by Manda Benson
The Emerald Forge
Electronic edition
Published by Tangentrine Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Manda Benson
www.tangentrine.com
Manda Benson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This novel is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to locations, incidents, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
ISBN (electronic edition): 978-0-9566080-8-6
The Emerald Forge is also available in print
ISBN (print): 978-0-9566080-7-9
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Contents
Verso
The Emerald Forge
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Appendix
The Lambton Worm
Blood & Organ Donation
The Emerald Forge
by Manda Benson
With thanks to
J.D. Williams and D.J.Cockburn
-1-
THE graffiti must have gone up last night. Dana would never have missed this if she’d walked past it yesterday.
A roiling black-and-grey mushroom cloud took up the entire wall, its underside shot through with veins of red flame, upon a background of an infernal red sky and a desolate plain of blackened buildings and burned trees. In the foreground of the panorama, uplit by a red glow and with hair appearing to flow in the hot breeze, had been painted the head and shoulders of a woman with an exaggerated cartoon expression of demonic glee. Her fist was raised in triumph, her face sinister behind dark glasses.
It always hit Dana with a stab of longing and apprehension whenever she recognised Jananin Blake’s face on a newspaper or public wall, or when she heard her voice on the radio or television. It wasn’t easing over time, either.
If anything, it got harder.
The painting must be one of Boggsy’s. Yes, Dana could just make out the cursive signature with the long, curled tail on the y on the bottom right corner, highlighted in white against Jananin’s shoulder. Boggsy didn’t like Jananin. Indeed, Boggsy didn’t seem to like any of the Spokesmen for the Meritocracy. Graeme used to say Boggsy was like a mirror, reflecting the Spokesmen’s opinions without their high talk. In the last two annual Spokesmen’s referenda, people had even voted for Boggsy enough that he― or she — could have claimed a position as Spokesman, but Boggsy was anonymous and had never come forward to claim or reject that right.
Dana took a few steps back onto the grass bank so she could see the image in its entirety. Mentally, she drew a rectangle around it and remembered it as a digital photograph. She’d transfer it to a computer when she got home.
There was a plaque at the bottom of the wall. Dana couldn’t read it from this distance, but she knew it had a statement on it saying the surface was a public wall for the expression of the opinions of the public, and something about it being a criminal offence to prevent people from using it, because it was treason to censor the Meritocracy.
Cool pinpricks had begun to flick Dana’s face and hands. A sparse rain rustled the dry grass. She glanced up to the sky, and at the path behind her. A boy was coming this way, but he was still some distance behind. A tall, fat boy, with thick plastic-framed glasses and dark brown hair cut in a puddingbowl style. The bottom of his shirt hung crumpled over his trousers, and he wore the green-and-gold striped tie of Dana’s school, tied so the narrow end was short and the tie so ridiculously long it hung to his knees. He had his coat slung over one shoulder by a finger and carried his school bag on the other arm.
Earlier that day, Dana had been trying to get through a crowded stairwell to go upstairs to Chemistry, and some older boys had yelled “Falcon Punch!” and shoved a fat boy into her, and laughed and jeered as though pushing fat boys into smaller girls was a new sport. The boy had stared at her before the motion of the throng pulled him out of sight. This boy looked similar, but Dana wasn’t very good at recognising people, especially people whom she’d seen only once. It could be the boy was angry with her for being there and making him look bad in front of his friends. It hardly made sense, as it wasn’t her fault, but then people rarely did make much sense at school. Best to leave now, and avoid the chance of anything happening.
She didn’t look behind as she continued on the path, but she could hear the boy’s footsteps, and his presence just a few paces behind made her nervous. She didn’t like that boy walking there, able to see her.
Dana’s route home brought her through an avenue with cherry trees edging the driveways, and at the end of this avenue was a gate that led to a field of common land and a copse: an alternative route to Pauline and Graeme’s house. She would feel much more at ease in the quiet wood with the bird song and the rustle of the trees instead of the noise of traffic and people, and that boy behind her. Dana passed quickly beneath the branches of the cherry trees, climbed up onto the metal stile, and jumped down into the field. She set off across the wet grass confidently, not looking back.
The rattle of the gate behind told her she was followed.
Dana hurried along the uneven path worn in the grass beside the allotments that backed onto the field. A piebald dog behind the hedge barked, making her jump and quicken her pace. The boy had to be following her. Why else would he be coming this way? Dana didn’t dare look back. She broke into a run as she reached the bottom of the path. Her course took her across wet grass and under the cover of the trees. She scrambled up the gap worn through the undergrowth and glanced back as she turned onto the main path. The boy was still behind her. She ran. When she looked back, he still followed, slower than her. Perhaps she could outrun him. Dana knew these woods well, although Pauline was always telling her not to go into them because there might be murderers and rapists lurking there. If she could get enough of a headstart and break off the path, perhaps she could hide in the wood until he’d gone.
