The Blemished Read online

  “There’s something not right about those two,” I said partly to Angela but mostly to myself.

  She nodded in return. “That’s what we’ve all been saying.” She looked around nervously. “Not to their face, though. Billie’s bark is probably worse than her bite but no one wants to test that theory.”

  We each took an end of the heavy chopping board and lifted it over to a huge frying pan. Tilting the board we transferred the sliced onions into the pan. There was a satisfying sizzling noise as the onions hit the hot metal. I breathed in the bitter-sweet scent of them and felt my mouth water.

  “Can we eat any of this?” I asked.

  Angela made an “are you joking” face. “No way. We serve the GEMs first. If there are any leftovers we can. But only after they’ve eaten.”

  I sighed. “I figured. It just smells so good.”

  She nodded. “Hey. Do you want to come to mine after school? I can introduce you to my mum and Daniel.”

  “I’ll have to check with my dad. Is Daniel your brother?”

  “No, well, kind of. It’s a long story. I’ll walk with you to your house after school and explain on the way. Mum doesn’t mind if I’m a bit late. So, you live with your dad then?”

  I nodded.

  “Just your dad?”

  I nodded again. Angela knew not to ask any more questions. The Blemished always do.

  3

  We walked briskly. There was a chill to the air, an early spring nip, and I pulled my headscarf tighter. Next to me Angela did the same. School had finally finished and I was glad to put some distance between me and it. There is a simple pleasure in turning your back on a school building – a tiny rebellion.

  In front of us stretched out the primitive road to town, busy with the GEM parents picking up their kids in fancy cars. The Blemished walked – dragging their long tunics through the gravel. Only the cars provided colour. Without them I would be lost in a scene of monochrome; a Blemished girl in black surrounded by more girls in black on drab streets, grey houses, gravel and dirt.

  Above us the clouds knitted together, darkening, threatening rain, and it reminded me of the time my dad explained the Fracture to me. We’d been back in Area 10, after Mum had left for the Resistance and Dad decided that it was time I understood because he was sure the schools weren’t going to explain it to us. It was a rainy day and I’d watched as the water tapped onto the windows. He’d pulled me onto his lap – he was sat in the great big armchair he always sat in – and he said he was going to tell me a story.

  “Is it a happy story?” I asked.

  “No, Minnie, I’m afraid not.”

  And then he told me that when he was younger, right after he’d got his first job at Leeds University and just before he’d met my mum, that a laboratory in London cloned the first human child. They called them “designer babies” and the laboratory, named the Genetic Enhancement Ministry, wanted to sell the babies to parents. They wanted to create “perfect” children for those who could pay for it and the women didn’t even need to be pregnant because they’d created artificial wombs.

  At first there was public outcry. Many religious groups protested against them, turning more and more violent with every day that passed. The Government were silent on the matter. Knowing the financial implications of the new technology, they were reluctant to speak out against The GEM, or Ministry as we call them now, instead speaking volumes with their silence.

  The protests became more extreme. They called themselves The Resistance and got organised – planting bombs in the city centre, attacking research facilities. But as the protests grew so did the Ministry. They gathered an army and fought back, something that no one expected and that was what took everyone by surprise.

  Dad said it was in the midst of all this that he fell in love with my mum. It was right in the middle of the Fracture. That’s what people called it ­– the moment Britain cracked.

  The Ministry drove the Government out. Dad told me about the King and his family and how they had to flee to Australia because it wasn’t safe anymore. He said that the owner of the Ministry invaded 10 Downing Street and took power, taking control of the military. No one knew what to do. The general public had been so lazy and comfortable in their democracy that they froze at the first sign of trouble. They hit the snooze button one too many times and before they knew it the Ministry had taken over Britain.

  Things were tumultuous to say the least. Pro and Anti GEM groups clashed but whilst the fighting was going on people bought their designer children. Dad said that I was just a baby when they built the border around London – when they drove everyone out who couldn’t afford or didn’t want a Child of the GEM. Scores of people were sent to the small towns ravaged by the fighting, and in turn the parents of designer babies were given refuge in London.

