The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (2 page)

He was almost upon her when she came to the stream. Dana was never sure if it was rightly a stream or a river, or something between the two. It meandered several times around this part of the wood, and she made straight for where she knew a fallen tree bridged it. Dana was up through the gap in the roots and over the tree before the boy knew what was happening. She scrambled over the slimy bark with the water several feet below her, glad she always wore sensible shoes and not the ridiculous bricks Pauline had once suggested she strap to her feet in order to fit in better with the girls at school.

The tree held up the boy, and Dana slackened her pace, panic momentarily giving way to fatigue, but then she blundered into an impenetrable bank of brambles and had to go around, and the boy started gaining on her again. The water doubled back on itself somewhere around here, and upstream of a mini-waterfall it was possible to jump over. Dana could remember a time when the waterfall had been much farther downstream. It had slowly eroded its way up, eating a six-foot gorge backwards into the clayey soil in a process she had learnt about in Geography. She could hear the rush of the falling water now, and she headed for the place where she could cross.

She was running full tilt, and with all the ferns and brambles obscuring it she nearly fell into the gorge. She struggled to stop in time and found herself staring down into a muddy torrent six feet below, scattered with stones, broken plants, and lumps of clay. The waterfall had moved back again― the recent rains must have precipitated it. The water below looked deep and fast, swollen by the rain, and Dana imagined someone falling from such a height could easily break a leg, or worse. She couldn’t remember how far downstream one would have to walk before there would come a place where it was possible to climb out. When she looked upstream, she couldn’t see where the waterfall had moved to, just the gorge going on until the stream’s course took it out of view.

She would have to go upstream and find a place to cross. When she turned, the boy was running straight towards her, barging through brambles with his elbows.

“Hey,
Epsilon
!”

Dana turned back and launched herself into a running jump. The muddy gully and the churning brown waters flew past below her. She landed heavily in the wet mud on the other side, bending her knees as she came down and grappling with a tree for stability.

When she looked behind, the boy was standing on the other bank. He stared down at the stream below, and back up at her.

Dana began to run up the bank. Slender trees grew vertically from it, impervious to the gradient, and she grabbed at the trunks to speed her ascent. A number of times she slowed to throw a hurried glance over her shoulder, just to check the boy had not jumped and continued the pursuit, but he hadn’t. She crested the bank and came out onto the footpath through the woods. She blocked out the raw feeling in her throat, the burning in the muscles of her legs, and the cramp in her side, and kept up a running pace until she was out of the woods and on the path running alongside a cornfield. The path was always strewn with dog turds, and Dana stepped in at least two, preoccupied with checking behind rather than in front where she was going.

Epsilon
… it was only Ivor who had called her that. It was the name he’d given her before she was born, a label for an experiment…

The path ended with a short alley between a house and a backyard, before leading onto the grassed playing field. Dana shuffled her feet in the grass in an attempt to wipe the dogpoo off her shoes. She looked at her watch: three minutes to six. She made the last fifty yards across the field and over the street to Pauline and Graeme’s house at a run.

Dana rushed into the front porch and closed the door behind her. The hallway was dark and familiar-smelling. Relief enveloped her. Safe, at least until tomorrow. She dumped her bag and coat on the hall floor.

Graeme’s voice came from the living room. “I expect she’ll be back soon,” he was saying. “After all, she always wants to watch to see if Demented Badger Woman is on the news. She’s
obsessed
with that woman.”

A hot prickly feeling crawled up the back of Dana’s neck. Demented Badger Woman was a mildly unkind name that Graeme called Jananin Blake― because she had black hair that had gone grey at the temples, which he’d compared to the stripes on a badger’s face.

“I expect she’ll grow out of it,” said Pauline’s voice. “And anyway, surely a scientist and a political speaker is a much better model for a girl than a singer or a footballer.” Her voice became louder as the door to the living room opened. Graeme started when he saw Dana. “Oh, hello, Dana, we didn’t hear you come in. You’re just in time to watch the news.”

“I don’t want to watch the news!” snapped Dana, indignant. “And I’m not
obsessed
!”

