The guards take one look at the boy’s left side and nod. They don’t bother getting him to confirm his identity, but the younger one – still in her fifties – can’t seem to keep herself from mouthing, ‘Holy God!’
The other is more businesslike. ‘The State needs your service, Mr Lawlor.’
‘You don’t mean me, I take it,’ Da says, and the guards ignore him.
‘We need you to come with us.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Anto says. He can barely squeeze the words from his throat. ‘We’re here to meet my, uh, my friend, I—’
‘Vanessa Doherty won’t be arriving, son. I’m told she’s been given a mission of her own.’
Anto hasn’t seen Nessa since she went home to give her Testimony and be with her family. He finds it hard to cope with the dreams, and none of the counsellors can help him the way she does just by sitting near him, by being so … serene. Is that the word? Nothing gets to her. Except him, and only in good ways that make her smile and talk about her strange interest in lost poems and songs.
‘Are you saying my boy has a mission, guard?’ asks Da, puffing up his chest.
He’s oblivious to Anto’s shattering disappointment, but Ma can feel the quick rise and fall of his breathing under her fingers.
‘We’re not allowed talk about it, sir. But he must come with us. We have a car waiting.’
‘A car!’ Da is delighted. Thrilled. ‘You hear that, son? A car!’
‘I don’t want to go,’ says Anto. He doesn’t like the sound of the word ‘mission’. He needs to find a school now, a real school where the pupils aren’t murdered. He’s supposed to learn a trade and to have time to get to know the girl he loves. Da pushes him gently towards the women, but he resists.
‘You want to get us in trouble, son?’ asks the older guard. ‘And remember, your friend’s not coming today. You’re not missing out on anything.’ Her face is beginning to harden. They could arrest him, or even his parents. The Nation will do anything to survive.
What choice does he have?
For the first time in Anto’s life, he gets to travel by car. The journey takes them up the old M1 before they turn on to narrower roads, barely fit for purpose any more, with the sea on their right.
One of the policewomen is sitting beside him in the back seat.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it? Wales used to be out there somewhere.’
Now the horizon just fades to mist. He doesn’t like to look at it. He’s heard stories of boats heading out to sea, only to drift back to shore empty of human life.
The policewoman must be thinking the same thing. ‘Where do the passengers disappear to?’ she muses. But she has to know the answer is hell. The Grey Land. At least that’s what everybody says. A trip in a boat would be worse even than the Call, because there is no coming home again, alive or dead.
‘That’s where we send them all these days,’ she says. ‘We put them in rafts or dinghies and let the current take them into the mist.’
‘Who?’ Anto asks.
‘Oh, you know.’ She shrugs, as if the answer doesn’t matter. ‘Criminals. Traitors.’
Prison
The cell door is open, but Nessa stays where she is, lying on a mattress made of hard lumps. Damp stains splotch the ceiling and a thousand names and dates crowd each other on the walls, layer upon layer of them. ‘Effie took the boat.’ ‘Remember Cathy – not one bit sorry.’ ‘This here picture is the warden and a sheep.’
Outside, a woman screams. That’s how I feel, Nessa thinks. That’s it exactly.
Yet she’s not dead, is she? Not waking to the horror of the Grey Land either. Instead they have brought her to the women’s wing of what appears to be a prison. She never knew such a place existed. The Nation has no resources for criminals, does it?
She growls. ‘I didn’t do anything.’ But nobody’s listening. Nobody cares that she should be celebrated as a survivor, that she should be burying her face in Anto’s neck and teaching him to laugh again. No. Beyond the cell it’s all just shouting and jeers while somebody weeps.
‘Doughnut!’ a woman cries, winning applause. ‘Doughnut!’ The sobbing that follows is breathless, desperate, full of whispered pleading that Nessa can’t quite hear.
She throws off a thin blanket and walks gingerly to the doorway. The scene is like something out of a movie – an old one, from the time before prisons had automated doors. Two storeys of cells form a square around a central area containing what might be a table-tennis table. It’s hard to tell with such a thick crowd of women surrounding it, jostling, angry, laughing, while others hang back.
‘What’s going on?’ Nessa asks a pudgy grey-haired woman. ‘Aren’t there guards? Isn’t this a prison?’ But then the crowd parts to reveal Melanie, the only familiar face here, lying weeping on the table. She is naked from the waist up, the denim shirt everyone else wears has been ripped away to reveal a hole in her torso the size of two fists. She tries to lie down, but two burly women force her shoulders up while others take turns to put their hands right through her chest. They wave and make faces. Someone tries to stick her entire head through and Melanie screams with the pain of it.
‘My heart!’ she cries. ‘The doctors! Call me a doctor!’
Sturdy wooden chairs line the walls between the cells. Nessa helps herself to one, raises it above her head and smashes it across the wall, leaving her with a splintered leg. The crack brings sudden silence.
‘By the cauldron,’ she cries, ‘you’ll kill her!’
A pair of large women who were holding Melanie drop her and push their way through the crowd. The girl flops back like a doll, and what worries Nessa is that she makes no effort to cover her deformity.
But Nessa should be more worried about herself.
Almost everybody here has at some point been trained to kill. They have survived horrors beyond human imagination and, for some, the experience has taught them the worthlessness of life. Two of the strongest are facing Nessa now. A red-haired brute of a woman with a scar right across her nose, and a younger pale-skinned girl, her hair bleached and spiked, her bare left forearm deformed by the handprint of a Sídhe.
‘By Lugh, Mary.’ The spiky-haired woman is speaking the language of the enemy. ‘It’s strange the cripple should defend that little twist, isn’t it? Considering it was Doughnut who got her locked up here.’
‘What do you mean?’ Nessa asks.
‘That’s right, Ciara,’ says the red-headed Mary, grinning at Nessa’s confusion. ‘Doughnut made a deal with the Sídhe to cure her, and only when that fell through, she confessed. Says there are a lot more like her. Traitors. People who claimed to survive the Call.’
‘Only they didn’t survive, did they, Mary?’
‘Not really, Ciara, not really at all.’ She looks pointedly at Nessa’s legs. ‘Some of them couldn’t have made it through. Not without doing a deal with the enemy. There’s no other explanation, is there?’
And now they’re both looking at Nessa, grinning. Their shoulders tense, and this is a mistake, because how stupid of them! To signal their intention to fight like that. Nessa has never needed to wind up before delivering a punch; never needed to think it through. She simply acts.