Big Brother's Little Sister

by Mike Bursell

  I winced. “No. It's not that sort of discussion.” The other thing that had always been made clear to me was that if ever I “got into trouble” – exactly how had never been specified, but I had a pretty good clue – with a boy, that Denise would be someone I could come to if I needed.

  She let out a little sigh of relief. “So, you don't want to discuss him...?”

  “There is no 'him'. Mum's got the wrong end of the stick. She's always been so keen for me to 'get on with boys' that as soon as I mentioned something, she leaped at it. There is a boy we were talking about, but he's not my boyfriend. He's not anybody's boyfriend. He's just a friend. A friend who's a boy.”

  “OK,” she said, thoughtfully. “I did wonder: mothers can be a little uptight about these things when they have daughters. And particularly when the father isn't around.”

  “Actually, that's more what I want to talk about.”

  “You'd like a chat about your Dad. Right.” She glanced outside. Si had finished with the washing, and was heading back indoors with the empty basket. “Looks like Si's coming back in. Why don't we go and sit on the patio while the supper cooks? Should be ready in about half an hour.”

  As we got up to go out through the French windows, I wondered for a moment why Denise had chosen that moment to go outside. Maybe it was coincidence – Si had just finished with the washing – but on the other hand it felt almost as if it were the mention of my father which had led to the suggestion. Surely not? I thought, I'm just being suspicious now. Why would wanting to discuss my father prompt a move outside?

  We went and sat next to each other on the bench. The garden was long, and sloped down to a stream at the bottom.

  “More water? Something else?” asked Denise, though I was only halfway down my glass.

  “No, I'm fine.”

  “So, your father. What brought this on?”

  I didn't want to give her the full story: about Mo and his parents. I decided to start from something she did know about. “Have you heard anything about Ryan recently?”

  “Still in hospital, but he's doing OK. Why do you ask?”

  “I was thinking. About Enforcers.” I paused. She waited: she had always been a good listener, I remembered. “Mum hates them, doesn't she.”

  She waited again, but when I didn't continue, but took a sip of water instead, she replied: “Let's just say that she's not that keen on them.”

  I half-choked on my water. “That's one way of putting it.”

  “Do you know why?” I asked, carefully.

  “I think it's down to the interactions she has in her job,” she replied, equally carefully.

  I took another sip of water. “Not my father?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I took yet another sip. I wasn't thirsty, but my mouth was going dry with nervousness. I decided to come straight out with it: “Did Mum leave Dad – my father – because he was an Enforcer?”

  She sighed, almost as if with relief. Which is weird, I had a moment to think. What question did she think I was about to ask?

  “No,” she said. “She didn't. Nothing like that.”

  I was relieved, too, but only at one level: I didn't have an answer, but at least one concern was crossed off.

  “In fact,” she continued, “he left before you were born, right?”

  “I assume so,” I confirmed. “There are no pictures of him in the house, but there are pictures of Mum and me from when I was quite small. So I think he must have done.”

  “Me, too – I never met him, I'm pleased to say,” Denise said. “You were about six months old when the two of you moved into the village, but he was definitely off the scene by then. And you're nearly sixteen, right?”

  I knew she knew my age, and my birthday: she never forgot it, and I always got a present from her. I nodded in agreement.

  “Don't they teach you any history at school?” she enquired.

  “What the Government calls history, yes. Not sure I'd agree.”

  “Yes, fair enough,” she agreed. “That's what I meant, though: what the Government puts on the syllabus.” She took a sip of coffee, and looked down the garden at the birds flocking round the trees at the bottom. “When were the Enforcers formed?”

  I thought back to school history classes. “I can't remember. I have to admit that I don't pay that much attention to those lessons.”

  “Tut-tut,” she admonished. “My god-daughter. I thought you were a good pupil: that's what your mother's always telling me.” She smiled. “About twelve years ago. They weren't official until the Government came in and started making some serious changes: ten years – no, nine and a half years ago.”

  “So he wasn't an Enforcer, then?”

  “No. He wasn't. Not a very nice man, from what your Mum tells me, at least,” she added, “but not an Enforcer.”

  “I thought there might be a connection, that's all,” I said, annoyed with myself for not realising that the dates didn't work.

  Denise got up. “Let's go in, shall we? See if Si needs any help with the vegetables.”

  I followed her into the house, wondering if I'd missed anything, but it all seemed quite straightforward: there didn't seem to be any way that my father could be connected with the Enforcers. Do I obsess about my Dad too much? I wondered. But doesn't anyone without a father – or a mother – always wonder about them?

