Outside

by Sarah Ann Juckes

  It’s so small.

  But I understand what Willow is saying. This ain’t my Tower. This is another room, one that lived all this time on the other side of my wall.

  This is Jack’s room.

  I push the door further, blue lights now flashing around the Inside. The tap. The drain in the middle. The food bowl – empty. But there’s something else. A shape in the corner. A bag of bones and tangled hair.

  I choke, gripping the door. ‘Zeb?’

  My brother. Curled up in the corner, fists all bloody from knocking.

  He’s alive.

  Fifty-Five

  I’m tangled up in Zeb on the floor of the room. There are lights, but I can’t see them. There’s noise, but I can’t hear it. I’m making a noise. I can feel it in my chest, humming like I’ve swallowed all the black dots flying around. I can’t hear it, though. The Others have got their hands on my ears again.

  His body is all bones. There are rough patches of skin all over him, like he’s been grating himself over the walls and the floor. He’s breathing like it takes all of him to do it. His whole ribs throw themselves wide with each breath, and his dry, broken lips look like they are screaming, too.

  He clutches me back. I don’t know if he knows it’s me. He don’t look at me long enough to see.

  They come in. They try to take me away from him, but I don’t let go. They ask me questions, but I can’t hear them over all this noise of nothing.

  Then things start breaking through, one at a time. The yellow lights they’re shining on us. A question.

  ‘What is your name?’

  I’m being ripped up. I’m being screwed and wound round.

  ‘He’s me!’ I shout. ‘He’s me!’

  He does look like me. A me before Willow. But worse. So much worse.

  I can hear Willow. He’s telling them who we are. He’s sorting the lies from the truths. The Inside from the Outside.

  He’s not me. He’s Zeb.

  He’s alive.

  Each moment is being measured out by flashes of light. The noise of people talking, cussing. We’re watched with sad eyes.

  ‘Ele,’ one of them is saying, holding my elbow. ‘Ele, can you let us look at Zeb?’

  I don’t want to let go. I wind myself further up in his hair, and he grips at me.

  I don’t want to let him go. I just found him again.

  ‘Ele, it’s time for Zeb to get out now.’

  And it is. It was all those years ago, when we first started trying.

  It’s my fault.

  I let go of him, but keep his arm in my hand. It fits easily, like I’m holding a finger.

  The people are wearing green coats. Zeb is doing his best to shout and hide away, but he don’t have no voice or nothing left to do that with.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I whisper to him in Other. In our language. ‘It’s OK.’

  They look him over. Shine lights in his eyes. Listen to his chest through a wire. Wrap blankets over him. They lay him down on a board and thread needles into his arms, put a see-through bucket over his face and cover his eyes up, even though it’s still night. They try to put a blanket over me, too. They try to take me out and away, but I won’t leave him. He leaves that place with me, holding my hand. Him lying down and being carried by the people in green coats. Me walking next to him.

  We pass my Tower – what used to be our Tower – but I don’t look Inside, even though the door is open and the people are inside there, too. I only see the shape on the floor out of the corner of my eye. I hope Zeb can’t smell Him through his mask. He can’t hurt us no more.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say. Again and again and again.

  They load us up into a big, bright hunk of junk full of laptops and wires and things I want to touch. But I don’t let go of Zeb’s hand. Or his eyes. The only time I look up is as they are closing the doors, and I see Ezra-Dad arguing with a man in black who is holding a black box to his ear that’s also talking to him. And I see Willow looking back at me.

  He smiles.

  I hope I smile back.

  Part Four

  * * *

  OUTSIDE OUTSIDE

  Fifty-Six

  ‘Slow down!’ I call out to Willow, who’s marching ahead.

  ‘Nae. Keep up!’

  I cuss under my breath and scurry along to join him.

  We’ve been walking for ages, and we were driving for ages before that. Willow ain’t told me where we’re going. He just asked me to pack some stuff into the picnic basket and put on my sun cream.

  It’s damn hot.

  There ain’t no people here. We’re up high, away from our house and the town with the hospitals and the reporters and the police. The ground is spongy and brown. I want to stop and touch it, but Willow won’t let me.

  ‘Slow down!’ I call again.

  He just turns and flashes me a smile.

  We’re not supposed to be outside. Doctor Kelly told me that my skin ain’t used to the sun yet, so I got to stay inside in the day. But Willow says that ain’t nothing that can’t be solved by sun cream and an umbrella.

  I feel stupid carrying around an umbrella when it ain’t raining.

  Doctor Kelly likes making up rules almost as much as I do, but she’s all right, really. She’s mighty good at getting to the truth of the matter, and she lets me know all of the truths – the good and the bad. Ezra-Dad ain’t always pleased with the stuff she tells me, but I tell him that it’s better to know than not.

  Truths are like people, see. They don’t like being shut up tight. They shrivel slowly, and then they rot with lies, creating something mighty ugly. Something so bad you’ll need to throw out all your clothes, ’cause you’ll still smell it on you days – weeks – after. Even after a thousand washes.

