The Testament of Jessie Lamb (3 page)

‘Because–I don't know.'

‘Why are you thinking about whoever did it? They're a monster–they're evil, they should have holes drilled in
their
brain and needles stuck all over them and boiling wax poured in!' Sal wiped the back of her hand across her eyes. ‘I don't know why you care about who did it.'

‘I'm sorry. Shall I make some cocoa?' Sal likes cocoa, we always used to have it at her house. When we went down to the kitchen Sammy got excited and started barking, and we ended up throwing the ball for him in the garden.

That was one of the first times I argued with Sal. I didn't really know what I wanted to say but I didn't just want to talk about how bad the terrorists were and how they should be punished. Yes, of course they were wicked, but it was more I wanted to know why this had been
allowed
to happen. Or, what it was about now, about us, that made it able to happen? I felt outside all that blah about isn't it terrible and shocking, as if there was something I knew that no one else did.

Then came the public information announcement. They trailed it all week on TV and in the papers; it was when they officially stated that MDS was worldwide and everybody had it. They compared it to being HIV positive and said most of us would live out our lives without ever getting ill; the trigger for it to become deadly was pregnancy. They wanted to reassure us that governments across the world were cooperating in research blah blah blah.

I remember watching it with Mum and Dad and staring at them afterwards. They had the disease. I had it. We all had MDS. It was like knowing you've swallowed slow-acting poison. I didn't want to sit with them so I went up to my room and texted Baz. (How ridiculous. Just writing his name makes me happy. Baz, Baz, Baz. And now there are stupid tears running down my cheeks.)

Back then he was just a friend. We were at primary school together. I went to Sunday School for years because of him–his dad was a vicar and Baz always went, so I tagged along too. Sometimes when you're talking to him it's as if he's still practising piano in his head, you wonder if he's even heard. Then when he speaks you realise he's been thoughtfully considering, instead of leaping in and babbling. When we started secondary we both made other friends and avoided each other in school, as if we were embarrassed. But we still used to go round to each other's houses.

That night he rang me back and said his parents were out, get Sal and some of the others and come round. I didn't want to get Sal. I felt like talking to him on my own. I had thought he was the only boy I knew who didn't fancy Sal, but clearly I was wrong. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought how much better my life would be if my legs were longer and my tits were bigger and closer together. I wondered if I should dye my hair blonde, like everyone does, but then I thought how my Dad at least really liked it brown. He called me his nut brown maid, hazel eyes and chestnut hair. And hairy brown caterpillar eyebrows, he forgot to mention that. There was no point in straightening my hair, I looked revolting and who cared?

So Sal and I went round and everyone was in a weird mood. Rosa Davis was there, who Baz'd sort-of gone out with the year before. It hardly counted, he'd dumped her after two weeks. She was pretending to be really drunk. Baz was wearing a black t-shirt with a blue whale on it the exact colour of his eyes. After we'd been there half an hour Sal rang Damien and got him to come round. The two of them smooched together for a while then went off upstairs. I asked Baz where his parents were. His dad was working with the bereaved, there was a residential weekend of counselling and faith, and his mum'd gone too, to help. We laughed about how MDS is great for business–for vicars and undertakers. I asked him if he'd watched the TV announcement and he said ye-es, slowly, as if there was more.

‘What?' I asked him.

‘I was thinking that maybe we deserve it.'

‘MDS?'

He nodded.

‘Why?'

‘Well something bad was bound to happen sooner or later. People have messed up the world so much–'

‘You mean, like global warming?'

‘Sure. And running out of oil, and water, and food. The point is, a bad thing was ready to happen. The ground was prepared.'

‘Not by us,' I said. ‘By our parents. And their parents. They're the ones who've messed things up.'

‘Right. But now this has happened everyone can blame someone else. Instead of being mad at the government for giving scientists money to make hideous weapons, or at themselves for polluting the entire world, they can put all the blame on some unknown monster.' Baz tapped a little rhythm on his beer bottle, then blew across the top a few times to hear the sound. ‘People always think there's enough time left to change,' he said.

