Under the Weather

by Tony Bradman

  Jade struggled to get to the boy. Something was holding her back, stopping her legs from running, her arms from moving.

  A voice from the darkness called, “Jade, are you OK?”

  She opened her eyes. Her mother’s concerned face looked down at her.

  “What?” asked Jade, confused.

  “You’ve had another nightmare,” whispered her mother.

  “Oh.” She propped herself up on an elbow. “Sorry!”

  “How about I make you some hot chocolate?” asked her mother, not really knowing what else to do.

  Jade nodded with a half-smile. Hot chocolate! It was her mother’s solution to everything from skinned knees to family crises, from the death of a pet to ... bad dreams. It meant she had something to do and didn’t have to talk about it.

  As she got up to follow her mother to the kitchen, Jade shivered, despite being drenched in sweat.

  Jade waited outside the school counsellor’s office, hoping that no one would see her there. Her mother had driven her to school early and was in talking with the counsellor – talking about her; talking about her dreams.

  The door finally opened and her mother came out.

  “You’ve got an appointment to see Ms Helmond at lunchtime today.”

  “Mum, I don’t...” began Jade.

  “I’d really feel happier if you talked to someone about your dreams,” said her mother, cutting her off. “Please!”

  Jade looked down at her shoes, sighed, and then nodded. Her mother wasn’t a good talker, or listener for that matter, so Jade wasn’t really surprised that she was getting her daughter to talk through her problems with a complete stranger.

  “Thank you,” said her mother. “Now I’ve got to get to work.”

  She gave her daughter a quick hug and rushed off. As Jade watched her mother leaving, she noticed Marc walking past. He had a drink can in his hand and a school bag over one shoulder. He stopped by the bins and looked over at her. Then, smiling, he made a big show of dropping the can into the recycle bin rather than the rubbish bin, before continuing on his way.

  “And you’re having these dreams every night?” asked Ms Helmond, the school counsellor, as she shuffled through the papers in Jade’s file.

  “Pretty much,” answered Jade.

  Ms Helmond nodded as she continued to look through the file.

  “Hmmm,” murmured Ms Helmond, head down. “You took part in the school’s recycling drive last year.” She continued to shuffle through papers. “You wrote a piece for the school magazine on climate change.”

  Jade nodded as Ms Helmond looked up.

  “Environmental issues are really important to you, aren’t they Jade?”

  Jade nodded again.

  “Would you say that climate change and damage to our environment is something that worries you?”

  “I guess,” answered Jade. “I mean ... I do think about it a bit. You know ... pollution and recycling and stuff.”

  Ms Helmond nodded thoughtfully. She closed Jade’s file and folded her hands together on top of it before looking up at her.

  “I think your dreams may simply be manifestations of your anxieties. It’s your subconscious telling you that you need to do something to help the world. That’s why the boy is asking for help. Maybe, deep down, you’re even feeling a little guilty because you’re not doing everything that you can.”

  She smiled. It was a self-satisfied sort of smile that said I’ve figured it out, aren’t I wonderful.

  “I think you’ll find,” she continued, “that if you start doing something proactive – saving water, recycling, or whatever – that your subconscious will settle down and the dreams will stop.”

  She picked up Jade’s file, indicating that the session was at an end.

  Jade nodded and reached for her school bag.

  “So are you nuts?” asked Marc as Jade stepped out of the counsellor’s office.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Jade, surprised to see him waiting there for her.

  “I got lonely eating my lunch with no one staring at me,” he smiled, holding up his lunch box.

  “Yeah ... funny,” said Jade, scowling at him.

  “So ... are you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you nuts?”

  “No!” said Jade indignantly. “I’m not nuts.”

  “Then why were you seeing the counsellor?” persisted Marc. “Is it because you keep staring at new kids in a weird kinda way?”

  “None of your business,” said Jade stalking off. “Get lost!”

  “I was just joking,” said Marc, following after her. “I don’t really think you’re nuts.”

  Jade continued walking.

  “Wanna have lunch together?” he said. “I haven’t eaten mine yet.”

  Jade walked over to the quadrangle, dumped her bag on a bench and slumped down beside it. Marc sat down on the other side of the bag. They both brought out their lunches in silence. Neither of them said anything while they ate. After they were finished, Marc threw his can into the recycle, and then went to put his apple core in the bin.

  “I’ll take that,” said Jade, snatching the core from his hand.

  He looked at her strangely.

  “Compost,” she said, explaining her actions. “We have a compost bin at home.”

  “Oh,” nodded Marc.

  “Yeah, I know, that probably makes me even weirder,” said Jade.

  Then the bell rang and they headed off for class.

  “So, how did it go?” asked Karen, as Jade walked into the kitchen.

  Jade shrugged as she dumped her school bag on the floor by the table. She headed to the refrigerator and got the carton of orange juice.

  “Glass,” reminded Karen, before Jade had the chance to put the carton to her lips.

  Jade nodded and got herself a glass before sitting down at the table, opposite her sister. She filled it up with juice, drained the glass and refilled it.

  “Come on,” coaxed Karen. “Spill the beans. What did the counsellor say?”

