The Infinite. Patience Agbabi
my hair AND she doesn’t have to work hard to pull it tight when she’s tired after a day of cleaning because it only has to last till the morning. I’m happy too because it won’t feel like a facelift and I’ll be able to close my eyes in bed.
But when I get into bed and close my eyes I don’t sleep, I worry.
I worry Mrs C Eckler was so offended I ran away from her she’ll stop being nice to me in school and won’t be my favourite teacher any more.
I worry someone will find out about the illegal leap and arrest me and send me to a Young Offenders Unit, which is prison for teens, though I’m not 3-leap yet.
But most of all I worry about the bad thing that happened at school.
I open my eyes wide to make the bad thoughts go away but it doesn’t make any difference. My mind plays back today like a film on a loop. Each time I see it, it’s exactly the same as the first time. Every sight, every sound, every smell. It’s bad because, even though I now know it’s going to happen, I don’t know what it means.
Today I got a text from the future!
THE PREDICTIVE
My school is called Intercalary International because it’s a boarding school for Leaplings who have The Gift. It only has two classes with a four-year gap in between and goes up to Fourteenth Year. It looks like a country mansion and you have to go up a drive with lots of tall trees to get to it. There’s no sign outside apart from ‘Private’ because it’s top secret. Locals think an eccentric billionaire lives there. It’s the only one in the world and some of the pupils come from places like India and Brazil.
I’m a day pupil because I live close by. Very occasionally, an Annual will attend as a day pupil if they’re the right age and can’t fit into another local school, like Pete LMS. His real name is Peter Wolf and he’s a bully. He goes to athletics club, but Mr Branch never picks him for the team. He went to my primary school. In Second Year, he was addicted to the computer, wanted everyone to ‘Like My Status’ on Facebook = HIS status, not mine. I never go on Facebook because of trolls. I nicknamed him Pete LMS and the name stuck. EVERYONE calls him Pete LMS. He’s still addicted to social media. I never call him Pete LMS to his face. I wouldn’t want to get close to his face anyway.
His breath smells of raw meat.
Yesterday we had double PPF before lunch. Leaplings don’t do history, we do PPF, which stands for Past, Present and Future. We take PPF in Block T, away from the main school building and built in the shape of a capital ‘T’. The further up the school you go, the more lessons you have in Block T. We don’t mix with the Eleventh Years until after the first Leap trip. PPF’s my favourite subject. I got a Level 4, which is exceptional for a Seventh Year.
Yesterday was important in the PPF curriculum. Our teacher, Mrs C Eckler, gave us final information about the Leap 2048 trip to the Time Squad Centre. The Time Squad is like the Crime Squad, but it solves crimes committed across YEARS rather than countries, like if you kill someone in 2020 and hide the body in 1960. It only has four members of staff and is also top secret.
In Seventh Year you go to the future because it doesn’t matter if you get things wrong. You have to be more experienced before you leap to the past. You do that in Eleventh Year. If you accidentally change something in the past, you rupture the space–time continuum. It’s a VERY BIG DEAL. But some people say you can’t change the past because what happened, happened. I prefer the past: you know what’s going to happen. I’d rather go back to 1968. The future is totally unpredictable.
We were given the timetable for the Leap 2048 trip last week, but Mrs C Eckler said it might change because of the weather. In 2048 it rains so much due to global warming they’ve invented new words for it, like drazzle and catdogs. I was surprised they hadn’t improved weather forecasts by then so people could plan things. I like plans. They help make things more predictable so I feel safe. When plans change, everything becomes unpredictable.
Then, Mrs C Eckler introduced us to the Meat Ration menu.
‘Can anyone tell me why meat is rationed in the future? Yes, Elle.’
‘Meat is rationed in the future because too many people want to eat it for dinner and they ran out of land to breed enough animals to be made into meat.’
After that, lots of the meat became GM, which means genetically modified. I learnt that in science. Even now, scientists can change genes to make animals grow faster or lose their horns. In the future, people became scared it would make THEM grow faster or, worse still, GROW horns, so some stopped eating meat. But millions still wanted to eat meat that wasn’t GM. So it had to be rationed.
The Time Squad have a no meat policy to be eco-friendly. On the lunch menu, there were things like minute steaks made of beans. Mrs C Eckler asked me to read the menu out loud because I have a clear voice. I pronounced minute steaks miNUTE by mistake. Mrs C Eckler corrected me and said it was MInute, as in
Yesterday, Mrs C Eckler gave us a quiz about 2048 to see if we’d been listening in class. It had questions about eco-robots who collect rubbish. I liked it because it was multiple choice, which means they give you some silly answers, some not-so-silly, and the correct one, and you have to choose. I like reading the silly answers best because they’re like jokes. The best ones were:
Question 2: Why must we keep the Time Squad trip a secret?
Answer B said: To stop the wristwatch becoming extinct.
The correct answer was C: Because we all swore the Oath of Secrecy to protect The Gift and everything connected with it.
Question 6: Why is the population smaller than in 2020?
Answer E said: Everyone went to live on the moon!
The correct answer was A: The global one-child-per-family policy.
There was one I had to guess.
Question 7: What was significant about the year 2000?
I put A: The Time Squad was formed.
But I thought it might have been C: There was an upsurge of eco-crimes.
I couldn’t remember if the upsurge BEGAN in 2000 or just after.
After that, she showed a video about the Time Squad Centre.
First ‘2020’ came onto the screen followed by a picture of the globe with green for land and blue for water. Then ‘2048’, and there was more blue on the globe. The camera zoomed into the green really quickly, so it was like the view from a plane. Rain seemed to be dripping down the camera lens.
The camera zoomed in again on an aerial view of a glass building surrounded by lots of fields and trees green as a tropical rainforest, a play park with everything made of wood and a group of yellow dome-shaped buildings that looked like upside-down baskets. It was still raining.
Big letters on the screen said ‘FIGHT CRIME ACROSS TIME’. That’s the Time Squad motto. A voice said, ‘Welcome to Time Squad Centre, 2048,’ and the camera zoomed in on an old white woman. Her face was like earth when it hasn’t rained for months, her hair was a white electric shock and she had cat’s eyes. She looked 200 years old. A caption said ‘MILLENNIA, Centre Director’ and she said, ‘I run the Centre.’ I smiled when she used the word ‘run’, imagining her sprinting down the track in the 100 metres, doing a dip finish.
Then the camera zoomed in on the grass and trees and showed a bald man chopping wood who looked about 40. Lots of letters were flying around like insects, which made me feel dizzy until