by Ann Halam
One of our meeting places was a disused watchtower, north of the Dogs’ barracks (the wardens were still Cats, and the guards were still Dogs). It was out of the way, but near enough to the school buildings so we didn’t look suspicious heading in that direction; and we weren’t afraid of the guards. They wouldn’t do anything except under orders. It was the wardens we feared: they enjoyed being nasty. . . . Our safeguard was that the stairs to this tower had been taken apart, to stop anyone from doing what we were doing. You had to climb the metalwork of the struts, and get in through the open trapdoor in the floor of the tower. It was a challenge, especially for me: and you were a long way off the ground when you got to the most awkward bit. But that added to our security.
I met Rose there, after lights-out, to discuss what to do with our plenty. The watchtower was heaped with stolen blankets, plus a big stash of canned stew, and fat jars of pickle. We wrapped blankets around us, opened one of the cans, which was full of con—our favorite, protein concentrate— stewed in savory gravy, and sat there, with our dark lantern, slurping stew and gnawing on pickled cucumbers. Rose counted the blankets with an expert eye. She didn’t need to touch them.
“You sure there’s no fleas or lice?”
“College issue, just fumigated. The same blankets as we sleep in ourselves. What d’you think you can get? Chocolate? I can get unbelievable prices for chocolate from my Permanent customers. New shoes, pens, really good stuff.”
She narrowed her eyes impressively. “Maybe I can get chocolate. I’ll consult my associates.” I never asked her who these associates were. It was better not to know. She grinned, suddenly. “Hey, Sloe, I’ve got an idea. We’ve got all this stuff. We’re doing so well. Why don’t we throw a party up here?”
“What, you mean at night?”
“Yeah. After lights-out, with cards and liquor. No strangers, just the gang.”
I said, “No one would hear us. It’s that time of year: the dorms will be full of screamers, sobbing like strangled cats.”
We both laughed. I savored a lump of cheesy, delicious concentrate.
“I never cried,” said Rose.
“Nor did I. Not even when they made me a Permanent Boarder.”
Rose gave me a brooding look. She leaned over to fish for another pickle. “D’you remember the day you were moved up to the seniors, back at home?”
I shrugged. “Maybe I do. So what?”
“You walked up from the babies’ end as if you owned the place, and you went straight to the globe. That light-up globe on the bookshelf ?” Her eyes caught cruel yellow gleams from our shaded candle. “Not even the big teenagers dared to touch it without special permission. You went over and casually started pushing the buttons. You were so far above us. We could tell you’d had lots of things like that, when you lived in the city. You and your mama . . . I wanted to be you, back then. Or I wanted you to be me. Maybe I still do, and that’s why I told the warden—”
“I wanted to be you,” I broke in, quickly. “I still do. I want yellow hair.”
I had realized long ago that it must have been Rose who got me my invitation to the principal’s office, and caused me to betray my mother. Teachers didn’t report students for crimes against the Settlement Commission, like boasting that your mother had taught you science. They’d be too scared of being questioned themselves. . . . Wardens did things like that. But how would a Cat have got to know about something that had only happened in a school lesson? Somebody must have told tales. Rose had been there, she’d seen Mr. Pachenko looking shocked. She must have realized she could get me into bad trouble, and she wouldn’t have been able to resist an opportunity like that.
I knew, but I didn’t want her to confess. I didn’t want to be told for sure. I didn’t want to have to do anything about it.
How can I explain about Rose? I think she truly liked me, but she hated me too. She hated me because I belonged in the city. I had been born there, and nothing could take that away from me. But Rose had been born in the Settlements, and it didn’t matter how many pretty things she had, she could never be like me. . . . And I knew she hated me, but I never tried to get away. I suppose I thought if I could handle the danger of being friends with Rose, it proved I was tough enough to survive. Yet I sort of really liked her too. Life gets very twisted, in a prison.
“We’re a team,” I said. “A mutual admiration society.”
Rose hiccuped, giggled, and put her hand over her mouth. Her hands were soft and pretty: somehow Rose managed never to be the one scrubbing floors. Her nails gleamed, like little pink claws, in the candlelight.
