9
It was a funny thing about my little sister, Petra. She seemed so normal. We never suspected — not one of us. She was a happy child, and pretty from a baby, with her close golden curls. I can still see her as a brightly-dressed little thing constantly dashing hither and thither at a staggering run, clasping an atrociously cross-eyed doll which she loved with uncritical passion. A toy-like creature herself, prone as any other child to bumps, tears, chuckles, solemn moments, and a very sweet trust. I loved her — everybody, even my father, conspired to spoil her, with an endearing lack of success. Not even a wandering thought of difference crossed my mind concerning her until it abruptly happened….
We were harvesting. Up in the twelve-acre there were six men mowing in echelon. I had just given up my scythe to another man, and was helping with the stocking by way of a breather when, without any warning, I was struck…. I had never known anything like it. One moment I was contentedly, unhurriedly binding and propping up sheaves; the next, it was as if something had hit me physically, inside my head. Very likely I actually staggered under it. Then there was pain, a demand pulling like a fish-hook embedded in my mind. There was, in the surprise of the first few moments at any rate, no question whether or not I should go; I was obeying it, in a daze. I dropped the sheaf I was holding, and pelted off across the field, past a blur of amazed faces. I kept on running, I did not know why, except that it was urgent; across half the twelve-acre, into the lane, over the fence, down the slope of the East Pasture towards the river….
Pounding across the slope on a slant I could see the field that ran down to the far side of the river, one of Angus Morton’s fields, crossed by a path that led to the footbridge, and on the path was Rosalind, running like the wind.
I kept on, down to the bank, along past the footbridge, downstream towards the deeper pools. I had no uncertainty, I kept right on to the brink of the second pool, and went into a dive without a check. I came up quite close to Petra. She was in the deep water against the steep bank, holding on to a little bush. It was bent over and down, and the roots were on the point of pulling free. A couple of strokes took me near enough to catch her under the arms.
The compulsion ebbed suddenly and faded away. I towed her to an easier landing-place. When I found bottom and could stand up I saw Rosalind’s startled face peering anxiously at me over the bushes.
‘Who is it?’ she asked, in real words, and a shaky voice. She put her hand on her forehead. ‘Who was able to do that?’
I told her.
I carried my little sister ashore, and laid her on the grass. She was exhausted, and only semi-conscious, but there did not seem to be anything seriously wrong with her.
Rosalind came and knelt on the grass on the other side of her. We looked down at the sopping dress and the darkened, matted curls. Then we gazed across her, at one another.
‘I didn’t know,’ I told her. ‘I’d no idea she was one of us.’
Rosalind put her hands to her face, finger-tips on her temples. She shook her head slightly and looked at me from disturbed eyes.
‘She isn’t,’ she said. ‘Something like us, but not one of us. None of us could
Other people came running up then; some who had followed me from the twelve-acre, some from the other side, wondering what had made Rosalind go tearing out of the house as if it were on fire. I picked Petra up to carry her home. One of the men from the field looked at me in a puzzled way:
‘But how did you know?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t hear a thing.’
Rosalind turned an incredulous expression of surprise towards him.
‘What! With the way she was yelling! I’d’ve thought anybody who wasn’t deaf would have heard her half-way to Kentak.’
The man shook his head doubtfully, but the fact that we had both apparently heard it seemed confirmation enough to make them all uncertain.
I said nothing. I was busy trying to fend off agitated questions from the others, telling them to wait until either I or Rosalind was alone and could attend to them without rousing suspicions.
That night, for the first time for years, I had a once-familiar dream, only this time when the knife gleamed high in my father’s right hand, the deviation that struggled in his left was not a calf, it was not Sophie, either; it was Petra. I woke up sweating with fright….
The next day I tried to send thought-shapes to Petra. It seemed to me important for her to know as soon as possible that she must not give herself away. I tried hard, but I could make no contact with her. The rest tried, too, in turn, but there was no response. I wondered whether I should try to warn her in ordinary words, but Rosalind was against that.
‘It must have been panic that brought it out,’ she said. ‘If she isn’t aware of it now, she probably doesn’t even know it happened, so it might easily be an unnecessary danger to tell her about it at all. She’s only a little over six, remember. I don’t think it is fair, or safe, to burden her until it’s necessary.’
There was general agreement with Rosalind’s view. All of us knew that it is not easy to keep on watching each word all the time, even when you’ve had to practise it for years. We decided to postpone telling Petra until either some occasion made it necessary, or until she was old enough to understand more clearly what we were warning her about; in the meantime we would test occasionally to see whether we could make contact with her, otherwise the matter should rest as it stood at present.
We saw no reason then why it should not continue to stand as it did, for all of us; no alternative, indeed. If we did not remain hidden, we should be finished.
In the last few years we had learnt more of the people round us, and the way they felt. What had seemed, five or six years ago, a kind of rather disquieting game had grown grimmer as we understood more about it. Essentially, it had not changed. Still our whole consideration if we were to survive must be to keep our true selves hidden; to walk, talk, and live indistinguishably from other people. We had a gift, a sense which, Michael complained bitterly, should have been a blessing, but was little better than a curse. The stupidest norm was happier; he could feel that he belonged. We did not, and because we did not, we had no positive — we were condemned to negatives, to not revealing ourselves, to not speaking when we would, to not using what we knew, to not being found out — to a life of perpetual deception, concealment, and lying. The prospect of continued negativeness stretching out ahead chafed him more than it did the rest of us. His imagination took him further, giving him a clearer vision of what such frustrations were going to mean, but it was no better at suggesting an alternative than ours were. As far as I was concerned a firm grasp of the negative in the cause of survival had been quite enough to occupy me; I was only just beginning to perceive the vacancy left by the absent positive. It was chiefly my appreciation of danger that had sharpened as I grew up. That had become hardened one afternoon of the summer in the year before we discovered Petra.
It was a bad season, that. We had lost three fields, so had Angus Morton. Altogether there had been thirty- five field-burnings in the district. There had been a higher deviation rate among the spring-births of the stock — not only our own stock, but everyone’s, and particularly among the cattle — than had been known for twenty years. There seemed to be more wildcats of various sizes prowling out of the woods by night than ever before. Every week someone was before the court charged with attempted concealment of deviational crops, or the slaughter and consumption of undeclared Offences among stock, and to cap it all there had been no less than three district alerts on account of raids in force from the Fringes. It was just after the stand-down following the last of these that I happened across old Jacob grumbling to himself as he forked muck in the yard.
‘What is it?’ I asked him, pausing beside him.
He jabbed the fork into the muck and leant one hand on the shaft. He had been an old man forking muck ever since I could remember, I couldn’t imagine that he had ever been, or would be, anything else. He turned to me a lined face mostly hidden in white hair and whiskers which always made me think of Elijah.
‘Beans,’ he said. ‘Now my bloody beans are wrong. First my potatoes,
