Piers Torday - The Last Wild

Look at my sweating red face, I want to scream. Feel my forehead! I don’t know how much more ill I need to be.

I half expect her to run away, but instead Polly just purses her lips and shakes her head. She picks up the tiles and puts them back in the bag, drawing it tight and folding up the board before putting them both away neatly in the box. Then she lays the gun carefully on the floor, grabs a magnifying glass off the table and examines me closely, peering in my eyes and feeling my forehead and my wrist.

‘And you left these animals at the top of the valley? That’s where you came from?’

I nod. Although who knows where they could be by now. But Polly seems satisfied with this answer. She scans me all over one more time before rummaging in her pocket, pulling out a pair of tweezers, leaning forward and plucking a piece of muck off my cuff. She holds the scrap of muck up to the light with the tweezers in one hand and studies it with the magnifying glass in the other. She nods to herself, as if answering a question no one has asked, raises an eyebrow in my direction and says –

‘You don’t have the virus.’ She picks up the gun and digs it in my belly. ‘And I’ll show you why.’

The kitchen of Wind’s Edge is bigger than any I’ve ever seen and messier too. In the light squeezing through the shuttered windows I can see pans, mugs and dishes piled up in a sink full of water. Bundles of spoons dangle from wooden bars, hanging low on ropes attached to the high ceiling, along with bunches of dried leaves and blackened twigs. The walls are lined with crooked shelves, crammed with jars of powders and seeds and glass bottles holding puddles of oily liquids.

‘Sit down,’ says Polly, simultaneously pointing the gun at a chair and tossing the word game on to the table. As I collapse on to the seat, the General whizzes off down my leg.

*Right!* he barks. *It is essential that I carry out a reconnaissance for any possible enemy armies.*

*You mean the kind of ‘enemy armies’ that you can eat?* I mutter.

*Do not interfere in military matters,* he snaps back, before scuttling off over the rubbish-strewn floor.

Ignoring him, Polly leans her rifle against the wall and pulls a notebook out from underneath a tottering pile of newspapers, sending the whole lot flying — and Sidney running.

The book is old and covered with wrinkled black leather. As she flicks through the pages I peer over her shoulder. It’s full of drawings and diagrams — of plants, and petals, and leaves. Trees, from diagrams of their tangled roots to close-up sketches of their crinkly bark. Bunches of berries, nuts and weeds. More plants than I’ve ever seen, every kind, there must be — drawn this way, then that way, cut in half, and covered with scribbled notes.

Polly finds the page she wants, begins to study it — then senses me watching and whips the book away. She stamps over to the sink and fills up an old kettle, setting it to boil on a stove in the corner. Standing on a stool, she reaches up to pull at the dangling bunches of twigs, examining and sniffing each one until she has a carefully selected pile in her palm.

She crumbles them into a stone bowl, followed by a scoop of powder from a jar and a squirt of some oily green liquid. She takes a wooden spoon and bangs and pounds the different ingredients together, until a bitter smell rises into the air, making my stomach turn. The kettle begins to hiss and scream on the stove — and rinsing out a mug from the pile in the sink, Polly tips the crushed mess in, before topping it up with boiling water and plonking the cup down in front of me.

I take one look at the steaming potion and gag, pushing it away.

Polly shakes her head.

‘Headache?’ she asks.

I nod.

‘Stomach cramps?’

I nod again.

‘Feeling sick and dizzy?’

I just close my eyes, to try and stop the spinning.

With a look of triumph she brandishes the tweezers holding the piece of muck from my sleeve and drops it into my open palm. Except I can see that the piece of muck is in fact half a squashed berry. One of the berries the pigeons gave me, now blackened by mud.

I still don’t get it.

‘Briary berries,’ she says, sliding the notebook across the table. It’s open at a page covered with a drawing of berries — the ones I ate. ‘The woods you came from are full of them. I made the same mistake once too — they’re so pretty to look at, and so juicy. But you can’t eat them.’ She thinks for a moment. ‘Well, humans can’t — they’re poisonous to us. Not enough to kill you, but enough to make you very sick.’

I look at the potion and feel the bile rise in my throat, but Polly pushes it towards me. ‘This will make you feel better. Charcoal and flaxseed tea. But you have to drink it. Every last drop.’ She folds her arms. ‘You haven’t got the red-eye. Trust me.’

I see the General watching us from the floor. *How was I to know you couldn’t eat them?* he bristles.

I look down into the steaming mug, close my eyes, pinch my nose with one hand and take a gulp. It’s black and claggy, and every mouthful makes me want to retch, but somehow I get a bit down.

I shudder at the taste, but my stomach feels calmer already.

‘It was only luck that I saw that berry really,’ Polly says. ‘It could have been anything. The woods round here are full of poisonous things you mustn’t eat. But I always knew it wasn’t the red-eye.’

I don’t understand. She reaches under the table and picks up Sidney, all bony and lopsided, with red eyes burning, holding her tight to her chest, burying her face in the white fur till Sidney wriggles free on to the floor, yowling with disgust.

*For goodness sake, boy, I’m ill enough as it is — can’t you make her stop?*

But I only have ears for Polly.

‘Can’t you see. She’s been sick for two weeks, and I hold her every day, but I’m as healthy as can be.’ I look at her, not believing what I’m hearing. ‘Facto are lying to you all. Humans can’t get the virus.’

Over more sips of charcoal tea, which begins to taste much nicer and more warming than I could ever have imagined, Polly tells me her story. Sidney falls asleep, stretched out across the game board, only mewing and coughing occasionally, but the General perches silently on my shoulder, not missing a word.

‘I was very little, so I don’t remember it starting,’ she says. ‘When they ordered everyone to leave the countryside, and declared it a quarantine zone, we stayed. Mum didn’t want to leave the house she grew up in, you see — anything could have happened to it.’

Looking around at the peeling window frames and filthy kitchen, I’m not sure what else could have happened to it.

‘We ate everything in the larder, in rations, and then we rinsed out the empty tins and packets and made soup from the scraps. When the formula came, we never got any. We weren’t meant to still be here, you see. They only gave it to people in the cities.’ I never knew that. ‘Facto destroyed the vegetables and crops, saying they were contaminated, so Dad said if we were to stay, we had to learn everything there was about the plants.’ She waves the leather notebook in front of me. ‘We had lots of old books in the library. Mum and Dad are historians, you see. Of the way we used to live — right back to the first human beings ever. We studied the books together. I know about all the plants in the woods around here — what mushrooms and berries are safe to eat, and which ones aren’t. Even soup made out of nettles — we ate anything we could get our hands on.’