We called the party our Annual General Meeting, and held it on a night when the moon was dark. We’d been out of the dorms together before. It wasn’t too dangerous when you knew the wardens’ routine; if you had a skeleton key. Ifrahim was clever like that. He could make a key out of a pin or a paper clip, and he’d taught us all how to pick simple locks. In third year, top juniors, they didn’t patrol the dorms through the night the way they did with the younger Bugs. They locked us in, and came around to look through the glass of the door at intervals. They trusted in the red lights to keep us behaving ourselves: but we knew how to avoid the camera eyes.
Rain and Amur (another Permanent I’d recruited for his criminal skills) and I left our beds stuffed with blankets. We sneaked out of the Permanent Boarders’ block and met the Termers up in the tower. There we feasted among our spoils, wrapped like savages in stolen New Dawn blankets, in the smoky, smelly light of stolen New Dawn candles; playing cards while we passed the bottle round. Someone drunkenly called for a speech. I stood up, arm in arm with Rose, and explained how much I’d learned at New Dawn College, and how rehabitu-witulated I was.
“Here’s to a life of crime!” cried Rose.
We were getting dangerously loud. We didn’t hear the lookout scrabbling down from the roof, until he catapulted into the room, headfirst. It was Amur, and he was scared. “Out of here!” he gasped. “The guards are coming, a bunch of them, out of the main gates guardhouse. They must have had a tip-off!”
“How d’you know they’re coming here?” cried Rose.
“Where else? Come on! Come on!”
“But all our stuff!” groaned Bird.
“Don’t be stupid,” I hissed. “There’s always more.”
The candles in the dark lanterns were doused, all but one. Amur was already shooting down the struts: Rose and Bird, Lavrenty and Ifrahim followed. Tottie grabbed a last spoon of stew, stuffed it in her mouth, and dived wildly through the trapdoor. We heard her gasp and choke as the metal bar on the other side of the gap connected with her midriff, then she was gone into the dark. Rain and I looked at each other. We were the weaklings, the ones doomed to think too much.
“What if they get us by our fingerprints?” whispered Rain.
“They haven’t got the things they’d need. They’re not trained police. They’re idiots, guarding a lot of half-starved children. They don’t care.”
“Why did we get into this, Sloe? Why did we go to the bad? It’s crazy. It was a privilege to come to school, and we’ve wasted it. Why were we such fools?”
“It’s not a privilege. You finish your course, then you end up back in the Settlements. Oh, I don’t know. It’s a rotten world, we were desperate. Go on, Rain.”
Rain put out the last candle. “You first.”
I flung myself through empty space, grabbing ahead of me for that cold metal. I was flying, I was falling, then my hands hit the bar and locked on to it. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear the guards coming. The tramp of their boots was like thunder. I was always scared of that gap; and Rain was more scared than me, but I knew he’d jump now I’d done it. I scrambled down, slipping through several handholds once, and wrenching my weak leg.
I dropped to the ground.
“Rain!”
“I’m right behind you.”
I could see him moving. He was high up, but he’d made the leap. I thought he wa
s safe so I hobbled and stumbled for cover. I was in the undercroft of the Dogs’ own barracks when they hit the watchtower, surrounding it, flashing their torches, letting off rifles. When they started barking and yelling in triumph, I knew they’d got Rain.
There was nothing I could do. I sneaked into my dorm again, before they really began hunting for the rest of us. I found out next morning that everyone else had got safely away too. But we’d lost all our stuff, and Rain was in deep, deep trouble.
A general assembly was called in the great gymnasium hall, with the teachers up onstage. Madam Principal was at her rostrum: her most trusted stooges, the chief wardens, in a half-circle behind her, and all of us Bugs lined up below. Permanents on the left, Termers on the right. She said how shocked and appalled she was that a Bug (she said a junior, of course), a mere child, had been involved in the crime ring that had been uncovered. She said the ringleaders had corrupted his innocence, and deserved no mistaken loyalty from us. Any Bug who gave information would be treated firmly but kindly, and she was sure somebody knew something. . . . I didn’t listen, any more than I’d listened at Midwinter Break, when she was telling us what a wonderful place New Dawn was. I looked at Rain, who was standing on the stage between two guards. His uniform had been taken away, because he was in disgrace. He was wearing a dirt-colored T-shirt and patched, knee-length pants that must have been in his baggage when he first arrived. They were far too small for him.
