The Line

The Line - Part Six

6

The boarding house is dead silent, deserted. Everyone else is in classes.

    I walk down the corridor, my footsteps echoing in all that oppressive, multi-layered nothing.  I let myself into my room. I close the door behind me. Then I just stand there for what feels like an eternity, looking blankly at everything and nothing. The dull grey wintry light makes everything look a bit banal, dispiriting. The two neatly made beds, the wonky-looking towers of ancient books piled up on Seph’s desk, the perfumes and cosmetics and framed photographs on the shelf by my bed. The half-open door to the bathroom.

    I’ve seen this room a million times.

     This is the last time I’ll ever see it.

    It’s as if the knowledge can’t sink in all at once.  Instead, it’s trickling through a little at a time, drip by drip by drip. Soon, I think, something inside me will give way and it will all come pouring through in a sudden flood and I’ll go into total hysteria.  

   I open my wardrobe door with numb hands, and look inside.

    South&Silver, Roman, Marlo James. Impeccable clavey fashions that’ll be wildly out of place where I’m going.

  What do people look like beyond the Line?

    I can’t even imagine it.

    When I think about the future, there’s nothing in my mind but a terrifyingly huge blank space. I literally have no idea where I’ll be this time tomorrow. Or even where I’ll be tonight. My mind recoils from it all like a fifty-storey ledge with no hand rail.

   The Barrier, known less formally as the Line. The barries, who live beyond it.

  The only barries I’ve ever seen – the only barries any of us in the Enclaves have ever seen – are the fac stars who come through for occasional concerts.  The barry elite. They’re accompanied by a full Security Services escort every second they’re on the other side of the Barrier. They travel with a full motorcade like the President himself, although in their case, it isn’t for their own protection, but to make sure they don’t make a break for it or endanger anyone here. The massive escort looks like a mark of respect and status, if you don’t analyse it too closely. Personally, I’ve never been a fac fan. It’s music for people in enclaves who don't identify as claveys. They say fac is raw and real and brilliant, but I don’t like it. There’s a venom to it, an anger and a savagery that I’ve always found unplaceably disturbing. Something that doesn’t belong here.

     My mind drifts back to a time when I saw one of the biggest fac stars, quite by chance, out shopping with my mother during the summer holidays. He’d been coming out of the Carlton store, surrounded by armed Security Services men and burly personal bodyguards. The bodyguards held the crowds at bay as some of the teenage shoppers began noticing him and rushing over and shrieking his name. Wiz, he was called. Nothing else. Just Wiz. Some if the girls at the Academy had his albums. He was tiny, pallid, looked barely out of his teens – a sneering ratlike sort of face, not at all handsome. The bodyguards on all sides dwarfed him so he looked like a little kid, but the gathering crowds were going mad. The sort of clavey girls who think they aren't clavey girls. This pallid little boy could have had any one of them for the asking right then and there, if only the Security Services men had let him out of their sight - which they very clearly weren’t going to do for a single split second. He must have had a dozen or more gold and diamond chains round his neck, and five or six massive gold watches all the way up one forearm. His fingers were crammed with gold and diamond rings. His pinstripe suit was much too big for him, like a parody of Christo’s father’s impeccable tailoring. When he raised his hand to the crowds and smiled, diamond teeth glittered in the sunlight. It’s the mother of all status symbols, they say, past the Barrier. It looks grotesque by clavey standards, but out there it says you’re the cream of the cream of the cream.