She went to an employment agency and got a temporary job. Since she could not type or take shorthand, it was a very lowly job. She became a filing clerk for a company in the City which specialised in the marketing of petrochemical products.
She found herself a room in Bayswater, and was content for a while to cook meals over a single gas ring, to listen to the radio and to read the books it was necessary to read if one hoped to take an external degree in English Literature.
After a time, she was promoted to the grandiose status of Information Assistant, which meant that she had to answer the phone and search for the data required by high-powered executives. Sometimes, they wished to know about the seismic surveys in Brazil, or natural gas deposits in Australia, or butyl rubber production in the U.S.A., or crude oil reserves in the U.S.S.R. She was rather good on these kind of problems, particularly if she had to consult a specialist. She seemed to know the answers almost before they were given.
Meanwhile, she met John. John had a room in the same apartment house. He had at the time a good job supervising girls who packed chocolate bars in a large factory. He was a Rhodesian; and his complexion was dark enough, his cheekbones broad enough, his hair black enough to suggest a touch of negro blood somewhere along the line.
John was a drop-out arts graduate, an idealist. He could have taken some sinecure in a museum of fine arts or a commercial gallery, or even in the expanding sub-industry of post-graduate research. Instead, he chose to drift. The job in the chocolate factory was, so he said, simply the means by which he could buy an air-ticket to Japan. He said he wanted to take a look at Japanese culture and also find out what the radical students were doing.
John and Jenny were never in love; but each had an uncanny ability to know what the other was thinking and feeling. Sometimes, they seemed to indulge in conversations where neither opened their lips. Eventually, they went to bed together—as much for mutual comfort and an extension of intimacy as for sexual desire.
Within six weeks of their getting to know each other, John was killed—stupidly and absurdly—in a demonstration outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. The demonstration had started peacefully enough as a disciplined protest against the alleged charges of malpractice against an American negro doctor in Alabama. But a lot of people turned up—it being a fine day—the provos became violent, and the mounted police, that splendid British anachronism, were called in. Somebody threw a nails-and-gelignite bomb, intended for the mounted police. It fell short. Two demonstrators were killed and seven injured. John was one of the dead.
By that time, though she did not yet know it, Jenny was pregnant. Somehow, she learned to accept his death. Somehow she managed to hold down her job in the city. Indeed, she prospered. She learned much about the company for which she worked, and she learned something of the manipulation of stocks and shares. She learned not so much from what people said as from what they thought.
While the baby swelled in her stomach, she learned to make money. By the time the child was born, she had become intent upon making money as a means to power.
Also she had met a bright young man—not empathetic in the way that John had been empathetic—but sensitive enough and attractive enough to draw her allegiance and physical desire. He wanted to marry her, but he did not want to be encumbered with a child not his.
Jenny bore her baby and put it into a home. Then she married her bright young man and became very, very rich. She never went back to the farm in Sussex, and she never enquired after the welfare of her daughter. When she was thirty-nine years old, she took an overdose of sleeping tablets. But by then she knew what had happened to Vanessa.
3
IT WAS SHORTLY after midnight. Vanessa had left the dormitory and had stolen a pole from the gymnasium and also a four-pound lumber axe from the forester’s hut. Tonight she would be free or dead.
She had been practising pole-jumping for several days. She hoped it had not been noticed, but she did not count on it. In practice jumps she had managed to leap nearly ten feet. The electrified fence was eight feet high. Theoretically, she should have easy clearance. But before she could get to the fence, there was the thorn hedge. A narrow avenue would have to be cut through it. She needed at least twenty paces for her run.
Vanessa wore only the dark blue trousers and vest and the light plimsolls she used for physical education. They were the only things she could think of that were practical enough for the task ahead. Fortunately, it was a warm night. Fortunately, also, there was some moonlight.
The moon was both friend and enemy. She needed its light to hack a way through the thorn hedge, to see where the fence was and where to plant the pole when she made her leap. But it exposed her. It made her feel naked.
This was not the first time Vanessa had been out late at night. She had used several evenings to check when the guards and the dogs made their rounds. They were very regular. They came round at half-hourly intervals until midnight, then at one-hourly intervals until dawn. The midnight rounds had just been made.
Vanessa had chosen, to make her leap over that part of the fence that was farthest away from the school. It was nearly a quarter of a mile from the main buildings; and it had the additional advantage of being partially screened from the school by a group of beech trees.
Cutting a way through the hedge was going to be noisy—and she would have to skip very carefully over the thorn stumps—but these were risks that could not be avoided. Better to face them than remain a prisoner or, in desperation, leave as poor James had left.
Exposing herself as little as possible as she crossed the moonlit lawns, Vanessa had darted from the shadow to patch of shadow, like a true creature of the night. Constantly, she looked back apprehensively over her shoulder. Constantly she ran through a verbal mind-block to defeat any accidental or deliberate probe. Dugal would be asleep; and without Dugal the para-psychologists of Random Hill were almost blind.
