The Roar (7 page)

Later, he listened to them pull down their bed and settle for the night. He put Ellie’s pictures under his pillow and turned on to his side hoping for sleep so he could escape his fractious thoughts. It was hard to get comfortable with the metal collar pressing into his neck. He drifted into sleep like a stone skimming over an endless stretch of ice, his eyes jerking open now and then as if he’d hit a tree or a rock. After a while his eyelids felt too heavy to lift, and in those brief moments of near-consciousness, he kept them closed and coaxed himself back into oblivion. He didn’t know how long he’d lain in that state when he felt something cold and wet pressed against his left eye. He forced open his lids and started, pulling his head back on the pillow.

Close to his face was another face, with a wet black nose
shaped like a soft liquorice sweet. Two dark soulful eyes gazed into his and a pair of soft ears pulled back as he did, displaying the creature’s alarm at his sudden movement. It was some kind of dog, Mika thought, but he wasn’t sure; he’d never seen a real one, only plague dogs on television with their eyes full of blood, and this dog was particularly odd-looking – a big skinny dog, that looked more like a deer than a dog, and it seemed more afraid of Mika than Mika was afraid of it.

‘Hello,’ Mika whispered tentatively, trying to sound friendly because he didn’t want to be bitten, and the dog responded by jutting its head forward to poke him in the eye again with its wet nose, then it slobbered all over his cheek with a smelly pink tongue. Mika could hear the dog’s tail patting against the cover, and its breath was hot and excited. Reassured it didn’t want to bite him, Mika pushed the dog gently on the side of its neck to stop it licking his face so he could get a better look at it. It was very heavy and felt warm and it was the colour of custard cream biscuits. Its nose, legs and tail were long and elegant, its fur short and silky; the softest thing Mika had ever felt. He ran his hand over the dog’s head and down its neck, admiring the darkness of its eyes and nose, contrasting with its soft, creamy fur. He could feel the muscles beneath its skin, its warmth. Its expression was gentle and kind.

‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘Why are you here?’

The dog sat down and gazed at him benevolently.

‘What?’ Mika asked.

The dog lifted one of its long front legs and pawed the cover, its claws pressing on Mika’s arm beneath it. Mika heard a clink at its neck and saw the dog was wearing a collar with a round, metal tag. He pulled himself up in the bed and held the tag in his fingers, trying to read the inscription in the darkness.

‘Awen,’ he said and the dog’s ears pricked up as he recognized his name. ‘Awen, is that your name? Are you Awen?’

Awen panted cheerfully, his pink tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth.

‘Hello, Awen, nice to meet you,’ he said, stroking the dog’s silky ears and filling up with wonder as he discovered the magic of boy and dog. He couldn’t stop touching him – the feel of his silky fur and muscled body was addictive.

He likes me, Mika thought, and I like him.

The dog licked the fingers on his left hand, long slow licks like smelly caresses, and Mika felt his fingers tingle pleasurably. The more Awen licked, the more they tingled until Mika felt a strange sensation in his fingertips, as if something was pushing up out of them from beneath his skin. It didn’t hurt, it felt nice. He lifted his hand to stop Awen licking, and looked at his fingers and watched as tips of green pushed through the skin. There was no blood, no pain, it tickled. He had stems growing out of his fingers, unfurling bright green leaves. When they were the same length as his fingers, they stopped growing, and Mika got out of bed and walked to the window so he could look at his hand in the moonlight – unaware that his parents were standing in the doorway watching him. They’d heard him talking to Awen.

‘What’s he doing?’ Asha whispered, clutching David’s arm, as she watched Mika stare at his raised left hand. The collar on his neck glinted and his eyes shone in the milky light.

‘He’s just sleepwalking,’ David replied. ‘He doesn’t look upset, we should leave him. He’ll find his way back to bed in a minute.’

They tiptoed away to their own bed and sat propped up against their pillows whispering in the darkness.

‘I wish I could get inside his head,’ Asha whispered. ‘I want to share his thoughts so I can understand what’s going on with him. I feel guilty, David. I wish we’d been more patient.’

David sighed. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘So do I.’

‘We should have talked to him and tried to understand why he did it.’

‘I know, but that fine – I was fuming.’

‘The thing is, I know he can’t help it,’ Asha went on. ‘I can see it in his eyes. He’s so unhappy and confused. He really believes Ellie’s not dead and that they’re trying to poison him. But why?’

‘I think we should ask Helen to visit him tomorrow,’ David said. ‘While we’re at work, so they can be on their own. Let’s see what she thinks. Perhaps he’ll talk to her.’

‘Good idea,’ Asha said.