  “Area 10 is further south isn’t it?” Angela brought me back from my thoughts. She didn’t like silence and I was glad of it. “You’ll find it’s a lot colder up here. Well, most of the time anyway. It’s not so bad in summer, kind of warm actually. It rains a lot too. You know – that drizzly rain that wets you though.”

  “That’s good to know,” I replied, holding back a little smile. I already liked Angela a lot. “You were going to explain this thing with your brother?”

  “Oh yeah, Daniel.” She smiled. It was the second time Angela had smiled when mentioning Daniel. “Firstly, he’s not my brother. I mean, you’ll see that straight away – he’s blond haired, blue eyed and white.” She laughed. “His dad was no good. Ended up on Twitching Sundays.”

  I shivered. “That’s awful. What did he do?”

  “He stole from a GEM family,” she said matter-of-factly – as though this wasn’t the first time she’d had to explain the story.

  My jaw dropped. Even I knew how incredibly stupid that was. The Ministry clamped down on any crime committed by a Blemished on a GEM. They made examples of anyone stupid enough to do it. My dad always said it was a smoke-screen to quell the chance of uprising.

  “Apparently they’d been treating him badly, cutting his wages for no good reason.”

  I understood. The wages paid to the Blemished, no matter what the occupation, could barely cover food and clothes. If the GEMs were ripping off Daniel’s father he would struggle to feed his family. “So he took revenge?”

  “There’s more.” Angela hesitated. “He drank… a lot.” She raised her eyebrows to express her point. “He got tanked up one night and broke into the Dylan’s – that was the name of the family – and stole money from them. He was so drunk they caught him easily. I think they found him passed out on their lawn.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said. I imagined watching my dad die on Twitching Sundays and nausea grew in the pit of my stomach.

  “Yeah, well that’s not all.” Angela took a deep breath. “Daniel’s mum didn’t take well to the Operation.”

  I nodded sombrely. This was something I understood too. My mum left before she was forced into the Operation but I knew from people in Area 10 that sometimes it changed women.

  Shortly after the Fracture, when the people in the towns were still trying to settle into their new homes by picking through the remnants of those before, the Ministry sent Gene Testers out. They came to us and took our blood and created the Blemished database. From that they decided who carried pre-dispositions to illness. Then they told us we couldn’t breed. The GEM had decided that there was only one rule when you created a designer baby ­– it had to have at least 50% of the parent’s genes – but if you were Blemished, you weren’t allowed to pass those damaged genes on at all.

  The Operation was developed about a decade ago and – working through the fifteen Areas outside London – they neutered all women over the age of sixteen. Sometimes, when my dad drank whiskey and slumped in the rocking chair at our old house, he told me that the Operation doesn’t just mess with your reproductive system – it messes with your brain too. He used to tell me how the ot
her mums in Area 10 turned into a hollow shell and how the light in their eyes faded away. He used to say over and over again that he was glad Mum left us. He was glad.

  Pregnancy is the highest offence. Taking away the threat of pregnancy is supposed to give us the chance of a normal life and perhaps even a marriage.

  In all comes down to one simple fact – the Children of the GEM are perfect. We are the ugly and imperfect. We are the Blemished.

  “What happened to her?” I asked.

  “She just disappeared one day,” Angela’s voice had lost its cheery tone. “She left Daniel, ten years old, begging for food and searching through bins. My mum saw him like that and couldn’t leave him. So we took him in into our home and he’s lived with us ever since.”

  “Really?” I struggled to keep the shock from my voice.

  “Uh-huh. She couldn’t see a child suffer like that.”

  “So after the Operation, she wasn’t…?” I trailed off, unsure how to end the sentence.

  Angela’s spine straightened. She glanced around us to check there was no one in earshot. “No. My mum is fine. She’s always been fine. Well, she’s been a bit… forgetful recently. But she’s fine.” She paused. “I don’t want the Operation.”