She arrived at the place she had chosen, laid down the axe and pole, and leaned against a beech tree for a while to get her breath and renew her courage. She looked around her. The world was curiously still and beautiful. How easy it would be to take back the pole and the axe, creep back into the dormitory and accept the security of clean sheets, regular meals, an orderly existence.
But the price you had to pay for such security was too high. You had to surrender freedom of action.
That could be borne. What could not be borne was that you also had to surrender freedom of thought. Vanessa, though only seventeen, knew very well what the parapsychologists of Random Hill were doing. They were intent upon turning a group of gifted children into controlled sensing machines. The government needed people with paranormal powers for sophisticated techniques of communication, for plain simple espionage, for non-verbal interrogation, for internal security and for every dirty game that governments throughout the world were prepared to play to maintain their own authority. From odd remarks that Dr. Lindemann had made, Vanessa knew that China, Russia, America and most of the other countries that presumed to play at international politics were rapidly developing their own paranormal resources.
Vanessa did not want to be part of any political game, dirty or clean. She simply wanted to be herself, her own woman. She wanted to live in peace. It was a simple ambition and, in the world of 1990, a brave ambition. There was a price tag on that, also.
She took a last look round at the peaceful, nocturnal world. How clean everything seemed. How clean and clear. She looked up at the stars. Many were obscured by the haze of moonlight; but enough burned to indicate that truly the universe was too poignantly beautiful for people to allow themselves to be destroyed in meaningless ways.
She brushed tears from her face, lifted the axe and approached the thorn hedge. She had been able to practise pole-jumping. She had not been able to practise cutting down thorn hedges. She had no idea how long it would take or how much noise she would make.
This was the testing time.
An
owl hooted.
Vanessa chose her spot and swung the axe. She aimed low, where the tough wood entered the ground. The first blow glanced off, the axe-head was buried in earth. Vanessa pulled it clear and swung again. This time the axe bit. Not deeply, but it bit. The hedge shook. Overhanging thorns snagged at her hair, scratched her face, hooked in her vest. Vanessa ignored them and swung again with all her might. The blow sounded like a pistol shot through the still, clear night. She ignored the blood on her face, the scratches on her body, wrenched the axe loose and swung again. And again. And again.
After perhaps ten blows, there was a creaking noise. Then a section of the hedge fell forward, almost upon her. Oblivious of the sharp thorns, she tried to drag it clear, but it was still attached to the stump by a few annoying strands of wood.
She swung the axe once more with all the strength of frenzy and despair. She could hear dogs barking in the distance. In a few minutes, perhaps even in a few seconds, the guards would come. The last axe blow severed the remaining strands, and she was able to drag the clump of thorn hedge clear of the gap.
Now she had a clear run, provided she remembered to skip over the stump. She dropped the axe and found her vaulting pole. She could not grip it properly. Her hands were sticky with sweat and blood.
But it was now or never. She could see the dogs, and she could see the guards running after them, electric torches swinging from side to side.
Suddenly an icy coldness came over her. It was as if all emotion were banished, as if she had become physically detached from her body. Calmly she went close to the fence, turned and paced her running distance from it. Then she turned once more, the pole held in both hands, testing its weight and attitude. The dogs and the guards were little more than a hundred yards away now. They would be upon her in seconds.
She gazed at the moonlight, shining upon the formidable barbed wires of the electrified fence.
“I can only die once,” she told herself coolly, as if it were a kind of consolation.
Even as she poised to start her run, she heard a woman’s voice in her head. It was not a voice she knew, but yet it seemed familiar. “Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”
“I will do it!” shouted Vanessa aloud.
With practised grace, she started the run, taking long powerful strides, remembering to skip over the thorn stump in the gap in the hedge without disturbing her essential rhythm. Then all coherent thought was lost. Her body became a finely tuned machine.
She gathered speed, the fence loomed before her, she thrust the point of the pole down into yielding earth, and leaped. The pole bent under the impetus of her forward movement, responded to the lift, jerked back into its natural straight shape, and hurled her over the fence.
As she let go she was aware of sparks and crackling noises. Then she was falling on to soft earth. She picked herself up, turned and saw the guards and their dogs, impotent on the other side of the fence. It would take them a long time to reach the main gate; but perhaps they could radio for help. Vanessa turned and ran. There was only one direction in which to run, and that was away. She ran until she thought her lungs would burst. It was several hours until daylight. That was when the search would begin in earnest. During the remaining hours of darkness, she must put as much distance between herself and Random Hill as possible.
In a luxurious penthouse flat at the top of an expensive block in London West One, Jenny Pargetter, née Jenny Smith, woke up screaming.
“Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”
Simon, her husband, switched on the light and tried to comfort her.
“What is it, love? A nightmare?”
She was shivering and shaking. “Yes, a nightmare.”
Simon kissed her, held her close, attempting to dismiss it. “Not to worry, love. Too much lobster thermidor. Maybe too many pink gins. Serves me right for embroiling you with ghastly stockbrokers. Won’t do it again.”
Jenny tried to respond to his caresses and could not. “It was so real, Simon. So vividly real.”
“Tell me about it.”
