To See the Light Return

by Sophie Galleymore Bird

  She made it perhaps half a mile before she heard a car engine approaching behind her. The sides of the lane banked steeply; there was nowhere for her to hide before headlights swung around the bend and she was trapped in their glare, blind. The car slowed wheezily beside her and a window stuttered down.

  ‘And where do you think you’re going, Missy?’ Dorcas’s tone was light, but Primrose could hear the anger underneath, sliding like knives under silk, ready to tear her head off. ‘You get yourself in this car, Primrose, or I won’t be held responsible for what happens to you.’

  Defeated, hanging her head, the girl stumbled around the bonnet to the passenger side and fell into the seat, the car’s suspension complaining loudly as it dipped.

  As she executed a clumsy reverse back up the hill, to make a five-point turn at the entrance to the drive, Dorcas berated Primrose at length. The girl was too sick with shame and disappointment to do more than hang her head and cry into her lap, and so she missed the note of fear behind the anger.

  ‘What were you thinking? Making me waste all this fuel finding you, selfish cow … and after all I’ve done for you, keeping you all these years, useless lump … You’d best hope Mr Spight doesn’t hear about this or we’ll both be…’

  Frowning, Dorcas clamped her mouth shut, remaining silent throughout the time it took to get them back to the fat farm and up the stairs to Primrose’s room, hauling the girl mercilessly behind her and ignoring her whimpers. None of the other inmates appeared to see what was going on but Primrose could sense them behind the closed doors lining the corridor and imagined them straining their ears, agog at her attempted escape. Would they think she was mad, or secretly thrill at the thought of freedom? A momentary euphoria lifted her, but then it occurred to her that if Dorcas really wanted to punish her she could tamper with the anaesthetic. Leave her conscious throughout the ‘procedure’ and during the painful recovery period. Euphoria shrivelled and tears resumed as she clambered back into bed, her bleeding and filthy feet staining the sheets. Alise snored on, oblivious to the dramas being enacted in the waking world.

  *

  It wasn’t in his mission briefing – he was there to record the comings and goings of cars out of Bodingleigh, and this car only came and went again before it even got to the village – so Will wasn’t sure whether to make a note of the poor fat girl and the Matron from the farm, but he decided it was better to note too much than too little. He couldn’t see to write very well, as his torch was shielded, but he noted the car, the route and time, and Dorcas, and when she mentioned the girl’s name he started, then noted that down too.

  Little Primrose. She and Will been in the same class at school back before he’d gone to Cornwall, had even hung out and held hands. He never would have recognised her in the pale, shaking obese girl in the soaked nightgown, cowering before tiny, raging Dorcas.

  It was nearly the end of his shift. He would take the information to the Major, see if he felt it was important and should be included in their report.

  He’d heard Primrose staggering down the lane before the car came and scooped her up, seen a smudge of something pale in the darkness, but pedestrians were not of interest to the Major, even late-night ones dressed in nightgowns. Will supposed she must have been trying to escape the farm. As the car reversed laboriously up the road, he felt a pang of regret that he had not helped the girl he remembered as sweet and kind. Even if she was – albeit reluctantly – one of the enemy now. But the Major was very clear; Will wasn’t to allow himself to be seen in case someone recognised him. His parents’ views were well known and considered dangerously subversive and radical by Spight and his followers. Seeing Will once more might make people wonder why he had returned and was hanging about in the woods next to the fat farm.

  *

  Primrose hadn’t been due for harvesting for another two days. Clearly her escape attempt had brought it forward; when she woke after fitful sleep, old Dr Harrow was already in her room, a vague presence in the pre-dawn light.

  Alise and her bed were absent, rolled out and into another room so the gurney blocking the corridor could be manoeuvred through the door and the other girl wouldn’t be freaked out by witnessing the procedure. It would be her own turn soon enough. Dr Harrow turned towards Primrose when he heard her grunt of surprise, pulling on surgical gloveswith a loud snap. His face – even through its gnarls and wrinkles – smoothed into the mask she was becoming used to seeing on the faces of the few people she met these days. The polite blankness that masked their shock. She wasn’t sure which was preferable, that or outright revulsion.

