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ILLY IS BULLIED, hated, assailed; made to feel separate and shamed for her ugliness, her lowness, her meanness. It has been this way forever—from the screaming moment she took her first breath, and those who were meant to love and protect her fainted in a terror of their own. It was a long time in those first years of dark, thoughtless infanthood before she knew her essential self, and her true separation began. She is Gilly; ugly, reviled. They screamed and gasped when they saw her in the birth room; later there would be jeers in the schoolroom, and always their voices would echo through the years.
She is twelve now, a tall girl, thin, standing straight at the sink in the plain bathroom of the house where she lives. It is hers alone, as the bedroom is hers on the third floor where no one else goes. There are three generations in the house; Gilly, a ghost among them. The looking glass is tall and thin like her, mercurial, changing with the changing of the sun through the dirty window. It drips silver and breathes out fog. She looks for a long moment before twisting her face into a gruesome mask. The tongue lolls out, the eyes bulge, the nose snuffs, one corner of the wide mouth droops to the level of the chin. In the next second she has sunk her small fist into the silver-running glass. It leaves a jagged circle of shards cresting to a point in the middle, like a strange, reflective eye. Gilly positions her face in the mirror until this new eye appears reflected over her smooth forehead. She smiles, then cups her hands over her two real eyes, pretending.
Her mother leaves breakfast on the little table: perfect spheres of egg with their intact yolks, circles of toasted bread, a jar of jelly. Food for hope. Gilly’s mother, who speaks to her once a year on every birthday, is a good and kind woman. Her only fault in the whole community’s collective memory was to lie with one of them, the Smooth Ones, the sightless ones with their faces of unendurable symmetry.
Gilly eats, packs her bag, leaves for school by the little winding staircase that opens on the neglected garden path. She begins her long walk by the scorched fields where the slaves, who have neither thoughts nor memories nor prejudices, turn their faces one by one. She is twelve now, and she does not know how much longer they will let her go, how much longer they will endure her among them in the spaces reserved for the rearing of their young. Her, soon to be an adult Smooth One, a sightless one, living among them, no longer a child who might still have a chance, who might still change under the kindness of time or the swiftness of the surgical knife. Long ago there’d been hope as there is for all her kind, the bastards of two worlds. Hope that she’d be blessed with the rare sight of the old Gods in their cunning, as all the people of her world are. But her face remains unchanged; nothing has worked, and she is twelve now, three moons past her first blood and growing stronger. She looks to the stars, where a silent planet containing her progenitor is orbiting in time with this one.
She passes the playgrounds, the water machines, the high walls that keep them out and Gilly in. She passes the rows of hovertrolleys on their crackling blue wheels of fire. The other children stare. By now she has amassed the usual followers, and the gruesome song begins.
‘Gillyweed, Gillyweed, can I have a cup of tea? I wouldn’t touch it if you murdered me! Gillyweed, Gillyweed, can’t you see? I wouldn’t touch you if you murdered me!’
School at last. She never cries anymore. Her eyes burn hot and dry. The bell rings, and the children rush the door. Now the final humiliation: a sack of woven cloth, once pregnant with shining new root vegetables, now sporting two roughly cut eye holes and used to hold one Gilly head. It is somehow the worst and the best; relief, but not redemption.
Now the long walk home. A renewal of the chant by the outer school gates, but no followers today, no group of daring, jeering boys whose mothers will tell them later, in the safety of their own beds, that to touch her or even breathe the same air would be risking the same fate. As if one could be made this way instead of born. She walks home unassailed, unmolested, for today at least, a rare gift. She drops the itchy cloth—she has a hundred—and wishes for the strength to never pick it up again. She picks it up anyway, runs home, where a miracle might still be waiting.
