by Sarah Govett
There used to be quite a few campaigns (shouty people with placards) to close the zoo based either on cruelty issues, as the cages are pretty small, or on the grounds that it was a ‘waste of precious dry land’. But the scientists argued back that we needed to preserve as many species’ genes as possible as we might need them in the future. Maybe they’re planning to splice a bit of tiger DNA into mucor? Well, it wouldn’t taste much worse if they did! Anyway, the scientists won (maybe because the shouty people were all massively annoyingly right on and ugly) and the zoo got to stay.
Anyway, typically, just after Mum’s announcement, her emergency mobile rang and she was called out to some important case. Then the house phone rang and one of Dad’s clients was about to be evicted so I was left Billy no mates with three tickets.
Mum urged me to take Daisy and Jack in their place. Said she thought it’d be ‘nice for us to all be children for a day’, at which I obviously did a massive eye roll. Dad told me not to roll my eyes at Mum and then got a bit concerned about my inviting Jack, but I reassured him for the millionth time that Jack’s decking me was a one-off accident and not some new messed-up habit.
That said, I was stupidly a bit worried about spending the afternoon with Daisy and Jack. I knew I’d been a rubbish friend recently and had spent too much time with Raf. And things with Jack were still off and then there was the issue about the uploads that I couldn’t speak about. I’d never kept secrets from Jack and Daisy before and felt pretty uncomfortable about starting now.
I shouldn’t have worried though.
Despite it being a particularly lame day out, they both agreed to come immediately. Daisy responded with a, ‘Hell, yeah!’ but I think she’d be up for any break from studying. Jack too sounded amazingly keen and even apologised for being ‘a bit of a denser recently’. This keenness faded a bit when I said Daisy was coming too, but then bounced right back up again when I confirmed that Raf wasn’t.
We met at the zoo entrance, just off People’s Park, and any weirdness between us vanished as soon as we stood in front of the first cage. There was a massive orangutan whose fur was basically identical to Jack’s hair. It was hitting its fist on a tree stump and even Jack creased up as he accepted the resemblance. For the rest of the afternoon, Daisy and I would occasionally break mid-sentence to do an orangutan impression and we’d all be rolling about in hysterics.
We saw parrots and tigers and giraffes and lions and penguins and ate popcorn. Even the mucor burgers didn’t seem to taste too bad.
The only time our moods dropped was when we reached the ‘Territorial’ section. Rather than your typical exotic ‘zoo’ animals, cage upon cage was filled with sheep, cows, pigs, chickens, rabbits. At one point I had to blink away tears as we stood in front of a tiny cage labelled: ‘Dog’. Inside sat a sorry-looking spaniel, chained to a stump, tail low, its eyes brown pools of betrayal. A couple of toddlers pointed excitedly at it, as transfixed as they had been by the rhino and crocodile. Memories of Rex flooded back and Jack must have sensed them too as he came and wrapped me in a bear hug. For those few seconds I felt that no one else would ever understand me as well. I almost regretted Raf’s coming to Hollets. Almost.
‘How’s it come to this?’ I choked. ‘Next, it’s going to be one of us in a cage, chained to a stump, lump of mucor in a bowl, “Norm” written on the door.’ I tried to laugh but it came out super hollow and we all shivered slightly at the same time.
‘It might be better than the Wetlands,’ Jack joked, trying to lift us out of our gloom. ‘Sitting around all day being admired. Plenty of food. I think I’d be well suited to the role. Maybe I should campaign to be the first zoo Norm. What do you think?’
You know there are some days of your life you’ll never forget, well this was one of them. Raf and I have just been on our first proper date and I’ve been grounded for, well, probably forever.
Raf snuck up behind me in the canteen while I was eating with Daisy and Jack and held two pieces of paper over my eyes. They were black and shiny.
‘Guess what these are?’ he whispered.
‘The answers to today’s History test?’ I suggested, hopefully.
‘Better,’ he said, ‘you of little imagination. So much better.’
