‘Dear Nora,
You were well aware of the heartache the job entails and were thoroughly prepared via your studies here at the University of Holistic Medicine. Your inability to cope with the pressures of helping society as a care assistant only shows the weaknesses in you I had originally anticipated. It is with regret that I have asked my staff to prepare for your own retirement here at the University.
Yours in good faith,
Klara Johnson,
Dean of Health Care Studies.’
‘So, it was suicide,’ said Jambit, praying Bastian wasn’t going to confront Nabulus with any of his concerns.
To question Nabulus was to question the Party and that could have serious repercussions.
‘She was terrified of leaving care work, but why?’ said Bastian.
They split at a fork in the road, Jambit to his house and Bastian to the station to file his report with Jambit’s advice to let sleeping dogs lie reverberating in his ears. And maybe it was the hot nights sending people crazy with another suicide craze sweeping through the village.
* * *
Bastian threw off the blanket of lama wool from the prisoner’s bed, the only one in the police station, and lay on top looking at the stars through the bars of the cell window. His opium pipe was ready to use and he inhaled the fumes that offered escape from the questions rebounding in his head. He smoked some more with his spirit rising gently in the air and looked down at his still body.
Bastian saw a cobra with Nabulus’s head and ready to strike at his right arm. He turned into a mayfly to escape but crashed into the ceiling and dropped into a large jar of Jambit’s honey. Slowly he sank to the bottom with his wings pinned back by the viscosity. Holroyd laughed and screwed on the cap. Bastian was banging the sides of the glass jar as he arrived at an old train station, one from the history books at school. Jeremiah held a large spoon and lifted him out. He returned to human form and an unknown woman with wildflowers in her hair blew him a kiss before she waved him goodbye beside the railway tracks made from human bones. He stepped into a train carriage and sat down as it whisked him away into a dark tunnel full of smoke. A trolley of dried bush meats and cider flagons was being pushed along the corridor by May. He shouted her name but she just smiled and carried on her way.
‘Where are we going?’ Bastian asked his elderly companions in the carriage.
‘Where dreams come too, of course,’ they all replied smiling. ‘To Scotland.’
Chapter Seventeen
As the sun rose in the sky that morning, there were two hot-air balloons flying over the village and they were coloured green like giant apples hovering above the trees with the world turned upside down. They were doing another check on the livestock, bushels of wheat, bales of hay, pails of milk, and any other produce that would feed the mouths in London. Nabulus was in a balloon flown by Bastian. Holroyd was with Joshua who was a government apprentice long liked by Nabulus for his willingness to listen and not ask too many questions. He was twenty-one, impressionable and malleable.
Bastian wore his other armband today, the one with his police insignia and a pterodactyl that denoted his status as a pilot. And the one he hated wearing as it drew attention from the armband spotters and a whole of host of questions of which he felt obliged to answer but in which he had no real interest.
The skies were empty of aeroplanes as no one had the fuel, long depleted by warlords then countries and latterly continents fighting over the last remaining barrels. Science and technology had almost destroyed the world, created an unsustainable population. Now the unhealthy and the old in all of the animal kingdom were left to die if they weren’t strong enough to survive what nature threw at them. And there was no medicine to save the weak, only reliance on God’s book of life, your own DNA.
Beneath the balloons was a real living paradise, not harmonious but where the vines on trees would strangle the opposition, and roots would steal the nutrients from other plants leaving the competition to die. Foxes would kill chickens and be hunted themselves. The poor innocent lambs would look on, unaware of their own fate as they frolicked in the sun until their final day. But they were killed quickly and not in a slaughterhouse. Death was now respected, not feared, according to the STP.
‘I’ve got myself in a bit of pickle,’ said Holroyd to Joshua, his pilot for the morning.
Holroyd was looking through his binoculars and moving from one side of the balloon to the other.
‘Can we see pickles from up here?’ asked Joshua, sweating.
He repositioned the goggles that were pinching his nose and meant to protect his eyes from the propane flame. He wore thick gloves, a long-sleeved shirt and camel skin jeans. Joshua would have melted but for the moments changing altitude when the winds cooled him down. The various air currents were used to steer the balloon: when they went up they veered to the right, and when they went down they turned to the left.
‘I meant I’ve put my foot in it,’ said Holroyd, as they flew over June’s small herd of cows.
She waved at them as they flew by and still had eight cows, the same as yesterday.
‘You’re married to Nabulus’s sister, perhaps you could have a word on my behalf,’ said Holroyd. ‘I admit, I do find him rather intimidating.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it. Nabulus is a pussycat when you get to know him.’
‘Look closely at the house beside the flour-mill, there’s a goat herd hidden under the trees. We missed that yesterday,’ said Holroyd.
‘Well spotted.’
Holroyd made a record in his notepad with a question mark beside the number of goats. They’d make a surprise visit later in the week.
‘Have you ever met
