Siberia (5 page)

“You sound sensible,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“They call me Rain. What’s yours?”

“Sloe.”

He choked on his mouthful, and spluttered, “You’re a real joker, you are.”

“It’s S-l-o-e, not S-l-o-w. It’s the fruit of a wild blossom tree, people put it in the vodka where I come from. But I did choose it for the double meaning. I reckoned, if I have to have a bad leg, I might as well get some fun out of it.”

“No blossom trees around, where I come from,” said Rain, grinning. “It’s desert. Never rains. You got any friends in this dump, Sloe?”

“I don’t want friends,” I said, determined to sound tough.

My only friend was Mama, and I missed her terribly, but I wasn’t going to tell a stranger that. “Friends are fake. I know what happens in school. If you have anything good, a bigger kid takes it. If you get good marks, everyone hates you, and copies your work and scribbles on it. Nobody stands up for anyone else, and only tell-tales have power.”

“You’re dead right.”

Then we didn’t dare talk anymore, because the hall had gone quiet, and the white-coated Cats were prowling. When dinner was over I dodged the girls’ warden and followed Rain’s line, hidden in the surging crowd. I didn’t want him to see that I was interested, but I wanted to know where he’d gone. . . . At last I saw his trail of boy Bugs disappear through a door. Their warden swept after them and locked it behind her. I was left stranded, far from the corridors I knew.

“What are you doing, Bug?” said a passing senior. “This is the boys’ side.”

“My friend went through there. What’s through there?”

The big teenager looked at the notice on the door, and looked at me.

“That says
Permanent Boarders
, kid. Can’t you read? That’s where they keep the lost souls who don’t have homes to go to. They live here all the year round, until they die and get rendered down for stew and fertilizer.”

“I can read,” I said. “I didn’t know what it meant.”

“Are
you
permanent?”

I shook my head.

“Then you can’t have a Permanent for a friend. We don’t do that.”

But I was already backing away, horrified. Never to go home! I didn’t want to know anyone in who was in such terrible trouble. Trouble rubs off. . . .

I made friends with Rain, later, when everything had changed.

The first week was very, very hard. The days were bad enough, but the nights were terrible. I had to lie in my cold narrow bed, surrounded by strangers. I wanted my mama desperately but
I must not cry.
Anyone could tell that if you showed your feelings in a place like this, you would be done for.

I didn’t know if I could survive. Then, after a week, Rose turned up, and was put into my class. She’d been staying in the town with her mother and her mother’s important friend: having a shopping spree. Her uniform was made to measure. Her underwear was
out of this world
compared to what the rest of us had to wear. She’d also got herself kitted out with mouthwatering pencils, and colored pens, and a geometry set. I was surprised she wanted to be friends with me, but I wasn’t too proud to go along with it. Better the devil you know, I thought. Rose can’t pull any surprises.

And it got better. In ways the fact that we had no contact with our families made the loneliness easier to bear. You concentrated on the present. I joined the running club for the disabled, because I was allowed to take my brace off when I went running. The physiotherapy teacher said it would do me good. I didn’t think so at first, but then I could
feel
myself getting stronger. At night I’d lie in my dormitory bed, that was so narrow you had to be careful about turning over, and tell myself, Mama is all right, she’s sleeping now, cozy and warm in our cupboard-bed. . . . If I was feeling strong, I would write imaginary letters to her in my head.

I’m all right, Mama. I’m going to be good and do well and make you proud. Until next summer. I love you. . . .

Winter closed in, more quickly than at home. Snow poured out of the sky, until the pillars that supported the buildings were buried. The dormitory was freezing at night, and the night warden would patrol, stripping back the blankets suddenly, to make sure we weren’t cuddling with each other, or sleeping in our nice thick uniforms (both of which were strictly forbidden). By the midwinter break—when none of us left school, we just had boring activities instead of lessons. . . . I could run twice round the snow-packed playing fields before I collapsed. I didn’t look good, but I could cover the ground. We were allowed to stop for a breather near the main gates, and I noticed, while jumping on the spot to keep warm, that I could see a tree: one skinny, crooked tree, away down the road toward the town. It was bare and iced up now, but it would have buds. It would have leaves, unfurling in the sun: and when those skinny branches were hidden by a green cloud, it would be time for me to go home.