  Last year, Dorcas had allowed in a field trip from the village school, organised by the Mayor. The children, most of them too young to remember Primrose, had stared at her as if they were at one of the old zoos she’d read about; not horrified but brimming over with questions and wide-eyed fascination. ‘Do you get to eat cake every day?’ and ‘I bet you never have to eat vegetables.’‘Is it true you’re so greedy you’d eat your own shit?’ This last from Hector Junior, the snot-nosed ten-year-old grandson of the Mayor; he had the same narrow gaze and high, domed forehead.

  Of all of them, he would be the only one to benefit directly from the farm. All fuel that wasn’t sent direct to Spight was supposed to be kept for emergency heating and to run the old fire truck and few remaining ambulances, but it was an open secret that it was also bestowed as ‘special grants’ of generator rations, as tractor fuel for favoured farmers, and to run Spight’s private fleet. She’d seen the Mayor and his family from the farm’s windows, driving past in one of the few cars in the village still running, and wondered if she was the one supplying the fat it ran on.

  Mrs Prendaghast hadn’t been with the class; that day they were in the care of Mrs Harrow, the Doctor’s wife, leader of the Door Knockers, and the only person Primrose knew who resembled the women in old magazines, with shiny, stretched skin that failed to make her appear younger. Primrose had been sorry not to see the teacher’s friendly face, sure she would, at the very least, have sent Junior out of the room for asking that rude question. Someone told her later that Mrs Prendaghast had refused to come, saying she would not be party to such disgusting practices. It was the first time it had occurred to Primrose that what was happening to her wasn’t sanctioned by all the villagers.

  ‘I hear you gave Dorcas some trouble last night, hmmm?’ It wasn’t a real question, Dr Harrow never really spoke to any of his patients, just made these little pronouncements, so she didn’t bother to reply. He drew the trolley of instruments over to the bed, its wheels squealing and bumping over the uneven floor. Primrose’s gut contracted with fright, but at least there was a full hypodermic there, glinting on the green cloth next to the dull rubber of the hose attached to the much bigger needle he used for the liposuction. They weren’t going to punish her. Or at least not now.

  Dr Harrow picked up her arm as if it was a side of beef, deftly swabbed inside her elbow and slid the hypodermic needle under her skin.

  ‘Count down from twenty,’ he instructed and, habituated to obedience, she began.

  ‘Twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixtee … four...’ The room went dark.

  *

  The entrance to the bunker was so well disguised it took a while for Will to find it; someone must have rearranged the bramble bushes that hid the entrance when they went in or came out. Stumbling around in the soft grey light slowly permeating the woodland, he was so tired he could barely stand. As visibility improved, he recognised the shape of a fallen tree and turned himself slightly west. There, that darker hollow, that was it.

  Ducking around the bramble screen, shivering as droplets of water shook free and fell inside his collar, he found the metal of the door under his hands and felt for the lock. The key was on a string around his neck and meant he had to stand awkwardly with his cheek pressed up against the cold, wet steel and fumble until he heard the lock click. Before he pushed the heavy door open he paused, looking and listen
ing to check there was no one about that shouldn’t be. A few sleepy birds were calling and beginning the morning’s chorus, but otherwise the woods were quiet.

  Beyond the door, a tunnel had been dug into the bank, extending about five metres and lined with rough concrete; the floor was packed dirt and covered with a drift of leaves. Crouching, as the roof was less than five and a half feet high and he’d recently had another growth spurt that took him to over six foot, Will rearranged the brambles before he closed the door behind him. When he heard it clunk he relocked it and shuffled along to the inner door. This also was locked. He rapped on its wooden surface with the code knock and waited.

  The air that greeted him as the door swung open was warm and stale, tainted with the funk of unwashed males and fumes from the foul pipe the Major held in his hand. He insisted he be allowed to smoke it inside, pointing out that he couldn’t very well do so outside, in case someone smelled it and investigated.

  The Major looked like he hadn’t slept either, his face lined with fatigue, and grey-streaked black hair standing up in tufts. He stepped back and gestured Will inside.

