me drift away again.
Day two.
Sleep. Nothing but sleep, and pain, and disturbed dreams.
Day three.
There’s a knock on my door, and I close my eyes. Mum enters. I know it’s her from the perfume scent and the effortless, perfect way she glides in and sits without disturbing a thing. After a while, she speaks.
“I know you’re awake.”
I keep my eyes closed.
“That was Tina at the door. Tina from Highland Castle. She was asking for you. It took a lot for her to come here, especially with, you know, them outside. She knew you wouldn’t want to see her. She just wanted to give you these.”
I open my eyes and see a box of pretty cupcakes. Pink, lilac, blue and yellow, with glittery edible flowers and butterflies on top.
“She said her daughter made them for you. You can eat one this week,” she says, trying to make that sound fabulous.
One luxury a week is all a Flawed is allowed to have. It is part of the basic living we must abide by, so that we can purify ourselves. We must eat staple foods, nothing luxurious or fancy, nothing considered unnecessary for our bodies, for our life. Basics. Our intake is measured at the end of every day by a test I’ve yet to experience.
“And she brought you this, too.” Mum hands me a bag.
It’s a Highland Castle tourist shop paper bag, which I feel is highly inappropriate. If she thinks I want a trinket to remember the worst experience of my life, she is sorely mistaken.
Inside the bag is a box. I barely want to open it, but curiosity gets the better of me. Inside the box is a snow globe, enclosing a miniature Highland Castle. I shake it lightly, and the red glittering particles are churned around inside the glass. Extremely inappropriate. Even Mum views it with distaste. I’m surprised by Tina, but I’m sure she was trying to be kind, maybe even say sorry, or that’s my own wishful thinking. I put the globe back in its box and straight into my bedside locker. I don’t want to ever see it again.
I close my eyes.
Day four.
I have a visitor. Angelina Tinder sits beside my bed, dressed in head-to-toe black, which is a look I’ve never seen on her before. She looks like a lady from Victorian times grieving her dead husband. She is wearing fingerless leather gloves to hide the branding on her hand. Her long piano fingers are as pale as snow beneath the leather. She’s not allowed to wear these when she’s out in public, but she can hide it in her own home if she wishes. She is not in her own home. She is breaking a rule. Though it’s not me she is hiding it from, it is herself. She sits upright in the chair, looking at me rarely, just enough to see if I’m listening now, and then she speaks.
Her eyes are rimmed with red, as if she hasn’t stopped crying since she was branded. The tip of her nose is red, too. She is paler than I have ever seen her, as though she hasn’t seen the sun in weeks.
“You’ll have a Whistleblower appointed to you,” she says. “They’re giving you mine. She’s senior. A horrible woman with nothing better to do with her time. She’d volunteer for the post even if she wasn’t paid. Mary May is her name. Calls herself a Christian woman. She’s the same kind of woman who was burning other women at the stake. She won’t give you an inch, Celestine, you remember that.” She quickly glances at me, then away again. “She’s looking to catch you out. She thinks you’re disgusting.” She sniffs as if smelling a bad odour herself. “But they are. The Flawed. Absolutely disgusting. We are not them, Celestine, and don’t ever let them think that of you. Though, what on earth were you thinking helping that Flawed man to his seat? Saying all that in the courtroom? It’s everywhere, you know that. The footage of you on the bus has gone viral.” She looks at me, her face twisted in confusion and disgust.
I don’t answer. I can’t answer. I wouldn’t anyway.
“Be home by ten thirty. They say eleven, but she’ll be waiting for you, and anything can happen. Allow for delays, mistakes, anything. They will probably even try to trip you up. They’re always testing. I missed the curfew once. I won’t miss it again, I can assure you.” She thinks for a moment. “She’ll test you every evening to make sure you’re sticking to your basic meals, and a lie detector test to ensure you’re telling the truth about following all rules. They rely on these to work. They can’t keep their eyes on you all the time, but God knows they’ll create something soon enough in those laboratories. A camera sewn into our head or something, seeing everything we see, hearing everything we think. Because that’s what they want to know, you know. It’s like they want to crawl inside us, under our skin.”
She sniffs again and scratches at her arms. I look at her fingers and see that they’re trembling.
She sees me looking at them.
“They won’t stop. I can’t play any more. It’s like they’re not mine any more.”
She leaves a silence, and I try to prepare for the next onslaught, which inevitably comes. “It’s awful. A woman looked at me today as though I had murdered every one of her children. I would rather they had killed me instead of living like this.”
I’m glad my tongue is so damaged that I can’t speak. I wouldn’t know what to say.
“Good luck, Celestine.”
She stands and leaves the room.
Mum comes to my room later with a hopeful look on her face. “Did that help, sweetheart?”
I close my eyes and drift away.
Day five.
I wake up. And just as I have done every day for the past four days since I’ve come home, I force myself to go back to sleep. I realise it was not all a nightmare. It is true. Sleep is my only friend these days, so I roll on to my side, for my back is in too much pain, move my head on the pillow so that my temple doesn’t brush the fabric, try not to crease the skin on my chest so that it doesn’t sting and leave my right hand flat and open, the dressings preventing me from closing it anyway. This is the only way I can find respite, though for a girl of definitions, I use the term respite lightly.
I have not left my room for four days. I have left my bed only to go to the bathroom. Apart from Dr Smith and Angelina Tinder, Mum, Dad and Juniper have been the only others I’ve seen. They’re shielding Ewan from me, and I agree. Mum has tended to me night and day, cleaning my wounds, changing my dressings, putting whatever potions and lotions on them to take away the pain, to fight off infection. I have woken some nights to find Juniper sitting in the chair beside my bed staring into space; and then when I wake again, she is gone, so I wonder if it was merely a dream. Things were awkward and stilted between us when I returned from the castle. Though I know she did not plan for any of this to happen to me and it’s not her fault, something is bubbling beneath me, an anger over her part in it. She could have come to my aid on the bus, and she could have testified in court that I didn’t help the old man to a seat. Why couldn’t she have said it? I sensed her guilt as soon as I saw her when I came home, and it made me angry, it made me want to blame her. Anything so as not to blame myself.
I am plied with painkillers, and I like it. They give me a woozy out-of-body experience that takes me away from reality, softens the blow. I am aware, at different stages, of a crowd outside our house, but I don’t watch them and we don’t talk about them. I know when Dad leaves and arrives home from work, not because of the sound of his car engine, but from the camera clicks, the jump to life by the pack, the shutter speeds, the shouted questions. Some are kind, some are disgusting, directed at him as he comes and goes. I never hear his responses, if there are any, but I, too, would like to know if he could still love the most Flawed person in the history of the state.
“Do you love your daughter, Mr North?”
“How can you still love your daughter?” another shouts.
Still,