Out of Time (11 page)

‘We know that there is,’ Helmuth thunders.

‘There are no other conspirators.’

‘There is a boy.’

‘I know no boy.’

‘You were seen with him in the park. He took instructions from you and left.’

‘ I have given no instructions. I know no boy.’

But Susie did. Susie knew whom they meant. Susie had seen Joe. She had told no one but she had written it in her diary.

‘You and your conspirators knew you were acting against the law.’

‘There are no other conspirators and yes, my wife and I, we knew.’

‘It is strictly forbidden to keep children. They have to be handed to the Council.’

‘We wanted to keep our own child.’

‘You will be punished, your daughter put into the service of the town and the boy captured and executed. We will find him.’

*

Joe felt the community’s hostility like a dark beating host. How could he ever have thought he could live with them as a friend, that they would provide shelter and comfort? He cursed himself for his naivety. All these young people were and probably always had been his enemies, feigning friendship or at least tolerance but, it seemed clear to him now, they were allied to the townspeople, in an outpost strategically situated to capture those who had evaded the nets. He was trapped, imprisoned.

Otto was asking him a question. Joe tried to focus on what was being said but, yet again, the words made no sense.

‘Were you selected?’.

‘Selected?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

*

‘You are aware of the selection process in the town?’

‘Yes, we are aware.’

‘You deliberately flouted our most important law.’

‘We were doing what we thought best for our child.’

‘It’s not for you to think. It’s for you to obey.’

‘We are individuals. We cannot help but think.’

‘You are, or were, a part of this community. You will be excommunicated.’

‘It was a risk we were willing to take.’

‘You will bear the consequences of that willingness. So will your daughter.’

*

What were they talking about?

‘Selected for what? The school, the football team? What?’

‘Don’t prevaricate!’

Prevaricate? No, he was not going to. He was going to give it them straight. The time for pretence or prevarication was over.

‘Where were you living?’

‘Twenty two Fairfax Road.’

‘Who with?’

‘My mother.’

‘Alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where is your father?’

‘I no longer know.’

‘Exterminated?’

Joe stared.

‘Exterminated?’ he returned. Though it was many years since he had heard from him it had never occurred to him as a possibility. He examined it now. Extermination was not a concept with which, in his daily life, he was familiar but he read thrillers, saw films, watched the news, kept up with world events. These provided no shortage of extermination on a number crunching scale that this group of five people could not conceive. So why not his father?

He replied carefully.

‘I don’t think he’s been exterminated.’

But suddenly he was no longer sure.

‘He left.’

‘To go where?’

‘Away.

Perhaps the story of another love was a decoy, perhaps his father’s absence was not voluntary but decreed by some outside agency. Perhaps MI5, MI6, or some secret organisation had used him in a special capacity Joe could not even begin to imagine. His father had been a civil servant and Joe was never clear what that entailed. He could have been sent on a mission abroad and taken hostage. Was he allowing his imagination to run riot? Joe put the question to one side to be considered at a later date, if such there was.

‘He just left,’ he repeated.

‘To join the junta?’

‘There is no junta where I come from, not in England anyway, and there are no townspeople, not as you know them. We live among decent citizens who don’t chase and kill one another. We live in a law abiding country, not like it is here, everyone at one another’s throat and young people like you living in isolation...’

‘You’ve been sent to spy on us.’

‘No!’

‘We have proof!’

‘What?’

‘The jumper with the hood. The one you’re hiding under your mattress, waiting for the right moment to put it on. Only Helmuth’s guards wear hoods like that.’

His Gap jumper. His hoody. Joe burst into hysterical laughter.

‘You cretins! It’s just an ordinary jumper. Everyone wears them where I come from. It’s you who are spying on me, searching my room where you have no business to be. You’re like the secret police they had in Russia, using some insignificant detail to incriminate me.’

He could see they did not know what he was talking about.

