Campion's Choice

After a short drive, along a badly rutted road, they reached the Refuse Site and pulled in through the chain link gates. Bob Evans seemed to relax.

On the journey, in a four-wheel drive Nissan, the man had remained silent, looking out of the corner of his eye to make sure Jack wasn’t thinking of leaping from the moving vehicle. Jack had tried to reassure him. He chatted quietly, hummed a tune and kept smiling until his cheeks ached. But, even when he told Bob that he thought his four bed, semi-detached house, was very nice and that the guest room was perfect the man stayed silent.

‘This is where I work.’

Those were Bob’s first gruff words as he got out of the car, puffed out his chest with pride and took deep, happy breaths.

‘Ugh,’ Jack complained. There was a disgusting smell in the air.

‘Ahhhh … nectar!’ Bob boomed happily.

‘Nectar? Smells like cow sh….’ Jack began but his words were drowned by a deafening hooter.

‘The night shift starts now. Come on. I’m just going over there, to the offices, to check the computers.’

Bob led Jack towards a ramshackle, flat roofed building and, when they got there, instead of using a door, Bob walked straight through the side wall of the building.

‘Look at this mess! He never clears up,’ the man grumbled on the other side of the wall. Jack looked both ways for a door but couldn’t see one. How was he supposed to get in? Walk though a wall? Well, what’s the worse that can happen? He headed straight for the blue panels, expecting, with each step, to end up with a flattened nose. Instead, with a shiver, he slipped through the wall.

He held his breath and touched the panels. They were solid. Moving through them had felt like walking through a curtain of rain.

So, this was Bob’s office. It was astonishing. From the outside the office looked like a tumbledown, temporary bungalow. Inside it looked like the NASA space centre: a room crammed full of hi-tech equipment.

‘Blimey,’ Jack said, admiring a bank of flickering monitors and added, ‘when you said rubbish dump I thought you meant dustcarts, old sofas and yesterdays leftovers.’

‘It is dustcarts and leftovers. We process loads of garbage here. Some places just bury it but we want to save the land. So we change the world’s junk back to something useful,’ Bob answered. He wandered from panel to panel and punched in new commands.

‘Like what?’

‘Anything.’

‘Yeah, right. I suppose you turn broken teapots into gold bars.’

‘Sometimes. Gold is a fairly easy thing to do,’ Bob said and reached across his desk.

There was an empty coke tin next to his keyboard. He put a hand gently on top of the can and then sat back with a satisfied grin. Curiosity got the better of Jack. Reaching out he grabbed the can but it hardly moved. It had to be gold. It was unbelievably heavy.

‘But … but … if you … if your people … can do this .. then Hanston would be the richest village in the world.’

‘Yes. It is. But we don’t want to attract too much attention do we? Anyway, gold’s easy.’

‘So what’s hard?’

‘Food. We only perfected the food machine about twenty years ago. I think they have them at The Manor. Tubes go from underground bottles to the silver dishes and you just speak your order. The machines do the rest.’

Jack remembered the magic breakfast served up in The Manor as Bob gazed up through a small blue cloud of pipe smoke and chatted happily.

‘We built the food machine after it was ’remembered’. But getting the food right was a real challenge. Roast chicken tasted like car tyres. Soufflés smelt of hair spray. We got there in the end. It turns out that anything stinking and rotten makes brilliant bacon, especially if you throw in a bit of brush bristle for the crunch.’

Bob chuckled but looked concerned when he saw Jack’s face.

‘So the food they serve, at The Manor, is made from rubbish?’

‘Yes. Are you all right? You look a bit green.’

‘I feel sick.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘Remind me never to eat in The Manor again.’

‘fair enough. Of course, the main thing we make here is energy. We’re one of Cambridgeshire’s biggest suppliers. We could light the whole of Great Britain, and have energy left over, but, again, we don’t want to attract attention.’

As the night wore on Bob offered to take Jack on a tour of the huge fields where the waste came in to be dumped, sorted and processed. Jack happily agreed and followed the man as they walked between stacks of clothing and old blankets and wandered past a huge skip filled with televisions and fridge-freezers. All the way Bob kept explaining how everything got sorted. Right in the middle of the tip they climbed on top of a mound of broken tables and Jack marvelled at an army of tiny red-hatted garden gnomes that seemed to spread before them as far as the eye could see.

