‘’S good, room for more cider now,’ one of them slurred.
His companion guffawed, staggered, cursed as urine splashed back on to his shoes, and said in a slightly less slurry voice, ‘You gon’ bring down the wrath of Spight, you too bladdered to take stock down Dartmouth at sparrer’s fart.’
‘He’ll be madder at you for talkin' 'bout it ’ere in public. He don’ wan’ folk to know what we been up to.’
‘What public – you mean that bey over there? Hey, bey!’
Will was almost across the square. He froze and half turned, keeping his head down and face in shadow.
‘Yeah?’
‘You ’ear what we been on ’bout?’
‘What? No.’
‘See, ain’t no one listenin’. Now you bugger off before curfew bey.’
Will nodded and hurried away before they changed their minds. Behind him, the noise from the pub increased as the door opened and they staggered back in.
*
A knock on the door so late at night had to be trouble. It was her third unexpected caller in as many days. It could not be good news. Mrs Prendaghast told Primrose to go upstairs and be quiet, before creeping to the front door, guarding a candle flame against the many draughts. Its light threw wavering shadows across the walls.
She put her mouth up against the door and called softly, ’Who is it?’
‘Mrs Prendaghast?’ The voice was young, male and unfamiliar. He wasn’t shouting, so he didn’t want to be heard by any neighbours still up. She had a bad feeling this was going to add to her troubles.
‘Yes, this is my home.’ A note of asperity crept into her tone. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’
‘I was sent here by Bob, I need your help.’ His voice was pitched so low she had to strain to hear it.
Praying this was not an elaborate trap designed by Spight to catch her out, she put the chain on the door and opened it a crack. A tall young man stood on the step, dressed in soaking black clothes stained with mud, his blond hair sticking up in all directions. He was shivering and looking at her with a hopeful expression.
She looked back at him blankly. ‘Do I know you?’
‘No. Well, you used to. I was in your class but my parents took me away. Five years ago. I’m Will.’
‘Will?’ Looking closer, she could almost see the gawky thirteen-year-old he’d been, with scabby knees and cheeky grin.
‘Look, can we talk inside? I’m kind of on the run.’
She hesitated a moment longer before taking the chain off the door and opening it wide enough for him to come in. Once he had done so they stood on either side of the table in the small room. He was so tall his head practically touched the ceiling. She checked the windows were still curtained.
‘What sort of help do you think I can give you?’ She was wary. ‘And what are you doing back in Bodingleigh? I thought you and your family went to Cornwall?’
‘We did.’
He looked to be in the grip of an internal struggle. She remembered him as an idealistic boy, prone to saving injured wild animals and devastated if they died. His parents had been founders of SCREW and vocal opponents to the more extreme ideas of the Council and Spight, ending up as social pariahs, everyone too afraid to be seen associating with them. Then they disappeared; the first she had known about it was when Will failed to turn up for school. She had hoped they got away, wished them well and had pretty much forgotten about them.
A decision must have been reached because Will went on, ‘We moved to Saltash and I signed up with the resistance as soon as I could. I’ve been back, up at the fat farm, in a bunker with a bunch of other agents, working to get the Mayor out. So people can live the way they want to.’
She laughed. ‘You know you sound just like him – the Mayor. That’s the reason he gives for getting rid of the resistance. Only he calls you insurgents.’
The boy’s face flushed. ‘I can’t help it if he’s a liar. We never locked anyone up. Or tortured them. Or fed them up so we could suck the fat out of them. Or sold them.’
‘Sold them?’
‘Yes, we just found out about it, the Major and me … I mean, Paul and me … from the old man.’
He wasn’t making sense. But before she unravelled his meaning, she wanted to know what he was doing in her house, inviting trouble to her door.
‘Why are you here, Will?’