  I decided to avoid the subject for the rest of the evening, and even managed not to respond to Si's somewhat heavy hints that he wanted to know more about Ryan and what had gone on at school. Somebody had given them a couple of rabbits – “one of the benefits of having a parish that's half in the countryside,” Denise explained – and we ate a stew, from which we spent most of the main course spitting out shot.

  As I was leaving, I stopped outside the door. “Denise, could you do me a favour?”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Would you mind not telling Mum?”

  “About coming round?” she asked, mystified.

  “No, not that. Just about what I asked you about my father,” I replied.

  “Sure. I won't: promise.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and waved goodbye as she closed the door, with a nagging suspicion that there was something else I was missing: a question that she'd been expecting, but which I hadn't asked.

  Chapter 17 – We think she's an Enforcer

  There was a note in my locker the next morning at school. There's never a note in my locker, and even if there had been, it should never have been from Mo. The note was from Mo. It read “No phone. Fliss home.” This almost rhymed, though I had a suspicion that Mo wouldn't have noticed when he wrote it.

  We had a protocol. In other words, we had a list of agreed ways to try to get in touch with each other if we couldn't use the phone, and he was supposed to try one after the other until I responded, which had to be done in a particular way. I had a similar list, which I would have followed if I'd needed to. A note in my locker wasn't even near the top of his list. It wasn't in the middle of his list. In fact, it absolutely wasn't on his list at all, and I was caught between horror that he would have perpetrated such an awful security breach, fascination around why he had bothered, and concern about what the impact might be. He hadn't followed the protocol. And I'd spent literally months trying to get him to take security more seriously. I mean: really?

  Presumably, when his parents had gone to visit Fliss, wherever she was, they'd brought her back home, and they'd not even bothered to tell him about it before leaving. I could see why he wouldn't have been able to call me on the phone, but I really couldn't see why he couldn't have used one of the other methods of communication on the protocol list to let me know about her arrival.

  I didn't have time before lessons to do anything, so I left a message round the back of the chemistry section of the school library, behind a book which had never been taken out in the history of the school, and then waited. This was my protocol: at least one of us was following us. I
ignored him during the one lesson we shared that morning, though he looked quite stressed, and I was pretty sure that I spotted him glancing in my direction a few times.

  I managed to get a chance to check his first dead-letter box just before lunch. It was empty, but as it was just opposite the boys' toilets, I wasn't concerned, as it wouldn't be the first time that he hadn't been able to leave a message there safely. I was ready to try the second – a hidden ledge behind a shelf on the way back to the dining hall – but it wasn't safe to approach. There were a couple of year eights hanging around, so I walked on by. After lunch, I waited for a gap in the people walking down the corridor, and managed to get to the drop: and there it was. I pocketed the piece of paper and headed to the girls' toilets to have a read of it.

  In my note I'd asked what was going on, and also why he'd broken protocol. I didn't want to get too heavy-handed, but I was annoyed that I kept having to remind him about this stuff: it was both of us who would suffer if either of us got caught.

  “Sorry,” the note read, in Mo's rather scruffy handwriting not even in printed capitals, “I panicked. F. home unexpectedly, due into school today or tomorrow. Don't know why, but be careful. Very suspicious about everything: presumably because of training she's getting. Have removed phone for now.”

  To start with, I wasn't sure what he meant about being suspicious: why was Mo being suspicious? Then I realised that he meant that his sister was being suspicious, and that he thought it was probably down to the training she was getting to be an undercover Enforcer. I wondered whether to leave a note in reply, but decided against. I'd have loved to have known more, but didn't think it was worth breaking protocol, and, after all, Mo hadn't asked any questions in his note. It would have to wait. Once I left the toilet, I headed to my locker and fiddled around in it as an excuse to move the magnet that I left on it to a different position. This was my signal that I'd picked up the message, and hadn't left one in return. Mo would presumably walk past it at some point and would get my signal without having to take any risks.

  It was a slow process, though, and I knew that if it lasted for a long time, it was going to get very frustrating, because it was going to make it difficult to plan attacks. It was a week or two since our last one, given everything else that had been going on around school, and I didn't want to leave it too long before we put out another one. Although keeping the frequency at which we launched them irregular was good, and kept the Government on their toes, I knew that people looked forward to our attacks, and I didn't want the Government to get the idea – or start giving the impression – that they'd managed to get to us.

  But for now I was going to have to live with it – as would Mo. I tried to remember if we had any attacks ready to go, but didn't think we did. We'll just have to wait. If this goes on for a long time, we can probably arrange something via notes, but it's going to be awfully, awfully slow. I thought about sending him a note asking how long Fliss was going to be around, but restrained myself. If he'd known, he would have mentioned it, I decided.

