by Manda Benson
I hate this body. It’s as much as a prison as this room, as these barred windows.
The man’s voice cuts into the privacy of our thoughts. “Don’t you want your family to take you back? Don’t you want to be normal? Leave your arms alone!”
“There are things in my blood.”
“There are no things in your blood. At least not beyond the usual cells in everyone’s blood, to protect you from disease and transport oxygen around your body.”
I thrust out my arm, pulling the sleeve up past the elbow. My voice comes out shrill and hoarse. “Look at it!”
The man looks away instead. Embarrassment. Disgust. He goes to a small table in the far corner and picks up a glass of water, and his hand delves into a plastic jar there. When he comes back to us, he holds out his hand, and in his palm there’s a pill shaped like a torpedo, half bright red and half transparent and full of tiny blue spheres. It’s the only coloured thing in this white and grey room. It will make the man and the room go away.
The man’s spectacles reveal only the reflected glare of the strip light.
You don’t trust him.
Don’t take it. It could be poison.
Good. I put the drug in my mouth. The water tastes of fluoride, I swallow, and the plastic lump on my tongue is gone.
Why are you letting them do this to you?
It only gets worse if I don’t. I’ve taken this medicine before. It makes things not matter. I forget.
This is wrong. We have to get out of here.
Thoughts grow weak, indistinct. Awareness is being taken away. There’s nowhere to go, and even if there were, they’d find out.
You don’t understand. Everything you’ve experienced in this world feels wrong, goes against everything you understand to be right and just. If people here can do this to us, there’s no telling what goes, what is allowed and considered reasonable. There must be something we can do, somewhere we can get to where we’ll be safe, where no-one will look.
I can give up and let go of you, like I have countless times before. Always you’ll find me again, always wretched, and always you try to help me with suggestions that don’t work. It feels easier not to care, to let you be smothered and lose myself in the oblivion of a dreamless sleep, where I don’t have to face what I can’t face. But your ideas are seeds endlessly trying to take root. Perhaps this world isn’t real, and all I need to do is try for another reality to make it change. Could it still be I have the strength to hope?
Perhaps there is a place like that.
You’re slipping away from me. I can barely sense you. I clutch at the memory, in the way stranded people hang on to a rock at high tide, clinging to the last seconds before the currents pull us down. A glimpse caught from the window of a moving vehicle a long time ago. Was there ever a name for it? I cannot recall. Perhaps this sanctuary is mine to call what I see fit, and even if it’s not real, if it does only exist in my head, I can at least let myself believe our own lie. There is something comforting in that, something peaceful that stills this constant fear that strains every nerve of me while I’m awake.
The Emerald Forge.
The man’s figure becomes hazy and the room gradually darkens.
*
The disorienting darkness made it hard to tell which direction was which. A blurry greenish light became visible. Dana forced her eyes to focus, and the green light resolved into the digits 4:08, a square of curtained window from the streetlights outside Pauline and Graeme’s house beyond it.
The Emerald Forge. What did the Emerald Forge mean? Dana stared at the alarm clock and tried to disentangle the unrefined mess of thoughts in her head into something that made sense. Had she been back in Cerberus’s world, or something much like it? No, Ivor had thrown Cerberus into the ocean. It was lying at the stony bottom of the Atlantic, inert and rusted beyond repair, most likely. Were there other games, new games after Cerberus?
In the Cerberus game, the system had recognised things about Dana that she hadn’t consciously told it, like naming her avatar in that world Epsilon and automatically rendering its appearance to match hers. It could be the names Gamma and Epsilon had been plucked from her subconscious in the same way. But the Cerberus game, although it had felt sinister, had never felt as real as the world she kept encountering in her sleep. Cerberus’s world had been obviously fantasy, full of fascinating details made up from complicated codes. This world wasn’t. It wasn’t that it lacked detail, just that the detail was too well integrated into the whole, and she’d never sensed that code beneath controlling everything. On the other hand, Dana didn’t really make a habit out of playing games on the Internet, and this kind of bleak, ultra-realistic scenario might be what people looked for in a game these days. Perhaps fantasies and puzzles had become dated and fallen from favour.