Rain didn’t look at anyone. When he was sentenced to thirty-six hours in the Box, his expression didn’t change. When he was told he would be given time to think it over, he went on gazing out over our heads. The guards brought him down, and led him through the gap between our ranks. He was walking on his own, his chin high: but I don’t think he saw us. His eyes were bruises. You could see bruises and weals on his white throat, and his arms too.
And we kept silent. Rose and I, Amur and Tottie, Ifrahim and Bird and Lavrenty and Miriam, and everyone else who might have spoken. We couldn’t have done anything to save Rain. He was going into the Box whether he talked or not: we knew that. But we could have shared his fate; and we didn’t. We hadn’t had a chance to talk to each other, but we all probably had the same idea. Obviously whoever had tipped off the guards had mentioned no names. Madam Principal was convinced that it must have been seniors who were stealing on such a large scale, and Rain had been just their errand boy. We knew that Rain had TB, and the Box might kill him. But Madam Principal knew that too, and she didn’t care. . . . If he didn’t break, and if we all kept our mouths shut, there was a chance that we’d get through this.
When the prisoner and his escort had passed, we faced about and waited our turn to march away. There was a moment when I was looking straight at Rose, across the space between Permanents and Termers, and I knew she was the one who had informed on us. Why had she done it? Maybe she’d seen that the racket couldn’t go on much longer: I don’t know. Rose was just like that.
Hail and farewell, Rose, I thought. I’ll never speak to you again. We could never speak to each other again, none of us. We’d taken care not to act like friends when we were running our empire: except in secret. It would be real now. Each of us was on our own.
Rain went into the Box. It was a cold, wet day when they put him in. When he came out he had to be carried, and they took him straight to the clinic. He died there, about two weeks later. Nobody told us, officially. One of the clinic Cats let it slip, and the news went round the school in a wildfire of whispers.
I don’t remember what I did, after I heard. It’s a gap in my life, like my baby years in the city, like the time after I found out that I had betrayed my mama. One day I got beaten up by the wardens on the dormitory, after I’d done something very cheeky: I didn’t remember what it was. . . . Yagin the guard found me, the evening after my beating, huddled in my favorite lurk by the main gates. He had a bottle of homemade vodka with him. It was raining, cold and small. The big man hunched himself down beside me—his rifle clattering, his uniformed bum in the mud.
“Drink up,” he told me. “It’s good for you.”
“It’s a rotten world,” I said. “We were desperate.”
“A little girl who takes a knife from the canteen, and tries to stab a night warden, must be desperate. You know, you didn’t even break her skin. You’re lucky they pitied you, and dealt with it themselves.”
So that’s what I did. “I’m a fool. I’ll sharpen it, next time.”
“I think you will, my chicken. Drink up.”
I was in deep trouble already, why not have a drink? I knocked back the liquor and soon the world went all swaying and vague. Maybe he’s drugging me, I thought. Maybe this is poison. But I hadn’t eaten anything that day, so I suppose it was easy to get me tipsy. My tree down the road, my little crooked tree, it had no leaves. . . . Yagin looked into my face with that creepy expression of love and pity in his eyes. He took my chin between his hard, dirty finger and his thumb.
“Seed corn must not be ground,” he murmured.
I blacked out.
I was found in one of the boys’ dorms, dead drunk. That’s not the kind of offense that gets a girl sent to the Box. That’s low and disgusting, and it gets you dumped out of the whole world.
I was expelled, of course.
I never considered trying to explain what Yagin had done. I couldn’t care less if I got expelled or not: I was too far gone even to be glad I was getting out of New Dawn. But I was disgusted with my so-called guardian. Why had he set me up? Why would anyone do something like that? What harm had I ever done to him? It was a while before I realized that Yagin and his vodka had probably saved my life.