‘Has he gone back to bed?’

‘I think so,’ David replied.

‘Good,’ Asha said. ‘It creeps me when he wanders around like that.’

7

A DEADLY WEAPON

T
he space station, the Queen of the North, was the headquarters of the Youth Development Foundation and Mal Gorman’s pride and joy. It carried several megatons of people and hardware involved in his new project in orbit around Earth, but although it was large enough to see from the ground, it looked no more than a hole cut out of the stars; an eyeless, silent hulk, her rumbling engines struck dumb by the nature of space.

On board it was past midnight London time and Mal Gorman was still working. In front of the desk in his enormous office, the catering department had laid out a buffet table for his visitors, a group of high-ranking politicians and military personnel, including the Defence Secretary and the Education Minister, who had come to celebrate the launch of the Fit for Life project on Earth. Gorman, as Minister for Youth Development, had spent the evening being told how clever he was, but
now he was bored and his guests didn’t seem to want to go to bed, and he, being the host, had no choice but to wait up with them. He didn’t like people eating in his office and he watched irritably as they stuffed themselves from platters piled high with tank meat and plastic flowers, cheese sculptures, crudités, dips, tarts and wine and droned on about how important they were, whilst dropping pastry crumbs on the floor and discarding their plates of leftovers on his desk.

Eventually Gorman decided he’d had enough of it and called over his butler, Ralph.

‘Get the waiters to clear the table,’ he said.

‘But, sir,’ Ralph replied, ‘your guests haven’t finished eating. I was just about to send for dessert.’

‘They’re not going to starve to death between now and breakfast,’ Gorman snarled, watching the Defence Secretary walk away from the table with a whole platter of canapés. He was one of the youngest and still had a little bit of flesh on his bones.

‘Bring coffee,’ Gorman said. ‘No, scrub that, bring water. Perhaps when they realize the feed is over they’ll go to bed. I’ve got a busy day tomorrow and I want my office back, spotless.’

‘Yes, sir.’

After his guests had departed, having said goodbye with tight-lipped smiles, Gorman decided to walk to his rooms via the cargo bay. All the equipment for the Fit For Life project was packed and waiting to be taken down to Earth. The cargo bay was dimly lit and silent, a cavernous hole in the belly of the ship. Gorman’s footsteps echoed on the hard black floor. He nodded towards the guards in the office and they waved and took their feet down from their desk and turned off the telly so they looked as if they were working.

The equipment filled the whole cargo bay and was stacked in neat rows on metal pallets ready to be loaded into the freighter bound for Earth the next morning. Every box had the Youth Development Foundation logo, YDF, printed on all sides. The
bigger boxes contained uniforms for the project staff. Their type and size were also printed on the box: uniforms for doctors, nurses, security guards – loads of jobs had been generated by the project, and even the people cleaning the toilets had a uniform with YDF printed on the pocket. For weeks the space station had been packed with people under Mal Gorman’s watchful eye, training for their new jobs.

The smaller boxes had ‘Fit Mix’ printed on the side of them and each contained ten thousand small sachets of powder.

Gorman patted them with a bony hand and smiled.

‘Mr Gorman, sir?’

Gorman turned to see a man standing behind him.

‘What do you want?’ he snapped. ‘I can’t get away from you for a minute.’

‘It’s Ellie,’ the man replied, nervously. ‘The lab staff sent me down to find you. She’s doing something interesting and they thought you’d want to see.’

They walked quickly towards the maximum-security area along a stark, white maze of corridors. Every twenty-five metres they passed through a door guarded by a security borg who scanned their retinas before letting them pass. Eventually, they entered a room marked ‘Opus Three’. It was an observation room, small and dark, lined with desks and equipment and monitor screens. A researcher in a white coat sat in front of a window, which looked out into another room lit by dark red light, where Ellie lay sleeping. The room was empty apart from a bed hollow moulded into the wall. Ellie was curled up on her side with her back to them and a white sheet wrapped around her like a shroud. The top of her head was bound up with tight bandages to prevent her from opening her eyes. It was six weeks since they’d recaptured her, and she’d been kept blind ever since. Gorman wanted to punish her for what she had done to him and, although he didn’t admit it to his staff, he was also scared of her. Everyone was scared of her. They knew now that with her eyes uncovered she was a deadly weapon.

‘She’s asleep,’ Gorman observed, impatiently. ‘What’s there to see?’

‘Look above her head,’ the researcher said.

Gorman leaned on the desk and stared into the dimly lit room. He could see something moving in the air above Ellie’s head, but until his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he couldn’t make out what it was.

