My bare feet are cold on the wooden floor and I’m only wearing thin pyjamas, but I’m still thinking about trying to escape through the snow. If I fight the nurses and make enough noise could I wake Clara up? I’m filled with a fresh dread. I can’t imagine not seeing Clara again. I can’t imagine her waking up to find me erased from the house. I hate that we won’t have even said a proper last goodbye, just an ordinary goodnight and see you later. I can’t even exactly remember how she looked at that moment. I didn’t know it would be the last time I’d see her. I didn’t absorb it. I want to turn the clock back. I want to stop the clock completely. To steal some more time. I want more time.
I’m so busy panicking as I stand pressed against the wall, light-headed with anxiety and clammy with fear, that I don’t realise the lift has stopped and it’s not on my floor. It’s only when I hear the shuffle of feet above that a surreal relief floods through me, hard and fast, making me shake. It’s not me. They haven’t come for me. Not tonight. Not yet.
I can’t hear the wheels even though the night is so silent there’s a hum in my ears. The nurses must be headed far down one of the corridors. I’m confused. Most of the dorms in use are near the central stairwell. So where are they going?
Away from the windows the night is like a black sea and I creep up the stairs through it, treading carefully to avoid waking the wood and making it creak with surprise at my weight. My heart thumps too loudly as I drop into a crouch and peer around the last bannister. I can’t see anyone, but my straining ears hear a door click somewhere far away along the disappeared corridor. The church and the nurses’ quarters are down there, nothing else. Why would they be going to the nurses’ rooms?
As the whispering of shoes grows louder, I slide down a few stairs and press myself into them, my bones unhappy against the hard edges. They won’t look down, that’s all I can hope, but I have to see. It’s not one of our beds that goes by but rather a gurney with silent, well-oiled wheels. There are two Angels of Death, one normal nurse and one solid, recognisable figure – Matron. Automatically, just at the sight of her, I slide silently down one step further. Matron isn’t like the nurses. Matron can see everything. I crane my neck to try and get a glimpse of the still figure they’re wheeling to the lift. It’s a woman. Strands of fine ginger hair hang over the side like gossamer from a spider’s web.
It’s a good book. My grandmother used to read it to me when I was little.
It’s nothing to worry about.
If you don’t, I will.
I stare in disbelief and feel sick all over again. I don’t want to see any more.
‘I think she took an overdose of sleeping pills,’ Matron says.
‘I found her.’ It’s the ordinary nurse who’s with them. She looks shocked and sounds young. Almost like a real person.
‘I just don’t understand why,’ she says.
‘Her psych evaluation must have been inaccurate.’ Matron’s voice is soft but still devoid of any real emotion. ‘She’s been behaving slightly erratically for a few days. I had hoped she’d go home with the rest.’ The lift doors slide open and they wheel the gurney inside.
‘I’ll contact the Ministry and tell them what’s happened,’ Matron says as she steps inside. ‘You go to bed. There’s nothing more any of us can do now.’
I catch a glimpse of her face before the machinery grinds into life again. Cool. Determined. Empty. The dead beating heart of the beast that is the sanatorium.
I wait until the nurse has headed off to her quarters then run back downstairs and into my dorm, curling into a ball like Clara, but mine is tight and angry and scared. The lift falls silent and I squeeze my eyes shut, willing myself to sleep. It won’t come, though. My mouth tastes of metal and my stomach is greasy. The good nurse has gone to the sanatorium. This is to do with me and Louis, I know it. The test results. Her argument with Matron. Did she drug her at bedtime? Put the pills in her hot chocolate? A glass of wine? Matron’s staged it somehow, but why? Too many terrified thoughts race around my brain, flaring up from the ball in my stomach. This isn’t like us being taken away. We’re Defectives. Whatever they do to us doesn’t matter – not really. This is different. The nurse was healthy. Normal. She’s gone to the sanatorium, and no one ever comes back from the sanatorium. I think about her, trying to remember her face. I think of the posters on the walls of the church, the ones with the names on. She won’t even get that.
