Piggies (9 page)

14 The Farmer
’
s Daughter

The next day, it rained heavily and Ben knew she wouldn’t be there. He went to the clearing, even so. It got him away from the menacing looks and whispers.

It was good to get away from them all. They had never trusted him, and now he had made it all so much worse.

The clearing seemed strange without Rachel and her pony. Ben went to sit on the fallen tree and instantly the dampness started to soak through his jeans.

He stayed there for a long time, but she didn’t show up.

~

Walter was waiting for him where the path cut through the barricade, fussing over newly planted honeysuckle.

“I’m sorry,” he said, softly.

Ben peered at him, puzzled by this change in attitude.

“You really didn’t understand, did you? It never occurred to us that you might talk to them, but then it never occurred to us that you didn’t appreciate the risks involved. There seem to be so many gaps in your memory.”

“I’m not from here,” said Ben.

“So you say.”

He remembered Old Harold’s explanation: worlds so similar and yet so different. Worlds so close, like the interlocking fingers of two hands. Somehow he had crossed from one hand to the other. If there were two worlds so close, there could be many more: each slightly different from the others. It was a daunting thought.

“The girl’s father will come after us if he knows she’s talked to you. He’ll be outraged. He’ll think she’s at risk – his daughter mixing with the wild folk!

“Some of the beasts are okay – or at least, we can deal with them and they leave us in peace. But McDonnell is different. He’s obsessed with the idea of purity: keeping the bloodlines separate. Arranged marriages, keeping the families pure, no mixing of races. If he knows his daughter has made friends with one of
us
...”

“She mentioned the Purity League,” Ben said. “Some group her father belongs to.”

“They’re fascists,” said Walter. “Racial fanatics. The man is an extremist, and what’s more, he’s a powerful extremist. From what we hear, McDonnell has been wanting to hunt us down for ages, but he can’t do it alone. He needs the support of his neighbours. Maybe he’d be able to use this to win some of them over: ferals getting close to their children – that would scare some of them, all right.”

“What’s wrong with us being different?” said Ben. “Why shouldn’t we be able to live our lives out here?”

“You may well ask,” said Walter. “To people like McDonnell we’re just
too
different. Our kind have their place and it’s not out here in the wild. He’d have us rounded up, treated like animals, or worse. McDonnell and his friends wouldn’t even accept that we’re basically the same species. Blood sharing goes back a long time in human history, but we all started out the same.”

“Doctor Macreedie said our resistance to sharing is like a disease – some kind of flaw in our genes.”

Walter shook his head. “It’s the other way round, Ben. People like McDonnell don’t like to admit it, but back in history there was a time when there were no beasts. Blood sharing was an abomination that hardly anyone practised. But then it spread like some kind of disease. That’s the best description I can come up with: a plague, passed from one person to another. And as with any disease, some are immune to it. Through history our numbers have steadily fallen. Now, as far as we can tell, there are only isolated groups scattered through Europe, holding out where we can. The fascist purity leagues would wipe us out like vermin if they could.”

“In my world,” said Ben, “there was no plague of blood-sharing. That’s where the difference is.”

“Whatever,” said Walter, clearly disappointed that Ben was still sticking to his story. “To an extremist like McDonnell, the resistant population are a freak of nature. We don’t fit into his neat view of how the world should be and so he’d think nothing of wiping us out just to tidy things up a bit.”

~

The next day was brighter, and there was a freshness about the vegetation that had been missing in the dry spell before the rain. Everything was coming back to life.

It seemed like a good sign and suddenly Ben felt optimistic.

In the afternoon he went to the clearing and waited but, again, Rachel didn’t turn up.

Was it the end of the school holidays already, he wondered? He had completely lost track of the passing days.

He sat on the fallen tree and tried to work it out. After a few minutes, he decided that it was still only late August.

So where was she?

Perhaps they had shared blood already... Perhaps they had tasted her memories and knew that she had been meeting a wild boy in the woods.