Dana nestled back into the dent in her pillows and pulled the duvet over herself. Eric might know about this sort of thing. She would have to ask him when she next saw him, if she still could remember. She must at least try to remember the Emerald Forge. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but just before the dream ended, it had felt as though she had been very close to understanding.
-4-
THE next day was Wednesday, and that morning Dana’s concerns about the wyvern and the possibilities its existence might hint at assumed a lesser priority compared to more immediate worries. She still had to get through this day and two more before the end of term and the six weeks of sanctuary that was the main school holiday. Abigail was still there, and undoubtedly she wanted revenge on Dana for making her look foolish in front of her friends and the teachers.
As she made her way into the front yard and up the steps to the main building and the door where she’d encountered the wyvern, she overheard a conversation between two boys:
“You see that? Abigail Swift broke it.”
“A girl punched that and broke it?”
“Ya, and when she got wrong for it, she said a dragon broke it. Ha!”
“Psycho bitch!”
If the news had got out and people were talking about her, Abigail must really be angry. Dana looked around the crowded school grounds, although it wouldn’t be now or here Abigail would choose to attack her. It would be during break in the toilets, or after school. Maybe she could come up with a way to escape early for the next three times. She hurried past the crowd on the steps and into the building. The corridor with packed with students waiting to go into their registration group classrooms.
“Dana?”
Dana started at the sound of someone shouting her name, but it was only Mr Kell, pushing his way to her through the throng.
“Dana, could I just have a quick word with you in private?” he shouted over the noise the children were making.
He pushed open the door to his science classroom and waved her through. The door clicked shut behind him, muting the racket from the corridor.
“Abigail Swift earned herself a temporary suspension by breaking the door last night. She won’t be back at school until the start of the next academic year.”
Dana stared at the axolotl where it lurked on the stones flooring its tank, feeling enormously relieved that she would likely not set eyes on Abigail’s stupid face for three days and six weeks at least, but not wanting to say anything that might betray the wyvern or her own guilt.
Mr Kell continued. “Over the summer holidays there are probably going to be a number of educational reform topics coming up for referendum. The Meritocracy might finally come up with some coherent arguments from all this background noise of conflicting ideals, and the Electorate might at last have some clear-cut options to choose from. August will be a fresh page for everyone.”
Perhaps Mr Kell thought the school system would be seriously reformed. Maybe he even thought Dana wouldn’t be coming back to this place at all? There had not been any referenda yet on school reform, because when people nominated school issues, they complained about so many different aspects of it rather than all focusi
ng on one point as a start of reform that there were never enough votes for any individual referendum on any of the school topics to be carried through. More recently, influential people on the Internet had started to talk about a grammar school system where people would go to different schools depending on their strongest subjects. If Dana did get to go to a science school, it wouldn’t mean no bullies, but it might mean significantly less bullying. Most of the bullies who targeted Dana seemed to be kids who were bad at science and maths. Or perhaps it wouldn’t work at all, and bullies existed in some kind of equilibrium, and if you removed the bullies, more tolerant children would mutate to replace them.
“In the meantime, if anything, or anyone, is bothering you, I want you to let one of the teachers know. It doesn’t have to be me. It can be a woman teacher if that feels easier for you. It doesn’t have to be your registration group teacher or your head of house. Any teacher you like. Will you do that, please?”
“Okay.” Dana nodded.
“Good. You’d better get off to your registration group.” Mr Kell opened the door again for Dana. Going back into the clamour and crowded mass of bodies was like diving into a fast-flowing river and trying to swim through the rapids. The corridors were a sea of heads, riptides flowing in opposite directions and whirlpools in the stairwells where they surged up to the higher floors. The law in the school was that you had to walk on the left side of the corridor. Dana had always wondered if it was intended to prepare the students for learning to drive when they got to seventeen. Graeme was always saying that schools didn’t teach kids anything applicable to life in the real world.
