Where the World Turns Wild

by Nicola Penfold

  Birds of the World. I look down at the amazing winged creatures on the cover. It’s Bear’s favourite book, even though he knows every single bird already. But then Bear knows most nature things. Acorn, buttercup, conker, daisy. That’s Bear’s alphabet. The only one he’s ever bothered learning.

  He points to the kingfisher on his wall, flying over the meadow. “It’s on its way to the river, Ju. Remember? For fish.”

  “Yes,” I say and I stare at it, all blue and orange and cyan. I painted all kinds of birds, but it’s the kingfisher I’m most proud of. Tears mist up my eyes. “I’m going out. Annie Rose can read tonight, Bear.”

  Bear sits bolt upright. “Ju! You love kingfishers!”

  “I’m going out,” I repeat flatly.

  Annie Rose places her hands on Bear’s shoulders. “Let your sister go. I’ll tell you all about kingfishers. I saw one once, when I was very little. It must have been one of the last of all.”

  “Did it have a fish, Annie Rose?” Bear asks, wide-eyed, lying down to listen, even though he’s heard it a thousand times before.

  Annie Rose’s voice floats after me as I go to the kitchen table to pick up my sketchbook and pencil. “You do just mean the Palm House, Juniper?”

  “Of course,” I say. “I know the rules.”

  In the night, Bear comes into my bed. He’s half asleep, rubbing his eyes. Usually I go straight back to my dreams but tonight I can’t. I’m worried about Bear, but I’m worried about me too. I’m lying awake, listening to the generators and the city sirens that call out above everything whenever there’s any kind of alert. Someone breaking Curfew. Disturbance at the Buffer. Trouble in the Warren. You never really find out.

  “Camouflage,” Ms Endo said, when she put the tank of phasmids in my arms. “That’s what you could learn from them. You’ve got to keep your head down, Juniper. Blend in a bit. Has something happened you want to talk about?”

  “No,” I’d said, but I’d stopped there because how could I explain? It’s not one thing – it’s everything. Everything’s just gone on too long. Each long day at school like the one before and the one before that. Everything regulation. Everything the same.

  When it’s cold, they turn the heating up. When it’s hot, they put the air-con on. When it’s dark, all the city lights illuminate to make it exactly as bright as the day before, for the exact same period of time. Until switch-off. 8pm. Curfew. That’s when our days end. When the wail of the siren sounds. The klaxon.

  I know it’s autumn because it’s the end of October and I’m eight weeks into Year Eight, but there are no leaves to colour and fall and in our crowded, clean city the cold never really penetrates too much. The breaks go up if it’s windy, the canopies if it rains.

  And every morning I’m waking from my dreams of an altogether different kind of canopy of branches and leaves, and I think I can’t stand it any more. Another day in this city.

  Then I think of Annie Rose and the hard place inside me softens a little.

  When the Buffer went up, it was the Plant Keepers who kept a link to the outside. Most of the ReWilders had left the city by then. They’d taken their chances out there and most had already died. Not just from the disease. Hunger. Cold. Annie Rose said humans had forgotten what it was like to survive off-grid.

  A few of them found Ennerdale though and for a while the ReWilders kept up communication with the Plant Keepers. Supplies came in, supplies went out. Messages. And, in our case, children.

  But all that was a long time ago. Almost all the Plant Houses have closed now – there’s just ours on the South Edge and another one in the north. And you can’t bring things into the city these days. Barely even messages, but certainly not people. Everyone’s too scared.

  Over each district there looms the tallest building in the city. All grey and shiny, like the suits worn by Portia Steel’s officers. The City Institute.

  Annie Rose said Portia Steel opened it in person, in the days when she was still seen around, when she wasn’t just a photo on everyone’s walls. There was a big fancy ceremony and Steel cut the bow on a red ribbon. She said the Institute was her gift to our city.

  It’s a mental health hospital. A facility for people who’ve gone off the rails. People who are too angry, or too unpredictable, or just too sad. Adults mostly, but children too. The Institute is meant to help people get better, so they can better manage life in this place. Only that’s a big fat lie because no one comes out. No one ever comes out.

