The Whisper (12 page)

Gorman gave her his coldest, most evil look. “You’re not serious,” he said. “You’re
not
going to put
me
in a
pig house.”

“Why not?” Helen replied.

“You wouldn’t dare!” Gorman ranted. “I’m the Minister for Youth Development! You can’t expect me to use a porta-potty!”

His shouting aggravated the wolf borgs and one ran at him, snarling. He cowered against the wall while the children shooed it away, and as soon as Helen unlocked the door, he shoved rudely past her. Now he was in the building, but he didn’t want to be, so he cursed and stomped while the children closed the door against the wolves.

Inside there was a long trestle table against one wall, and three doors to the right lead into spacious pigsties. The children looked through the windows of the sty doors. On the floors old straw glowed gold in natural light. At the far end of each sty was another, smaller door that led out to the grassy enclosure. The sties looked comfortable. The children could still smell the animals that had lived there.

Helen unlocked one of the sties. “The only thing that won’t work,” she said, “is the water trough. I’ll just pop up to the house to fetch some bottled water. You might as well lock him in there now.”

She left.

The children faced Mal Gorman.

“No,” Gorman said. “I’m not living in a pigsty.”

“You shut me in a coffin,” Ellie said. “And Puck. You cut my hair. You made me spend weeks blind.”

Gorman’s light withered, but he stomped into the sty and turned to glare at her. She shut the door and watched him through the window. Then he exploded, unleashing his fury in a frenzy of flailing arms and legs.

The children realized this was an important moment. Ellie had locked up the man who’d done the same to her.

She felt relieved. Not malicious or bitter or hateful. Just relieved she was free and Mal Gorman couldn’t hurt anyone.

Mika put his arm around her.

He looks like a total perp,
he thought.
Flailing around like that
.

Ellie grinned.
Yeah, he does
.

Then Mika started thinking about Helen again and considered following her up to the house.

Go
, Ellie thought.
You need to talk to her. We’ll stay here and watch Gorman
.

Mika walked along the path alone.

The mansion was silent.

He felt nervous.

He wanted to talk to Helen, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know the answers to his questions.

The stone steps up to the front door were covered in moss. As he entered, he called out to her, “Helen?”

“Up here!” she bellowed from one of the bedrooms.

He was in a wide, wood-paneled hall, and it surprised him. Although the house looked deserted from the outside,
the inside was littered with dusty family things, as if the people had walked out one day and never returned. Near the door was a table covered in letters and keys. On the wall was a screen with a faded shopping list stuck to it. It was Helen’s writing. Mika would have recognized it anywhere. So she had lived here once.

The floor was covered in leaves that had blown in through the door. As he walked toward the stairs, a rabbit hopped past. Mika stopped and watched it, entranced by its beauty, startled by its nonchalance.

At the top of the stairs, Helen’s head poked out of a door. “There you are,” she said breathlessly. “Come up here and give me a hand.”

He climbed the stairs and followed her into a dusty bedroom.

There was a surfboard hanging over the bed. The floor was covered with heaps of sports gear and game consoles. Helen had emptied out all the closets. Awen sniffed at an old pair of sneakers while Mika lingered in the doorway.

“I think the sleeping bag is on the top shelf,” Helen said. “I can’t reach.”

Their eyes met.

There was an awkward silence.

“You’re wondering who I am,” she said quietly.

He nodded.

She took a deep breath and sat on the end of the bed. Mika sat next to her, hoping she’d be able to explain all this away. But he felt dread.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Helen Gelt,” she replied. “I called myself Helen Green in Barford North, but on this side of The Wall, I’m Helen Gelt.”

“So Gelt is your real name,” Mika said.

“Yes,” she replied.

He nodded again and looked at his hands.

“I was married on this side of The Wall,” she said, “and I have a son here. My husband was Victor Gelt, who owned Unistore, the food corporation that ran the supermarkets before The Wall was built. This room is my son’s room. His name is William. He’s grown up now, but he spent his childhood in this house.”