‘I really don’t know. We were caught by Spight when we rescued Mal, and we were all ordered into a truck, then Bob fell over so I got free. He told me to come to you. I’ve nowhere else to go, Mrs P. And something bad is about to happen to a whole bunch of people and I don’t know what to do …’
Gibberish. But … Mrs P. He used to call her that when he was very young, unable to pronounce her name.
Behind her, she felt a draught as the door to the stairs opened. ‘You have to help him, Mrs Prendaghast.’ Primrose came into the room and clutched her arm, then turned to the boy and smiled awkwardly. ‘Hi, Will.’
The two youngsters were sharing the one armchair, Primrose in the chair and Will perched on one of the arms, wrapped in the crocheted throw. He kept stealing glances at the girl, still dressed in Mrs Prendaghast’s bathrobe, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Mrs Prendaghast snorted quietly to herself. Ah, hormones.
He had given her a second, more detailed account of the last few days and she was badly worried. A lot of people were about to be shipped out and there was little time to do anything about it. She had no way of contacting Bob, without putting both of them in danger. Besides, she was furious with him for only giving her part of the story. She could only assume he had been too ashamed to tell her all of it.
She would have to go direct to the resistance again. It was risky, but Primrose was right. They had to help.
Mrs Prendaghast poured out the camomile tea she had been making while Will told his story, and passed them a mug each, then held her cup up to her nose so she could breathe in the steam and steady her nerves. She regarded them both over the rim.
‘We’re going to go make a phone call. You’d best come with me, Will, so you can fill in the details I’ll forget. You too Primrose. I’ve wanted to shield you, but I’m your teacher, and I’m not doing you any favours by standing between you and what’s really happening. This is the world you live in, and if you don’t like it, it’s up to you to do something about it.’
*
Primrose was excited. Instead of skulking inside – when she had done pretty much nothing else but that for the last five years – she was going to get to do something brave and useful, and to help people. The fact that, until yesterday, she had thought the resistance was a dangerous gang of delinquents out to destroy society, no longer seemed to matter. If Will was one of them they must be OK. She had liked Will at school, had thought him handsome and had a bit of a crush on him before she was sent to the farm. He had been one of the friends she missed most in the first few confusing and miserable months away from home.
Sitting close to him now was another thing giving her little quivers of nervous energy and making it hard for her to sit still. Every time he looked down at her, and he seemed to do that quite often, sparks ignited in her chest, and her belly felt a bit fluttery.
Mrs Prendaghast took her upstairs to get dressed, and to find some of her dad’s old trousers and a jumper for Will, who was shivering in his wet clothes.
As she helped Mrs Prendaghast rummage through old boxes stacked in a corner of the bedroom, Primrose wondered aloud at the information Will had brought them, saying how terrible it must be for the poor souls being sent away. Mrs Prendaghast told her to sit down for a moment. She did so and looked up at the teacher expectantly.
‘You do know that could have been you, don’t you?’ Mrs Prendaghast said, sitting beside her. ‘If you hadn’t run away, you’d be part of that shipment of people leaving tomorrow.’
Primrose was confused.
The teacher went on, ‘Why else do you think th
e last harvesting was so extreme? To make you look like you do now, so that when you arrived in New Jersey you’d fetch a higher price.’
It took a while for that to sink in. ‘But what good am I if I’m not fat?’ she asked.
Mrs Prendaghast’s eyes filled with tears. ‘You’re plenty good just as you are, or as you were, Primrose. But, you see, New Jersey has plenty of fat people. They don’t farm them because they still have oil fields, and coal, and they don’t care about climate collapse, but they have terrible food so most of them are very fat. The poor people anyway. What they want, what they pay for, is young, beautiful girls. Like you. Boys too.’
‘I’m beautiful?’
‘Of course you are, dear.’
This was such a novel concept it quite distracted Primrose from the seriousness of what Mrs Prendaghast was telling her, or what she could see the teacher thought was serious. To Primrose, who had been a thing to be used for so long, it didn’t seem so outlandish that people should be sold off, like cows or sheep, no matter how much it shocked Will and Mrs Prendaghast. She knew it was wrong, but was not surprised.