  Bear’s stirring beside me, tossing, turning. “No! Go away! Leave me alone!”

  “Shush,” I murmur. “Shush.” Like the wind, whispering to him.

  These are the dreams he comes into my bed to banish. He never talks about them. I don’t know whether they’re a rerun of his school day. I don’t know what he’s trying to push away as he kicks his legs and hits out with his hands.

  If I wake him, he’s more afraid than ever, so I put my arms round him and whisper him back to a better place. To when he was little, out there with Mum. She would have known what to do.

  Bear drags his feet all the way to school.

  “Come on, Bear, you’re faster than this. You can run like the wind, remember?”

  “I won’t go, Ju!”

  “You have to, Bear. Every kid has to go to school. It’s the rules.”

  “It’s a stupid rule. I won’t. I won’t go!”

  He’s shouting loudly. We’re only a block away from school and the pavements are full of kids.

  “Come on, Bear, it’s just a few hours. And it’s Friday. It’s the weekend tomorrow. Maybe you can tell Ms Jester about the Sticks. Maybe she’ll let you draw one. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Bear says, defiant. “I won’t go, Ju.”

  “Please, Bear,” I say, changing tactics. “Do it for me. I need you to, Bear.”

  I can hear the whispering around us. I think I even hear the chant – that hateful verse they’ve made up about him. There was one about me too, once.

  “Juniper Green, Juniper Green.

  She’s so crazy, I think she’s going to

  Scream.”

  They don’t say it any more – I think they’ve forgotten it – but sometimes I recite the words in my head. Like they’ve become this truth. This suppressed scream that one of these days is going to leak out of me.

  “Please, Bear.”

  He hates it when I plead with him. He doesn’t want to make me sad. Tears well in his eyes and another rhyme starts around him.

  “Cry baby Bear,

  Crying for his lair.”

  I flash my head, angry – but the kids who were singing look away, or break into a run. Only a few older ones hold my gaze – curious, amused.

  “Shall we show them how fast we can run?” I say, making my voice loud so the challenge is public.

  Bear wipes his sleeve against his face and a spark of defiance dances into his eyes. “Sprint?” he says.

  “Tear,” I answer, and we hold hands and run past them, fastest of all. No late marks today.

  I’m called to Ms Endo’s office right after assembly. There are about a dozen other kids there. There’s just one other Year Eight – a girl, Britta.

  Etienne’s here too, and it’s seeing him that makes me realize what everyone has in common. We’ve all been given the Sticks. I’m just the latest recruit.

  Ms Endo smiles at me. “We have a treat in store for you today, Juniper. We’re going to get leaves for the stick insects.”

  The atmosphere in the room is kind of gleeful. On a table is a box and the other students are fingering its items – shells and fossils, pinecones and dried seed heads, feathers and animal bones. It’s all contraband. Bear’s talked about it. He says Ms Endo calls them her treasures.

  “The minibus will be here in ten minutes,” Ms Endo says. “I’ve just got to check something at the Infants, then we’re good to go. Please make Juniper feel welcome.”

  The other kids glan
ce at me, disinterested. Only Etienne looks up. Etienne who spoke my name for the first time in months yesterday.

  He hands me a skull, like some kind of silent greeting. I know from the books Bear pores over at home that it’s a bird skull. A bird of prey. A raptor, Bear would say. I love the idea of these creatures dancing in the sky, scouring the earth, ready to swoop. For the kill. But the bone in my hand only makes me sad. The deep round sockets where the eyes would have been and the hooked beak, blunted now, that could once tear through flesh.

  “Hi,” I say awkwardly.

  Etienne lives upstairs in our block. He used to come down to play in our glasshouse but stopped when he went up to secondary school a year before me. Something changed. He started saying our games were kids’ stuff.

  Plus he got into trouble at school. He beat up a boy in his class. He beat him really bad. Hospital bad. Everyone thought that was it for Etienne – exclusion, the Institute – but he’s still here, kicking around. It’s probably because of his mum. She’s high up in the city design department, programming the fractals they plaster the city with. The never-ending patterns, which are the same whether you’re looking at one tiny section or a whole wall.