* 5 *
The Settlements Commission had arranged for Nicolai to pick me up at the railway platform with his tractor. I don’t know what I’d have done otherwise, I suppose I’d have had to walk, even though it was about twenty miles. I parted, silently, from my last lot of guards, threw my knapsack into the cart, and climbed after it: very stiff and sore after the long, long journey. The snows hadn’t yet begun here and the road was horrible, a mess of mud and potholes. We left the platform behind; the guards still standing there, growing smaller in the distance. Our Brigade Chief looked over his shoulder. The glass in the back of the tractor’s cab had been broken for a long time.
“Your mother left you something?” he remarked, hopefully.
“No,” I said. “She had nothing to leave me.”
I thought of little Rosita in her cherry red coat. It must have been Nicolai who was driving the tractor that day too. I didn’t remember if he’d spoken to us. He grunted at my reply, and turned back to the road. Nothing more was said, until we reached the potato patches on the outskirts of the Settlement. The tractor stopped, and Nicolai got down. He pulled out my bag and dumped it in the mud.
“You get out here. I have work to do.”
The huts were still a mile or more away, and I was very tired. I could have pleaded my weak leg, or tried wheedling, but I couldn’t be bothered. I shrugged and got down. Nicolai stood rubbing the bristly stubble on his upper lip.
“Your mother did leave you something. Everybody knows.”
I was looking at him eye to eye. I had grown tall while I was away. Nicolai the Nail Collector, controller of our lives, feared by all, was a small, smelly man with shifty eyes, who was getting old and had bad teeth. That gave me a strange feeling.
“Everybody’s wrong. Mama left me nothing. She had nothing.”
He fished inside his layers of ripe clothing. “You’re a little girl, you must trust someone. What about the Mafia, eh?” (We called the ruling bandit families Mafia in the Settlements; from an old tradition.) “They’ll want their cut. You can’t bargain with them for yourself. You let old Kolya do the business for you, Kolya will see you right. Here, a little something.” He shoved a paper-wrapped jar into my hands, and clambered back into his cab. “When you remember what it is she left you, you tell me. I’ll look after everything.”
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He had given me a small jar of berry jam.
The potato patches were stripped and bare. A few straw-colored, mildewed tomato vines straggled in the mud. There wasn’t a sloe left on the blackthorn hedge; yellow leaves rattled on the dwarf willows like teeth chattering. If I’d been a good girl at New Dawn College, I might have come back to this desolation—or somewhere like it—as a teacher. That was what they meant when they said they’d give you a chance in life. I could have become someone like Miss Malik, getting old and dried up and nasty: remembering the glory of learning and knowledge, but forever shut out. I thought of her life, how cruel I had been to her, how she must have hated us. At least I hadn’t lost much, by messing up my school career. I shouldered my knapsack, and trudged toward my old home.
Our hut was standing empty. I’d been told I could live in it and take on Mama’s nail-making quota. I was supposed to be grateful for this . . . and I was. I didn’t have any other ideas. It must have been empty since Mama had been taken, it was very damp and cold inside. Our furniture was long gone, of course: our table, our chairs, our kettle; everything we’d owned. Except the narrow-necked grain jar that had been Nivvy’s home, which lay on its side, empty, on the roof shelf. There were many boot prints trodden into the dirty concrete, and places where boards had been shifted, pulled away from the earth walls. The hut had been searched, but all the signs looked old, which was reassuring.
I had no food, nothing to cook with, no blankets. A very thin wad of start-up vouchers stood between me and starvation right now, and the coming winter was going to be a rough one. I stood just inside the door, thinking of my mother. How she must have felt, arriving here from the fabulous warmth and luxury of the city, with a tiny little girl. How brave she had been. . . . I opened the bed-cupboard, and there was still a mattress on the boards. I tried the water pump, it was working; and the stove had started to get warm. Kolya must have done that, when he knew I was on my way. It was almost like a welcome home. I sat on the floor with my back against the warmth, and ate berry jam with my fingers. If you only have one meal there’s no use in trying to ration it.
