parents, and five kids. It was always noisy and it felt like everyone was happy, all the time. They didn’t have money, obviously, but Alesandro was an expert hunter and forager and there always seemed to be something cooking away. Maria always found a bit extra for me, and I always ate it, even though I could have had anything I wanted at home. The food our cook made was never as nice as the stews she’d dish up.

  “One summer, I came home and I went straight down to the cottage to find Andreas like I always did, but he wasn’t there. His mum told me he had to help out with the labour on the farm now he’d turned fourteen, so that was the pretty much the end of our friendship. I’d see him all the time, working away, but we never got to spend much time together any more. I know it was wrong of me, but I resented him for it. It felt like he’d grown up and I was still a boy, like he didn’t have time for our childish adventures now he was a man.”

  Jack stood up then and walked off into the woods. I wanted to go after him, but Ben said we should wait.

  “He’ll come back,” he said. “He’ll tell us, in his own time.”

  So we waited there by the fire. He was gone ages. It was really late, and as I stared into the flames, my eyes felt heavy, but I didn’t want to go to sleep. In the end, Ben was right: he came back and carried on like he’d never stopped talking.

  “I’ve never told anyone this before,” he said. “It’s the worst thing I ever did. You two think I’m a good person, but I’m not.” And then he sat down with his back to us and told us the rest of the story.