Michelle Muckley - The Dawn - The Bombs Fall

“Stop it, Dad. Leave it!” She burst from her bed, snatched the remote panel from his hand before sinking back into the soft waves of the duvet beneath her. He stood with his hands on his hips, his breathing erratic and nerves frayed.

“I just don’t understand you, Emily. I don’t understand this need that you have.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, his hands resting on the tops of his knees. He turned slightly, but avoided eye contact as she edged herself away from him. When she was a child, a tiny bundle curled up in his lap, he used to imagine the day when she would hit puberty and become distant from him. He knew that with the growth of breasts and the surge in hormones his daughter would push him away, and that he too would find it hard to reach her as she grew into a woman. He had always dreaded that feeling of her effortlessly slipping beyond his control, but knew he would live through it a thousand times over if he could go back to that now. If he could choose to be the father she despised because he stopped her dating a wayward boyfriend, or imposed an unreasonable curfew, he would trade in a second. “You have to try to accept your life,” he said, more kindly than he had set out to be when he had first sat down.

“I can’t.”

“You’re not a child anymore, Emily. You are a grown up, just like you say you are. I know I treat you like you are still fourteen years old, but you persist in acting like it.” He turned closer but she drew her knees away from him, shifted across the satin bed sheets that Beda would be arriving to turn down shortly. She would be bringing clean towels for the bathroom, too. “I only want the best for you. I know what that is, I promise. You have to trust me.” He stood up and wandered over to her dressing table. He regarded her things as one might a box of old coins. He rifled a fingertip through her belongings. A selection of dated magazines, a hairbrush, a pot of lip balm that had lost its smell, and a few dog-eared photographs. He picked one up. “I remember this being taken,” he said as he turned and looked at her, tapping the photograph with the back of his fingers. Her silence remained like a noose around his neck. He knew that at any moment he could say the wrong thing and she could kick the stool out from underneath him. He placed the photograph back down from where he had picked it up from amongst the meagre possessions from her childhood.

“I don’t know why you keep all these old things. I have seen the girls of your age on the Community Level. They spend lots of time getting different colours on their fingertips and their eyes. You don’t do anything like that.”

“They don’t have anything else to do.”

“Why don’t you spend some time out of the house with them?” he suggested. “It could be nice. You might enjoy their company. You used to enjoy going down to the lobby and playing with the others. You used to enjoy the Community Level, and the dance classes.” The Community Level was supposed to be a place of unity, a place where people could go and always find company. Loneliness was dealt with by the third creed of the Omega Manifesto: No citizen of New Omega shall feel alone. That’s what they promised. Emily had been avoiding the Community level even before she found out, she knew something wasn’t right, even then. She didn’t want to be around the girls completing their forced Population Planning Checks, or the men carrying out Renunciation Pledges like robots. Not when everybody knew that she didn’t have to do the same.

“I used to be fourteen, Dad.” He nodded his head to show that he understood. “They spend time down there making themselves look stupid and eating too much, and then worrying about getting fat and ugly because they are bored. I am not bored.”

“Well, what else do they like to do?” he asked, not able to accept that he was beaten, or that he couldn’t drive the conversation where he wanted it to go. “Maybe there is something else you could do together.” She looked up without moving her sunken head.

“They go up to level seventy two.”

“Excellent. It is very nice up there.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“What, you’re trying to tell me you have never been?”

“Never,” she said, before he had even taken a breath. Emily couldn’t work out if he was awkwardly putting his hands in and out of his pockets because she had never been to the outside viewing deck, or because he didn’t know that she had never been. They had drifted so far apart. Or rather he had pushed her. But it was hard not to relent when he looked so bewildered. “It was easier before, Dad,” she said, relaxing her shoulders and her hard line stance. She placed the remote control panel, a small glass square that looked almost transparent, back on the edge of her bedside table. “It was easier when I didn’t know.”

Her last comment burdened him, his back curved, surrendering to the responsibility. If he could take time back, he would. He would keep her in the dark like the rest of the remaining world, tell her that they still had no choice. At least this way she would accept the world before her as the truth, and she would accept that there was a purpose to their way of life other than self serving greed. “I wish you had never found out.”

“Maybe so, but you can’t expect me just to accept it now that I have. I can’t, Dad. I just can’t.”

“But you don’t have a choice,” he said. Again they remained in silence, her staring at her feet and him staring at his hands. Lies were easier believed when they were told convincingly , she thought. She had read that somewhere. She always knew he was being truthful when he couldn’t bring himself to look her in the eye. When he couldn’t handle her judgement. “Regardless of how you feel, this whole charade of yours of going backwards and forwards to whichever tower it is,” he raised his finger again, “has to stop. If I find out who is helping you I’ll…..”

“You’ll what? Cut their oxygen rations?”

“I don’t know what you think you know about the other towers, Emily, but here in Omega Tower there are rules. We must abide by them. However you convinced one of the Coordinators to take you I’ll never know.”

“Guardians, Dad. They call them Guardians.”

“What if you are seen?”

“What if I am?” She considered the words already on her tongue, and before she could stop herself she was already saying, “Maybe I already have been.”

“What?” he screamed as he reached forward and took her chin in his hand. He gripped her so hard she bit the inside of her cheek and the metallic taste of blood streamed into her mouth. “We’ll talk about that in the morning. You won’t be going anywhere until then. Got it?” He released her from his grip, shoving her backwards and she ended up lying in a heap on her bed. She swallowed the blood in her mouth and suddenly felt hungry. It was hours since she had eaten. He snatched the control panel away from her bedside table. He was fast, and although she reached out to intercept him she missed, and instead slipped forward in time to see him holding it in his hands. “The first thing,” he said, pressing one of the glass icons. A sun. “This has to go. I can’t watch it, and I will not have you watch it either like some sort of prisoner.” Before she could say anything the room filled with sunlight, golden shards of it pouring through, refracting through the glass. It was close to sunset. She saw the greenery in the background, the oversized clouds which were made up of so many colours they hurt her eyes. “This is how your room will stay. Do not let me catch you with that old programme. I’m going to have it uninstalled.”

“Then I’ll never come home.”

“With that attitude, you’ll never go out. I’ll keep you locked here until you face up to it. Until you are begging for the opportunity that I have given you.”