Mika tried to imagine Helen’s son, but he could feel no warmth for William Gelt.

“So you’re one of them,” Mika said.

“Yes.”

“And your husband was Victor Gelt of Unistore.” He sat silent for almost a minute, then stood up and moved away from her.

“This is difficult,” he said.

“I know,” she replied.

“You should have told me,” he said. “You should have told me before. I told you everything about me. You knew exactly who
I
was. This isn’t fair.”

“You know why I couldn’t tell you before,” she replied. “I couldn’t tell you who I was without telling you The Secret. When I realized what you were seeing in your dreams, I was so excited, Mika. I wanted you to know you were right and I wanted to help you find Ellie, but telling you The Secret would have been a death sentence then. I wouldn’t have been much of a friend if I’d put your life in danger, would I?”

“No.”

“So I tried to help you without putting you in harm’s way. And that meant I couldn’t tell you the truth of who I was.”

He closed his eyes and pressed his eyelids, trying to ease
the pressure behind them. “OK,” he said. “I’m just trying to get my head around it. Victor Gelt … Unistore … It just doesn’t seem very
you
.”

“That’s because it’s not very
me
,” she replied.

“But” — he cast his hand around the room — “you own all this?”

“I own the whole of Brittany, in what was once France,” she said. “I’m the ninth richest person in the world — or at least Helen
Gelt
is the ninth richest person in the world. Helen Green knows none of it belongs to her.”

Mika had faced many difficult challenges over the past few weeks while he was searching for Ellie, but this had to be one of the worst, because it made him feel so torn. One of his best friends had been responsible for The Wall, and now he had to decide whether she was guilty. The evidence stated YES, but her light and her eyes said NO. He thought of his parents. He remembered how tired and unhappy they were. All that suffering on the other side of The Wall had been caused by people like Helen Gelt.

He looked her straight in the eyes. “You need to tell me how Gelt became Green,” he said. “Because I don’t want to feel this way about you.”

“I know,” she said. “I don’t like Helen Gelt any more than you do. We were
all
broken back then, Mika. Every single one of us. Come downstairs. And then I’ll explain how I changed.”

He followed her, Awen trotting ahead, nudging the hem of her skirt. She led them down to a large room with three long windows overlooking the garden. It was bursting with books. Newspapers and magazines fell like stuffing out of the shelves and lay in piles on the floor. Mika wandered through them, touching paper warmed by sunlight.

“I was born rich,” Helen said, watching him. “And I grew up rich, surrounded by rich people and expensive things. I was given every privilege a child could wish for and I can’t remember a single day when I felt like you did in Barford North — cramped and cold and hungry. Do you wish you had a childhood like mine? Instead of yours?”

He shook his head.

“Of course you don’t,” she said. “Because you understand what sort of person it made me. I had no idea what it felt like to suffer, because I had never suffered. I did not feel empathy for those who did, and I never questioned the justice of our world. During my childhood I believed what my parents believed. And when I married I believed what my husband believed. I grew up being told I was better than most people, and I was surrounded by people who believed they were better.”

Mika walked toward the window and looked out at the overgrown garden. “So when The Wall was built …” he said.

“I had no idea what we were doing to people like you. I wasn’t … myself. My best self.”

“Did you think The Wall was a good idea?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” Helen replied. “But I did think it was necessary, because that was what everyone around me was saying. It seemed a fact plain as day that there were too many people, and that if they kept on using up and fighting over resources, the natural world would die. And it would have. Yes, The Wall felt necessary, necessary to save nature. I believed we were building a Brave New World. Containing the overpopulation in the North, planting forests and breeding animals in the South to replace all those that had been killed. Even the fold-down apartments looked nice on the plans I saw. But I had no idea
how much greed was involved. I believed what our politicians told us and I didn’t understand how the people on the other side of The Wall would suffer. Helen Gelt was very naïve, Mika.”

“Tell me what made you change,” he said.

“My husband died,” she answered. “That’s what started it. He died of cancer caused by the drug Everlife-5. There I was, living in this Brave New World, breeding boar for the forest and raising my son, and then that happened.”

