I do, really, want to see what those games are like.
• • •
While Mumma is in her study on her notebook (investigating, I suppose) and Kate has gone off in her own anxious, bad mood to the midweek Friday social night at the granmummas’ house (they play cards; they claim no gambling is involved—everyone knows different), I decide to do a little bit of investigating/Friday social of my own.
I knock on the boy’s door. (Knocking on my own bedroom door!) When there’s no answer after the second knock, I open the door: Mason, slouched on my bed, jumps out of his skin! He chucks aside whatever piece of his computer equipment he’d got hold of and whips off the headphones he’s wearing.
And all he does is glare at me.
And all I do is glare back.
My room. I take a step inside. Obviously, it’s not the first time I’ve looked in. Plenty of times when he’s been in the shower, I’ve poked my head around the door to mourn my bedroom, which looks so strange now: walls bare (I said I wanted my pictures), filled with machines and other “gym” stuff, but almost empty of any kind of smell apart from baking powder, cider vinegar, and soap. He is very keen on hygiene, both personal and household. It is incredibly clean. It is not like my room at all.
“You could at least say hello,” I say.
He grunts.
That makes me furious.
“I’ve basically saved your life twice. This is my room you’re living in. You didn’t seem to have any problem speaking to me before, so…”
He picks up the computer equipment, some kind of control set, and clicks around with something.
“What? You won’t even say hello?”
“You could too,” he mutters, putting the controls back down.
“Could what?”
“At least say hello.”
We glare at each other. I’m probably the glaring loser right now because he’s got a point. I didn’t say hello, did I?
“Hi,” I manage to say.
“Hi,” he says.
On the huge screen he’s got sitting on my chest of drawers, there’s an image of a cobbled city square—ancient, medieval—and in the middle of it, a man with a sword stands, looking this way and that, but not otherwise moving.
“Nice talking to you,” Mason says, and picks the controls back up.
“Now who’s being rude?”
“What?” he says. “Oh, wait—don’t say what. Say pardon. Look, River, I’ve got nothing to say. What would I have to say?”
Tons of things, I’m thinking. Tons of stuff I don’t know about and I don’t really want to know about—and…HOLD ON! I’ve got tons of things to say—tons of things you’d think he might want to know about.
“I thought…maybe you’d like to ask me some things?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe you’d just like it if I told you some things?”
“Nope.”
He puts the controls back down and wipes his hands on the blankets; he has loads of blankets, because Kate says he’s not used to the cold. What cold? Our house has never been so day-and-night warm. So he’s sweating—palm sweat. I know palm sweat; I get it when I have to speak in public. Palm sweat means nerves.
“Are you nervous?” I ask him. I know I shouldn’t do that; it doesn’t help me at all when people notice and ask, but he’s a boy, isn’t he? Would it even signify the same thing?
“Nope. You got something else to say, or are you just gonna go? ’Cause I really do just want you to go.”
“Yeah, and I wish you would.”
The second I say it, I regret it. However true it is.
“And I wish I could. But there ain’t nowhere for a freak like me to go, is there?”
“I’m sorry,” I tell him—and I am. I am, obviously, sorry he cannot just up and leave my life and take this storm of lies and upset with him. But I am also, I realize, genuinely sorry because he cannot do that. Because he never meant for this whole thing to be happening either. And now…I suppose we just all have to live with it. “I want to see that,” I tell him, pointing at the screen. “I want to try it.”
He delivers one weary stare.
“Well, then just forget it,” I tell him, reaching out for my bad mood. I need it; I can feel waves of annoyance—waves of yet more goddamn emotion—rising around me.
“Five minutes,” he says. “Five.”
I roll my eyes. That’s how you speak to littler ones.
“Ten max,” he says.
I take the deal. I shut the door behind me, and I walk over to the bed and reach for that piece of equipment he’s got.
“Nuh-uh!” he says. “You take the old one’s controller.”
He points at my dressing table; there’s another piece of equipment just like his.
“Kate’s been playing this too?”
He nods. “She ain’t bad.”
I grab the equipment. Before I got to fly real planes, I tried simulators to learn the basics, and this equipment, this controller, looks pretty simple to me. I sit down on the side of my bed with it.
“Knock yourself out,” says Mason, removing his headphone jack and switching to screen sound.
It is infuriatingly difficult.
After I’ve been sword slaughtered, horribly and effortlessly, about five or six times, I could pretty much slaughter someone myself.
I am just kidding. Of course I am. But honestly?!
“You are so dead!” Mason laughs. We’re well over the ten minutes, but neither of us is bothered about that. I don’t know him or XYs enough to know for sure, but his laughter…it seems…genuine. And not unkind. It reminds me of how, when I was tiny, Kate couldn’t help but laugh a little at the minimachines I made; she laughed, but I didn’t feel intimidated by it. It was a kind and appreciative laugh. I don’t feel intimidated now. I feel totally wound up. Determined to conquer.