  And when those truths get out in the open you might think they’re gonna smell up the whole world. Rub their backs on the clouds and turn them grey. Wilt the bloom out of the moon. But they don’t. They get rubbed clean by people. Nice people.

  They come back to life. They grow up like trees into something new.

  It turns out that the job of the police is to find out the truths. And, after we’d had the first few of our chats up in her office, Doctor Kelly said that I could find them out, too.

  How to be an Outside Person – number twenty-one: Find out the real truth.

  I found out a lot.

  His name was Brian Colt. He’d come over here from a place called the United States of America a long time ago. He had done some bad things over there that had ‘slipped through the net’. He’d brought a lady with him – my mother. He wasn’t very nice to her, but she stayed with Him even though her door was open.

  They had twins – Zeb and me. Twins means we’ve shared the same space all of our lives. No one knew about us. Not one person. We din exist on the Outside.

  They din realize she was dead neither, ’til they found her body buried behind His house.

  I guess she never did find her brave.

  Her name was Janet. They showed me a picture of her. With that yellow hair and those red lips smiling. Just like I remembered her in my dreams.

  Doctor Kelly asked me if I was mad at her for not doing something. For not taking Zeb and me and running away from Him, back when we still could have. But, when I think about it, I don’t reckon I do feel mad, ’cause she did get us out in her own way, din she? She read us those stories and she taught us how to read and how to speak. She taught us how to be brave, even though she couldn’t be.

  I keep her picture in a frame next to my bed.

  They guess that He killed her, and that’s when things got worse for Zeb and me. He had the stables specially built. There were six rooms in all. Six. I asked Doctor Kelly why there were six rooms when he’d only used two, and she told me that was a very good question.

  I reckon I’ll be a police officer one day.

  He controlled the rooms with electricity. It was clever, they said, for a man who dealt in scraps. Water was on
tap, as was the cleaning solution that rained down from the ceiling. But the rest – the lights, the food, the doors – He controlled.

  They found out what He did to me when He visited, too. I told Doctor Kelly on my second visit to her office. She asked me if it was OK for her to tell anyone else, but I said that I ain’t telling no more lies. It made Ezra-Dad crumble at the middle when he heard, like a building falling down.

  They don’t know why He kept Zeb alive. They just have theories. Theories about selling him on to other people. But theories ain’t truth – they’re just scary stories.

  They found out about the day I escaped, too. I told Doctor Kelly about it as best I could, but it was mighty hard not to lie to her. In the end, she asked me to tell her the lying version and the version I thought to be truth. That was easier. She’s helping me to work it all out. To separate things into lists of stories and truths.

  Of course, the Others din take the gun off Him. It was me. But I don’t remember what I did. All I remember is the darkness, like their hands are still over my eyes and my ears. They’re still protecting me.

  All we know of the truth is that He was hit on the head a lot, knocking him out cold for enough time for me to escape. Not enough to kill Him, mind. And it’s good to know – even after everything He did – that I weren’t the one who killed Him.

  When I escaped, the door slammed shut. The key dropped to the floor Outside. And He was trapped in that Tower, in the dark. When He woke up, He ate all the feed left in the bowl. And then nothing. Not for days and days. There weren’t no feed rattling down the pipes, and no light coming on day and night.

  And it was the same for Zeb. Nothing.

  When they found Him, He had a hole in His head – right between the eyes. Turns out that guns can explode a head, just like they can explode a wall. They said He did it to Himself. It’s funny, ain’t it? We always thought Him bigger and stronger than us. But He weren’t that strong, after all.

  Zeb was as strong as ten Giants. I guess he was used to not eating much. It weren’t the first time he’d lived without food and light for a while, if his Tower was anything like mine. So he ate only what he needed to from the feed left inside the bowl. Filled the rest of himself up with drink. Just like I would’ve done.

  They said he wouldn’t have lasted much longer if we hadn’t gone back, though. I cling to that truth and try to forget the feeling inside me that I should’ve gone back sooner. That I should’ve known. That I left him in the dark while I ate and stayed with a family and became almost real. Sometimes I get awful sad about all of that, but Doctor Kelly helps. So do Willow and Ezra-Dad.

  Zeb ain’t as concerned with the facts as me. He ain’t concerned about much, truth be told. I see him as much as I can. He’s in a special place called a hospital, but I make sure they keep the door open for him. He has a bed, though his is on wheels and not as comfy as mine. He has a wardrobe with clothes in it, too, and lots of people have been sending him cards and toys and stuff, which I show him when I go. We even got him a phone when I got mine so I can talk to him, even when we ain’t together. He don’t know how to use it yet, but I send him messages, anyway.

  GET BETTER, ZEB.

  Mainly he just stares around when I’m there, not really looking. Never talking. But he does like me speaking in Other. When I do it, he clutches at me like he knows who I am.