“
Dana
!” Pauline exclaimed when she appeared behind Graeme. Dana looked at the floor behind her, at grubby brown smudges on the carpet where she’d trodden. Great. A shit end to a shit day, and even now she was back home she couldn’t escape from people having a go at her. Dana ran upstairs to her room, ignoring Pauline’s shout for her to take her shoes off, and slammed the door. She pulled off her dirty, stinking shoes without untying the laces and threw herself down on the bed. It felt like a clockwork mechanism inside her had been wound too tight. She hated school, she hated dog owners who didn’t clean up, and she hated not being able to do something as straightforward as watching the news without Graeme and Pauline guessing at her motive and forming judgements on her. She wished, as she often did, that she could go and stay with Jananin in Inverness and not have to go to school any more. She wished she could tell everyone that Jananin was her real mother and not have to carry the secret around with her any longer, but she had promised Jananin she would not, and no-one would believe her anyway.

There came a knock on the door. “Dana,” said Graeme’s voice. “We’re sorry for talking about you. Did you have a bad day?”

Dana didn’t answer him.

“What are you doing in there?”

Dana turned her head out of her pillow, to look at the desk and at the biscuit tin― oneof the fancy ones you get biscuits in for special occasions, with a gold oak leaf pattern on it― that she kept paints and modelling glue in. The overtightened cog inside her slackened a little. She took a deep breath before answering. “I’m making a Hawker Hurricane.”

This game had been started by Dana’s therapist, who had come up with ‘strategies’ to help her deal with stress and overwhelming emotions. If Dana had to talk about her emotions, thinking about it only made them even worse, so the therapist had suggested she go somewhere quiet and do something she enjoyed that took up all her concentration. Dana had come up with making Airfix models as an idea for this, so after that meeting, whenever she was feeling overwhelmed she would sit at her desk in her room with the door shut, and paint and glue Airfix models until she felt in control again. If Graeme or Pauline asked her what she was doing, and she told them she was making Airfix models, they were to leave her alone and not disturb her.

Only it had evolved into a kind of code, a private joke. Graeme would ask her what she was doing, and she would say she was making a World War II aircraft based on its size as a comparison to how she was feeling. If she was making a Supermarine Spitfire, then she was just a little bit stressed and would feel better soon. On the other hand, if she was making an Avro Lancaster, it meant she felt really overwhelmed and wouldn’t come down for the rest of the day. It meant she could communicate more specifically how bad she felt without either of them losing face or Dana having to think or talk about her emotions.

“Oh, that’s nice. We’ve got steak for dinner.”

“Don’t want any,” said Dana.

“All right, I’ll keep some for you. You come out when you’re feeling better.”

Dana heard Graeme go downstairs. She put her hand in her pocket and held Ivor’s watch. A hot ache filled her eyes and nose.

She sat up and swung her legs down from the bed, and concentrated on the sensation of the carpet under her feet. After breathing in and out a few times, she got up and went to the desk. Dana arranged the fuses in her pencil tin in ascending order of amperage, standing on their ends on the shelf above the desk. She looked at the ordered calm of the regular, coloured writing on the white middles, and then she opened the biscuit tin and found the pot of enamel paint that was the right colour for painting a Wellington bomber. As she concentrated on reproducing the camouflage patterns on the kit’s box, it became easier not to think about what had happened today. By the time she’d finished, it seemed the surrounding room separated her from the boy following her and Pauline and Graeme’s disapproval, as though they had become distant.

She heard Graeme’s footsteps coming upstairs as she was putting the paint away. He knocked on the door.

“Dana, can I come in?”

“If you want,” said Dana nonchalantly. “It’s your house.”

Graeme came in and sat down on Dana’s bed. Dana sat at her desk and put the fuse tin away in the drawer without looking at him.

“It’s your house now as well,” he said gently. “I’m sorry you came in and heard the end of that conversation we were having. We didn’t mean it to sound like what you heard. And besides, it was wrong of us to talk like that. What you like is your choice, and not ours, and not our business to talk about.”

