All life matters. STOP PLAYING GOD.
One of the woman finishing off the knots raised her head and my stomach clenched. Her platinum hair was shaved down one side. Was it her? Was she here? But then she turned and her face was wrinkled like a crumpled paper bag. I released one long breath and sank low into the passenger seat.
“Let’s just take the side exit, eh?” Art spun the steering wheel and we headed down a narrow country lane towards a set of painted white gates. The security guard there looked just as rattled as the one in the front booth, and scanned our ID bracelets and paperwork with shaking hands. Then, a quick and husky “Thank you”, before opening the gate just long enough for the car to inch through the narrow gap before locking behind us with a clang. We pulled into the car park and sat in silence for a few minutes. Art’s face was grey and I could see all the whites of his eyes, so I reached across and held his hand. He looked down at it, his lips tight. “It gets a bit fucking much sometimes. Why won’t they just give it up?”
We were early, so had a little walk around the wooded grounds before hunting down the phase five clinic. It felt like when we visited a stately home in our early days, but of course this time all of it was new – the trellises, the trees, the turf. Some saplings looked like they were struggling for light between the larger, artificial oaks. On those, bark sparkled like it was newly coated, but it still peeled in the midday sun. On one wooded avenue I picked up a pinecone to inspect the tight fit of its armour. I used a thumbnail to separate the layers, and discovered that the inner was constructed from corrugated cardboard. I pressed it back together and returned to the grave before carrying on walking.
Further back into the deeper woodland were the clinics reserved for the full members, in phases four and five. These were larger buildings built of stone, perhaps converted old barns and farmhouses. They couldn’t all have been though; there were too many, and they stretched on far between the trees. As we made our way up the gravel walk, we made a game of guessing which buildings were genuinely old and which were fake, judging them on the colour of the stone, the slates on the roof, the window frames. But as neither of us could work out the truth, our game ended without any sense of closure. There was no winner, and instead we just tailed off, each of us lost in our own thoughts.
It wasn’t long before we reached the area with the painted prefabs, beneath the willow trees. The speakers in the branches were blasting out the kind of deafening coos and hoots that I would never have associated with a feathered thing. Art pointed to the central hut. “You know, once I heard the strangest thing coming from there, in a pause in that crappy soundtrack. It was like a shout, but it wasn’t words. Just vowels, really.”
I didn’t want to think about it, I wanted to be away, but Art started to drag me over the grass towards the door, crisscrossed with metal bars.
“Stop,” I said. “This bit’s not for us. It’s private property.”
Art twisted his mouth. “Private? We’re members now. Nothing’s hidden anymore.”
I yanked my wrist from his grip, but not before I was close enough to read the small bronze sign low down beside the door handle: “The Core: Detention and Reconditioning”. Art stared at the plaque for a few seconds before turning back to me, his eyebrows raised, his cheeks ashen. I grabbed his hand and pulled him back towards the path with one thought in my mind. We shouldn’t be here.
We continued along the gravel in silence. What was there to say? We didn’t know what was inside the pre-fab for sure, but I couldn’t stop wishing that I’d used a magnifying glass to read all that small print in those first information packs.
After a few more minutes we realised how utterly lost we were. We’d given ourselves plenty of time to find the right building, but by now we’d definitely wandered too far. We stood for some time, looking back and forth along the trail for a clue or a signpost, both of us growing increasingly panicked that we were going to be late. It seemed to me that the place was designed to lead you off into the wild without any signage to guide you home, and I knew deep in my heart that it was deliberate. Nothing at Easton Grove was ever accidental.
“I can’t say much for their user experience,” Art muttered into my ear.
To our left was a three-storey stone building painted in duck-egg blue, with a sign by the door which read “Surgical Recovery”, and just opposite, a huge white behemoth marked up as “Organ Auxiliary Centre”. Beside that was the entrance to a long, low-lying complex which stretched back into the trees, so I couldn’t see how big it really was. There were no windows, and the stone-effect exterior made it look more like a bunker than a medical centre. Art wasn’t looking and drove me onwards, but before we passed by completely I craned my head to read the sign: “Ovum Organi Genesis Centre”. Strange glassy clangs and thumps could be heard from within, and I quickly turned away and focussed on the squeaking green grass, the daisies that never died.
If how deep you went into the grounds reflected how long you’d been a member, we’d definitely come too far.
We headed off back in the
