WE KNEW, BUT WE DIDN'T KNOW

                                          

 

CHAPTER THREE

The kids at Hailsham were called students; they thought of themselves as students. At Ingersoll, we were boarders. Our facility had an insignia discreetly engraved just above its civic address, and the iron-coloured bus we boarded for our dollar store outings had textured identification stickers pasted on the front and back which were clones to the original. The effect was pretty creepy, and made all of us feel ashamed, as though we were convicted felons.

 

I really started to enjoy my time with Mr. Steeple. He never looked at me with pity or revulsion. He acted like I imagined a dad would, and I pretended that he was mine. I fantasised that passersby would glance at the two of us together and assume that’s what we were to each other, but if I’d given it any real thought, I would have known that we looked like what we were: a uniformed bus-driver and a uniformed donor.

One mid-morning in early May, I was standing outside our bus, gobbling the caramel-centered sweets that Mr. Steeple offered me. We normally weren’t allowed to eat sweets except on special occasions, but Mr. Steeple coaxed me, “C’mon now, love. Try one. I’ll bet anything you’ll fancy it. They’re only harmful if you eat handfuls of them.” And so I tried one and it tasted lovely. I had never imagined that food could have so much sweet flavour and such soothing texture. When I had finally sucked all the life out of that sweet, even the hard shell, I murmured, “Mr. Steeple, that was wonderful. Why are sweets not allowed? I had been instructed that they were toxic, poison, nasty bits of tooth-rot, but how can something that tastes this good be bad for you?”

So Mr. Steeple explained to me that donors’ bodies were temples and that our entire purpose in life depended on our staying ‘fit as fiddles.’ But then he winked at me as though he didn’t believe a word of what he had just said. While we were bantering and enjoying the warm May breeze, a young man parked his car beside the bus. His hair was so pale it shone platinum; it looked too beautiful to be natural. He almost sprang out of car while whistling “Queen of the Slipstream.” His whistling sounded pitch-perfect to my ears. He wore a tan suede jacket, faded jeans and light brown leather boots. He was tall and thin with a girlishly smooth complexion. He looked at me, laughed and spun around in a fast, full circle, “Golly, dolly bird, you’re gorgeous!” Mr. Steeple laughed, but he straightened his spine and suddenly looked absolutely alert.

The young man looked at me, the bus, back at me and then he asked Mr. Steeple, “Is she a school-girl?”

“Not exactly although you’re not far off. I’m her bus driver. The others are inside shopping.” Mr. Steeple had moved protectively between the young man and me.

“How old are you?” the young stranger asked, looking directly into my surprised eyes.

“I’m fourteen and you?” My boldness shocked me, but in an exciting way. Finally! Something unscripted was happening in my life.

The young man’s expression changed from eager and curious to brooding. All he said was “Ah”, but he stretched it out to sound like “aaaaaaaaaaaah.” That made me giggle and the tension dissipated. Suddenly we were three chums who had known and liked one another for a long, long time.

He told us that his name was Allen Chisholm, that he was eighteen years old and that he was an assistant chef at a vegetarian restaurant in Amersham-On-The-Hill. When I heard that, I blurted out, “That’s brilliant! We’re vegetarians.”

“Yes, I know,” he responded and I realised that he understood  precisely who and what I was. “So what do they call you, sweetheart?” he asked me. I was feeling playful and sexy and rebellious and I played along. “Well, he calls me Brigitte, but my name is Sophie.”

Allen lit a cigarette and offered one to Mr. Steeple, who readily accepted. They began talking about me, which should have made me feel uncomfortable, but it didn’t.

Allen said, “She’s special, isn’t she? There’s something about her. She’s so alive! It makes you want to hide her, doesn’t it? I know that a lot of that goes on.”

Mr. Steeple looked alarmed. “Oh, I don’t know about that! I don’t fancy prison or exile. But it does make you question the system. They’re just like orphans, all of them, and they know but they don’t know.”

I realised they were discussing me as though I weren’t there, but it didn’t bother me whatsoever. I felt a new sensation. It made me short of breath. It made me weak in the knees. It was hope, and I didn’t know if I liked it or not.