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A weed is just a flower growing in the wrong place.
They’re not my words, they’re my granddad’s.
He sees the beauty in everything, or perhaps it’s more that he thinks things that are unconventional and out of place are more beautiful than anything else. I see this trait in him every day: favouring the old farmhouse instead of the modernised gatehouse, brewing coffee in the ancient cast-iron pot over the open flames of the Aga instead of using the gleaming new espresso machine Mum bought him three birthdays ago that sits untouched, gathering dust, on the countertop. It’s not that he’s afraid of progress – in fact he is the first person to fight for change – but he likes authenticity, everything in its truest form. Including weeds: he admires their audacity, growing in places they haven’t been planted. It is this trait of his that has drawn me to him in my time of need and why he is putting his own safety on the line to harbour me.
Harbour.
That’s the word the Guild has used: Anybody who is aiding or harbouring Celestine North will face severe punishment. They don’t state the punishment, but the Guild’s reputation allows us to imagine. The danger of keeping me on his land doesn’t appear to scare Granddad; it makes him even more convinced of his duty to protect me.
“A weed is simply a plant that wants to grow where people want something else,” he adds now, stooping low to pluck the intruder from the soil with his thick, strong hands.
He has fighting hands, big and thick like shovels, but then in contradiction to that, they’re nurturing hands too. They’ve sown and grown, from his own land, and held and protected his own daughter and grandchildren. These hands that could choke a man are the same hands that reared a woman, that have cultivated the land. Maybe the strongest fighters are the nurturers because they’re connected to something deep in their core, they’ve got something to fight for, they’ve got something worth saving.
Granddad owns one hundred acres, not all strawberry fields like the one we’re in now, but he opens this part of the land up to the public in the summer months. Families pay to pick their own strawberries; he says the income helps him to keep things ticking over. He can’t stop it this year, not just for monetary reasons but because the Guild will know he’s hiding me. They’re watching him. He must keep going as he does every year, and I try not to think how it will feel to hear the sounds of children happily plucking and playing, or how much more dangerous it will be with strangers on the land who might unearth me in the process.
I used to love coming here as a child with my sister, Juniper, in the strawberry-picking season. At the end of a long day we would have more berries in our bellies than in our baskets, but it doesn’t feel like the same magical place any more. Now I’m de-weeding the soil where I once played make-believe.
I know that when Granddad talks about plants growing where they’re not wanted, he’s talking about me, like he’s invented his own unique brand of farmer therapy, but though he means well, it just succeeds in highlighting the facts to me.
I’m the weed.
Branded Flawed in five areas on my body and a secret sixth for good measure, for aiding a Flawed and lying to the Guild, I was given a clear message: society didn’t want me. They tore me from my terra firma, dangled me by my roots, shook me around, and tossed me aside.
“But who called these weeds?” Granddad continues, as we work our way through the beds. “Not nature. It’s people who did that. Nature allows them to grow. Nature gives them their place. It is people who brand them and toss them aside.”
“But this one is strangling the flowers,” I finally say, looking up from my work, back sore, nails filthy with soil.
Granddad fixes me with a look, tweed cap low over his bright blue eyes, always alert, always on the lookout, like a hawk. “They’re survivors, that’s why. They’re fighting for their place.”
I swallow my sadness and look away.
I’m a weed. I’m a survivor. I’m Flawed.
I’m eighteen years old today.
The person I think I should be: Celestine North, daughter of Summer and Cutter, sister of Juniper and Ewan, girlfriend of Art. I should have recently finished my final exams, be preparing for university, where I’d study mathematics.
Today is my eighteenth birthday.
Today I should be celebrating on Art’s father’s yacht with twenty of my closest friends and family, maybe even a fireworks display. Bosco Crevan promised to loan me the yacht for my big day as a personal gift. A gushing chocolate fountain on board for people to dip their marshmallows and strawberries. I imagine my friend Marlena with a chocolate moustache and a serious expression; I hear her boyfriend, as crass as usual, threatening to stick parts of himself in. Marlena rolling her eyes. Me laughing. A pretend fight, they always do that, enjoy the drama, just so they can make up.
Dad should be trying to be a show-off in front of my friends on the dance floor, with his body-popping and Michael Jackson impressions. I see my model mum standing out on deck in a loose floral summer dress, her long blonde hair blowing in the breeze like there’s a perfectly positioned wind machine. She’d be calm on the surface but all the time her mind racing, considering what is going on around her, what needs to be better, whose drink needs topping up, who appears left out of a conversation, and with a click of her fingers she’d float along in her dress and fix it.
My brother, Ewan, should be overdosing on marshmallows and chocolate, running around with his best friend, Mike, red-faced and sweating, finishing ends of beer bottles, needing to go home early with a stomach ache. I see my sister, Juniper, in the corner with a friend, her eye on it all, always in the corner, analysing everything with a content, quiet smile, always watching and understanding everything better than anyone else.
I see me. I should be dancing with Art. I should be happy. But it doesn’t feel right. I look up at him and he’s not the same. He’s thinner; he looks older, tired, unwashed and scruffy. He’s looking at me, eyes on me but his head is somewhere else. His touch is limp – a whisper of a touch – and his hands are clammy. It feels like the last time I saw him. It’s not how it’s supposed to be, not how it ever was, which was perfect, but I can’t even summon up those old feelings in my daydreams any more. That time of my life feels so far away from now. I left perfection behind a long time ago.
I open my eyes and I’m back in Granddad’s house. There’s a shop-bought cold apple tart in a foil tin sitting before me with a single candle in it. There’s the person I think I should be, though I can’t even dream about it properly without reality’s interruptions, and there’s the person I really am now.
This girl, on the run but frozen still, staring at the cold apple tart. Neither Granddad nor I are pretending things can continue like this. Granddad’s real; there’s no smoke and mirrors with him. He’s looking at me, sadly. He knows not to avoid the subject. Things are too serious for that now. We talk daily of a plan, and that plan changes daily. I have escaped my home; escaped my Whistleblower Mary May, a