  The doctors there do the same tests on me as they do on him. Tests on my eyes, my ears, my legs. Tests where I need to talk a lot. Tell more truths. Some of them are helpful. Some of them ain’t.

  I like the words they use on me, though. ‘Remarkable’. ‘Strong’. ‘Unique’. They can’t believe a girl who has been Inside so long can be as brilliant as me, and it feels good to be liked by all these people. Everyone wants to talk to me – all these people in white coats and black coats and red coats. And all the Outside People. The TV wants to talk to me. And Willow says there are people all over the internet talking about me, too. I don’t need to talk to them, though. I don’t even care what no one thinks of me but Willow and Ezra-Dad, which Doctor Kelly says is a real good thing.

  They don’t use those magic words on Zeb. His words are ‘damaged’, ‘trauma’ and ‘malnourished’. But Zeb lived in the truth of it all for so long. He soaked it up for the both of us, while I lived all dry in my lies. My brother. And he taught me to run every day, so I’d be fit to do it when the time came. He taught me to seek out the truth when I was ready to hear it. He saved me.

  When he’s better, he can come stay with me in my new home with Ezra-Dad and Willow. We can redecorate Willow’s old room together and make it ours. He can listen to me as I learn the violin. Willow is teaching me, and I reckon I’m getting good. I even got my own one, all shiny wood. I can show Zeb all the friends Ezra-Dad and I are planting for Maple – flowers of all different sorts. We’re even gonna plant an Ash soon, to grow up with Maple.

  And maybe Zeb can have a journal, too. A blank book to write his own story in, just like I’m doing. A book of truth.

  And he can come on secret walks with Willow and me.

  ‘OK, we’re here!’ Willow calls.

  I’ve been buried in my own head for a while. When I finally lift it up and look around, I ain’t so sure that I ain’t still in there, ’cause it looks just like that Outside Inside my Head. I’m standing on a hill, the toes of my brand-new trainers buried in tiny spikes of green grass. When I look down the hill, I see water running fast – blue and white in places, and sounding like tiny things talking. And there’s a big rock next to it, where Willow is sitting himself down, taking out the food I packed and laying it all out for us to eat.

  I see it and I don’t see it.

  I let my umbrella fall and see that the sun is being broken into tiny pieces by leaves. Green … and real. Growing on trees so tall they scoop up clouds as they float through the sky. And I can hear whistling from the branches, and smell the flowers, and taste the green in my mouth.

  ‘I thought you’d like it,’ Willow says, beaming at me.

  He wants me to go over to him. Wants me to sit next to him on the rock. To take off my shoes, dip my feet in the water and listen to the wind in the trees. And I want to do all those things, too. And I will. In a moment.

  For now, I close my eyes. I take a deep breath. And I send out my knocks to Zeb in that hospital.

  Zeb, I knock. We’ve found it. The Proof of the Outside.

  Acknowledgements

  This book was made by hundreds of brilliant people over twelve years (and three ‘practice’ stories). To everyone who told me what to do, and that I could – thank you. I’m sorry I can’t list you all here.

  My fantastic family have been there every step of the way. Thanks for staying up until two in the morning to read my drafts, Mum. And Dad – thanks for queueing with me at midnight for the next Harry Potter book. Grandma and Grandad – you’re only allowed to buy two copies. Put this one down and leave the poor bookseller alone.

  Kathryn Davies, Anna Raby and Harriet Venn – you are the very best friends a weird girl could have. Harriet – the plan worked!

  My wonderful agent, Sallyanne Sweeney, who sent me a life-changing email forty-four minutes after receiving Outside. Your belief in my writing is phenomenal – thank you.

  Thanks also to my fabulous editor Carmen McCullough for championing this book and making it shine. And Kimberley Davis, Wendy Shakespeare, Shreeta Shah and the whole PRH Children’s team – you are all amazing.

  A big shout out to the many writing groups I’ve been a part of over the years, with special thanks to the writers and tutors at Arvon Totleigh Barton 2014, and the Advanced Writing Workshop 2016 with tutor Catherine Smith.

  Ellie Brough and Pippa Lewis – you are my favourite people to write with. Ellie – thank you for sending me screenshots of your favourite pages and forwarding them to your mum to check the Scottish. Pippa – thank you for explaining what this book is really about. You were right, as always.

&n
bsp; My original proofreaders: the Venn sisters, Anna Lewis, Ryan Annis and Helen Leale-Green.

  Thanks also to the Annis family, for allowing me space in their summerhouse to write this. Ryan, Jacquie and Chris – your support over the last few years has been tremendous, thank you.

  I’ve been extremely lucky to work with some of the best people on the planet, who gave me everything from unwavering belief to writing retreat Christmas bonuses. The teams at Blaby Library Group, Completely Novel, Creative Future, the NSPCC and Jericho Writers – you rule.

  And finally thank you for reading all the way to the very end of this book. You might be my most favourite person of all.

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  First published 2019

  Text copyright © Sarah Ann Juckes, 2019