  Etienne gives a low whistle. “That was some essay, Juniper Green.”

  I pull a face. “I didn’t think you were allowed in assembly?”

  “They let me in for that one. A Juniper special.”

  My cheeks rash. “Yeah, well. You heard it. You can hate me now too.”

  “Hate you?” Etienne actually looks surprised. “Nah. That’s just Abbott.”

  “You heard what the other kids were saying.”

  “Not all of them.” Etienne shrugs. “You know how Abbott stokes them up. Anyway, you’ll be all right with us. The Remedials. There’re no big Abbott fans here.”

  Everyone’s listening now. A couple of the others pull faces and groan, and one girl, Serena from Year Ten, sticks two fingers down her throat and pretends to gag. Then with the same two fingers she points up to where Abbott’s office would be. “Bang, bang,” she says all slow and deliberate. She winks at me.

  My eyes flit up to the corners of the room and Etienne laughs. “Don’t worry. There aren’t any cameras here. Ms Endo makes sure of it.”

  “So where do we go for the leaves?” I ask, switching subject.

  Etienne’s face lights up. “The North Edge.”

  “The Plant House?” I say, surprised, and something stirs inside me because it’s all the way across the city where I’ve never been before.

  Etienne nods. “They have a special licence to grow leaves for phasmids. Actually, I guess it’s not only for the phasmids, it’s some Future Science thing. Stick leaves are why Ms Endo got us in there. But it’s weird we’re going today. It wasn’t meant to be for a couple of weeks. How’s your glasshouse doing, Juniper?”

  I shrug. “It keeps me almost sane.”

  “Does it?” Etienne asks, a weird longing in his voice.

  “Annie Rose says the North Edge is like a palace!”

  Etienne grins. “Oh, it’s way better than that.”

  On the bus, everyone takes a double seat for themselves so they can be by the window. It’s a novelty. For us kids anyway.

  The grown-ups are probably all fed up of the daily commute across the city – the routes to the Farms or the Park. They sound like nice places to work – farms, park – but they’re not.

  The Farms are pesticide and fertilizer central and farmhands spend their whole day in Hazmat suits, trying to get fruit and vegetables and cereals to grow in the worn-out soil they have left. The Eco Park is the city dump, where all the rubbish gets sent for sorting. We don’t have the raw materials to be fussy any more. If something can be melted down and used again, that’s what happens.

  You can see the Park workers now, scurrying along the pavement, one after another after another, like the ant trails we read about in one of our books.

  “Mum,” a wavering voice calls. It’s Britta. She’s pressing her fingers against the window of the bus, staring at a woman at the back of one of the lines.

  The kids clamour on the glass to get her mum’s attention. Britta doesn’t. She just watches. Her mum’s head hanging low, her back all stooped.

  I went to Britta’s flat once. Before Bear came and reminded everyone where I came from and all the kids started keeping their distance. It was Britta’s eighth birthday. Her mum and dad had arranged a treasure hunt and laid clues through all the rooms of their flat. I found the treasure at the end and it was a box of chocolates for us to share.

  Britta’s mum wasn’t stooped then. I remember her throwing back her head, laughing at the chocolate round our faces. “You’ve all got extra smiles today. You must be extra happy!” She looked extra happy too.

  I guess the Eco Park takes happiness away pretty fast. Plus Britta’s dad isn’t around any more. He got admitted to the Institute. It was the talk of the school, until another person was admitted. Someone else’s parent.

  “Oi! Tick truck,” one of the boys calls, and I grab on to the seat in front as everyone moves to the other side of the bus and starts banging against the windows again, only louder this time.

  It’s Glyphosate Patrol day. The trucks are out.

  No place to hide! That’s their motto and the vans have this ugly great tick on the side. Just so we remember what we’re scared of. They hunt down every single bit of green – each stray blade of grass or seedling that’s somehow resisted the defences and taken root in the city’s streets – and they spray, in their unwieldy white suits and boots. Like misplaced moon men.

