The Girl in the Shadows Read online

I cringed in fear. I knew he didn’t mean I could nip next door to use the slide and then come home again. This was AB: his world was black and white. ‘Which Side Are You On?’ we sang in the mornings; I couldn’t like red slides and be part of the Collective. If I left to play on that slide, I’d be banished from the safety of his presence.

  ‘If you go, you might have fun, but I would lock the door so you could never come back,’ he hissed at me. ‘You’ll never be allowed back.’

  I listened to his words in terror. I was eight years old and I knew about Outside now: I knew there were not just fascist agents out there, but child-killers and thugs. Even if I risked it, who could I turn to? I didn’t know anybody outside the Collective; I had never spoken a single word to anyone not in the group. Where on earth would I go?

  Sadly – because I really did like that slide – I acquiesced to AB’s guidelines and gave up my dream of playing on it. Such things were not for me.

  But a seed had been planted, nonetheless.

  Were some things better Outside?

  12

  ‘Why is Gorbachev not dead yet?’ I asked AB impatiently. Bala had been crowing about the downfall of the former leader of the Soviet Union in late August 1991; I couldn’t understand why he didn’t just kill him, given he was such an enemy and AB had the power.

  ‘Ah,’ said AB expansively, ‘I have a programme for him – just like I have for you …’

  That year, AB’s programme for me required that I write down my dreams for him: although he could already read my mind, he demanded an account of all my waking and sleeping moments, so as better to train me. No stone was to be left unturned: he wanted control over every aspect of my life.

  I couldn’t really remember my dreams, only the nightmares, which were often about the scarred Iraqi children AB had shown me, or starving African children with worms in their bellies: what I thought might be my fate if I was ever abandoned by AB. With no genuine dream material at my disposal, I excitedly spied an unexpected opportunity – to write. It was the comrades who would oversee my work and they didn’t have the power of thought control, so they wouldn’t know that I was really making up stories!

  I used to write pages and pages, delighting in the freedom to express myself. My ‘dreams’ often starred my friend, Mao, although I would write: ‘Dreamt I was organizing a meeting to denounce Mao!’ I liked that I got the chance to write his name and create something.

  I was so happy, writing those ‘dreams’. I felt less of a shadow-child when I could see words unravelling from the end of my pen. Afterwards, I’d stare almost in wonder at the page of writing: I did that. It was proof that I existed. Over time, I began reading my ‘dreams’ aloud to the comrades when we were together in the kitchen, whenever AB was not there.

  I liked the kitchen. Food was one of the highlights of my life; a punctuation point amid the dreariness of the day. It was my one daily pleasure, and it gave me comfort on days when I was feeling miserable.

  Comrade Josie was the best cook, though I could never openly praise her skills. She and the others made a lot of Indian food – liver masala, vegetable curry, stuffed sweet samosas and banana erussery. I relished the opportunity to help in the kitchen, where I would pick through the rice to remove debris or gather ingredients for a recipe. I wasn’t taught to do any actual cooking, and was too terrified of the electrical appliances to use them, but nonetheless I much preferred the kitchen work to doing my studies about AB. Bala himself was in two minds about allowing me time in the kitchen – my work as his soldier was far more important. Sometimes he disallowed it as a punishment, but on the whole, to my relief, he permitted it.

  It meant the kitchen and bathroom soon became my two favourite rooms in the house. As I grew a little older, I tried closing my bedroom door in the hope of a little more privacy, but AB disciplined me, reminding me that the Shadow World Government (SWG), led by David Rockefeller, would take me away and kill me if I did not allow the comrades to maintain their constant watch.

  Then, to my horror, he started worrying again about allowing me privacy in the bathroom. It seemed he had noticed the ever-lengthening time I was spending in there and decided to put a stop to it. On 10 December 1991 he gave a strict guideline:

  1-2 minutes for peeing.

  3-5 minutes for shitting.

  The comrades should report if I disobeyed.

