by Ann Halam
“They’ve told me I have to have a name like theirs.”
“That’s good,” said Mama. “They’re inviting you to belong. What are you going to choose?”
“I don’t want a new name. They’re not inviting me, they’re picking on me because Rose makes them. She took my sharpener. She scribbles on my book, and pretends it was me. She’s jealous, because I was moved up and I’m younger and I get higher marks than she does.”
“Why don’t you let Rose get the high marks?” said Mama, frowning. “If that would make her happy. What does it matter?”
“It matters to me.”
Mama was frowning because Rose’s mother was one of the people who told tales. She and her daughter lived in a hut like the rest of us, and didn’t wear a uniform, but they had nicer clothes: and better food that somebody important sent to them, maybe a Settlements Commission official, maybe a bandit. Even Nicolai was polite to Rose’s mother, and tried not to offend her. But I knew I was in the right.
“I could still call you Rosita at home.”
“I won’t do it. I don’t see why I should. It’s not a school rule. Mama, what does peepee actually mean? It doesn’t really mean wetting yourself, does it?”
“It means political prisoner.”
I knew that was bad, worse than being an armed robber. It didn’t worry me. I’d learned that in the Settlements there was no point in being ashamed. “That’s what they call you. Are we political prisoners, you and me?”
My mama was tired after rolling and heading nails all day: too tired to be bothered with me, I thought. She pulled off her torn work gloves, and rubbed her worn and dirty fingers. “I’ve never been involved in politics,” she said. “Your dadda did something that the government didn’t like, but he didn’t know it was wrong, he thought it was his duty. Rosita, pick yourself a new name. You can’t win this one. Don’t insist on learning everything the hard way.”
Storm secretly passed me a note saying CH+NG YR NAME ITS F+R YR OW+N GD. I mean secretly as in trying not to let Rose see. No one had to keep secrets from Snory. He was too harmless. I didn’t answer it. I went on spending my playtimes walking around alone. I knew the thing about the plain name wasn’t over, but the others didn’t come near me, so I didn’t know what to do. It was the worst season of our year. The whole Settlement, except for those who were too ill, had spent the brief summer weeks frantically tending and harvesting our potato patches (we grew anything that would grow, but mostly potatoes). Now the warm days had gone, the excitement was over and the tasty food was stored away. But we were still living in an unfrozen bog, and the insects were still biting. Everyone was longing for the frost to set in, and every day we hoped for the first snow.
About a week after they’d told me to change my name, we seniors were sent out into a sleety, freezing drizzle to eat our lunch. The juniors were allowed to stay indoors, with the big teenagers and the teachers. I walked up and down eating my meal: a piece of rye bread with a chewy dried tomato. The bread was rations from the stores, and nasty, but the tomato had been grown and dried by my mama and me, and it was very nice. Then I went to get myself a drink of water. I was standing by the pump, sipping from the tin cup, that was attached to the pump handle by a chain, when I felt a creeping in my shoulder blades.
I looked around, and there they were.
They made a circle round me.
The pump was near the schoolyard wall. I looked up at the crumbling bricks, and a reckless plan leapt into my mind. The schoolyard gates were kept locked, and the walls were high. But if I managed to escape and run home, what would happen? I had never heard of anyone doing that, so I didn’t know. I could get expelled. Then I’d have to stay at home and help Mama. . . . That didn’t sound too bad.
“We’ve decided,” said Snow, glowering from under her fringe. People said her father and her oldest brothers had been executed for several gruesome murders. That was why the mother and younger children had been sent here. It was the law: if someone in your family was guilty, you were guilty too. “You have defied us and must be punished, but we are merciful. Give us your lunch every day for three weeks, and give Storm a kiss right now, and we’ll let you be called Sugar. Is that a deal?”
“I don’t want to kiss anyone,” I said. “And I can’t give you my lunch every day, I’ll get sick. I’m only nine.”
“You’re in the senior class,” explained Rose. (I was sure this was all her idea.) “That makes you a teenager. You have to be tough, when you’re one of us.”
