Jane Higgins - The Bridge

We were climbing by then. Not a steep hill, but from it we could look back towards the Mol. Hundreds of tiny lights were blinking into life across the patchwork of iron roofing that spread out from the bridge. No blackout here. They must’ve been confident that they’d hit the city hard. We passed other walls stuck with posters – Unlock the Mol and Free Movement for All – marked with the logo of a globe with an arrow circling it. That was the CFM logo, the Campaign for Free Movement. I remembered Stapleton drawing it on the wall-screen in class one day and saying, ‘This is all you need to know about CFM: it’s a militant coalition pushing for a unified city, north and south of the river. According to their propaganda, they want a Breken voice in the governance of such a city. That’s a lie, of course. What they intend is a unified city under Breken command.’

The Rof Remnant was also plastered everywhere – another faction. ‘Fanatics,’ Stapleton had said. ‘Committed to building “a renewed and holy paradise” on both banks of the river.’

CFM were godless heathens; Remnant were heretics. Take your pick who you’d rather be blown up by.

‘Hey!’ Jeitan snapped his fingers at us. ‘In here.’ He pointed us past two guards on a gate set in a high wire fence. Fyffe and I stopped in our tracks. Breken headquarters, in Moldam at least, was a rambling monster of a building that looked, oh so familiar: we’d come back to school. Some architect must have done a two-for-one deal: two storeys high, three wings, stone steps leading up to a huge wooden door, and a clock tower rising above that. The clock face was smashed and a lot of windows were boarded up and the brick walls were pockmarked all over; someone – or someone’s army – had shot it up and the war had run over it a few times. But it was unmistakeable. Except that instead of the green lawns and trees of school, it was surrounded by ranks of modular, box-like buildings that must have been barracks for their squads from the look of the people coming and going.

‘Hurry up!’ said Jeitan. Fyffe gripped my hand and we walked inside. Floodlights, powered down to maybe thirty per cent, lit the grounds in a dim, patchy way: enough that we could see that the place was churning with people with a purpose. They all seemed to be looking miles ahead of themselves and in a hurry to get there. We were nearly bowled on the steps by a great hulk of a guy lugging a bundle of newspapers under each arm, then by a kid with a box brimful of those red armbands. When we finally got in the door, the foyer was full of people crowding around a desk. The woman behind the desk was trying to organize some of them into task groups and give map directions to others, while answering questions and a phone.

When we got to the front of the crowd, she looked up at Jeitan and sighed. ‘Things are happening at last, so everyone wants to help. It’s chaos. Still, we mustn’t complain.’

‘Make way!’ Behind us, two boys pushed through carrying boards stacked high with flatbreads and sausages. ‘You’re late,’ she said to them. ‘Get a move on! Now, Jeitan. What do you need?’

I stared after the sausages until they disappeared around a corner, while Jeitan recounted his sad story about landing this babysitting job because Commander Vega was consciousness-raising again, so could he please access the stores to find us some clothes? The woman looked me over like I was an insect. She looked at Fyffe with a slightly more kindly eye, then fished keys from a drawer. She summoned a female equivalent of Jeitan to take Fyffe away and called, ‘Right. Who’s next?’

I opened my mouth to protest, but Fyffe went without a backward glance, head high, undaunted. Jeitan called after them, ‘Back here in ten!’ Then he marched me along a high-ceilinged corridor stacked with chairs and mattresses and folded-up trestle tables; the air was thick with the smell of cigarettes and unwashed bodies. We went past a lot of shut doors and stairways and boarded-up passageways, all eerily familiar. I tried not to look like I was curious, but I was looking all around and trying to feel if Sol could be there. He’d be terrified. I wondered if they had anyone primed to calm him down, maybe try and talk to him. Not that he’d say anything, even in Anglo. When he arrived at school he spent his whole first term sitting on the sidelines watching Lou from behind that thick fringe of fair hair and saying nothing. If you caught him looking and winked at him, he’d look away as if he hadn’t seen you. Then one day he gave this half a smile before he looked away, and by half-year he was grinning right back. They wouldn’t wait for that here, though. Would they even ask his name? Would he tell them?

We came to a storeroom where Jeitan grabbed some clothes and some boots, and then to a washroom fitted with decrepit showerheads stuck high in cracked-tile walls. I took the chunk of soap he gave me, turned on the tapful of stone-cold water, and I washed away four days of smoke and grime and dust and blood. Four days. That’s how long it had taken for everything to go up in flames. When I’d finished, my old clothes were gone.

The new clothes were just what I’d seen on all of them – not a strict uniform where everyone’s the same, but a dark shirt, trousers, jacket, and boots. They weren’t new either; they were threadbare and patched and not what you’d call warm. I could feel every bump in the ground through the soles of the boots. It didn’t take much imagination to work out that whoever had worn these before probably wasn’t walking around anymore.

But for all the drama of standing up in a dead guy’s clothes and trying to sense where Sol might be and worrying about Fyffe, what I was thinking about was food, because the world was spinning again. I crouched down just as Jeitan looked in to see why I wasn’t hurrying up like he’d ordered. ‘Now what?’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘Just hungry.’

‘Everyone’s hungry. Come on!’

‘Okay, okay.’

‘How long since you ate?’

‘Um. Yesterday morning.’

‘Not much of a scavenger, are you.’ Which was perceptive of him but, since he wasn’t fronting up with any actual food, not very helpful.

Fyffe and her minder arrived back in the foyer just after we did. They’d given her some black squad clothes that were too big for her and made her look more fragile than ever. Her hair, pulled back hard with a tie, shone gold in the dim generator light. The graze on her forehead was patched. She smiled and gave me a nod.

‘Come on!’ said Jeitan. So we followed him out of the compound and back through the crowds towards the Mol.

Tamsin was her name. The one I saw shot on Moldam Road. They brought her back over the Mol that night in a procession they called a Crossing. A slow march, her body carried on the shoulders of six others. The Mol was lined with militia and one of them led the way, carrying a light.

Down off the bridge where we were, it was like the whole of Moldam township had turned out, holding any kind of light they could find. Everywhere I looked, faces flickered, watchful, waiting. There was no hum from Cityside. You could hear the river lapping and, above it, the boots of the people on the bridge. Around us people shuffled now and then, and occasionally a kid squawked and was shushed. But mostly the crowd held still.

When the procession reached the Southside gateway it stopped. The crowd parted and a woman came forward. She was tall and dark – black skin, black tunic, and baggy trousers. She stood in front of the ones carrying the body and everyone seemed to hold their breath. Then she sang. Just her, alone, calling out to the night, calling home the dead. And, I swear, the Mol sang back, because I was standing close and I heard the ironwork ring. When she stopped there was deep silence. Then the whole mass of them sang back. It just about knocked me off my feet.