by J M Hemmings
She and Tesla sat down, dug in leisurely, and began chatting over the meal. Margaret kept the focus of the conversation on Tesla; the boy obviously didn’t get many opportunities to talk about himself, and he seemed to be relishing in this rare chance to discuss his past, his present, and his hopes and dreams for the future.
Margaret couldn’t help but feel for him; he truly did seem to have a heart of gold, and did not appear to have a mean, malicious or selfish bone in his body. It had been terrible, the things he had been through, the violence and brutality he had experienced as a child, and it seemed, as much as it went against almost everything that Margaret believed in, that soldiering had been good for him. It had instilled in him a sense of dedication, purpose, motivation and, most importantly, a strong sense of self-discipline and self-worth, all of which were often sorely lacking from so many teenagers’ lives, whether they lived in the jungles of the Congo or the urban tangle of Los Angeles.
Getting to know him so intimately made it even harder to think of what she was going to have to do to him. A pang of sadness gnawed with its sharp rodent teeth at her heart, but she steeled herself against the guilt, the pity, and the pain, and forced herself to focus on her own needs.
Collateral damage and civilian casualties are terrible, they’re unfortunate … but sometimes they’re necessary. And in some situations – life and death situations, like this one – one has to make very, very difficult choices. I’m sorry Tesla, I’m so sorry. You’re a good kid, a lovely kid … but you’re my only ticket out of this hell.
Margaret had, by the end of the meal, finished one glass of wine, and with the alcohol stoking the furnace of courage deep within her core, she felt more emboldened to start working on Tesla.
As she poured another cup of wine for herself, she looked at Tesla’s empty glass – which had previously contained water – and grinned.
‘How about some wine, Tesla?’ she asked, with a conspiratorial glint sparkling in her eyes and a cheeky smile paring her lips.
‘Oh no, no,’ he answered quickly, looking somewhat shocked and staring at the angled bottle in Margaret’s hands as if it were a loaded pistol aimed squarely at his face. ‘It is absolutely forbidden for us soldiers to drink alcohol! Alcohol is a great destroyer of many things, the General says. It is a poison, a very dangerous poison! I don’t mean to insult you Margaret, but I must refuse your kind offer.’
Margaret remembered how, on the first night she had met the General he had offered her brandy from his own hipflask, and a jolt of anger flashed hotly through her; the man was a hypocrite, among many other things. Here he was, telling these impressionable teens that alcohol was this evil drug when he himself partook of it; thinking about this twisted a knot of wrath in her stomach. Nonetheless, she suppressed these dark feelings, kept her cheerful smile in place and rolled her eyes playfully.
‘Oh come on. You don’t really believe that do you? It’s just a scare tactic. You know when I had my first drink?’
Tesla looked distinctly uncomfortable talking about this subject, and he shifted and squirmed in his chair, and turned his face away from Margaret’s gaze.
‘I, um, I don’t know. When you were in university?’
Margaret chortled loudly, although she made sure the tone of her laughter was not a mocking one.
‘Way before that, sweetie! I had my first bottle of wine with my older sister, in our parents’ basement one weekend when they were out of town. Yeah, that was back in Texas, that’s where I grew up and went to college. Our old aunt Regina, who was babysitting us, fell asleep watching TV, so my sister persuaded me to go down to the basement with her and get into the wine. She was seventeen and I was fifteen, and we were both old enough to have started to rebel against the very strict religious rules our parents set for us. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses, you know. You heard of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Tesla?’
He shook his head.
‘Humph, I’m surprised about that. The General doesn’t have religious education teachers in this school of yours?’
‘We only learn about religion when we are in our twenties. The General says that before that age our minds are not mature enough to tackle the concept with true objectivity and reason.’
Margaret was impressed.