Raf whisked his hands away and my eyes refocused to see two tickets for Kaio’s Storm concert. A stupidly big grin stretched across my face. These were hotter than anything imaginably hot. Kaio was only performing for one week this year and all the tickets had sold out within the first three milliseconds. Then I saw the date on the tickets.
‘But they’re for tonight,’ I said glumly, knowing that there was no way that Mum was going to let me go out late on a Wednesday night with the TAA just over two weeks away.
‘I’ll cover for you,’ Daisy offered. ‘It’ll be fine. You’re always over at mine anyway. Say that I need you to help me revise. Your mum will believe that. I mean, anyone would believe that!’ Daisy tried to sound light-hearted, but her fear came through and I felt like a really rubbish friend for not helping her more. But I really wanted to go. I really, really wanted to go.
‘I’ll leave you to your important discussions,’ Jack broke in and then stormed off across the canteen. I thought he’d get better about this, about Raf, but looks like I was wrong.
‘You should really go,’ Daisy kept on.
‘Please. Pretty please,’ said Raf. And it was that, and his wolfish grin, and THOSE EYES that broke me.
‘OK, OK, I’ll call my mum. If you’re sure, Daisy?’ Daisy did over-exaggerated head nods and the next thing I knew I was calling my mum from the hall payphone and lying to her like I’ve never done before and never thought I’d ever do.
I was in such a state of excitement all afternoon that my pretty poor Geography test result just kind of passed me by and it took me a while to register why even Jack rubbed my arm and said not to worry, that it’d be OK. I know I’ve got to get a grip, particularly with my two point deduction, but I told myself that that grip’s going to start tomorrow.
After school, I went straight to Daisy’s to borrow some clothes and basically make my story more convincing. Daisy’s parents weren’t even there, as per usual. I reached into Daisy’s cupboard to pull out a pair of her jeans, we’re basically the same size, but Daisy dragged me out immediately.
‘You’re going on a date.’ Daisy spelt out as if I were a complete denser. ‘You’re not wearing my old jeans on a date.’
The next twenty minutes were pretty horrific. Daisy forced me into a number of different outfits, all more revealing than the last, and I felt like I’d somehow descended into makeover hell.
At last she declared herself happy. I was squeezed into a tiny black skirt and a black top with gold sequins on the shoulder and slashes across the back.
‘I look like I’ve got gold dandruff and have been savaged by a tiger.’
Daisy pouted. I don’t think this was the praise she’d been looking for.
The doorbell rang.
‘Have an amazing night.’ Daisy hugged me and I opened the door to Raf’s grinning face. He held the door open and as I walked under his arm he stroked his hand across the back of my top and made a ‘grrrr’ sound. I recoiled in embarrassment.
‘I know, I look ridiculous,’ I said as we got on the bus.
‘You don’t look ridiculous. You do look a bit too much like Daisy. But you look beautiful. As always. You’d even look beautiful if you’d been clawed by an actual cat rather than a pair of scissors.’ And then he put his arm round me and I sort of nuzzled in.
The concert was mad when we got there. There were so many people. All our sort of age. People crammed in together so close that you couldn’t tell who was a Norm and who was a freakoid and there was this crazy atmosphere like everyone needed to party as no one, especially the Norms, knew what the future, if they even had one, held. Massive spotlights lit the stadium and the speakers were as high as cliffs. There were loads of police, probably to protect Kaio from his hordes of femal
e fans, and cameras everywhere, ready to catch the poster boy doing his stuff live. When the cameras swivelled in our direction, I shrank away and Raf laughed.
‘Do you really think your parents are going to be watching this?’ I laughed too at the absurdity of the idea. My mum dancing (or as she cringeworthily says, ‘bopping’) away to Kaio as she does the ironing.
When Kaio came on stage, the whole stadium sort of erupted. His first song was Into the Dark and everyone’s playing it on their Scribe at the moment so you can imagine what reaction that caused. Huge pillars of red and gold light were projected up on either side of the stage and there must have been at least fifty dancers on stage with Kaio, mirroring his movements exactly. The whole effect was incredible, sinister too, but in a really cool way. When he finished, the whole stadium was vibrating to chants of, ‘Kaio, Kaio’. The next two songs were from an earlier download and just blew the roof off as well.