She ran on until the path turned a corner and trees blocked the sight of her pursuer, and leapt down off the path. Her foot landed wrong in the soft soil, her ankle twisted, and sky and ground turned over. Dana sat up, heart pounding. The boy hadn’t caught up with her yet, but a nettle had got her on the wrist. She’d pulled in her hands instinctively when she had fallen, and aside from her ankle she couldn’t feel that she was hurt anywhere else. A large tree trunk stood not far from where she had fallen, bracts of burgundy-and-purple-striped fungi sprouting from it. Her ankle ached as she staggered behind the tree and crouched down. From here she could see the wood of the tree was decomposed and spongy, and its core had rotted away to leave an uneven crater formed from its outermost layers of bark. Keeping her knees bent into a crouching position, she crept inside the hollow and looked through a crack in the wood up onto the path.
Presently the boy appeared. He looked about the
path ahead, apparently confused, and turned slowly through 360 degrees to scan the woods. Dana steadied her breathing― the boy was standing not ten yards from her, and he might hear it. She felt safe, ensconced inside the dead tree with the smell of mould and soil surrounding her, and she began to think derisive things about the boy, as she often did about people who bullied her. He was a fat, ugly boy, Dana thought, and probably a stupid boy as well from the look of him. He had a double chin and a spotty face, and he was sweating copiously from a brisk walk and a five-minute run on a summer afternoon. The perspiration had wetted his school shirt, and he had breasts like a girl.
The boy was looking at the ground in front of the path. She must have flattened the ferns when she’d fallen. He lifted his head and his eyes looked straight at Dana. Perhaps the boy wasn’t as stupid as he looked.
The boy put one foot down off the path. He was coming. For a moment, Dana was paralysed. Then she turned and broke from her hiding place and ran down the hill.
“Oi! Oi!” the boy shouted. Dana could hear him crashing through the undergrowth behind her. She ignored the stiff pain in her ankle and weaved her way through brambles, pulling the sleeves of her school jersey over her fists to protect skin and pushing tall stems apart with her arms. She was faster and more agile than the boy chasing her, but quickly she began to see he had other things on his side. She had to use effort to force her passage through the vegetation, whilst he simply followed in the trail she had cleared, and his physical bulk gave him more inertia on the downhill run and made it easier for him to trample anything that did get in his way.
He was almost upon her when she came to the stream. Dana was never sure if it was rightly a stream or a river, or something between the two. It meandered several times around this part of the wood, and she made straight for where she knew a fallen tree bridged it. Dana was up through the gap in the roots and over the tree before the boy knew what was happening. She scrambled over the slimy bark with the water several feet below her, glad she always wore sensible shoes and not the ridiculous bricks Pauline had once suggested she strap to her feet in order to fit in better with the girls at school.
The tree held up the boy, and Dana slackened her pace, panic momentarily giving way to fatigue, but then she blundered into an impenetrable bank of brambles and had to go around, and the boy started gaining on her again. The water doubled back on itself somewhere around here, and upstream of a mini-waterfall it was possible to jump over. Dana could remember a time when the waterfall had been much farther downstream. It had slowly eroded its way up, eating a six-foot gorge backwards into the clayey soil in a process she had learnt about in Geography. She could hear the rush of the falling water now, and she headed for the place where she could cross.
She was running full tilt, and with all the ferns and brambles obscuring it she nearly fell into the gorge. She struggled to stop in time and found herself staring down into a muddy torrent six feet below, scattered with stones, broken plants, and lumps of clay. The waterfall had moved back again― the recent rains must have precipitated it. The water below looked deep and fast, swollen by the rain, and Dana imagined someone falling from such a height could easily break a leg, or worse. She couldn’t remember how far downstream one would have to walk before there would come a place where it was possible to climb out. When she looked upstream, she couldn’t see where the waterfall had moved to, just the gorge going on until the stream’s course took it out of view.
She would have to go upstream and find a place to cross. When she turned, the boy was running straight towards her, barging through brambles with his elbows.
“Hey, Epsilon!”
Dana turned back and launched herself into a running jump. The muddy gully and the churning brown waters flew past below her. She landed heavily in the wet mud on the other side, bending her knees as she came down and grappling with a tree for stability.
When she looked behind, the boy was standing on the other bank. He stared down at the stream below, and back up at her.
Dana began to run up the bank. Slender trees grew vertically from it, impervious to the gradient, and she grabbed at the trunks to speed her ascent. A number of times she slowed to throw a hurried glance over her shoulder, just to check the boy had not jumped and continued the pursuit, but he hadn’t. She crested the bank and came out onto the footpath through the woods. She blocked out the raw feeling in her throat, the burning in the muscles of her legs, and the cramp in her side, and kept up a running pace until she was out of the woods and on the path running alongside a cornfield. The path was always strewn with dog turds, and Dana stepped in at least two, preoccupied with checking behind rather than in front where she was going.
