The Territory (12 page)

Then they just shook their heads. We didn’t have any money spare. If it wasn’t for the free place, I’d be at some dump school too. Even Dad’s salary as a family lawyer wouldn’t cut it. He’d have to be doing humungo deals rather than wills and probate to pay Hollets’ fees.

Mum said that Aunty Vicki would go too if it came to it. Make sure Ella was safe.

‘In a way, Ella’s lucky,’ Mum said. I nearly choked. Yeah, real lucky.

Raf is complicated. Good complicated, I guess, but complicated nonetheless.

He came round to mine to study this evening. By some horrific bit of bad luck on my part, both Mum and Dad were back from work and so I had to do the whole ‘meet the parents’ thing. Raf was great with them – really polite but still natural and totally himself rather than some phoney creep version. Mum seemed to like him immediately, although she tried a bit overly hard at first and did massively exaggerated smiles like she was auditioning for mime school or something.

Dad was outwardly completely friendly, but I could see he was still trying to figure Raf out, work out what some freakoid might want with his precious daughter. I was kind of pleased about that. Dad’s always distrusted freakoids that bit more than Mum. I think it was him who was totally adamant that I was going to be born a Norm
.
‘No one is messing with my beautiful daughter’s head.’ Go Dad!

He ruined it a bit though with his, ‘Well, I suppose you want to go and
study
now,’ as if it were some massive innuendo for drop down and do it on my bedroom floor. We escaped to my room. Dad insisted we left the door open though, which again made me turn scarlet with embarrassment and Raf shake with laughter.

Anyway, as practice for the analytical writing section of the English exam we had to write a 500 word essay on how well the introduction of the TAA solved our problems in the aftermath of the Great Flood. Upside – this was a section in which you had to actually structure an answer so the freakoids didn’t have an advantage. Downside – although in English there’s not supposed to be a right answer, in the exam there definitely was one – one that basically said everything about the Territory and the TAA was just AMAZING!

When I talk to Jack or Daisy about the TAA, the conversation always goes the same way. We agree that (1) it’s massively cruel to send any fifteen year old to their pretty much guaranteed death and (2) it’s massively unfair that freakoids have this huge advantage and that the test is nearly all about recall and facts rather than ideas or expression.

With Raf it was different. He sat on the floor. We both did. He said he finds it more comfortable and I didn’t want to tower over him and give him an unflattering view of my thighs pressed onto a chair. (Daisy’s advice.)

‘So, this is such a great essay!’ I laughed, automatically assuming Raf would join in. ‘The TAA is the purrrrrrrfect solution to all our problems.’

Before I had time to worry that I’d somehow morphed into Daisy, Raf replied, ‘It might not be the worst.’

I was silent, stunned, betrayed. Was he no different from every other freakoid after all?

‘So the TAA is OK then, is it? “The best we can do”? SERIOUSLY?!? It’s OK that in June thousands of Norms are going to die, is it? It’s OK that my cousin and probably my friends and probably me are going to be dragged from our homes and dumped in a malarial swampland? That’s great, isn’t it? That’s just such a great system.’

By now I was standing, angry. I didn’t care how chunky my thighs looked from his angle, I kind of hated him right now.

Raf remained calm as ever and gave me one of his most hypnotising blue/green gazes.

‘Noa, that’s not what I meant and if you calm down for one minute… OK, obviously I phrased that badly. The TAA is horrific. I just meant no one’s come up with a good solution and some have come up with even more terrible ones. What do you know about what happens in other countries?’

I must have looked like a right confused denser as I assumed this was some sort of trick question. Everyone did the same as us, didn’t they? We’d never studied it at school, never talked about it at home (and it’s not as if there’s any way of just looking stuff up other than through Dad’s massively out-dated encyclopaedia from the stone age), but I’d know if there were other ways, wouldn’t I?

Apparently not. Raf had found out by accident. His dad was working at his computer – laboratory heads are treated like top Ministry peeps: they get their own computer, even at home, database access and everything. But they have to keep them in a locked room, password protected, far from the eyes of the ‘common people’. Anyway, Raf’s dad had got distracted, went downstairs to have a fight with Raf’s mum or something. Raf says they fight a lot.

Raf wouldn’t tell me what he’d searched for. The most he’d reveal was something about how uploads work and studies from other countries (which seems like the weirdest thing ever to search for if you’ve suddenly got access to massive amounts of information, but hey) when he’d come across information about other countries’ ways of killing off their population. And it wasn’t pretty.

‘The States do the same as us. We basically nicked their system. Brazil, which lost less land in the floods, has a lottery system. Everyone gets entered and if your number comes up you get sent to the flooded west coast, which is also pretty much like a death sentence. There are no freakoids in Brazil. No company bought the technology as without the test there was no real demand for it.’