But it was the fourth song that changed everything. Kaio doesn’t normally introduce his songs. He might say this one’s for blah-de-blah, but not much more than that. But this time he waited until the whole stadium was quiet and then looked all serious; almost unrecognisable as he’s normally always got this hot grin on. ‘This next one’s a new song,’ he began. ‘It’s for everyone out there doing their TAA this year. It’s for everyone who’s lost someone. It’s for everyone who thinks this system stinks. Which it does. I know I’m partly to blame as I’ve supported it. But that stops here. That stops tonight. So here goes. This is my new song – The Line. Hope you enjoy it.’
The next few minutes seemed to happen in suspended time. The drummer started the beat and then Kaio began to sing:
You say good luck and stay dry
As they line up like cattle to die
Just plug in your Node
Information overload
Don’t listen as the little ones cry
Half the audience, still as waxworks, watched Kaio. The other half, including me and Raf, watched the police. At first they seemed like robots about to malfunction, jerking this way and that, looking for leadership. Clearly no one had expected this. Kaio was the Ministry’s darling after all. Then suddenly it was as if a switch had been flicked and the police came to life. They began to storm the stage. Arms flailed, the drummer was knocked over and a policeman had Kaio in a headlock on the ground. Police started to stream into the stadium and you could taste the fear in the air as everyone turned to run. Raf grabbed my hand and pulled me along beside him. We clambered through and round people, pushing, clutching, running. At one point a couple in front of us tripped and fell and we didn’t stop, we just ran over them, survival was everything. Anyone caught from the concert would be marked as a potential Subversive.
We managed to crawl under a metal seat at the back of the stadium and through a hole in the wire mesh fence. The wire claimed half of Daisy’s skirt and tore into my right leg. The next thing I knew Raf had grabbed my hand again and I was running, warm blood trickling down my calf. We knew we had to make it home on foot, that the police would already be stopping and searching the busses. We decided the safest route was probably through People’s Park as there were fewer CCTVs there, so we clambered over the railings and began following the stream to the south end. Just when we thought we’d left all the police behind us, the night was sliced open by a high intensity torch beam. We both dived to the ground, tasting mud as our heads hit the path. Lights and voices shot overhead. My ears were filled with the sound of my heart thudding and all I could think was, ‘They’ve found us, they’ve found us.’
A radio crackled. A deep voice answered. ‘Negative.’ Then the voices and the lights receded.
Raf walked his fingers along the path to interlock with mine and we lay there for some time, bathing in relief. I finally rolled onto my back and spat the mud out of my mouth. The taste lingered.
Above, myriads of stars seemed to mock us.
We made the rest of our way back in silence. Words would have seemed trite and the clasp of Raf’s hand brought comfort enough. I finally stumbled through my front door just after 3am. My mum was sitting on the sofa, a single desk lamp illuminating her blank expression, red eyes and very straight back.
The TV was paused on the news channel. There, freeze-frame, was the concert with police with their raised batons and teenagers running. In the bottom of the left of the frame you could just make out mine and Raf’s faces.
‘They arrested one hundred and twenty-four teenagers,’ Mum said quietly. ‘One hundred and twenty-four.’
‘I’m so sorry, Mum.’ I said, bursting into tears. ‘I had no idea, no one had any idea … I just really wanted to go.’
‘I’d have let you, you know. Go, that is. I just want you to be safe. I love you so much.’ And then she started crying too and I wished she’d just got angry with me as this made me feel so much worse.
‘No more secrets from now on,’ Mum said.
‘No more secrets,’ I agreed.
‘And you’re grounded.’
Today was a Newsflash! day. You know, the sort of day when they interrupt all channels to broadcast some massively important news and everyone speaks in exclamation marks. Dad and I were trying to watch a comedy set in space. It’s pretty lame but we watch it together every Tuesday evening. It’s our father-daughter thing and a half-hour liferaft in a sea of revision. Dad even makes popcorn and we moan about what stereotypes we’ve become, but we both secretly love it. Each episode ends with Astronaut Tyrone staring into the camera and saying, ‘One week to go and counting.’ We always both join in and Dad does the worst impression you’ve ever heard. Accents really aren’t his thing.
