‘Go away.’ I tried to speak but the words were stuck in my dry mouth. She held out a plastic cup with a straw and told me to take a sip and I did.
I had no idea where I was. I was alone, on a hard bed with a drip in my arm hooked up to a bag and the low light from a lamp made weird shadows on the walls that sometimes turned into people screaming and then I’d hear a voice I thought I knew say, It’s OK, it’s OK.
I don’t know how long it went on.
I opened my eyes and found Pip and Z. They were curled up in chairs beside my bed. There was no Mila. I tried to tell myself she was having a shower or making a sandwich or practising her violin but I listened and listened and couldn’t hear her music.
Z stirred and lifted his head and we looked at each other and neither of us said a word, but I knew.
Mila was not here.
Mila wasn’t anywhere.
She had gone.
And a sob escaped from the bottom of my gut and it spewed across the bed and the room and the whole wide world and I didn’t give a shit who heard it. Pip said, It’s OK, it’s OK, but she was lying. My body twitched and shook and I felt hot and cold and sick and numb. Z said nothing. I think it was better that way.
People came in and out of the room. They brought food and chunks of ice and needles and pills. They all looked like versions of Beth, these people, with calm faces and sad smiles and words that meant nothing cos they hadn’t known Mila and they didn’t know me. They wanted to make me comfortable, make me feel better. But I didn’t want to feel better.
Pip told me I would be OK. I told her I didn’t want to be. She squeezed my hand and told me I’d been shot. A real bullet. Not rubber. Left shoulder. I’d lost a lot of blood, but I was alive. Mila was not. She had lost a lot of blood, too. More blood than me. I was there and she had gone. I said, Why me? I said, She was a kid. I said, It’s not fair. She was better than me. Than all of us. It should have been me. Pip said, You can’t think like that. I said, Piss off. Or something like that. But she didn’t listen. She stayed right there, by my bed.
‘We’re in a safe place now,’ she’d say when I’d wake up crying and sweating.
But I didn’t feel safe.
They told me I had to eat but I wasn’t hungry and I’d push the tray away or throw it on the floor and Pip would have to clean it up but I didn’t give a shit, even when she apologised to the doctors or nurses or whoever the hell they were. ‘She’s not herself,’ she would say, and I’d think, Nope, this is me. This is exactly what I am like.
I didn’t see Z again for a long time. Thinking about him and what he was going through … it plunged me even deeper into a black hole. Pip told me he was helping out and I didn’t ask her what that meant cos I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. About anything. It hurt too much to care. I slept. I woke up. I stared at the blank wall. My nightmares felt like real life. And real life felt empty. I wanted my mum. I wanted to rewind. I wanted to close my eyes and have all this be over and done with. Finished.
One night, at least I think it was night, I heard the violin. The song was one Mila had practised over and over. My feet touched the carpeted floor and I slowly stood up. My legs were wobbly and it took me a moment and a few deep breaths but I eventually managed to shuffle to the door. I pushed it open and found myself in an ordinary hallway. Not a hospital. Just a house. I followed the music down the hallway of closed doors. I think I must have known it wasn’t Mila. That it couldn’t be her. But still, I let myself pretend I’d see her, standing so perfectly poised with her little violin and serious face.
‘Santee!’ Pip rushed towards me.
I was in a room full of strangers and no Mila.
‘Where’s Mila?’ I said, even though I knew the answer by now.
Pip looked old and tired. She cupped my face in her hands. Tears filled her eyes.
‘Sorry, Pip,’ I said, cos I was.
‘You have nothing to be sorry for, my love.’
The strangers turned out to be Pip’s friends and the house turned out to be where we were staying.
‘Just for the time being,’ Pip said, and I wondered how long that would be, but I didn’t ask. Pip was never big on details, anyway.