‘You’re treating me as though I were on trial! You twist everything I say, just biding your time before you hand me over to this Helmuth whom you pretend to hate. Well, you can bloody well listen to the truth for once. Not that you’ll believe it. But it’s this. I don’t know what I’m doing here, I don’t know how I got here. And I no longer care. I wish I were dead.’

He sat down with an awful kind of finality, as though nothing else needed saying.

‘Are you a spy?’ Otto asked again.

‘No I’m not! Why would I be? Who would I spy for? Those terrible people in Bantage who tried to kill me because I’m young? What reason is that? In my world young people are treasured and looked on as the hope for the future, not hounded to death. What happens if there are no young people? You’ll all die out.’

No one moved, no one spoke.

‘And you’ve sheltered me and I’ve tried to help you always, show I’m grateful. I kept watch and looked after everything while you buggered off, leaving Otto to cope. He would have perished but for me. That’s true Otto, isn’t it? And anyway, where did you all disappear to without word or warning?’

They did not reply but went on the attack again.

‘You’re waiting for a signal for the right moment to destroy us, you want to put an end to the last spark of civilisation, the last hope for mankind.’

*

‘You are part of a conspiracy. You were waiting for the right moment to stage a coup.’

‘We have stated that there is no conspiracy. We were not planning a coup.’

‘Why else would you defy the state?’

‘For the sake of our daughter.’

‘Who is now a prisoner. You must have realised that you would be discovered. You were using her as a hostage for your own dark purposes.’

‘No!’

Susie can hear the anger and despair in her father’s voice and tries turning towards him but firm hands hold her back.

‘It was my fault!’ she shouts. ‘I asked them.’

A hand over her mouth silences her.

‘Leave her alone!’ her mother cries. ‘ She is only a child. only a child.’

*

Joe was beyond understanding, foundering in a welter of misconceptions that bore no relation to anything he recognised as reality. He felt as though he had become a character in someone else’s fantasy, that his own individuality had ceased to exist, he felt that some essential part of him had gone missing. He felt that he had lost his being.

‘If,’ he said in a voice of utter resignation, ‘if you think I’m here to destroy you, why don’t you kill me? It’d be easy enough. There’s five of you and only one of me. Go on, do it. There’s nothing here for me anyway, just growing old and dying without having achieved anything, experienced anything....’

A murmur went through the room.

What had he said now?

‘Look,’ Joe said with controlled calm, ‘I was coming home from school...’

‘There’s been no school here for four hundred years,’ Meredith said

‘There is where I come from. Hundreds of schools. People learn to read and write. Can you read and write?’ he asked accusingly.

‘Of course. But writing’s been banned. And we have learnt to do without it.’

‘Well, lucky you,’ he said sarcastically.

‘Go on,’ Otto ordered.

‘It was an ordinary day like any other. Same old routine, breakfast, school, home. Mum always leaves tea out for me, she has to earn you see....’

He faltered, seeing the incredulous looks on their faces.

‘She has to earn a living with my father gone and never contacting us or sending money.’

Money. How were they to understand money? Joe saw that he was digging an ever deeper hole for himself.

‘There’s just the two of us. She’s in an office. Not a very exciting job, she doesn’t like it much.’ He was talking to himself now. ‘I’ve promised myself that as soon as I have my ‘A’ levels I’ll train in some skill, don’t know what at the moment. Don’t think I’ll manage university on account of the cost, though I would have liked to. We don’t have an ancestral home, not like yours with family roots reaching back four hundred years. Ours is a three up, two down, rather poky....’

How could he possibly explain?.

‘It’s so different from the life you lead. Children live with their parents.’

Another murmur round the table.

‘Everything is different. In my Bantage people live ordinary lives, in ordinary houses without bells on the roofs; and there are people in the countryside, there are farms and houses and villages, cars, lorries, tractors and no one wants to kill anyone else. Not as far as I know anyway. Here is like a foreign country even though we speak the same language and even though the houses in Bantage haven’t changed. Or at least don’t look different from the outside.’