According to Rose-Marie there was still a week to go until the next feast day, but was she really sure? Ben remembered Rachel sharing blood with her two friends, Lenny and Stacker. Maybe that was how their secret had slipped out...

He left the clearing. On the west side there was a wide trail through the woods that Rachel called the Foxglove Ride. Ben knew that was the way she came from Tippham.

He set off along the ride.

He wasn’t going to do anything foolish, he was just going for a look. He could hide at the edge of the woods and look across the fields towards the farm. Maybe he would see her. Maybe he could attract her attention.

~

This was the way they had come on the night they had finally trusted him enough to take him on a farm raid: along the Foxglove Ride and then across the fields to the farm.

He remembered the journey back, helping Zeb with the tools they had taken from the barn. He wondered if they would ever trust him even that much again.

It had seemed so much farther in the darkness. Now, after about half an hour, he was approaching the woodland edge.

He saw her straight away. She was on her grey pony, trotting along the track that cut across a field towards the woods.

He should have been more patient. He should have waited for her. For a moment he considered retreating to the trees and cutting back to their usual meeting place. But that would take another half hour and she might not still be there by the time he arrived.

He stood at the edge of the ride, waiting in the shade of the trees.

“Piggy!” she said, a short time later. “What are you doing out here?”

“I came looking for you,” he said. “I wanted to see you, to talk.”

“Sounds serious,” she said, with mock solemnity. She jumped down from the pony’s back. “Tell me more.”

“I’m moving on,” he said. “I’m going.” He remembered their talks in the woods. He had felt trusted, but all the time she had been betraying him – betraying him with the memory traces carried in her blood.

“Going?” she said, losing her usual confident tone. “Where? Why?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll head south, I reckon. I came to the woods because I’d heard that there might be others like me here, but I was wrong. I have to keep looking. I can’t live on my own in the woods forever.”

For a moment he thought she believed him. Just for a moment.

And then he saw the look on her face: puzzled, hurt, angry.

“What’s changed, Piggy? Why are you lying to me?”

“It’s true,” he said. “I’m going.” He had to keep it up. He had to convince her somehow.

“You haven’t been living alone, Piggy. I know that. Oh, you’ve been careful, all right. You haven’t told me where you live, or how many of you there are, but you’re not on your own here, Piggy. And if you’re lying about that, you’re probably lying about leaving, too. So what’s happened to make you start lying to me?”

“You didn’t tell me the truth,” said Ben. “I asked you why your kind share blood and you only told me about sharing immunity. And the taste.”

They were standing toe to toe, so close that Ben could see the restless twitching of Rachel’s upper lip, the pearly top row of teeth it concealed.

“You didn’t tell me about the memories,” he went on. “You didn’t tell me that when you share blood you share memories, too. You tell me that your father would have people like me rounded up if he knew we were here. You claim that you’re not like him. But all the time, you have his blood in your veins. His memories. You must think like him in some ways, too, mustn’t you? All this time it amuses you to come to the woods and talk to a feral, but I bet you still think we should be rounded up – that we shouldn’t be living here at all!”

“That’s what you think, is it?” There were tears welling in her eyes: angry tears. “I’m not my father. I
am
different. So your wild friends have been telling you that we’re all the same, have they?

“It doesn’t work like that. Yes, we share memories. I can close my eyes and remember exactly what it was like to fight in the trenches in the Great War – Great Grandad was there. He made sure those memories were passed on so that we would all know how awful it was. But there are other memories that you don’t want to pass on. You can block it out, Piggy. You can learn to control the way memories imprint on your blood.

“Do you really think I’m just like my father? Do you think I’d come out here and meet you if that was true? Or is it really that you’re scared I’ll give you away? Is that it?”

Ben shrugged. He felt horribly guilty. He didn’t know who to believe. Rachel and Zeb were the only friends he had made in this mad world. Was this really her talking to him? Or was it the part of her that was her father, struggling to persuade him that it was okay to confide in her...?

“I don’t know,” he said. He never seemed to know.

