If I Could Fly (2 page)

It’s a free country.
That’s what the graffiti in the shopping precinct says. Maybe it was, before the virus swept through and killed five thousand people. The government made a universal media announcement to explain that the virus is carried by wild animals, which must be kept out of the towns. Any found beyond the barbed-wire checkpoints are being destroyed. ‘No great loss,’ my dad said.

‘Maybe it’s all just a lie made up by the prime minister to keep everyone frightened,’ I suggested to Crease.

‘Maybe you should keep that thought to yourself, Paper Clip,’ Crease had warned me, his eyes holding mine, unblinking.

‘Free country,’ I replied, deciding this would be my favourite phrase. Crease just shrugged, his sleek shoulders rising and falling like the curve of a mountain range. It made me feel hot and embarrassed, like there were weighty things I didn’t get or understand. It was
a gesture that said,
You are just a kid – you know nothing
.

I thought,
Soon, when I’m fourteen, I’ll know what you know.

But look at me now. Crease was right. I’m just a kid without a plan. With a dodgy memory and stupid holes in my best trackies.

Forget Crease, I tell myself. Focus on this moment. The sit-u-a-shun, as the Feathers would say. Look around. Assess every contour. Map the footholds, ledges, flat tracks. Work out the next move.

It’s funny. I was expecting things I’ve seen on the TV: endless coils of metal on the landscape, like giant Slinkies, blocking off the footpaths and the single-track country roads; signs with
Keep Out
in black and red; tape across farm gates; piles of dead sheep and cows; regular patrols by the FISTS. Maybe this zone is free from infection. Or maybe I just didn’t see the warnings in the dark and this very moment the lethal ‘glue’ virus that makes your eyes stick together is spreading through every cell in my body. Maybe I’ve watched too
many movies and the moon’s made of bendy cheese.

Do they know I’ve gone, Little Bird? You would never tell them, but there are others who might.

The facts will look like this – just words on a screen. Calypso Summer. Yeah, that really is my name. And then would come some letters. AAAR. Absent, alone and at risk. NYO. Not a young offender, unless you count the giant protest poster I stuck on the window of the discount clothes shop in the high street. Turned out its stuff is being made by kids younger than me, working twelve-hour shifts in complete dumps in India. It was my initiation act, to impress the Feathers. Crease took me to one side and kept repeating, ‘Be cool at school, do you hear me? Break the System. Never get caught.’

Until I met Crease, I hadn’t really thought much about the System. Life’s OK on the estate, I thought. The gates don’t bug me the way they bother some people. We have a two-bedroom semi with a nice white bathroom and our own garden with a pond. Our
kitchen is yellow and cheerful and smells of spices. There’s a plasma TV; Dad insisted on that so he doesn’t ‘have to stare at the pictures of gold temples on the wall’.

I’ve got to keep focused. The ground beneath my feet is vibrating. There’s a low thrumming close by, getting louder, the deep
whoop whoop whoop
of blades chopping through air. I throw myself face down and lie very still as a shaft of white light beams down into the field. Leaves are sucked into a swirl in the updraft. If this is a Wasp, the patrol helicopter of the FISTS, I’m in trouble. It feels like it’s going to pull me skyward, chunk me up like a vegetable slicer.

I’ve seen Wasps on the TV. I know what they do. Any moment now, there will be a gush of liquid, the chemical solution they drop to stop the spread of the disease. The newsreaders say it’s an anti-viral, but what if they’re wrong? What if it’s poison?

Are you looking for me? Is your sting ready?

My brain is in free fall.

Am I going to die, here, amongst worms and beetles and rotting leaves?

Everything is closing in. I’m imagining our front room – the grey sofas, the purple cushions with hand-stitched gold edging, the coffee table with elephant’s legs made of wood. Then everything suddenly implodes. Little Bird becomes a tiny doll, standing amongst the rubble. Her smile is fixed and empty. Some huge force is propelling me away from her. I so want to feel the lightness of her touch, the softness of her fingers wrapping round my hand, as delicate as silk.

A wind rushes over the surface of my body. It feels as if it is stripping the clothes off my back. The thrumming instantly recedes. The Wasp is flying away, its luminous eye scouring the ground as it goes.

I’m on all fours, like a cat, trying to steady my eyes, which feel as if they are spinning in a vortex, and forcing back the waves of sickness washing up to my throat from my clenched gut.

I lie on my belly again, pushing my face into the
layers of damp leaf mould, letting the vegetation stifle a series of low moans which are spilling from my spleen, my liver, my lungs, my heart. In the tall trees, the rooks start to rasp in unison. In the dark undergrowth, the badgers shriek and the foxes howl.

I know what they are telling me. There is no going back.

Daylight. I can tell, even though my eyelids are closed. I don’t want to open them. It’s not real, the soil on my tongue, this ache in my ribs, this burning in my thigh. Any minute now, Little Bird will open my door, wish me good morning and place a hot chocolate on my bedside table.

There are insects crawling over my face. I am frozen. My neck is stiff. There is no doubting now that my bed is the earth beside a massive, tangled tree root, and, when I dare to open my eyes, that my ceiling is a canopy of red-gold autumn leaves like giant hands, sheltering me. There are wood chips stuck on my cheek. Twigs digging into my chin. Dew is clinging to blades of grass like glass baubles and now, I am sucking at them, trying to rid myself of a terrible thirst.

Feelings of panic, hunger, fear and the need to pee come in waves. The pain in my thigh makes all of these fade into insignificance. I wish I could dissolve into the soil like the dew. Disappear off the face of the earth, like Foo.

