Noughts and Crosses (37 page)

Please, please God . . .

I trip over my feet and hit the ground face first. Dazed,
I look up, but the car is almost out of sight. I grip Sephy’s letter in my hand, lying on the ground, listening to the sound of all my hopes and dreams moving further and further away. Like listening to the sound of a door being slammed in my face.

Funny the way things work out. When I first arrived at Chivers, I thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. I’d cry myself to sleep over what had been and what might’ve been, over Callum not wanting to leave with me, live with me. He didn’t even bother to say goodbye. It took a long time to stop crying.

And shaking.

I didn’t really believe I was drinking that much and I certainly wasn’t an alcoholic, but after the second day of feeling wretched and wrung out, I finally realized I was suffering from alcohol withdrawal pains. The school nurse reckoned I had the flu and was very sympathetic, but I knew differently. It took three weeks before I could call my body my own again – and even then, I had to fight hard against the sudden cravings I got for a glass or two or three of wine or cider. So I buried myself in schoolwork and activities, the more physical the better. And it had slowly but surely begun to pay off.

Chivers is definitely the best move I could’ve made – under the circumstances. It gave me a chance to remake myself, start from scratch. I stopped hanging on to my childhood and started moving forward. I made new
friends like Jacquelina and Robyn, who saved my sanity because they liked me for who I was, not for what my father did, or the money my mother had.

The schoolwork was harder than it’d been at Heathcroft, because at Chivers no-one pushed me, so I had to push myself. And I was terribly homesick for the first few months. I still get homesick if I allow myself to think about home for too long, but I don’t allow that to happen any more – much. I spent the whole Crossmas holiday with Jacquelina and the Easter holiday skiing with Robyn. It was great. I talk to Mother on the phone of course, and she’d been up to see me a few times, but so far, I’d managed to stay away from home.

And I joined a dissident group. We were Crosses fighting for change in the system. But we had to be careful. We each made a pledge to do what we could – now and in the future – to further the cause of true integration between noughts and Crosses. I think we all felt that the only way we’d achieve real progress was to wait for all the old dogs to die so that us new dogs could replace them and their thinking. Old dogs like my father who couldn’t see beyond the fact that noughts used to be our slaves. As far as he was concerned, they’d never be much good for anything else. The dissident group was the one thing that kept me focused when I was at Chivers. It was my reason for doing well, for succeeding. Our group kept me sane. It was a shame my sister didn’t have something similar to believe in.

I used to comfort myself with the belief that it was only certain individuals and their peculiar notions that spoilt things for the rest of us. But how many individuals does it
take before it’s not the individuals who are prejudiced but society itself? And it wasn’t even that most Crosses were prejudiced against noughts. I still didn’t believe that. But everyone seemed to be too afraid to stand up in public and say ‘this is wrong’. And, by everyone, I meant me included. No-one wanted to raise their head above the parapet. At least our group knew that the way things were was wrong. At least we were trying to do something about it – albeit from behind the scenes. We moved quietly but irrevocably, like a relentless army of tiny termites eating away at the rotten fabric of a house. And we would succeed. Each of us believed that, for the simple reason that we had to.

A few months after joining our group, I thought long and hard about asking Minnie to join us, but in the end I decided against it. Minnie’s only got one more year at school and judging from the twice I’ve spoken to her, she’s finding being at home difficult to say the least. She’s determined to go to a university as far away from our home as she can get, but Mother cries or throws a tantrum or both if she even so much as mentions it. I’m glad I got out before her. Selfish but true.

According to Minnie, Mother’s still drinking. I’m not. Even when some of the girls sneak the odd bottle or two into the dorm at night, I don’t touch the stuff. I don’t trust myself. It’s very easy to hide away in a wine bottle, but very hard to come out again. Besides, that’s part of my past too. I’m designing my future.

A future without Callum.

I’ve decided to be a lawyer. But I’m only going to work on those cases that I believe in. I’m going to be another
Kelani Adams. I’m going to stand up and speak out and I’ll be so famous and popular that no one will be able to touch me. Not the government, not the
P.E.C.
, no-one. It’s great to finally have some direction to my life.

I admit that I think about Callum. Often. But I’ve stopped brooding and I’ve stopped yearning for the impossible. Maybe in another lifetime or in a parallel universe somewhere Callum and I could be together the way we should be. But not here. Not now.

And that’s OK too. He’s moved on with his life, and now so have I.

I wonder if he ever thinks of me? I doubt it, but just occasionally, when I’m doing my homework or washing my hair or cutting my toenails, I pause for a second or two and wonder.

But only for a second.

Or two.

My dad said something once about the Liberation Militia. He said that once they had you, they never let you go. I learnt exactly what he meant over the next couple of years. I started off as little more than the tea boy, but I was eager and keen. I soon worked my way up the ranks. I moved on from tea boy to grunt, following the orders of
anyone and everyone in my cell of six men and three women. From grunt I moved on to private and on up the ranks until I earned the rank of sergeant and joined a new cell. Sergeant at nineteen – I was proud of that.

