by Rebecca Ward
‘He’s right.’ Reed speaks up from the other end of the table. Evan looks surprised that Reed has his back.
Flip just stands agog. ‘You’ve got to be joking! No way. I’m not getting involved in this, it’s batshit.’
‘You’re always saying you want to live with the normals Flip. Well, this is your chance.’ Reed baits her.
‘Not while I have breath in my body will you be a part of this, Felicity,’ Penelope’s shrill tone rings across the room.
Well, that is settled. Nothing Flip likes more than to upset her mother. ‘I’m in,’ she whispers to Evan.
The adults are all talking over one another again. ‘Can we let this happen?...They don’t know the first thing about strategy… How would they protect themselves?... They’re just kids.’
But Bodi knows. This is it. Her mind is alive with the possibilities. Her fingers tingle and she feels power course through her whole body. She feels stronger than she has done in 24 hours.
They are going to get her mum back.
Evan nudges her shoulder with his.
‘Miss Boo. Our newest recruit.’ He grins.
Bodi senses Evan has been waiting a long time for an excuse to get out into the real world and cause some havoc. He is practically dancing with joy. He leaves her to go talk strategy with Balthazar. Bodi stands there, tuning out the dissonant hubbub. She knows she can make this happen.
She can hear trap doors slamming. Populus’ members disappearing back down the tunnels to their ‘real’ lives. Bodi stares at the map, waiting to leave. She puts her palm flat over where she and her mum lived. ‘We’re coming’ she promises.
Reed comes up to her. ‘We should get going. Everyone decided you should stay with us. If that’s okay? Sam’s has the most space and well, we thought it would be good not to move you around so much.’ Bodi is grateful. She had worried she would be sent off to live with Penelope and Flip. A lose lose situation all round.
Bodi looks round the vault. They are the last ones there. Time to head down a tunnel again and see what rabbit hole they pop out of.
Ten minutes later Reed pushes aside some shelves and she finds herself in the cellar of a restaurant. Huge drums of cooking oil are piled high with bags of potatoes. Old chest freezers hum and churn out rancid, warm air. Reed walks up some grotty stairs and she follows him into a burger bar. The guy working behind the counter isn’t at all shocked to see them and carries on talking to his customer. Reed helps himself to a portion of chips, salt and ketchup, and lets himself out through the front of the shop with Bodi behind him, agog.
The music was crazy loud but Ruby was happy for it to numb her skull. She swigged from her can and looked around for him. For the past hour she had tried to look nonchalant but now it was totally annoying her that she couldn’t find him. She even considered lurking by the warehouse exit until he arrived/left but that really would smack of desperation. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him all week and that was way unusual for her. So she made one more circuit of the room, dancing as she went, so as to not look the full stalker.
All of a sudden someone was shoved into her with huge force. She landed in a heap on the floor with this person on top of her. Some guy loomed over them both. ‘I told you to stay away Cal. She doesn’t want to see you anymore.’ Seemed she was not the only stalker in town. The shover walked into the crowd and it felt like they sat there with him on her lap for quite a while.
‘Cal?’ she thought, pushing the body off her. He started laughing.
‘Shit! Sorry,’ he said, picking up his cap. Then ‘Oh! It’s you! Satan’s spawn!’
‘Devil Child,’ she said, never more embarrassed in her life.
‘That’s what I meant,’ he laughed. ‘You came. Amazing.’ He looked genuinely happy to see her and reached down to pull her up.
‘Ruby’ she leant in and shouted in his ear. All around them the crowd was going insane as the music kicked off.
‘What?!’ he shook his head.
‘Ruby. My name is Ruby.’
‘I know.’ She wasn’t entirely convinced he did but she didn’t care. He was still smiling that dorky smile and still holding her hand. ‘Let’s get out of here, Ruby. The music’s lame anyway.’ He pulled her behind him, round the edge of the room to the exit. Ruby wondered momentarily whether she should be worried about this other girl. Not like she was a real threat and something was definitely happening here.
He pushed the doors open and ploughed through a huge group of people. Ruby pulled her hand free to put on her hoody, instantly regretting it. ‘What if he never holds my hand again?’ She winced at the inanity of that thought. This was bad.