I read that a child goes missing somewhere in the world every five minutes. Staying lost is another matter. That takes planning. As of a few hours ago, it wasn’t at the top of my ‘to do’ list. I can’t remember what was. Maybe if I ask myself some questions, the faulty bits in my memory will put themselves back together.

Where am I?
Dunno. A field. The furthest from a Big Mac I’ve ever been.

Why am I running away?
OK, brain, just give in and tell me!

Where am I heading?
I’ll come back to that one.

What will I do when I get there?
Put up a flag, sing the national anthem, starve to death, how should I know?

What would you do, Crease? You wouldn’t sit here feeling sorry for yourself.

So try again:

Where am I?
Well, the sun is rising over there, so that’s east. The hills at a sort of right angle to this tree must be south. That must be the direction I’ve been running in, because the Social Observation Tower is behind me, in the distance, like an upended barbecue skewer.

Why am I running away?
Something happened, something that frightened me so much I took off and didn’t stop.

Where am I heading?
There are three choices, and it doesn’t include phone a friend. I can go east, south, west. I need to find someone I can trust, or at least somewhere safe to hide out, preferably with a roof.

Concentrate, Caly.

It’s like waiting to pull down the lever on a fruit machine, choosing the right moment to stop the circling pictures reeling in front of me.
Kerchunk-chunk-chunk
. Two bunches of grapes and a banana. Hey. It’s not as random as it seems. That’s the fruit Little Bird
brought me when I was in hospital three years ago, with appendicitis. And the hospital was on a hill near the sea. Maybe that’s a good place to head. It felt safe there – maybe they can help me again?

What will I do when I get there?
Maybe try to find the doctor with blond hair who told me jokes, and the nurse who gave me chocolate. Get some pain killers, clean clothes, food.

It’s diddly squat, Paper Clip.

‘It’s a plan, Crease. I’d like to hear you come up with something better.’

I’m talking to myself. I do it all the time at school, really bums off the teachers. I don’t mean to. The words just come out. It’s odd because I’m quiet at home, careful. Dad doesn’t like ‘squawking’ as he calls it – stupid chit chat. If he’s not around, Little Bird and I have a good old gossip, but never raise our voices, just in case he comes through the door with one of his ‘heads’ on.

We like it when he goes upstairs, puts on those
eyepatches and stays in the dark, looking like a pirate, for hours until his migraine goes away. On those days, Little Bird and I cook a special tea of rice, chilli chicken and peanut sauce. She lights candles for the table and reads me the letters from my aunties and uncles in Thailand. She tries to explain the symbols that make up the words and giggles at my random guesses at translation. I’m not exactly fast when it comes to languages, but she says I am beautiful like a lotus flower, my petals unfolding. When I was born, she wanted to call me Padme, which means ‘lotus’, but Dad chose Calypso because it was the name of his first drink in the Caribbean when he worked in the Merchant Navy.

My gran says I’m a Heinz ’57 – a mongrel not a pedigree. British but half Thai with almond-shaped eyes, wavy black hair and skin that tans as soon as it glimpses the sun.

I’ve looked up mongrels on Google. They are often stronger and healthier than pure breeds. Survivors, in
other words, who live on their wits, not their looks.

My wits are telling me I must get up and keep moving, using the cover of the woods, the long grass on open ground, the dense, spiky gorse bushes, anything I can find. It’s dangerous, this daylight. All the rules are reversed now. It’s only safe in darkness.

When I close my eyes for a moment, I can remember the smells of the hospital on the hill: the lemon hand-spray the nurses and visitors use before coming on the ward, the disinfectant in the corridors, the wood polish in the day room, the mouth-watering sweetness of cocoa from the vending machine. My tongue pokes through my cracked lips. I’m nearly swallowed up with anticipation.

It’s time to shift.

Stop running. Look around. Where am I now? Crouching low on a steep hillside. Sweat is trickling down my neck. My thigh is screaming. The pain is making me drowsy. I want to sleep, to sink into oblivion.

I’ve sprinted until my tank is empty, until my legs have crumpled, until the soles of my feet are raw with rubbed blisters.

Beneath me lies a flat plain of farmland, a patchwork of brown, gold and green squares with houses and barns dotted here and there like raised badger sets. Above is a sharp, grassy incline, rising so high that cotton-wool clouds seem to be balancing on the top. I hold my hand up and let one sit on my palm. If it was candyfloss, I could pluck it down and gobble it up. I
could eat the sky and then, maybe, the sun and have the moon for pudding.

I’d like to stay here until the end of time, in the warmth of the soil, and sleep. I’m drifting into my dream world, on a long-tailed speedboat, gliding between the giant rocks protruding from the azure Andaman Sea. My mother is next to me, wearing a wide wicker hat like an upturned lamp shade. When she laughs, beautiful red-whiskered bulbul birds fly from her mouth.

Sweet strains of music are whispering in my ears – the same melody, over and over.
La la, la-la la, la la, la-la la.
The sound is soft, distant, familiar. As the penny drops, I curl my knees over my chest and giggle.

An ice-cream van! I could be just a few minutes from a freezer full of lollies. I want to grab handfuls of them to hold against my skin and let their arctic coldness numb the burning in my thigh.

I’m running again, trainers scrabbling across bare patches of chalky earth, hands grabbing at clumps
of dry stalks, body bent forward as I scale the fierce incline. Up and up, eyes watering, nose running, I’m driven only by the thought of a release from pain.