The Disappearances by Gemma Malley
He was on the road now, ambling down towards the arcade, hands in his pockets. He didn’t usually leave the estate alone; safety in numbers and all that. But today he was feeling confident. And he didn’t want to hang with his boys all the time. They talked a load of shit, laughed at stupid things. They were boring. Infantile. That had been one of his words, couple of weeks ago now. In-fan-tile. Like an infant. Like a baby. It was now his favourite put down. People didn’t like it. They didn’t like it because it was a long word and it showed up how stupid they were. They didn’t have to be stupid. They could get a dictionary app just like he did. But people didn’t think like that. They were happy in the gutter. His father had been right about that: other people deserved what they got. They brought it on themselves. They were lucky he even noticed they were alive.
A girl was outside the newsagent, holding onto a bike, looking into the shop hesitantly, looking down at the bike. It was pink. It was new. Cheap shit; soon enough it would fall apart, the pink would chip. But right now it looked all right. She was wearing a matching helmet, pale pink. The bike had a basket on the front. She had a lock in her left hand; she was looking for somewhere to lock it up.
Devil walked over; something in him needed to separate her from the bike, needed to show her that he was the boss, that everything on the estate was his for the taking, even a crappy kid’s bike.
‘You can leave your bike with me.’
She looked up at him, her eyes wide. She was six, too young to know not to look him in the eye, but old enough to be hesitant. He remembered when she was a toddler. Her mother used to be fine-looking. Not any more. ‘Mum says I got to lock it up.’
‘Your mum wants your bike safe. It’s safe with me.’ He smiled, his whole face softening. He’d learnt that from his father. Soft then hard; hard then soft.
She looked torn.
‘You want to go in the shop, you gotta leave the bike here. I’ll look after it for you.’
He smiled again. Reluctantly, she started to move towards the shop, turning every few seconds to check the bike was still there.
‘Helmet,’ Devil said. The girl frowned. ‘I’ll need your helmet.’
The girl opened her mouth to say something, then she caught Devil’s expression. The smile was gone. He was sitting on her bike, his knees pressed up against his chest. She didn’t move.
‘You give me the helmet,’ he said, his tone now threatening. ‘I’m just going to take your bike for a ride. Keep it safe for you.’
She edged backwards into the shop. Devil pounced, grabbing her, pulling the helmet from her head before dragging her back to where her bike lay on the pavement. He pressed her nose against the bike, holding her by the neck. ‘Now you tell your mamma that Devil has your bike. You tell her if she wants you to have it again, she’s going to have to pay me for looking after it for you? You get me? You hear what I say?’
The girl was crying. For a second Devil looked at her; he had an urge to wipe away her tears just as he’d done with Leona, holding her to him, rocking her in his arms, telling her that monsters didn’t exist, that he’d protect her, that he’d always be there for her. But this girl wasn’t Leona. And this girl’s slapper mother hadn’t helped them one bit when they’d arrived here; hadn’t once given Leona even a smile. Suddenly filled with anger and hate, he pushed the girl roughly onto the pavement. ‘You tell her. You tell her what I told you.’
He didn’t look back as he cycled away. Didn’t care whether she was crying or not. Leona didn’t have a bike. Leona didn’t have nothing. What right did this girl have? The bike had been bought with money that should have come to the Dalston Crew. Twenty per cent of earnings, that’s all he asked of her mother. Not much for protection, not much for her family’s safety. But he knew she was robbing him, seeing clients on the sly. He knew she was fiddling, lying, cheating him. And now she’d know he knew.
The bike was too small, far too small, but he rode it anyway. It reminded him of the BMX he used to have when he was younger. He’d loved that bike. He used to go everywhere on it. Sometimes he’d cycle with Leona on his knee and she’d giggle as they rode, clinging onto the handlebars, squealing when he did wheelies.
He got off the bike, threw it down in disgust, forcing the images of his little sister out of his head. Leona wasn’t there any more. That’s how things were. Things had changed.