I know I won’t see her again. I know that however quietly Matron is doing this, it’s still murder. We come here to die. The nurses don’t. I can almost feel the call of Matron’s office below me. I hope that when I get in there I can find the nurse’s name. Not to put on the church wall, though. That might as well be dust on a breeze. Within a year or so there won’t be anyone left who remembers those names anyway. Outside is different. I want the nurse’s name for when I get out of here with Clara. I want to scream it to the world in a letter to every newspaper. I want her family to know. We can’t all be unimportant and forgotten. We just can’t.
I wonder what they’re doing to her upstairs. Pumping her stomach or letting her die? I wonder if she was already dead on the trolley. I think about Henry and Ellory and all the others and me and Louis and Will and Tom and Jake and Clara, and I think about how I love them all a little bit. Even the kids I don’t speak to. I think about the lift. The silence of the night. The aloneness of it all.
I start to cry and I can’t stop.
The first year they went to Cornwall that Toby could remember, he was five. They didn’t go to the overcrowded resorts with the high-rise hotels and busy beaches, but instead to a cottage in an old village a little further inland. It must have cost his mum and dad a fortune but they never said. They had cream teas and swam in the pool and explored the small rocky cove a short drive away, which wasn’t deserted but avoided being crammed like sardines on the sand with everyone else trying to get the best of their two weeks of summer freedom. His parents laughed and looked for crabs and paddled with him along the surf’s edge. The first time they took him out in it, he cried. He’d blown the bright orange rubber armbands up so tight that they squeezed hard against his skin when he pulled them on, but they still didn’t feel like enough. Not against the enormity of the sea.
This wasn’t like the pool. The sea scared him. It was so vast, so endless beyond the horizon, and he couldn’t imagine something that went on and on for ever like the water did. When he was in the pool, he was scared of drowning if he didn’t paddle and splash hard enough, even with his armbands on. In the sea, he was scared that it would pull him away and he’d be left floating in the middle of that expanse of dark water, alone for ever.
His parents laughed and splashed and he got used to it, but it wasn’t until he was about ten that he really relaxed in the sea. He liked his mother’s tales of mermaids and mysterious magic living in its depths, but he never quite believed them. He loved the pull of the tide and the cool of the water, but sometimes he looked out at the emptiness of it all and wondered how terrible it would be to drown and be lost in all that water. To be gone and forever alone in its depths.
Seventeen
‘Sorry I fell asleep,’ Clara whispers as we go in for the breakfast. ‘I couldn’t help it.’
‘It’s okay, I did, too.’ I try to be normal but everything looks different today: bright and sharp. Hyperreal. I don’t want to tell anyone about the nurse, especially not Clara. The nurse leads to the retest and I can’t talk about that, either. I love Clara but I’m now keeping two secrets from her. I wonder if she keeps secrets from me. I wonder if we all have secrets we never share.
There’s no sign of Matron and the two nurses at the food station keep their expressions neutral even though Matron must have told them what’s happened. I get a plate of eggs and bacon I don’t want and go back to the table. Luckily, everyone else from our dorm looks vague, too.
‘My head hu
rts.’ Will is pale and his eyes are dull. ‘And I ache everywhere.’
Tom snorts out a giggle. ‘Hangover,’ he says.
‘Well, if this is how drinking makes people feel, I don’t get why they do it.’
Louis doesn’t say anything but his eyes dart nervously my way. I don’t look at him. I don’t have time for his paranoia. Will has a hangover, but Matron murdered our nurse in the night. The sentence is on a loop in my head but still it feels surreal. Nothing is certain any more. It feels like the solid walls of the house are closing in and suffocating me.
‘The snow’s still there,’ Will says. ‘We can finish our snowman. Can we, Louis?’
Louis nods.
‘Have any of you been in the church?’ Ashley stands over us and the words come out in a tumble like a held-in breath. We all look at each other. Ashley still sleeps in our dorm but we don’t ever speak any more.
