Fearless

Little Fearless

  From where she stood in the shadows, Stargazer could see someone sitting outside a cage of metal bars. It was Bellyache. She could not see inside the cage, but she knew that someone was in there, because Bellyache was talking to them.

  “I don’t know why I have to be stuck down here on the day of the big inspection. It’s all your fault. If you hadn’t tried to run away, I wouldn’t be here. What was the point? Look where you’ve got yourself.”

  There was a murmur from the other side of the bars.

  “Come and get you! You think they’ll come and get you! Listen. They don’t even remember you. They don’t even know who you are!”

  Another murmur, fainter this time.

  “Why don’t they remember you? Because you don’t exist. Because you don’t matter. They don’t even believe you existed in the first place. They think you’re just a story. I’ve told you before. I’ve told you a million times. When will you get it? You’re no one. No one. No one.”

  This time only silence answered Bellyache’s terrible words.

  Stargazer felt anguished and fearful, but excited that they were so close to rescuing Little Fearless.

  Bellyache continued droning on. “The other X girls get all the fun. I’m the only one who—”

  But Bellyache never finished her sentence, because Stench had clamped her hand over her mouth.

  “Sometimes I wish you would look on the bright side of things for a change,” said Stench, and with that she whipped Bellyache’s leather scourge from her belt, stuffed it in her mouth, and secured it in place with a handkerchief, then produced some string and tied her up.

  Bellyache lay on the floor, spluttering and writhing. “Peace and quiet at last,” said Stench.

  Stargazer was fumbling at Bellyache’s belt, where there was a big brass key attached – the key to Little Fearless’s cell.

  Stargazer unlocked the door and pushed it open. She saw a small figure lying on a plain wooden bench on the other side of the cage. The figure was so thin and pale, it was hard to know if it was Little Fearless or not. Her hair had grown back a little bit but was dirty and tangled, and she wore an old pair of striped pyjamas that looked like they had never been washed. Only when she opened her eyes to reveal one brown eye and one blue eye could Stargazer be sure that it was her best friend.

  Little Fearless’s eyelids flickered as if she couldn’t quite make out what she was seeing. Her gaze seemed far away, and clouded. When she did finally raise her head, she looked first at Stench.

  Little Fearless was so tired and weak, she could hardly manage to be surprised. “Hello … number … number…” She seemed to struggle for a moment. “Whoever you are. Have you come to mock and curse me?”

  “No,” said Stench. “Of course not.”

  “I remember you, though I can’t remember your name. It was you who helped me escape from the Institute. You were the … queen of the hills and valleys of the rubbish tips.”

  Stench looked away, quite unable to speak, so shocked was she at the sight of Little Fearless in that awful hole.

  Stargazer was staring at Little Fearless. She felt both joy at seeing her best friend again and horror to find her so pale and faded away. Little Fearless brought her one brown eye and her one blue eye to rest on Stargazer. For a brief moment, a light appeared in them.

  “I know you,” she murmured. “I’m sure I do. You’re not an X girl. You’re … someone. What are you doing down here?”

  “Little Fearless, it’s me. It’s me, Stargazer. I’ve come to take you away from this place.”

  Little Fearless’s eyelids flickered, closed, then opened again. “I do remember you, I’m sure. You used to be my friend when I was … when I was a real girl.”

  “Oh, Little Fearless,” said Stargazer, and then fell silent.

  After a while, Little Fearless spoke again. “The X girls say no one remembers me.”

  “I remember you,” said Stargazer weakly.

  “I know it can’t be true that I have been forgotten. Because I did it all for them. The escaping. To find their families. Do they tell stories about me? What do all the girls say about me now that I am gone?” asked Little Fearless.

  “They say … they say … I do not know how to tell you,” said Stargazer, barely above a whisper.

  “They can say I am bad or a liar or a thief. They can say I am a traitor or a fool. These things are untrue so they do not matter.”

  “They don’t say those things,” said Stargazer.

