by Robin Banks
“Easiest way is if you get your parents to sign you off. Fastest way, too. We pack up in eight hours.”
“No worries. We’ve got this.”
We take the papers and head back towards town as fast as we can walk. We have no time to waste.
I nudge Tom. “You got the forms?”
“Yeah. Got them the day I got out. Wanna check?”
“No time. I trust you.”
“That’s a first,” and he nearly manages a smile.
“You think we can pull this off? Time is tight.”
“Has to be, doesn’t it? Parental permission is revocable. Do you want to give those assholes the chance to change their mind before we’re off planet? Anyway, it’s easy on my side. It’s not even lunchtime yet.”
We go to his house first. We shimmy up the containment wall at the back and crawl along it until we can look through the windows.
“There you go,” smirks Tom. “No bother.”
Tom’s dad is sprawled on what passes for a sofa in that house, completely out of it. By the amount of bottles around him, he’s not yet recovered from the night before. Nobody else is in. We crawl back along the wall and hop down.
Tom mutters “Easy does it, ok?” As if he needed to tell me.
We stash our bags behind a bin and walk to the front door. It takes Tom about three seconds to jimmy open the lock. He’s been doing this since he was tall enough to reach. I stay by the door to keep an eye out just in case, while Tom goes in. He picks up his dad’s limp hand, puts a pen in it, makes a scrawl on his form, and pushes his dad’s thumb against the biometrics pad. His dad doesn’t react at all. Tom looks at him for a couple of seconds before shaking himself off and walking out. He doesn’t even bother to shut the door.
“What papers did you use?” I ask him.
“Full emancipation, my man. If you’re gonna do it, do it all the way.”
It all seems too easy. “You sure this will work? What if he contests it?”
“You think he reads his coms? And I’ll be off-world by then. Not that he’ll care, but even if he did what’s he gonna do, pay for my transit back?”
One down, one to go. We pick up our stuff and get going. The next bit is going to be trickier.
My house is only a few roads down, but it’s a third floor flat, the security’s tighter, and I know that asshole’s inside. There’s nothing for it, though. I can’t just hang around outside and wait for my mom to come out. I could be waiting for days. There’s no choice but going up. That doesn’t make me feel any better.
“Never broken into the place before.”
“First time for everything. You want me to come with?”
“Nah. Stay out here. If you hear anything kick off, start chucking cobbles at the windows.”
“Subtle.”
“Effective. Probably. Here goes.”
Tom gives me a leg up so I can grab the first bracket holding the waste pipe that runs down the length of the building. I know that it can support my weight because I’ve used it a million times to climb down. From there it’s pretty easy for me to get up to the third floor, grab the balcony railings, and haul myself up and over. I try to land as quietly as possible, but I still make way too much noise. I crouch on the balcony for a few seconds, waiting for some kind of reaction from inside the house, but nothing happens. I dart past the living room door, just in case, then peer through the kitchen door. My mom is there, as I expected. She’s almost always there. No sign of the motherfucker, either, which I also expected. He doesn’t do mornings. I tap gently on the door to attract her attention, nearly giving her a heart attack by the looks of it. Thankfully she doesn’t scream before she recognizes me. Maybe she’s too zonked out for that. Her eyes widen and she looks behind her at the door into the flat, but I tap on the glass again and gesture at her to be quiet and come out.
Meeting my mom is always the same: gross and frustrating. She won’t accept that I don’t like her pawing at me. She throws herself at me and clamps on. As soon as I manage to get one bit of her off me she latches on with another, all the while snuffling and snotting me up. It makes me feel like an asshole for being so grossed out, which is what it’s designed to achieve. Knowing that has never helped.
She’s babbling incoherently all along. She’s clearly halfway out of it on some of her meds already, which could make this either incredibly easy or a giant clusterfuck. In no time at all she’s going to be working herself up into full hysterics and then I’ll be screwed. Once she’s wound herself up she can go on for hours and the noise is unbelievable. I have to keep her calm. Thankfully, I’m used to doing that.
“Mom, stop. I’m here for a reason. I need you to do something for me.” I only have to repeat it four times for her to catch up.
“What? What’s going on? You’re not back?”
“I have a job. But I need you to sign some papers.”
“A job?” She looks at me as if I’d achieved some kind of miracle, which I guess I have.
“A job. But you need to sign some papers for me first.”
“And then you’ll come home?”
“Then I can come visit. Send some credit over, too.”
Her eyes narrow. She’s not whacked out enough. Damn. “Where is this job?”
Shit. I should have lied. “It’s a travelling job. A building crew. Get me out of the city. Away from bad company. You’ve been telling me I should stop hanging out with the guys for years.”