Dana shrugged.

“Pauline’s gone out with some people from work. Would you like to come downstairs and have dinner with me?”

“All right, then.”

“I recorded the news. If you like, we could watch that too.”

“Yes please, Graeme.”

Downstairs, Cale was sitting at the dining room table, eating tapioca pudding. Propped up in front of him was one of his music books with his b’s and q’s written in it. Cale was disinterested in anything musical and refused to play music for anyone. All he did was work out Pi, convert the digits of it into notes, and write them in the book and then play the tuneless string of keys they translated into on his keyboard. He was still working through the decimal places, and Pi in C Major as Graeme called it had built up into six volumes.

Graeme brought his and Dana’s dinner plates into the living room so that they could eat off their laps. Dana started to eat while he sorted out the recorder.

They both sat and ate in silence while the headlines ran. First was another report about electricity and nuclear powerplants, which had featured often on the news recently. Jananin wasn’t on it, and Dana was a bit disappointed as Jananin was very keen on nuclear powerplants and often would argue about them in public debates. But they did show a film of a site on Lewis — Dana didn’t recognise where, but the scenery was familiar to her — where they were proposing to build a new one.

The next report showed a picture of a graveyard, and Dana didn’t pay much attention to the introduction to it.

“...are shocked and disturbed by the desecration of the grave of a young victim of the First of December London Compton bombing. The deceased, a girl estimated to be about twelve years old and whose identity was never discovered, died from heart failure in the Information Terrorism attack over two years ago.”

Dana stopped chewing and stared at the television. It had to be Alpha. No other girls had died in the Compton bomb blast.

“The girl’s grave was dug up, and police say the coffin appears to have been tampered with, but that the body remains intact. They can only conclude this is some kind of tasteless joke.”

“It’s horrible, isn’t it?” Graeme must have noticed something in Dana’s demeanour. “She was just a girl. They never even found out who she was, and now someone’s done that.”

Dana couldn’t pay attention to the remainder of the news — Jananin wasn’t on it anyway, and the realisation that the girl whose grave had been dug up was Alpha shocked her and sent her mind working through a chain of questions. The first reason she could think of for Alpha being dug up was that someone had worked out how to bring her back to life, but she immediately dismissed that as irrational. Alpha had been dead far too long. So what had the news said? That the coffin had been dug up, but that nothing had been removed. Surely after this time, all that would be left of Alpha’s body would be bones, and this meant that the police, or whoever dealt with cases like this, had opened the coffin and found what they expected to find, bones, and counted them all and compared them with an inventory of the bones in a human body and found nothing amiss.

But what if something had been stolen, something they hadn’t expected to be there: Alpha’s transceiver, the same as the one implanted in Dana’s brain. If it had been taken, the police who examined the remains wouldn’t know, because they’d have no reason to expect it to be there.

Dana began carefully, “Graeme, you know when Bunce was dead?”

Bunce had been a hamster whom Pauline had brought home one day. Dana had thought it a remarkably uninteresting little animal. For nearly three years it had eaten and drunk and slept and made the living room smell bad. It had a cage with transparent pipes coming out of it so it could climb around in them, and it had always done its business in the pipes, and that made it smell even worse. Pauline kept having to muck it out because no-one else wanted to. Towards the end of the last year, it had become thin and ratlike and balding, and one morning Dana had found it lying on its back in the bottom of its cage, legs in the air like when animals in cartoons are dead, lips pulled back over its ugly yellow teeth.

So Pauline and Graeme had a funeral for Bunce in the back garden, and Dana went with Graeme and Cale to the garden centre to choose a plant to grow on Bunce’s grave, because Graeme said they could remember Bunce by the plant, and Bunce would turn into fertiliser in the ground and be good for the plant. Dana chose a plant with green and brown leaves called
Oxalis
, and Bunce must have made really good fertiliser, because nearly a year later there were
Oxalises
growing all over the garden and in the lawn, so that Pauline and Graeme uprooted them and hid them in the compost heap when they thought Dana wasn’t looking.