‘Well they're stupid.'

Someone turned up the music and we raided his parents' booze cupboard, and Kaz passed round a spliff. I remember feeling very cunning when I thought of phoning my parents to say I was staying over at Sal's. I remember snogging Danny who I don't even like, and the next thing I remember is sitting propped against the bath feeling sick. Sal told me to put my fingers down my throat and I did puke a bit, but not as much as I needed to. I went down to Baz's room in the cellar after that. He was there on his own playing his piano, he didn't take any notice of me. I curled up in the big armchair and tried to doze, while the notes ran on and on like water pouring from his fingertips, and every few minutes I had to open my eyes to stop the room going round. I must have dozed off eventually because when I woke up there was a rug draped over me and Baz had vanished. I felt terrible in the morning of course, and even worse when I went upstairs and found Rosa helping Baz to tidy up. I asked her where she'd slept and she grinned and said his parents' bed was kingsize. I went home and stayed in my room all day, telling my Mum I had a headache which was true.

But during that evening, before I started feeling ill, when we were all madly dancing and making the world spin around us, I had this fantastic sense of freedom. I thought I could be free of my Mum and Dad and their petty squabbles. I could soar. No-one could say a thing to me, especially not anyone older than me. Because it was them who had messed things up.

The feeling that I had was power; like when I went to help my aunt Mandy at the theatre. As well as making puppets and masks for the children's theatre company, she did lighting. Sometimes in the holidays she'd let me help and I'd do follow spot. There's a metal frame like a handle around the big hot spotlight and you twist and tilt it so the beam follows the actor and he's always standing in a beam of light. You get to know his moves so you can predict where he's going and move the spot exactly with him. For a while I thought I'd like to have the same job as her, sitting up there in the dark with the lighting desk and all the controls, softly turning the pages of her marked up script. Giving light to the characters who needed it, making the sun shine or darkness fall, making the stage into a firelit cottage or a bright summer morning. Giving them light brings the characters to life. That's the kind of power I felt I had.

We heard Caitlin was dead, and some people from my class went to her funeral. I didn't because it seemed a bit hypocritical, I hadn't even known her that well. Rosa Davis disappeared and there was a rumour that she'd been pregnant too. Nobody was bothered, she'd always been weird. She never had any real friends among the girls, she used to hang around on the edges of groups. I was glad she'd gone.

The next time I went to school I was feeling a bit schizo. Part of me was panicking about my GCSEs, and part of me was going, ‘So what? This stuff is meaningless.' I was afraid Baz thought I was a drunken idiot. Then he rang and asked if I was interested in a meeting. ‘It's about what we were talking about the other night,' he said. ‘How people have fouled up the world.'

I said yes because I thought he was asking me to go with him–then it turned out he had a piano exam in Manchester and his mum was dropping him off after that. I felt stupid, and stupid for feeling stupid. I asked Sal but she didn't want to come.

‘It'll be boring,' she said. ‘It's one of Baz's greeny things. Who needs to save the planet now?' Sal didn't have space in her head for anything but Damien. They were just at it whenever they got the chance. I ended up going to the meeting on my own.

It was in a grotty area, west end of Ashton, a low redbrick building like a fort with hardly any windows. It smelt of food and sweat inside, and I could hear a babble of voices. There was an office to my left, with its door open–no-one there–and straight ahead a big low-ceilinged room where the voices were coming from. I went to the doorway and saw Baz's long black hair straight away. He was talking to a boy I didn't know. There must have been about thirty kids there, but only three other girls. One lad was in a wheelchair. A skinny youth with a plait in his beard–studenty type–faced us all and said, ‘Quiet please.' He began to mutter about how human beings had the earth in trust and have abused that. The kids in front of me looked at each other then gradually began to whisper. An Asian boy in the front row stood up and asked everyone to listen. People began to call out, ‘Get on with it!' and ‘Shut up!' and a slow handclap started up. Beardy Plait soldiered on about politicians being useless, then a pale boy with floppy brown hair started shouting at us. He looked like he was about to burst into tears, and everyone suddenly went quiet. ‘This isn't a joke! The experiments scientists are doing are against nature. Because they attack nature, nature's attacked us. They mutilate animals–'

Beardy Plait was asking him not to interrupt, the Asian boy was shouting ‘Wait your turn!' and a girl in front of me was screaming, really screaming, ‘Women are dying! You want to talk about animals? Women are
dying
!' No one was listening to anyone else.