The teacher was still talking but Primrose got up from the bed and went to the bathroom, where she stared at herself in the mirror, trying to see beauty there.
Mrs Prendaghast came to the door and watched her with an amused but somewhat exasperated expression, which Primrose noticed after some moments spent studying her own small nose and full mouth, set in a heart-shaped face atop what were now her slender neck and shoulders.
‘I’m sorry, it’s just no one ever said I was beautiful before.’
‘I think you may be missing the point here, dear. It wouldn’t have done you any favours, you’d still be just a breeder to them …’ She saw Primrose’s expression and stopped.
‘Breeder?’ Now Primrose really was shocked. So that was what all the fuss was about. That was why the two of them were so upset. And now she was too. Breed? Despite plenty of offers at the fat farm, she hadn’t even kissed anyone yet, let alone … She felt like an idiot for being so naive. Of course, that was how they made new cows and sheep.
‘You see, conception rates have dropped like a stone over there. They need young people like you, with healthy bodies.’
In the parlance of Mrs Prendaghast’s youth: what the fuck?
Somewhat subdued, Primrose continued rummaging through boxes and eventually found some things that fitted her better than the clothes she had taken from the farm, and dark enough not to show up at night. Will was given a jumper, jacket and trousers that smelled of thirty years of storage, but didn’t complain, stripping and pulling on the dry clothes while Primrose averted her eyes from his skinny body and Mrs Prendaghast hung his wet things over the bath to dry.
By the time they were ready it was well past curfew. To make it less likely they’d meet one of the enforcers, Mrs Prendaghast took them out through the door that connected her kitchen to the school, and from there to an entrance into the empty building next door, so that if they were seen emerging, it wouldn’t be from her home.
‘This was the girls’ school, back when sexes were segregated in village schools, and there were enough children to need two buildings,’ Mrs Prendaghast explained as they walked through the empty rooms, which still carried the faint smell of chalk dust. ‘Then it was sold off to become someone’s second home, but they left after Devolution, and no one had any money to buy it, or any need for somewhere so hard to heat. Spight was going to use it as a store room but he decided it wasn’t secure. It’s been empty ever since.’
A back entrance let them out into a quiet alley with blank stone walls. No windows overlooked it. From there they slipped down another alley that led them steeply to the bottom of the village. They walked in silence, Mrs Prendaghast leading, followed by Primrose with Will at the rear. Once, they heard someone coming towards them and ducked into a front yard to hide behind a hedge, but it turned out to be a hedgehog, snuffling and pushing its way through the undergrowth to the side of the path. Primrose stifled a laugh. This was so different from her flights from the fat farm and their solitary terrors. She was no longer alone.
The storm had swollen the stream at the bottom of the hill and it had overspilled its banks. The nearest bridge was in the village, next to a house with lit windows, so they were forced to walk beside it for several hundred metres over uneven ground pocked with waterlogged holes, before they could find somewhere to cross without getting more than their feet wet. The shock of the cold water sobered Primrose a little; that and the rubbing of wet leather against her feet, which made her hobble.
Mrs Prendaghast turned right at the next crossroads, and then left into a driveway marked as private by a battered sign. An ornate but abandoned gatehouse stood back a little from the road, and she took them around to the side, where a door hung off its hinges. With a good deal of effort, she squeezed through the gap in the wood and beckoned them to follow. Primrose got through with little trouble but she could hear Will struggling to fold his frame small enough, cursing as bits of him caught on splinters. On the other side of the broken door was a heavy black drape, being held back by Mrs Prendaghast so they could slip past. Once all three of them were safely through, she dropped the fabric and switched on a torch.