“Let me show you,” she said suddenly. She reached for his hand and took it in hers. Her touch was warm. Somehow he had expected it to be cold, like that of a corpse.

“What do you mean?”

“Come back to the farm with me and I’ll show you exactly why you should trust me. Come on, Piggy. Let me prove it to you.”

“But...”

“Come on, Piggy. Just a quick look. It’ll be okay. We won’t see anyone and if we do I’ll just tell them you’re a new boy from Kirby.”

It was his best chance to convince her, he realised. If he went with her, then he would be in her confidence again and so, when he insisted that he was moving on, maybe she would believe him. He remembered how long it had taken Doctor Macreedie to be sure he was a feral. Surely he would be able to carry off a short visit to the farm without being found out?

Maybe by taking a risk like this he would convince the woodlanders that they could rely on him to do the right thing.

“Okay,” he said. “But I
am
moving on. I can’t stay around here.” And perhaps that was true, after all. Perhaps he would leave the community and try to find somewhere better.

But first, he had to go to the farm with Rachel.

~

They rode there on the pony.

“It’s okay,” said Rachel, leaning down to help Ben up behind her. “Champion’s strong enough to carry the two of us.”

She sat forward in the saddle and there was just enough room for Ben to sit behind her, his arms around her waist. Sitting like this, her neck was centimetres from his face and he could see that her skin wasn’t as flawless as he had thought. Its smoothness was punctuated by the neat white indentations where others had feasted. Some of the marks looked fresh.

She turned and smiled, deliberately baring her teeth. She smiled more broadly when she saw the startled look pass over his features. “I won’t bite,” she said. “I promise.”

He closed his eyes and concentrated on holding on tight, enjoying being so close to this maddening, exciting girl.

They emerged from the woods and headed along the track that cut through the fields to Tippham. No turning back now. To either side, the fields were golden with barley, ready for the harvest.

Over Rachel’s shoulder, Ben could see the silhouettes of the farm buildings up ahead. The farmhouse, itself, was a solid redbrick building and it was surrounded by big square-edged barns and a succession of the long, semi-circular livestock buildings like the community hall back in the woods. He remembered Zeb saying that they kept mainly pigs and cattle on this farm.

He wondered what it was that Rachel was going to show him.

They crossed the farmyard and rounded the corner of one of the barns. And there was a young man standing there, brushing down one of the other horses.

“Hi, Pete,” said Rachel, casually, as they rode past.

He looked up and grunted.

When they were out of earshot, Rachel reached down to squeeze Ben’s knee and whispered, “It’s okay. Pete looks after the horses. He didn’t notice a thing.”

A few seconds later they stopped. “Go on, then,” said Rachel. “You have to get off first.”

Reluctantly, Ben eased his grip on her waist. He swung his leg over the horse, then realised too late that he didn’t have anywhere to put his foot and tumbled in a heap on the ground.

Rachel sat back in the saddle, giggling. “Don’t they have horses where you come from, Piggy?” she asked him.

He clambered to his feet and brushed himself down. He felt angry with her, but suddenly he understood that she was the one in control now: he was on her territory, he was relying on her completely.

Why had he come here?

She jumped down from the saddle and led the pony into the stables. “We’ll leave him saddled,” she said, as she shut the half-door on the horse. “We can ride back into the woods in a few minutes.”

She looked sideways at him, and hesitated.

“So?” said Ben. “What is it? What have you brought me here to see?”

She took his hand and led him along one side of the stable block. At the end there was another small yard and on the far side the semi-circular end wall of one of the livestock buildings.

They crossed the yard.

There was a door set into the wall, but they didn’t go there. Instead, Rachel led him to a row of windows, set head-high in the wall.

As they approached, Ben heard the animal grunts he remembered from the night of the raid. “What’s in there?” he asked Rachel. “What is it?”

“Pigs,” she said, in a low voice. “Daddy’s a pig farmer.”

Ben looked through the first of the windows into the piggery. It was gloomy inside and the glass was filthy and smeared. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust and then, with a sudden shock, Ben understood why Rachel called him ‘Piggy’.