  I was devastated. Life became harder – not helped as 1991 turned into 1992 and AB became more violent than before, as though me turning nine meant I’d graduated into a new world of pain. He’d spit in my face and swear at me. ‘If you carry on like this,’ he’d yell, ‘I will break your fucking finger.’ He threatened to take a chair and beat me to a pulp; to smash my head in; to chop off my fingers if I bit my nails. Those suicidal feelings I’d had aged six buzzed up again, like a swarm of bees stinging me beneath my shirt.

  Such was my desolation that I’d sometimes even speak back to AB. When he gave me five ‘beyond ultra-ugly’ grades one day, I responded: ‘I don’t care.’ If ever I talked back like this, I was always severely punished.

  To my surprise, however, I no longer seemed to be the only person in the Collective feeling that way. Ever since we’d moved to Streatham, Comrade Cindy had been acting strangely. She used to stand far off in Discussions now, almost out of the circle, as though she couldn’t bear to be near AB. She barely talked to anyone; if she did speak, she would snap. Once, there was a huge fight when she failed to greet AB on passing him in a corridor. For hours at a time now she would sit on the edge of her bed, face turned away, and silently draw line after line on a piece of paper. I didn’t know what she was doing; her behaviour frightened me. Something wasn’t right.

  Too young to be able to figure out what was up with Cindy, I tried to lose myself in the happiness of writing ‘dreams’. But in September 1992, AB wandered in one day while I was reading my ‘dream’ aloud.

  He was furious. Outwardly, he said he was angry because the fascist state might be eavesdropping; inwardly, I wondered if it was really because he knew the story was made up. He pushed me roughly to my knees and I cried out; even more so when he slapped me and I felt the sting of his heavy palm. He went for Comrades Aisha and Sian too, for allowing me to read out what I’d written. It had not been expressly forbidden, but they were expected to have anticipated it was wrong.

  Worse was still to come. Before I could stop him, he reached out a hand and grabbed the book I’d written my stories in. Without missing a beat, he tore it in two and then thoroughly shredded the pages.

  I felt the pain deep inside, far worse than any beating. Each rip of the paper felt like he was ripping up my soul. Everything I wrote was sacred to me. Like Tap and Toilet, my words were my friends.

  ‘You must all ask yourselves,’ AB raged in Discussions, ‘“Did AB ask me to do this? If not, WHY AM I DOING IT?”’

  AB had not asked Comrade Cindy to make all those lines on her pieces of paper. That autumn, he finally started attacking her for her strange behaviour, whereas previously he had let it go. In hindsight, I think he was worried about money. Throughout 1992, whenever I requested something, I was told: ‘No, there are no units to waste.’ But it seemed, despite the money worries, that Cindy’s insubordination had become too much.

  As always happened, we were asked to join in with the attacks. I did so too, denouncing Cindy, and much more happily than I had Leanne because Cindy never seemed upbeat, so it was hard to find anything pleasant to say about her. AB began picking on everything she did, escalating his violence against her. Later, he said this was a test: she had to show that no matter how hard on her he was, she wanted to stay in AB’s CC, to prove herself a good person.

  Cindy failed the test.

  On 13 October 1992, she didn’t come home from work. Like Fartcolour before her, she had left the Collective. ‘Traitor Cindy got wiped out!’ I wrote in my diary.

  It was all part of AB’s plan.

  After Cindy left, with no one in the
Collective working we really were poor. The Indian feasts dried up; we ate a lot of biscuits for breakfast. Two old tops of mine got stitched together to make a new one because we couldn’t afford replacements. Everyone seemed stressed. AB developed a toothache soon after Cindy’s banishment and blamed us – we were the ones creating it through our disobedience.

  Dentists, like doctors, were part of the old world – so none of the comrades ever went, no matter the pain of their teeth. Consequently, they all had dreadful teeth, black and brown or simply missing. AB instructed they should let their rotten teeth fall out – because when they reached the age of a hundred, new ones would grow.

  That winter, no matter what I did I could not get back in Bala’s good books. Shobha was ill one day and I helped look after her, but I was beaten for building an anti-AB clique. Other transgressions were more familiar: I mentioned, a bit uncertainly, that I thought I looked more like a girl than a boy … AB promptly told me I was an ‘ugly cadaver’ and he didn’t want to hear any more talk about girls; he wanted people for his Collective, not men and women. I was beaten 63 times; given 12 kicks. My diary charted every crime and punishment.