‘Gee,’ she remarked, ‘I gotta say, that’s a pretty sound policy. If only more schools around the world looked at the subject that way. But anyways, I’m getting sidetracked here. So, my sister and I, we got into our parents’ wine collection. Lord, you should have seen it! Because they were Jehovah’s Witnesses they hardly ever drank, but my dad had been a heavy drinker before his conversion. That’s why we had all these dusty bottles of wine down in the basement. I guess he just never got around to throwing ‘em all out. We finished half a bottle in about twenty minutes between us, and next thing I knew we were running around the back yard in our underwear, putting the sprinkler on and jumping through it. It was a warm summer evening, with as starry a sky as one could see in the suburbs of Dallas. And it was a great memory; I felt completely, truly free. Truly uninhibited. Totally unfettered, unchained. It was electrifying, Tesla, truly electrifying! To feel freedom for the very first time in my life, when every waking moment before that, I’d felt trapped, like an eternal prisoner kept in a cage. It changed me forever, that first lil’ sip of wine. My word, it certainly did a number on me, and what a number!’
An inspired grin brightened Tesla’s features, and he did not seem nearly as repulsed by the wine as he had a few moments before. Margaret pressed home her advantage, applying every subtle twist of the arm she could think of.
‘I mean, I know it’s totally different for you though, right? I’m sure you must feel really free here, like you can truly be yourself. Yeah, just forget about the wine, you don’t need it like I once did. Forget I offered you any, it was silly of me. When I was a kid, I was in a totally different situation to the one you’re in now.’
Tesla stared hard at the bottle, and it was apparent that a number of conflicting thoughts were careening madly about the corridors of his mind, charging and crashing and accelerating like driverless racing cars. Margaret pretended not to notice and set the bottle back down on the table before she began to sip on her fresh glass of wine. Tesla’s gaze remained locked on the bottle of wine, and on his face a tempted keenness glowed in his eyes and sparkled in the white flash of teeth revealed by his parted lips.
‘Um, Dr Green, you would, er, you would never tell anyone if I just … if I just had a little sip of wine, would you? Only one small sip, just to see what it tastes like. You wouldn’t say anything to anyone, right?’
Margaret winked at him, chuckling softly and sympathetically.
‘Why of course I wouldn’t! We’re best friends, you and I! Best friends never, ever tell other people their secrets. What happens between you and me stays between you and me. Like I said, taking that first sip of wine when I was your age really changed my life for the better. It awoke a part of me that I never knew existed, and turned me into a completely new person.’
‘That sounds … really wonderful.’
‘I promise I won’t tell a soul if you have a sip.’
‘Really? You’ll never say anything? You promise?’
‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’
Tesla looked suddenly puzzled.
‘You want to die?’
Margaret couldn’t help herself, and she let out an uproarious belly laugh.
‘I’m sorry kiddo,’ she spluttered between bouts of laughter, ‘I didn’t realise that you didn’t know that expression. Of course I don’t wanna die! I love being alive, just as much as you do, I’m sure! No, “cross my heart and hope to die” is just a way of saying I promise – and being really serious about keeping that promise.’
Tesla smiled.
‘Mm. I like that! I will remember it and try to use it in my conversation. My English teacher says that we must always practice using new words and phrases in our own conversations. That�
��s how we can remember them well.’
‘He or she is right, so remember to say “cross my heart and hope to die” next time you make a promise. All right, you ready for a little taste of wine? Your first ever!’
Tesla breathed in deeply, and drawn across his face was the look of a cliff diver about to plunge off a precipice and plummet into a seething ocean below.
‘Okay,’ he said, drawing in a deep, serious breath. ‘I will try it. But you must never, ever tell anybody about this! Please Margaret!’
‘Like I said kiddo, cross my heart and hope to die. All right, I’m just gonna pour a little into your glass. This is strong stuff, I’m telling you, so take it easy. South African, from the Cape region. I do enjoy those Cape wines, I gotta say.’
She leaned over the table and poured some wine into Tesla’s cup.
‘Just a little. There you go.’
Tesla picked up the cup, staring at the burgundy liquid inside it with his features crumpled into an odd twisting of dread, fascination, fear and excitement. He raised the cup to his lips, but then hesitated and shot a wary glance into Margaret’s eyes.
