something? For me? I’m about to run into the passage screaming for Leonid when I realise it’s just the moon.
I go to the window and peer out into the star-splattered sky. The silver moon is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Not an alien in sight.
DURING THE NIGHT I dream my old recurring dream. I’m walking in a forest. The trunks are thick and twisted and tower over me. I’m looking for my mother, desperate to find her. I see a woman walking in the distance but before I can catch up with her, she disappears.
I feel the familiar sense of sadness. She’s left me. She wouldn’t wait.
I hear a rooster crowing and I wonder why I’m sleeping in the poultry gallery. There’s a strange clopping sound I can’t place, and I sit up, rubbing my eyes. Where am I? Why hasn’t the waking siren gone off yet?
Then I realise there’s a ray of real sunlight streaming through the window and a dog yawning at my feet, and the sound is of horses walking on the road that runs around the house. I’m in my new bed, in my own house, in my new life. I get up and open the wooden lockers. They’re packed with clothes – robes like Mr Frye’s, and pretty clothes like the ones people used to wear long ago. I don’t know what I’m supposed to wear here. I’ll have to wait for someone to tell me what my uniform is. So I pull on my white shift and pants again and stand at the window. Horses are eating grass in a field. Chickens are scratching in the plants, running around freely in the open. The sky, the trees, the vibrant green … They take my breath away.
I go out into the hallway. Twenty people could sit at the table that runs the length of it. I imagine my family sitting at this table, filling all the seats. And now they’re all dead. It makes me miserable, so I cheer myself up by imagining Fez and Letti and Jasmine and me enjoying a feast, like in the old kinetikas, and servants bringing in all the food from Letti’s recipe book.
I investigate each room – there are three more bedrooms. One for each of us. There’s a really big sitting room filled with paintings, and a study. But it’s the kitchen I’m heading towards. I’m dying to see what other food I can find, and Leonid’s not here right now to make me feel stupid.
Just as I hoped, the kitchen is big and homely, with a kettle on the hob and pretty china on a dresser. I take a blue-and-white striped bowl and go into the pantry. I’m not sure what everything is, but I dip my fingers in and taste everything, like a naughty child. “This all belongs to me,” I tell myself. “I can eat it all if I want,” but after sixteen years in the colony, where everything was shared, I still feel like I’m stealing.
I recognise the yoghurt from my ninth birthday meal. I can’t believe there’s a whole bottle of it here, and it’s all mine. I serve myself a bowl, add a teaspoon of sweet sticky golden liquid I think may be honey and sit down at the table to eat it. It’s so good I lick the plate. Leonid almost catches me when he comes in, stamping the dust from his boots on the doorstep.
“Oh. It’s you,” he says. “Mr Frye’ll be here soon.” He grins. “You’ve got something on your nose.”
I wipe off a smudge of yoghurt. Oh, great. More things to despise me for.
I begin to wash my bowl but he stops me. “Not your job. Leave it.”
“What is my job?” I ask. “When does the work siren go off?”
He snorts. “Your job, miss? You’re a citizen. Your job’s sitting around all day ordering the servants around.” And he turns on his heel and marches off. Isi runs after him.
I sit down, and wonder what to do next.
We worked in the colony. Twelve hours a day. I was Ebba, “the girl who could grow anything”, part of sabenzi group 4.7, Year Five. I got up when a siren went, ate breakfast when the siren told me to, started work. Each moment in each day was allocated and all I had to do was be obedient and work my hardest. For the common good, so we could all survive.
But up here, who am I?
I’m just a girl with a big house and nothing to do.
I go out of the front door, and follow the driveway around the side of the house. I pass rows of rain tanks, chicken coops, go through a half-open door in a wall, and I’m in a kitchen garden. So many food plants, all growing in the ground. Just the sun, the soil, and rows and rows of vegetables.
I fall onto my knees, hands in the earth, sniffing it, feeling it crumble between my fingers, feeling the coolness when I dig down a little way. Insects fly around a row of plump purple aubergines. The ones we grew in the colony were a quarter of this size. Beans dangle from frames, tomatoes cluster together, ripening in the sun. I pick one and take a bite. I’ve never tasted anything as wonderful as this fresh tomato, warmed by the sun and grown in the earth.
Leonid comes past then, pushing a wheelbarrow along the dirt path. “Like gardening?” he grunts.
“It’s the best thing in the world,” I say, and his brooding face almost shifts. “Please can I help?”
“Fine. Vegetables need picking, and stake the tomatoes.”
We work together all morning, and I’m happy with my hands in the dirt, happy under the sky and in the fresh air. If only Jasmine and the twins were here with me, it would be perfect. Leonid seems more cheerful, and I think maybe we can be friends after all. Maybe he’s shy, or was in shock, and now he’s getting used to me.
“I wish I could take a basket of your vegetables to my sabenzis in the colony,” I say as we go towards the kitchen at noon. “Let them see what real fresh vegetables ripened in the sun look like.”
“They say food’s running short there,” Leonid says.
I stop in my tracks. “Really? But we’ve been dehydrating the excess and sending it to the storage galleries. There must be a massive stockpile.”
“That’s what I heard.”’
I ponder this. They lied to us about the outside world. Could they be lying about the food too? Why?
“What will happen when it runs out?”
He’s pumping water at the well, but now he stops and shrugs. “Who knows?”
“They’ll have to elevate everyone,” I say.
“Pah! Table Island can’t feed thousands more. Won’t elevate them.”
“Then what will happen?”
He’s scrubbing his hands like the dirt has gone down to the bone. “How’d I know?”
I don’t ask him any more.
He’s probably got it wrong.
I go inside to shower. Mr Frye is coming, and I’m filthy.
I’VE JUST FINISHED showering when I hear Mr Frye’s nasal laugh in the hallway. There’s another voice too – a male’s. I quickly check myself in the mirror on the front of the wardrobe. My robe is too dirty to wear again, especially if I’m meeting the High Priest’s son, so I pull on a robe I find in the wardrobe. The colour is astonishing – a deep indigo blue, with yellow embroidery around the neck. I smooth back the tendrils
