Big Brother's Little Sister

by Mike Bursell

  I tried to think as a Youth Enforcer, and to react as one of them might have done. "Well, that's interesting, but that hardly links Mo to these incidents, does it? Does he even spend much time in the computer room?" I knew he didn't, but I was hoping this would help convince Kareem that he was wrong.

  "No, he doesn't," admitted Kareem, and on seeing me raise my eyebrows, he rushed on, "... but that just proves my point. I've asked around, and everybody says that of everyone at the school, he's by far the most advanced at computers – a real 'hacker' or 'cracker'. I think he's staying away from the computer room just to avoid drawing attention to himself!" He sat back, as if this proved his point.

  From an objective point of view, this all seemed very circumstantial - he'd jumped to a conclusion which he really didn't have the evidence to support. But I happened to know that all of the things he'd said were entirely correct, and however he'd come to the conclusion, that was correct, too. If I told him he was talking rubbish, then there was a danger that he'd talk to someone else about his suspicions. If I told him I wasn't a Y.E., then we were in even more trouble. I was thinking furiously, and decided to try to buy some time.

  "What made you suspect that I was a Young Enforcer?" I asked Kareem, very carefully not confirming or denying his suspicion this time.

  "I suspected it almost from when I arrived," he confided. "I noticed that you spend a lot of time watching people, seeing what's going on. You don't seem to have many friends," he was counting off on his fingers again, "your mother's a police officer, and you always seem to be not just watching, but analysing things. It wasn't immediately obvious, and I've not told anyone," he added quickly, looking again for approval, or at least lack of censure. "What finally fixed it for me was when I started putting two and two together about Mo. I started keeping an eye on him, and I noticed that although you're careful not to spend too much time near him, you're often watching him, or glancing over to see what he's doing. Particularly during lunchtimes at one of these incidents." He leant back, pleased to have had the chance to explain himself. I was really taken aback by this. I didn't think that I'd been that obvious, and I was going to have to be much more careful – we were going to need to be much more careful – if we got through this.

  But I had to bring my mind back to the matter in hand: how to keep Kareem quiet, stop him sharing what he'd worked out. He didn't have the whole story, but if he kept on digging, he might find out more. I had to stop him looking any further, but do it in a way that would make him think he was being listened to, which was clearly important to him. If I could have proved him wrong, I would have done, but he was scarily close to the truth: at least about Mo, if not me.

  He was looking at me expectantly, looking for praise, and I realised that there was only one plan that I could think of right now, anyway. "Master Hussein," I started, trying to sound as official as possible, "first I must swear you to secrecy."

  Kareem's eyes widened, as my words finally confirmed what he'd suspected, and he nodded eagerly. People are always keen to have what they believe confirmed by other people, and it's much easier to convince someone of something they've already half-decided than to change their minds.

  "I must ask you not to breathe a work of your suspicions to anyone until we are ready to act." He was leaning forward again now, with his hands clenched in front of him and I lowered my voice to make what I was saying sound even more important. "This is an undercover operation, and my position as a Youth Enforcer is not known to anyone on the school staff, or even to the local Enforcer organisation. We have had ..." I paused, as if grasping for the right word "... concerns about this young man for some time, and are watching him very carefully. It is of the utmost - the utmost - importance that he does not become aware that he is under surveillance. We hope to track other members of this group through him, and will, at some point, arrest him and take him in for questioning. If we act too fast, however, or he suspects that we are onto him, he will alert his fellow criminals, " (I was quite pleased with this), "and we will lose any chance to infiltrate this organisation, of which he is obviously only an unimportant and minor member."

  I sat back in my chair, and he mirrored my action, sitting back in his. He was clearly hoping that I would say more, but I kept silent, staring directly into his eyes, and doing my best to keep as calm as I could. Has he bought it? I asked myself. Is he convinced, and if not, what can I do? What if he grabs me and calls the Enforcers right now, from his phone? I won't even be able to warn Mo!

  After a few moments, which felt like hours, he broke my gaze, and looked down at his shoes. It all depends on the next few seconds, and what he does right now. I tensed, ready to make a break for it and run for the door if he looked like he was going for me. Then he looked up at me, and I realised that I'd pulled it off. He looked convinced, and cowed, as if, now that I had confirmed his suspicions about who I was, he was now in my power. I decided to speak first, to maintain that power relationship. "Do you understand?"

  "Yes," he said.

  "You will not take any further action that might alert this criminal or his organisation."

  "I won't."