He walked quickly, past the arcade, past the sprawling mess of small two-up-two-down houses that surrounded the estate, gardens full of washing lines and broken-down cars, the paths strewn with broken bottles and cigarette butts. Cheap cigarettes.
Devil smoked Silk Cut, his father’s brand. Just to be different. Classy. You wouldn’t catch him with one of those cheap brands that tasted like shit.
Then he stopped, looked around. A couple of boys looked at him cautiously, then dropped their heads and walked away. He was on safe territory here. A mile further and he’d need his crew. Just in case. But here, no one would dare mess with him. No other gang would think about trespassing.
He started to walk again, past the houses, around the corner, sneering as he saw people going about their daily business: fighting, doing the washing, shouting at their kids. It was a shit place to live. Sink estate, they called it in the newspapers. Not that anyone around here read a newspaper. They might look at the pictures sometimes, peer at the tits, but nothing else. That’s what made it a sink estate, Devil had realised a month or so after moving here. It wasn’t the flats and houses, even though they had walls so thin you could piss up them and the damp would show through on the other side; it was the people inside them. Lazy, stupid, ignorant people. His dad would have cleaned up, he’d thought to himself. And then he’d remembered that his dad had run away, that he wasn’t coming back. And that’s when he’d decided that he would clean up instead. That he would own this place, just like his dad had owned his town.
First time he’d seen his dad on television he’d thought it was a game, thought it was something clever his dad was doing with the camera, like when he put images of Devil riding his bike with Leona on his computer for them to watch. But it wasn’t a game. It was real. His dad, speaking to millions of people.
‘They love me,’ his dad had smiled proudly. ‘They love me so much they send me their money. All the way from America, from Africa. We’ll go to America one day, son. We’ll have them eating out of my palms.’
Devil had a different name back then. But a lot of things were different back then.
‘Devil? Fancy finding you here.’
Devil stopped, abruptly, cursing himself for getting lost in thought, not noticing the pigs creeping up on him.
‘Yeah? It’s a free country last I heard,’ he said, looking the copper right in the eye. There was a policewoman with him. Quite fit, if you liked that kind of thing. She had dark brown hair; the policeman was a ginger.
‘What I heard,’ the woman said, ‘is that you were behind the stabbing last week. You got anything to say about that?’
Devil shrugged. ‘I ain’t behind no stabbing. Not my style. My crew’s all about peace, officer.’
He smiled, broadly, confidently. They had nothing on him. Could have nothing on him. The boy wouldn’t squeal, not if he cared about his family.
‘Peace.’ The male copper’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re a little shit, you know that? You know your little gofer’s sister is in hospital, don’t you? A revenge attack for the murder you made him commit. The Green Lanes Massive have threatened to kill her next time. That boy thought he had your protection. But you don’t give a shit, do you? Think he’s going to keep quiet now? Think he’s going to think twice about telling us exactly what you told him to do?’
Devil’s eyes widened. His sister? Shit. He didn’t know. ‘Yeah?’ he said, folding his arms insouciantly. ‘Well good luck trying, ’cos I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.’
Devil turned quickly and walked back the way he had come. He had an uncomfortable feeling in his stomach. What if
‘Don’t go too far, Devil,’ the policeman called after him, but Devil didn’t turn around. He just shoved his hands in his pockets and made his way back towards the estate.
11
The sewing rooms, as they were known, were situated towards the northern end of the settlement and were made up of two rooms, one for sorting and machining and one for more delicate work. It was in the second of these rooms that Evie worked, sometimes hand-stitching special garments but mostly mending and darning to eke out more use from clothes that had seen better days. Most of the clothes were hewn from wool, but new fabric was expensive to produce so reusing what already existed was the bulk of their work, clothing the farmers who worked all hours to put food on the table for the whole community. In the Settlement, after teachers it was farmers who were revered the most; the majority of men between the ages of sixteen and forty toiled the fields or looked after the animals because, as Benjamin explained, food gives you the energy to do everything else; without it, everything would fail.