‘Is that a sock shoe?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ the researcher said, smiling. ‘And the other one’s on the ceiling, look.’

Gorman looked up to see Ellie’s shoe bobbing across the ceiling as if it was on the surface of the sea. ‘How’s she doing it in her sleep?’ he mused.

‘She’s dreaming at the moment,’ the researcher said, pointing at a screen. ‘Look at her brain activity.’

‘That’s interesting,’ Gorman said, thoughtfully. He looked at Ellie as if she was a box of chocolates he wasn’t allowed to eat. ‘I want to know why,’ he continued. ‘I want to know more. I wish I could trust her; what an utter pain she is.’

‘She’s promised not to use her eyes like that again,’ the researcher pointed out. ‘She said when she hurt you it was an accident and she didn’t realize what she was doing.’

‘I know,’ Gorman replied, impatiently. ‘But do you trust her? Do you want to be the one to take the bandages off?’

The researcher looked uncomfortable for a moment, then shook his head.

‘Let’s try threatening her again,’ Gorman continued, thoughtfully. ‘Tell her we’ll kill her family and the monkey. I want to get on with the experiments. I want to know everything about her. Get a security borg to take the bandages off in the morning. When you’re sure she’s safe around people give her something to do, let her go swimming, she’ll like that, and give her a book to read. I’ve got a book of poems she might enjoy, send someone to my rooms to collect it. Tell her if she’s good I’ll let her see Puck. Tell her if she’s bad I’ll kill everyone she knows. And make sure
she has an armed guard at all times.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Right, I’m off to bed.’

8

COMING SOON TO AN ARCADE NEAR YOU

M
ika was awoken by a bright flash like a bolt of lightning through his eyelids. He was alarmed for a moment, then realized it was the television blinking on at the end of his bed. The light seemed unusually bright as though overnight the veil that had darkened his world for weeks had been lifted. He didn’t know that a thousand miles away, Ellie had awoken to find her eyes were uncovered; for Mika it was just another unanswered question to add to a growing pile.

The familiar drone of news voices began, the rush of water – his father in the shower – the metallic yawn of his parents’ bed folding up into the wall and the soft sound of his mother’s slippers padding on the carpet. Everything sounded normal, but it wasn’t. Mika put his hand to his throat and felt the metal collar. No, nothing was normal, he was going to spend the day at home
doing the sorting beads and feeling tormented by guilt because he had caused so much trouble for his parents.

‘Morning, Mika,’ his mother said gently, putting clothes on the end of his bed.

‘Morning,’ he mumbled warily. His parents had gone to bed angry and he wondered what had changed. He’d thought it would take more than a night’s sleep to undo the damage he’d done.

‘What do you want for breakfast?’ Asha asked.

‘I’ll do it,’ Mika replied, swinging his legs out of bed. ‘You’ve got to go to work; I’m going to be at home all day.’

‘I’ve called Helen,’ Asha said, looking at him nervously. ‘I asked her to come round – we thought you might like to talk to her.’

‘Oh, OK,’ Mika said. ‘I do, thanks.’

He stepped into the shower, closed the door and turned on the water, leaning against the thin wall. He kept his head up while he washed, because when he bent forward the weight of the detention collar gave him a pain in the back of his neck.

He felt guilty. His parents being nice to him after what he’d done was more difficult to handle than the yelling. He felt he deserved to be yelled at, but he still didn’t want to drink the Fit Mix.

He turned the water pressure up so it was blasting his skin and scrubbed himself hard. He wanted to wash them away – Telly Heads, Mr Grey and fellow classmates all down the plughole never to be seen again. As he rinsed his hair he heard a strange voice in the apartment. He opened his eyes and listened, wondering who it could be. He heard the beep of the front door as it slid shut and locked. The person had come in.

‘Mika!’ His father knocked on the shower door. ‘There’s a friend of yours out here! You’d better hurry up because he’s on his way to school!’

Mika turned off the water.

A friend? He didn’t have any friends.

He rubbed himself down as quickly as he could and emerged from the shower half dry with his towel wrapped around him,
anxious to see who the ‘friend’ was.

It was Kobi Nenko, the new boy, and he was soaking wet, wetter than Mika who’d just had a shower, his tangle of black hair dripping on the carpet and his feet squelching in his holey sneakers. He was wearing a long black coat with a spaghetti tangle of wires hanging out of the pockets.

‘Hi,’ Kobi said, through his hair.

There was a moment of awkward silence.

‘Do you boys want a drink?’ Asha asked brightly, sensing the tension. She wasn’t quite sure what she thought of Kobi with his strange clothes and wires and hair, but she wanted Mika to have friends.