  On 3 December 1992, AB beat me – again – for running above his room. It was a particularly bad beating, even by AB’s new standards, and coming on top of all the other kicks and shoves and slaps I’d received in the past few weeks it was too much for me to take. Increasingly, I’d felt it was unfair, what AB was doing in attacking me. ‘I am very innocent!’ I’d told him once. ‘I don’t know why I should work with you when you attack me when I am so innocent. I am very hurt and offended by the way you treat me.’

  My reasoning always fell on deaf ears.

  On 3 December, I limped away from AB after his latest beating. I may have looked defeated and compliant as I bowed my head and hobbled away, but inside I felt anything but. Rather than feeling sorry for myself, or believing that I was wicked and deserved to be hit, for once my overwhelming feeling was anger.

  With the time limits now imposed on the bathroom, I could not retreat there to lick my wounds. With my cocoon blasted to bits by all the beatings, there was no relief to be found with my old friend Mao.

  So – unusually – I let my anger grip me, rather than running away from it into a peaceful fantasy that calmed me down. I let it flood my mind, vine its way along every vein. Until now, my thought transgressions had been fairly minor – finding a friend in Mao, a man who had once been a friend of AB. But, in that moment, I tried to think of the most outrageous thing possible. I almost wanted AB to know I was angry. I’d already been punished and I felt I didn’t care if he beat me again: what was one more bruise on top of all the rest?

  So I racked my brains, trying to find the right words to give voice to all these feelings. How could I express the depth of my rage?

  Trembling with fear, I closed my eyes and thought with all my might: I HATE AB AND I LOVE DAVID ROCKEFELLER! I HOPE DAVID ROCKEFELLER FINDS AB AND PUTS HIS FOOT ON HIS FACE!

  I cowered afterwards, expecting my body to explode in a conflagration, for Spontaneous Human Combustion to engulf me in a searing heat …

  Nothing.

  A beat later, still alive, I opened my eyes gingerly, expecting to see fire and brimstone raining outside the window; for the ground beneath me to shudder and tear apart; for a lightning bolt to strike me dead …

  Nothing.

  I looked around me, waiting. But no disaster, natural or otherwise, befell me in those first few minutes after I’d made the curse.

  When I next saw AB, I searched his face for any sign he’d heard me …

  There was none.

  In the days and weeks that followed, I didn’t fall sick and nothing untoward happened at all. I could not comprehend or make sense of it. AB is God, God is AB …

  But still nothing happened.

  How can this be?

  I think it was then that the realization struck me, with all the intensity of that lightning bolt that never came.

  AB cannot read my mind. He does not have that power.

  I felt on the brink of a brave new world.

  Part Two

  Insurrection

  13

  I sat quietly on the plastic chair, swinging my legs. Lambeth Housing Advice Centre was not particularly busy on 28 October 1993 but nonetheless the unfamiliar sounds – phones ringing, computer keys clicking, the officious voices of those in charge – swamped my ears until my head ached. With Comrade Cindy and her salary gone, we had lasted almost a year in the Streatham house without paying rent, but two days ago had been unceremoniously evicted and were currently staying at a guest house.

  I was thrilled by the eviction. There were so many wonderful new things I was experiencing as a result – such as a hotel! I was captivated by the other residents, including several nice-looking African women who had children. As with the blonde girl at the fence when I was five, these small citizens confounded me. Comrade Sian had told them all I didn’t speak any English so, to my disappointment, they ignored me. I had watched jealously as children from different families introduced themselves to each other and then scampered off to play. Even if Sian hadn’t stopped me, I would have been at a loss as to how to do the same.

  AB was spitting mad about the ‘warlord criminal’ landlord who had evicted us; the day before he’d unleashed wildfires over California in retribution. Though I despised the stinking landlord too, I also found it amusing watching AB fulminate about his enemy. Since that powerful December day the previous year, I’d formulated a nickname for our leader in my head: AB = Anger Burns. It was apt both for his constant rage and for the way his beatings burned me.