In the City, by contrast, farmers were rarely seen, except when they brought their goods to market; agriculture had been taken for granted but never celebrated, never seen as a worthy career. And it wasn’t until Evie had gone outside the City that she’d learnt why: the City wasn’t self-sufficient, and farming wasn’t celebrated because it was carried out elsewhere, a dirty little secret that the Brother liked to keep that way.
Evie still got angry when she thought about what Linus had told her, about the Evils working outside the City to produce food for its citizens under terrible conditions. She would compare their treatment with the farmers of the Settlement and it would send a shiver down her spine, but mostly she tried not to think about the City, tried only to think about the here and the now, about the Settlement, about her future.
Trouble was, sometimes that sent a shiver down her spine, too.
Evie enjoyed her work here. In the City she had hated sewing, had done everything she could to escape from it. But that had been because it was her mother’s work. The mother who wasn’t her mother. The mother who had stolen her from her real parents and had failed to even love her in return. Now Evie relished the camaraderie as the women worked together – and it was all women in the sewing rooms. ‘Not because men can’t sew,’ Benjamin had told her, a twinkle in his eye. ‘I just haven’t yet found a man brave enough to join in the conversation.’
And the conversation had been a revelation to Evie. The women talked as they worked, sharing confidences, telling each other stories from their pasts, discussing their dreams for the future, teasing each other, supporting each other. It was so unlike the City where people worked in silence, where sharing a confidence was to put in jeopardy your standing in society, your label.
Here, the women gossiped about others, but mostly kindly; people in the Settlement, Evie had learnt, did not seek to judge or despise or fear. They looked for things that they had in common with others; they looked for shared values, for shared hopes. And all because of Benjamin. Because Benjamin had taught them that love always trumps fear, that peace was far stronger than violence. And Evie loved it, loved the gentle rhythm of this place with the whirr of the machines audible through the thin walls, the delightful eruption of laughter every so often punctuating their conversation.
But today, the conversation was about one thing only: the welcome ceremony. The joining ceremony that would also be Evie’s wedding. The dress that she would wear on the day, that she would continue to wear at all celebrations until she got pregnant, when another dress would be made for her for after the birth, signalling that she had entered yet another stage of life.
‘Your dress is nearly ready,’ one of the older women, Sandra, said with a smile. ‘You’re going to look so pretty.’
Evie blushed. ‘It’s ready?’ she said, trying to ignore the strange feeling in the pit of her stomach. ‘I hope it didn’t take much time.’
‘No time at all. My daughter doesn’t need hers any more, not now she’s got a baby. I just added some ribbons and took it in a bit. For someone who lived in the City you haven’t got much fat to you.’ It was the sort of comment that City women would have made sharply, critically. But Sandra smiled indulgently as she spoke and Evie let the warmth envelop her as she always did in this room. ‘Here, try it on,’ she said, handing it to Evie.
Evie looked at it, tried to imagine herself wearing it, tried to picture herself happily making her marriage vows. Then she put it down again. ‘Maybe I’ll try it on at lunch break,’ she said, falteringly. ‘Don’t want to eat into working time.’
Sandra shrugged. ‘You’ve certainly got a work ethic for someone who’s grown up with plenty,’ she said with a little smile.
‘And how is the baby?’ another woman, Kathy, asked Sandra suddenly, much to Evie’s relief.
Sandra smiled in delight. ‘Just perfect. Adorable little thing,’ she gushed and the other women cooed.
‘How old is he now? Nine months? Won’t be long till his Welcome,’ Kathy said, shaking her head and exhaling loudly. ‘Time goes so fast, doesn’t it?’
‘Too fast,’ Sandra agreed, as she put down a farming glove and started mending another.