“Seriously,” Mason says, “River, you are about the worst player I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty. In K-Beta, I taught all them kids. I taught them: this is how you fight.”
“Again,” I say to him. “Let me try again.”
I get slaughtered.
“Again.”
I get slaughtered.
“Again.”
I get slaughtered—but I wounded him first.
“Again!”
I get slaughtered. Mason says I need to slow down just a little bit, watch where the sword swings are coming from. Jump clear.
Not really listening now.
“Again!”
I hack one assailant to death only to get felled by another.
“Again!”
Mumma comes in, Kate, wheezing, shooting inhaler, right behind her just as I do it: I plunge my sword into my medieval opponent’s heart.
“I just killed him!” I shout—my whole body feels like it’s jumping with excitement, my hands twitch with a strange, new tension.
In the kitchen, in front of Mumma, Kate says there is a new house rule:
I am not to go into Mason’s room.
“But…it’s my room,” I say.
“I agree,” Mumma says. “With Kate,” she adds—in case there could be any doubt.
“We were just playing!” I protest.
“And I don’t want those games in this house,” Mumma tells Kate.
“It is just a game,” says Kate.
“Where’s the fun in that?” Mumma says. “Where’s the fun in death?”
It was fun—I mean, not fun fun, when you laugh so hard your cheeks ache, but it was fun! It was the most fun I’ve had in weeks. I’m not even looking forward to tonight’s harvest supper, which is usually the wildest fun, because of this situation.
And I think about that. And I try to imagine: What if I were Mason? What if that gaming thing truly wa
s all the fun I could ever expect to have? I think about that all night as another angry storm rages; the weather, this autumn, it is furious.
I creep upstairs. I don’t knock.
“Yo,” he says through the darkness. He is sitting on the window seat.
I close the door and sit down opposite him.
“Venice was all I had,” he says, and I look where he is looking. Even in the darkness, I can see the screen is gone, the PC too. “I didn’t even play it much no more. I just liked…so when you’re not fighting, you can explore. I liked climbing around that city. I knew every stone in it. I knew every person. I knew Leonardo. I saw his drawings. I saw it all.”
“You should have told Mumma that,” I say. It’s all I can think to say. And it’s true.
“I…I wanna see the ocean,” he says. “I just want to see the ocean. I want to see one real thing.”
“Everything is real.”
“Not to me it ain’t. That there,” he says, pointing at the empty space the PC occupied, “that was the best real I had.”
Chapter 19
Swamp
The estuary looks really beautiful. It has a thousand moods, and now, with the first soft glow of the coming dawn gently kissing the stars goodbye, it looks…serene. That would be the word for it. The world is still and cool and fresh after the storm, and even the water, resting between tides, lies gray and smooth and calm.
“Well, this is shit, ain’t it?” he says.
It is, absolutely, the last thing I would ever have expected anyone to say in the face of such gorgeousness.
“I mean—WAIT! Is this actually shit?” he says, extracting his feet with loud sucks from the softly sheening ripples of estuary mud.
“Of course it’s not! It’s just…mud.”
“It stinks!”
Does it? I wouldn’t even notice that. Mud just smells like mud to me. If I smell it at all, it smells like…home. It smells like life.
“And you’ve been lied to big-time,” he says. “This ain’t the ocean.”
“It is. That is to say, it’s the sea. That is to say, it’s an estuary, isn’t it?”
“You said ocean.”
“I said sea. You saw the map. You saw the globe. What were you expecting? A view of the American coastline?”
“Can you see that from here? Can you see America?”
A slight wind—tiny but full of spiky chill—ghosts up off the water as more and more light floods the sky.
“It’s all lies. Everything’s lies. We been lied to, River. You and me both. I’m part girl, so say you. Ain’t no goddamn ocean.”
He turns to me, and all is hopelessness on his face. Hopelessness and bitterness, crushing disappointment.
I lead him out onto the spit. I have to tell him, Follow where I tread. I have to be that specific about it because there’s a way you have to go, and he (obviously!) doesn’t know and keeps wandering off and hitting yet more mud sinks, where streams finally carve their way to the sea. I lead him out until we hit the beach—that’s the stony place we swim from, on an incoming tide. Even if you go out a little too far, all that will happen is you’ll get swept home fast. Unless you go too far and know what you’re doing. This is the place me and Plat rafted from.
“So, this is the beach—”
“This ain’t no beach,” he mutters. “Beaches got sand. Beaches got bikini babes. Beaches are hot.”