She kicked a can and sent it clattering down the road.
‘You a pro footballer, like?’ he ribbed.
‘Yeah. On a million quid a game.’
‘Minor leagues then.’
Calder turned with a jump and planted himself right in front of her. ‘Funny that, me running into you here.’
‘Well I’d say ‘running into’ is a smidge inaccurate,’ she teased. ‘What was that bloke’s deal?’
‘Ah, nothing, just big brother issues. I mean literally. Not like, ‘Big Brother’ but my ex’s big brother. She’s struggling to move on.’ Ruby let this go, not really wanting to dwell on his ex.
‘Good rave’ she offered, weakly.
‘Yeah. For sure.’ He pulled the string on her hoody.
He looked down at her, still smiling, and took hold of either side of her top, guiding her backwards against the wall. A raver’s slow waltz. He lifted her up on top of the wall and she yelped with glee.
‘You came then?’ he teased.
‘It would appear so.’ Ruby looked up at him from under her long eyelashes. That always did the trick.
Cal stood between her legs. Arms firm, either side of her. Ruby was happy to be trapped.
‘Coincidental, of course.’ he said, cheekily.
‘Completely. Utterly. Coincidental.’ she drawled.
And he leaned in to kiss her while the thud thud thud of the bass vibrated through them both.
WEDNESDAY
‘Boudicca!’ Sam tries to wake her. ‘We’ve had word from one of Balt’s contacts. They’ve seen your mum.’
‘Whaaa?’ Bodi is half asleep and sounds are barely registering, let alone words and meaning.
‘Your mum, she’s okay love. Well as far as we know.’ Sam’s smiling face looms over her. She forces her eyes open.
‘Where is she how they know it’s her how we get to her?’ The words drizzle out of Bodi’s mouth in a long mumble.
‘She works at the central processing centre, Balt’s contact. She saw your mum yesterday afternoon but she doesn’t know where they’ve taken her. So good news. All well for now.’
Sam squeezes her arm then leaves the room. Bodi pushes herself up and leans against the wall. The sun is barely up and the fuzziness in her head starts to settle to an even hum. ‘Processing? Processing for what?’ Her mind runs away with the possibilities. Prison? Deportation? Execution?! ‘You need to calm down,’ she reassures herself, ‘got to get used to the fact that nothing happens instantly around here. At least they know where she is.’ She tries to bury each of these destructive thoughts, though shoots of negativity still break ground.
She wonders what passes for a bath in this house. If she is going to concentrate today it is better she doesn’t smell like a baboon’s bum. She tentatively pushes open doors along the corridor. One is entirely full of birdseed and smells beyond words. Definitely not something you want encounter on an empty stomach. Another is just full of tea chests, their contents pouring out over the floor as if Sam has been desperately searching for something that is in the very bottom of the tea chest at the very bottom of the pile.
Bodi eventually finds the bathroom. She sits staring blankly at the plughole as water heats up in an ancient hot water tank. The tiles are chipped and broken and what must have been pale blue wallpaper peels down
from the ceiling. She feels relief that her mum is still alive and even though they can’t get to her, it feels like they will. She hopes they will.
She thinks back to yesterday when they had got back to the house. Sam had sat alone with her in the leather chairs and patiently answered her questions about Populus. She knows it was a time that her mother had loved and that had defined her before she had been born, but it had also trapped her and taken away her freedom. Beyond that Bodi’s knowledge is sparse.
‘It was something that started out very positive.’ Sam began. ‘We were a force to be reckoned with. The arrogance of youth meant we thought we could and would achieve everything we set out to do. We felt oppressed and didn’t like where the world was heading. The rich were getting richer while the rest of us couldn’t get a shoe in. Not just that, the values of the country were all upside down. It was the culture of the ego. Instant fame and instant gratification. It’s not that we were pushing for a new morality, far from it, but we were hoping that people would wake up to themselves. Wishful thinking as it turned out.’
‘What sort of things did you do?’ Bodi asked, not really wanting to know the whole truth.