Babies were commonplace in the Settlement but they were still greeted with great excitement and love. Each child was officially welcomed into the Settlement as soon after their first birthday as possible; this was why the Welcome Ceremony was held, to bind these children – along with any new recruits – to the Settlement. Two were held every year. Evie and Raffy had attended one already as onlookers as new joiners had to wait a year before formal acceptance was possible. Nevertheless, the ceremony had left tears in Evie’s eyes; it was so full of hope, so full of love, so different from the City where strangers were feared, where children were seen as inferior creatures that needed to be rid of their innate evil, needed to undergo the New Baptism, then moulded and coerced into being good citizens.
‘So,’ another woman, Lucy, said suddenly. ‘When do we think it’s going to rain? Soon? Let’s hope it’s soon.’
It had been two weeks without rain; not enough for people to worry too much, but enough to make the weather a hot topic of conversation. No rain meant crop failure; crop failure meant the Settlement going hungry. The Settlement was on the river Humber, but the water had dried up years ago. Instead, the Settlement relied on rainwater collected and stored in large reservoirs. And rainwater needed regular topping up.
‘It’ll rain soon enough,’ Sandra said immediately. She was the mother of the group, always ready to reassure, to offer words of wisdom.
‘That’s easy to say,’ Lucy replied. ‘But what if it doesn’t?’
‘It will,’ Sandra said, her voice firmer this time. ‘Let’s not worry unduly shall we? Doesn’t Benjamin warn us that worrying out loud can lead to contagion of thought? That if we are going to spread our thoughts, they should be full of positivity and hope?’
‘Well, that’s all very well but we all know that we wouldn’t be so dependent on the rain if the water didn’t just run away to feed the City.’
It was a far-fetched accusation that Benjamin regularly countered, but which people clung to because it gave them a focus for their anger and resentment when the rain didn’t come. But as with most rumours there was some truth to the story: the City had built several dams to shore up its own water supply, blithely starving all the surrounding settlements of the water they needed to survive.
Evie reddened as she always did when her former home was mentioned, as though she were somehow responsible for it. She hadn’t known about the dams until she’d arrived at the Settlement; had had no idea that the City was so ruthless, so focused on the needs of its own people to the exclusion of everyone else. She knew that people wanted to live within the City walls, but had always been taught that it was salvation people wanted, a chance to live in a world without evil. In reality, it was because the City had made sure that resources were scarce for any
‘Lucy,’ Sandra said, a note of warning in her voice.
‘What? It’s true isn’t it?’ Lucy said defiantly.
There was a short silence as the women, sitting on wooden chairs in a semi-circle, digested this.
‘They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it,’ Carlotta, a short woman with dark hair, dark eyes and a stout, strong body, agreed eventually. ‘Who gives them the right to dam every river? Who?’
Lucy nodded vigorously. ‘Exactly. Benjamin should do something. It’s all very well being people of peace, but when people are stealing from us—’
‘That’s enough,’ Sandra said then, standing up. She looked around the circle. ‘Are you happy living here?’ she asked Lucy. ‘Is there anywhere else you’d like to go?’
Lucy shook her head.
‘And do you believe that Benjamin is a fine leader, who has looked after us so far, who has devoted himself to our well-being?’
Lucy nodded and looked at the floor.
‘Good,’ Sandra said, sitting down again. ‘Don’t ever talk like that about him again in this room, do you here? And don’t make Evie here uncomfortable, either. We’re fine. It’ll rain. Okay? It’ll rain.’
As she spoke, the skies around them darkened and a clap of thunder made them jump; moments later, rain began to lash against the windows. Sandra smiled triumphantly.
‘Nice trick,’ Kathy said with a giggle. ‘You knew that was going to happen, didn’t you?’
Sandra shrugged, a little smile on her face. ‘I might have noticed a few dark clouds this morning,’ she said lightly.
The women sewed for a few more minutes, then Kathy looked over at Evie. ‘Don’t suppose you had to worry about being hungry when you were in the City, did you?’