  “They can say I pick my nose, that I forget to brush my teeth, that I am sometimes stubborn and hot-headed and don’t put my clothes away in a tidy pile at night. You can tell me. I shan’t mind.”

  “No,” said Stargazer. “They don’t say any of those things.”

  A look of puzzlement passed across Little Fearless’s face. Then suddenly, with what appeared to be her last remaining strength, she raised herself up and looked directly into Stargazer’s eyes, the brown and blue of her irises seeming to burn with a strange light.

  “They do remember me – don’t they?”

  Stargazer hesitated. It was only for half a second, but Little Fearless was watching her face with all that was left of her strength. In the space of that tiny hesitation, Little Fearless collapsed back onto the bench as she saw the truth that was written in Stargazer’s eyes.

  At that moment, Stargazer stumbled back, stricken with fear and wonder.

  Filling her field of vision were three angels. They had come because they had heard a sound – a sound only angels can hear. It was the sound of a human heart breaking.

  “What are you looking at, Stargazer?” said Stench.

  “Can’t you see? Can’t you see?” whispered Stargazer, rapt and terrified.

  “There’s nothing there,” said Stench, bewildered.

  Little Fearless gave a gasp, and Stargazer saw the three angels descend and lift Little Fearless’s spirit out of her worn and racked body.

  One was the angel of compassion, whose face was infinitely agonized and perfectly beautiful at the same time.

  The angel of courage had a hundred faces. Little Fearless knew every one of them.

  The angel of truth had more faces than anyone could count, and many were wonderful, and still more were too terrible to gaze upon.

  The three angels rose, the spirit of Little Fearless flickering between them like pale fire.

  Stargazer suddenly began to speak all in a rush, as if she could call Little Fearless back.

  “Of course they remember you. They talk about you all the time. You’re a hero. You’re loved by everyone. You’ve given them all strength. You’ve…”

  Little Fearless’s eyes seemed to flicker, and the light in them grew a little fainter.

  Then they closed.

  Stargazer took hold of Little Fearless and began to shake her, gently at first, then harder and harder. Almost mad with grief, she drew out from inside her coat the white rose she had picked from the rubbish dumps. “I’ve brought you a white rose, Little Fearless. I know you love them.”

  The vision of angels had evaporated. There was only thin, dank air. Stargazer held the white rose out towards Little Fearless, close enough to let her smell the scent. She stood like that for a minute without moving, then gently pushed the rose into a lock of Little Fearless’s dirty, tangled hair.

  “The angels have taken her,” said Stargazer softly. “She has returned to the great nothing.”

  Stench, stunned with grief, did not speak.

  Then Stargazer felt something so strong well up inside her that she thought she would fall over. It felt as if all the pain and anger in the world, and all the determination and all the outrage at all the crimes that had ever been committed were inside her. She cried a cry that seemed to reverberate on the surface, far above them. Then she bent and picked up the dead weight of Little Fearless’s body in her thin, pale arms.

  “Let me carry her,” said Stench sadly. “I’m stronger than you.” br />
  “No,” said Stargazer so fiercely that Stench took a step back. “I owe her this journey.”

  So it was that Stargazer carried Little Fearless’s slack body all the way up the spiral staircase. Her arms felt like lead and her legs felt as if they were going to collapse at any second, but she kept going.

  She carried Little Fearless out of the Discipline Block and towards the exercise yard. The air was cold and the sky was brown as a puddle. The great metal walls, although painted pink and covered with fake ivy, seemed as dull and oppressive as ever.

  “What are we going to do?” asked Stench.

  “We’re going to make the other children remember what must not be forgotten any more. Stench! Watch out ahead.”

  For just at the entrance to the exercise yard, where the inspection was at that moment taking place, was the Whistler. Immediately Stench disappeared into the shadows.

  Whistler was whistling:

  Who killed Cock Robin?

  I, said the Sparrow,

  With my bow and arrow,

  I killed Cock Robin.

  She spotted Stargazer carrying Little Fearless, and immediately began to move towards them. She stopped whistling.