‘I wouldn’t mind a world without freakoids.’ I said. ‘You excepted, of course. And at least everyone’s got an equal chance of staying safe.’

But then, as Raf pointed out, some of Brazil’s most intelligent and gifted scientists, thinkers and writers had been lost to their Wetlands and that had hurt its recovery. One guy who was sent was just about to crack a new form of fusion that could have released more energy than ten fission power stations and create no radioactive waste at the same time.

‘Well they should have kept him, obviously,’ I interrupted.

‘But that wouldn’t have been fair, would it? To have one rule for some and another for others? I mean a ‘freakoid’ is more likely than your cousin to solve our energy problems, just because they’ve got more information in their head and have been taught more. Does that mean it’s better to ship her off?’

I had no answer for that.

‘What about somewhere else then. What about France?’

‘They kill older people instead. Compulsory euthanasia for the over 40s. But they’re looking to change their system. Seems that if people know they’re not going to live that long, they act more wildly and have loads of kids to sort of continue their legacy. France’s population’s massively expanding at the moment.’

‘What about Australia?’ I asked quietly.

‘Oh, there you just have to buy a space. If you can’t, you’re sent to the desert zones. So there’s no test – you’ve just got to be rich.’

‘India?’

‘I don’t know. My dad came back in before I could find out any more and went mental. He broke my finger.’ Raf said it like it was a joke, but I’m not sure it was.

‘Why do you think they don’t tell us this stuff?’ I asked. ‘Surely it’d be good for the Ministry if they could show other countries doing horrific things?’

‘That’s what I thought too, at first,’ Raf agreed. ‘But, then I realised … they don’t want us to compare, to question, ’cos we might keep questioning. They just want us to accept and obey.’

‘But all of this, it still doesn’t make the TAA right,’
I said.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Raf agreed. ‘I hate this system. More than you can know. But it’s not simple either. And if you really want to attack something you need to be able to bury your anger, to look at it coldly. To decide exactly what’s wrong with it and why and then destroy that.’

And there was something about the way he said ‘destroy’ that sent a surge of adrenaline through me.

Oh, my God! My mum just slapped me, and I’m talking a full whack across my face. She never hits any one. She believes ‘violence breeds violence’. Or at least she did. My cheek stung and I brought my hand up in shock, tears forming in the corner of my eyes.

At registration, Ms Jones handed us all these bottles of the foulest-smelling insect repellent. She said, in her best fake hushed voice, that some government spod had just discovered that a few mosquitoes carrying the Milo virus had entered the Territory from the Wetlands. We therefore have to coat ourselves in this rank yellowish fluid to protect ourselves from ‘bleeding eyes, body sores and immuno-breakdown’. Nice. Apparently mosquitoes find young people’s blood particularly delicious! She also banged on about how we had to protect each other as this virus is like some super-powered bug and can spread really quickly. ‘One rotten apple can destroy the basket,’ she said.

She’s always so melodramatic. They all are. Just to make you think that you’re really lucky to be in the Territory.
It’s bound to be lies too. We all know there are massively high electric grids between the Wetlands and Territory ready to zap any evil bug-carrying flies. Also she’s just such a hypocrite. Always saying we need to protect each other but then thinking it’s OK in June to turn half of us into Fish who are bound to die from this evil bug thing anyway.

Well, it only took ninety minutes till first break for Amanda to rinse the stuff off in the loos. I guess she thought it might put the amaaaaaaazing Hugo off. Yeah, like he’s interested in her anyway! Thought she’d have learnt that his thing seems to be watching Norms getting groped at parties. I thought about rinsing mine off as it kept on nearly making me gag, but Jack and Daisy kept theirs on and Raf said that Amanda was an idiot for doing it. Raf looked pretty cool today. He wore a greeny-blue jumper that really brought out the green of his green eye and the blue of his blue eye.

When I got home I told my mum about the repellent and Amanda and she started doing her super-straight back thing. I said I had nearly washed the stuff off it was so grim and that’s when she slapped me. Said I must never, never do anything so ‘damn bloody stupid’ and stormed out of the room crying. She never normally swears either.

Maybe she’s going through the menopause. Daisy’s mum is going through the menopause and keeps getting even more stressy than normal, if that’s actually possible.

Mum apologised later. That was even scarier though. She sat next to me on my bed and kept stroking my hair saying over and over again how I must never ever wash the repellent off.

Raf doesn’t upload. And he kissed me.

I can’t quite believe it, either part, but it’s true, both parts. And I can’t tell anyone about it. I swore I wouldn’t.