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
‘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
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