  ‘Come in, I’ve just boiled some water, you can make yourself useful and brew some tea before you turn in.’ The Major resumed his seat at the small table in the centre of the room as Will ducked through the low door.

  Somebody must have been cooking recently because he could also smell hot fat. He hadn’t eaten anything except some dried apple since he started his shift and his stomach rumbled even though the reek was unappealing. He removed his jacket and the woolen hat he’d used to cover his pale hair, draping them over a chairback to dry.

  ‘What’s for breakfast?’

  ‘Eggs. Mal pinched ’em from the farm coop before he came off watch yesterday. Bit of bread left.’

  Will crossed the cramped and windowless room to the camping stove, set on an old door propped on plastic crates. As he passed, he nodded a greeting to Mal, an agent a year or two younger than his own eighteen years, who was sitting on a foldaway bed in the corner. A plate with smears of egg yolk was held on his lap.

  ‘When’s the next supply run? We’re getting low if we’re down to stealing eggs.’

  ‘Nothing low about it, eggs is premium grub,’ Mal mumbled through a yawn. ‘Busy night?’

  ‘Nothing past one o’clock, except a girl did a runner from the farm. Primrose … used to know her from school, before.’ Maybe they had eggs, but they were down to the last few teabags. Will pulled one out of the box and dropped it in the stained teapot.

  ‘A runner eh?’ The Major looked interested. ‘She get out?’

  ‘Nah, Dorcas came and scooped her up before she got to the village. Poor cow could hardly walk she was so fat. Don’t know where she thought she was going.’

  ‘Back to her family?’

  ‘Doubt it, they’re the reason she’s there in the first place.’ Will hadn’t known the rest of the family well, but he did remember Primrose’s parents and siblings looking better fed, and wearing smarter clothes, after she was ‘selected’ for the fat farm; her dad had a promotion at the more conventional farm he laboured at, owned by Mayor Spight. Soon after that, Will’s own parents had taken him and his sisters away, crossing the Tamar to reach Cornwall by boat one night, seeking sanctuary with his mum’s sister and her family in Saltash.

  They had been founder members of the radical Archimedes’ Society for the Creation of Renewable Energy for the West, a group of concerned citizens seeking to use Devon’s remaining solar, wind and hydro infrastructure to supply electricity direct to the populace. Tolerated by the County Council at their inception, tensions had grown as their project looked to be on the brink of successfully hooking up what remained of an old solar farm. Accusations were made in a heated Council meeting that SCREW could not be trusted, that they were in league with external forces to control Devon’s energy supplies. SCREW’s representative countered by saying they were dedicated to preventing the Mayor and his allies from using energy scarcity to control the population.

  Incensed, Spight proposed that SCREW be disbanded; the motion was carried unanimously, and calls were made for mass arrests. Worried for their children, Will’s parents had decided to get out while they still could, along with many others. Once settled in Cornwall, and with the support of their new community, SCREW had reformed as an activist group dedicated to putting power in the hands of the people of Devon.

  ‘Ah, well, it’s academic now, but it’s useful to know there’s someone up there,’ the Major gestured in the direction of the fat farm, ‘who wants out. Could be an ally.’

  ‘Maybe. Don’t see what use she’d be,’ Will said dismissively. ‘She’s the enemy anyway,’ he laughed.

  BANG! The Major’s fist hit the table, bringing a sifting of dust from overhead and startling Will so badly he almost dropped the pan of hot water he had taken off the hob. ‘Don’t EVER let me hear you say that!’ the Major shouted. ‘She’s been sold like cattle by her parents, she didn’t choose what happened to her!’ He continued in a more moderate tone. ‘What we’re doing here – it’s for her and all the others on the farm, and all those other poor sods down in that village and all over this benighted county, and don’t you ever forget it. They’ve been lied to and tricked, and they are not “the enemy”.’

  Will blinked, ashamed. But it was hard being in a war and knowing that if any of the … opposition … came across him, they would have far fewer qualms about treating him as an enemy of their state.

