Giant, page 4
‘But that’s your most valuable possession, Papa,’ said Minnie. She’d always loved watching it when she was a young girl, sending up messages from the earth, heralding the earthquakes with long black jagged lines.
‘It was,’ said Papa, smiling tiredly at her. ‘But it was old when I brought it to the island, and that was fifteen years ago. And I can’t afford a new one.’
‘Maybe the finance department will lend you the money to buy a new one,’ suggested Minnie.
‘There’s a higher chance of screecher birds learning to sing like nightingales than that happening, Minnie Moo,’ said Papa, ruffling his hair a little. ‘Never mind. I’ll try and fix it tomorrow. I think I can afford to wait a while – we haven’t had any tremors for five months. Perhaps we’ve entered a dormant phase.’
‘Can I help you fix it?’ said Minnie.
‘Of course,’ said Papa. ‘After we’ve all recovered from Florin’s ceremony. What time does this one start again?’ he said.
‘Really, Keyton!’ sighed Mama. ‘Really?’
‘Six?’
‘Eight.’
‘Ah, yes. I thought it was eight.’ He winked at Minnie. ‘Nice time at the lagoon?’
‘Yes, Papa.’
‘Does it still have that badly made statue with the eyes?’
‘Yes,’ said Minnie.
‘Dreadful business,’ he said absent-mindedly, checking his watch. ‘Well, I have an hour to add the finishing touches to this new design. I want to show it to a few of the chaps.’
‘You can’t take work to the ceremony,’ Mama said. ‘It will make you look desperate—’
Papa shrugged. ‘I am desperate. But I want to talk to them about this one. It wouldn’t cost as much as the last one they rejected—’
One day, Minnie thought, as Mama pinched at the dress around her, Papa’s luck would finally turn. All his inventions would get made, and they would stop the earthquakes on their island for good. But until then, his most recent design would probably remain on his desk along with all the others. One day, though, he’d come up with an earthquake-prevention machine that the Giant Management Company actually approved of.
Yet that was easier said than done. Mrs Primrose and the board of executives kept spotting things wrong with Papa’s designs that Papa had not seen. One design was too complicated. One was too simple. One design was rejected because Papa had hastily sketched it in black ink, not blue.
But soon he’d get it right, Minnie was sure. The island would be safe, and the quakes would stop, and Papa would get paid that bonus he was always being promised. Then Mama and Papa would turn the ballroom, which had, over the years, become Papa’s study, back into a beautiful room with a polished floor, and they would throw big parties like they used to when Minnie was tiny, and eat nice food instead of tinned jackal meat all the time, and the ceremonies would end and—
‘Lift up your arms,’ said Mama.
Minnie lifted her arms.
In the meantime, Papa kept scratching away on his ideas in the cluttered, dark, dusty ballroom, surrounded by papers and prototypes of his machines, getting by on the tiny Invention Allowance that they gave him.
Mama flapped a hand in the direction of Papa. ‘Work if you must, but at seven thirty sharp I want to see you dressed smartly outside by the carriage house, with no ink marks on your face.’
He and Mama looked at each other then. Papa said softly: ‘Nothing too fancy for Minnie.’
‘Yes,’ said Mama. ‘Plain and simple.’
‘Yes,’ said Papa.
The air grew thick with secrets. Minnie looked from Mama to Papa, confused.
After Papa left, Mama braided Minnie’s hair tightly, without bothering to brush it. Then she seized her by the shoulders and rotated her to face the mirror.
‘Perfect,’ said Mama, sounding delighted.
Are we even looking in the same mirror? thought Minnie sadly. In the gloom, the harsh black stitches that darted in and out of the pale silk made it look like someone had stitched through her skin. Plus, her hair had been scraped back so tightly it made her skin hurt, and her dark brown eyes almost bulged with the pain of it. And, Minnie had to admit, without a few tendrils framing her features, there was no getting away from it: her nose really did look a touch on the large side.
Everything about me, she thought with a sigh, is either too small or too big. The only thing that was a proper fit was her name: Minnie. She was the smallest in her classroom, the shortest child on the street. You think I look perfect? thought Minnie. Perfect for what?
