Harold
It was Maggie's idea that I should pretend to be a cleaner too, sent along with her to work at Bolvangar. 'You see,' she says, 'cock-ups like that is always happening. They won't be able to check up on what's gone wrong until the next airship goes back home and the one after that comes back here. Meanwhile, we'll be able to go anywhere we want round Bolvangar. Nobody ever pays any attention to the cleaners. Ask my mum – she knows.'
It's not so surprising if you thinks about it. When did you last notice the postman, or the milkman, or the knife-grinder, or the lamplighter, or the man who sweeps out the gutter? I bets you can't say. No, I thought not.
Bolvangar is a bunch of modern flat-roofed buildings in the middle of this giant compound, surrounded by a wire fence with watchtowers spaced out along it. We can't tell if the fence is to keep people in, or out. Or maybe there's more than people, outside the fence. Who can see what lives out there in the cold dark icy wilderness? There is dazzling lights on the watchtowers, shining on the ground and lighting the Santa Maria up all silver-white.
We waits until Mrs Coulter has gone into the building and follows a few minutes later. Not a moment too soon; it's desperately cold and Maggie is starting to shiver, despite wearing the thick coal-silk coat they gave her on the airship. There is a man in a uniform on the desk behind the door. Maggie gives him her papers, like she did at Cardington, and he picks up what we supposes must be a telephone – we has never seen one before, though we has heard of them – and speaks to somebody we can't hear. This somebody turns out to be a Mrs Fawcett and she is the housekeeper of Bolvangar. She comes up to the front desk to see us.
'Let's see,' she says, 'you're Margaret Doyle, yes?' She is s kindly-looking person, quite round about the middle and not very tall.
'That's me,' says Maggie.
'So who are you?' says Mrs Fawcett, looking at me.
'We is Arthur Shire. The agency sent us along with Maggie here.'
'The agency sent you?'
'Yes, ma'am. They said they had two vacancies for general cleaners. Special rates, overseas work.'
'Where are your papers, then?'
'We left them on the train. We is sorry, ma'am.' We tries to look even dimmer than usual at this point.
'Heavens above! What is the world coming to? I ask for two cleaners, so the nurses can do their proper jobs, and they say I can only have one. I say all right, one's better than nothing, send me one. So then they send me two after all, but one of them's an idiot who can't even look after his own papers!'
'We is sorry. We is a very good cleaner. Very thorough.'
'Arthur – I'm sure you are. You must be good at something!'
This is not said unkindly. She tells us to follow her and we does, as she waddles plumply down the corridor with her terrier-daemon trotting at her heels. She shows us the rooms we has to clean; the canteen, the kitchens, the hallways, the offices – Maggie and me looks at each other, there'll be clues in them – and the dormitories.
'Maggie, is it?'
'Yes, ma'am.'
'We've got a room for you in the nurse's quarters. Arthur, you'd better find yourself a spare bed in the boys' dormitory. We'll see if we can't sort things out in the morning. I'll get the night nurse to give you both a call at four o'clock tomorrow so you can get off to a really good start.' She gives us a broad smile. 'There's lots to do. I want this place looking spick-and-span, bright as a new pin! Oh, and by the way. Here's the cupboard with all the things you'll need.' And with swelling pride she flings open yet another door. There's a big closet behind it full of brooms and mops and dusters and bottles of bleach and dustpans and towels and lots of other things like polish and scouring pads. We is going to be very busy people, I can tell.
Mrs Fawcett is a very busy person too, so she tells us to settle in ready for the off tomorrow and get something to eat at the canteen in the meantime. Then she trundles off back to the front desk. I expects that by now Mrs Coulter will have found something to complain to her about.
I says 'Adèle?' and Maggie adds, 'should be here now!' and we both collapses against each other in a fit of the giggles.
'Right,' I says when we has sobered up a bit. 'I'm off to the boys' dorm to find a bed and have a wash. And . . . I'll find your Stan for you, Maggie. I promise. You go to your room and we'll see you in the canteen in half an hour or so.'
Maggie nods. 'Good luck, Arthur.' I knows how much this means to her.
- 0 -
It's half-past five and the dorm is empty, or so I supposes. I walks down the rows of iron-framed beds, looking for an empty one that we can use. Each bed has a cabinet next to it and a label stuck onto the bar at the bottom of the bed with a name like Frederick Bloggs or Thomas Atkins written on it. Near the end of the row I finds a bed that is not in use. The old label has had the middle bit scratched off. The bit that's left says Ant……… rios. What's all that about? Where's this Ant – whoever he is – got to? We is starting to get a very bad feeling about this place. What's happened to him? Why is his bed not needed any more? I plonks my bag down on the bed and sits down next to it. Sal and me needs to get our courage back.
'Hello. Who are you?' A voice, a very educated, very posh voice, comes from one of the beds opposite, one of the ones I thought was empty.