They are waiting for her, too. They climbed up to the third floor by the outside, breaking their nails and scraping their palms, kicking off loose tiles, which Gilly steps lightly over on her way to the door, heedless. Or maybe they were let in casually, maliciously, by little cousins or big, booming uncles, or even mother (no, never mother, never think it). They are lying in wait for her. They fall on her. She only has time to see the broken china, the spilled milk. One of them kicks her in the stomach; another deals an open slap to her face.
‘Gotta get her in the face, else the dare don’t count!’
‘Nah, I ain’t risking it. I ain’t ending up like that!’
It is three of the bigger boys, fourteen or fifteen, on the cusp of graduating into skilled work. On the cusp of leaving for the capital, if they’re lucky. She has fallen to one knee but struggles to her feet again, not thinking, not realising it would be better to curl into a ball and hide her face. They push her among them, jerking her back and forth. She is deeper in the room now. One of them, Gud, not the biggest but certainly the meanest, gives her an almighty push, and she stumbles through an open door and into the bathroom where she began her day so many light-years before. There is a thud and a sharp crack. Gilly’s vision tunnels and she’s crouching, small hands flat on the unvarnished floor. There is the sound of glass falling. Moments pass, seconds counted in heartbeats. When Gilly looks up, Gud’s face is inches from her own—his perfect, perfect face. He spits on her.
The spitting is good. It lands, and Gud is proud, as his father will be too when Gud tells him. It’s his father who’s told Gud, in endless ranting rages, of the power the Smooth Ones once had. How Gud’s people drove them out, at great personal cost, back to the heavens, back to the stars, those million hideous eyes blinking refracted light onto the scorched earth, always watching, always waiting. And still the hated creatures remain in the spawn they’ve left behind, and in the blue fire, without which there’d be no hovertrolleys, no brain chips, no bottled sunlight at night. These things Gud’s people died for, these things they killed for. But still the hated spawn remain. Creatures like Gilly who are reared, given a place, and given work, which men like his father often lack. He hates them, as his father did before him, despite the deep primordial yearning that led many to cover their faces and sneak into the hills and lie under the unblinking eyes of night.
Gilly gasps when the cold, viscous blob lands squarely on her cheek. She feels his contempt slide toward her chin. Tears well in her eyes now, her two cursed eyes, so different from Gud’s round, eternally staring eye under folds of white skin. As her vision blurs and tears begin their march down her cheeks, a strange thing happens. She sees her hand rooting around on the floor by her foot. She sees that hand picking up a thick piece of mirror glass with a sharp point, the same glass she’d barely cracked in her impotent rage of the morning. She gets to her feet, blinking away the tears, aware that she’s done all the things she saw. It’s as if the gods in their mercy have granted her the true sight after all, made her one of their own at last. The hand holding the glass tucks itself into a fold of her pleated skirt. She blinks the last of her tears at the floor, then looks up. The other boys fade. They aren’t really there. Only Gud is there, and he’s in her face now, breathing sour air into her open mouth. He is all of them: her schoolmates, her family, her mother, her progenitor circling the heavens in a silent planet of his own. Gud is the whole hated race, who have declared themselves beautiful and Gilly ugly. In his cyclops eye she sees more than burning hatred. She sees the future, a new gift from the gods. She sees the murder Gud intends for her, turned on himself. She squeezes the shard, blood squirts between her fingers, and she is not surprised to see her hand rise to the level of Gud’s face. She is not surprised to see it arc forward with effortless grace. Gud is the one surprised. His one large eye is still widening when she sticks it with three inches of jagged glass. Hot jelly explodes onto her wrist and into her laughing mouth; it is so like the jelly she had for breakfast. He screams, and it is the same scream that has echoed from the womb and into her every waking moment.
The other boys have fled, but Gud is there, lying forgotten and sightless. Gilly has become the surgeon and the patient, turning her blade first on Gud and then herself. She removes her two hideous eyes and cuts a place in the once smooth plane of her forehead between twin rivers of blood. Later, when they find her, she is lying on her back in the last cool light of day, trying to see through her new eye. |
