‘Stand up straight! And
smile
,’ she hisses, then pushes me through a door.
I paste a wide smile on my face, convinced it won’t transform me from scared and miserable to angelic and happy; more like, demented.
I stand in the doorway, and there they are. I almost expect to see them posed like they are in the photograph, wearing the same things, like dolls. But each of them is in different clothes, different positions, and the details fight for notice: too much at once, all threatening to overwhelm and send me into the red, even with the Happy Juice still lingering in my veins. I hear the teacher’s bored voice, over and over again with the same words, as if she were standing there next to me:
one thing at a time, Kyla
.
I focus on their eyes and leave the rest for later. Dad’s are grey, unreadable, contained; Mum’s soft flecked light brown, impatient eyes that remind me of Dr Lysander, like they miss nothing. And my sister is there, too: wide dark almost black eyes stare curiously back at mine, set in glowing skin like chocolate velvet. When the photo was sent weeks ago, I’d asked why Amy was so different to my parents and me, and was told sharply that race is irrelevant and no longer worthy of notice or comment under the glorious Central Coalition. But how can you not see?
The three of them sit in chairs at a desk, opposite another man. All eyes are on me but no one says anything. My smile feels more and more like an unnatural thing, like an animal that died and is now stuck on my face in a death grimace.
Then Dad jumps out of his chair. ‘Kyla, we’re so pleased to welcome you to our family.’ And he smiles and takes my hand, kisses my cheek, his rough with whiskers. His smile is warm, and real.
Then Mum and Amy are there, too, all three of them towering inches taller than my five foot nothing. Amy slips an arm through mine, and strokes my hair. ‘Such a beautiful colour, like corn silk. So soft!’
And Mum smiles then too, but hers is more like mine.
The man at the desk clears his throat, and shuffles some papers. ‘Signatures, please?’
And Mum and Dad sign where he points, then Dad gives me the pen.
‘Sign here, Kyla,’ the man says, and points to a blank line at the end of a long document, ‘Kyla Davis’ typed underneath.
‘What is it?’ I say, the words out before I can
think before you speak
like Dr Lysander is always telling me.
The man at the desk raises his eyebrows, as surprise then irritation crosses his face. ‘Standard release from mandated treatment to external sentencing. Sign.’
‘Can I read it, first?’ I say, some stubborn streak making me go on even as another part whispers
bad idea
.
His eyes narrow, and he sighs. ‘Yes. You can. Everyone, prepare to wait while Miss Davis exercises her legal rights.’
I flick through but it is a dozen pages of long, close typed print that swims before my eyes, and my heart starts thumping too fast again.
Dad puts a hand on my shoulder, and I turn. ‘It’s all right, Kyla. Go on,’ he says, his face calm, reassuring; his words and Mum’s the ones I must listen to from now on. And I begin to remember a nurse patiently explaining this all to me last week: that is part of what is in this contract.
I flush, and sign:
Kyla Davis
. Not just Kyla, any more: the name picked by an administrator when I first opened my eyes in this place nine months ago, after her aunt who she said had green eyes like mine. An actual second name that belongs to me, as part of this family. That is in this contract someplace, too.
‘Let me carry that,’ Dad says and takes my bag. Amy links her arm in mine, and we go through one last door.
Just like that, we leave behind everything I have ever known.
Mum and Dad study me in the car mirror as we spiral up out of the car park under the hospital towards the exit. Fair enough as I study them back.
They are probably wondering how they got two such mismatched daughters, and nothing to do with the skin colour I’m not supposed to notice.
Amy sits next to me in the back seat: tall and busty and three years older at nineteen. I am small and slight with wispy blond hair; hers is dark and thick and heavy. She is
va-va-voom
, like one of the male nurses says about another nurse he fancies. And I am…
My brain searches for a word the opposite of Amy and comes up empty. Maybe that, in itself, is the answer. I am a blank page. An uninteresting one at that.
Amy is wearing a flowing red patterned dress with long sleeves, but she pulls one up now so I can see her Levo. My eyes widen in surprise: so she was Slated, too. Her Levo is an older model, chunky and thick where mine is a thin gold chain with a small dial, meant to look like a watch or bracelet but fooling nobody.
‘I’m so happy you are my sister,’ she says, and she must mean it as it says 6.3 in big digital numbers.
We get to the gate; there are guards. One comes up to the car and others watch behind glass. Dad hits a few buttons and all the car windows and the boot open.
Mum, Dad and Amy pull up their sleeves and hold their hands out the windows, so I do the same. And the guard looks at Mum and Dad’s empty wrists and nods, then he goes to Amy and holds a thing over her Levo and it beeps. Then he does the same thing to mine, and it beeps, too. He looks in the boot and slams it shut.
A barrier in front of the car rises and we go through.
‘Kyla, what would you like to do today?’ Mum asks.
Mum is round and pointy, and no that isn’t ridiculous. Her shape is round and soft but her eyes and words are sharp.
The car pulls on to the road and I twist round. The hospital complex I know, but only from the inside. It stretches side to side and up and up. Endless rows of little barred windows. High fences and towers with guards at regular intervals. And…
‘Kyla, I asked you a question!’