I knew they would do it. They’d steal my food. I wasn’t sure about the kiss, but I couldn’t look at Storm, and I had started shaking.
“I’ll t-tell Snory, what you just said. You’ll be in trouble, not me.”
They laughed. “Oooh, she’ll tell Snory!”
Rose bent down, and scooped up a handful of mud. She never got herself dirty, so that caught me off guard and the first gob hit me in the chest. I ducked the next one. I dodged another gob, and they let me run. I ran around the yard, getting mud flung at me, and horrible names, and stones too. I didn’t cry, I didn’t scream for help. I galloped around, ducking and diving, sleet stinging my face: it was almost fun. I could take it. Maybe if I showed them I could take it, they’d decide they liked me. . . . But I had my plan in mind. When I saw my chance, I made a break. I leapt at the wall, in the corner of the yard, and scrambled up, bracing myself between the two sides. Then I was on the top, standing on the slippery coping stones, waving my arms to keep my balance. It was a longer drop on the other side. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure this was a good idea. I knew Mama would hate it if I was expelled.
Miss Malik’s tall, thin form appeared at the door of the school hut. She came marching over, through the sleet, in her indoor shoes, without her hat or coat.
“Rosita! Get down! You’re going to get a whipping for this!”
“They were throwing mud at me.” I was going to get whipped whatever I said. I was just putting it off. “They said horrible things.”
“Get down!”
Her mouth, red as blood, seemed to gape at me, her hands were like claws. I was so scared I lost my balance and fell, my right leg doubled under me.
“Get up! Right now! Back into the classroom, this minute, all of you!”
My head was ringing. I managed to stand without crying, but my leg hurt very badly. But I wouldn’t beg. I tried to walk, with my head up.
“Stop favoring that leg, you little show-off. March, and be quick about it.”
I got myself across the yard and into the school. I remember seeing poor old Snory, a glowing image far away, standing by our miserable scuffed blackboard, shuffling a stub of chalk from hand to hand. Miss Malik fetched the rule.
“Hold out your hands!”
I saw her furious face, looming down, and the loose skin on her throat all wrinkled like skin on porridge. I felt the first stroke, but not the second. I heard someone say Rosita, I don’t know who it was, and the world faded into nothing.
When I opened my eyes again I was in a bed.
My leg hurt, but everything was far, far away. There was a fat woman sitting by me, with a hard square face. She had a uniform, and a nurse’s cap on her head, so I knew I was in the hospital. “Mama?” I said. “Where’s my mama?”
“Yourmamawillbeallowedtovisityouatvisitingtime,” said the fat woman, in a grumbling, monotonous voice, all the words running together.
“When is visiting time?”
“Next week.”
I found out later that Mama had tried to rescue me. But I had been taken to the hospital from school, on Nicolai’s tractor, before she knew what had happened, and afterward she didn’t have a chance of getting me out. My kneebone was cracked, and my shinbone too. They weren’t bad breaks, they were what are called greenstick fractures: but the doctor didn’t treat them properly. He wrapped my whole leg in thick plaster, and made me stay in bed for weeks. He gave me medicine that made me sleepy and weak; and Mama had to increase her
quota to pay toward my treatment.
Nobody trusted the Settlements Commission doctors, who traveled around the wilderness, visiting the useless Prison Settlements hospitals that were supposed to be a sign of how good the government was. Anyone who was really sick or hurt did their best to stay at home. There were women among the ordinary prisoners who knew about herbal medicines. In our Settlement there was also Mama, and Madame Imrat, and the proud gentleman who had been a surgeon: who would give good advice, at least. But I didn’t get any of that. I don’t expect the hospital doctor meant to cripple me. He just didn’t know much.
I was in a room with four beds called Children’s Orthopedic Ward. I could read the notice from my bed, and spent hours wondering about that strange long word. Most of the time I was alone. It was very cold, as winter came on, much colder than in the cupboard-bed I shared with my mama. I lay and watched the snow fall, and thought of the wilderness that stretched forever out there, like an endless dream. What about the great journey Mama had planned? How could I walk hundreds of miles? How could I cross the wilderness?