He noted their disbelieving faces but once started on his tale could not stop.

‘I was walking back from school and I had an accident. I fell. And when I got up to go home everything had gone quiet. There was no one about though I wasn’t taking too much notice. I felt dizzy and odd. I thought I was probably suffering from concussion. Then the front door key didn’t fit and I thought I’d gone to the wrong house but I checked and I hadn’t. And some strange guy who thought he owned our house chased me and the whole nightmare began.’

He told them about the chase, about how he had spent the night in the waste ground. He described his escape from the guards and tracker dogs, he told them how he had gradually learned to survive on his own. All the pent-up fears, hopes and speculations of the weeks since he had lost home, family and his once familiar life poured out of him in a torrent. He stopped only when he saw that their faces were still hostile.

‘If all you say is true, how did you get here in the first place?’

‘I told you. I don’t know.’

‘That’s difficult to believe. We think you were brought up in the dark and have turned traitor.’

‘I don’t understand!’

‘Yes, you do. There are parents in the town who hide their children.’

The image of the girl skipping in the park; that was it. She was hiding from the townspeople because she was young.

‘We don’t believe your fantasies.’

‘They’re not fantasies! They’re real!’

‘They’re the ravings of a madman.’

Perhaps they were right. Perhaps it was he who was mad, making up a life that had never happened.

‘Joe, how old are you?’

This was a question so irrelevant that it caught Joe off guard. For a moment he could not remember. When was his birthday? June seventeenth. It had passed without his noticing. He must be eighteen. He said so.

‘I mean your real age.’

‘That is my real age.’

Confusion round the table as they looked at each other in dismay. What now, Joe wondered with an indifference born of despair.

*

‘Step forward!’

Susie’s cowl is torn away and she is given a push. She confronts an impenetrable, silent court and the terrifying face of her persecutor, Helmuth. She has courage enough to look him in the eyes. His anger is implacable. She knows there can be no mercy from this man.

‘How old are you?’

Susie tries to prevaricate.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘That is a lie.’

‘She is ten years old,’ her mother cries out, ‘you have no right to put her on trial. She is an innocent victim.’

‘Victimised by your actions. You have defied the state and escaped justice for ten years. You will escape no longer. The court will decide your sentence.’

But Susie knows Helmuth has already pronounced it.

*

Kathryn, distressed, said in an abandoned voice,

‘He’s a new born.’

‘Have you taken the drug?’

What drug? Medical? Recreational?

‘The drug,’ Otto persisted.

Joe looked at him helplessly. What was he talking about?

‘Cocaine, Crack, what?’

‘L.L.’

‘L.L? I’ve never heard of it. Is it something you lot take?’

That was probably it. They were all on drugs, the inmates of a loony bin playing out a morbid, obscene game in which he was cast as victim. But no, he’d got it wrong, it wasn’t them, it was he who was mad, the people in this room the product of his ravings, personifications of his disgust for himself. He was shut up in a madhouse, drugged by white coated men with syringes. He could feel himself going faint, the faces before him blurring into grotesque shapes. He pushed past the two boys hovering beside him, ran into the corridor and out into the open. No one followed. Joe leant against the wall and took in great gulps of air. The wind howled round him, a potent symbol of his stricken confusion. He scooped up a clod of earth and held it in his hands, then rubbed it over his face and pushed some into his mouth, savouring the roughness and the bitter, gritty taste on his tongue. Running to the nearest tree he tried to dislodge one of its waving branches which held until, with strength born of despair, Joe tore it from its trunk and with these, branch and soil, ran back indoors. They were still sitting round the table and looked silently at the wild and mud bespattered figure placing his trophies before them.

‘They’re real, aren’t they?’ he shouted and ran out again, retching up a stinking black mess in painful spasms as he staggered to the well and looked into its reflecting waters. A rippling, sickle moon looked back.

He jumped.

The dark and slimy walls went past him in slow motion, the sliver of moon broke up into a thousand silver fragments and the water closed over his head.