Winter Underland (Part 1)

It seems to Hope, that for as long as she can remember, it has been winter.  It is a May morning and the low weak rays of the sun, slant through the bedroom window, glinting off the frost flowers and illuminating the gloomy interior.  The fronds and swirls of ice melt as Hope forms an ‘O’ with her lips and breathes onto them.  She scrapes away at the crisp white veneer with a grimy fingernail to make a spy hole and peers onto the backyard, her hot breath forming vapour clouds around her face.

She recoils at the sight of her father.  He tends a fire, which blazes away in an old metal drum, rubbing his hands together vigorously over the flames.  At his feet lies faithful Grinder, his muzzle and thick muscular neck a mass of scar tissue.  Later, the yard will be full of men, shouting over the yelps and growls.   Hope hates the dog fights and cries when the injured animals yowl and moan until someone puts them out of their misery.  Dad tells her off for being soft, the money from the illegal gambling puts food on their table, but she hates everything about it.  The men with their faces contorted in blood lust; the tearing flesh and cracking bone and the rusty acrid stench of blood and shit, which lingers in the nostrils and burns the back of her throat.

Hope runs downstairs, steals a crust from the bread bin, and ducks out of the front door.  She dreads bumping into Dad.  She can’t stand to be near him since Mum went away, taking with her the all the warmth and comfort she’d ever known.  She remembers with a shudder her parent’s argument the night Mum left and her heart torques with the pain of her loss.  They were discussing her that night, Hope knows that, but Mum was pleading with him not to split them up.  How could she just abandon her after all she’d said?

She heads for Gran Paget’s house.  Her tense muscles feel as though they might tear with the conflicting effort of walking, while bracing herself against the icy wind.  It forces her gait into an unbecoming cramped scuttle, which belies her youth and natural grace.  The people she passes on the grey, brumal streets are similarly hunched and crabbed with the relentless cold, their faces are unsmiling and their eyes barely register one another.  Hope instead turns her attention to the pavement, sweeping the gutters with her eyes for lost treasure, hoping that a waste picker hasn’t been there before her.  She catches sight of the metallic blink of a coin captured in a frozen puddle and excitement thaws her chilled breast.  Urgently, she begins to chip away at the ice with the toe of her boot.

Her progress is halted unexpectedly.  The broad uniformed chest of a patrol guard looms in front of her face and he stills the movement of her foot with the pressure of his heavy boot.  His black tunic is made from a smooth protective material which feels strange to Hope as it brushes against the skin of her cheek, accustomed as she is to coarse fabric and rough garments.  She looks up, but the guard’s face is concealed by the smoked visor attached to his helmet, so that only his mouth and chin are visible.  Hope gives an involuntary jolt as he draws a gun-like object from the holster on his hip.  Dad has told her many times to stay cool and hard-faced when questioned, but the guard’s intimidating presence and huge frame, enhanced by his sleek body armour, makes her nervous. 

“Identity?” he barks and she obediently lifts her dirty blonde fringe from her brow.  He aims the barrel of the gun at her forehead and it emits a red light as it scans her I.D. chip.

“Hope Mendicant, 54 Station Road, juvenile?” he reads from the screen on his visor.

Hope nods.

“Daughter of Robert Mendicant?”

“Yes.”

The guard pauses, as though he is about to say more, but changes his mind.  Without another word, he steps aside to let her pass, and Hope hastily seizes the opportunity to continue her journey.  It’s rare that Guards bother to patrol this section, on the outskirts of the city, which is inhabited by the dregs of society, the menials and the genetically inferior.  Yet on the way to Gran’s she sees half a dozen identically uniformed militia making spot checks and questioning the locals.

Not that any of them will speak to the authorities.  In the outer districts the underclass police themselves, through a system of covert self-surveillance, under the watchful gaze of the camera drones.  A network of spies and informers, feeding back to the Ministry, breeds mistrust between neighbours and acts as a barrier to cooperation.  As Hope knows only too well, the punishment for subversion is immediate ration chip deactivation, and very few people would risk certain starvation.  Fortunately, Robert Mendicant is well connected and can get most things on the black market, bought with the proceeds of his illegal dog fights and other nefarious activities.  Ever observant, Hope has already figured out that his most useful connection is her maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Paget. 

Hope reaches her Grandmother’s shop on Mill Street and pushes open the peeling front door.  She waits for her eyes to become accustomed to the dim light, cast by the grease lamps, dotted around the room.  The rag pile in the corner begins to stir and at first Hope thinks it must be rats, but then the frowsy mound of cloth erupts with a series of hacking coughs.

“’Morning Gran,” she says.  “Shall I make a cup of tea?”

The tea is more dust than tea leaves of late, but the room is freezing and Hope wants an excuse to stand next to the flame of the paraffin stove.

“Don’t overfill it now,” says Gran, as Hope fills the camping kettle from a jug of water.  “It’ll waste fuel.”

“I was stopped by a guard on the way here.” 

Her grandmother pretends to be too busy retrieving mugs from the kitchen next door to answer her.
Gran lives in two rooms on the ground floor and lets her upstairs to lodgers.  She runs a shop from her living room - a shabby affair, mostly selling scavenged items - and sleeps in the kitchen at night.  As there is so little food around, the kitchen is hardly used for cooking, but instead serves as a storeroom for unsorted items for the shop.  The room is piled high with rags, crockery and items of junk.

“We’ll be taking it black – my powdered milk ration ran out yesterday.”

Hope wrinkles her nose in disgust.

“What’s going on Gran?   The patrols hardly ever come this far out.”

“Perhaps they’ve got wind of something?” she answers and Hope catches a glint of something in her opaque cataract clouded eyes, like the gleam of metal in a gelid puddle: the luster of a coin trapped under ice.  The junk shop is just a front; Gran Paget trades in secrets and clearly knows more than she is telling.