Saturday morning saw me up and dressed early. The weather was cold and grey, but it wasn’t raining. I had packed everything in my backpack and was sitting waiting in the kitchen when the doorbell rang. I walked through the living room and opened the front door, expecting Ruth or Mark, but was surprised to see David with a whole load of students behind him looking petrified.
‘Zoe,’ he said.
‘Hi David,’ I said weakly, suppressing the urge to search for Ruth or Mark amongst the sea of faces. ‘Wow, it’s early, have you come for breakfast?’
He wasn’t smiling, ‘No, I’ve come to see what’s going on, apparently I signed a work order?’
I opened the door wider and stepped back, there wasn’t anyone else with him, no soldiers or other adults, maybe I could contain this.
‘I’m sorry David, what work order? And why are all these kids here?’ I turned to them, finally spotting Ruth and Mark, ‘hey guys, I’m making pancakes, do you want some?’ I turned and walked back through the open space, hoping they would follow.
‘Zoe,’ David barked, not moving ‘Why is there a work order with your address on it, listing fourteen kids and signed by me?’
I stopped in the kitchen doorway and turned back to face him, ‘Really, David, I don’t know,’ I said earnestly, ‘I have no idea what you are talking about, is it some sort of mistake?’
David looked at me and I stared back at him, trying not to break, not to give away any hint of my furious thoughts. What could I say? He knew it couldn’t be a mistake; there was no getting round the forged signature. Would he believe someone had set me up? How could we still get away. There was no way we could whilst David was watching. Unless we incapacitated him. Could I hit him? It was out of the question, David was a big guy, and loud, and anyway he hadn’t ever done anything to me.
Suddenly my mouth started talking, it wasn’t planned, the words just came out. ‘David, what is going on? Why are you so mad?’
‘This is ridiculous, stop lying and tell me what this is…’ he strode forward into the living room waving a form at me, it was the work order.
‘David, what am I supposed to have done?’ I said, in my best helpless, innocent voice, stepping back as if in fear.
‘You faked a work order,’ David yelled, as he followed me into the kitchen, ‘what are you doing with these kids?’ If he hadn’t realised yet what we were doing, he must just have come over as soon as he had seen the form, without any plan or idea what was going on. The kids streamed in after him and I heard the front door snick closed.
I was now standing in the kitchen on one side of the table, David was on the other side, and between him and the kitchen door, spread out, were Ruth and Mark and the other twelve kids. Some of them were carrying backpacks, all had dark coats and scarfs, mostly in either green or brown or black and looked prepared for the cold weather. In the warmth of the house the sight was incongruous. I stepped over to the stove. I hadn’t been kidding, I had spent the time I had been waiting making pancakes. I used the spatula to lift the top pancake from the stack warming on the pan and placed it on the top plate of a pile waiting on the counter. I popped open a bottle of golden syrup and drizzled the sugary treacle over one side, before folding it and offering it to David, ‘David, I really don’t know what you are talking about, but have some breakfast, you might feel better.’
He knocked the plate out of my hand onto the table where it spun wildly. His eyes searched around the room and settled on my backpack, he looked at me, then at the kids, dressed for the outdoors and finally put two and two together.
‘You’re leaving.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘is there something wrong with that?’ I wanted him to admit out loud that this whole place was a fraud, it pretended to be all fine and friendly and normal, when it was anything but.
‘Zoe, you can’t leave,’ he said, ‘the soldiers won’t let you, it’s too dangerous out there.’ He sounded calmer now, like the normal David, calm and sensible and highly credible. I ignored him, picked up the pancake and started eating.
‘Would anyone else like some?’ I asked, a series of nods had me dishing out the food to the nearest kids whilst David watched nonplussed.
‘You came here because you couldn’t hack it out there,’ he said, ‘here you have everything you could possibly need or want,’ he gestured around, ‘we have given you a beautiful home… a garden…’
It was at this point that Ruth, who was passing the plates of pancakes back to the others, decided to make her voice heard, ‘but we don’t have any of this, where is our home? Our gardens?’
David’s voice turned rough ‘You don’t deserve any; you are just stupid rat city kids who happened upon this place and we were good enough to take you in.’
He reached out and dashed a plate from her hand then grabbed her arm. I heard all the hidden venom and bile that I had guessed had been lurking under his usual bonhomie. ‘You think we don’t know how you survived in the city, scavenging and stealing? Well there is none of that here; we turn parasites like you into useful members of society. We have fed you and educated you, now you owe us.’
He shook her and Ruth gasped in pain. I found myself instantly and awesomely angry. ‘Let her go!’ ‘Now!’
David looked at me in surprise. I wanted to hit him with a violence and urgency I found disturbing.
‘I am taking these kids somewhere better, where they are not treated as slaves.’ I said, ‘We’re going and you are not going to be able to stop us.’
The words came out as if I was watching someone else, even as I spoke I was thinking furiously, surprised at the words coming out of my mouth. ‘I didn’t put everything on my form,’ I said, slowly and ferociously, ‘I have a black belt in a Japanese martial art… I know how to fight… I have climbed the Himalayas, scrambled alone over mountains in Spain and Scotland.’ I stepped closer to him and reached across to the knife block, ‘I have walked the streets of London at night,’ I paused, my voice rising, ‘I walk alone and I know how to defend myself.’ As I spoke, I drew a knife and pointed it at his face, desperate to make him believe me. ‘If you do not let her go, I will hurt you.’
The funny thing is, I didn’t feel stupid saying it. I meant it; I really, really wanted to hurt him. And I think he saw it. Saw how fiercely I was holding myself back. He let her go.
‘Sit down’ I said.
‘You can’t,’ he began to bluster.
‘SIT DOWN’ I yelled, I was shaking and sweating, and the adrenaline was pouring through me.
He sat, still blustering. ‘Mark,’ I said, ‘there’s some gaffer tape in my backpack.’
Mark didn’t need telling twice. He had David trussed up and gagged in no time. It looked like he had done it before.
I pulled out a chair and sat down, feeling drained. The kids had all stopped eating, but now they started passing out the pancakes and syrup. They seemed awfully inured to what had happened. I was still shaking. Ruth sat down opposite absently rubbing her arm. ‘That was brilliant, thanks Zoe.’