One day in February my class had a science lesson, in the laboratories. This was a privilege that we’d been waiting for, but the laboratory was a disappointment. It already looked run-down; there was no electricity, and there were broken hospital notices that no one had removed. I was still excited, because I knew my mama and dadda had been scientists, when we lived in the city. She’d taught me interesting scientific things (I didn’t count the Lindquists, which I thought were purely magic); and I was looking forward to showing off my knowledge.

I felt important. No other Bug had a
right
to be in here, but I did!

We were divided into groups, one group to each bench. I was with Rose, and our friends: Tottie—a girl so small she only came up to my elbow, but she had a fierce temper; a boy called Ifrahim (not everybody had plain names, it was about half and half); a boy called Lavrenty; a girl called Bird, who had homemade tattoos all over her face; Bird’s friend Miriam; and a girl who wasn’t one of us, who’d been dumped on us by the teacher. We had a tray of different materials. We were supposed to write whether we predicted they would burn, and then wait for our turn to use the Bunsen burner and try and burn them. We set ourselves up, with our goggles, and our beaker, and our spatula and our notebook, and I wrote down what we thought would happen.

Wood would burn, and a stone wouldn’t burn.

Water wouldn’t burn, and metal wouldn’t burn.

I felt all this was beneath me. I said that
anything
would burn if you made it hot enough, even rock or steel, but nobody agreed. Bird said I was daft. I suppose she was right: a Bunsen burner isn’t a volcano. . . . It wasn’t like one of Mr. Snory’s lessons. Nobody messed around in class, at New Dawn. The punishments they gave you were too horrible. But the science teacher didn’t mind us talking, if it was about our work.

Tottie said that earth would cook, like meat.

“But cooking is the opposite of burning,” protested Lavrenty. “Cooking is so you can eat things. If something’s burned, you can’t eat it.”

“Burning is when you cook something too much,” said the girl we didn’t know. “How can it be too much,
and
the opposite?”

“Smarty pants,” said Tottie, “Sloe, you write down what I said.”

Ifrahim sniffed the earth sample. “You know what? I bet this is the meat. This is school dinner meat before they cook it.”

The meat was supposed to be a luxury. It wasn’t too bad once you knew to bite and swallow, never try to chew: but it
worried
us. Some people said it was dead bodies. You died here, you got minced and served in slices. Others believed it was our poo, collected from the toilets and processed in a big vat.

“Nah,” said Laventry. “All meat comes from factories.”

“Meat products didn’t always come from factories,” I announced. “They were once made from raw animal flesh.”

“Eeeughgh!”

“You mean, vermin like rats and cats?”

“Only bigger. They were called cows, pigs, sheep. I used to have toy ones.”

“You’re lying,” said the girl who wasn’t one of us, looking sick. “That’s disgusting, imagine eating a rat.”

She must have come from a very easy Settlement. . . . Bird jeered at her. “Ho, softie. You’d eat a rat if you were hungry. And you’d like it.”

“People ate wild animals too,” I said, getting carried away. “That’s the reason why they’re extinct, besides habitat loss. My mama told me, and she’s a scientist.”

“Oh, you big liar. You don’t even know what those fancy words mean.”

“Nyah,” said Bird, “your mam’s not a
scientist.
You’re the same as us, and your mam’s a convict and your dad was hung.”

It was an ordinary New Dawn insult, but I wasn’t as tough as I pretended. I was stabbed by the thought of Dadda, whose face I could not remember, and the noose going round his neck. I dared not show my pain, so I looked as proud as I knew how. “She’s a convict
now.
She got sent down because Dadda did something against the government. But she’s still a scientist, it doesn’t go away. She taught me about the earth going round the sun, and dinosaurs, and—”

I noticed they’d gone quiet. I looked around, and our teacher was standing there. He was looking at me, with a very shocked expression. I felt confused. What had I said? Had I been saying something rude, or cheeky?

“Hello, Mr. Pachenko,” said Rose, brightly. “Sloe was telling us about her mother, who taught her about the earth going round the sun, and—”

“Stop chattering and get on with your work,” snapped Mr. Pachenko.