  “Me neither,” I replied. The words felt heavy. Released weight. I was lighter.

  “It feels so good to say it out loud, doesn’t it?” Angela said.

  “You’ve never admitted it before?” I asked. I hadn’t either. There had never been anyone in Area 10 who questioned the Ministry; they accepted their future as barren cooks or cleaners in quiet indifference. Or at least they’d never shown otherwise.

  “Only to Daniel.” She dropped her voice even lower. “He knows about the Resistance.”

  I saw her in my mind again, Mum, the woman who left me for the Resistance, who put her politics before her daughter.

  The events of the day hit me full on and I felt the blood drain from my face. Panic tingled in my hands and feet and a light-headed dizziness overwhelmed me. I had to stop on the verge of the road, my headscarf suddenly restrictive and tight around my neck.

  “Are you all right?” Angela asked. “You look about to faint.” She placed a tentative hand under my elbow to steady me and it felt comforting.

  “I’m fine,” I lied. “I don’t think I ate enough.”

  But I wasn’t fine. The mere mention of the Resistance sent my heart fluttering with panic and it wore down my control. We were stood on the tatty ghetto pavement next to a run-down house whose gate, a rusted old metal thing on squeaky hinges, began to rattle. I took a deep breath and tried to concentrate but my thoughts had become fragments that refused to piece together. The rattling grew louder until the clasp released and the gate swung open and slammed shut. A rush of calm worked its way through my muscles and I relaxed.

  “That was weird.” Angela looked at me and then the gate and back again. “There’s barely a breeze.”

  “Must have been an undercurrent.” I smoothed down my tunic and tried to stop the shaking in my fingers. “Come on. My house is right up here. It’s a bit of a mess because we just moved in.”

  “Hold on a minute,” Angela said, her hand squeezed my elbow. “Did you just make the gate move?”

  I laughed, it sounded fake and nervy. “Of course not. That’s not even possible! My hands were miles away, you saw them.”

  Angela frowned. “Yeah, I did see them. But I know there’s no wind around too. And I know that I can’t move things with my mind.”

  “No one can move things with their mind, don’t be ridiculous.” A trickle of sweat snaked down between my shoulder blades. “It’s just not possible.”

  “How do we know?” She moved closer to me and I took a step back. A few houses down I heard a man and a woman having a row. The man sounded drunk. “How do we really know what is possible?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean? Do you know… Have you experienced something––?”

  “Maybe,” she said, “maybe not. But I really think you should meet Daniel. He’s… special.”

  My mouth flapped open in surprise, unable to form a reply. My mind filled with thoughts of my dad. This was exactly why we’d left Area 10 in the first place and now, on my first day in a new school, I’d revealed myself again. How did she guess? Why was she looking at me with that strange expression as though she knew something I didn’t? Why couldn’t I get through one day without attracting attention?

  “I can’t do this,” I said. I pulled my arm from her grip and turned around.

  “You should come and meet Daniel, Mina,” she called after me. “You can trust us.”

  I started running before she attracted any more attention.

  4

  Running felt good.

  I longed for Area 10. There my house backed onto a small forest – a place I could disappear into and be myself. There I ran through the trees, feeling the tightness in my legs, feeling the cool air sharp in my lungs. Here my feet pounded the pavement, brick dust and grit in the air, rusting tin cans to hurdle.

  I ran through dirty streets with cracks in the tarmac; past the run-down houses where paint peels from doors; past blank stares from Blemished people, going about their day. I ran on the outskirts of the ghetto because that is where our house sits. On the day we moved I tentatively explored the inner areas, where the blank stares became harsher and murals of the Resistance looked down from the bricks with guilt inducing accusations. Why aren’t you fighting back?

  I thought about Angela’s words. You can trust us. Why didn’t she run from me screaming? Why did she figure everything out so quickly? You should meet Daniel. What did she mean by that? Could it be possible that Daniel was like me? The questions kept on coming until I had to shake my head to make them stop. No matter what Angela said I was still a freak. When people discovered what I was they would stay away from me. Yet for the first time there was the tiniest speck of hope that someone in this unfamiliar place might understand what I was and not be afraid.