Her eyes narrow even more. “Yes. That Lopez kid. Bloody trash!”
She’s going to go off on one about Tom now, so I head her off. “Well, this is your chance. I got me a job. A paid job. A paid, permanent, legit job. Who else my age has a job around here?”
She swells up at that. “Nobody, that’s who. Such lazy kids! Disrespectful, too!”
“But I’m not like that. I messed up a lot but you never gave up on me and you did what was right even when it was hard for you. So I straightened myself out and now I got a job. All you have to do is sign the consent form and I’m set. Even though it’s hard for you, you’ll do it because it’s the right thing for your son.”
My mom doesn’t really see reality. Never has, since I can remember. Dealing with her has always been about manipulating the dream she wants to believe in.
Her eyes fill with tears. “Of course. My boy, my beautiful boy!” She’s starting to tear up again, so I get her to sign the papers and give her thumbprint quickly, before she dissolves into sobbing. Only instead of the parental permission forms, I get her to sign the emancipation papers. She doesn’t read them, anyway. She doesn’t even look at them. She’s too busy telling me what a good mother she is and how hard it’s all been for her. I’m trying not to scream.
I stash the papers in my back pocket. Time to scram. I detach her from me for the umpteenth time and hold her at arm’s length. “Ok. I have to go now. I can’t be late for my first day.” She tries to clutch at me again, but her arms are too short.
“Aren’t you going to come in, have something to eat? Klaus will be up soon. He’ll want to see you.”
I stifle a shudder. “No, mom, I gotta go.” I can’t piss away my time here and I’m starting to feel dirty enough to vomit. Plus if the motherfucker catches me here I’m going to have a situation. Nothing I can’t handle, particularly with Tom as backup, but I’ll rather not have to. “I’ll write. Send you a postcard, with a picture on it.”
She swells up with pride and tears up again. Time to end this.
“Mom, I gotta go.” I get over the railing before she can grab me, and shimmy down the pipe.
Tom’s just around the corner of the building, out of sight. He hands me my bag. “Which way?” he asks.
“This way. Longer, but she can’t see us.”
We run down the alleys until we’ve gone round enough corners that there’s no way they could catch us. We don’t need to, most likely, but old habits die hard.
“She signed you off?”
“O
f course. Anything to get me away from you.”
“Your mom still hates me?”
“Yup. Can’t blame her. You’re a bad influence.”
“Bullshit. She never liked me.”
“That too. But she can’t have you people leading her golden boy astray with your loose morals and looser women.”
That makes him grin. “Fat chance of that!”
We jog all the way to the court house. This is the last step. I’m really worked up now. Of course, when we get there there’s a line.
We’re waiting our turn, twitchy as hell, when Tom asks me. “What would you have done if she said no? I wasn’t at all confident. I can’t believe she’s letting her little boy go off world.”
“I didn’t tell her anything about that. Who do you take me for? I wasn’t sure, either. But they managed to recover quite a bit of DNA from me a few years back, nail scrapings and stuff, when we had a bit of a situation.”
“Nail scrapings?”
“Yeah. Nearly took the motherfucker’s eyelids off. It was a fun time.”
“I don’t know whether to be impressed or to point out that you fight like a toddler.”
“Very funny. Anyway, I managed to convince the case worker that I was a jerk and wasn’t going to play ball, and that it was probably partly my fault. She didn’t bother investigating much or filing for charges. But it’s all on record and I was 13. The motherfucker doesn’t need charges of assault against a minor. He’d have to get off his ass to deal with them.”
“Eh. Fuck that guy.”
“Rather not. That’s the whole point.”
The woman standing in line behind us jumps up at that with a horrified face. That makes us both laugh. We’re both so wound up that once we start we can’t stop for ages. We just keep setting each other off. By the time we get to the service window, we’re out of breath and I’ve got a stitch, but we’ve worked enough tension out of our systems that we can pretend to be cool about this. I do the talking. I’m better at sounding serious.
“We’re here to file our emancipation papers. Both consensual. Parental release forms. Proof of employment. IDs.”
The woman behind the window looks at the papers, then looks at us over her glasses. “Are you sure about this?”
“Absolutely.” She carries on staring at me, so I carry on. “If you look at our records, between the two of us we’ve spent around 90 months in a juvenile detention center. I think we can all agree this is an improvement. And a great saving to our fair city.”
Tom smiles broadly at that. “Your chance to sanitize the neighborhood.” He sounds so cocky. I love this guy.
The lady looks openly disgusted, but she stamps our papers and feeds them through a machine.
“I’m obliged to remind you that your emancipation can be revoked until you reach your majority in the event of you failing to support yourselves or committing a crime," she drones at us as she returns our papers.
