Piers Torday - The Last Wild

He stared down at us through his bottle-top glasses and flicked away a loose strand of greasy hair as we gazed out of the glass walls behind us at the waves chopping and crashing at the cliffs.

But I didn’t believe that Dad wanted to forget about me.

Six years later, I still don’t.

‘There are t-t-two ways, ah, out of here. Through our front gates, as an improved and functioning member of society. Or off these bally c-c-cliffs and into the, ahm, sea. So either learn to, ah, m-m-modify your behaviour, or jolly well learn to, ah, dive!’

I haven’t learnt to do either yet.

I pull on my trackies, shove my feet into my trainers and strap on my watch. Then there’s a beep, and the light in my door goes red, orange, then green, before sliding open with a hiss. The fat warden is standing there in his crumpled purple jacket and trousers, my door keycard dangling on a strap from around his wrist.

‘Come on, Jaynes,’ he mutters, scratching his hairy chin. ‘I haven’t got all day.’

I’m not surprised, with so much sitting on your bum and sleeping to do, I think. That’s one of the advantages of not being able to speak — you never get in bother for talking back. I step out into the corridor and wait.

One by one, the other doors along from me beep and slide open. And out come the other inhabitants of Corridor 7, boys and girls my age, all in trackies and trainers like me, their hair unbrushed, their faces blank. We look at each other, and then the warden silently points to the other end of the corridor.

I feel his eyes boring into my back as we walk past him along the passage and into the open lift.

The Yard is full of noise, which gets right inside my head. Most of it from the queue for the servery, a polished counter set into the wall, lined with pots. Metal pots full of pink slop, which some women with grey hair and greyer faces are busy dishing out, all of them wearing purple tunics with a big F stamped on the front.

F for Factorium. The world’s biggest food company. More like the only food company now, since the red-eye came and killed all the animals. Every last one, apart from the varmints.

So Facto started making formula for us to eat instead. Which now makes them the only company , full stop — they run everything . First the government asked them to take care of the red-eye, and then they ended up taking care of the government. They run the country now, from hospitals to schools. Including this one. I don’t know why making food or killing animals makes you good at running schools as well, but the first thing you learn in a Facto school is: never argue with Facto.

‘What’s the flavour, miss?’ shouts Wavy J, waving his plastic bowl in the air, somehow first in the queue already. That’s why he’s called Wavy — he’s always at the front of every line, waving. I don’t even know his real name.

Behind him is Big Brenda, a fat girl with hair in bunches who has to sleep on a reinforced bed. She’s here because she ate her mum and dad out of house and home — even during the food shortage — and got so big they couldn’t look after her any more. That pale-faced kid with bags under his eyes is Tony — who got in trouble for stealing tins of food. And now he’s here, quietly nicking some headphones out of the bag belonging to Justine, who is here because she was caught being part of a gang. A gang of thieves who got around everywhere on bikes, who nicked not just tins of food, but anything they could get their hands on. Like music players and headphones. That little kid she’s talking to with spiky hair and a devil grin — that’s Maze, who has an attention deficiency. The kind of attention deficiency that makes you chase your mum around the kitchen with a knife. And then right at the back, behind them all, is me.

I know their names. I listen to their conversations. I know why they’re here.

But I don’t know why I am.

‘Chicken’n’Chips,’ announces the grey lady behind the hatch who looks like a big door on legs, with hairy arms. ‘Today’s flavour is Chicken and chips.’ Her name is Denise, which doesn’t rhyme with arms, so instead the others have made up a song about her hairy knees, which aren’t actually that hairy. It doesn’t matter what Denise or any of the women say though — Sausage’n’Mash, Ham’n’Eggs, Pie’n’Peas — everything they serve looks exactly the same: bright pink gloop that spills over the edge of the bowl and only ever tastes of one thing: prawn-cocktail crisps.

‘Formul-A’, they want us to call it, pronouncing the ‘A’ like in ‘day’, but no one does. It’s just formula . First the animals we eat went, and then the bees went, and then the crops and fruit went. Vegetables were contaminated. So there were rations, the remaining supplies of fresh food stockpiled in giant deep freezes. Then all that went too. We lived out of tins. Oily, meaty, fishy or veggie mush out of tins. The tins began to run out too. People started eating anything. Even varmints. Rats. Cockroaches.

Then, one day — I was here by now — they just started serving us formula, and that was it — no more normal food. ‘It’s gone,’ Denise had said, ‘and it ain’t coming back. That’s all you need to know.’ Instead we got given a meal replacement that ‘satisfies all your daily nutritional needs’.

If you like prawn-cocktail crisps.

‘Jaynes! Do you want feeding or a crack on that dumb skull of yours?’

Hairy Denise empties a ladle of pink slop into my bowl, and I walk back past the others, already stuffing their faces where they stand. Big Brenda smiles at me as I pass, and so I stop. She’s all right, Bren — perhaps because people laugh at her all the time for being fat, she doesn’t laugh at other people so much.

‘All right, Dumbinga?’ she says, putting away half of her formula dose in a single spoonful. Dumb and ginger. I’m a gift for a nickname, I am.

I shrug and stir the formula round in my bowl.

Then there’s a head-full of spiky hair in my face, and Maze is leering up at me.

‘Hello, Dumbinga. What’s the chat?’

I avoid his gaze and look down at the pink gloop.

‘Bit quiet, is it?’ he says.

‘Leave him alone,’ says Bren, her mouth full of Chicken’n’Chips.

But he doesn’t.

‘Nah. He’s only pretending. Aren’t you, Dumbinga?’

I shake my head, already resigned to what happens next. Maze puts his bowl down and rolls his sleeves up. ‘Look, Bren — I’ll show you. I bet you if I give Dumbinga a dead arm, he’ll scream his little head off. Won’t you, Dumbinga?’

No, I won’t.

A) Because I can’t, and –

B) I’m not in the mood for this today.

So holding my bowl close to my chest, like a shield, I press past him and the others.

I hear Maze spit with disgust on the ground behind me and laugh, and even though it’s the worst thing to do, it’s impossible not to — I turn back round. They’re all just staring at me.

‘Freak,’ says Maze. And flashes his little devil grin.

I have to remember that I gave up trying to be like the talkers a long time ago. So, shaking my head, trying to pretend like it doesn’t matter, playing the big man — I turn back and take the bowl to go and sit in My Corner.

My Corner isn’t really my corner, of course. It’s just a part of the Yard, underneath one of the metal walkways between classrooms, where there’s more metal and concrete than glass, where they pile up the empty formula kegs from the kitchen, next to a drain. A quiet and dark place, somewhere good to go if you don’t want to be bothered by spiky-haired idiots. I put the bowl of fluorescent pink down on the ground and turn one of the kegs over.