'Who wants to know?'
'Me; Harold. Harold Owen. Harry.'
'Let's have a look at you, Harold Owen, Harry.'
The boy sits up in his bed. He has a pink face, blue eyes and tousled curly blond hair. I can tell that he is not from Limehouse. He's not our sort at all. We crosses over and sits on the next bed to him, Sal perched on the rail at the top. His daemon is curled around his neck, mouse-formed. Only the tip of her nose is showing.
'Why is you in here, Harold Owen?'
'I was feeling unwell after the fire practice we had earlier. Matron told me to go and lie down for a while. Have you come on the Zeppelin?'
'Yes, we has.'
'Gosh, that must have been exciting. I've only been on an airship once, and that was only for a quick trip to Wulfrun and back. We went first class, of course. You're very lucky, going on a real voyage.'
We is not sure we cares much for Harold Owen. He sounds like he was born with a silver spoon stuck up his gob. We has taken a lot of abuse from his kind. He leans forward and takes a close look at Sal, and we doesn't like that much, either.
'Has your daemon settled?'
'Yes, Harold Owen, she has, if it's any of your business. Yours hasn't yet, has she?'
'He's a he. His name's Mike. And no, he hasn't settled. None of ours have.'
Poor little sod. I remembers what we used to do to boys like him in the Tottenham Union. The funny ones. The different ones. We didn't like them much.
'Come out from there, Mike. We won't hurt you. Come on. Harold, can you answer a few questions we has?'
'Yes, if I can.'
'How did you come to be here? Most of the kids that was taken by the Gobblers where we comes from was from poor homes. You're not, are you?'
'No, my people are quite comfortably off. Daddy's a wine merchant.'
'So how did they get you?'
'I'd run away from boarding school – Ercal College in Salopshire. They were giving me a beastly time. Because of Mike, you know. They used to take him from me and lock him in a cupboard and drag me away from him, six or seven of them. It hurt horribly.' The poor kid looks like he's about to burst into tears. I remembers the daemon cage and the winch in the Tottenham Union Workhouse and I feels again a flash of the awful desperation I used to feel then. I rests my hand on his shoulder for a second.
'It's all right, mate. They used to do that to me, too.'
'But you're not . . . queer?'
'It don't matter. There's bullies everywhere. I don't suppose your teachers did anything to help?'
'No, they didn't. Anyway, I'd had enough, so I ran away during a school rugger match. I got as far as Oakengates, but I was awfully tired and hungry, so when this kind lady offered to buy me supper I was jolly grateful. She looked so nice – I trusted her.'
'She had a golden monkey-daemon, didn't she?'
'Yes, she did. Her name's Mrs Coulter and everyone here's afraid of her.'
'Me too, Harold. I'm afraid of her too. Now, does you know a boy called Stan? Might be called Stan Doyle or Stan Tulliver?'
'Stanley? Yes, he's two beds down from me.'
'Is he all right?'
'Yes, as much as any of us are.'
We sighs with relief. We has some good news for Maggie at last.
'Harold, what's going on in this place? What's it for? What's it called?'
'It's the Bolvangar Experimental Station. There are theologians and doctors here. They do experiments on us and on our daemons.'
'Experiments? What sort of experiments?'
'Have you heard of intercision?'
'No. What's that?'
'It's a kind of cutting.'
'Cutting what?'
'Cutting away. When they intercise you, you become what they call a severed child. Then they take you away from here. We don't know where they take you or what happens to you then.'
This is scaring us rigid. We is frightened out of our wits, but we must know what he means.
'What does you mean, they cuts away? Cuts what away?' Harold Owen looks down.
'We talk about it in the dorm, after lights out. Some of us think it means they kill your daemon, but that can't be right, I know, because you'd die immediately.
'Two weeks ago, I overheard two of the theologians talking in the canteen. I don't know why they didn't notice me. They were having quite a heated argument, and that might be the reason, I suppose. I worked it all out from what they said.
'Intercision means that they separate you from your daemon, with a silver blade. It's to do with Dust and Original Sin. It's supposed to free you from sin. Some of the children who are severed die straight away. Sometimes they live a little longer. Tony, the boy who had the bed you've got now, he lived for a while, I think'
They cuts away your daemon? But that's not possible! Nobody could do that… Nobody human could possibly
They used to lock me away from you, Sal reminds me. In the Union.
So…Wait a minute…
'This Tony. Used to sleep here. Was his full name Tony Makarios? Little kid – daemon name of Ratter?'
'Yes, it was.'