Mister Evans pointed towards a huge, grey building in the distance.

‘That’s where we turn waste into electricity,’ he said.

Back at ground level they stopped in front of a low, brick building and Bob tapped a button on the wall. Two huge doors rolled upwards. Inside it looked like an exotic storehouse. It stocked everything, from a gleaming Bugatti sports car, to a tiny old-fashioned transistor radio.

‘This is the ’Replicatory’,’ Bob said.

‘The what?’

‘The Replicatory. People get in touch, on the Internet, if they want something precious or unique or treasured restored. We get their old thing and then make it new again. It’s a nice little earner.’

There was a workbench nearby. The man picked up an old, battered, porcelain doll. It was dressed in ragged, faded clothes. Perching on a stool Bob rocked from side to side, passing his hands gracefully over the fragile little figure. Gradually, like early morning sun flooding a valley, the tiny plaything changed, the dress became bright, the porcelain face glowed with pink health.

‘See? There’s not a Huras that could do that as well,’ Bob said, standing the toy at the back of the workbench.

Leaving the Replicatory they continued the midnight expedition. They were joined by a bunch of dogs as big and fierce as a wolf pack. These animals frisked by Bob’s side, fighting for extra pats but, when Jack became tired and dropped behind, they circled him, snarling and snapping. If he looked at them it only made things worse because they took his stare as a challenge to fight and started growling nastily, prickles of hair spiking their shaggy backs. To avoid eye contact Jack walked with his head in the air, gazing up at the heavens, his eyes fixed ahead, gazing at the strange purple star just above the horizon.

The next morning, Monday morning, feeling surprisingly fresh, Jack decided he might as well go to school with Petra. He had to do something even if he was a prisoner.

It was a surprise when Petra left the house without a bag, or pens, or books so he asked about homework. A blank look came across the young girl’s face.

‘You know? Stuff they make you do at home just to make your life a misery?’

Petra looked confused.

‘Homework? We don’t bring work home. School is for learning. Home is for living.’

It was only a short walk and they soon arrived outside the old, red brick building. The first people Jack saw were Tia and Liam.

Liam was with a group of older boys and they soon disappeared without a backward glance. Tia spotted Jack and came bounding over.

‘You’re here! Great. I thought they might have tied you up, or stuck you in a deep dark dungeon.’

She linked her arm through his and dragged him under the wide arch of the main school entrance.

Petra followed, head down, sneaking curious looks at the pair as they joined a caterpillar line of kids heading to class.

‘I’m so glad you’re here. You’ll love it. I’m sure you’ll be at least a Gamelin and maybe even a Huras. You do not want to be Crow. They are the lowest of the low. I mean, Liam is a Huras! Can you believe it? They think he’s some kind of genius! He’s going with them to a sports day against – wait for it – Redemere. Unbelievable. I bet Gidean will be a Huras when he gets here.’

Tia pushed the door open and led Jack into the large, cluttered classroom he had peeked into the day before.

It was obviously a mixed age class, some kids looked young but others were definitely older. Tia pulled him to her table and sat him down.

‘We sit here. You’re over there,’ Tia said, glaring at Petra. The girl nodded obediently and scuttled over to the other side of the room.

‘This place only has students from Hanston, so there’s just sixty kids in the whole school. We’re in Class Four,’ Tia prattled on. She pulled up a chair and waved happily to other children who all beamed back. It seemed to Jack that Tia was behaving like royalty.

‘Class Four?’

‘Yeah. There are five classes. Class One is for four to five year olds. Class Two is for six to seven. Class Three is eight to ten year olds and we’re in Four. That’s eleven to fourteen. Liam’s in Five which is fifteen to eighteen.’

A young man walked into the room and began to chat with some of the pupils.

‘That’s Mister Faisal. He’s really dishy and great and he’ll help you but I warn you, it is so hard here!’

Mister Faisal scanned the room. When he saw Jack he smiled and nodded before tapping lightly on the front desk with his fingers. The class fell immediately silent. The lesson began. It was American History. Before Jack knew what was happening Mister Faisal was in full flow.