“And that’s Wales,” I tell him, pointing at the land across the estuary. “Those islands? That’s Little Holm, that’s Steep Holm. Out that way, there’s Lundy. Gull cities! Over there, Exmoor—seriously tall cliffs, brilliant prehistoric stone…arrangements.” I remember, just in time, what Tamara said they should be called: arrangements, not circles, because they’re not circular, and they’re small—tiny!—but they must have taken discussion and agreement to build. (Tamara even adores ancient evidence of organization.) “And that,” I tell him, “is the ocean.”
I point my finger at where there is no land in sight.
It’s like he hadn’t seen it. How could he not have seen the space?
“America?” he asks, staring in wonder at the horizon.
“It’s there.”
“Can’t see it.”
“It’s thousands of miles away.”
“How many? How far?”
“Depends which part. Five thousand. At least.”
This fact seems to do something to his legs. He sits. He sits on the beach and holds his head in his hands. If my whole life hadn’t gone a little overly dramatic, I’d think he was being overly dramatic. Right now, it’s just perfect. Got an XY wigging out, as Kate would say, with dawn now seriously blasting us.
“We really do need to go home now,” I tell him, picking up a pebble. It’s what I do when I get stuck on math problems; I come here and skim stones.
“Home? River, I’m so lost right now I don’t even know which way is up.”
I know I should probably say something or do something—but what? Give him a hug? I know that’s what I would do if another person spoke so upsetting a thought…but I don’t. I feel…exhausted. Exhausted because I haven’t had enough sleep for ages, not just this last night. And exhausted because this is EXHAUSTING. How on earth do you even begin to explain the world to someone who seems to have so little clue about it? So all I find I can do is look back at him and shrug. I can’t even manage a reassuring smile… That would be the right thing to do now, wouldn’t it? To at least smile. I CAN’T.
I feel my hand close around the pebble: smooth and cold and true.
“The whole world’s a lie,” he moans. “And I’m a lie too, ain’t I? I’m a goddamn girl.”
“Part girl—no, it’s not even that! It’s tiny. It’s just a tiny, tiny sliver of girl. And in any case, what could possibly be so bad about that?”
He huffs out air and rolls his eyes like it’s obvious.
“I don’t really understand. I don’t understand at all.”
The pebble is warming in my hand. My heart, it’s fluttering, flitting. It doesn’t know where to land: compassion or contempt?
“Know what I think? I think you could have gone through your whole life without even knowing about that. Why should it make any difference to you? Honestly, trust me, Mason, you were you before you knew this, and you’re still you. You’re always going to be you.”
I hurl the pebble.
I am very, very good at skimming stones. Plat thinks she’s better. She isn’t!
The pebble bounces—one, two, three, four, five times. Not bad, considering. Nine’s my record. I turn to him; he’s staring, open jawed, at the place where the pebble sank, ripples spreading on the flat, quiet sea.
“Stones bounce on water,” he says. “Stones freaking bounce.”
And I try very hard to remember when I saw that for the first time, because I must have been amazed too…but I can’t. I don’t know what to say to him, and besides, we really do need to go.
That’s the thing about a dawn, isn’t it? When you’ve been up all night, even the smallest glimmer of it seems so incredibly bright. Apart from the disconcerting possibility that others have dawn lessons on the weekend (I’ve been so distracted I don’t know anyone’s timetables), the village won’t be up for a while yet to start on the preparations for the harvest supper, but still—daylight. I don’t want to be out here in my pj’s with a shivering boy in a too-short, pink bathrobe when my friends and neighbors open their curtains.
“Come on,” I say to him. “We’d better get you out of here before the she-wolves wake up.” And he looks up at me, and it’s like all the fight and fire have gone out of him and he’s just plain wide-eyed scared. “I’m joking!” I tell him. “But we really should go, okay?”
“’Kay, River,” he says in that small voice I heard once before, and he gets to his feet, bu
t in a stiff, shaky way, like one of the oldest of the granmummas.
I don’t take the chance of going back through the village. I cut right around it, keeping well clear of the school, looping, zigzagging on the maze of footpaths, made narrow by the summer’s lush growth, dying off now, but still—
“JESUS!” he cries out, and I turn to see him scratching frantically at his nettle-stung legs, bare from the knees down under MY bathrobe. “Goddamn she-wolf plant attacked me!”
I pick a dock leaf and offer it to him.
“You need to rub it on your skin. Trust me. Do it.”
My heart flutters again. Compassion? Contempt? Confusion? No! Never mind what! If we don’t get a move on, we’ll get spotted, and I do NOT want to have to deal with any kind of escalation of this situation.
“Like this,” I say and bend to rub his legs.
He jumps back away from me, then forward again because—“Jesus!”—he hits more nettles.
For crying out loud. “Do you want me to help you or not?”
He doesn’t answer; he’s just standing there…all done in. So I reach deep. I reach deep to find how I’d speak to a littler one or the oldest and the frailest of the granmummas: kindly and in their own language. I’d find a way to connect.
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