He went away. I saw the flash of disappointment in Rose’s green eyes, and felt I’d scored a point. I would have bet she’d seen Mr. Pachenko coming over, and hadn’t warned me because she’d hoped I was going to get into trouble. Rose was like that: she had a mean streak a mile wide. But this time she’d failed.

A week later I was called out of class and taken to the principal’s office.

I was terrified. I couldn’t think what I had done, but I knew it made no difference. Once you were taken to the principal’s office you were going to get punished: and it would be something horrific. I was afraid I’d get the Box. Stronger children than me had been known to die, after they’d spent a day or a night in the Box. The warden walked ahead, her keys jangling. Behind me walked two guards with guns in the holsters at their waists: which was really, really scary. What could I possibly have done that was
so bad,
without knowing it? The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I imagined the men dragging me, kicking and screaming, to the coffin of cold darkness, and locking me in for hours, for a whole day. I was so afraid I thought of running: so they’d have to shoot me and get it over with.

The warden opened a door, took my arm, and pushed me forward.

There was a thick, patterned rug on the floor, that went all the way into the corners. The room was warm and there was a bright lamp, dispelling the gloom of a murky February afternoon. All I could see was the pattern on the rug. I
couldn’t
raise my eyes. The warden gave me another push, and I stumbled forward.

“So this is Sloe.”

“Look at Madam Principal,” said the warden sternly. “Stand up straight!”

I stood up straight. I saw a tall, slim woman in a tailored uniform. I had seen the principal only once before—a faraway figure, across a sea of heads in student caps, at the Winter Break General Assembly. I’d never expected to get any closer. Smiling, she came from behind her desk and led me by the hand to a stool in front of an easy chair near the stove. I wondered what on earth was going on. A warden, in a smarter white coat from the one who’d brought me, set a tray on a little table.

I could feel the armed guards, there behind me.

“Now, Sloe, don’t be afraid. You aren’t going to be punished, you haven’t done anything wrong. I’d like to talk to you about your mother.”

I nodded.

“Say ‘Yes, Madam Principal,’” snapped the warden who’d brought me.

“Yes, Madam Principal,” I whispered, reeling with shock and fear, trying not to let my voice shake, trying not to show any feelings. What had happened to my mama? The red light on the wall behind Madam Principal’s desk meant everything in here was being recorded. I stared at the tray, which held a glass of milk, a plate of yellow slices of cake, and a glass dish heaped with glistening purple jam. What were the treats for, if I was here to be given bad news? It made no sense.

“It’s been reported that you have confessed to your play-mates that your mother taught science, when you were living with her in the Settlements. Is that true, Sloe?”

Nothing had happened. Mama was safe. I almost fainted with relief.

“Do you like cake?” suggested the principal. “A little jam wouldn’t go amiss?”

The deal was clear. I must talk about Mama or I would get nothing. I had been hungry every day of my life, for as long as I could remember. I was hungry now. They could have stabbed me with red-hot pokers, and I would never,
never
have told anyone about the Lindquists, but I thought hard, and I could see no harm in what the principal was asking. Of course Mama had taught me. There was nothing wrong in that. She’d only taught me things everybody at New Dawn was learning.

“What kind of things did she teach?” coaxed the kindly voice.

My hand reached out. “Well, she didn’t teach anyone but me, but she told me oh, lots of things. About the planets, and the moon and tides, and how the winters got so cold, and how once there were dinosaurs.”

“Yes, yes,” said the principal, smiling sadly.

I didn’t understand. Mama had always said she would explain things when I was older. She had never told me why we were in the Settlement. I didn’t know that what Dadda had done wrong had anything to do with science. I’d never thought about it, never put two and two together. . . . I was just a little girl, and I believed New Dawn was different, in spite of the guards and the wardens. I really believed I was being given a chance. Mama had taught me to respect teachers, even Miss Malik. I never suspected that a head teacher would get a little girl to betray her own mother.

I ate two pieces of cake, with a big spoonful of jam spread on each. I couldn’t believe how good it tasted. I drank my milk: and I answered the questions. Then I was escorted to my next class and sent to my desk. My friends and enemies stared as much as they dared, their brains frying with curiosity, amazed that I’d come back alive. Rose and Bird and Tottie jumped on me, the first moment they had a chance.