They were standing in a small, square room. The large, carved-stone window frames she had seen from outside were hidden by another set of blackout curtains. The room was dusty, empty, with a padlocked door in the far wall. Mrs Prendaghast crossed to this door and drew a slender chain from within her clothing, at the end of which hung a key. She used this to open the padlock, before unbolting the door and opening it into another blacked-out room with a desk and chair atop a dusty rug. Pulling the chair aside, shoving the desk a few inches, Mrs Prendaghast stooped and flipped back the rug to reveal a sturdy trapdoor, with an iron ring set into it. She pushed herself up to standing and gestured to the ring.
‘One of you open that, please, I’m pooped.’ She sat herself down heavily on the chair while Will grabbed the ring and heaved. A yawning black hole appeared, leading down to a basement. Primrose could see the top of a ladder.
‘Can one of you go down and fetch a phone please.’
Will switched on a torch and headed down into the dark without even looking to see if Primrose wanted to oblige. Somewhat piqued, she climbed down after him. The basement was bare and windowless; she could just about stand comfortably, but Will was having to bend his neck and couldn’t stand upright. He was looking around with wonder.
‘How come I never heard of this place?’ he called up to Mrs Prendaghast.
Primrose’s eye was caught by something glinting in the shadows. She took Will’s torch from him, jumping slightly as their hands touched. He was so warm. Directing the beam revealed a metal box with a hasp but no padlock. Inside were old papers, which she ignored, and a bundle of shiny plastic phones, which she recognised from old movies, with another device attached to one of them. She snatched them up eagerly and flourished them at Will. They were bulky and made it difficult to climb back up the ladder, but she managed and passed them to Mrs Prendaghast with a triumphant air.
Will climbed back out and repeated his question. He sounded offended, as though secrets had been kept from him, an insurgent. A member of the resistance, she amended.
Mrs Prendaghast’s amusement showed as she replied, ‘Very few people know about this place. Or rather, they know there is an abandoned gatehouse here, but they don’t know it’s a secret lair.’ Will was glowering, and she went on, ‘Don’t worry, lad, I doubt your Major knows about it either. It’s a bolthole for one of your lot, who happens to be a good friend of mine. She told me about it, in strictest confidence, so I could communicate with the resistance if she wasn’t around and the need arose. I never used it until yesterday, and I hope, after tonight, I won’t have to again.’
‘She? Do you mean Mrs M? Mrs Mason?’ A thought seemed to strike Will then and he exclaimed, ‘Was it you who rang the safe house to tel
l us about Mal?’ He looked at the old woman with a noticeable increase in respect.
‘Mrs Mason, is that what she’s calling herself?’ Mrs Prendaghast chuckled. ‘That’s a bit close to the bone. And yes, that was me. Right, let’s get on with making this call then shall we?’ She powered up one of the phones.
‘I didn’t think mobile phones worked anymore,’ said Primrose.
‘They don’t, dear, since the masts all went down, but this is a satellite phone, and so long as they don’t fall down, it should be working fine.’ Primrose wasn’t sure what a mast was. She imagined a line of old sailing ships toppling. Satellites were more familiar to her. The moon was one, so maybe that’s what Mrs P – she copied Will unconsciously – meant. The moon certainly wasn’t going to fall down any time soon.
From being excited she was feeling despondent again. There really was so much she didn’t know. Or maybe it was hunger dragging her mood down. She was so used to eating whenever she was awake, and she and Mrs P had been on their way to bed when Will came to the door. It had now been hours since their spartan supper of soup with a bit of cheese. Her stomach rumbled and she flashed an embarrassed smile, but no one seemed to have noticed.
‘Right, where’s the call history? Ah, here we go.’ There was a long pause before a tinny ringing sounded.
A voice came on the line. Mrs P put the phone to her ear and asked for Mrs Mason. There was a wait of a couple of minutes, while they all stared aimlessly around the featureless room, and then, faintly, they could hear the voice of a woman with a no-nonsense voice say, ‘Hello? Iris? Why are you calling again? Everything alright?’
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