‘… a copy of which is displayed in the National Archives. Some colonists supported the idea of reconciliation but others were determined to seek independence.’

The teacher droned on, and on and on about 1776. History again. It made Jack’s head spin. What was going on? There were no books, no pens, no computers, no calculators, no writing on the board, no questions, no raising hands, no passing notes, no nuisances, no jokers, no breaks. Mister Faisal repeated nothing. The only sounds were his musical voice and birds twittering in a tree outside.

It lasted for thirty minutes, the man stopped and then his pupils started to chat.

‘What was that?’ a bewildered Jack asked, coming out of a daydream, and rubbing the spot where Tia had nudged him in the ribs.

‘That’s how the lessons are. The teacher talks. You listen. You have to remember everything he says. You get tested,’ she said.

‘You have to remember a whole lesson? Just by listening? That’s impossible.’

‘Not really. Clare? Come over here.’

Tia beckoned to a thickset, brown haired girl, who ambled over to join them. Again, Tia was like a Queen, summoning her servant.

‘Clare, what did Mister Faisal just say?’

Without hesitating the girl piped up and launched, word for word, into a recital.

‘… a copy of which is displayed in the National Archives. Some colonists supported the idea of reconciliation but others were determined to seek independence,’ Clare parroted.

‘Stop!’ Jack said loudly. There was a brief nervous hush in the class. Mister Faisal looked up but carried on chatting. Clare looked crestfallen.

‘Did I get it wrong?’

‘No. I’m sorry. Thank you. I didn’t mean to be rude. It was just, it was bad enough hearing it once,’ Jack tried to explain.

‘That’s okay. Glad to be of help.’ Clare smiled and trotted away.

‘That’s unreal! The kid has a brain like a tape recorder!’

‘No. It’s easy if you’re Huras. And Gamelins are pretty good at it too. But Crows are fairly thick,’ Tia shrugged. Jack looked blank. What was all this Huras, Gamelin, Crow, stuff?

‘That girl you’re with? She’s Crow,’ Tia said sniffily.

‘Petra?’

‘Yeah, her,’ Tia said and, using her sickly, syrupy be-my-best-friend voice, she called out, ‘Oh Petra? Sweetie! Would you come over here?’

Petra jumped up and almost ran across the classroom.

‘Yes?’ Petra asked eagerly. Jack wondered what kind of power Tia had that could make all these kids jump. He half expected one of them to say, ‘At your service, your Majesty.’

‘Petra, what did Mister Faisal just say?’ Tia asked.

Petra’s pretty face scrunched up in concentration and Jack waited until finally she began to drag words up from a deep, deep, well.

‘ ….. a …… copy ……of …..which …..is ……displayed ….in …..the ……National …..Archives …’ Petra mumbled on but Tia stopped her.

‘That was lovely. Thank you.’

‘Really? Only there’s more. It was right, wasn’t it?’ Petra asked. She gazed adoringly at Tia and rocked happily backwards and forwards from heels to toes.

‘Very good, Petra. Now run along.’

Petra skipped away but Jack watched Tia as she turned to the others on her table and started to make faces.

‘She sounds like a broken tape recorder.’

Tia sniggered and crossed her eyes. She let her tongue loll out sideways. She flapped her lips like a landed fish. A smiling Petra glided innocently back to her desk as Tia made fun of her, every step of the way.

‘Stop that,’ Jack shouted. This time even Mister Faisal fell silent. Jack angrily said, ‘Are you so clever, Tia, that you can remember the whole lesson?’

‘Yes.’

Tia put her hand on her chest and touched the coin. Without breathing she began to rattle out words. She stopped when Jack held up a hand.

‘I could have done it all if I’d wanted,’ she said.

‘You’re so clever, Tia’ one of the girls by her side said before reaching over to admiringly pat Tia’s shoulder.

Tia looked down her nose at the girl and brushed away the hand.

‘I could go with Huras but I like Gamelin. We have fun. Who are you going to go with, Jack?’

Jack remembered something Petra had said, ‘We are only Crows.’

‘I’ll go with the Crows.’

He said it loudly and defiantly. He hadn’t got a clue what any of it meant.