That’s a good one. I like it that she doesn’t mind my scars. I don’t think she’d like them really, but maybe she wouldn’t mind them too much.
And then there’s the fantasy that I don’t like to use too often, but I sometimes can’t help myself. In it I’m living in a cottage in a beautiful valley by a shallow, fast-flowing river that’s so clean and clear it sparkles even at night. The hills are covered with green trees that are almost humming with life, the forest is full of birds and animals. And my mum and dad are alive and living in the cottage and I live with them. Mostly I spend time with my dad, and we don’t sleep there in the cottage, we sleep in the forest and hunt and fish together. But we also spend time with Mum; she keeps chickens and grows vegetables. And summers are hot and sunny, and winters are cold and snowy, and we live together forever. My mum and dad grow old and are happy, and I stay with them and every day is beautiful forever.
Thoughts about My Mother
When I got back from Mary’s, Gran told me that Marcus and my mother were in love. But my mother knew it was wrong to love a Black Witch. She felt guilty about it. She married Dean and had his children and tried to be happy, but basically from the moment she met Marcus she was in love with him.
I wonder if she still loved Marcus after he killed her husband, the father of her children.
I guess when Dean found Marcus and my mother together there would have been a bit of a fight. Dean’s Gift was the ability to send flames from his hands and mouth, though it didn’t do him much good in the end, as Marcus must have fancied having that ability and he took Dean’s Gift.
When did the flames stop? Did they curl out with his last breath?
And where was my mother while all this was going on? Was she there? Watching my father eat the living heart of her husband?
And was it easy to kill herself, knowing that she’d loved someone who could do that? She loved someone who killed men, women, and children, who killed the father of her children. She loved someone who ate people. And when she looked at me, her child—Marcus’s child—and saw I looked like him, did she wonder what I’d be capable of?
Assessments
I have a monthly assessment now. Celia carries it out.
She starts off by weighing me, measuring my height, and photographing me. I don’t get to see the measurements or the photographs.
Then come the physical tests: running, circuit training. All the results are noted down. None of the results are shown to me.
After that I have to do some memory tests, general intelligence tests, and some maths. I’m all right at those. Then it’s reading and writing, which Celia says we have to do, even though we both know what the results are going to be.
That’s it.
The next day I’m left in the cage, shackled up. She drives off in the morning and gets back late in the afternoon. I don’t know if she meets someone. I ask sometimes, and my questions are ignored.
The other change, which Celia has just been told about, is that I don’t have to go down to the Council building for my annual assessment. For my sixteenth birthday the Council is coming to me. Apparently I have to look my best.
Punk
“What are you trying to achieve?”
“Eh?”
“With that.” Celia indicates my head with a slight movement of hers.
I grin.
Once a month, before the assessment, I’m allowed into the cottage bathroom for a proper bath. There is hot water, which is a peaty brown color, and soap. I shave the hairs that are sprouting above my lip and on my chin. The razor is a really crummy throwaway one, and as weapons go I have decided a pencil is more lethal. Celia cuts my hair once a month, keeping it short, but today I’ve shaved off the sides to give myself a Mohican.
“You should shave it all off. You’d look like a monk.”
“A look that says pure and holy and searching for the Truth?”
“A look that says meek and mild. A look that says novice.”
“That’s not really me.”
“It would be best not to antagonize them.”
Celia wants me to do well. It will reflect well on her, I guess.
I sit at the table. “Now what?”
“Now I wait here while you go back in there and shave that mess off.”
“You’ve no sense of humor.”
“You do look absurdly funny, I’ll give you that, but it would help things along if you shaved it all off voluntarily.”
I go back into the bathroom. The reflection of me is strange. The hair is okay, a tufty Mohican. But I don’t recognize myself. I guess I’m not used to looking at myself in a mirror. I watch myself stroking my hair, see my scarred right hand brush it back, but the face doesn’t look like me. I know it is me ’cause of the scar on my cheekbone that Jessica gave me, and there’s the scar near my ear, white against the black specks of my shaved scalp, where Niall got me. But my face looks different from the way I thought it looked. Older. Way older. My eyes are large and black, and even when I smile there’s no hint of a smile in them. They look hollowed out, the black triangles rotating slowly. I lean into the mirror and try to see where my pupils end and my irises begin and my forehead hits the glass. I step back to the far end of the bathroom, turn away, and turn back quickly, trying to catch something, a light perhaps. I don’t catch anything.
“What’s taking so long?” Celia shouts.
I pick up the razor and then put it down.
A minute later I walk out.
She laughs and then stops herself and says, “Now you’re being ridiculous. Take them out.”
I grin at her and feel my eyebrow. I’ve pierced it with three small metal rings, put a metal ring in my right nostril and a bigger one in the left corner of my bottom lip.
“It’s all part of the punk look.” I run my fingers across the choker. “It would be better with safety pins.”
“Where did you get that thing in your lip?”
“They’re all from the plug chain.”
“Why don’t you attach the plug as well? You might as well look totally mad.”
“You’re just too old to understand.”
“Can we go back to my original point? What are you trying to achieve?”
I look out of the window to the hills and sky, pale gray high clouds leaching the color from everything.
“Well?”
“Freedom from persecution.” I say it flatly.
Silence.
“Do you think I’ll ever get that?”
Nothing moves outside; the heather on the hills is undisturbed by wind, the clouds are motionless.
Later on in the evening I do a drawing. I use pencil, as we’ve run out of ink and I’ve gone off charcoal. Pencil is okay. I’ve drawn the animals and plants I see around here. Celia has put a few aside to show the Councilors. I am tempted to ask, “What are you trying to achieve with that?” but I don’t bother, as I’ll just get a blank.
Tonight I’m drawing Celia. She hates me drawing her, which is all part of the fun. Warts and all is my approach. Take no prisoners. She’ll burn it afterward. She always burns the portraits of her. I don’t take this as an artistic insult; it’s the original that’s the problem.
I do self-portraits, but just of my right hand. The melted skin is like runs of thick oil paint ending in a rounded, not quite solidified blob. The skin on the back of my hand between the smooth runs is cracked and lifting like an old painting too. My hand is art.