  The Major’s face had softened. ‘Not that some of them aren’t bloody hostile,’ he said in a kinder tone. ‘Now, get yourself something to eat and have some rest. There’s plenty to be doing tonight.’

  Still red-faced and embarrassed, Will busied himself making the pot of tea, using the one fresh teabag and supplementing it with a couple of used ones. Once it was brewed he added powdered milk and handed a cup silently to the Major – who accepted it as if nothing had just happened – and poured some into a clean thermos for Mal, who was putting on his waterproofs, preparing to take the next watch. Hopefully the bed he had just vacated would still be warm when Will climbed into it.

  Before doing anything about food, he would have to treat his horsefly bite and check himself over for ticks. Parasites were having another bumper summer and it didn’t pay to be careless. He could still remember the long drawn out death from Lyme disease one of his mates had endured back at basic training, having not checked himself over thoroughly after an exercise in long grass. Wearily, Will began removing his shirt.

  *

  Another chilly morning despite the season. Thick cloud obscured the sun and shielded Bodingleigh from its ferocious heat. Mrs Prendaghast applied a combined sunscreen and insect repellent procured from an itinerant hedgewitch, before dressing for warmth; but in layers, in case the sun emerged later. Once equipped for the vagaries of the day’s weather, she went downstairs to the kitchen.

  The room lay in shadow, curtains drawn against the damp of the night before, but she didn’t bother opening them. If the sun did come out while she was in class, to beat through the single-paned and cracked glazing, the room would become uncomfortably warm. Neither did she begin the laborious process of lighting the stove to heat water. She hadn’t the energy to empty it out and the ash bucket was already full. She would need to ask one of the older children to take it across the village to the communal composting area; it was too much for her knees these days.

  Besides, her wood store was low, and she wasn’t due another allocation for two weeks. Perhaps she could quietly borrow a few logs from the school’s well-stocked store, again with some help. Unless Spight Jr was in class, and snitched to his grandfather. If that happened her next allocation would be docked as punishment. Probably best not to risk it.

  She sighed and, using one hand to prop her weight against her knees to support her back, stooped down to start laying kindling in the open fireplace. She’d light the fire tonight, unless the sun had warmed the stone of
the cottage, and make do with a couple of slices of bread and butter and some milk for breakfast. At least the classroom would be warm. Mr Spight had increased the weekly ration of fuel that came to the school around the same time his grandson started there.

  Hector Spight Jr was indeed in class that morning, though he was late. Mrs Prendaghast had already marked him as absent and was setting out the work for the morning on the chalkboard, when he announced his arrival by throwing his bag loudly down beside his desk. The bang it made was familiar, she didn’t jump or turn around but continued writing, the tiny nub of chalk squeaking and setting her teeth on edge. Her sleeve was falling away from her arm. She hoped now wouldn’t be one of those times Hector started making snide comments about the intricate but faded tattoos spiralling up from her wrist, her daily reminder of a life pre-Devolution.

  ‘Good morning, Hector, thank you for joining us. Please sit down and take out your notebook and pens so we can get started.’ She turned to face the class, wiping chalk dust from her hands, giving the children a pleasant smile dredged from somewhere deep.

  Hector grunted and scraped his chair out from under the desk, slumping down into it and punching the younger boy next to him in the arm. Mrs Prendaghast pretended not to see. Some battles were not worth fighting, and it hadn’t been a hard punch. For Hector, it was almost friendly.

  ‘Now then class, this morning we will be working on arithmetic. Between morning break and lunch, we will work on your spelling. Those of you who don’t have to go home this afternoon can have some free time for reading or drawing. Your page assignments are written on the board.’ It would be only a handful of children staying after lunch, though the class was not large to begin with; only twenty-six children from the village and surrounding farms were of an age and aptitude that the Council – or rather Mayor Spight – considered likely to benefit from a formal education. Though what was formal about it Mrs Prendaghast was at a loss to say. There was no real curriculum, no measuring of achievement beyond the grades she gave them, and no qualifications at the end of it. They came to her from the ages of five to fourteen, and she did her best by them within the constraints set by her employer.