‘Not a single person, right? Ever?’
‘Cross my heart, Tesla. Nobody will ever know.’
He closed his eyes, put the edge of the glass to his lips and tipped it back. He pulled a little wine into his mouth and sloshed it around for a few seconds before swallowing it. He then cocked his head to the side, looking slightly confused and perhaps a tad regretful about what he had just done.
‘It … it tasted a bit like fire in my mouth,’ he said. ‘And now it’s making my belly warm.’
Margaret let out a giggle.
‘That’s what it does, silly!’
Tesla’s eyes widened.
‘Oh! And now the warm feeling is spreading all around my body!’
Margaret laughed.
‘You want some more?’
‘Y-, yes! Yes please!’
She poured him more wine, and this time he had no compunction about grabbing the glass and sucking the liquid out with enthusiastic delight, quickly draining it to the last drop.
‘Wow!’ he exclaimed after a minute or two of calm silence. ‘I feel even warmer now! This is … this is nice! I think I feel more happy than I did before. And … and I’m not so worried about so many things. This is what alcohol does to people?’
‘Yes! It’s not some terrible, life-wrecking poison like the General is making it out to be. I mean, it can be, you see, so he’s not entirely wrong. It can be a bad thing if you’re not responsible about it. It’s one of those substances you can easily abuse. But you’re lucky, see, because you’ve got me here looking out for you … and I’m afraid I’m gonna have to say no more now.’
Tesla frowned and looked immensely disappointed.
‘But, but I only had such a little bit. It’s not doing anything bad to me! Come on Margaret, can’t I please have just a little more?’
Margaret’s expression hardened.
‘Sorry sweetie, but I meant it when I said just a taste. You’re only a kid, so you shouldn’t be having any more than a sip. This stuff only starts hitting you properly after half an hour or so. And because of that, if you don’t know what you’re doing it’s easy to get in over your head real quick.’
Tesla’s shoulders slumped, and his face took on a deflated look.
‘Okay,’ he sighed. ‘You do know best, Margaret. Thank you at least for the taste. I’m glad I did that.’
The hardness melted from Margaret’s face.
‘I’m glad you did too.’
It was time now to steer the conversation in the direction she needed it to go.
‘Look out the window, Tesla. The sky is so pretty, ain’t it?’
‘There are a lot of stars starting to come out, yes. It’s quite beautiful.’
‘You know one of my hobbies back home is astronomy. Do you know much about astronomy?’
‘A little, but we only study it in detail in higher grades at school.’
‘I could teach you a lot about the stars in the sky, Tesla. I could show you all the constellations and tell you about the planets and our galaxy … but not from this room. We’d need to be outside, where I could see the whole sky. Oh, how I ache to be outside on a starry night like this! It really kills me to be stuck inside when there’s such a pretty, starry sky out there.’
‘Well, I … I could ask the General if I could take you outside to look at the stars for a while.’
‘You could? Really? That would be amazing! And like I said, I could teach you so much.’
‘All right, I will go now!’ he declared, emboldened by the alcohol flowing freely through his young veins.
‘No, no!’ Margaret said, looking suddenly alarmed. ‘You can’t go to him now! He’ll smell the wine on you! You can’t let him see you again until tomorrow, when the alcohol is out of your system. Besides, I’m beat now. I wanna go to sleep real soon, so I guess you can just tell your friends there’s no need to warm up a bath for me. But yeah, how about tomorrow you ask the General if you and I can go for a lil’ stroll around the city and look at the night sky? It’ll be perfect too; tonight there’s almost no moon, and tomorrow the moon will be gone completely, so we’ll be able to see all of the stars in all their glory.’
Tesla stood up to leave.
‘I will ask him first thing in the morning. Good night, Margaret.’
He gathered the dirty plates and the now-empty bottle of wine and walked toward the door. When he reached it, however, he stopped and turned around, fixing an intense stare into Margaret’s eyes.