  When I came to the yellow door of our house I stopped and tried to catch my breath before facing my dad. The colour seemed out of place in this neighbourhood. It was too cheerful and bright. My dad always did see the bright side of things – hence the door. When I stepped into the kitchen he was cooking and singing.

  “Mina! How was your first day at school?” Dad turned from the stove with open arms, wooden spoon in hand. The kitchen was filled with the scent of his tomato sauce, rich and sweet. Familiar. “Ah. I see from your expression that it did not go well?”

  I sighed and removed my headscarf, flattening it out on the kitchen table to show Dad the tears in the fabric. “The GEMs here are pretty rough.”

  Dad sat down at the table, his fingers moving slowly over the scarf. “How did this happen?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” I gestured to the cooker. “Spaghetti?”

  He smiled. It was a tired smile. One with regret. “Am I that predictable?”

  “It’s not a bad thing,” I replied. “You’re still here.”

  It was meant to be light-hearted but then I knew we were both thinking of Mum. I realised then that we still hadn’t talked about her since she died.

  “I must stir.” Dad rose stiffly to his feet. “The secret in the sauce––”

  “––is to never let it boil,” I finished.

  “Well,” Dad said with a laugh. “I suppose I really am that predictable.”

  I found myself smiling, really smiling, for the first time since we’d moved. And it was all because of him. “Dad?”

  “Yes, Minnie?”

  I ignored the nickname, just this once, not wanting to rock the simplicity of us together in the kitchen: a simple scene of father and daughter, cooking together, eating together. “It’s a really good sauce.”

  He laughed and it came up from his belly like it always does when he laughs with his whole heart. It was a large belly, grown larger from the fit and healthy
man I remembered as a child. But he was still handsome. Dad always told me about how Mum would get jealous of the way his students flirted with him. According to him he was a “cool” Professor that the kids “related to”, but I could never imagine him like that. He hummed as he stirred; the tune from some old music he remembered – now illegal. Someone knocked at the door and he stopped humming abruptly.

  “Why don’t you go freshen up before tea?” Dad said to me while wiping his hands with a tea-towel.

  I glanced hesitantly at the door. Had Angela come over to tell my dad about the gate? Maybe she still wanted me to go to her house? I moved away from the table and left the kitchen. But then I waited outside the door between our kitchen and the tiny lounge. The TV screen was on, as it always is, and the prattle of another GEM beauty contest distracted me. I pressed my ear right up to the wood.

  It wasn’t Angela. I heard two male voices, one of whom was my dad, but the other I had never heard before. They talked in hushed tones as though hiding a secret. I strained to hear, catching only words and bits of sentences. It sounded as though the two of them were trying to agree over a date. The words “months” and “weeks” kept cropping up but I struggled with the specifics. Finally the two men ended the conversation with goodbyes. There was familiarity between them, they said goodbye like old friends. I wondered who my dad knew in Area 14. But it was no time for speculation. I quietly sprinted across the lounge and into the hallway. Trying to avoid any creaky stairs, I headed up to the bathroom.

  He sent me out on purpose, I thought. Whoever the man was, he didn’t want me to meet him. I frowned into the bathroom mirror, wondering what my dad would want to keep from me and why. Since Mum left for London he’d promised, promised firmly, to never keep secrets from each other and to stay safe above everything else.

  With a sigh I pulled at the tangles in my hair. Like most Blemished girls I kept my hair long. I guess because we have to keep it all covered up we like to make the most of what we do have. My hair comes almost to my waist and is a dark brown. When it catches the light it shines and I like to brush it every night before I sleep. It is a little too dark for my pale skin which never tans and only pinkens slightly in the summer. I’m tall and gangly, with long arms and legs which took me years to learn to negotiate, but I have muscle tone thanks to the martial arts my dad taught me in the basement of our home in Area 10.