  At the end of the day, I went home, dumped my bag in the hall, went upstairs to my room, then back downstairs to pick up my bag before Mum noticed and yelled at me, took it upstairs, changed and got the phone out from down the side of my bed before I realising that Mo wouldn't call, and if I called him, then he wouldn't answer. I felt rather stupid, but as I did my homework – reading some poetry today – I had a nagging discomfort in the back of my mind, just knowing that we wouldn't chat.

  It wasn't as if we spoke every day – most days, maybe – but just knowing that I could pick up the phone and there was a good chance that he'd pick it up provided a feeling of comfort. After some thought, I'd had what I considered a genius idea, and had managed to find a ringtone for my phone which was very similar to the one of the land-line one. I'd spent some time trying to work out how to change the ring on that, only to discover that it wasn't possible: you were stuck with the same one, with no way to swap it out at all. Now that I had changed mine, it meant that I could sit in my room with the land-line set to ring, and Mum would be none the wiser if she heard it. And I didn't need to sit and stare at it, waiting for the light to flash.

  Mo had been quite impressed, and a little annoyed, I think, that I'd thought of the idea before him. “What about when you leave the room?” he had asked.

  “I always unplug it from the wall anyway,” I had answered. “I leave it by my bed, plugged in, when I'm in the room, but I'd have to move it anyway when I wasn’t there, just in case Mum came into my room.”

  “Your mother comes into your room?” he had asked, horrified.

  “Yup. Of course. Doesn't yours?” I'd replied.

  “No. Never. What a terrible thought.”

  “I thought that teenage boys' Mums usually went into their rooms to clean from time to time?” I had suggested.

  “No. Never,” he had repeated.

  I'd left it at that, unable to bear that thought of what horrors might be lurking in his room, and wondering whether, actually, he might be one of those small number of mythical boys who cleaned and tidied up after himself.

  Mum, when she first heard my new phone ringtone, had nearly jumped out of her skin. “Sounds just like the phones we used to have back in the day,” she had commented. “It's been ages since I heard that sound. What made you change it?”

  “It's kind of a thing. At school,” I had lied, making it up on the spot.

  “My Lena, always up with all the trends,” she had said, and I had left her to her little delusions, only to discover that within a couple of weeks all the “cool kids” at school had changed their ringtones to old-style telephone rings, so I had started some sort of craze. Life is really strange, sometimes.

  It was another assembly, though this time, Ms Martin didn't seem to have a problem with it. This time, the visitor, Fliss, sat to the side of the staff and didn't put herself in the middle of the front row. She was only a year or so out of school, so lots of people already knew her, and the welcome was rather positive. I had to keep reminding myself that only two people – Mo and me – knew that she was part of the Junior Enforcement Corps. Why wouldn't they be positive about her? As far as everyone else is concerned, she's like us: a young person who's under as much pressure from the Government as the rest of us.

  “Today we're going to have a talk about National Service Volunteers,” Ms Martin announced. “I know that many of you have brothers, sisters or cousins who are already involved in various National Service schemes, but this is Fliss Williams, Mo Williams' brother.” She looked in his direction, and he tried to duck his head out of sight. “She's going to talk about some of the opportunities that National Service volunteering provides, and her experiences. Fliss?”

  Fliss got up and walked to the middle of the hall, next to Ms Martin. Fliss was taller than her, and had dark hair, which she wore quite short. She was wearing jeans and a pastel coloured top. She could hardly have looked less like an Enforcer of any type. Which is, of course, the point, I realised. She leaned towards Ms Martin and had a word in her ear.

  “Oh, yes, I forgot,” said Ms Martin, as Fliss straightened up, handing her a piece of paper. “She's also going to be spending some individual time with a number of girls talking about various new programmes that the Government have introduced to help young women...” she glanced down at the piece of paper and read off it, “...to be able to provide the most social and economic benefit to the country. She'll be using the library, so please keep out of there this morning.” It may have been my imagination, but she seemed to wince a little as read the bit about 'social and economic benefit', as if she didn't really believe them. Interesting, I thought. I wonder what's going on here.

  Fliss stepped forward as Ms Martin stepped back. “Thanks, Ms Martin,” she said, and then faced the rest of the school. “It's really weird being up at the front,” she announced, with a smile. “I'm more used to be skulking in one of the seats at the back.” There was a ripple of amuseme
nt. She's really good, I thought, and so much better than the Enforcers we had who were recruiting. It helps that she's not that much older than most of us, and she used to be a pupil here: this is her territory.