The Territory (2 page)

At the end of the lesson, lots of the freakoids’ pieces of paper were still blank. Ha ha. That’s what a malcy 0 per cent looks like!

Jack’s just given me an amazingly cool picture he’s done. He cycled round to mine after dinner, rang the bell and thrust it into my hands. It’s of two kids playing by the stream and the water just seems to shimmer on the page. But the best part is that it’s of us. Six-year-old us. Six-year-old me clutching a tattered red kite and six-year-old him brandishing a stick.

‘Do you remember the day?’ Jack asked.

Of course I do. It was my sixth birthday. Mum and Dad had given me a kite for my birthday and Jack and I had raced to People’s Park to try it out. I ended up flying it through a bramble bush into a huge patch of nettles and Jack, knowing how much the kite meant to me, charged into the nettles to get it back. He tried to beat a path through them with this big stick. He was just wearing a pair of shorts so his legs were stung raw, but he came out grinning anyway. That’s when we jumped into the stream, to cool off. Rex leapt in after us and kept shaking himself, covering us with freezing droplets, and we couldn’t stop laughing. Funny to think that you could do that back then. That the streams weren’t always infected. It’d be rather less hilarious now.

‘I just thought of this. I don’t know why. So I painted it. It’s a present.’

And that’s part of what I love about Jack. He’ll do things that other guys would think are tragic or limp, but they’re not. They’re really cool.

Jack and I have been friends forever. On the surface we couldn’t be more different. I’ve got properly yellow (or as Daisy says ‘pus-coloured’) curly hair and green eyes. I prefer the term butter-yellow, but Daisy won’t believe that I’ve ever seen, let alone tasted butter, as even when there were still cows it was reserved for the massively super-important. I have though. Tried it, that is. Mum got some years ago in a Ministry hamper and it was so good that I actually licked my plate and knife afterwards, grim, I know! My hair’s bound to end up mousy brown, annoyingly, as both Mum and Dad have brown hair and only people who are practically albino stay blonde past their teens anyway. I’ll have to dye it, although I’d need to make sure I do a better job than Amanda who dyed hers ‘ash blonde’ last year but it came out more grey than blonde and she looked like a granny who’d had a face transplant.

Jack, on the other hand, looks like he’s descended from a Viking warrior. He’s so broad and tall that other schools look at him massively suspiciously when he turns up to sports matches, as if they think we’ve smuggled in some 17 year old to play against them. He’s got carrot-red hair (he’d say strawberry-blond – but it’s not) and his face, upper chest and arms are covered in an explosion of orange freckles. He fries if the sun so much as looks at him so maybe he’s actually descended from a Viking warrior vampire.

Jack’s the kindest, most loyal friend anyone could have. We were born on the same street and have played together from the age of three. He moved to a bigger place when he was seven though – when his mum left his dad for his step-dad. I guess, although you get tonnes of perks and subsidies working for the Ministry like Mum does, if you’re just looking at the money side of it, a transport magnate does loads better. Our parents were never exactly great friends. Mum and Dad thought Jack’s dad was a bit too ‘political’ for their taste and that his mum was, I don’t know, superficial and a massive pain. I mean, she still spells my name Noah even though Jack’s told her about 1000 times there’s no ‘h’.

They were a real odd couple come to think of it. His dad was into rallies and ‘opening people’s eyes to the abomination that is the Ministry’ while his mum was into facials and boob jobs. I remember Jack being mortified when his mum had her first boob job. We were probably ten at the time and sunbathing in People’s Park. His mum took her top off (already cringeworthily embarrassing) and her boobs (covered by tiny triangles of bikini) just sort of defied gravity and stayed shooting up into the air like proud sandcastles. I can’t believe you’re allowed to dress (or undress) like that in public. I mean, wear a hat and some police guy will pounce as you might be ‘unidentifiable on CCTV’ for a split millisecond, but make everyone in a park want to puke, no problem!

No one was surprised when she left his dad. Nor I guess when his dad was taken. He was the first person I actually knew who’d been ‘eliminated’ and it freaked me out for ages. Not for as long as Jack, obviously. He’s still not over it. Never will be.

I think I’ll hang the picture over my desk. That way I can look at it while I’m revising. Which I guess I’ll be doing FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE, or until the fifth of June anyway.

I’ve just circled the date in red on my calendar.

And breathe…

Just spent the whole weekend at Daisy’s. Mum and Dad went away to the Woods for their wedding anniversary. They do it every year. Dad calls it their ‘romantic break
à
deux
’, which he thinks sounds cool as it’s got two French words in it. Mum always literally flinches and hisses, ‘
Ben,
’ when he says this. I don’t know if it’s because it’s SO completely cringeworthy or because using French is A-not-OK. They did try to invade us after all. Western France is underwater – let’s go and live in Britain. Nice.

Anyway, time with Daisy is always good. We spent the whole day hanging out with Jack by the pond. Jack and I had a competition to see who could skim a stone the furthest and when I won Jack grabbed me and held me upside down so the end of my hair dipped in the water. I yelled at him to pull me out as I didn’t want my hair in that disease pool. I mean, if it’s got something in it that can kill fish, it can probably make your hair fall out and then I’ll never have a boyfriend, ever.

Jack pulled me upright again and held me for a second with my face just centimetres from his. I’m pretty sure he’d had toast for breakfast.

