The Infinite

by Patience Agbabi

  ‘Why didn’t any of your Leaplings come on this trip?’

  ‘They leapt to 2096! I don’t know where they went. Not here.’ She smiles, showing her gap. ‘You’ve got flour all over your face.’

  It must have been when I opened the packet. It came out in a cloud.

  ‘Are you a Vegan?’

  ‘No.’ She laughs and lowers her voice. ‘I eat meat on a Sunday, so I can’t call myself Vegan. My parents don’t believe in Veganism.’

  ‘You make it sound like a religion?’

  ‘It is for some. Strict Hindus don’t eat meat. We’re Christians. Kind of.’ She raises one eyebrow; I don’t know how she does it. ‘You?’

  ‘Grandma’s Christian to the power of 3!’ I brush the flour off my face and sneeze. ‘If you’re not a Vegan, what are you? A Vegetable or a Meathead?’

  Ama laughs. ‘You know about the Meat Wars? Not everyone falls into those two camps. We’re Omnivores, aka Omni, I suppose. We eat meat but keep to the rations. Mum’s worried it’s all GM. Used to eat fish on Fridays but fish are retro.’

  ‘We learnt that in PPF.’ I stir the flour into the mixture. It looks like it’s curdled so I use the whisk. I learnt THAT in cookery. But I don’t want to think about school.

  ‘Yeh. They rationed it cos no one listened. You get the eco-warrior types, the Vegetables, some of them Vegan,’ she nods towards Season, ‘and the Meatheads who have to eat meat every day or they’ll die. In the end, there were so many Meatheads there wasn’t enough land to grow anything else. Food chain slumped. Scientists started growing meat in labs.’

  ‘So they don’t do intensive dairy farming any more?’ I read about intensive farming for my geography project.

  ‘You totally get it,’ Ama said. ‘Shall we cook these cakes, then?’

  ‘Am I your boyfriend?’

  Big Ben joins us. I don’t know where he’s been up till now. He’s soaked through, so maybe he just stood outside for an hour. He’s taken the hat off, though. He wanders to the other side of the kitchen and looks out the window. I realise he’s gazing at Fiona the Ferrari.

  ‘ARE you his girlfriend?’ Ama says. ‘Think he likes you.’

  ‘Me? No. Big Ben just likes timing me run,’ I say. ‘Fiona’s his girlfriend.’

  The smell of the main cake cooking is making me hungry. I hardly ate any lunch and running always makes me hungry. I scrape the spoon round the inside of the bowl and taste it. Not bad. Maybe I’ll try a slice of birthday cake later. If I could last that long before dying of hunger. The others are tasting the mixture too. I worry we’ll eat it all before the cake goes into the oven. Then we’ll all starve this evening.

  ‘Something smells good.’ Le Temps strides into the room in green wellington boots, leaving footprints all over the white floor. ‘Let me guess, birthday cake?’

  Season looks at the footprints and her eyebrows drop down to her eyes. He disappears into a side door and appears a minute later carrying a clear bag containing what is obviously large chunks of meat. Season goes white and her voice sounds distorted, like she’s virtually tongue-tied, struggling to get each word out.

  ‘Mr T. What, exactly, are you doing carrying meat, in a meat-free zone?’

  ‘Carrying meat in a meat-free zone.’ He grins.

  ‘On whose authority?’

  ‘Infinity’s,’ he says, no longer grinning, and Season jumps a little at the name. ‘Meat’s permissible on leap birthdays. Special occasion, remember? Some of us CAN taste the difference between animal and vegetable. It’s Armageddon outside. Where else could I preserve it? Sorry, old bean.’

  And off he walks into the grounds. We all look at each other. I’m the first to speak.

  ‘Who’s Infinity?’

  Ama makes what-big-eyes. ‘You never heard of Infinity? She’s the wisest bissextile of all but no one’s ever seen her.’

  ‘Like a god?’

  ‘No. More like an elder everyone respects.’

  ‘Can she live forever?’

  ‘No one can. But rumour has it she can leap to the far edges of time.’

  I want to ask more questions but Season’s throwing washing- up into the sink. I’m worried the cakes are going to burn because she might have a mega power surge and burn them and we won’t be able to have our party. As I think that, the buzzer goes off to say the cakes are ready and Season puts on the oven gloves and asks for two volunteers to get the cake racks out. Big Ben and Noon put their hands up. I notice Noon’s wearing a pair of jeans which she must have borrowed from Ama because she wouldn’t have jeans in 1924. Maybe Ama would rather be friends with Noon than with me. I’m sad when I think that.

