There aren’t chairs; the places where the audience will sit are mossy indents, formed somehow in the grassy slopes which meander towards the stage where the woodland theme continues.
The trees up there are tiny and adorned with thick blossoms. I breathe the heady smell in; it fills my lungs with perfume. The law of the seasons doesn’t apply in this wonderland; it’s spring, summer, winter and autumn all at once, for the trees bear fruit too – their boughs laden with golden pears, yellow lemons, shiny red apples. Vines, rich with clusters of purple grapes, curl around the trunks, entwining themselves among the branches.
There’s a high waterfall, right at the back, gushing down serenely. The water cascading down is rainbow-coloured, changing mid-flow from red to orange, from blue to green, twinkling and dancing as it rushes down to a bubbling brook below.
I tread my way over to the stage and reach up and pick a cherry from the nearest tree. I put it tentatively to my lips, but it’s real. It explodes in my mouth, the rich, sweet juice trickling down my throat. I take another one, and another one, and another one, cramming them into my mouth. I stand on the spot and rotate around and around, captivated by the smell of the blossom, the song of the birds, and of the babbling stream, the waterfall, the sights so rich and lavish.
Who created this place? They’ve surpassed themselves. How much did it cost? And what on earth happens in here? It might look like the Garden of Eden, but it can’t be anything good.
The door opens, and there she is, framed in the sunlight, the serpent herself: my mother, Vivian Baines.
“Well, well, well,” she says. “After all this time, the return of the prodigal son.”
HOSHIKO
“Well, he was friendly!” I say. “Come on, let’s get out of here, quickly.”
We turn away. I look over the road at Jack, answering his quizzical look with a shake of my head.
Suddenly, the sound of sirens fills the air again. Louder. Closer.
The police are in the slums. That woman must have told them we were here.
“Where can we go?” Greta gasps. “Where can we hide?”
“I don’t know.” I look around for an answer. “Deeper into the slums, I suppose.”
We both look towards Jack. He points to the left and starts running, fast. We start running too, until there’s a shout, from behind us.
“Wait!”
I look back. It’s the boy from the hut, standing in the middle of the path. “They’re coming this way,” he says. He gestures towards his tiny home. This time the door’s open. “You’d better come in.”
BEN
We stand there, my mother and I, facing each other, either end of the forest.
She steps forward, slowly coming closer and closer. I fight the urge to step away from her. I don’t look down. I will not let her intimidate me, will not let her bully me. I raise my chin, thrust back my shoulders, and keep my eyes fixed on hers.
Her hair is longer than before and she’s ditched the power suits she always used to wear for softer, more casual clothes.
“Benedict,” she says, tentatively stepping even closer. “I’ve been so worried about you. I haven’t slept for months.” Her voice wavers. “I was so scared I’d never see you again.” Her tone is less abrasive than it used to be; it’s mild, reasonable.
“A lot’s gone on,” she says, gently. “Too much for one conversation. Right now, I’m just relieved to see you in one piece. Why don’t we leave the talking for tomorrow? You can come back home, where you belong. We’ll have pizza, if you like, watch a film. You don’t have to talk at all if you don’t want to.”
I just keep glaring at her. It’s the only power I have: the power of defiance.
“We’ve missed you,” she says. “All of us. Let’s just go home and be together as a family again.”
She’s almost pleading with me. My mother, pleading: I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this.
I try and picture it for a second, what it would be like, walking away with her now, going back to my old life. Living in that house again, going to school, settling back into the way things used to be.
It’s a ridiculous suggestion. I’m not that person at all any more.
“Benedict,” she says, softly. “I love you, we all do.”
Blimey, she’s really pulling out all the stops. I don’t think she’s ever said she loves me before. I’m surprised the word’s even in her vocabulary.
“You’re my baby,” she croons. “We’re a family.”
I can’t be bothered to have this conversation, to play these games. They’re pointless, can’t she see that? They’re not my family any more, her and Father and Francis. Hoshi is. Hoshi and Greta and Jack: they’re the only family I need.
The last eleven months, being on the run, they’ve been hard, really hard, but they’ve been so precious too – to me anyway. When you know that every day could be – probably will be – your last day together, everything is intensified, every moment becomes sacred. There’s no time to play games, to waste precious seconds.
I turn away from this grasping, evil woman.
She doesn’t even know what it is to love someone. She never will – the only person she’s ever really cared about is herself.
Love that wants to own people and curb them to its will isn’t love at all: it’s the opposite of love.
Thinking of Hoshi, out there somewhere, without me, makes the fluttering panic I’m trying to suppress rise up in my chest. How am I going to cope, not knowing where she is, not being beside her every day? Not even knowing if she’s—
I steel myself. It won’t do to think like that. I have to stay strong. For her, and for Greta and Jack. I have to somehow find a way to help them. Nothing else matters but that. Certainly not my mother, with her big house and her big cars and her endless food and her endless money and her piles and piles of luxury goods, mounting up all around her, while the Dregs she crushes have nothing.
“Benedict.” There’s tension in her tone for the first time now. “I’m trying here.”