Some people got up and left, and I was happy to see Baz uncurl his skinny self and come round to the end of my row. ‘Want to go?' he mouthed, and I moved along to join him. There was a man with bristly-short blond hair sitting there. He stood up to let me pass, then quietly asked Baz and me to hang on a minute. He walked to the front of the room and held up his hands, then he clapped them and called out, ‘Friends! Friends!'

It was like at school; Mr Clarke comes in and everything goes quiet. Very calmly he asked us all to move our chairs into a circle. He stood there patiently waiting for us to settle, then he introduced himself–Iain–and started talking about how we need to make our voice heard because young people are the future. The wheelchair boy, Jacob, called out, ‘There isn't any future!' and the angry girl, who was Lisa, muttered under her breath but loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘Who asked you anyway?' Iain glanced at her.

‘I should tell you about myself,' he said to all of us. ‘I'm an activist. I've been living in a solidarity camp opposing a high pressure gas pipeline. Before that I was involved in airport runway protests. I know how these things work, alright? I'm not here to put words in anyone's mouth.' There is something about Iain that is very careful. He doesn't fidget, he's always still, his voice is calm and steady. He keeps his grey eyes fixed on you, like you would if you were trying to recapture a frightened animal. It's as if he chooses every word, as if he's steadily and constantly deciding how he will speak to you, and everything's under control. It used to almost hypnotise me. Lisa looked down at her hands as if it was nothing to do with her.

‘OK,' said Iain. ‘Why don't we start by going round the circle again each naming one important thing we want to change? Then we can discuss which ones we want to start with.' A red-faced boy sitting near me pushed his chair back loudly, and said it was just like fucking school. He went out and slammed the door. Iain said, ‘Anyone else?' and no one moved. He got the flipchart and asked Ahmed to make a list of each person's change. Lisa said she wanted more money putting into MDS research, and for scientists to be allowed to do
any
experiments that might help lead to a cure. She was staring at the pale faced animal liberationist as she said it–Nat–and of course he said, all experiments on animals to be stopped immediately. Other people wanted the usual stuff, carbon rationing, no nuclear power, ban arms sales, stop wars, no to GM crops. Jacob when it was his turn said, ‘I can't believe you people. Haven't you listened to the news? We'll be extinct in 70 years and you're fussing about organic farming?' Iain asked him what was the change he wanted and he said, ‘I want to show those bastards, man. I want to blow up parliament!' And someone called out ‘Guy Fawkes!' and everyone burst out laughing, Jacob included.

Iain held up his hand now and then to stop some people butting in, but we were all picking up on what each other said. It was about being angry, about seeing how all the old people, parents and politicians and business men had messed up the world.
We
wanted power. It was us who were going to have to live with the catastrophe they had made. MDS was the worst of it but there was everything else too–wars, floods, famines. People had just carried on pleasing themselves–but now they would have to stop. ‘They can't tell us what to do anymore,' said Jacob.

‘No,' said Lisa, ‘they owe us.' Her little brother Gabriel was sitting next to her. When she spoke he began to cry, and she put her arm around his shoulder and pulled him close, but she went right on talking. ‘They owe us compensation,' she said. ‘Our mother's dead. There are thousands and thousands of us. Our mothers are dead, they have to listen to us, they have to give us money.' There was a shocked silence. I didn't know anyone my age whose actual mother had died. Mostly it was mothers of younger kids. Then the clamour started up again; that we needed to get ourselves heard. To have meetings, rallies, where masses of kids could listen and decide what they wanted to do. Iain said we should meet again next Friday and he would draw up an agenda.