This is terrible. We is crying and feeling very sick indeed. We is looking down into a deep pit of black horror and we can't hardly breathe. Sal is making faint distressed sounds in her throat. I clasps her to my heart and holds her very tight. As we sits and shakes with terror and disgust so we wonders if we can ever be well again, a change starts to creep over us, very slowly but unstoppable just the same. There is a buzzing sound in our head and we can't see properly – it's as if we is seeing two things at the same time. Perhaps we is being severed from our own world now. There's the dorm, and behind it, or in front of it, we sees, we sees – something else. It's a dream, we thinks, or maybe the shock of what we has learned is killing us. Now we seems to be hanging above the top of the world, looking down on it spinning round, far below us. We can see the moon and the stars and the sun when we looks about us in the space where we is suspended.
We hears a whooshing sound and from over our left shoulder there is a rush of bright golden glittering sparks that go speeding past us and gathering themselves together into a shining river of brightness that flows down through the sky to the grey-white streaked mass of the icy north. A branch forms in the river and loops itself around us and covers our eyes and suddenly the earth and the moon and the stars are blocked out by the surging, twisting braided light. We is filled with a sensation of great joy – it's the torrent of golden light; it's good, we knows it is. It's alive and it loves us. We would like to throw ourselves into this stream, swim in it, wash ourselves in it, let it carry us where it wants. Never more be hungry and cold, never more suffer pain and fear. We leaps, we must, it tells us to, forward through space and dives into the main flow, feeling it running over us, through us, shining inside us, lighting us up so we glows like angels. We is free! Free for ever! We cries out aloud in our delight. This is Heaven – Heaven at last. We sings – and the chorus of heaven joins in with our song.
- 0 -
We does not know how long we lives in Paradise. It may be for only two or three seconds or it may be for more than ten or twenty years. Time means very little there. But we is called back to earth. Back for a time, while there is still work for us to do.
'Are you all right?' Someone is shaking us by the shoulder. 'I say, can you hear me?'
Our vision of joy splinters and falls away from us in shards of broken light. We is back in the boys' dorm in Bolvangar Experimental Station and we is still in very great danger. Even so, the peaceful feeling stays with us for a while, giving us strength. We has never had anything like this happen to us before – we can't understand it at all. As the calm feeling fades, we finds that we has become different inside, somehow. We is no longer afraid. Our fear has been burned out of us by the golden fire and in its place we has a deep, strong anger. We will kill that Mrs Coulter and her evil Gobblers that have done this dreadful thing to these poor kids. We will destroy this awful Bolvangar Experimental Station if it's the last thing we does.
'You . . . went away.' Harold looks worried. 'For ages. We were afraid you were dying. Are you all right?'
'Never better.' And we means it. 'Did you tell the other kids what you found out, Harold?'
'Yes. Some of them believed me. The others didn't. "Backs to the walls, boys, here comes Queer Harold," they said.' He caresses Mike, who has taken the form of an ocelot.
'You've got guts, son. You really have. Now listen, my name's Arthur Shire and this is Sal. I'll tell you what me and my friend Maggie're doing here.'
I tells him all my story, just as we've been telling it to you, except for the parts I'm ashamed of. As I speaks, I sees him beginning to think that there might be some hope for us after all. I doesn't want to let him down so I says look, there's only me and Sal and Maggie and Jimmy, and you of course, against all these Gobblers, but Maggie is very clever and very brave and if anyone can get us all out of here she can. I wishes we was as sure of this as we sounds.
'Come on,' I says. 'They're waiting for us.'
- 0 -
Harold and me finds Maggie in the canteen and we grabs one of the round tables at the far end of the room. We notices that the tables, which are made of some white shiny stuff, ain't all that clean even though they is quite new. No wonder they needed cleaners. This Bolvangar is reminding more than ever of the Union, only it's cruel in a modern, experimental theological sort of way. They both does awful things to kids, that's for sure.
'There's something wrong with this place,' Maggie says, when the three of us, plus our daemons, has got our chai and buns from the counter and is sitting down. 'The kids I've seen is all scared to death. The nurses is weird, somehow. Their daemons – they don't seem to be a proper part of them. They're more like tame animals than daemons. Why, one of the nurses was talking to me in the privy and her daemon wandered out of the door and she didn't even notice!'
Harold and me looks at each other. 'I'll tell her,' I says. So I does, and I can tell that Maggie and Jimmy is suffering the same pain and fear and horror that me and Sal was feeling in the boys' dorm. She holds her head in her hands while her Jimmy licks her face, trying to comfort her.
'Maggie,' I says. 'Look, there's good news. It's Stan. He's here, he really is, and they haven't . . . done it to him yet.'
'Not yet, but they will, won't they?' she replies, looking miserably down at the table. I reaches across and takes her hand.
'Maggie – we needs you to be strong. Don't let us down now. And look, the kids is coming in for their tea. You'll see little Stan in a minute, just you wait. Be brave for him, Maggie. You and me together – we've got to be brave enough for everyone!'
Maggie manages an uncertain little smile. 'I'll try, Arthur. I'll try.
'And what's happened to your eyes?'