  "Your contribution is noted, and I congratulate you on your reasoning and commend you for presenting your suspicions to an appropriate person." I was trying to sound as pompous and official as I could, and wondered whether I was overdoing it, but he seemed to be lapping it up.

  "My earlier request...? About a different posting?" Ah - here's a problem, though. He really wants to get out of here. I need to find him something to do, a way to feel useful.

  "Moving you at this point might arouse suspicions. I'm sorry, but at this point I must ask you to remain in your current position." I thought quickly. "However, while you cannot undertake any further investigations into Mo Williams, it would be helpful if you could keep an eye out for any accomplices. Your work in the computer club could be useful here: have you noticed any likely candidates there? Pupils with particular skill in programming, for instance?"

  This seemed to satisfy him, or at least give him enough to be keeping him occupied for now. He thought for a moment: "Nobody in particular so far, but I can keep an eye out."

  "That will be helpful. You should go now: if anybody asks why we have spoken, you should say that you were wondering if I might join the computer club. Do you understand?"

  He nodded, and I made to get up, desperate to get away and get home, where I could contact Mo and warn him of the problem. Before I could rise from my chair, though, he put out his hand towards me, to stop me getting up.

  "What will happen to him?"

  "To whom?"

  "To Mo." He seemed, suddenly, to have realised what he had got into.

  I thought quickly: there was nothing I do other than spout the standard Government line. "At some point he will be arrested and face trial. He will then probably attend a Child Internment Camp for re-education." Kareem was looking more and more concerned, and I had to distract him from this line of thought. "Your contribution, however, is noted, as I have already mentioned." His frown lessened a little, but didn't disappear. "I will discuss this with my colleagues and we will decide how best to proceed."

  At this, he nodded, but seemed lost in his thoughts. I got up, picked up my bag, and was about to walk for the door when I realised that I had another opportunity to assert my authority over him. "You should go now," I ordered, and he shook his head to clear it. He looked up at me with something like fear in his eyes at the awareness that this girl, over two years younger than him, held his future in her hands, and then got up and walked to the door. As he got to it, he put his hand on the handle, and then looked back at me. I couldn't work out what he was waiting for until I realised that he was waiting for my permission to leave. I nodded curtly, once, and he opened the door and walked out without turning round again.

  I sat still for several minutes, trying to process what had just happened. We were clearly still in extreme danger, but I'd managed to avert any immediate
crisis for now. I'd also established a really weird position of authority over Kareem, and though it was an amazing feeling of power, I wasn't sure that I really liked it. He believed that I could help him and make his life better, but there was, truly, nothing of the kind I could do. He was also clearly scared of what I could do to Mo, or cause to be done to him, and just the act of describing Mo's likely fate had made me consider how true it was, and how the same almost certainly applied to me, as well.

  Finally, I roused myself from my thoughts, got up and hurried home, glad when I managed to avoid talking to anyone on the way.

  Chapter 22 – Are you going to report me?

  I was very jumpy when I got home, desperately anxious to get on the phone to Mo, but when I saw the time, I realised that it was still early, and that it would be hours before he'd be waiting by the phone in his bedroom, waiting for the light on it to flash. I dropped my bag in the hall disconsolately and started up the stairs as I heard a voice from the kitchen: “Lena, is that you?”

  It was Mum, of course. I could never work out why she asked if it was me: who else was it going to be? I sometimes wondered she half hoped it might be Dad, given that we’d moved after they’d split up, he would never have come through the door of this house, and didn't, as far as I knew, even know where we lived, so it seemed unlikely. “Yes, Mum, it's me.”

  “Come through, would you? Cup of tea?”

  I stepped down the two stairs I'd gone up and went through the hall into the kitchen. Mum was sitting on a chair to the side of the table, and there was a cup of tea next to the one at the end. I was clearly supposed to sit there. I suppressed a sigh: it was such a Mum-thing. On the other hand, if I had sighed, or rolled my eyes, she would have got upset, and, if I was honest, I generally enjoyed our “little chats”. It's just that this time, I had some much that I wanted to talk over with Mo. Which would have to wait.

  I wondered which chat this would be. We hadn't had the “do you have a boyfriend?” one for a while, though I was pretty sure she'd recently decided that Mo and I were “together”, so it might not be that one. In fact, I was never really sure which answer Mum wanted to that one. I got the impression, every time I said that I hadn't, that she was a little sad for me. One time, a few years before, she'd got all twitchy and told me that she worried whether, if I did go out with someone, he would be “a nice boy.” Mum really used language like that sometimes. Amazing. I was rather surprised, on reflection, that we'd not had more discussions about Mo: I wasn't convinced that he'd come under the “nice boy” category for Mum, given what his parents and sister did for a living.