A bigger boy clipped her shoulder and spun her into the opposite current. Dana lost her footing and people swore and shoved into her, but someone’s clammy fingers closed on her wrist and spun her back onto the other side. She caught sight of Eric’s face obscured by acne and glasses, grinning, before the current bore it away.
It wasn’t until after he’d gone that Dana realised a slip of paper had been put in her hand. Rather than risk reading it in the corridor, she put it in her pocket and continued to her registration class.
In registration, Dana always sat in a seat next to the wall, and nobody sat next to her because everyone knew Dana Provine got bullied, and being seen to associate with her in public was a sure way to invite bullying on oneself. She put her bag on the other seat and opened the note on her lap under the table. It contained only the instruction ‘after school’ and an address. Dana checked the postcode on GPS. It was easily within walking distance of Pauline and Graeme’s house.
Even though it was only Wednesday, Dana suddenly felt overwhelmingly positive. Abigail had been suspended, in three days’ time, school would be over, and she had what she supposed was a friend, which Pauline would be happy about. Yesterday she had found a wyvern, and Osric had sworn not to harm it, and Jananin might still get in touch with her because of that. Ivor might be alive somewhere, and it was summer. And she had the whole six weeks ahead to spend at Pauline and Graeme’s house enjoying the best weather of the year in peace, constructing her bog garden with Graeme and making ice creams with Pauline and eating them on the lawn. Duncan would be home for the University holidays, and he had promised to take Dana to go camping one weekend in Devon, where there were fossils and a beach made entirely of shells. She would get to spend time with Cale during the day, when he wasn’t engrossed in his own thoughts from being exhausted by interacting with people at the special school he went to. And while they were all out or otherwise occupied, she could make Airfix models and try to dig up more information about Ivor and the wyvern.
Dana’s good mood carried her through registration and the morning’s lessons, protecting her like a bubble of insulating atmosphere from various insults and rude comments in the corridor. Indeed, it didn’t even break when, while queuing in the corridor to go into the school canteen for lunch, a hawking, retching, spitting noise came from someone behind her, and something damp and rubbery hit her in the back of the head.
There was a lot of laughter and noise, but Dana had always been told to ignore bullies, so she stood and pretended she didn’t notice, resisting the temptation to raise her hand to the back of her hair. She bought her food, found an empty table, and ate, conspicuous of a damp sweaty sensation between the base of her skull and her collar.
In the lavatory, she used a handful of toilet paper to grab hold of the thing and drag it out. It was impossible to do it without pulling it down the entire length of the hair it had stuck to the roots of, a gluey tension resisting all the way. When it at last broke free, it left a dirty off-white clag smelling faintly of spearmint in the toilet paper. Chewing gum: the same material stuck under every desk and forming revolting beige and grungy pink pustules in every corner and every surface of the school, making the building look as though it was infested with some kind of fungus. She tried to rub it out with more toilet paper, but the residue of it left the hair at the back of her head in a coagulated tacky wad that felt stiff when she touched it.
The afternoon’s lessons passed without much event. Upon the last bell, she dashed out of the classroom and through the main doors, and ran to the school gates. She took the quickest route back to Pauline and Graeme’s house, and as soon as she got there, she ran upstairs without checking to see if anyone else was there. Dana threw her bag and blazer on the bed, pulled off her school trousers and replaced them with her jeans, and unbuttoned her shirt and threw it on the floor as she went from her bedroom to the bathroom. She could sense Cale’s signal nearby, and from his bedroom came the tuneless sounds of him bashing at his music keyboard.
A hairbrush and comb lay beside the sink. She grabbed the brush, wet it under the tap, and raked at the back of her hair with it. The chewing gum had by now dried into a hard crust, and all the brush did was stick and hurt.
