To See The Light Return. Sophie Galleymore Bird
it open but she managed it quietly and there was no sound from the kitchen to show anyone had noticed anything.
Outside the air was damp but not too cold. After the stuffiness of her room and the house, its freshness was shocking. There was no moon and plenty of cloud, and no one to see her as she made her slow way down the stone steps, where she was soon screened from the house by a dense laurel hedge flanking the drive. She had no firm plan or direction in mind. It was so long since she had left the house her memories of the village of Bodingleigh were fragmented, but she had grown up knowing where the fat farm was – everyone knew – and had a rough idea of how to find the school and the schoolhouse next door. Mrs Prendaghast had always been kind to her; Primrose hoped she might take her in.
The surface of the drive was pitted, eroded by decades of heavy rain channelling itself down the hill, but the road beyond was worse and her progress slowed even more as she struggled to keep her balance on the ruts. Her slippers kept coming off and it was an effort to stoop and pull them out of clods of mud, then slip them back on her sore feet. She was sweating and breathing hard even though she was going downhill, and the dark and quiet were so unfamiliar, after all these years of being indoors, that she was terrified.
It began to rain, pattering drops giving way to a steady downpour; soon her nightdress was plastered to her and she was shivering.
For half an hour, she had no company but the trees – whispering overhead as the breeze built up – and the occasional scuttling of something small fleeing from her, making her jump. But she kept going, gritting her teeth against the pain in her joints and chafing of her thighs, her wet nightdress clinging to her shins and making it even harder for her to walk. She lost her slippers in the dark and was too miserable to go back to look for them.
She made it perhaps half a mile before she heard a car engine approaching behind her. The sides of the lane banked steeply; there was nowhere for her to hide before headlights swung around the bend and she was trapped in their glare, blind. The car slowed wheezily beside her and a window stuttered down.
‘And where do you think you’re going, Missy?’ Dorcas’s tone was light, but Primrose could hear the anger underneath, sliding like knives under silk, ready to tear her head off. ‘You get yourself in this car, Primrose, or I won’t be held responsible for what happens to you.’
Defeated, hanging her head, the girl stumbled around the bonnet to the passenger side and fell into the seat, the car’s suspension complaining loudly as it dipped.
As she executed a clumsy reverse back up the hill, to make a five-point turn at the entrance to the drive, Dorcas berated Primrose at length. The girl was too sick with shame and disappointment to do more than hang her head and cry into her lap, and so she missed the note of fear behind the anger.
‘What were you thinking? Making me waste all this fuel finding you, selfish cow … and after all I’ve done for you, keeping you all these years, useless lump … You’d best hope Mr Spight doesn’t hear about this or we’ll both be…’
Frowning, Dorcas clamped her mouth shut, remaining silent throughout the time it took to get them back to the fat farm and up the stairs to Primrose’s room, hauling the girl mercilessly behind her and ignoring her whimpers. None of the other inmates appeared to see what was going on but Primrose could sense them behind the closed doors lining the corridor and imagined them straining their ears, agog at her attempted escape. Would they think she was mad, or secretly thrill at the thought of freedom? A momentary euphoria lifted her, but then it occurred to her that if Dorcas really wanted to punish her she could tamper with the anaesthetic. Leave her conscious throughout the ‘procedure’ and during the painful recovery period. Euphoria shrivelled and tears resumed as she clambered back into bed, her bleeding and filthy feet staining the sheets. Alise snored on, oblivious to the dramas being enacted in the waking world.
*
It wasn’t in his mission briefing – he was there to record the comings and goings of cars out of Bodingleigh, and this car only came and went again before it even got to the village – so Will wasn’t sure whether to make a note of the poor fat girl and the Matron from the farm, but he decided it was better to note too much than too little. He couldn’t see to write very well, as his torch was shielded, but he noted the car, the route and time, and Dorcas, and when she mentioned the girl’s name he started, then noted that down too.
Little Primrose. She and Will been in the same class at school back before he’d gone to Cornwall, had even hung out and held hands. He never would have recognised her in the pale, shaking obese girl in the soaked nightgown, cowering before tiny, raging Dorcas.
It was nearly the end of his shift. He would take the information to the Major, see if he felt it was important and should be included in their report.
He’d heard Primrose staggering down the lane before the car came and scooped her up, seen a smudge of something pale in the darkness, but pedestrians were not of interest to the Major, even late-night ones dressed in nightgowns. Will supposed she must have been trying to escape the farm. As the car reversed laboriously up the road, he felt a pang of regret that he had not helped the girl he remembered as sweet and kind. Even if she was – albeit reluctantly – one of the enemy now. But the Major was very clear; Will wasn’t to allow himself to be seen in case someone recognised him. His parents’ views were well known and considered dangerously subversive and radical by Spight and his followers. Seeing Will once more might make people wonder why he had returned and was hanging about in the woods next to the fat farm.
*
Primrose hadn’t been due for harvesting for another two days. Clearly her escape attempt had brought it forward; when she woke after fitful sleep, old Dr Harrow was already in her room, a vague presence in the pre-dawn light.
Alise and her bed were absent, rolled out and into another room so the gurney blocking the corridor could be manoeuvred through the door and the other girl wouldn’t be freaked out by witnessing the procedure. It would be her own turn soon enough. Dr Harrow turned towards Primrose when he heard her grunt of surprise, pulling on surgical gloveswith a loud snap. His face – even through its gnarls and wrinkles – smoothed into the mask she was becoming used to seeing on the faces of the few people she met these days. The polite blankness that masked their shock. She wasn’t sure which was preferable, that or outright revulsion.
Last year, Dorcas had allowed in a field trip from the village school, organised by the Mayor. The children, most of them too young to remember Primrose, had stared at her as if they were at one of the old zoos she’d read about; not horrified but brimming over with questions and wide-eyed fascination. ‘Do you get to eat cake every day?’ and ‘I bet you never have to eat vegetables.’‘Is it true you’re so greedy you’d eat your own shit?’ This last from Hector Junior, the snot-nosed ten-year-old grandson of the Mayor; he had the same narrow gaze and high, domed forehead.
Of all of them, he would be the only one to benefit directly from the farm. All fuel that wasn’t sent direct to Spight was supposed to be kept for emergency heating and to run the old fire truck and few remaining ambulances, but it was an open secret that it was also bestowed as ‘special grants’ of generator rations, as tractor fuel for favoured farmers, and to run Spight’s private fleet. She’d seen the Mayor and his family from the farm’s windows, driving past in one of the few cars in the village still running, and wondered if she was the one supplying the fat it ran on.
Mrs Prendaghast hadn’t been with the class; that day they were in the care of Mrs Harrow, the Doctor’s wife, leader of the Door Knockers, and the only person Primrose knew who resembled the women in old magazines, with shiny, stretched skin that failed to make her appear younger. Primrose had been sorry not to see the teacher’s friendly face, sure she would, at the very least, have sent Junior out of the room for asking that rude question. Someone told her later that Mrs Prendaghast had refused to come, saying she would not be party to such disgusting practices. It was the first time it had occurred to Primrose that what was happening to her wasn’t sanctioned by all the villagers.
‘I