  But now another whistle rose up from somewhere.

  Ring-a-ring o’ roses,

  A pocket full of posies,

  A-tishoo! A-tishoo!

  We all fall down.

  And with the “down” the Whistler felt a strong pair of hands force her to the ground and bind her hands. Then a length of sticky tape was fastened across her mouth. Stench stood over her and muttered, “Try and whistle now.”

  The Whistler turned red with fury. Stargazer, carrying the body of Little Fearless, just walked on. Stench grabbed the Whistler by the collar of her jacket and pulled her through the dirt after her.

  The City Boss was standing on a high podium ten yards in front of the first row of girls, talking into a microphone. The podium was covered in lush red carpet in honour of his visit.

  The X girls were dotted here and there among the gathering, watching the Y and Z girls carefully for any signs of misbehaviour. Up on the podium with the City Boss and the Controller were Soapdish, Tattle, Beauty and Lady Luck. Their attention was focused on the City Boss, who was making an elegant and nicely crafted speech. The Controller gazed at him in admiration.

  Soapdish saw Stargazer first. Then Tattle, then Beauty. They watched, riveted to the spot, their faces frozen in shock. Then, one by one, the eyes of all the Y and Z girls were drawn to the sight of Stargazer, now staggering under the weight of her burden. Although she was exhausted, still she wouldn’t give it up. The vidcams swung away from the City Boss to take in this extraordinary vision.

  Eventually, almost every eye in the Institute – and many thousands beyond, watching the vidscreen pictures being broadcast in the City – fixed on the tiny child carrying the filthy, broken body.

  Stargazer kept walking towards the podium where the City Boss was still blithely talking, oblivious to what was going on below him. She reached the bottom of the steps that led up to the podium. Slowly Stargazer began to ascend.

  Transfixed, not one of the X girls moved to stop her. When, finally, the Controller and the City Boss turned to follow the gaze of all the girls, the Controller let out a loud cry of amazement. Then he immediately started yelling at the X girls, while the City Boss looked on, astonished.

  “What are you waiting for? Grab them! Get them out of here.”

  But seeing Stargazer holding Little Fearless’s body, and then the Whistler being dragged behind them by Stench, who looked huge, red-faced and extremely determined, not one of the X girls moved a muscle. The Controller stood stock-still, although his eyes swivelled in panic behind his tinted spectacles.

  Then Stargazer, her eyes wet with tears, reached the top of the high podium and, still carrying Little Fearless, walked to the microphone where the City Boss was standing. She looked up at him. So fierce was her gaze, he moved away in alarm. She took his place. Then, with her last reserves of strength, she lifted the tiny, wasted form of Little Fearless above her head, and spoke. The voice that came out was enormous, ten times the size of her normal voice. The smallness of her frame meant she could not reach the microphone, but everyone within the four walls could still hear her, as clear as a bell.

  “Here she is! Here is the girl that doesn’t exist!”

  She laid Little Fearless gently on the red carpet at her feet, then straightened up again.

  “Look at her. She’s so cold and dead and real. Remember her. Because in forgetting her, you have destroyed her.

  “You have lied to yourselves in forgetting her. You have lied in this place that is made out of lies. You have lied because you thought that if you did it long enough, and hard enough, you would escape this place and become real people. But that’s a lie too. I’ve got proof that the only place we’re going after we grow up is another house of nowhere.”

  Stench let go of the Whistler, took from her pockets the reams of papers that she had picked up from the Pit and flung them into the crowd. The girls immediately broke their lines to grab them. As they read the documents, there were mutterings of anger, which grew, then faded. There was a silence that seemed to go on for ever.

  The City Boss tried to leave the podium, but found his way blocked by Tattle, Soapdish, Beauty and Stench. Tattle, eyes filled with shame and grief, had been the first to rip the X letter off her lapel. Soapdish, then Beauty, quickly followed suit.

  The Controller, momentarily panicked, fell to his knees and began praying to Eidolon. Stargazer looked down at him with sorrow and disdain.