Mika knew it would be polite to say he was sorry her husband had died of cancer, but he couldn’t.

“It’s OK,” Helen said. “I’m not expecting you to be sorry.”

Mika just looked at her.

“Victor was a lot older than me,” Helen continued, “and he took Everlife-5 to stay young. But Everlife-5 was a terrible mistake. It killed lots of people on this side of The Wall. And as I stood by my husband’s grave, watching clods of earth land on his coffin, I saw the first crack in my Brave New World. And then, because I was suffering, I began to ask questions. I wondered how such a thing could have happened when we were supposed to be so perfect. And the more I found out, the more cracks appeared. After I took control of Victor’s business affairs, I realized his company, Unistore, had been selling this stuff called Fab Food to the people on the other side of The Wall. I’d never heard of it before, Mika. So I asked for some and I discovered just what we’d been feeding you. I will never forget my first mouthful of Fab peas — my tongue was green for days!”

She began to stomp through the piles of magazines.

“Imagine!” she snorted. “Finding out the man I’d lived with half my life, the father of my child, was the stinking rogue responsible for that monstrous muck Fab Food! And making a
profit out of it! I was furious, Mika! Absolutely furious!”

Mika watched as she knocked over a heap of magazines, then crouched down to tidy them up. Red light fizzed around her.

“The cheap scoundrel!” she raged on, making a worse mess in her fury. Mika crouched beside her and helped straighten the stacks of paper.

“Then guess what I found out,” she said.

“What?” Mika asked.

“That the directors of Unistore were stealing money from him. Stealing from him on his deathbed! So Victor was swindling the poor people in the North, and the directors of Unistore were swindling Victor. Suddenly I realized I was surrounded by scoundrels and liars. And how
stupid
I’d been … and how awful life was for you … for you poor people in the North …”

She stood up creakily. “The next day I packed a bag and moved to Barford North. I wanted to see what life was like there. And I wanted to figure out how we’d all gotten so broken. And that was the first sensible thing I ever did in my life. I took books with me. Lots of books: For years I’d had this library and never used it. I thought of books as decoration, until I started asking that question — how did we all get so broken? — and I couldn’t find the answer. I suddenly realized how much knowledge I had all around me, all along.”

Mika ran his fingers along the books’ spines. “How many have you read?”

“Most,” Helen said. “Some were boring. That’s the boring pile over there where the ducks have been nesting. I read for years. First novels and biographies, then the heavy stuff: history, philosophy, science. And all these magazines.”

“And did you find an answer to your question?” Mika asked.

“I may have,” she said cautiously. “I don’t want to say ‘I did’ because that would be incredibly arrogant, but I’ve got an idea what broke us.”

“Tell me.”

“We forgot what we are. We forgot we are animals and that our feelings are controlled by instincts. Instincts were useful in ancient times, when we were living as hunter-gatherers, trying to find food for ourselves and avoid becoming food for other animals, but in the age of science we don’t need these instincts so much. We battled so hard against nature, inventing things to keep ourselves alive, that we forgot we were part of nature.” She looked at him. “Does that make sense?”

He nodded.

“And I think it’s dangerous to forget we are controlled by instincts,” she said. “It makes us do things without understanding why. It makes us destructive, angry, and cruel.”

She picked up a magazine about kitchen gadgets and handed it to Mika.

“I’ll give you an example,” she said. “Humans like to collect things, don’t they? Like squirrels collect nuts.”

Mika flicked through the pages. It was full of strange devices invented during the twentieth century to cut vegetables.

“In ancient times,” she continued, “the instinct to hoard was useful, because it meant we were able to survive through the winter. But since we invented cans and freezers, we didn’t need to hoard loads of stuff. But we continued to do it anyway: We’d forgotten why we did it, but we still followed our instinct to do it. Like broken squirrel borgs that couldn’t stop squirreling, we filled our houses with things we didn’t need.”

Mika was looking at a picture of a food processor that
boasted over a hundred ways to slice and dice potatoes.