‘Well, you’ve seen Reed’s room, love. Chaos, disruption, damage. A huge amount of damage. Upset, pain. That was never the plan but the end point was very different from where we started. We began as a small group allied to a larger cause. Populus is international but we were so consumed with London and changing what was immediately around us we didn’t fully absorb what was going on elsewhere. They’d blow up a bus in Madrid and we’d think ‘Well, that’s not us. We would never do something like that. They must have some rogue members.’ Blinkered and naïve. Well I was. And a lot thinner!’ Sam patted his belly and chuckled. He was trying to diffuse the tension but Bodi didn’t bite.
‘After a while you start to believe that peaceful demonstration is not enough. You must make your mark. People became bored with us. In fact, we irritated them. And we had set out to be inspirational. Inspiration to irritant in a matter of months…
‘You have to take back the headlines to reach them. So gradually those that are predisposed to violence start to get their way more and more and the original principles are abandoned. Soon you’re the one helping to blow up a bus, or setting fire to a house, or ransacking an office block, and you convince yourself that it’s for the greater good. But mostly you’re just high on the attention and the adrenaline. For a bunch of veggie liberals it turned out we were huge adrenaline junkies!’ Sam shook his head, embarrassed.
‘What’s the worst thing that you did, personally?’ Bodi asked tentatively. Sam looks at her, with sadness in his eyes.
‘I’m not going there, my young friend. I was a whole different person then and you wouldn’t be sitting so cosy here with me if you knew the terrible things that I’ve done. I convinced myself that I was just there along for the ride. For the ladies, you know! The craic! But it became deep-seated and any sense of right and wrong I’d had before shifted. When we began we were true to our common beliefs. We genuinely were right about all of it. There needed to be a big shift in the status quo. But it turns out you’ve got to create a big stir to get things changed, so we really stirred things up.
‘When we started out I never believed in a million years that we’d make things worse rather than make them better. And now, here we sit. My little brother Cal is no longer with us and your mum is gone and you have to question it all.’ Sam shook his head. Bodi felt mixed emotions. She felt his loss, but it was hard to reconcile these actions with people who wanted to do good. And she was struggling to see Sam as one of them, let alone her mum.
‘Do you think that we’ll have to do some bad things? You know, to get Mum back?’ Bodi doesn’t think she can be violent. The thought of even slapping someone fills her with horror.
‘I hope not, dear heart, because those things change you and you don’t recognize yourself afterwards. And you are perfect just as you are.’ He stood up and lifted up her chin with his hand. ‘Never forget who you are, Boudicca Jones. Even in the middle of the chaos, try to remember.’
At that point, alone in a rambling house of books and birds and rooms plastered with anarchy, Bodi had made a promise to herself that she would never forget who she was.
Bodi takes a very shallow, quick bath, shivering all the while. She is glad to be dressed again and finds herself back at Reed’s door. She hadn’t got enough details out of Sam and she wants to know more. She knocks at the door and getting no answer opens it hesitantly. Dappled sunlight comes through the window, spots of light pinpoint different newspaper clippings. She follows their trail around the walls, reading stories and looking at photographs:
Populus protest camp set up outside Houses of Parliament, numbers swell to two thousand…So called Peace Camps have sprung up around London in parks and squares and are spreading to other cities across Europe…Twelve dead in underground fire, 30 injured…An unnamed source said “we won’t stand for the hypocrisy of the government any longer, we had to take action”…“Populus are ruining London, I don’t feel safe to go out anymore,” said mother of two…Fire fighting units unable to cope with levels of arson...Populus targets government officials…Call for action, troops line the streets…Is marshal law a step too far?... Residents pack up and leave the city fearing for their safety…A special review board has been set up to look into army brutality…“I’m not sure who’s worse Populus or the army,” said one resident, “I feel like I’m a prisoner in my own home”…Special forces deployed to rid the city of Populus…An already stretched economy takes massive hits, The City is in freefall…‘Burn them out, see how they like it’ said Jack, 65 of Harrow…Special Forces take back the city, the hunt begins for ring leaders…
Around the room the story escalates from a few minor incidents to a full-scale battle on the streets of London. Some Londoners join the fight feeling more scared of the army and the law enforcers than they had been of Populus. Pictures show how Populus went from a well-intentioned protest group to being accused of every crime committed in the city.