  But I don’t think that for long because I’m thinking about Infinity, the person and the symbol . Infinity is the wisest bissextile of them all. And MC2 has an infinity tattoo on his left hand . . .

  Chapter 10:00

  GAME

  We open our birthday presents at 6 p.m. in the Common Room. I’ve never been in there before. There are lots of comfy chocolate-brown chairs and circular rugs with jagged patterns on them in cream, black and gold. I get a book about Bob Beamon. His wife helped him write it. Maybe he’s like Big Ben and needs help with typing. I can’t wait to read it. It’s not really a children’s book. In the future, they don’t believe in separating the two. They think children shouldn’t be sheltered from bad things. GMT gets a new watch. Maybe it’s one MC2 stole from another century. Those two have definitely met before. Big Ben gets a stopwatch that can time nanoseconds. I’ve never heard him whoop so loud. Ama doesn’t get anything because she’s an Annual.

  We’re having a barbecue outside instead of the usual evening meal in The Beanstalk. The air’s mild and damp and there’s music to help us relax but it’s a bit loud. There are two separate grills, meat and vegetarian. Le Temps is in charge of the meat, which is why he collected it earlier and made Season cross. And you’ll never guess who’s slapping meat on the barbecue. An eco-bot! The bot looks like someone squashed together old clothes, metal cans and cardboard boxes to make something that LOOKS like a human. Their face is patchworked, and they’re wearing a black beanie. Some of the boys are pointing and laughing.

  GMT’s staring at the eco-bot. She’s wearing a long purple velvet gown, long black beads and has her hair parted in the middle and hanging loose. It’s quite hard to see her eyes and she keeps pushing the hair out of her face. I like the gown, though. I think she’s having trouble looking at the eco-bot because she has too much hair, but then she says:

  ‘Holy Joe, it’s them!’

  ‘Who?’ I say.

  ‘Mange-Tout. Why’re they here?

  ‘Who is THEY?’

  ‘Neither he nor she. Mange-Tout. Eco-bot 350. Lives off waste and recycles ideas.’

  I frown like Grandma at the Eco-bot 350. ‘They shouldn’t be here. This is a robot-free zone.’

  GMT’s still staring. ‘Used to be big on the Veggie scene but they switched.’

  ‘What’s that in English?’ says Ama.

  Ama’s wearing a shiny orange bomber jacket the same colour as her hair and silver trousers that have a skirt on top in the same material. I blink. When I look again, the jacket has turned turquoise! Noon’s standing behind her, wearing a pale yellow dress almost down to her ankles covered in cream beads. It’s so sparkly, I can only look at it if I squint my eyes and look sideways. It’s beautiful, though. GMT lowers her voice.

  ‘Mange-Tout was eco-royalty for a decade. Vegetable veteran. A soundbite for animal rights. Most Veggies were eco-only but Mange-Tout was retro. Said animals had the same rights as people. Their slogan was MAN=BEAST. Bot was cool, man.’ She shakes her head and her hair goes into her eyes again. ‘Then they malfunctioned. Went mute. No one knows why.’

  Ama nods. ‘Think I heard something,’ she says. ‘Didn’t they make a public—?’

  ‘Yeah. “I EAT MY WORDS. EAT EVERYTHING.” Then disappeared. There were rumours. And now they’re here.’

 
; I stare over at the barbecue. Mange-Tout stares back and bares their teeth like a smile. But their teeth are metal. They don’t look happy, they look angry, like a mad metallic dog. They look like they don’t know what a vegetable is. They must have been totally reprogrammed. I turn my head but still watch them out of the corner of my eye as they slap more meat on the barbecue and say something to Le Temps. But GMT says they went mute. Obviously they are talking again now. I wonder if Mange-Tout sounds like a person or a machine. By now, most of the group are staring with eyes big as Mars. GMT takes one last look at Mange-Tout and the meat barbecue then walks over to the veggie one and we slowly follow.