‘Do you think maybe we could take my hair down?’ she asked.
‘Absolutely not,’ said Mama, firmly. ‘Now go and have a rest, so you’re able to enjoy the ceremony. There’s dancing, you know, and you must take part in that. Hurry along. And don’t open your bedroom window. Did you hear about that poor boy, Milton? Can’t have that happening to you.’
‘But they caught the giant who did it.’
‘There’ll be ten more like him, coming down the mountain path, you mark my words. Window shut. Off you go, love.’
Minnie limped away slowly, and lay down on top of the sheets on her bed. As she drifted in and out of a fitful doze, she thought she could hear, underneath the faint scratching of Papa’s pen coming up through her floorboards, the sound of the jackals crying again.
THEY HAD PLANNED to go to the ceremony by carriage, but the wobbly wreck that Speck pulled out of the carriage house clearly wasn’t going anywhere. Mice had nibbled away at the seats. It had a bad case of wood-rot and one of its wheels was rotten and damp. Like almost everything the Wadlows owned, it was on its last legs. Their horse looked at them glumly.
‘We’ll walk,’ said Papa.
Mama glanced down at her high heels and Minnie’s cream dress. ‘Our clothes will be ruined. What will the Athelstans think of us?’
But there was nothing else to be done. The four of them set off down the potholed drive; Minnie between her parents, Speck behind, as usual.
Despite it all, Minnie was still excited about their destination. Florin Athelstan hadn’t stopped bragging about his ceremony for a whole year. She’d heard him boast about the food so much she could have recited the menu in her sleep. But it wasn’t just the feast she was excited about. It was the location. The ceremony was going to be held somewhere entirely new. She was going to go from west to east. She was going to cross the river for the first time in her entire life.
In the Old Town, the moans of pain from within the dungeon had stopped completely. A single screecher bird perched on the castle’s battlements, a lethal patience in its eyes as it stared down into the dungeon, watching whatever was happening inside. Screechers liked death throes.
The Wadlows moved out of the city gates and took the river path along the sluggish Five Bridges river, which was brown with waste from the jackal-meat factory and burbled, quite disgustingly, next to them the entire way. By the time they reached Red Bridge, all four were covered in a fine layer of grit thrown up by the carriages that went past them. As her parents checked their pockets for the invitation and tried to wipe the worst of the dust off, Minnie studied Red Bridge. It was the only surviving bridge of the original five that had given the river its name. Its blood-red masonry was crumbling. One of the statues that propped up its mid-section looked as if it was about to lose an arm. Yet as the sun set over the filthy river, Red Bridge took on a certain glamour. Covered in ribbons, adorned with flowers for the ceremony, it stretched before them like a path to another world. On either side of the bridge, large jackal-skin torches had been lit, from which flames roared and snapped at the oncoming dusk. Sounds of celebration reached them from the other side of the river; excited chatter, crystal glasses being clinked.
The fragrance of the flowers cut through the stench of the petrol-soaked torches. As they walked over, Minnie began to flicker with excitement. She’d grown up hearing about ceremonies. Now, finally, she was going to attend one.
ONCE OVER RED BRIDGE, Mama and Papa rapidly disappeared into the group of guests that had gathered on the rough dirt square. But Minnie stayed where she was, and stared.
The Rubbler district was so different from Quake Avenue and the Old Town that it was hard to believe it was part of her island. She’d never been anywhere so full of nothing.
Well, nothing but rubble. Even the air was full of it; a dusty quality that made her eyes itch. Everything here was built from it. From the small cottages to the humble shops, the tiny tavern with its swinging rusty sign saying THE BROKEN BACK, and the stony paths that snaked between all these things, all were made from rubble – broken bricks and broken stones, jagged and rough.
She’d grown up catching glimpses of the rubblers – those hunched adults and stooped children – as they cleared away broken bricks after a quake. But she’d never stopped to wonder where they took the rubble. Now she could see it had been squirrelled away over here.