  But it wasn't that one, or the “have you decided what you want to do with your life yet, because I wouldn't recommend a career in the police” one. She'd dropped that one once it became clear that there was no point in anybody thinking about jobs or careers until they'd got through National Service, and I had two or three years before I'd even start that.

  She waited until I'd sat down, and then drew breath.

  “Lena. There's something that I'm supposed to say to you.”

  This sounded odd. I raised my eyebrows.

  “They're giving out flyers at the station. In fact, they're making us take them home.” She lifted an envelope that had been on the table, hiding a glossy flyer, printed in black on red background. She didn't hand it to me, and I struggled to make out what it said.

  “They told us to give these to our children.” She kept her voice calm and steady, but she looked like this was the sort of order that she would have ignored if she could. She didn't seem any closer to handing over the sheet of paper, so I took a sip of tea, put my hand out, and she passed it to me, reluctantly.

  In big, bold capital letters, it read, “HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THE YOUTH ENFORCERS?” At this point, I spat my tea all over the flyer, the table and Mum. It was a recruitment flyer for the Youth Traitors, printed in a design similar to the booth that the Enforcers had brought into school that time.

  “Don't be angry at me, please, Lena,” she begged, putting her hand out and grasping my arm. “They ordered us to give these to you.”

  I wasn't angry, but I was shocked. “Mum, this really, really isn't what I'm looking for in life.”

  “It could be good for you.” She didn't look like she believed this: it looked like something she felt she had to say.

  “Really, Mum?” I looked into her eyes. “Really?”

  She looked away. “Well, I've done my duty.” She looked ashamed, and after a moment of looking down at the table, her shoulders started to jerk in little spasms, and I realised that she was crying. I put my tea down, pushed my chair back and went round behind her. I put my arms round her and held her tight, my cheek on the back of her neck. I thought back to the number of times she'd held me like this over the years, and wondered at the role reversal. “You know,” she continued, “when I realised I was pregnant, it was the easiest thing in the world to leave your father.”

  I tried not to freeze in her arms. Mum almost never talked about my Dad. As I'd said to Denise when I asked about him, I knew he must have left when I was very little, because there were no pictures of him in the house. Anywhere. I've asked Mum about him from time to time, but it's always reduced her to angry tears, so after a while I stopped asking. She seems to have a real problem with whoever he was, so I guess that we're best off without him in our lives. I patted her back, for something to do.

  “He wasn't … he isn't … a nice man,” she explained.

  “You mean... Mum: did he hit you?”

  “No. He never did that,” she said, as if it had never occurred to her before. “He wasn't even cruel to me, really. Not intentionally.”

  “Then … why?”

  “He stopped caring about me. And started caring more about himself. And his … work. That wouldn't have been too bad, on its own, but he was becoming cruel. He was getting more senior, and more successful at what he did, you see, and the more successful he got, the … nastier he became. I'd had enough of that: I couldn't live with someone like that. When I got pregnant, I wondered, briefly, if it would be enough to change him, but I took one look at him, the day I realised I was having you, and decided I wouldn't even tell him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it wouldn't have changed anything. It might have made things worse. So I asked him for a divorce, the same day, and he just agreed. Like that.” She held me for a while. “He moved out the next day. It was such an easy decision. For both of us, in a way.”

  I waited for her to say something, but she didn't continue. “What brought this on, Mum?”

  “Oh, I don't know. It's just that sometimes I wonder if it would be easier if he – no, if someone – were around. Someone else who understood.”

  “There's always Geoff,” I joked, and then realised that I'd made a mistake, as I felt her tense up in my arms. “Don't worry. I was joking. But I don't mind. Seriously. About him. Or about the Enforcer thing,” I said, changing the topic swiftly. “It's OK. I'm really, really not upset. You did what they ordered you to.” Her head moved beneath mine, nodding.

  “I could have disobeyed. They wouldn't have known.”

  “And if they'd asked? You'd have lied?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “Mum – you're a terrible liar – they would have known immediately!” I said, trying to lighten the tone again.

  She snorted a little laugh, and then went quiet. I thought she was about to say something, and then suddenly I felt her start to cry again. I held her tight. After a minute of holding her as she cried silently, I asked her, quietly, “What is it, Mum?”

  She shook her head, and carried on crying.