  Season has made lots of vegetarian options, some ‘Real’, like vegetable kebabs, which are different vegetables on sticks. She colour-coded them so one has things like yellow peppers, yellow courgettes, sweetcorn and golden tofu; one has aubergine, red onions and red peppers; and one has a lumpy green vegetable I don’t recognise and green peppers. And some ‘Substitutes’, like beancon and soysages. Season says it’s better to eat ‘Real’ food, but if you like meat you should eat the substitutes. There are all kinds of colourful dips set up to look like a painter’s palette in small, circular bowls. There’s a sign over the dips saying Pique Your Palate, which means taste. I like the homophones ‘palette’ and ‘palate’.

  I’m enjoying being outside, even though it’s noisy with people talking over the music. This track’s a weird instrumental from 2048. It has fast drums like a heartbeat, frogs croaking and birdsong. The 2048 pupils are swaying to it, nodding their heads, and Ama’s twitching her body like a sparrow on a birdbath. Her jacket’s gone glossy black. She doesn’t look human! Then I realise they must be playing music from different leap years. When I first came outside, they were playing a song called ‘Crosstown Traffic’ by Jimi Hendrix, which came out in 1968. He was a black rock star from America, so maybe he knew Bob Beamon.

  On the side of the main building is a large canopy so all the food and people can stay dry. It’s still murgy after the storm. Murgy is a mixture of muggy and murky.

  I love the smell of the food on the barbecues, even though everything smells a bit burnt. I hope Mange-Tout and Season don’t completely burn the food. Further away from the building is a small fire where one of the Triple M teachers is cooking jacket potatoes. I decide that’s what I’m going to eat, with one of Season’s white dips, followed by birthday cake.

  All the pupils and tutors are here. Everyone has dressed up because it’s a VERY SPECIAL OCCASION, even people who hate clothes. I’m wearing a white jumpsuit that glows in the dark. I packed it specially because we were going to the future and it looked like a spacesuit. It’s also waterproof so very practical for damp future weather. Even Big Ben is dressed up. He’s wearing some black skinny jeans that make his legs look even longer than they are, a red jumper and, would you believe, the red hat we found in the undergrowth! He hasn’t even bothered to take out the twigs and it still has mud on it. Classic Big Ben!

  Mrs C Eckler is wearing a sparkly silver top and black shiny trousers. I love her top. I keep squinting my eyes so the sparkles dance in the light. Her hair is piled up on her head, with a sunflower pinned on the left-hand side. Her husband is also wearing black shiny trousers but his top is plain grey. She’s eating some of the red vegetable kebabs.

  ‘Can I get you something, Elle?’

  ‘I’m waiting for the potatoes.’

  The barbecues are making me hungry though, Mange-Tout cooking on one and Season on the other. A stereo of smells. Ama says they do that to keep the meat separate from the vegetables. I like that because I like to keep food separate on my plate, even though it’s the same colour. If it mixes, there are too many textures to cope with and I don’t enjoy the food. I wander over to the meat barbecue expecting to see burgers and sausages but that isn’t what’s there. It looks like steaks. The Leaplings gather around the meat table because we aren’t used to so many vegetables. I think most of the 2048 pupils are Vegan except Ama.

  ‘There’s nothing better than the smell of meat on a barbecue,’ says Le Temps. ‘Actually, there is. Eating it.’

  ‘Is it ready yet?’ says Jake.

  ‘Indeed,’ says Le Temps, putting the steaks onto white bread rolls. ‘And now, the moment of truth. If anyone can tell me what kind of meat it is, you get to drive Season’s Ferrari.’ He pauses. ‘Only joking.’

  It isn’t a very good joke. But Big Ben grabs a roll on the word ‘Ferrari’. He wants to drive. I hope he manages to guess correctly. He takes a huge bite and immediately opens his mouth like he wants to spit it out.

  ‘Is it disgusting?’

  Big Ben does his three-second pause and mutters something that sounds like too hot. Of course it was too hot. It came off the barbecue 20 seconds ago! Then his voice sounds normal again.

  ‘Is it cows?’

  He’s thinking about the cows we saw in the field earlier. It isn’t a bad guess. If they live on this land, maybe they kill one every four years for the Leap Party barbecue.

  Le Temps shakes his head. ‘Try again.’

  Big Ben chews for a few seconds. ‘Pork chop.’

  ‘No.’ Le Temps smiles. ‘Here’s a clue: something you might come across in the grounds here. If you look far enough ahead.’

  ‘Rabbit,’ says Jake.

