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by Claire North

  “Lady tells me you’re looking for your daughter,” she muttered at last, sparing Theo not a nod.

  “Yes.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “Looking isn’t as hard as doing.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I know where she is. I know which prison. But getting her out is meaningless, impossible, until I can keep her safe.”

  “Does she want to be found? Does she want you keeping her safe—keeping her anything?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe not. She can make that choice, if she wants to, when the moment comes. Least there’ll be a choice.”

  The woman nodded at nothing much, scraped the last aphid from a flower, straightened up, wiped her insect-smeared fingers down her skirt, peeled away the gloves, draped them over the side of a plant box, and turned to examine Theo.

  “Don’t look like much,” she mused. “Come have a cuppa.”

  Theo hesitated, and was duly poked in the back to follow her inside.

  There was a wood-burning stove with an iron kettle on top, a smell of lavender and lace. The woman stood on a plastic orange stool to fumble on the top shelf of a cupboard, before bringing down a teabag. “It’s not proper tea of course,” she muttered as the kettle boiled and her escorts draped themselves around the low, sky-blue kitchen. “I think it has dandelions in it. Dandelions, it’s just …”

  A scoff, a half-guffaw, you know how ridiculous it is it’s just …

  “But it’s what we have and tea is an important binding social ritual, so sit you down.”

  A hand on Theo’s shoulder plonked him down in a wooden chair at a small square table in the centre of the room. A bowl containing almost-blooming winter bulbs sat between knitted table mats. A mug stained with tannins, the front depicting a penguin performing a probably impossible sexual act, was put in his hands. He sniffed the tea and flinched. Sipping, his host watched him. He drank cautiously, and then quickly, getting as much of the heat and fluid as he could without having to spend too much time with the taste.

  The woman beamed, sat down opposite him, let the heat from her mug seep into her skin.

  “I’m the queen,” she said at last. “You’re Theo, yes?”

  He nodded.

  “You can call me ma’am, or your maj, or Bess. If you call me your maj without looking proper about it, my boys will take you out back and beat you till you bleed out your ears.”

  “What’s proper?” he mumbled over the lip of the mug.

  “Proper! Respectful. Proper respect.”

  “But I can call you Bess?”

  “Respectfully, yes.”

  “All right.”

  “And I shall call you Theo.”

  “Okay.”

  “So!” She slapped the table brightly with the open palm of her right hand. “Helen tells me that you’re looking for help. Says you have information that’ll take down the government, rip the Company apart and generally set things a-burning, is that about the short of it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Is it proper?” Theo hesitated, sucked in more liquid, tried to guess again at proper, at the mystic meanings of this word. Bess flapped impatiently. “Proper, proper, is it good, is it decent, or are you spinning me a yarn and are we gonna have to do the beating business?”

  “I can prove that the Company is murdering thousands of people, imprisoning people without trial, all in the name of profit.”

  She shrugged. “So? Stuff like that never makes it to court.”

  “I know.”

  “Then you’re wasting my time, yes?”

  “I have financial records from the Company. Documents, records of—”

  “This sounds like shite to me it sounds like—do you think this sounds like shite I think it’s …”

  “I have Philip Arnslade’s mother. She is willing to testify against her own son. I can make the Company destroy itself, and in the process take down the government and all who sail in it.”

  Bess raised a hand, stopping the men who’d already begun to move towards Theo’s slouching back. “Okay. Don’t be boring.”

  Theo spoke, and by the way she listened, it wasn’t boring.

  Chapter 60

  The queen of the patties, Good Queen Bess, her name isn’t Bess of course she took it because it seemed nice, it seemed sort of regal, sort of majestic but also very down-to-earth, it was a name that implied a much grander name somewhere behind it but she wasn’t grand she wasn’t …

  She killed her husband a long time ago. It was self-defence. She called the ambulance immediately, but he hadn’t paid for the health insurance like he’d said he had, so the ambulance didn’t come. He hadn’t paid for a lot of things that he said he had. The money was a big part of how the troubles began.

  That was when she was still a teacher. Things were different, back then.

  “So why’d you come to me?” she asked when Theo’s story was done.

  “People are looking for us. Mostly looking for Helen, but also for me. We needed a place to go. Somewhere safe.”

  “This ain’t safe. The police don’t bother to come here no more, but sometimes the Company sends in the boys and shoot the village up a bit, just to keep things ripe. They used to try to take the kids, or the pretty ones, but we shot back and it wasn’t a worthwhile economic investment. They think there might be some gas down beneath these hills, they want to dig it up, so they cut off the water, the electric, the roads, trying to starve us out. We are starving. It may look all lovely but they’re starving us to death. We go raiding for grub but they make it harder every year. This isn’t safe.”

  “I heard the patties had a queen, they say these prayers, blessed are the—”

  “Even atheists pray when they’re gonna lose a thing they love and know they can’t stop it. It’s the knowing they can’t stop it that makes them do the whispering.”

  “They pray to you.”

  She shrugged. “They pray to the idea that somewhere in the north there’s a place where the patties can be free, where we try again. They pray to that. I’m just sitting here.”

  “Will you help us?”