  Jade sighed. “She reckons I’m worried about the environment and that I just need to do something positive to make the dreams go away.”

  “What?”

  “She said that my dreams were just manifestations of my anxieties.”

  Jade sipped at her juice.

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” complained Karen. “You’ve been having these dreams, on and off, since you were a little kid. I doubt that you were all that worried about the environment when you were five.”

  Jade shrugged and drank some more juice.

  “What kind of a counsellor is she?” railed Karen. “I mean...”

  Karen’s voice trailed off as realisation dawned on her. She stared intently at her younger sister. “You didn’t tell her the whole story, did you?”

  Jade shrugged and stared into her glass of juice.

  “Well, what did you tell her?”

  “Not much, really,” admitted Jade, looking up. “Mum talked to her this morning and told her about my dreams. And I guess she didn’t tell her that I used to have them when I was little.”

  Karen stared at her sister.

  “So I guess it’s Mum’s fault,” said Jade, looking down at her juice again. She suddenly felt guilty about blaming her mother.

  “To be fair,” said Karen, “Mum probably doesn’t even remember you had bad dreams when you were little. She was working an awful lot back then, and I was the one taking care of you.”

  Karen shook her head and turned to stare out the window. She ran a hand through her short blonde hair and sighed. “OK,” she started. “I think there’s something I should tell you.”

  Jade looked up.

  “I’ve had the dreams too,” Karen announced. “Not for a long time now. But when I was younger, I had them for a little while. The dreams were always about bad weather – storms and things. And there was someone in them. A kid. I could never really tell if it was a boy or a girl.”
She looked back at Jade. “They didn’t last all that long. I had a few when I was about ten. And then again a couple of years later, when I was your age.”

  “Wow!” exclaimed Jade.

  “Yeah,” agreed Karen.

  “So... they’re probably not ordinary bad dreams, then?” said Jade.

  “Probably,” agreed Karen.

  “So what are they?” asked Jade. “And what do they mean?”

  “I’ve got a friend studying psychology,” suggested Karen. “Maybe we...”

  “No,” Jade interrupted. “No thanks.”

  “What about...” started Karen.

  “I’m OK, really,” Jade cut in. “I never wanted to see the counsellor in the first place.”

  “But...”

  “Look,” said Jade, interrupting again. “I’ve always known there’s something more to these dreams. And now I’m sure.” She suddenly looked determined. “And I think I know who I should be talking to about them.”

  Jade dreamt of the storm again that night ... and the boy. The storm was not as severe. The boy did not look as sad.

  “To save the future, start with the present,” said the boy. His voice was familiar. “Each step is important, and each individual can make a difference.”

  Marc came and sat next to Jade at lunch the next day.

  “Sorry about being grumpy yesterday,” said Jade, as she began eating her lunch. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  After they finished their apples, Marc automatically placed his core in Jade’s lunch box. Jade looked up at him and he smiled.

  “I’ve been having weird dreams,” started Jade.

  She told him all about the dreams, about the session with the school counsellor, and about her talk with her sister. Then they sat in silence for a few minutes, until Jade looked towards Marc expectantly.

  “Wow!” exclaimed Marc, eyes wide.

  “Is that all you’ve got to say?” asked Jade.

  “Um...” Marc shrugged.

  “Great!” said Jade. “I thought that you might ... I dunno ... have some idea ... something to say ... maybe...” Her voice trailed off and she looked away.

  “What?” said Marc. “Have a neat solution for you? Be able to explain everything?” He shrugged again, wracking his brains for something more to say — something to make Jade feel better about having told him everything. “Maybe ... maybe the dreams are messages.”

  Jade turned slowly to look at him. “Messages?”

  “Yeah. Messages from ... aliens or something.”

  Jade began to turn away again.

  “No! Not aliens. Maybe ... the dreams are messages from the future?”

  Jade looked interested.

  “Maybe things have gotten so bad with the environment,” he continued, “that these future-people are desperate to get people in the past – that’d be us – to change their ways ... to start caring more for the environment ... and ... change the future ... make it better...”

  “And they’re doing this with dreams?” Jade raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, maybe that’s the only way of getting messages to the past.” Marc was on a roll now. “First they tried your sister, but she didn’t listen. And now they’re trying you.” He grinned at her. “You could be the chosen one. The one destined to save the world.”

  Jade looked back sceptically.

  Suddenly they both burst into laughter.

  “Dreams ... from the future,” laughed Jade.

  “To change the world,” laughed Marc.

  “As if!” they both hollered together.

  As their laughter petered out, they both looked around at the school grounds they were in.

  On the next bench, they saw someone eating a banana. A teacher walked along the path eating an apple. A young kid dropped a half-eaten sandwich into a bin.

  “It’s a pity the school doesn’t have a compost bin,” sighed Jade.

  “Well,” said Marc. “There’s no reason why it shouldn’t.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Jade, thoughts of starting a school compost heap running through her mind. “You’re absolutely right.”

  There were no storms in Jade’s dreams that night. The sun was shining and a pleasantly cool breeze blew across the water. The boy was standing on the golden sand as the water gently lapped at his feet. He was smiling.