I fell asleep on the sofa listening to the classical music and the whispered conversations happening around me. The next morning I woke up in the bed without crying or screaming out. I won’t say the nightmares had gone because those kind of things never leave. Not entirely. But that night they’d left me alone. (I liked to tell myself that was Mila’s doing. Somehow.) There was toast on a tray and something that was supposed to be orange juice in a cup and I actually ate and drank and didn’t throw my food or refuse it like a big baby. I half expected to see Mila in the doorway, hands on hips, telling me, It’s about time.
Someone had left a sketchpad and pencil at the foot of my bed. The book had some pages torn out of it and the pencil was chewed at one end but they both looked absolutely perfect to me. I could only use one arm, for obvious reasons, and I wasted pages and pages with lines and circles and threw the book across the room and scribbled nothing all over a page and let the pencil get blunt. And then it happened. I started drawing. And the drawing turned into a picture of Mila. It was her face, because it had to be her face. She was all I saw when I closed my eyes, when I slept, when I woke, when I did anything. Mila. My drawing didn’t look like those almost-photograph drawings Z did, but it was definitely her. I drew a frame around her face of music notes and flowers and the words: She Was Ten. Because it was true.
‘That is a beautiful drawing,’ Pip said.
‘No,’ I said. I hadn’t got her eyes right. I couldn’t quite capture them. I suppose I never would.
‘I want to show this to someone,’ she said. ‘Just sit tight.’
I sat because there was nothing else to do. I stared at the television. It was silently playing footage from the night of the protest. Words scrolled along the bottom: Region still reeling from violent Threat attack. Hundreds injured. Magnus Varick announces State of Emergency measures.
‘Arseholes,’ someone said.
It could’ve been Diggs, the way he said it. But it wasn’t. It was Z. I forgot all about my arm and ran to him and ignored the pain as we hugged.
It felt like I hadn’t seen him in forever. His face looked thinner and there were dark rings under his eyes. I stared at him and tried to think of the right thing to say but nothing came out. I don’t know if there ever could be the right words for all he’d gone through. Z had lost everybody. Everything.
‘How you feeling?’ he said cos he was Z.
‘Better,’ I said, because I was better. Heaps better. Even though I felt like I shouldn’t be. Not with Mila gone.
‘That’s good,’ he said, and he tried to smile but it crumpled into a sob and my heart broke all over again. It hurt to see him like that. To hear the sorrow in his cries. Feel the heat of his tears. I wanted to take away all of the pain he was feeling, but I couldn’t. All I could do was hold him. So that’s what I did.
Z stayed around the house more after that, which was good. For me, anyway. We didn’t talk much but it was nice to feel him there, in the same space. To not have to worry about losing him, too. He slept next to me, the two of us crowded into the little bed. It helped. To wake up from a nightmare and feel his heartbeat, hear the even rhythm of his breath, feel his tears on my cheek, hold his hand and never let him go.
CHAPTER 43
Pip and her friends were constantly coming and going. Her friends never spoke to me. They kept to themselves and whispered their secret conversations under the blare of classical music.
‘It’s better this way,’ Pip said. I had learned by then not to ask why.
But still, I knew things were happening out there. Big things. There was something in the atmosphere of the house. The music, being played louder and more frequently. The almost-smiles on the strangers’ faces. The sound of faraway sirens. The smell of smoke that filled the night air.
/> Z wanted to go for a walk and Pip thought it was a good idea. I hadn’t been outside in weeks and wasn’t sure that I wanted to. But they both insisted and I was so much better that I really had no excuse.
So we went out. Me and Z. The house was a house, not an apartment, and it was out of the city a little, on a quiet street of nondescript houses and dying gardens. We walked on the footpath even though no cars were on the roads. We saw no-one. Heard no-one. It felt like we were the only people in the universe. It brought back a long-ago memory of being in the bush with Z in his broken-down car. Just the two of us.
Z said he needed me to see something. The further we walked, the more people and cars and life appeared. Every step got us closer to civilization. We reached the end of one street, turned left, right, left and then we were on a street of stores and offices and cafes left over from when people had been allowed to use those sorts of things. But that wasn’t what he wanted to show me.
It was Mila.