  “Maybe. Maybe. I don’t know about you, boy. But I like Helen. She’s got class. They don’t teach that, class, they don’t teach it at all. Now some might say I’m just responding to a certain socio-economic stereotype, that it’s the accent and maybe that’s true, maybe it is at that, but I dunno. If she’s willing to shaft her kiddy, that’s something. You think she’s got long left for this world?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think she knows?”

  “Yes.”

  “But she ain’t telling.”

  “No.”

  Bess beamed. “It’s that sorta attitude that makes the aristocracy so goddamn sexy.”

  They took him back to the room where the shadows crawled, left Helen and Theo in the dark.

  “How’d it …?” asked Helen.

  “Fine. Fine. I think … fine.”

  “Did she …?”

  “She didn’t shoot us, did she?”

  Helen laughed at nothing, and Theo realised just how stupid these words were, all things considered.

  After a few hours, a man opened the door, gave them a bowl of thin potato soup each, and a couple of blankets, chewed a little around the edges.

  In the morning:

  “My name is Corn.”

  “Theo.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m very happy to meet you, this is going to be—”

  “I was arrested for assault. I did it. He attacked my sister. I attacked him. I got eighteen years on the patty line. After nine, I broke out. Killed a guard when I did it. I killed him. I didn’t mean to, and I’m not sorry I did it. It’s just the way it went down.”

  “I see.”

  “You used to be an auditor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bess told me to help you. If you fuck us, I will make you eat your own fucking eyeballs.” />
  “Right. Well. That’s very clear.”

  In a cottage ten miles outside Derby, a laptop, a connection, a woman who once did a favour for a man and the man loved her and never forgot, and now she helps the patties, the runners, the screamers, the faders, the ones who pray to the moonlight through the bars.

  “I made the jam myself,” she murmurs, putting a plate on the table in front of Theo. “I won’t tell you how much sugar goes into these things.”

  The jam is made from gooseberries. It is disgusting. Theo eats it anyway, as Corn watches. Helen sits by the fire, gossiping with the woman about condiments and cats and the weather and the state of politics and the problem with women’s fashion and how underwired bras are just a tool of oppression all things considered.

  Corn fiddled with a camera. A young woman sat in the window of the living room, framed in light, one foot up on the sill, knee bent, eyes turned out towards the brilliant winter sun, a laptop shut at her feet. Corn murmured, not looking up from the camera, “She’s Bea. She does the machines. She’s good. She’s good.”

  There was that in Corn’s averted gaze, the quietness of his speech, that made Theo look away.

  By the first light of the new day they sat down in the kitchen, put a camera on a tripod, sat Helen in a wicker chair, a cup of tea by her side.

  She took a few attempts to get it right.

  “My name is Helen Arnslade, my son is Philip Arnslade, minister of fiscal efficiency. These are the names of the ones who died in HM Prison Lower Ayot, and whose bodies were put into the incinerator. Una Debono. Alice Turan. Janet Gantly. Rowena Ngongo. Claudia Hull. Michelline Heather …”

  They stopped every hundred names or so for Helen to have more tea and Bea to check the camera. When the light faded, they had supper. Supper was porridge and gooseberry jam. Theo was too hungry to care what it tasted like, and had stomach ache well into the night.

  They posted Helen’s videos online, and the contents of Dani’s USB stick two days later.

  Waited.

  For a few hours nothing happened.

  Then for a few hours, the internet exploded.

  Then they turned on the news, and nothing happened. GDP was up, unemployment was down, and the prime minister was heading off to the USA to visit key corporate innovators.

  At 7 p.m. Corn tried looking up “Helen Arnslade” on the internet, and no results were returned by any search engine. He tried texting a message to the woman in the window with Helen’s name in it, and the message showed as sent on his phone, and she never received it.

  “Well,” mused Theo. “I suppose it starts here.”

  Chapter 61

  Bea had trained as a weaver.

  “I liked to play with computers when I was a kid,” she mused. “I was told I should do IT GCSE. The school hadn’t ever taught IT GCSE before, and the teacher didn’t know what it involved or how to teach it but I did it anyway I did it and I got a C and I was really proud of that but the school tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. It looked bad on the statistics it was just …

  Anyway I was good at art too but there wasn’t any use for that, but then someone said why don’t you go into textiles, people always need clothes. And they do but they don’t want to pay for them and the moment you design something new someone’s ripped it off so I designed this T-shirt I thought it was really nice actually and I put a picture of it up on my blog and next thing you know …

  I mean it was a large company who stole it, someone owned by a company which was owned by … anyway, I was like, give me my royalty cos you’ve nicked my design, and they said that I hadn’t copyrighted it and I’d hear from their lawyers and we had this meeting and the man called me a very silly little girl and on the way out I was so angry—I was just so angry—I scratched his car with my keys and the indemnity wasn’t much, but the guy put his lawyers on me and suddenly it was so much more it was, like, everything I had. I paid, but my parents, they lost their home. And now I was in the shitter, and this guy, it just made me so angry that he’d got away with this stuff, that he could do it and next thing he’s running for government and—get this—he said that rape, he said it’s a thing, like if women don’t take responsibility for

  and I was so angry I just …

  So I hacked his site. Redirected everything to a victim support charity. He made sure I got six years. He had friends at the Company, and the Company was funding the redevelopment of the courts, and the judge, well, his pension came from Company shares so …

  They put me in a textiles prison. I got my own cell and everything. Special sponsorship. Made the T-shirt I’d designed for the guy who locked me up. Retailed for £8.99, big spring seller. Funny that. It’s all very funny, isn’t it?”