  “You should not pray to Eidolon. Or Ormazd, or any other god. You should pray to the stars, to the universe, for ourselves and for our lives, brief and imperfect as they are. Give thanks for the astonishing miracle that there is something rather than nothing. That we exist at all in the endless void. We should worship one another. We should worship our sameness as well as our uniqueness. We should worship what makes us truly human. Compassion. Courage. And truth.”

  Stargazer’s words echoed around the walls of the Institute, met only by silence. It was the Controller who broke it. He was gazing upon the face of Little Fearless. It seemed that only now did he recognize her. He rose unsteadily and he spoke a single word, in a cracked, heartbroken voice.

  “Fearless.”

  At that single sound, the girls blinked. It was as if all at once they had awoken from a dream.

  Tattle was the first to echo the Controller’s cry. “Little Fearless!”

  Then Soapdish and Beauty. “Fearless! Fearless!”

  Within seconds, the whole of the Institute were shouting at the top of their voices.

  “Fearless! Fearless! Fearless!”

  Outside the Institute, thousands of people were demonstrating, and they had been getting restless. A counter-demonstration was taking place that had been organized by the City Boss. These stooges had been shouting that the tears were forgeries, just tap water mixed with salt.

  Then a man dressed in the vestments of a priest stood up. He spoke, and his voice soared above the throng.

  “I remember this girl,” said the priest. “She came to see me too, just as she came to see John. She tried to tell us about the Institute.”

  Here he nodded at the man John, who had helped to organize the demonstration, and who had arrived in his huge rubbish lorry festooned with banners that read STOP THE TEARS NOW.

  “She asked for help. I am ashamed to say I did not help her, because she was dirty and bedraggled; and just a child, so I did not believe her. All the same, I have never been able to forget her. Now I feel sure that she was telling the truth.”

  Now the argument broke out more furiously than before. Such a cacophony of voices was raised that the police, drafted in to keep order, shifted on their feet uncomfortably. They didn’t want a riot on their hands.

  Then another voice rang out – this time through a police megaphone.
br />   “I too remember this girl,” the voice said. “I have not been able to forget her, however hard I’ve tried. She came to my police station, but I am ashamed to say that I ignored her. I didn’t believe her, because she was an outsider, an out of Cityer and a vagabond. But now I have come to believe that what she told me was true.”

  The crowd looked and they saw, to their amazement, that it was one of the policemen who was speaking. He took off his helmet, threw it on the ground and stamped on it, and joined the thousands of demonstrators demanding an end to the tears.

  Suddenly, what seemed like a trickle of rhythmic noise began to gather itself from inside the walls of the Institute. At first it was a thin whisper, but as it began to build, it became louder and louder until it practically drowned out all of the noise of the demonstrators. No one could at first make out what the noise was; then gradually it became clear from the pitch and tone that it was the massed voices of the girls. They were repeating one word over and over.

  “Fearless! Fearless! Fearless!”

  The noise grew, and the people at the demonstration began chanting too, while the people from the counter-demonstration tried to shout them down.

  “We must go into the Institute,” shouted the policeman who had thrown off his helmet.

  “Yes,” echoed the priest. “We can’t hide from ourselves any more.”

  “We’ll tear down the gates,” cried the man called John.

  In front of them were the two vast gates of the Institute, one the shape of a D, the other the shape of a reversed D. When they were closed, they formed the sign of a zero divided into two parts, one painted black and one painted white. John jumped into the cab of his rubbish lorry, revved the engine, and drove it straight through the zero-shaped gates of the Institute, splintering wood and metal like matchwood. The crowd flooded forward, the police helpless to stop them.

  Inside, the chanting of nine hundred and ninety-nine girls was echoing around the Institute.

  “Fearless! Fearless!”

  The City Boss, still on the podium, had a look of fierce panic on his face. He shouted and gestured at the policeman who was at the head of the crowd. He noticed that for some reason, this policeman wasn’t wearing a helmet.