She was everywhere. I mean, it wasn’t her, of course, but my drawing of her. Her face. Everywhere. And the words She Was Ten. Her face was printed onto pieces of paper that could be stuffed into letterboxes or thrust into passing hands or pasted onto walls or stuck up in windows. And that’s where they were. On walls and telegraph poles and bins and trees and in windows. She Was Ten.
But she wasn’t alone.
Alongside her were other faces. He Was 50. They Were 19. She Was 38. All these people. There were so many of them. Face after face after face.
Z took my good arm cos he was Z and he just knew I needed some help keeping upright. ‘We’ve put them everywhere,’ he whispered. ‘All over the city. Even on the Safety Border – the wall. Everywhere.’
‘What is this?’
‘We call it the Reminder.’
I stopped and stared at Mila. I wished I’d gotten the eyes right. People should have had a chance to see her eyes. I touched her cheek. ‘Why haven’t they taken them down?’
‘Not enough of them and too many of us,’ he said. ‘Not worth their effort, so they’ve given up.’
That didn’t sound like the Unit. Or the Regime. Maybe the tiny cracks of the protest had grown. Become fractures. Fractures that might, in time, make it all fall apart. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but a small spark lit up inside me.
A couple of Unit Officers walked by and Z casually led us in the opposite direction.
‘This was all you,’ he said. I shook my head. I hadn’t done anything.
We walked back to the house in silence. I thought about forever ago when we’d get a rush from writing Down with the Regime wherever and whenever we could. When we thought we were making some kind of difference. Waking people up. Maybe we had. But we’d lost Mila. And I would have given all that up to have her back.
Pip was waiting out the front, pacing back and forth across the dead grass. She looked so much smaller than she had when I’d first met her and I wondered if maybe we had all shrunk a bit. Collapsed in on ourselves under the weight of everything that had happened. She broke into a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes when she saw us.
‘We’re going home,’ she said.
For the tiniest second I thought she meant my real home. But she didn’t, of course. She meant her apartment, and we bundled into a car I’d never seen before, and haven’t seen since, and left the unknown house and the quiet street behind for good.
We’d left everything in the apartment as if we were about to come back, cos I suppose that’s what we’d thought; that after the protest we would have come back, the four us, and Pip would have made us cups of tea and we would have chatted in the candlelight about the night until, one by one, we fell asleep. The plates in the kitchen sink had a layer of fuzz growing on them, and so did the coffee in the cup one of us had left unfinished on the counter. Mila’s backpack was on an armchair, the homework she’d completed that afternoon sitting on top ready to be handed in on time, as usual. I packed her homework into her bag and stuffed the whole lot under the chair.
I opened the windows to get some fresh air into the apartment. It had been closed up for so long that the whole place smelled like dirty socks. We all kept busy that day. Cleaning and putting things away and not talking about the thing we all needed to talk about the most.
That night, after the News, which we all stared at but didn’t really watch, there was a knock at the door. It didn’t sound like the sort of knock you’d expect from the Unit, but it still made me catch my breath and wait and listen for a moment before saying, I’ll get it.
There was nobody there. I looked up and down the corridor but the light was already fading. Maybe someone was watching me from the stairs, but I couldn’t see them. What I did see was a handful of flowers on the doormat, arranged on top of a piece of paper. I picked it all up and took it inside. The paper had SORRY scribbled on the front and when I opened it I saw they had used the Mila poster. I found some empty jars in Pip’s pantry, filled them with the flowers and placed them around the apartment. Mila would have thought they were pretty.
‘You mad at me?’ Pip asked me later that night.
‘Why would I be mad?’
‘Your picture of Mila and those words … maybe I should have asked, but everyone was so taken by it, and it’s working, love. You’re making a difference. Your voice, people are hearing it.’
‘It’s just a drawing,’ I said.
‘A voice can take many forms, Santee. It can be more than words.’