She looked away, towards the horizon, then instantly wished she hadn’t. That sharp line of peaked mountains she’d seen from the other side of the Five Bridges river was now much closer. They were dark grey in the dusk and topped with bleached white trees, like teeth. For a moment she was sure the mountains were waiting to eat her alive.
The No-Go Mountains. Where the bad giants lived.
She took a tiny step closer to Speck, who seemed in no rush to leave her side either. When they were almost touching, she risked another look. The air that rolled off the mountains felt icy cold as it wound its way down the paths and puddled at Minnie’s feet like a fog. Her heart began to hammer inside her chest. Because even though she was scared of the mountains, she felt a strange pull towards them, too, and that was the most terrifying thing of all.
On the other side of those forbidding peaks, she thought with a shiver, are the dastardly child-stealing runaways of the island. The reason every child’s bedroom in Quake Quarter came with the strongest shutters. Why every family she knew had hired guards, and gave guns to those guards. Without them, the children would be stolen from their bedrooms as easily as apples were plucked from a tree.
Minnie felt the cold breath of the mountains against her face, and she shuddered again. ‘Where are their sentries?’ she wondered, almost to herself.
‘Rubblers can barely afford to eat, let alone pay for guards,’ muttered Speck. ‘That’s a privilege only Quake Quarter residents have.’
‘But …’ Minnie stammered, horrified, ‘how do they stay safe?’
‘Squash, madam?’ A waiter had appeared at her side. Minnie took a glass of juice, then turned her attention to the party: a noisy group of adults and children, and around them, the giants. The good ones. Twenty-nine of them, silently waiting in a perfect square on the fringes of the gathering. Each giant was the property of a Quake society family, and Minnie knew them all by sight and name, for she had grown up with them, just as she had grown up with the children they cared for. Between each giant burned a flaming jackal-skin torch.
Walking around the servants were two officials from the Giant Management Company. In the dusk, their black uniforms and black caps made them look like shadows. Each held a long, leather whip and a snarling dog on a leash. As the officials walked between the servants, the giants straightened his or her back, or looked at the ground, depending on what they were told to do.
One official glared at Speck; his meaning was clear.
‘See you in a bit,’ said Speck, and she walked away quietly to join the others.
‘What took you so long?’ cried a voice in the crowd.
Hester looked dazzling in a shimmering coral gown Minnie hadn’t seen before.
‘Our carriage broke,’ Minnie said. ‘We walked. You look nice.’
‘Three hours they spent on my hair,’ grumbled Hester. ‘Then they did my nails. It was so boring!’ Even so, Minnie’s classmate shone with prettiness, and next to her Minnie felt as badly stitched together as her dress.
‘Florin seems happy,’ said Minnie after an awkward pause, anxious to change the subject, and pointing at the boy who was the reason they were all there.
Through the bustling crowd came Florin Athelstan, swaggering and smirking, accepting the shoulder claps and arm punches his friends flung at him as he made his way towards the ceremonial table. This table was almost the same height as Minnie’s house, and had been used for every ceremony since ceremonies began. When it wasn’t being used, it was stored in a specially made hangar behind the jackal-meat factory. It took three giants to carry it.
Seated at the ceremonial table, as tradition dictated, was Florin’s giant. His name was Sandborn, and he was currently the most impressive giant in society, the tallest, at nineteen feet, and without a doubt the strongest. The one every family in Quake Avenue had wanted for their own, until the Athelstans had made the highest bid at his auction and won him for their son’s pairing. Sandborn the Mighty, they called him in Quake Quarter.
The closer Florin got to the table, the more his swagger left him. By the time he reached the legs of his enormous chair he wasn’t smiling at all, and his handsome brown face was tense and pale. Nevertheless, he climbed the rungs.
When he took his seat opposite Sandborn a gong was sounded. The crowd fell silent.
‘Dinner will now be served,’ somebody called, and Minnie felt a thrill run through her entire body. The ceremony was well underway.
AT THE SOUND of the gong, Hester skipped off to find her parents.