I jump.
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
And Dad laughs.
‘Of course not, Kyla; don’t worry. Kyla doesn’t know what she wants to do, she doesn’t know what there is
to do
.’
‘Now Mum, you know,’ Amy says, and shakes her head. ‘Let’s go straight home. Let her get used to things for a bit, like the doctor said.’
‘Yes because doctors know
everything
,’ Mum sighs, and I get the sense of a long-standing argument.
Dad looks in the mirror. ‘Kyla, did you know that fifty percent of doctors finished in the bottom of their class?’
Amy laughs.
‘Honestly, David,’ Mum says, but she is smiling also.
‘Have you heard the one about the doctor who couldn’t tell his left from his right?’ Dad says, and launches into a long story of surgical errors that I hope never happened in my hospital.
But soon I forget all they are being and doing and saying, and stare out the window.
London.
A new picture begins to form in my mind. New London Hospital is losing its central place, shrinking in the sea of what surrounds it. Roads that go on and on, cars, buildings. Some near the hospital are blackened and boarded; more are full of life. Washing on balconies, plants, curtains billowing out windows. And everywhere: people. In cars, walking along the street. Crowds of people and shops and offices and still more crowds of people, rushing in all directions, ignoring the guards at the corners who get fewer the further away we are from the hospital.
Dr Lysander has asked me many times. Why do I have a compulsion to observe and know
everything
, memorise and map every relationship and position?
I don’t know. Maybe I don’t like feeling blank. There are so many details, missing, that need to be set right.
Within days of remembering how to put one foot in front of the other and not fall over, I’d walked and counted and mapped with pictures in my mind every floor of the hospital that was access allowed. I could have found each nurses’ station, lab and room by number blindfolded; I could close my eyes now and see it all before me.
But London is a different matter. A whole city. I’d have to go up and down every street to complete the map, and we seem to be on a direct line trip to ‘home’, a village an hour west of London.
I’d seen maps and pictures of course, at the hospital school. Hours every day they’d spoon feed us as much general knowledge as our blank brains could soak up to prepare us for release.
How much this was varied. With me I gripped each fact and memorised it, drawing and writing things over and over again in a notebook so I couldn’t forget. Most of the others were less receptive. Too busy smiling great dopey grins at everything and everybody. When we were Slated, they upped the happy in our psychic profiles.
CHAPTER THREEIf they upped the smiles in mine, they must have been non-existent to start with.
Dad pulls my bag out of the boot and walks towards the house, whistling, keys in hand. Mum and Amy get out of the car, then turn back when I don’t follow.
‘Come along, Kyla.’ Mum’s voice is impatient.
I push at the door, hard and then harder, but nothing happens. I look up at Mum, my stomach beginning to twist as the look on her face matches her tone.
Then Amy opens the door from the outside. ‘You pull this handle down, on the inside of the door, and then push it open. All right?’
She shuts the door again, and I grasp the handle and do as she says. The door swings open and I step out, glad to straighten my legs and stretch after so long in the car. One hour had turned to three due to traffic delays and diversions, and had Mum getting more annoyed as each one passed.
Mum grabs my wrist. ‘Look. 4.4 just because she can’t work out a door. God, this is going to be hard work.’
And I want to object, say that is unfair and it isn’t the door but how you are being about it. But I don’t know what I should or shouldn’t say. Instead I say nothing and bite the inside of my cheek, hard.
Amy slips an arm across my shoulders as Mum follows Dad inside. ‘She doesn’t mean it; she’s just cranky that your first dinner is going to be late. Anyhow, you haven’t been in a car before, have you? How should you know?’
She pauses and I don’t know what to say, again, but this time it is because she is being nice. So I try a smile, a small one, but it is for real this time.
Amy smiles back and hers is wider. ‘Have a look around before we go in?’ she says.
Where the car is parked to the right of the house is all small stones that crunch and move underfoot as we walk. A square of green grass covers the front garden, a massive tree – oak? – to the left. Its leaves are a mix of yellow, orange and red, some spilling messily underneath.
Leaves fall in autumn
I remind myself, and what is it now? The 13
th
of September. There are a few red and pink straggly flowers either side of the front door, petals dropping on the ground. And, all around me, so much space. So quiet after the hospital, and London. I stand on the grass and breathe the cool air in deep. It tastes damp and full of life and the ending of life, like those fallen leaves.
‘Come in?’ Amy says, and I follow her through the front door into the hall. Leading off it is a room with sofas and lamps, tables. A huge flat black screen dominates one wall. A TV? It is much bigger than the one they had in recreation at the hospital, not that they let me near it after the first time. Watching made my nightmares worse.
This room leads to another: there are long work surfaces, with cupboards above and below. And a massive oven that Mum is bending over just now, putting a pan inside.
‘Go to your room and unpack before dinner, Kyla,’ Mum says, and I jump.
Amy takes my hand. ‘This way,’ she says, and pulls me back to the hall. I follow her up the stairs, to another hall with three doors and more stairs going up.