  Etienne’s on the seat in front of me, his forehead pressed against the glass. He’s so still I’d figured he was sleeping, but occasionally a noise erupts from him. A shudder. For one awful moment I think he’s crying, but then it hits me. It’s laughter. He’s laughing at them. At the Glyphosate Patrol. Why would he do that?

  The North Edge glasshouse must be five times the size of our Palm House. Everyone goes quiet as we enter and I go quietest of all. It’s like my dreams made real. There are way more plants than we grow and they’re wilder, rampant. Leaves like hearts spread up the walls and they’re wet – covered in tiny drops of water that glisten in the sunlight that’s spilling in from the domed glass roof.

  The others know the drill already. They’ve each brought with them a small plastic box and they disappear off in different directions, a skip in their step.

  The Keeper heads over to introduce himself. He’s called Sam and he looks as old as Annie Rose. Older. What wisps of hair he has left are pure white.

  “So who’s our new recruit?” he asks and Ms Endo says my name. My full name. Juniper Berry Green.

  Sam starts at this. I know I’m not imagining it as there’s something about Ms Endo’s manner too, something expectant. She’s prompting him. “Juniper’s grandmother, Annie Rose Green, tends the old Palm House on the South Edge.”

  “Annie Rose Green,” Sam says, his forehead furrowed. “We used to know each other. You’re her granddaughter? But Marian left?”

  “Yes.” I shift on my feet at Mum’s name and Sam’s scrutiny, and because Etienne is standing nearby, listening. “She ran away.”

  “I remember. Her and that boy. Sebastian wasn’t it?”

  I nod, my cheeks flushing. Everyone knows that bit. Mum ran off with a boy, only Mum got all the blame because the boy, Sebastian, was the son of one of Steel’s favourite henchmen. People said Mum corrupted Sebastian, that she led him astray. They said she preyed on him because she found out what his blood test had shown.

  Sam’s staring at me strangely. “Marian made it then? She survived out there?”

  I nod, proud suddenly. Because Mum did survive and I’m proof of it.

  “She sent you back?” Sam looks puzzled and like he’s about to ask something else, but Etienne gets in first.

  “Can I show Juniper round?”

  “You won’t forget anything?”

 
; “Of course not,” Etienne says, pulling a face.

  “Don’t forget your box,” Sam says, still looking at me curiously but handing me the same white box the others have. “Pick wisely. You have a good guide there.”

  Etienne blushes. “This way, Juniper!”

  “The heart-shaped leaves are ivy. The Sticks love it,” Etienne tells me as I watch his fingers prise off a leaf. “Glyphosate Patrol would have a fit wouldn’t they, if they could see all this?”

  I look at him and we burst into a fit of giggles.

  It feels wrong at first, to break off leaves, but there’s no shortage here. The ivy is twined round metal pillars that support the roof, and there are strands twisting all the way to the top and at our feet too – stretching out along the walkways.

  “It’s like a jungle. Bear would love this.”

  “You haven’t seen the best bit yet,” Etienne says and leads me on, leads me deeper. Where the leaves tangle together and some kind of fruit hangs from the stems.

  My hands reach out but something pierces my finger and there’s a bright speck of blood. “Ouch!”

  Etienne pulls me back. “Careful! I should’ve warned you. There are thorns.” He’s right. The plant is armed – ribbed with needles or spikes.

  I look around to see if anyone else saw, embarrassed to have been got by a plant. I grew up with cacti. I know how to be careful. But no one’s about.

  “It’s a berry?” I ask, thinking of the pictures on the jam pots in our kitchen. We barely ever see fresh fruit. It’s grown out in the Farms, but by the time we see it it’s so heavily processed it barely resembles the thing that actually grew.

  “They’re blackberries,” Etienne says and now it’s him looking around surreptitiously. “Try one.”

  I know instinctively which to take. There are firm, tight green ones and red ones like blood, but my hand reaches for the darkest of all. I tease it from its stem and it explodes in my mouth, all sweet and tart together.

  “Good, huh?” Etienne says.

  “It’s amazing! I want another! I want them all!”