He’s got nice hands, she thought, looking at them, long fingers, artistic, nimble, but dirty. His fingernails were filthy.

‘No, thank you,’ Kobi replied, politely. ‘I can’t stay.’

‘Mrs Fowler asked me to bring you this,’ he said to Mika, holding out a blue bag with the letters YDF written on the side. ‘It’s your goodie bag from yesterday. She said there are things in there you need, including Fit Mix, one sachet for every day you’re off school . . . sorry.’

‘Oh great,’ Mika said sullenly, taking the bag.

‘Mika,’ David snapped. ‘That’s not very grateful of you. Your friend has come out of his way to bring you that bag.’

‘I didn’t want to bring it,’ Kobi muttered through his hair. ‘I know you don’t want it.’

‘It’s all right,’ Mika said. ‘Thanks.’

‘I’ve got to go,’ Kobi said. ‘I’ll be late.’

He left quickly, propelled out of the apartment by the awkward atmosphere.

‘He’s an . . . interesting boy,’ Asha said, her eyes fixed curiously on the closed door. ‘You haven’t mentioned him before.’

‘He’s new,’ Mika said, looking at the bag and wishing he’d been friendlier. ‘He comes from The Shadows. I haven’t spoken to him much.’

* * *

After his parents left for work, Mika sat on the floor with the containers of sorting beads lined up on the sofa cushions. Everything about the task was designed to be odious and frustrating – the beads were so small, the level in the big container never seemed to go down. They were a nightmare to pick up because their surfaces were smooth, so if Mika held them too tight with the tweezers they popped out of its grip and he lost half of them before he got them to the right colour pot. Some went down the side of the sofa and some landed on the carpet so he had to hunt for them on his hands and knees, rubbing the carpet to make them bounce out of their hiding places in the tuft. He’d been told if he lost even one, he would have to do the task all over again. Sometimes he dropped them in the wrong pot by mistake so he had to hunt for one red bead amongst a few hundred yellow beads or one white bead in a few hundred blues. But despite Mr Grey’s intention to torture Mika with the beads, he found the repetitive nature of the task soothing – he liked the quiet ‘tap’ as he dropped a bead into its right pot and he enjoyed the tidiness he was creating as he worked, because he had no chance of achieving the same result with the thoughts in his head – his thoughts were like the tangled mess of wires hanging out of Kobi Nenko’s pockets.

Mika couldn’t wait for Helen to arrive. He glanced at the clock every minute, and when he heard the door buzz he jumped up, nearly knocking over the container of unsorted beads and only just managing to rescue it before it landed on the carpet.

He opened the door, and felt happier the moment he saw her – she was wearing a plastic rain bonnet that came down to her eyebrows, an antique pair of yellow rubber boots and a green coat that looked like an old-fashioned camping tent. She could have gone away for the weekend and accommodated several friends.

She rooted around in her handbag and produced a packet of biscuits. Mika was relieved to see it was a fresh packet.

‘I brought the biscuits,’ she rasped, tottering past him. ‘Squashed fly biscuits, my mother used to call them. That lift
smells like an old man’s toilet. Put the kettle on.’ She stopped suddenly and turned. ‘Oh my goblin lord! What is that contraption on your neck?’

‘A detention collar,’ Mika said, grinning. ‘The headmaster fitted it yesterday. If I step out of the apartment it gives me an electric shock strong enough to make me wee myself.’

‘I’d like to give him an electric shock!’ Helen said, her eyes flashing angrily under her rain bonnet. ‘See how he likes it!’

She cursed the weather as she slowly peeled off her layers of tent, boots and rain bonnet. Mika removed the containers of sorting beads from the sofa so she could sit down, and put the kettle on.

‘What have you been up to then?’ she asked, settling on the sofa and wiggling her toes in her woolly socks. ‘It sounds like you’ve been busy.’

‘I think I’m mad,’ Mika blurted out anxiously, beginning to pace back and forth. ‘You’ve got to help me. Everyone thinks I’m mad, even my parents, and I don’t know what to do about it.’

‘Stop pacing,’ Helen said, waving her hand. ‘You’re making me feel giddy. Sit down for a minute.’

Mika sat down reluctantly with his knees jiggling.

‘For a start,’ she said, authoritatively, ‘if you think you’re mad, you’re not. It’s a fact that mad people don’t know they’re mad. I worked with a boy once who thought he was an orange and there was no convincing him otherwise.’

Mika tried to laugh, but it caught in his throat and threatened to transform into tears as a mix of suppressed emotions welled up inside him.