Epsilon… it was only Ivor who had called her that. It was the name he’d given her before she was born, a label for an experiment…
The path ended with a short alley between a house and a backyard, before leading onto the grassed playing field. Dana shuffled her feet in the grass in an attempt to wipe the dogpoo off her shoes. She looked at her watch: three minutes to six. She made the last fifty yards across the field and over the street to Pauline and Graeme’s house at a run.
Dana rushed into the front porch and closed the door behind her. The hallway was dark and familiar-smelling. Relief enveloped her. Safe, at least until tomorrow. She dumped her bag and coat on the hall floor.
Graeme’s voice came from the living room. “I expect she’ll be back soon,” he was saying. “After all, she always wants to watch to see if Demented Badger Woman is on the news. She’s obsessed with that woman.”
A hot prickly feeling crawled up the back of Dana’s neck. Demented Badger Woman was a mildly unkind name that Graeme called Jananin Blake― because she had black hair that had gone grey at the temples, which he’d compared to the stripes on a badger’s face.
“I expect she’ll grow out of it,” said Pauline’s voice. “And anyway, surely a scientist and a political speaker is a much better model for a girl than a singer or a footballer.” Her voice became louder as the door to the living room opened. Graeme started when he saw Dana. “Oh, hello, Dana, we didn’t hear you come in. You’re just in time to watch the news.”
“I don’t want to watch the news!” snapped Dana, indignant. “And I’m not obsessed!”
“Dana!” Pauline exclaimed when she appeared behind Graeme. Dana looked at the floor behind her, at grubby brown smudges on the carpet where she’d trodden. Great. A shit end to a shit day, and even now she was back home she couldn’t escape from people having a go at her. Dana ran upstairs to her room, ignoring Pauline’s shout for her to take her shoes off, and slammed the door. She pulled off her dirty, stinking shoes without untying the laces and threw herself down on the bed. It felt like a clockwork mechanism inside her had been wound too tight. She hated school, she hated dog owners who didn’t clean up, and she hated not being able to do something as straightforward as watching the news without Graeme and Pauline guessing at her motive and forming judgements on her. She wished, as she often did, that she could go and stay with Jananin in Inverness and not have to go to school any more. She wished she could tell everyone that Jananin was her real mother and not have to carry the secret around with her any longer, but she had promised Jananin she would not, and no-one would believe her anyway.
There came a knock on the door. “Dana,” said Graeme’s voice. “We’re sorry for talking about you. Did you have a bad day?”
Dana didn’t answer him.
“What are you doing in there?”
Dana turned her head out of her pillow, to look at the desk and at the biscuit tin― oneof the fancy ones you get biscuits in for special occasions, with a gold oak leaf pattern on it― that she kept paints and modelling glue in. The overtightened cog inside her slackened a little. She took a deep breath before answering. “I’m making a Hawker Hurricane.”
This game had been started by Dana’s therapist, who had come up with ‘strategies’ to help her deal with stress and overwh
elming emotions. If Dana had to talk about her emotions, thinking about it only made them even worse, so the therapist had suggested she go somewhere quiet and do something she enjoyed that took up all her concentration. Dana had come up with making Airfix models as an idea for this, so after that meeting, whenever she was feeling overwhelmed she would sit at her desk in her room with the door shut, and paint and glue Airfix models until she felt in control again. If Graeme or Pauline asked her what she was doing, and she told them she was making Airfix models, they were to leave her alone and not disturb her.
Only it had evolved into a kind of code, a private joke. Graeme would ask her what she was doing, and she would say she was making a World War II aircraft based on its size as a comparison to how she was feeling. If she was making a Supermarine Spitfire, then she was just a little bit stressed and would feel better soon. On the other hand, if she was making an Avro Lancaster, it meant she felt really overwhelmed and wouldn’t come down for the rest of the day. It meant she could communicate more specifically how bad she felt without either of them losing face or Dana having to think or talk about her emotions.
“Oh, that’s nice. We’ve got steak for dinner.”
“Don’t want any,” said Dana.
“All right, I’ll keep some for you. You come out when you’re feeling better.”
Dana heard Graeme go downstairs. She put her hand in her pocket and held Ivor’s watch. A hot ache filled her eyes and nose.
She sat up and swung her legs down from the bed, and concentrated on the sensation of the carpet under her feet. After breathing in and out a few times, she got up and went to the desk. Dana arranged the fuses in her pencil tin in ascending order of amperage, standing on their ends on the shelf above the desk. She looked at the ordered calm of the regular, coloured writing on the white middles, and then she opened the biscuit tin and found the pot of enamel paint that was the right colour for painting a Wellington bomber. As she concentrated on reproducing the camouflage patterns on the kit’s box, it became easier not to think about what had happened today. By the time she’d finished, it seemed the surrounding room separated her from the boy following her and Pauline and Graeme’s disapproval, as though they had become distant.