It would never happen now.
The end-of-winter blizzards were blowing when they let me go home. I could get about by then, though I had to use my ugly crutches. My right leg was like a thin white stick, with a strange bend in it. Mama helped me to practice, and soon I could walk fairly well. In March, on my birthday, I limped out to the potato patches on my own. It was tough, but I made it.
I sat among the dwarf willows, by the place where we had buried Nivvy. I thought about never being able to run, ever again. I was ten years old, but I felt a million years older. If only I had listened when Mama told me to let Rose get the high marks. If only I hadn’t been so proud. I saw my life stretching ahead of me, into the dim desert of being a big teenager, and I knew that Mama and I would never run away, that was just a daydream. I would live in the Settlement, in the dirt and cold, forever and ever. And now I was a cripple too.
The blackthorn hedge, that someone had planted out here for a windbreak, was half buried in spring snow: but there were flowers opening on some of the thorny twigs. Mama had told me that blackthorn is one of the trees that remember. It tries to live the way it did before the winters were so cold and so long. I thought of the sour little plums, called sloes, that people gathered to flavor their homemade liquor. That suits me, I thought. Stupid flowers that try to grow in winter. Bitter fruit.
I went back to school. My leg dragged, but nobody laughed at me as I limped to the seniors’ end. When I sat down, Storm reached across from the desk he shared with Soldier, and shoved a package of furry exercise-book paper into my hand. There was a piece of real chocolate inside; I don’t know where he’d got it from.
The smell was amazing.
“What do I have to do for this?” I asked, not looking at him.
“Nothing,” muttered Storm, not looking at me. “It’s . . . free.”
“I’m going to change my name,” I said, still not looking at him; or at Rose, silent on the other side of me. “You can tell the others, I’m going to call myself Sloe.”
I had no trouble in school after that. Not from Rose, or anyone else. I had become one of them, and they knew it. I had the same weight on my soul, the same hardness inside, that comes from living without hope.
Snory had sent my lessons to me, and visited me in the hospital when he was allowed, so I hadn’t fallen behind. I was always top of the class. Nobody minded after I came back with my crooked leg. Before the summer break that year, we seniors had to take a test. This was a new idea, nobody had tested Settlement children before. You had to stay in school until you were fourteen or fifteen, whether you were learning anything or not. Then if you were a girl you got a quota and started making nails, or you were sent to labor camp if you were a boy. That was the way it had been: but not anymore, apparently. No one told us what the test was about. Snory checked our papers before he sent them off to the Examining Board, and he got very excited. He said Rose and I were the best students he’d ever taught, and we were a credit to the Settlements Commission.
I wasn’t excited, but it hurt my feelings when Mama wasn’t proud of me for coming top. I heard her muttering about it with Madame Imrat, the old lady who had been an ambassador, who sometimes came to spend the evening with us. They were sighing as if I’d done something wrong, and looking at me with pity. But Mama didn’t say anything, and no one at school explained. The first thing I knew about what it meant was when Mama got a letter.
We hadn’t had a letter in six years. The outside world had been as if it didn’t exist (really the inside world. We were the ones outside, shut out from city comforts). I was with Mama when Nicolai, acting as Brigade Chief and not Nail Collector (he had several official positions), handed over the envelope. It was dirty and crumpled from traveling inside his clothes, but it had the Settlements Commission stamp on it. Mama’s face went completely white. Then she tore it open.
Dadda, I thought. My dadda—
I thought the letter would tell us that Dadda had died, in some other prison far away. . . . But it was about me. I had to go away to school, a real school, specially for the brightest and best of the Prison Settlements children. It was hundreds of miles away. I would have to leave my mama. I wouldn’t be allowed to come home, except for the long summer break.