Bodi’s head is full of bodies, fires and fighting. Not only is her mum possibly responsible for killing people but she herself is now involved with the people who had let that happen. Made that happen, this isn’t passive. ‘Once I start down this road will I ever have any kind of a normal life? Is Flip right?’ Bodi wonders, ‘Should I get out now while I can? Is mum an arsonist? A murderer? How did she go from that carefree young woman on the front of the newspaper to being a mother on the run? Do I know her at all?’ This is really challenging Sam’s edict for her to remember who she was.
She looks at the heap of blankets on Reed’s bed, like a nest they curl up round and round on top of each other. She sits in the nest. It is still warm and seems as safe a place as any to be. The text on the walls around her dissolves into more of a blur. ‘Maybe if you don’t look too hard you don’t see it,’ she thinks. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’
She notices a photograph pinned to the wall next to Reed’s headboard. She pulls it off the wall. On the arm of a purple velour armchair sits Ruby, much younger, smiling, wearing a halter neck top and shorts. Next to her is Bodi as a toddler - shy of the camera, bare-chested wearing only pants, streaked in sun cream with a mop of crazy red curls. On the other arm sits a man with Reed’s build and looking like a young Sam but not quite. Maybe Reed’s dad, Calder? And right there, between him and Bodi, sits what can only be a young Reed, a reassuring arm around Bodi, bashed up trainers at the end of skinny legs. All big, dark eyes from under a solid bowl haircut with a huge grin on his face, just a little older than her. He has the sweetest smile, something Bodi has seen little of since she arrived. It is a tiny, worn snapshot of a happy day in the summer before Ruby had left.
‘Reed knew me before?’ Bodi leans in to take a closer look, disbelieving.
‘Er hello. Make yourself at home why don’t you?!’ Bodi jumps. Reed is back. Bodi waves the photograph at him, e
yebrows raised in a ‘what the hell?’ fashion. Reed sits down next to her.
‘So Bodi, the thing is, I’ve known you all my life. Just happens that I haven’t seen you for, like, 14 years.’ He tries a smile, at once transformed to a giant version of that gangly kid in the photo.
‘Oh my god! Reed?! I feel like my head is exploding. You knew me all along and didn’t say anything?!’ Bodi pushes his arm but doesn’t budge from where she is sitting, both their legs dangling off the edge of the bed.
‘Come off it, we were just kids, Bodi. I didn’t know you know you. I have a vague recollection. But that might just be because of this photo. Do you ever think that? Do I really remember this event or it just because of the photo?’ Reed is going off on a tangent so Bodi puts her hand up to stop him. He sighs. ‘We just have to use them Bodi, to get your mum back. Get your mum and leave, get as far away from them as you can. They’re devastating. Everything they touch turns to crap. People die, people leave and people get taken away and it’s entirely their fault. But if we use them to get through the first door, then we can work the system the way we want. Maybe we can make things okay again.’
‘Yeah. I guess.’ Bodi doesn’t sound sure. Her brain feels like sugar being spun in a candyfloss machine. ‘But you knew me…’
She doesn’t move. They sit there for a few minutes like that on his bed. Reed leans against the wall awkwardly, occasionally pushing his fringe out of his eyes; Bodi can hear his breath quicken. What else wasn’t he telling her?
Sam’s yelling disturbs them. ‘Kids! You better get going. Don’t want to keep the great and all-powerful Balthazar waiting.’ She can hear him whistling We’re off to see the Wizard as he leaves the house.
It is getting colder. Bodi yearns for her red coat with the fur trim and to be walking through Green Park again without a care in the world. It seems like weeks since that was her life but it is only three days ago. Three days! She looks over at Reed, his head down as normal striding forward, but she is getting better at keeping up with him. They are off to work on the plan with Balthazar. Bodi isn’t sure what to expect as she has only spent a matter of minutes with the man but he seems like he knows what he is doing. Of the Populus members that she had met yesterday she found him the most terrifying, but she soon realised that he was the man to get things done.