‘Why?’ Tom again. He’s doing the talking today. Probably a good thing. Once me and Clara are gone he’ll have to be the boss of Dorm 4.
‘Have you?’ Ashley repeats.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Why the fuck would we want to go in your stupid church?’ I can see each poster clearly in my head but now my imagination has put another on the wall, one with no name and just She was kind so Matron killed her written on it.
‘Some stuff has been tampered with.’ He’s defensive but also awkward. He’s like a middle-aged man. Who says ‘tampered with’, anyway? It’s like something Matron would say. A cupboard in the playroom has been tampered with. Matron fills my head.
‘It wasn’t us,’ Louis says. ‘We haven’t been in there.’
I can feel Clara’s eyes on me. It’s the candles. He knows someone’s been using them. We need to be more careful. Everywhere I look I feel trapped. I need to get into Matron’s office soon and find out when the boat’s coming but at the same time I’m terrified of actually doing it. Maybe there’s an alarm. Maybe she sleeps in there. I imagine opening the door and finding her sitting behind her desk, waiting in the gloom, perfectly still, with a large syringe in her hand. I think if she smiles at me I’ll see a row of ragged sharp teeth and then she’ll yawn wide and I’ll be sucked into the endless darkness.
‘Let’s go outside,’ Clara says, breaking the spell of my imagination so suddenly I almost jump. ‘I feel really good today.’
‘I want this headache to go away,’ Will says, chewing listlessly on a piece of toast.
In the garden, I face away from the house and the top-floor windows that feel like eyes staring down at me. Clara wants to climb the tree and I go with her. The exertion is good and despite everything, despite all the madness of the night before, I laugh with her as I clumsily swing my legs up and get tangled in twigs. The snow is still magical and the sky is clear blue overhead, the air crisp and cold all the way to the moon. We knock inches of snow from the branches as we climb with numb fingers and tingling skin, and finally we come to rest on thick wood, separate seats on either side of the trunk.
I’m out of breath and hot and Clara’s face shines as she peers round at me. Her branch is a little in front of mine and I’m in awe as she tilts her head back in the bright wintry sunshine. I’m clinging on for dear life. It didn’t look so high when we started but now I’m almost afraid even to glance down, sure that I’ll fall if I do.
‘Isn’t it lovely?’
I look out over the horizon. ‘I can see the mainland,’ I say. Through the distant haze I glimpse brown against the blue. ‘Just.’
‘Not long till we’ll be there.’ She smiles. ‘The boat has to come back soon.’
We sit in silence as beneath us the others play.
‘Don’t you worry about leaving them behind?’ I say, eventually. ‘Harriet and Eleanor?’
‘A little.’ Her smile fades. ‘But staying here won’t change anything.’
She’s right, of course. And people are tougher than I think. Everyone is caught up in their own dread – their own longing to survive.
‘Maybe we’ll give them hope,’ she says. ‘We’ll be like legends. The two who got away. Even the kids who come after will hear about us.’
‘We could change things when we get out. Help the others.’
‘Part of us will always be here,’ she says, snapping off a sharp, thick twig from above. ‘Right here in this tree. Look.’
I twist round to see, gripping the trunk tight, and my stomach lurches slightly as my eyes drop down for a second to the white ground so far below. Clara laughs.
‘You scared you’re going to fall?’
‘Maybe a bit.’ I grin. My fear is obvious in my tense body, but this is a good fear, one built from adrenaline and excitement. A normal fear rather than dread.
‘See, I told you the future isn’t certain. You’re not going to die from Defectiveness, or from drinking too much on a hot beach somewhere. You’re probably going to fall out of this tree trying to get down and break your neck.’ She’s scratching at the trunk with her twig.
‘That’s very reassuring. Thanks.’
‘But you’ll be immortalised . . .’ She pauses to scratch harder. ‘Right here.’