I still don’t speak. What is there to say that would make any difference?
My thigh’s aching, as usual. I massage it with my hands, easing the stiffness a little. Ever since Silvio Sabatini shot me, it starts throbbing if I stand on it for too long. I was lucky, really lucky, not to lose my leg.
The first thing Jack did when we escaped was get us to a safe house and arrange for a doctor to come and look after us; Beth, her name was. She was a proper doctor, six years training and everything, but she wanted to help. She was like Jack, like a lot of the Pures apparently, part of the resistance network which stretches across the country. She visited every day until Hoshi and I were healed, or as healed as we’ll ever be now.
Hoshi’s hands and feet are much better than they were when the infection took hold, but she’ll probably never be able to get up on a wire again. As for my bullet wound, it’s doing well, considering. I hardly even limp now but the scarring will never go away. There’s an indent in my leg where I used to have muscle; it’s concave now. I don’t mind really – you can’t even tell when I’ve got my jeans on, and Hoshi says it’s a battle wound, which, in a way, I guess it is.
A shadow looms over me. I look up; it’s my mother. She’s moved to the stage and is standing there, looking down on me. Two little dots of colour burn on her cheeks and, when she next speaks, all the softness has gone. Her voice shakes with rage.
“You don’t even have the decency to meet me halfway, do you? You arrogant, foolish child. Do you even know what you’ve done? Do you even care? You have brought shame on me, brought shame on your family, shame on our name! You’ve caused me personal and public embarrassment. There’s an election next week, did you know? The moment I’ve spent my whole career working towards, and I don’t even know if I’m going to win it! Your bleeding heart performance all those months ago stirred all those sentimental do-gooders into action, made them think they had a duty to stand up for
the poor little innocent Dregs. You have betrayed me in the worst possible way and yet you look up at me with that insolent look on your face and you say nothing! The very least you could do is apologize!”
I look up and smirk at her; I know how much it will irritate her.
“My son!” she cries. “My own son, a violent criminal, wanted by the police! His head turned by a Dreg trapeze artist! I still can’t believe it! You should be begging at my feet, begging for my forgiveness! Do you know what? I’ll tell you something incredible, shall I? I was nervous about seeing you today, worried about what I’d say to you! All those months of not knowing if you were alive or dead, I promised myself that if they found you, I’d forgive you anything. Now I look at you and I realize I don’t think I can. It’s too much, Benedict, it’s too much!”
It’s hard for me to look directly at her. All I see is what she’s done, what she is. I close my eyes and remember Priya how she was when I last saw her, and I think of Hoshi: this woman ordered her death. I think of the piano – her favourite possession – with its gleaming white keys, and all the Dregs she’s destroyed – how many? Too many, far, far too many.
I can’t keep quiet any more. Why should I?
“What do you want me to say?” I adopt a whingeing, whiny tone. “What a silly, naughty boy I’ve been! I’m so sorry that I dared to question you. I’ll never break the rules again, Mummy dearest! I’ll do whatever you say in the future if you’ll just forgive me. You were right all along: I could never really love a revolting Dreg girl! Do you know what? I am sorry. I’m sorry it took me so long to work out who you were, sorry I went along with it all for all those years. I don’t want your forgiveness! I don’t want anything from you! Everything that happened, everything I did, I’d do it again in a heartbeat!”
She lets out a cry of rage.
“I don’t know where you came from!” she says. “I don’t know whose genes you’ve inherited, but they sure as hell aren’t mine! I would never have spoken to my mother like you’ve just spoken to me! Never have behaved in such a reckless, selfish way! I respected my parents. I respected authority! How can my son be a rebel? My son be a filthy Dreg lover?”
“Let me go then,” I say. “If I’m such a disappointment, give up on me. I gave up on you a long time ago. Do us both a favour, disown me.”
She laughs. “Disown you? All of a sudden, it’s a tempting idea. If only it were that simple. No. You’ve humiliated me, Benedict; you’ve made me look a fool. There’s an election around the corner and your ridiculous behaviour has cost me votes. The world needs to hear you say how sorry you are! You owe me that at least!”
Ah, now it makes sense. I should have known; it seemed very unlike her to be so desperate to regain my affections. She needs me, that’s why she’s so persistent. My infamous betrayal has dented her reputation. She needs me to repent, publicly.
She turns away from me, pacing up and down the strange woodland wonderland. Then she whirls around, walks back towards me, crouches down on the stage, grabs hold of my face and thrusts hers towards it, baring her teeth at me in a snarl.
“You will apologize, my boy, I promise you! It’s just a matter of how difficult you make it for yourself.”
“You want me to say sorry, tell the voting public I’ve made a mistake?” I say. “You want that? Put me in front of a camera then, I’d be delighted to tell the world how I feel!”
She throws her hands up in exasperation. She doesn’t know what to do. For once, my mother is at a loss.
“Why am I here anyway?” I say. “And why are you? Why on earth are we meeting at the circus?”
She’s silent for a second and then she climbs down from the stage and sinks into one of the grassy indents. When she looks at me again, there’s something in her eyes I’ve never seen before. It looks a bit like guilt, a bit like sorrow.