‘Thank you for being my friend, Margaret. Words cannot describe how much your friendship means to me. I … um, that’s all. Thank you.’
Looking suddenly embarrassed at what he’d said, he hurried out of the room.
When Margaret heard the lock click in the door, she flopped down on the bed and beamed a broad, toothy grin up at the ceiling. Tesla’s confession of how much their friendship meant to him was quickly forgotten; all she could think about was just how perfectly everything was falling into place.
‘One more night in this hellhole,’ she whispered to the empty room. ‘One more goddamned night, and then I’m gone.’
58
MARGARET
Margaret awoke to the sound of knocking on her door, and an uppercut of panic cracked her jaw with stunning force as she realised that it was not Tesla’s telltale knock, but someone else’s. Fast fear froze her blood and paralysed her muscles with its glacial breath, howling gale-like through her body.
Oh God, oh my God, he knows! He’s found out somehow! Oh my God oh my God oh my God…
The rapping on the door intensified; whoever was outside was both impatient and quite possibly angry.
‘Dr Green!’
‘Uh, um, just one second, I just woke up, hold on!’
‘Quickly, Doctor.’
There was a grating harshness in the muffled voice.
Margaret heaved herself out of bed, ran a few fingers through her mousy, limp hair to straighten it out as much as she could, and then stepped onto the floor, sucking in a quick breath as the cold stone sank its icy fangs into the soles of her feet.
‘All right,’ she called out, ‘come on in.’
The key turned in the lock and the door swung open. The lanky, grim-faced teenage girl who had stood guard outside a few times before strode in carrying a platter of food and water, which she set down on the desk without so much as even looking at Margaret.
‘Your breakfast, Dr Green,’ she said brusquely, and then she marched straight back out of the room, not deigning to give Margaret even a single glance.
‘Wait a sec!’ Margaret blurted out. ‘Where’s Sergeant Tesla?’
The girl stopped in her tracks and shot a cold look over her shoulder.
‘Why do you want to know about Sergeant Tesla’s whereabouts?’
It was more an accusation than a question, and the words were prickly
with barbs.
‘I, well, I just, the General himself said that, that Sergeant Tesla was supposed to keep me company,’ she stammered in reply.
‘Sergeant Tesla is busy training at the moment. As of this morning, by special order from the General himself, all soldiers have been ordered to double up their training routines. Sergeant Tesla will be busy all day and will not be coming here, and that’s all the information I’m prepared to share with you. If there’s an emergency, knock on the door. Myself or another soldier will be standing guard outside. Good-day, Dr Green.’
‘But—’
The girl began to close the door.
‘I said good-day,’ she growled. She then shut the door swiftly, and with a sinking feeling Margaret heard the sound of the key turning in the latch.
‘Shit!’ she hissed under her breath. ‘Shit shit shit shit shit!’
She had no idea what she going to do now. Cold sweat oozed through her pores, its chill mirroring the trickle of panic-laden blood through her veins.
It’s my only chance, Jesus H. Christ, my only chance to escape! God, if Tesla isn’t able to come tonight, I’m done for! The barrels will be sent downriver tomorrow night at midnight, and then all hope is lost! Then I’ll be stuck here in this fucking prison until that psychotic monster does whatever it is he intends to do with me. Oh Lord, oh Jesus! What the hell am I gonna do?! Just yesterday it seemed as if everything was working out, as if it had all fallen perfectly into place … and now, with one order from that damned lunatic, everything has gone to shit! Everything! Damn it! Shit! God damn it!
Margaret fell back onto the bed, sprawling her arms out and staring blankly at the ceiling for a long time. The only thought running through her head was that she was trapped, that the entire plan had fallen apart, that her one and only opportunity for escape had slipped through her fingers. The helplessness she felt was devastating in its severity, its weight as that of a twenty foot anaconda wrapping its suffocating coils around her, squeezing every last breath of hope out of her and pulverising every bone in her body, crushing every last structure of hope into dust.
