The Declaration

down to earth?

Chapter Twelve
    6 March, 2140
    I am going to leave Grange Hall.
    Peter and I are going to run away through a tunnel in Solitary.
    He has a Plan.
    It’s impossible to escape from Grange Hall. The Catchers will come after us, and Mrs Pincent will too. But we have to go. Mrs Pincent was talking about Peter and she wants to get rid of him. She said that I was stupid too. Indoctrinated.
    I hate Mrs Pincent. I thought I liked her. I thought Mrs Pincent knew best. I thought she did horrible things for our own good. But she doesn’t. She’s cruel and mean and she doesn’t think I’m Useful at all, even though she told me that I was, even though I’ve always done everything that she said I should.
    I’m scared about leaving Grange Hall, though. I don’t know anything about the Outside. On the Outside I won’t be a Prefect. I won’t be set to be a Valuable Asset either. I don’t know what I’ll be on the Outside. Just an Illegal, I suppose.
    I’d like to run away with Peter to a big field, the one he told me about, where he used to run around and shout. Or I’d like to go to the desert – no one would ever come looking for us there and we’d always be warm.
    But Peter says we have to go to London. Peter says we have to go back to my parents. They live in Bloomsbury, in a house which has three storeys. Mrs Sharpe’s house was only two storeys. I’ll have new clothes, Peter says. And the Underground will protect us and hide us so the Catchers won’t be able to find us.
    Peter says that in Bloomsbury I won’t have to scrub and clean and be Obedient; that my parents will teach me about literature and music and that I can join the Underground Movement.
    I don’t like it underground. That’s where Solitary is. It’s dark and dank and scary and you’re left on your own for hours and hours and you start imagining things – like noises that sound like screaming and weeping, and footsteps too, in the middle of the night when everyone’s asleep and no one’s walking around anywhere. And you wonder if maybe you’re not even imagining them; maybe they’re real.
    The route out is in Solitary. Peter knows about it because Grange Hall used to be a government building before and my parents got hold of the floor plans from a neighbour who is ‘sympathetic to the cause’. Peter coming to Grange Hall was part of a plan to get me out, he said. I didn’t believe him at first – why would anyone go to all that trouble for me? I can’t even remember my parents. But Peter says they remember me.
    The tunnel was built in case of terrorist attacks. It leads out to the village, past the cameras outside Grange Hall, Peter says.
    I don’t want to go to Solitary. What if I can’t get out? What if I get left there for ever?
    I won’t, though. I trust Peter. Peter’s my friend.
    We’re going to escape tomorrow night. Tonight, I mean. I suppose it’s morning now, even though it’s still night really. I should be in bed, but I can’t sleep. I’ve got to do something wrong so they put me in Solitary, and then in the middle of the night, we’re going to ‘make a run for it’. Peter says the tunnel is hidden behind a grate in the wall. He’s loosened it too, he said, so it’s all ready. He said that Mrs Pincent would kick herself when she realised she’d put him in exactly the place he wanted to be. He said it like he was enjoying himself in Solitary, but I don’t think he is really. It might have a tunnel out, but it’s still cold and dark and lonely.
    Peter’s amazing. He knows everything about everything.
    I told Peter that’s how I felt in Grange Hall – cold and lonely. He said that he sometimes felt like that too. Even though he was on the Outside. He lived with my parents until he got caught. But only for a while – since he was ten, he said. Before that he lived with some sort-of parents. Lots of different ones.
    Peter was Adopted, which means that he’s never lived with his real parents. He doesn’t know who they are. Parents quite often leave Surplus babies somewhere to die, Peter said. It’s so they don’t go to prison.
    He said his parents didn’t want him, that he was a Mistake, so they left him outside a house where someone from the Underground found him. He didn’t have anything with him except a gold ring called a signet ring on a chain that had been put around his neck, and on the inside were two letters, ‘AF’, which he thinks might be the name of his mother or father,