The Infinite. Patience Agbabi
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Название: The Infinite
Автор: Patience Agbabi
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Журналы
Серия: The Leap Cycle
isbn: 9781786899668
isbn:
Big Ben’s favourite car is a Lamborghini Asterion, which goes from 0 to 60 in three seconds, but his ambition is to time its acceleration down to a nanosecond. That’s a billionth of a second. His uncle’s a second-hand-car dealer. Last year he told Big Ben he’d teach him to drive when he was tall enough. He didn’t expect that Ben would grow 6 inches that year. Now Big Ben can drive better than his uncle, even though he’s exactly the same age as me and it’s illegal to drive a car until you’re 17.
Everyone thinks he’s my boyfriend but he’s not. I hang out with him because he’s clever and kind and times me when I’m running. He says I’m the best sprinter in athletics club because I’m faster than boys the same age. Once I was crying at school because Pete LMS kept repeating everything I said in a silly voice so the teacher gave him detention. Big Ben gave me one of his socks straight off his foot. It was dark grey, at least a size 10 and smelled of cheese. I hid it in my bag because people might make more fun of me but it made me feel much happier. Big Ben doesn’t care what people think. He’d never give me perfume or flowers just because I’m a girl. He says ‘Am I your boyfriend?’ 100 times a day.
Grandma’s plaiting my hair before bed. I love it when she plaits my hair, even when she cornrows it so tight that I can’t close my eyes in bed for the first night. She says it must last a long time so the tighter the better, but it pulls my skin so I look like I’ve had a facelift. It takes days for my face to feel normal!
Tonight, she’s doing single plaits I can comb out in the morning. I sit on the floor and she sits on the sofa behind me, combs my hair with the afro comb, then the fine-tooth comb to divide it into sections. She massages pomade into my scalp, which smells like tar but in a good way. Some of the other pomades used to make me sick so we only buy this one. When I start shuffling on my bottom, shifting from one side to the other because I find it hard to sit still on the prickly carpet, Grandma sucks her teeth.
‘Elle Bíbi-Imbelé! You are too antsy-pantsy. Sit, not run-o!’
Grandma likes singing my name. Tonight, she’s happy. I know she’s happy because she’s singing whilst plaiting 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