I crane to see what she’s doing, which is difficult because I don’t want to relinquish my grip on the trunk and my neck aches with the strain. But when I see it I smile. An off-kilter heart roughly carved into the skin of the tree and inside it
T&C
4EVA
‘Trees live for hundreds of years,’ she says softly. ‘Other kids who climb up here will see this and remember that two escaped. And then one day, maybe in a hundred years’ time, this will just be an ordinary house again, and normal kids will climb up and wonder who T and C were. Isn’t that a crazy thought?’
I try and imagine a hundred years from now. Everyone alive now will be gone. It will be all new people rushing around and thinking they’re important. My head spins a bit. Even here, in the Death House, after what I saw last night, I still can’t imagine the world going on without me in it. I envy the tree.
After lunch Clara pulls me upstairs. ‘I want to go to bed,’ she says, and for a minute I think she’s tired, but then she closes the dorm door and puts a chair under the handle and I realise what she means. After the events of the past night, the fact that we’ve had sex has become like a dream, something from a world before, but as I stand there, my legs suddenly shaking, the wonder of it comes flooding back to me and I know I need it, I need her, to wipe all this shit out of my head for just a little while.
We’re more confident now and we take more time. We do it twice and the second time I don’t even have that edge of terror that I’m doing it all wrong. It’s not like in the films I’ve seen or the stuff I watched on the computer. We’re clumsier. We don’t speak. We don’t do some of those things they do, but at the same time it’s more amazing than any of that. It’s like a whole new world for us to explore. Her skin is hotter than I remember. She’s a whole universe that I don’t quite understand and I can’t look at her naked body enough and the small sighs she makes and the way she moves make me want to explode. It’s like all the talking we could ever do. It’s like really knowing each other entirely. It’s love. That’s what it is.
We’re lying on her bed afterwards, our clothes pulled back on, just in case, when there’s a knock at the door.
‘Toby? You in there?’ The handle rattles and gets stuck on the chair wedged under it. ‘Toby? Toby? Please come out.’
It’s Louis and he sounds upset.
‘Hang on.’ We tidy up our clothes and Clara hurriedly pulls the sheets and blankets straight as I go to the door.
‘What is it?’
Louis doesn’t even glance at the messy bed or notice Clara’s hair is half-out of her ponytail. His bottom lip wobbles and he’s shuffling, anxious.
‘It’s Will. Something’s wrong. You have to come.’
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Clara is beside me and we look at each other, the magic of moments ago vanished, eaten up by dread. We go without saying a word.
Will is in the bathroom, sitting on the rim of the white tub. His eyes are red and although he’s not crying, he has been and is still on the edge of it. He sniffs, loud and thick, and looks up at us.
I can see the problem straight away. The front of his jeans are wet, dark stains running down the legs. He’s pissed himself.
‘We came inside because he couldn’t pick the snow up properly,’ Louis says. ‘And then this happened.’
‘I couldn’t feel it,’ Will whines, a small, worried puppy-sound. ‘I couldn’t feel the snow and then I couldn’t feel this happening. Not till my legs got wet.’ The tears are coming again. He looks up at me. ‘I’m scared, Toby.’
Clara sits on the cool ceramic and puts her arm around him, hushing him gently, and we let him cry himself out.
‘What are we going to do, Toby?’ Louis whispers. ‘We can’t let the nurses know.’
My head is burning with fire ants as I take it in. I was sure it would be me or Louis next. We had the retest. Whatever is happening to Will, we have to protect him for as long as possible. ‘We’ll rinse them out and put them on a radiator. Say they got soaked in the snow. But we have to get him into some other trousers and then go back outside and try to play. Make it look good. Normal. Just in case someone saw something. Even if only for half an hour or so, then come in and play chess or something.’
Louis nods. ‘He’s going to be okay, though?’
‘Sure,’ I say, loud enough for Will to hear. ‘It’s just the snow. He’s not used to it. Maybe he’s allergic to it.’
The Death House Page 16