She passed a hand over her forehead, gripped her temples tightly. “Well, I seemed to be a young girl, in some kind of institution, trying to break out. There was an electrified fence, and I was terrified of it because I knew I would have to pole-vault it.”
Simon got out of bed, put on his silk dressing-gown, went out of the bedroom and returned with a bottle of brandy and two glasses.
“One for you?”
“No, thank you, darling. As you say, too many pink gins.”
“It wasn’t an accusation.”
“I know it wasn’t.”
Simon poured himself a large brandy. “A young girl, you say?”
“Yes”
“Can you remember anything else?”
“Not much. There were dogs and men in uniform. It was frightening.”
“Did you—or she—make the jump?”
“Yes.”
“Did you—or she—survive?”
“I—I think so.”
Simon took a deep draught of the brandy. ‘Hell,’ he thought. ‘Vandalism. One should sip this stuff and savour it.’
“A young girl,” said Simon. “How young?”
“Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—I don’t know.”
“Vanessa?”
Jenny gave a shrill laugh. “You read too much into nightmares.”
“Vanessa?”
“It could be—I suppose.”
Simon poured himself more brandy. “Darling, you underestimated me. I would not have resented her. At least, I don’t think I would… I’ll make enquiries tomorrow. O.K.?”
“O.K.”
“Well, then. Have a brandy and snuggle close. No more nightmares, I promise.”
4
VANESSA RAN UNTIL she could not even feel the ache in her rubbery legs any more, and only knew that she was still alive because the aching pain in her chest would not go away and because she seemed to have to muster a gigantic effort of will to draw in each sobbing breath to power the worn-out, overworked engine of her body.
She ran like a mindless automaton, through woods, across ditches and ploughed fields, through a small stream whose icy water had refreshed her temporarily. At first, she had heard the dogs behind her; and the sound of their eager barking had supercharged the adrenalin pumped into her bloodstream. For a while her feet seemed to have barely touched the ground. Presently, the sound of the dogs was left far behind. They could travel as fast as she could, faster. They were more efficient, more tireless; but they were held back by the men. The guards were stronger than Vanessa; but they lacked her will. For them the chase was not a matter of life and death. For her it was. And so she outdistanced them easily in the first hour of pursuit.
As she ran, a mindless song repeated itself endlessly in her head; Ten green bottles hanging on a wall… It went on and on; and as soon as the last green bottle had fallen there was a new wall with ten more green bottles to take its place.
Instinctively, she travelled south. She crossed two main roads and a motorway, almost oblivious of the blinding lights, the blaring horns. She climbed fences and fell across ditches. She ran on through the night until the stars winked out one by one and the moon danced crazily like a yellow balloon in the wind. She ran herself into the ground, and lay where she had fallen, unconscious, spent. She did not know it, but another fifty paces would have taken her to a barn where there was plenty of hay to make a soft, warm bed.
She just lay where she had fallen in a field of winter wheat. She lay on her face while tiny spiders crawled over her unconscious body and while dew formed on her hair.
She returned to consciousness shortly after daybreak. She awoke because her body was one great, terrifying ache. She tried to stand up, and cried out aloud with pain. Slowly, pitifully, she compelled her limbs to obey her. She forgot all about mental blocks. Let who would probe her mind. All they would discover would be agony. Rather than preserve secrecy, it
was more important that she concentrated on making her limbs obey her, that she concentrated on finding food and something to drink.
Luck was with her. There were free-range hens on the farm. One had made a nest in the wheat field and had laid eggs there in the sublime belief that she would be allowed to rear a clutch of chicks. Vanessa saw the nest and started cracking eggs. Fortunately, the hen had never been allowed to run with-a cock. The eggs were infertile. Vanessa sat cross-legged, cracking the eggs and swallowing their contents greedily while the hen strutted about, raised her neck feathers and swore mightily. Vanessa tried to make soothing noises; but the hen was not impressed.
In the same field she found an old stone drinking trough, doubtless belonging to the long-dead days when farmers once used horses to draw ploughs. The trough was encrusted with moss and lichen; but there was still some water—probably rainwater from recent showers—in it.
Vanessa cupped her hands and drank greedily. The water tasted faintly brackish but it also tasted good. With the raw eggs, it seemed to pour life and energy into her resilient body. As she was finishing drinking, she heard a voice. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw a man near the barn. He was beckoning her.
She panicked. The receding pain in her limbs forgotten, she began to run once more. Across the field, over a five-barred gate. South… South …
The sun had risen above the horizon. She began to hear voices in her head.
‘Vanessa, come back. Come back! You won’t be punished. Dr. Lindemann promises that you won’t be punished.’
She recognised Dugal’s pattern. Dear, simple-minded Dugal. He was transmitting what they wanted him to transmit. Doubtless the fee would be a chocolate bar.
She didn’t try to say anything to Dugal. There was no point in trying to say anything. Whatever thoughts she uttered would only make him more unhappy. He would not be able to understand why she had run away; he was far too young, far too trusting, to be able to comprehend tyranny. There was no point in putting doubt into his mind, setting him in conflict with the people who controlled his destiny.
Prisoner of Fire Page 2
