2089. Miles M Hudson
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dark hair where it itched from the removed blindfold. He imagined his grandmother sitting with him for a cup of tea, and pictured her own deep smile. She would have congratulated him on giving people back the chance to have secrets.
After he left home, they spoke pretty much daily using armulet video communications. With his long working hours, these were usually mundane chats about their respective daily activities. Sometimes the seasonal work in Ellie’s fields meant that she was not available much during Jack’s free time. Often their daily time together was shorter than he would have liked. The sometimes difficult nature of this arrangement meant that the life stories Ellie shared with her grandson had essentially stopped when Jack moved to Cheltenham at fifteen years old.
*
It took all his strength to upend the costermonger’s barrow. The wooden cart tipped forward away from the unsuspecting grocer and thudded onto the dry-packed marketplace mud. Green and red apples, which had been so carefully piled in little tetrahedrons of four fruits, cascaded onto the floor, streaming away in all directions. Jack’s incoherent roar was the thing that most attracted the villagers’ attention though. They froze and looked over, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, as the skinny sifter created the most unusual gossip. This sort of thing never happened in Highnam Kangaroo.
Overhearing two middle-aged sisters had finally tipped Jack into action. They met weekly at the Sunday market to trade gossip from opposite ends of the settlement. With a population of nearly 4,000, it had enough people so there was plenty of gossip and few enough so that everybody just about knew everyone else. Or, even better for gossiping purposes, nobody quite knew everyone else. Each tale could begin with a lengthy relationship scene-setter: ‘You know Harry’s sister’s first husband? Well, his mother’s cousin… you wouldn’t believe it…’ Thus the stories were close enough to be interesting, yet just far enough removed to be not personally affecting.
Jack hated this aspect of society. As there was nothing private, he could not understand why people would be interested in discussing the activities of others. It was all available on their armulets, at any time. As soon as anybody saw anything, or heard anything, including their own voice, it was published publicly and could be viewed and reviewed at one’s leisure.
Frances had grabbed her sister’s arm to distract her from the bunches of grapes laid out on one stall. Whilst Frances was a large woman, Amy was much thinner. They had similar short faces, and virtually identical curly brown hair. With sagging, wrinkly skin, the women looked as though their lives had been hard lived.
‘Amy, you coming to Kangaroo this afternoon? I reckon it’s gonna be a good one – that Ali Dally has been messing on again, this time with a married woman from Wessex Road. Two adulteries in two weeks!’
‘He’s a queer one that Ali Dally. They’re all the same, mind. And last week, George and Marisa at it. And them getting ten days’ labour. Can’t wait to see what happens to Ali, second offence this year. But nah, I’m just gonna watch on the armulet today. Harry’s not been so well, so I figure best to keep him out of the afternoon sun walking there.’
‘It’s not been too hot this week, but I guess you’re right. Best not to tempt things. Who’d have expected mid-September and only twenty-six degrees?’ She looked at the small armulet screen strapped above her wrist and its temperature reading in one corner.
Nobody recognised the boy they had voted to be their sifter fourteen years previously. His hair was darker than the common brown of the others, but his pale skin was different.
With the eyes of the square then on him, a distant booming sound floated through the throng, and smoke from several miles away rose into view above the mayor’s house behind Jack Smith. ‘Vive la revolution!’ he croaked, merely to himself, before turning to flee down the alley between the mayor’s house and the wall edging Highnam Court’s gardens.
Kangaroo Hall was located within the oldest surviving building for miles around. Constructed originally in the 17th century, Highnam Court had been commandeered by the populace almost immediately after the signing of the Covenants of Jerusalem.
The most recent generation had worked hard to restore their village’s grand meeting place, including returning the sumptuous gardens to their early 21st-century glory. From a distance, it looked bright and new and, as Jack trailed his fingers along the rough red bricks of the alley wall in the village, he felt like he was touching the court building itself. Emerging from the rear alley onto Lassington Lane brought him back to reality.
Jack kept looking back, but nobody chased him. With the audiopt feeds, nobody thought there was any need to chase him. People helped the grocer to rebuild his stall, set in their knowledge that the vandal would be rounded up for Kangaroo.
However, Jack had been keeping an eye on the time and had waited until just moments after the explosion at the Doughnut knocked out all the audiopt feeds for 200 miles. At the instant of his act of violence, there would be no digital record of sights or sounds. The townsfolk would have their memories though, in case he needed an alibi. Highnam’s Kangaroo court might believe he had something to do with blowing up the infoservers, but, with no digital record, they’d only be able to prove that he was seen in the marketplace when the bombs went off.
Justice for Dummies, his grandmother had called Kangaroo. Or sometimes, when she was most hacked off with it, she had changed the epithet to No Justice for Dummies.
After less than fifty yards, Lassington Lane swept around to the right into a double-width boulevard where large carriages could easily pass on both sides of the central grassy space. Jack, though, continued straight on along the much narrower byway. This was still a fairly busy thoroughfare, especially on market day, and he had to weave past pedestrians as he jogged north on the old, broken tarmac. After 200 yards up the narrow road, Jack was wheezing heavily.
He turned left onto a footpath between fields, a path with no other walkers on it, but where the dark green hedge was lower, a little lower than Jack’s shoulders. Looking back over it, across a fallow field, there was a view to the market. That was some distance away, and the activities of the villagers were not entirely clear.
Jack half lifted his arm to get a marketplace view on his armulet, before remembering that he himself had just destroyed all network service. The electronic part of any armulet was sealed and waterproof. Jack rarely bothered to take his off. Its strapping brace was black leather, and with his sweat and exertions, it felt tight and itchy.
One of the main thrusts of Jack’s escape plan was misdirection. His current route was headed in almost exactly the opposite course to the one he intended to take. His idea was that he would be seen passing mostly westwards, and then secretly return on a large arc to end up heading off to the east of Highnam to hide out in the old bunker he had researched.
To exaggerate his furtiveness, Jack walked the path with a slight stoop and occasionally popped his head up over the hedgerow to look over to the market. His intention was that anybody watching would remember him behaving strangely, and be able to advise his pursuers exactly which way he had gone.
The end of the footpath entered into a narrow but long thicket of trees bordering the edges of the fields. This copse, Rodway Hill Covert, extended for a half-mile to the northeast and formed the beginning of Jack’s secret escape route. From this point on, he could not risk being spotted. Pushing aside the thick branches and leaves and undergrowth, whilst making as little noise as possible, he sat down beside the grey rucksack he had secreted there just before dawn, six hours previously.
Jack had exchanged bombs for provisions in his rucksack. He pulled a water bottle from the side and took a long drink from it. The dust mixed into the sweat on his blue and white checked shirt made it itchy again. His armulet read twenty-eight degrees; some armulet functions were built into it without the need for an infonetwork connection.
Jack intended to rest and wait until dark before proceeding, so he took off his shirt and hung it over the leaves of a shrub. The hideout was small, as the vegetation of the copse grew tight and compact. At this point, the ground was steep, dropping away to