“It was only ever meant to be an insurance policy,” she says. “I promised your father it was just something to threaten you with, should you make things difficult. I didn’t think I’d have to do it. I thought it would be too much, that it would be too hard on you. Now, looking at you, standing there so brazen and so defiant, I realize we do have to take drastic measures. Not for me, but for you. For your own good. We do need to show you the error of your ways, show you what it would really be like on the other side.”
She stops for a second, and her voice, when she speaks again, sounds bewildered. “Who’d have thought it? He was right all along.”
“Who was right all along? Do you mean Father? Is that who you mean?”
She slumps down further and puts her head into her hands.
“Sometimes you have to take the hardest path,” she says, quietly. “Make the difficult decisions, even if they seem cruel at the time. No, Benedict, I’m not talking about your father; he doesn’t see it quite that way.”
She looks across at me and that unfamiliar, regretful expression is still there.
“I’m talking about the ringmaster.”
HOSHIKO
We dash back down the path and through the door. The boy pushes it shut just in time: blue lights flash on the walls, intermittently lighting up his and Greta’s faces as we all stare at each other fearfully.
Through the window, we see three police cars plough down the narrow path that the huts and shacks cluster either side of. It’s a tight squeeze for them – this track wasn’t made for vehicles – and they leave a wake of destruction behind them. A bit further along, the road tapers even more and a tiny cabin precariously overhangs the dusty trail. The cars don’t stop, they just plough through it. Debris flies up as they bulldoze through, leaving behind nothing but crushed and flattened wood and cardboard.
“There goes Molly and Joe’s pad,” the boy says, wryly. “At least they weren’t in there. I guess that’s something.”
“That was someone’s home? What will they do now?” Greta says.
He shrugs. “What can they do? Scrabble around in the rubbish tips to try and find enough stuff to build a new one, I suppose.”
Jack’s still outside, lurking suspiciously in the shade. He’s lucky the police cars didn’t stop.
I glance at the boy again. There seems to be a permanent scowl on his face.
“Thank you for taking us in,” I say.
He rolls his eyes. “Didn’t feel like I had much choice. Don’t imagine you’re staying long though.”
“But we’ve got nowhere else to go,” Greta says, dejectedly.
He shakes his head. “Look around you. What exactly do you think I can do for you?”
I take in our surroundings.
The tiny shack is neat and clean, inside as well as outside. There’s a little broom in the corner, made of bound-together rags, and the floor beneath our feet is dust and mud free. A large wooden crate, with a couple of smaller crates around it, functions as a table and chairs. The flowers we saw from outside are in a glass bottle. They look like they’ve been freshly picked. Two thin sheets, hung over some string, make up a curtain, dividing the room up. I crane my head a little to peer through the gap. Beyond are two buckets and three neat rolls of blankets: beds, I guess, at night.
“Do you live here on your own?” I ask him.
“No. With my mum. It’s … just the two of us.” His words jolt, as if they’re hard to get out. I wonder if there used to be more of them: a dad maybe, or a brother or sister. I wonder what happened.
“You think you can’t help us,” I say. “But you can, if you want to. You must know how it works around here: we don’t. We don’t know who we can trust – we don’t even know if we can trust you. We don’t know where to avoid. We don’t know anything. There must be something useful you can tell us.”
“Why did you have to bang on my door? I don’t need this hassle, especially not at the moment.” He sinks down on one of the little crates, kicking his legs out in front of him so that they almost fill the tiny room.
“Avoid everyone,” he says, curtly. “Avoid everywhere.
You can’t trust anyone.” His eyes narrow dangerously. “Including me.”
“Well, why did you let us in, then?” I say. “Why did you call us back?”
He laughs dryly. “That’s a good question.”
There’s a silence. Greta and I exchange uncertain glances. The sirens start up again; they’re heading back towards us. I need to get Jack in here, quickly.
“Our friend,” I say. “He’s outside. Can he come in? Just for five minutes, until the police have gone.”
“Who is it?” he asks. “That Pure boy from the posters? Benedict Baines? The one who made that speech they all talk about?”
“No, it isn’t him. It’s—”
“Where’s he, then?” he interrupts me, inquisitively. “Did he change his mind? Go back to his mother?” His expression is gleeful.
“No!” This boy is making me angry. “He didn’t change his mind. The police caught him. He turned himself in!”
In my mind’s eye I see Ben again, standing at the window with the gun to his head. Please, God, please let him be OK. What will they do to him? How will they punish him? I don’t think I’ll be able to keep going if anything happens to him, not even for Greta.
“He gave himself up,” I say, “for us.”
The sirens are close now.
“Our friend, his name’s Jack. He’s outside. Can he come in? Please!”
The boy runs his fingers through his lank, sandy hair and sighs heavily.
“It’s the copper, isn’t it? I hate Pures and I hate the police. Why would I let him in here?”
“He’s not a Pure, not any more. And he never was a policeman, not really. He only joined so he could help the Dregs! Please,” I beg. “Please. They’ll find him otherwise, and they’ll kill him. They’ll kill us all!”
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