  ‘Fox,’ says Maria.

  They’re both wrong. It’s far too big to be rabbit. And you can’t eat foxes. Everyone knows that.

  ‘Is it goat?’ I say. At that moment they start to play some of that 1924 music Noon likes and she and Ama go crazy dancing, all arms and legs.

  ‘Not a bad guess for someone who only eats yams. But wrong.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘Now that would be telling. It would spoil the game. The game is to guess.’

  I look at Big Ben. He’s screwing up his face to think.

  ‘Deer? Badgers? Monkeys?’ he says.

  Le Temps looks angry and scared. I wonder if he gets a headache when he feels like that. He talks to Big Ben’s hat, not his face.

  ‘SENSIBLE guesses. Since when did monkeys live in the woods?’

  ‘We only saw cows,’ says Big Ben.

  ‘So you met my prize herd in the woods today? Who gave you permission to go there?’

  ‘Mrs C Eckler,’ I say.

  ‘Looks like you brought the woods back with you.’

  He’s looking at Big Ben’s hat, with the dirt and twigs in it. Big Ben looks back at him.

  ‘Lamb?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sheep, then. It must be sheep, by process of elimination.’

  Le Temps burns his hand on the barbecue, says a bad word and gives Big Ben the bull’s-eye stare.

  ‘How do you spell “sheep”, Ben?’ He pauses. ‘As I thought, you have NO idea. No idea at all. And I think you’ll find the correct term is “mutton”.’

  ‘He wouldn’t know that.’ I find my mouth speaking before my brain has caught up. I’m angry with Le Temps for humiliating Big Ben. He can’t help being dyslexic.

  ‘Hot potatoes! Hot potatoes!’ sings the Triple M teacher like he’s selling vegetables in the market and the background noise of the barbecue is his bassline. I turn away from Le Temps to get my jacket potato. I’m starving. But as I leave I can hear Big Ben still guessing.

  ‘Is it hedgehogs?’

  We eat the cake indoors because the food has begun to get soggy. Maria dropped her burger on the ground and swore in Portuguese so she got away with it like she always does. We have to take our boots off and leave them at the entrance to the Common Room. I’m worried someone might steal my boots and throw them down the toilet because that happened at my primary school, but Mrs C Eckler says everyone here is well behaved.

  The 2048 cake is set up on a large circular table in the middle of the room. It’s fully white-iced and decorated with the cupcakes we made earlier. I want to take a photo on my TwentyTwenty so I can look at it forever but don’t want the grown
-ups to know I still have it. I’ll have to memorise it in my brain. Millennia gives a speech about the importance of leap birthdays. She says some bissextiles choose to celebrate their in-between birthdays on the 28th of February or the 1st of March and that is OK. But some bissextiles only celebrate the leap birthday once every four years. That makes it more special. I know from the way she says it that Millennia’s like me. She only celebrates on the true day.

  ‘Today is special. Here at the Time Squad, we drink a toast to time and we eat this cake to acknowledge our rare Gift. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, please raise your glasses . . . TO TIME.’

  ‘To Time!’ we say in unison.

  ‘1 minute, 20.95736793 seconds,’ says Big Ben, meaning the length of Millennia’s speech.

  They play the song ‘Celebration’, which came out in 1980. In 1980, the Olympics were in Moscow and America boycotted them, so Allan Wells won the 100 metres in 10.25 seconds, the slowest time in modern history. Allan Wells was 28 years old, really old for a sprinter. His wife was his trainer. I watched his race online 100 times.

  Some of the teachers start dancing on the rugs. Season begins to cut the ‘two’ cake and Mr C Eckler helps serve everybody. It’s the best cake I ever tasted. I’m going to make one when I get back to 2020 and celebrate with Grandma. I think she would like it. Big Ben eats three pieces but nobody minds. It’s a very big cake.

  Big Ben asks me to go to a midnight feast but I say no because midnight feasts are forbidden and we’re not allowed in the boys’ chalet. He shows me all the food he’s smuggled from the barbecue. It’s mainly steak in white rolls. I think he’s still wanting to guess what it is, to get a ride in the Ferrari, so maybe they’ll do that at midnight. Even though they’ll be breaking the rules, I don’t blame them for having their own party. After all, we only celebrate our birthdays once every four years. Four years is a long time to wait before the next celebration. Why not make the 29th of February last as long as possible?