Tonight was going to be extra special as Mum and Dad have just ungrounded me. Apparently they’d had this really long discussion and decided that everyone makes mistakes when they’re young and that it’s OK as long as you learn from them and don’t mess up again in the same way. The real issue they said was that I’d lied to them about where I was so I’m allowed out as long as I’m totally honest, and it’s to Daisy’s, Jack’s or possibly Raf’s (yet to be decided!), and it’s to study, and I’m back by 9pm.
But we didn’t get to watch Astronaut Tyrone’s semi-tragic mishaps after all because they’ve finally caught Archie Rycroft. Yes, the unbelievably dumb Archie Rycroft who’s been on the run for eleven months. The Archie Rycroft who managed to be the first freakoid to fail the TAA in three years. More used to fail at the start. Before the exam format changed. Before, I guess, loads of Ministers had freakoid children themselves. When Archie failed, people didn’t talk about anything else for two weeks. It wasn’t in the paper or in the Bulletins of course, but word spread and everyone in the First City seemed to have heard somehow or other. Lots of freakoid parents started going a bit crazy as they suddenly realised that they’d spent all this money but still hadn’t necessarily bought a nice dry place for their beloved sprog. Sending excess children to die in the Wetlands suddenly looked less totally good. Someone high up in the Ministry pushed through more changes to the exam format. More recall, fewer essays. Dad thinks he heard somewhere that that guy had a son in my year.
When the police turned up on Results Day, young Archie was long gone. His parents were sitting calmly in their huge mansion but Archie’s bed was bare. Norms try to disappear every Results Day. Of course they do. Why else would they have brought in the prison-like Waiting Places, which makes it way harder? But Norms are always caught. Quickly. And then shipped off. As punishment they’re not even given a basic survival kit. No iodine. No mosquito net. And if they run before the results are published, they’re shipped off even if they’ve actually passed.
But Archie Rycroft, of the massively rich and important and definitely inbred Rycrofts, miraculously avoided capture. And he was clearly not doing some massively cunning manoeuvres. Judging by his TAA score, there really aren’t many humans he could outwit. Possibly a leftover Neanderthal. Or the victim of a botched late upgrade. And everyone knew the p
olice weren’t really looking that hard. I mean his parents weren’t even arrested.
This obviously made loads of Norms cross. And I mean riot cross. There were serious clashes between protestors and police.
That was back in July last year. Now eleven months later, they’ve found him. The policewoman being interviewed claimed that Archie had been living in a hole in the Arable Lands. Surviving off crops and insects. But he didn’t look that dirty. Or that thin. I mean he still had this gross little pot belly peeping out from under his t-shirt.
And then the presenter made the real game-changing announcement. From this year, freakoids as well as Norms would have to go to a Waiting Place to sit the exam and wait for results.
I laughed aloud as I imagined Hugo’s reaction. Ha ha – pack your bag like the rest of us! Dad didn’t join in. He just looked super-serious.
‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘I wonder what this is leading to. This is the first time they’ve even openly acknowledged that Archie Rycroft was on the run.’ He had his worried look on. His eyebrows always skulk together when he’s worried.
He can also be slightly paranoid.
‘Maybe there’ve been more riots,’ I said. ‘Maybe they knew they needed to find him this time and look like they were equalising things a bit. Before they ship the next lot of us Norms out.’
‘No one’s shipping you anywhere, baby.’ He tried to sound reassuring, but his eyebrows kept on skulking.
Just when I thought things might be on their way back to normal with Jack, this happens and I lose him again. I think he might even hate me a bit. All his anger, and I totally get this anger, has been funnelled into one massive blame plaster and stuck on my head.
After the initial announcement in Assembly, he avoided me in Physics and Geography and then when I tried to speak to him at lunch he had so much stress in his face that it actually turned it ugly – like one of those gargoyles you see on the oldest churches.