I couldn’t sleep that night. Instead, I lit a candle and, in the flickering light, I tried to draw Mum and Dad and Astrid. But I couldn’t hold their faces in my mind long enough to get them on the page. I don’t know why I hadn’t tried to capture them sooner. Why had I waited so long?
CHAPTER 44
U OK?
The text message beeped through in the early hours of the morning. It was Tash. In all that had happened I had forgotten about school and Tash and all that stuff. It seemed so unimportant. I had no idea what to write back to her. It wasn’t as if we were going to fall back into the best-friends routine we’d had all those years ago. We were well past that. But it was kinda nice that she cared. Or seemed to. Maybe she just wanted some gossip.
Yeah. That’s all I wrote back. What else was I supposed to say?
She wrote back, real quick, When U back at school? And I knew why she’d messaged. She didn’t care about me. She was just concerned about being alone at lunchtime and wanted to know when ‘her group’ would be back.
But I didn’t want to go back. Ever. School seemed completely irrelevant.
‘We have to get back to normal sometime,’ Pip said.
‘Normal?’ I almost spat out the word. I could feel that familiar blood-boiling, fizzing, popping feeling rising up in me. ‘What the hell is normal?’
I stormed out of the apartment and sat on the stairs to cool down. From the surrounding apartments I could hear televisions and muffled conversations and yaps from the sad dogs locked indoors all day.
I heard them before I saw them. For a moment, the girl’s voice sounded just like Mila’s and I caught my breath. They came in the front entrance. The perfect-family neighbours. The people living in the Drivers’ home. School must have finished. They thumped up the stairs with their backpacks and I made them squeeze past me. Their mother stopped in front of me. I thought she was going to yell at me for being in the way.
‘We all miss her dreadfully,’ she said, and gently touched my arm. ‘We’re so sorry.’
‘Thank you,’ I said quietly.
‘Please let us know if there is going to be a funeral and if we can help with anything, anything at all …’
I looked at her. This woman who’d taken the Drivers’ home without so much as a, Sorry.
There wasn’t going to be a funeral, not until Diggs came home. Z was determined about that. I wondered if I should tell her that was how she could help: Get Diggs back and get out of his apartment. But before I could say anythi
ng they’d gone inside. I heard the door shut and lock behind them.
Something shifted inside me and suddenly I was up and out the door and heading towards the park. It was filled with memories of Mila – in Pip’s floppy hat, playing soccer, holding my hand – but still I walked. Breathed in the air. Let the tears slide down my face.
There were Reminders plastered all over the park – more faces of people lost in the protest. I noticed a Unit Officer standing, staring at one of the posters. A wave of panic washed over me and for a moment I thought he was going to rip it down or cover it up but as I edged closer I realised he was crying, too. A Unit Officer. Crying over the image of a man with the words: He was Twenty-Three.
That night I told Pip what I’d seen and she nodded knowingly. ‘They’re people, too,’ she said.
‘Who are?’
‘The Unit Officers.’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Those monsters who’d killed Mila were not people.
‘They’ve stopped paying them. Part of Varick’s Economic Plan,’ she said, and then added with a laugh, ‘let’s see how well that goes for him, huh?’
I wanted her to tell me more but she was already humming, a sly smile on her face.
‘Oh my god, oh my god,’ Tash squealed and then burst into tears and hugged us and worried about my arm and Mila and then cried again.
It was our first day back. Pip had insisted and I was too tired to fight about it.
‘I was there, at the protest,’ Tash whispered as we headed into the building.
‘You were?’ I was surprised. I couldn’t imagine her mum ever agreeing to that.
But it turned out Tash’s mum more than agreed to it – she went along, too. She wanted her husband back. ‘It’s a joke. Varick has let the power go to his head and he’s ruining everything. It has to stop.’ She said it with such authority that it was hard to imagine she had once told me Varick was the leader of the greatest and bravest government in history.
Imara had gone. Turned out her family managed to get the paperwork they needed for their Hawaiian holiday. Not that anyone believed it was a holiday. Muffins and international flights. Imara’s family really were connected.
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