  It was also sacrilege to have devised such a thing. Though AB was always seeing secret meanings in words and inventing acronyms – something he called ‘ARAdiction’ – the rest of us were banned from doing so. ‘Don’t do, “This means that and that means this!”’ he would say petulantly when I tried to copy him, or to make up my own new words. ‘I am the natural centre – no one else!’

  Yet despite my breaching of the guideline, no harm had come to me, so I merrily continued to use it. My mental cocoon had welcomed new allies alongside Mao, too – the most transgressive of whom was the British Prime Minister, John Major. Secretly, I considered him to be the greatest hero the world had ever seen or would ever see (aside from AB). More than in my mind, John Major was in my heart. He was something of a role model: AB often mentioned derisively how Major had left school at sixteen and didn’t go to Oxbridge, yet he was now leader of the BFS; it gave me hope that, despite my unconventional education, I too could achieve great things. Great things, that was, beyond becoming AB’s minister for children.

  I thought often about Major. When I’d been younger, I’d been frightened to like something AB didn’t, but now I almost took a perverse pleasure in it. And as I fantasized about Major in his grey suit and square specs, it seemed inconceivable that every night he tucked a napkin into his collar and devoured a newborn, as AB had always described. Earlier that year, I’d taken courage from my newfound thought freedom and even articulated it: ‘They don’t eat babies!’ I had scoffed, when AB was mid-rant against the SWG.

  He pinned me with a glare. ‘Don’t doubt me,’ he’d threatened. I had said nothing more. That always happened: any dissent was crushed so thoroughly that there was no dissent at all.

  Except in my mind.

  In truth, I wasn’t completely certain AB didn’t have the power to read my thoughts. He often said: ‘I allow you to express and lull you into thinking you have got away with it, so as to catch you on bigger crimes. Then I will punish you so that you will become a self-sacrificing soldier of AB, and will never violate my authority in anything at any time, anywhere in the entire universe …’ So part of me was worried that he was clocking up each and every thought violation and would one day show his hand.

  Yet I also thought: If Bala does know everything, then he knows I’m thinking about Major … and he’s not
angry, so he is all right with it. Perhaps he secretly likes Major after all and his denouncing of him is a test, just like he did with Mao. Perhaps it’s even good I like Major because I am passing the secret test …

  I could tie myself up in knots about it. It was a lonely dilemma, because I couldn’t ask anyone for help in unravelling it; Tap and Toilet offered no insight at all. Carefully, I assessed every move of AB’s: the way he allowed Aisha to start sleeping in my bed again at the beginning of 1993; the way he increased my good percentage to 70 per cent in September. Ultimately, I decided to trust my instinct. Perhaps things were not quite as controlled as I’d always believed. The thought was a happy one.

  Certainly, the Collective seemed rather uncontrolled at the moment, as I accompanied them to the Lambeth housing office. I knew they’d rather have done anything else but bring me here, but the alternative was to leave me in the hotel, which was equally unacceptable.

  ‘Stay here,’ they had hissed at me, some distance from the counter. I wasn’t to accompany them to speak to the official. Now I watched from afar as the group of comrades moved up the line, getting closer to the mixed-race woman sitting behind the desk.

  I viewed her cautiously. She was an out-and-out fascist agent, working for the BFS. With no comrades employed any more, we had been forced to come here to be rehoused by the state – but we all had to be on our guard as we carried out this heroic interaction with our enemy.

  Though my head had become a sanctuary for me, Outside was still as scary as ever. I didn’t understand my relationship with it: I loved to be Outside, and often thought the people I observed there seemed very nice, yet I also had nightmares about the neighbours. I felt as though I swung back and forth about it like a body on a gallows, corpse creaking in the wind but always rooted by the noose: the knowledge that Outside had to be dangerous because of all I read each day in The New World.

  Earlier that year, in January, I’d had a wake-up call about my fascination with Outside. Very naughtily, I’d spent several days pouring water into the airing cupboard, hoping the Collective would think there was a leak and call a plumber. (Anything to break up the monotony of my life.) The ‘leak’ was soon discovered, but I was identified as the culprit. AB was so incensed that he threw me Out of the house, just as he had when I was four.