Piers Torday - The Last Wild

Dad sits down at the worktop and roots around in a jar of pens and pencils, until he finds a screwdriver. Turning the watch flat over on his knee, he unscrews the metal back. I can see the innards of the watch for the very first time, a dark green circuit board with a straggle of multicoloured wires, and a tiny black ball buried in between them.

He pulls a pair of pliers out of his jacket pocket and clips off the black ball, holding it up to us in the light from the lamp between finger and thumb.

‘A small, er, precaution.’ He sees my expression and smiles. ‘A precaution any good father with a basic understanding of micro-radio transmitters would take, perhaps.’

A memory is beginning to stir in my brain again; Dad borrowing my watch, my last present from Mum. I thought it was because it was ‘nifty’.

He leans over to the worktop again, yanking one of the computer monitors over. Then he’s tapping on the crumb-covered keyboard, entering a password, and up it pops, clear as anything despite the fuzz of dust covering the screen: the photo of Mum in the garden — the photo from my watch.

Dad stares at it for a moment too. ‘Hmm,’ he says. Then he nods, moving on.

‘Nothing for six years,’ he says, finger poised over the keyboard. ‘Until …’

Click.

The picture of Mum changes to a satellite map of the country. There’s a single bright red dot, pulsing away in Premium, right where we are. Dad twists round to face us.

‘As long as I saw that — pulsing away at Spectrum Hall. I knew you were safe. I thought maybe you might escape, but for six years you didn’t move one inch.’

I didn’t know, I couldn’t –

Dad bats away my thoughts with a flick of his hand.

‘Of course, how could you? You were just as much a prisoner as me. And then, a few days ago, the dot started to …’

He leans in and presses the keyboard, click! The map disappears, and then there is the photo of the General in the lift at Spectrum Hall, the first ever one I took. Out of focus, blurred, surprised — how did he — Click! There are the wild at the Ring of Trees. Click! The empty First Fold. Click! Sidney! Click! The animals from the Forest of the Dead.

‘I discovered that it wasn’t just sending me the location of the watch, it was copying all the data as well.’ Dad turns round from the screen. ‘I know about the animals, Kes, the ones you’ve brought here. I tried to send you messages, but the reception here is so weak, I don’t know if …’

HELP DON’T GIVE UP

Typical Dad. Four words where ten would have been more useful.

‘Do you know why, though? I’d begun to … give up, I’m afraid. Your mum’s memory, fading away — until you started to take all those photos. I didn’t know exactly what you were doing — but you showed me that there were animals still alive. Who needed a cure. A cure that I had once invented — but no longer had.’

I begin to realize –

‘At least,’ says Dad, ‘I no longer have a fully finished and working cure. But I do have something. And it’s all down to you. Because once I started seeing you move, seeing your pictures, following you on the map — I saw it wasn’t too late to …’

Dad suddenly looks tired. He looks so much older. His skin paler and more lined, his face thinner. I realize that all this time I’ve been wanting Dad to help me . And now, perhaps — but Dad doesn’t notice my expression, and he carries on.

‘In secret, I dug out what scraps of my early research I could piece together and … I’ve been working ever since. Day and night, using encryption, using every trick up my sleeve to hide it from Facto. Using your photos, studying the symptoms, making notes, working right up until the moment that … wretch came back. Last night.’

Now Polly and I are looking at him with new eyes. Maybe, just maybe …

Breaking off, Dad suddenly bends down, right down to his feet, as if he was tying up his laces –

Pulling off his shoe –

Grabbing the screwdriver, tearing at the sole of the shoe, ripping the stitching, till it hangs off like an old leaf –

And sticking his hand into the exposed belly of the shoe, he brings out a glass vial. A vial which he holds up to the light, just so we can see a ray of sun pass and bend through the clear liquid inside.

We look again at all the papers, the flickering computer screens. Suddenly they don’t seem like piles of rubbish any more.

‘So what have you got?’ says Polly, looking warily at the vial in Dad’s hands.

‘One sample. A trial drug. But it’s completely untested.’ My father examines the clear, pure liquid in the vial. ‘And to test it I need some living animals, with the latest mutation of the …’ Polly and I look at each other. ‘Which I think you might be able to help me with —’

Polly is already racing up the stairs and out of the lab, screaming to the animals she can’t talk to –

‘He’s got a cure! He’s got a cure!’

And for a moment it’s just Dad and me. In the lab. Wolf-Cub breathing softly.

We both look at him, together, and Dad holds out his hand to me.

I take it.

Firmly, like I never want to let go. Ever again.

Still looking at the cub, his bandages, the syringe sticking out –

‘It won’t be easy, Kester, you can’t rush these things.’

‘No,’ I say again. But softer this time.

And Dad turns and smiles at me, his eyes crinkling up at the corners like they used to. A bright speck in each one.

‘Your mother,’ he says. ‘She really would have been … you know … proud.’

I want to say another word — but I can’t. Even if I could speak, right this second, I wouldn’t be able to.

Instead, realizing that perhaps the time for talking, of all kinds, is over, I lead Dad out of the lab, up into the damp, smoke-filled air of the green Culdee Sack — to show him my wild.

It’s a week later. A sunny afternoon and I’m standing in Dad’s lab again, only this time it’s tidy and clean. I’m looking out at our garden, stretching all the way down to the edge of the river, which sparkles in the light. The house looks just like it always did — except for the animals.

Some of the butterflies we saved flitter around the rose bushes, while above in the apple tree an occasional flutter of leaves gives the pigeons’ hiding place away. Beneath them all, the stag lies quietly in the shade on the lawn, polecats bouncing around him, doing their best to destroy what’s left of Dad’s flower beds. He barely seems to notice, and is still weak, still tired, and still sick with the berry-eye. But he is also alive, and every day he takes a bit more of Dad’s drug.

The trial drug Polly and I helped Dad make in the lab behind me. A trial drug which, as he keeps reminding us, might not fully work. The drug which we have named Laura II. But it has stopped the fever in most of the animals, and turned the red eyes a lighter shade of pink. Polly and I help Dad keep a precise note of what effect certain doses have. The otters, for example, when they’re not turning the lawn into a mud bath, have responded better to the cure than the polecats.

Yet all of them, hour by hour, day by day, grow stronger.

None of us will forget those who died in the Culdee Sack. Polly and I buried them at the bottom of the garden, in the shadow of the high brick wall, because Polly said that was the proper thing to do. I hope that in some way it made up for never being able to do the same for Sidney.