Once Mama, Papa and Minnie found each other again, they walked to their places at a table on one of the furthest edges of the square, and Minnie eyed her fellow diners before she sat down. Mr Straw, who sold them Minnie’s medicine, gave Minnie a tight nod then stared deep into her eyes, which was what he always did when they met. She looked quickly away, squirming. Also at the table were some shopkeepers Minnie recognised, and one or two adults she didn’t. The boy at the foot of the table was so small and so still she almost didn’t notice him at all: he was thin and grubby and solemn, in a yellow short-sleeved shirt with a few buttons missing. He barely glanced up at her, as he was busy staring at the food on the table instead.
Mama took her chair quickly, clearly glad of a chance to sit down after walking in heels, but Papa seemed to hesitate at the sight of the boy, who took this in with a quick, clever look; underneath his sunburned brown skin he flushed.
‘I might be a rubbler but it’s not catching,’ he said wearily. ‘You’re safe with me.’ Then he went back to staring at the bread rolls, as if to say, The bread, on the other hand, is not. Papa had the grace to look ashamed, before pulling out the chair next to the boy and indicating that Minnie should take it. Minnie sat down awkwardly, her badly made dress making it even harder than usual to move gracefully.
‘Robin Scragg,’ the boy said.
‘Minnie Wadlow,’ said Minnie, politely. Robin reached a calloused hand out, and she tried to take it, but he reached for the bread basket instead. Her cheeks flushed. He wasn’t going to shake her hand, after all.
Minnie sensed, rather than saw, that Papa had gone very watchful on her left. Not this again. The way her parents acted so protectively around boys was hugely embarrassing. If only they knew how much boys always teased or ignored her, and how little she cared for them in return.
She turned her back very deliberately on Papa and studied the rubbler next to her.
She had never seen one so close-up, let alone sat next to one. He was not like the boys in her class, who lived in the huge mansions of her avenue and had the soft skin, washed curls and pampered faces to prove it. Robin’s head was closely shaved, and even though he was sitting down Minnie could see that his back seemed stooped and stiff: the typical posture of someone who had spent his life carrying buckets of broken bricks. And his hands …
Robin saw her staring at them. Then he very carefully laid them on the table. It was an unexpected gesture, and there was something graceful about it, even though his fingers were twisted and swollen.
‘Is this your first ceremony?’ she said quietly.
Robin coughed. ‘Yeah. And hopefully the last.’
‘How come?’
He jerked his head in the direction of the ceremonial table. ‘I don’t like eating around monsters.’
‘Monsters?’ Minnie gasped. ‘You mean Sandborn? He’s the most impressive giant of all—’
‘He’s a monster. They all are.’ He hastily swallowed down some bread and reached for another roll. ‘They’re the reason I lost my—’ He’d clammed up. Minnie glanced around the table. Where are his family?
‘Smoked jackal?’ A waiter hovered between them, handing out thick red slabs of meat. Minnie had no appetite, but she took some anyway.
‘Look, I can see how, if you’ve never had your own, you might think of giants as monsters,’ she said, gently. ‘But they’re really not. My giant looks after me. Which means my parents are able to devote themselves more to serving the island. My giant’s a time-saver.’
‘Oh, they serve the island, do they, your parents? Bully for them. How do they do that?’
‘Well, if you must know, Mama helps those less fortunate than we are. She does very important charity work.’
‘Oh, she’s one of those do-gooders who comes here with hand-me-downs once in a while? Makes sure not to touch us while handing out ragged clothes and tins of jackal meat past their expiry date?’ He shook his head mockingly.
Minnie ignored this. ‘And Papa is an earthquake engineer.’
‘What’s one of those then?’
‘He designs machines to detect and prevent the quakes.’
‘They’re working well,’ came the sarcastic reply.
‘Anyway, until his designs are approved, we need the giants, Robin. They help us fix things. They’re very important, and you mustn’t call them monsters, as it’s not true and not nice.’
Robin chewed something without any obvious pleasure, then said, ‘Stone’s breath, you’ve been properly brainwashed, haven’t you?’ He began to mimic her. ‘Not true and not nice … Very important . . . These are lies you’ve been fed.’ He wiped the jackal grease off his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘The truth is, Minnie, they’re monsters. Giants invaded our island, caused the war and brought the earthquakes with them.’