‘Kiss already,’ Daisy shouted, which was really embarrassing and also completely nicked from
Girl Town
, the most tragic show to have ever been broadcast. TV’s pretty awful at the moment, not that Mum hardly lets me watch anyway. Apart from about two OK programmes, there’s just endless malc entertainment shows and Bulletins, Bulletins and more Bulletins about our glorious Territory. Maybe it’s trying to make us so brain dead that we won’t mind when we fail the TAA or maybe it’s some cunning plan to send us tunnelling under the fence just to escape the Bulletins. A watery death with a surprising upside.

Daisy won’t accept that Jack and I are just friends (best friends, joint with Daisy) and have been since forever. It’d be like kissing my brother, that’s if I had one. OK, well, maybe not quite like kissing my brother. Kissing my brother if a little bit of me was into incest.

We used long sticks to look for frogspawn under the giant lily pads past the bridge, but couldn’t find any. I didn’t mind too much. Last year when we found some and put it in a jar and loads of tiny tadpoles hatched, the tadpoles started eating each other, which was really grim. This year the layer of algae on the pond looks thicker and yellower. There weren’t any dead animals floating in it though. That was the first sign with the rivers. Fish everywhere. Floating belly up. With dead eyes, white spots and yellowy gills. It was weird looking at them. Feeling a weird mix of hunger and revulsion.

In the evening we went back to Daisy’s. Jack couldn’t come as he said he had to help his mum with something, but I think it was also because he knows Daisy’s mum doesn’t like him. I don’t think Daisy’s mum really likes me either, but she knows I always do pretty well in tests so I think she hopes I’ll help Daisy study more. Be a ‘good influence’.

We didn’t study though. It was Saturday night after all. Daisy turned on her Scribe and we danced around her room to Kaio. Probably the coolest music the Ministry’s ever provided. I know it’s seen as slightly malc to be into Kaio big-time, as he’s a Ministry pet and everything, but I don’t care. He’s still amazing, hot beyond hot, and the only way you’re going to hear anything better is if you somehow manage to get a massively illegal radio and tune into a massively illegal Opposition-run station. Strangely enough, I don’t have any contacts in the secret underground world of illegal radio providers and I don’t believe anyone who says they’ve listened to one really has. I mean Ben in the year below said his cousin had one, but then it changed to his cousin’s friend, and when I kept on at him about what the songs were like he looked shifty and sweaty and mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like
Into the Dark
mixed with
Faith.

Daisy is a REALLY good dancer. She knows how to twist her hips in a really sexy way. If I do it, I look like a complete denser.

At one point she was gyrating against the wall and I wished Jack had been there to see it. Jack gets really embarrassed when Daisy goes all flirty. His cheeks and the bit of chest just below his neck go all red and his freckles seem to leap out at you, almost neon in their orangeness. Like that really orange drink everyone was drinking last year that got banned because it made toddlers turn orange and go hyper. If you tease him about it, he goes even redder. Daisy says he’d go scarlet and probably explode like some giant supernova if I ever properly flirted with him, but she’s just trying to stir things up (and show off that she now knows the word ‘supernova’ after flunking last week’s Physics test). Looks-wise (and it seems dance-wise) I’m no Daisy.

Boys like Daisy and Daisy likes it that boys like her. She’s kissed eight boys in total and that’s excluding kisses without tongues. She can’t believe I haven’t kissed anyone yet; won’t stop teasing me about it. Her two major bits of advice are (1) be careful not to clash teeth as it feels horrible and you look like a right amateur; and (2) make sure the boy hasn’t just eaten a piece of cheese on toast like when she kissed Rory Pike and his whole mouth tasted like slightly stale melted cheese, which was grim.

We didn’t get to dance for long though. Daisy’s stressy mum had a go at us for disturbing Logan. Which is ridiculous as it was only 9pm and what normal twenty year old would care about a bit of music? Particularly amazingly cool music. But I guess Daisy’s brother isn’t exactly a normal twenty year old. He’s a freakoid for a start.

I was really shocked when I first went back to Daisy’s at the start of
Year 4 and saw that her brother had a Node; was one of them. ’Cos Daisy’s not, obviously. Daisy doesn’t like to talk about it. Apparently her parents used to be better off. Her dad was the head of some big computer company and so they could afford the procedure – could go make themselves a Childe.

Five years later, things weren’t quite so rosy. Another freakoid was out of the question. Daisy always says that she was a mistake. I always tell her she’s being a denser, but there is something about the way her mum looks at her sometimes, when she doesn’t think anyone else is looking, that is really pretty cold. Kind of scary. Like Mr Hughes with Jack’s Physics homework. And she gets so stressed about any test or exam. I guess she’s not used to the pressure. Logan naturally sailed through everything. I remember thinking he was quite hot when I first met him, but now I can’t see it all. He has Daisy’s great cheekbones and perfectly spaced eyes but whereas Daisy gives off this amazing energy, he is a personality black hole. Whenever I see him, I know he’s judging me. And by the look on his face, I’m clearly failing.

Once, when Daisy and I were having one of our late-night chats, Daisy asked me whether I thought my parents would come to the Wetlands with me if I failed.

I didn’t have to think. ‘Yes.’ I said. They can be right pains, but Mum and Dad would never let me go by myself. I know they’d do anything to protect me.