  “Thank you,” he said. “The future isn’t certain. So many things can happen. But you’ve given it a chance.”

  His familiar eyes sparkled.

  “Thanks ... Great-Gran.”

  Jade woke up smiling ... and wondering.

  Wasters

  by Linda Newbery

  My story began with the idea that people who live fifty years or so into the future will look back at the way we live now, and be horrified by how wasteful and extravagant we’ve been with the world’s resources. Future generations will surely be wiser.

  When Great-Grandad was a boy, people my age were called ‘teenagers’. He’d been one himself.

  I searched for it in my wordbank.

  teenager noun; English (obsolete) a person aged between thirteen and nineteen years. Originated in the USA; in use in Standard English from about 1960 until the mid-21st century.

  Great-Grandad said that being a ‘teenager’ meant not being a child but not being an adult either. ‘Teenagers’ had these few years when everyone expected them to be difficult, moody and selfish. It sounded weird to me – wasting that important time, when you were at your fittest for community work, and just coming into breeding condition.

  “Hey, we’re teenagers!” I said to Fern, trying out the word to see how it fitted. Only just: my thirteenth birthday had been three weeks ago.

  “What’s Standard English?” Fern asked, looking over my shoulder.

  That’s the trouble with research; you find out one thing and end up baffled about something else. But she answered her own question, as she often did. “Perhaps people were only allowed to speak English words. But that would be pointless. No one would understand you apart from other English speakers.”

  “That’s another thing Great-Grandad said,” I told her. “At school, they had to learn all these other dead languages – French and stuff. He didn’t even start speaking Global till he was seventy-something.”

  “Anyway,” Fern said, “what about teenagers? We’d better include them.”

  “Yeah. Put it down as a heading. We’ll go and see Great-Grandad tonight, shall we? I want to ask him about Houses.”

  Fern and I were determined to win this year’s Community Prize. The announcement would be made at a kind of graduation ceremony. Everyone our age, in the last year of General Instruction, worked on their own project before passing on to specialised training. Next year I’d be in the Germination Unit, and Fern would follow her mother into Forestry. But we were planning to win that prize first. It was unusual for a boy and a girl to work together, but that made us all the more determined. Fern, being a girl, was in the fast stream for Instruction, and most of those girls either jeered at boys or ignored them completely. But Fern and I had been friends since our crèche days.

  My great-grandad (really he’s my great-great-grandad, but that’s a bit of a mouthful) was a big help. There were lots of citizens who’d passed their hundredth birthday, but not many with such good memories. And memories were what we needed. We wanted our entry to be special. There were lots of presentations on tidal barriers or soil improvement, but ours, we felt, was a bit more ambitious. A bit more intellectual, and that appealed to Fern.

  Tomorrow’s community trip to Millennium Dome 2 would give us ideas. We’d seen the satellite pictures of the opening ceremony a month ago, with the President making a speech about the rebuilding of London. The new building was spectacular: a geodetic dome made entirely of glittering glass panels that caught the sunlight like the facets of a diamond. It was completely transparent, so you could see the lifts going up and down in the middle, like mercury in an old-fashioned thermometer. And we were
actually going there, all the way to London. To be honest, I felt nervous about going so far from home, but our Community had been chosen as one of the first to send an Educational Group. I wasn’t going to miss the chance just because I might be Transport-Sick. I’d heard that a lot of people were, their first time.

  As soon as Fieldwork had finished, Fern and I took off our overalls and visors, and went to find Great-Grandad in the Senior Citizens’ area. Some of the younger seniors were coming back from work, hand-weeding or banana-packing; they gathered in groups to drink herbal tea and watch the big screen or play games. Great-Grandad was sitting alone by the long window, with a book on his lap. Not many of the old folk read books, but I hardly ever saw Great-Grandad without one. A screen was no use to him.

  “Hello, Great-Grandad,” I said loudly, so as not to make him jump.

  He turned round. His skin was lined with grooves like pine bark, grooves that became even deeper as his face creased into a smile. “Hello, Rowan-love! Have you got Fern with you?” He sounded pleased, but weary. He’d never really seemed happy since he retired, three years ago. He’d have gone on working if he’d been allowed to. I can remember him saying, “I’m no use to anyone! On the scrap-heap, at a hundred and one.”

  I had to ask, “What’s a scrap-heap?”

  That had made him laugh, and snap out of his dark mood. “Of course, you wouldn’t know, Rowan-love. We don’t have scrap-heaps, now that we recycle everything. It used to mean a heap of rubbish.”

  But I’d had to look that up, too.

  rubbish noun; English (obsolete) waste matter; something worthless

  I still didn’t get it. Nothing was worthless; it was the rule we lived by. It was a matter of finding the right use for things, and storing them till then.

  Fern and I pulled up chairs next to him. Great-Grandad could remember all sorts of things; there’d been a queen when he was a boy, before England became a People’s Republic, and he remembered some of the leaders we’d learned about in World History. Back then, England had its own leaders, and so did all the other countries. It wasn’t surprising that all those different leaders made trouble, before there was a World Government. There had been wars – people had even killed each other. And all those leaders hadn’t been able to prevent the Catastrophe.