* 3 *
One Warm, Still day at the end of that summer, Mama made a picnic. We walked out beyond the potato patches, slowly because of my leg, into the marshy green plain which always looked wrong to me, as if snow and winter were the only clothes the wilderness should wear. Forest rimmed the edges of the sky, the sun was already lower than it had been. It was the farthest Mama had been from her workshop since the day we arrived. For six years her life had revolved entirely around our hut, the stores, and the potato patches.
Nicolai had graciously allowed Mama this holiday, because I was going away. I knew he’d also fined her many days’ pay (that’s what our Brigade Chief was like. He was quite kind in his own way, but if he did you a favor it cost you plenty). I tried to be happy, to make the expense worthwhile: I kept chatting about the birds and the flowers, and the sweet, fresh air. Mama was very quiet. We found some boulders, lost in the seeding grasses and rattling reeds, and settled there. There were midges, but we were used to that. She took out our picnic, I limped off looking for berries. When I came back she’d spread a napkin, and poured cold fruit tea into our beakers. I arranged cloudberries in a circle round the chunk of rye loaf, the pieces of concentrate “cheese,” the tomatoes, and the small, luxurious pot of jam. Far away in the distance a bird was calling, one note over and over, clear over the droning of insects.
“Does your leg hurt you?”
“No, it’s fine. It feels great.” (I was lying, a bit.) “Don’t worry, Mama. Kolya will put it on the records that you were allowed to have the day off. He wouldn’t take our scrip and then do nothing.” Kolya was short for Nicolai. . . . I didn’t really trust him, nobody official could be trusted. But I wanted to cheer Mama up.
Mama gazed around, opening her eyes wide, as if she was bathing them in the light and air. I saw that my beautiful mama looked older, and that hurt me. “It doesn’t matter, sweetheart. I won’t get into trouble. The red light is only there to keep us frightened. These days nobody cares if we make nails or not. . . . Our world is changing, Rosita. The supply trucks need more guards, and the supplies are getting very poor. Things nobody would have dared to say just a few years ago are being whispered: so that rumors even reach us here. I can’t tell if the changes will be good or bad, but maybe life won’t go on the same for much longer.”
Mama was the only person who called me Rosita now. I nodded. She’ll explain what she means later, I thought. When I’m older.
Then we ate our picnic, and talked as happily as we could about my new school, and how we’d get me the things I would need. “Underwear without holes in it,” said my mama, wistfully. “I wish I could send you away with underwear that
didn’t have holes in it. . . .” I would have loved a new pencil sharpener. The light grew pearly and the air grew chill. We knew we should be getting back, but we lingered on, our cheerful talk falling into silence.
At last Mama said, “My sweetheart, do you understand that if I’m not here when you come back, you are the guardian?”
“I’m coming back next summer,” I whispered.
I had been getting excited, as the summer went by. I wanted to go to a real school, away from these mud huts, and have a chance in life. But oh, I didn’t want to leave her. I wanted never to leave her, I wanted my Nivvy back, I wanted everything. My eyes started stinging, my mouth trembled, I blundered into her arms. We sat there rocking each other, heartbroken.
“It won’t happen,” said Mama. “It won’t. . . . But if you come back and I’m not here, you must do exactly what I’ve taught you. Keep the Lindquists safe, grow them and harvest them, keep the seed refreshed, and live quietly in our hut until—”
“Until you come back?”
Mama went on hugging me. “Of course, yes. Until I come back to fetch you.”
“And then we’ll take the Lindquists to the city where the sun always shines?”
“They say it’s a wonderful place,” said Mama. “There are green parks and fountains, and indoor farms like beautiful gardens. We could be so happy there.”
I had forgotten my first home, and I’d stopped believing that cities were wonderful. I thought of a huge Settlement with a roof of some kind over it: full of people like Rose and Rose’s mother, living in luxury on their ill-gotten gains while the rest of us starved. It was Mama herself who’d made me realize that the way the privileged people “inside” behaved was wrong. . . . But I could hear the longing in her voice, so I said nothing. For Mama, getting back to the city still meant everything.