  Data rolled between camera and computer, computer and internet. Bea watched a bar crawl towards completion and chewed her bottom lip. Helen sat by her side, waiting, polite and patient. At last:

  “I like machines. People think if you do art you can’t like machines, but I always thought they were wrong. I think people like to be right. And they like to be told that they’re right. And they forget when they’re not, because it makes them feel bad, and most of the time they’re wrong.”

  Helen smiled and mused: “I have led an incredibly privileged life. I am not ashamed of being privileged. If you could choose privilege you would, of course—but what matters is that you understand privilege for what it is. That you know this and see that with it comes a duty. Duty is the reason is why—”

  And Bea replied, “I used to have my own loom. But different looms have different effects sometimes you want to achieve other things you want to—you’d really destroy your son for duty?”

  A slice of the knife across the white of the egg on her plate, cutting off a triangle. She ate, and eating gave her time to think, and Bea waited, and Helen said, “Yes. Because my son is a good man who knows the difference between right and wrong. He is a man who understands that he has a duty. He does not destroy the world for an island in the Mediterranean Sea. That is the only acceptable truth.”

  Bea looked like she was going to argue, but looked in Helen’s eyes and saw the tears that were waiting to grow there, and put her hand in Helen’s hand and didn’t say a word.

  Chapter 62

  Corn had a car. It was one of only two that the patties had running. The car was old, and made of different cars. He said, “We take it to Northampton, then we have to change cars. If you enter London in something like this—the CCTV—they pick you up, you have to be driving something proper.”

  Helen made them sandwiches. The sandwiches were bad. The bread was thick and dry, and there wasn’t any margarine. She stood in the door of the farmhouse, pushed them into Theo’s hand and murmured, “Be safe, down there. Be safe.”

  Bea sat in the front passenger seat because she got carsick, and took turns driving with Corn. Theo sat in the back, knees together, hands in his lap, and watched the land roll by. Gentle hills and bursts of thick trees, the leaves spiralling up and away in great gusts of wind that whooshed and crackled through the branches. A church spire peeking up from an orange-brick village. A manor house where once, centuries ago, a woman had hidden her brother from the Roundheads even though she didn’t believe in his cause, and where in another time the children had lounged in the setting sunlight by the still waters of the lake as the bombers went overhead, barely disturbing their tranquillity.

  A petrol station where behind the counter a man with two dangling hollows in the lobes of his ears where the dress code didn’t allow him to wear his jewellery met them behind the air pump and pressed key’s into Corn’s hand and whispered, “Blessed is her name, let the bars be broken let the journey end.”

  Corn squeezed his hand tight, and the man nodded, and scampered back to the shop before his supervisor could catch him skiving.

  They found the next car parked two streets away from the garage. It smelled of dog and a tiny bit of dog vomit, but they wound the windows down and w
rapped themselves in coat and glove, and headed south.

  London grew at the bottom of the hill. Strange to think that the city had boundaries, strange to think that there was a place where it stopped that you could stand on this line and your left foot would be in mud and your right on concrete and to the south the grey towers reached up to prick the clouds and to the north the mud squelched on into the damp, stripped hills and …

  Strange to think that this was how he was coming home.

  Huddled in the back of the car with a couple of patties, a hat on his head and a scarf around his neck to hide his face from the CCTV, because they’d be watching, Bea said, they’d be watching.

  They left the car in a car park in Archway, and walked down the steep slope of the hill. Houses of red and black, stained-glass windows above the shut front doors, little front patios not quite big enough to be gardens but too big just to be for the bins, no one seemed to know what to do with them, you could maybe fit in a rose bush but that was all but anything less and the space seemed bare.

  Theo found this troubling. There didn’t seem any logic in it.

  He pulled his chin to his chest, his hands in his pockets, and followed Bea and Corn down the hill.

  They stayed in a house with four bedrooms and nine residents. Three of the inhabitants of the largest room moved into the beds of the others to give Corn, Bea and Theo a little privacy in a space not much larger than the double bed that inhabited it. The air smelled of stale cigarette smoke and spilt beer. The kitchen floor crunched underfoot when Theo walked on it. On his second night he found a needle in the toilet. The residents were all from the patty line. A girl with pale yellow freckles beneath her eyes caught his revulsion when he opened the door to the kitchen to find a month of dirty dishes, caked in tomato gloop, piled up to the walls. She looked away, ashamed, and her shame made him feel ashamed, and she looked back and saw he was embarrassed and she smiled and said:

  “It’s hard. You clean it sometimes, but it just gets worse again. And when you’ve got nothing else, what’s the point of doing the dishes I mean what’s the point of …”