I look at our IDs. Right over our parents' names is stamped in red ‘Emancipated’, and today’s date. I’ve never seen anything more beautiful. I find it hard not to snatch everything out of her hands and set off running. We manage to make it out of the building before we start jumping and whooping.
“Tom, we pulled this off. Can you believe this?”
“Nearly. I’ll believe it when we get off world.”
“I never want to see this godsdamn town again.”
“Too right.”
By the time we get back to the bubble gate, we’re fighting a sea of people heading in the opposite direction. It takes us an age and a lot of elbow work to get through. The place is in chaos. Workers are swarming all over it, dismantling and carting away structures as quickly as people are leaving them, literally rolling up the footways behind them. The main structure has already lost all its sense of grandeur, of solidity. Without partitions, with the lights off, it looks like a giant spider web threatening to collapse and engulf the minuscule people swarming all over it.
We don’t know what to do or where to go, so we go back to the one place we know. We manage to locate the ATR with the lady who gave us our contracts, but she’s not there. We can’t ask for her, because everyone is busy working and anyway we still don’t know who she is or what she’s called. It takes us a while to find her.
“Finally. You got your papers? Actually, fuck it. You get to work now. I’ll check them before we set off. If they’re not in order, we’ll just leave you behind. That’ll teach you.” She turns around and bellows. “Kolya!”
Another burly man bellows back in the distance. “What?”
“Got your workers!”
The man drops what he’s doing and trundles over to us. “Nicky, these are Tom and Luke. Tom, Luke, this is Nicky, your boss.” He stares at us, arms akimbo, blinking, then turns to the lady.
“This is joke, right?” He speaks broken English, with a thick accent I don’t recognize.
She sighs. “No joke, Kolya.”
“But these are children!”
“Look, if they don’t work, we’ll leave them behind. Nothing lost.”
“I don’t even start loading yet! Everything lost!”
“You say this every time.”
“Every time is right! Always shit workers.”
“Two men doing the work of four, and you know it. Come on, we need to get going.” He stares at her without moving. “Kolya, there is nobody else. And they need a lift,” she adds more gently.
He shakes his arms in the air. “More gypsies! One day this will kill you.”
“Maybe. Hopefully not today. Come on, we’ve got no time for this.”
He turns away, still muttering. She shrugs and follows him. “You can put your bags under there,” she points at a small ATR. “You’ve got work clothes?”
We look at her blankly.
She sighs. “Oh, for the love of… Kolya! Got overalls?”
He stops, turns around, throws his arms in the air again, and goes off into some kind of container. When he comes back out, he tosses two bundles of clothes at us. “Come on. No time.”
The lady walks us into some kind of mobile habitat. It’s definitely air-tight, but it doesn’t look like it’d take much pressure. That concerns me briefly, but I don’t have a chance to worry about it for very long because I’m distracted by what’s inside. Two rows of pens on either side, containing animals. All kinds of animals. Both Tom and I stop dead when we see them. The lady turns around and rolls her eyes at us. “Well, come on. It’s not as hard as it looks.”
We follow her down the passageway.
“Do not touch any animal unless you know what you’re doing. Which you don’t. So keep your hands well away. Do not touch any cage until the animals are sedated, unless we tell you otherwise. Basically just don’t touch anything without our say-so. Unless you’re happy losing a hand.”
She leads us out of the back of the habitat, where a bunch of wheeled crates of different sizes are stored. “It’s simple, really. Get the animals in a crate. Harness them up and sedate them if they need it. Pull the crate on board. Secure the crates inside the ship. Easy.” She flicks a smile at us.
I gotta say something. “Miss, we don’t actually have any experience of working with animals.”
“As if anyone did, these days. And that’s why you’re perfect. We don’t have to knock bad habits out of you. I don’t want you to be comfortable. I want you to be scared. Half of this is easy and half of this can kill you. I don’t want you to ever forget that."
Nicky pokes his head through the habitat flap and grins. “Little gopnik kid call you ‘Miss’.”
“About time I get some respect around here.”
“Maybe I call you that, too.”
“Be the last thing you do.” His grin gets even bigger. “Kolya, stop fucking around.” He laughs and disappears through the flap again.
I’m confused. “Sorry. Is his name Nicky or Kolya?”
“Nicky to you, Kolya to me.” I keep looking
at her. “What?”
“I didn’t catch your name.”
“Alya. My name is Alya. To you, anyway. You may continue to call me Miss. I could not care less, provided you move.” She stomps off towards the back of the habitat. As we race to catch up with her, she turns and smiles at us over her shoulder.
“Welcome to the circus, kids.”