‘But I don’t understand what’s happening in my head,’ he said despairingly. ‘This woman came to school and I thought she was a Telly Head! I thought she was trying to poison me with a vita-min drink, and look at the trouble I’m in because of it! Even though I knew I was behaving crazy, I couldn’t stop myself! My parents have got to pay a hundred-credit fine because of me and today they’re not even angry; it’s as if they pity me because I’m
mad, and at school they’re calling me a paranoid freak! Last night in my dream I had trees growing out of my fingers!’

‘Slow down and tell me properly,’ Helen suggested. ‘Make the tea and start at the beginning.’

Mika got up and made tea and she questioned him about everything in detail, about the strange party, the cakes with the YDF logo written on them, the Fit Mix, the Fit For Life nurse, the dream dog, the tree fingers, everything, and he began to feel better. Helen had this magical ability to make even the most terrible incidents seem funny. When he told her about throwing the cup of Fit Mix in Mr Grey’s face, she laughed until she wheezed so much she could hardly breathe and had a coughing fit, and Mika was worried for a moment because she looked as if she was going to fall off the sofa. But afterwards she became quiet and serious and looked thoughtfully at the heavy metal collar around Mika’s neck.

‘What?’ Mika said.

‘Shhh, I’m thinking,’ she replied.

He stared at her, waiting for her to say something, but instead she sighed and Mika could sense she was troubled.

‘You agree with me, don’t you?’ he said, feeling confused. ‘I know you do. It’s more than just seeing a demon from my nightmares. I feel suspicious, lied to, not just in school, but everywhere, and it’s not only Ellie, I’m being lied to about other things too, I can feel it. I know something. In the back of my mind I know something important, but I feel like I’m looking at one of those puzzle pictures – the ones you have to stare at and the picture appears, but I stare and stare and I can’t see the picture. I’m sure someone’s trying to tell me something.’

Helen gazed into her teacup, her eyes misty, as if she could see distant galaxies in the bottom of it.

‘I think we should look in your goodie bag,’ she said. ‘Let’s see what these people gave you.’

‘Nothing I want,’ Mika grumbled impatiently. He grabbed the blue bag, turned it upside down and shook it. A pile of stuff
fell on to the floor. Seven sachets of Fit Mix, a mug with ‘Drink Your Fit Mix’ written on the side, a white baseball cap with ‘Fit Camp is Fun’ written across the front, a T-shirt, shorts, a few packets of sweets, a balloon and a memory card titled ‘Introduction to Fit For Life!’

‘Looks like they’ve put a lot of effort into this,’ Helen said, picking up the baseball cap and putting it on her head. ‘What do you think?’ Her long, grey hair hung out of the sides like droopy spaniel ears.

‘I prefer your rain bonnet,’ Mika said, grinning. He left her inspecting the mug and took a sachet of Fit Mix to the kitchen area. He ripped it open and shook the powder into the sink, hoping some miracle would occur, that suddenly he would know the answers to all his questions. But all that happened was the white powder turned pink and slimy and smelled of strawberry as it made contact with droplets of water in the bottom of the sink. He turned on the tap and washed it away with disgust.

No clues there, he thought, throwing the empty sachet down the waste chute.

‘Let’s watch this,’ Helen said, holding up the memory card.

The television screen covered the wall opposite the sofa. Mika slid the card into the slot underneath it and sat down next to Helen. The screen lit up and filled with the image of a large group of children drinking Fit Mix as if it was so delicious they were about to faint with joy.

‘This is cheesier than a toothpaste advert,’ Helen said, as a skinny girl with goofy ears drank a cup of Fit Mix. A few seconds later she was skipping through a field full of flowers with the wind blowing in her hair, having grown at least thirty centimetres and become twice as pretty.

‘It is stupid,’ Mika agreed, watching a boy with bulging muscles stride up a mountain.

‘But you won’t just grow big and strong,’ a resonant voice boomed from the screen. ‘Fit For Life will make you more intelligent. We’ve developed a brand new game called ‘Pod Fighter’
designed to develop your fine motor and lateral thinking skills. Fit For Life is fun, Fit For Life is cool and Fit For Life will make all your dreams come true.’

‘Well, it certainly made your dreams come true, Mika,’ Helen muttered, thinking of the Telly Head nurse.

The screen became dark and was silent for a few seconds, then it filled with stars so Mika and Helen felt as if they were floating in space.

‘This must be the advert for the game,’ Mika said.

‘Coming soon to an arcade near you,’ boomed the deep voice. ‘The
ultimate
game experience. A new game that feels so real, you’ll forget it is a game.
You
will be in control.
You
will use your skills to protect
your
world against the Red Star Fleet!’