And whilst I was working my way up the
L.M
. ranks, I took the time to take care of some personal business. Namely, Dionne Fernandez, Lola Jordan and Joanne Longshadow – the ones at Heathcroft who’d beaten up Sephy for sitting with me, for being with me, for not knowing her place – which was kilometres above mine. With the contacts and resources now at my disposal it wasn’t difficult to find out where they lived. I made it my business to find out all about them: their home lives, their family circumstances, their likes and dislikes – everything. If there’s one thing that being in the
L.M
. taught me, it was that everyone had a weakness. You just had to know where and how to look for it.

I dealt with each of them in turn. Lola first, then Joanne. Dionne last, but by no means least. I took particular trouble to make sure that Dionne suffered – just as she’d made Sephy suffer. They say that revenge is a dish best served cold – and they’re right. I served it icy-cold. And I lost more of myself as I did so. But that was OK. Because the Callum Ryan McGregor who loved to sit on the beach and watch the sun go down didn’t exist any more. He’d been taken and I’d been left in his place. A poor trade, but an inevitable one.

In the new cell, there were four of us altogether. Pete, Morgan, Leila and me. Pete was in charge. We called him the quiet one. He didn’t say much, but he smiled a lot. I was careful to watch my back around him. He was deadly
with a knife and had at least four that I knew about always stashed on him somewhere. Morgan was twenty and the joker of the pack. He was our computer expert and the best driver in any
L.M
. cell for kilometres around. Leila was my age and knew everything there was to know about breaking into buildings and blowing stuff up. She’d been my call.

One evening, just a couple of months after my eighteenth birthday, I’d been sitting sipping a coffee outside a café in the city and surreptitiously timing the guards’ movements in the glass-fronted office block opposite when I first spotted her.

It was one of those cafés which likes to pretend it’s
très chic
by serving croissants at night and coffee that’s all foam and no flavour – or liquid for that matter. The evening was quite chilly so apart from me, there were only three other men huddled at another table about two metres away from me.

Leila came over to me first.

‘Spare some change for a coffee?’

I looked at her and shook my head. She moved on to the only other occupied table outside the café.

‘Spare some change please?’

‘Here’s five quid.’ One of the morons at the table waved it under her nose. ‘What will you do for it?’

I turned to watch, interested to see what she’d do next.

‘Well?’ The man winked at his friends and continued to wave the money under Leila’s nose.

I could tell from her tense stance that she was furiously angry, but the guy who was showing off to his mates was too thick-skinned to realize it. Or maybe he just didn’t
care? Leila lurched forward to try and snatch the money from the moron’s hand, but he snatched it back.

‘Come on, you tart! You can do better than that.’

‘What did you call me?’ Leila asked softly.

I moved my coffee to the other side of my table.

‘If the shoe fits . . .’ The moron laughed and his friends joined in.

‘Stand up and I’ll show you what I’ll do for that fiver,’ Leila said silkily.

And like a jackass the man stood up. Seconds later he was doubled over after Leila’s foot made painful contact with his goodies.

‘You were right. The shoe does fit!’ Leila hissed at him, snatching the five pounds out of his unresisting fingers.

Moron number one collapsed to the floor, coughing his guts out. Morons two and three should’ve remained seated but they decided to go for it. Big mistake! It took less than fifteen seconds for Leila to sort out those two. By the time she’d finished, they were all rolling on the ground like human skittles.

I waved to one of the waiters inside the café who was watching the proceedings with horror.

He edged out, giving Leila a wide berth.

‘My bill, please,’ I told him. I turned to Leila. ‘Would you like to have dinner with me?’

Leila spun around, belligerence all over her face. ‘Are you talking to me?’

‘Yes. Would you like a dinner – somewhere away from here though. The police will be here in about five minutes.’

She looked me up and down – and more than once
before she answered. ‘Yeah, OK then.’

I glanced into the café but my waiter was taking his time. So guessing at the price then doubling it, I put my money down on the table. We strolled off down the road towards a good meat restaurant I knew. I’d been poor for too long to be a vegetarian. And as we walked along, Leila never said a word. When we got to the restaurant, she sat down on her chair poised to leap straight on to her feet if the situation demanded it.

‘Two menus please,’ I said to the waitress. ‘I’m Callum,’ I told my new companion, holding out my hand.

‘Leila,’ she replied, digging her hands deeper into her pockets.

And that was the beginning of our friendship. It’d taken me a while to get to know her but it was well worth the effort. She and I had a similar sense of humour – which always helps. I was the one who recommended that she be taken under our wing. She’d been on her own for a long time before she joined our cell, so she was ridiculously grateful at belonging to the
L.M.
So grateful that she suggested becoming my lover. It was a couple of months later when we were held up in one of our safe houses, waiting for Pete and Morgan to return from a reconnaissance trip.