Piers Torday - The Last Wild

‘Factorium is a Selwyn Stone Enterprise’, it has engraved on the bottom. Whatever. No one’s ever seen Selwyn Stone for real. He probably doesn’t even exist. It’s hard to see people when they’re always behind a smoked-glass car window or disappearing into a skyscraper surrounded by crowds of photographers and bodyguards. The head of Facto, the man who invented formula. The head of the whole Island now, the man who made up all the new rules. Don’t touch this, don’t eat that, don’t live here — well, right now, I don’t care for his stupid rules. And to prove it, I sit right down on top of his stupid name, pick up my bowl and wait.

You see, I’m not going to eat it myself.

Well, maybe a bit — but it is properly foul. I’m going to give it to someone else. Someone who should be here right about … now.

And sure enough, there on the edge of the shadows by the drain, I can just see two antennae poking out, curling and tasting the air. Two orangey-red antennae belonging to an insect about the length of my thumb. An insect with a flat head, lots of bristly legs, and — silently chewing at the front — a pair of jaws.

Another varmint. A cockroach.

The antennae sniff the air, and, checking that no one else is around, he carefully scuttles out into the open, revealing the two large white stripes across his back.

I give him a smile. Not that he can smile back, he’s a cockroach. But he likes to come and nibble at spoonfuls of my formula, so I let him. And he’s OK to hang out with. He doesn’t thump your leg and say, ‘How about if I give you a dead leg instead? Will you scream then ?’ (No.) He doesn’t grab both your arms behind your back, while his mate tries to tickle you to death, saying, ‘What, you can’t even laugh either?’ (Again, no.) And he certainly never, ever jeers or points when you do try, as hard as you can, to say a word.

He just sort of listens .

I scoop a bit of formula in my spoon, and, checking no one is watching, lay it down on the ground by my feet. He scurries over and starts to lap it up.

No one knows why the cockroaches didn’t catch the red-eye. Dad used to say he wasn’t surprised they survived — apparently even if you dropped a nuclear bomb on everything, they would be the only ones left.

(That’s what happens when you have a scientist for a Dad. You don’t need school or exams when his lab is in the basement and he lets you watch him work, muttering to himself as he does. Your head is full of useless facts from the get-go.)

The red-eye wasn’t a nuclear bomb though, it was a disease. A disease worse than a nuclear bomb, if you ask me. ‘Like … animal flu,’ Dad said. A flu that turned animal bodies and brains to mush and, just before they died, made their eyes burn bright red like they were on fire inside.

Dad thought it had started in a cattle farm, but no one really knew where it had come from. And before anyone could find out, the virus had spread everywhere. Not just to the animals we eat, but to nearly every living creature — wild animals, pets, animals in zoos — right around the world it went — till the jungles were full of bodies, birds fell out of the air and fish floated in silvery slicks on top of the sea.

It killed all the animals in the world.

All, that is, apart from the useless ones. The ones we couldn’t eat, the ones that didn’t pollinate crops or eat pests. Just the pests themselves — the varmints. Like this smelly cockroach slurping at my spoon of formula. Even though they can’t get the virus, you’re still not meant to touch them. Because humans can get the virus. That’s why Facto declared the whole countryside a quarantine zone and forced everyone to move to the cities, where they can keep them safe — and why we live here under an upside-down glass boat. Just in case, Selwyn Stone says.

I don’t care. I lean over, put my hand out and let the varmint crawl into my hand.

He’s a big guy. Perhaps the biggest I’ve ever seen. Other kids here would freak out, but not me. And I look around at the damp empty patch of shade I’m sitting in, at the gang on the other side of the Yard laughing and joking over their food, and I think perhaps freak is a good choice of word by Maze.

Because he’s right. That’s what I am. I didn’t choose it, I didn’t ask for it, but that’s what I’ve become — a genuine freak, mute and only varmints for friends.

There’s a blast of cold from the air-con, and I shiver, feeling all of a sudden very alone. The most alone I’ve felt for a long time. Like I’m not even really here in the Yard any more, like I’m just sort of floating about in space, cast adrift in the sky above. It’s weird, but I kind of enjoy feeling sad sometimes. I deliberately think of all the sad things that have happened — the animals going, then Mum, and being taken away from Dad, dumped and forgotten about in here. Like it’s all been done on purpose just to make my life as rubbish as it could ever be, and there’s a kind of warm feeling rising up inside my chest, filling up behind my eyes, because I hate it, I hate everything, including myself for feeling like this, and I think I’m going to cry, when –

I hear it. A noise.

Strong, loud and clear, the strangest noise I’ve ever heard: faint and crackly, like an old-fashioned radio in a film. A noise that slowly, definitely, turns into a word.

*Help!*

That’s it — nothing else. It comes again.

*Help!*

There’s no one else here. The wardens are inside, probably dozing. Back over by the servery, Big Brenda seems to have Tony in a headlock and is trying to steal his bowl of formula, but they’re miles away. And then the voice speaks again, with more words, so faint I can only just make them out.

*Kester! Help!*

Whoever is speaking has a very deep voice — it’s not a kid’s voice at all, or even a man’s — it rasps and echoes, like a rock rattling down a metal pipe.

*Please. You must help.*

Almost not human.

Then slowly, with a knot in my stomach, I realize whose voice it is. The only possible answer, however impossible it seems. Looking straight at me, his little varmint antennae waving –

The cockroach.

No — I must be making this up. We’re not in a cartoon. The cockroach hasn’t got massive eyes, or a hat, and he isn’t singing a song. I definitely don’t think he’s going to grant me a wish. He’s just an insect sitting in my hand.

And yet I can hear him. He’s trying to speak to me.

The cockroach flicks his antennae impatiently — before we are both plunged into shadow. The shadow of a warden looming above us, a heavy hand on my collar, hauling me to my feet, as the varmint tumbles to the ground and scurries back to the drain. He pauses on the edge, looks at me one last time and then dives down inside the hole without another word.

What was I thinking? Cockroaches can’t talk. I can’t talk. Nothing has changed.

Which is when the warden says the words no kid at Spectrum Hall ever wants to hear: ‘The Doctor will see you now.’

There are some places you aren’t ever allowed into without being asked first.

The Doctor’s rooms are different to the rest of the Hall. They don’t have glass walls to look at the sea through. They’re underground, and you have to enter a special code in the lift to get there. The lift opens on to a long white corridor, like in a hospital. There are rooms off either side, and the whole place stinks of toilet cleaner.

This room is clean and bare, almost empty apart from a plastic chair in front of a desk, and a sink in the corner. On the wall behind the desk there is a picture of Selwyn Stone.