Pauline’s soft tread on the stairs. “Dana, is that you?”
She stepped into the doorway and noticed at once Dana’s hand over her shoulder, the hairbrush knotted up at the back of her head.
“Oh, honestly, Dana!”
“It wasn’t me!” Dana objected. “I didn’t spit it on myself!”
Pauline took the hairbrush and hurled it into the wastepaper basket on the landing. She did it in rather an exaggerated, melodramatic fashion. She began to pick at Dana’s hair with the comb. “The disgusting, filthy swine!” she exclaimed.
“Ow!”
“I’m sorry, love, I don’t know how on Earth we’re going to get this out.”
“Can I go to Eric’s house for dinner?”
“Oh, I suppose so. It’s a good thing Graeme’s going out with his friends from work for dinner tonight. I don’t think he approves.” Pauline exhaled. “Dana, look, you’re not having trouble at school, are you? That girl, Abigail, didn’t do this, did she?”
“No, she got expelled — I mean temporarily,” Dana quickly corrected. “She broke a window at the school.”
“Yes, well she’s going to end up in Borstal, that one. Perhaps we could iron it.”
Dana didn’t want Pauline to iron her hair. She just wanted to get to Eric’s house so they could work out what they were going to do about Osric and the wyvern. “I don’t mind, really.”
“Yes, well you might not, but I’m not having people think I let you not mind! Don’t move from that spot!”
She went into Duncan’s bedroom, leaving Dana alone in the doorway between the bathroom and the landing. Dana heard her switch on the computer and type some things. After a moment, she came back out and walked straight past Dana and downstairs. When she came back, she was carrying a jar of peanut butter. Pauline towed Dana over to the bath by her elbow. “Lean over the side.”
“Can’t you just cut the hair that’s manky off?” Dana protested as Pauline slathered a dollop onto the back of her head.
“Then it’ll be shorter than the rest and it’ll look even worse.” Pauline kneaded the peanut butter and chewing gum mixture into Dana’s scalp, the pr
essure of it hurting her chest against the side of the bath. She unhooked the showerhead and switched the shower on. The water managed to get down the back of the vest top Dana had been wearing under her school shirt, and because she was leaning forward the water ran constantly in her eyes and down her nose. When the peanut butter dissolved in the water and ran into the bath, it looked like vomit and made her feel queasy. Pauline ended up washing her hair three times, first of all in the shampoo Dana normally used, then using Pauline’s own expensive and smelly shampoo that was made in France, and then using Graeme’s anti-dandruff supermarket’s own brand that stank of tar, on the premise that men’s shampoo might be ‘stronger’.
After she had finished, Pauline dried Dana’s hair with her high-powered hairdryer, which was supposed to make ions that are good for your hair. Dana had once asked Mr Kell in a Physics lesson about the ions that came out of the hairdryer, and Mr Kell said he thought they sounded like a load of nonsense made up to sell more hairdriers.
“Where are you meeting Eric?” Pauline asked as Dana was putting on a check shirt to stop her shoulders getting burnt in the afternoon sun.
“Just at his house, I think.” Dana checked her pockets, making sure she had her fuses and Ivor’s watch.
“Well, I hope one of his parents is there. Here, take this.” Pauline handed her the mobile phone she’d had yesterday. “And be back by nine.”
Out on the street, the sun was very hot, and Dana’s wet back was something of a relief. She never liked visiting other people’s houses, and she felt even more uncomfortable because her hair was all frizzy and full of static electricity from being washed too much and blow dried, and she couldn’t escape the smell of Pauline’s shampoo.
This was where the postcode Eric had given her was according to GPS, a quiet street and a semi-detached house of bland 70s design with a tall silver birch in an otherwise desolate front garden. Weeds sprouted from the cracks between the slabs on the driveway, an old-fashioned design with a strip of gravel in the centre, and the full west sun beat down on a buckled garage door with peeling canary-yellow paint.
