The world between us, p.1
The World Between Us, page 1
Contents
1: WesleyCycles67
2: Alice
3: daddycool-007
4: destroy_roy
5: Alice
6: Alice
7: Alice
8: tokyo--drifter
9: Alice
10: Rowan
11: Alice
12: Alice
13: Rowan
14: Alice
15: Alice
16: Rowan
17: Alice
18: Alice
19: Rowan
20: Alice
21: Alice
22: Alice
23: Rowan
24: Alice
25: Rowan
26: Alice
27: Alice
28: Rowan
29: Alice
30: Rowan
31: Alice
32: Alice
33: Alice
34: Alice
35: Alice
36: Alice
37: Rowan
38: Alice
39: Rowan
40: Alice
41: Rowan
42: Alice
43: Rowan Me
44: Alice
45: Alice
46: Rowan
47: Alice
48: Rowan
49: Alice
50: WesleyCycles67
51: Rowan
52: Alice
53: Rowan
54: Alice
55: Alice
56: Rowan
57: Alice
58: Alice
59: Alice
60: Alice
61: Alice
62: Alice
63: Alice
64: Rowan
65: Alice
66: daddycool-007
67: Alice
68: Rowan
69: Alice
70: Alice
71: Alice and Rowan
72
73: Alice
74: Alice
75: Alice
76: Alice
77: Alice
78: Alice
79: Alice
80: Alice
81: Alice and Rowan
82: Alice
83: Alice and Rowan
84: Alice
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Sarah Ann Juckes writes books for young people. Her YA debut, Outside, was nominated for the Carnegie Medal Award 2020, shortlisted for Mslexia’s Children’s Novel Award and longlisted for the Bath Novel Award.
She works with writers from all over the world via Jericho Writers and is on the board for Creative Future, a charity supporting under-represented writers. You can often find her hibernating in her writing shed in East Sussex, with her cat.
Also by Sarah Ann Juckes
Outside
For Ryan
Welcome back to Stream Cast, Alice
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Connecting to WesleyCycles67 …
1
WesleyCycles67
And now I am strapped to the chest of a middle-aged man called Wesley as he straps his feet on to the pedals of his bike.
It’s still dark, but I can just about see his hand as he sets his watch to zero and pushes off.
His little street with the Monopoly houses curves round to a main road and we don’t have to stop and wait for the traffic today – we just cycle right into it and we’re riding – faster and faster – as the street lamps putter out behind us and the world is swallowed by darkness. Flashlight cars overtake us, and I can see glimpses of scarecrows in the fields. Eyes peering from bushes.
He checks his watch and cycles faster. Today we could beat his commute record. This morning could go down in history.
The road dips and everything blurs, but still we keep pedalling. His legs are going so fast I’m not sure if he’ll be able to keep up with them, but he does. And, when the road levels, we overtake the traffic-stuck cars that passed us before, and we glance through their windows to see the drivers’ looks of surprise – a quick flash – before we’re gone again.
The sun raises an eyebrow above the horizon and the lights from the cars stretch into neon lines, criss-crossing lanes like a stampede of metal, and we’re in the thick of it, zigzagging between bumpers, beating amber traffic lights, mounting pavements and jumping down kerbs to avoid belly-lit bollards and parked cars.
And we can see the finish line now – the bell tower jutting into the clouds from the middle of the school Wesley works at. And we have sixty seconds and one set of traffic lights to go through. They’re on red, but the way is clear so we don’t slow down.
And then.
Very much from nowhere.
A car.
And we brake and we brake and we brake.
And I’m screaming, because we’re going too fast and the car wasn’t there a moment ago and now it is.
I listen as Wesley’s heart leaps out of its cage as the rest of him
stops.
Carbon fibre fractures. The camera that he had strapped to his chest. Shatters.
WesleyCycles67 is no longer streaming.
Please choose another channel.
2
Alice
Two weeks ago, I died.
But I’m trying not to think about that, as today is a burst of brand new. The sun shining from under my closed curtains is turning Manta’s fish tank into rainbows, and Mum is absent-mindedly singing one of her old show tunes downstairs while she dishes up my breakfast and sorts out my meds.
I smile at her as she comes into my room, and the singing stops. ‘Oh, sorry, sweetheart, I hope I didn’t wake you.’
‘That’s okay,’ I say. ‘You can keep singing.’
But she doesn’t. She’s all tiptoes and hushed tones now as she opens the curtains and sets the bed to snail speed. And the room’s much too quiet for the angry buzzing of the bed motor slowly lifting me up, so I slide on my headphones and disappear into violins and flutes. I lie back and listen, trying to remember what it felt like to be cycling through fields with Wesley at weekends, chasing sheep while looking out at a sea of green cut against an almost perfect line of blue sky.
And then that car comes out of nowhere and everything stops again.
By the time I’m upright, I’m already out of breath.
Mum slides off my headphones. ‘How many spoons are we starting with today?’
‘Ten, I think,’ I say, although I said that yesterday and I was spent by eight.
Sitting up in bed = 1 spoon
Spoons are units of energy. When you’re trapped in bed by a chronic Illness, like I am, there are only so many units to go around. You might have an endless cutlery drawer full of spoons, but these days mine are all in a wobbly pot.
One unit of energy = 1 spoon
We started talking in spoons after we read a blog by Christine Miserandino, who used them as a metaphor for energy loss. Somehow, they’ve found their way into our everyday, now.
When you wake up with only ten spoons, you need to make every single one count.
Mum passes me my breakfast and I try to look happy about having smoked salmon again, for the fifth day in a row.
‘I know.’ She sighs at my strained smile. ‘It’s your dad’s fault. They had an offer on it and he’s packed the fridge full of the bloody stuff. We’ll all be eating it for the next year.’
Dad sticks his head round the door. ‘It was two-for-one, though. You never see that on salmon.’
Mum rolls her eyes and mutters, ‘Thinks we have money to burn, that man.’
The salmon is nice. So are the eggs. But I can’t shake the image of that car racing towards us and swallowing seems to take up more spoons than it should.
Eating breakfast = 2 spoons
Dad sneaks in as Mum disappears, and sits on the edge of my bed.
‘How’s tricks, kiddo?’
I smile, but keep my eyes on the skirting board. ‘Oh, I’m fine.’
He’s still looking at me and I can tell that smiles and pleasantries aren’t going to cut it today. So I pull my eyes over to his and try to keep them steady. ‘How was the funeral?’
‘Oh, you know – typical funeral really. A barrel of laughs.’
I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to a funeral. But the dark circles under his eyes tell me that they might not be a laughing matter.
‘I recorded it for you.’
He picks up my plate and starts eating my leftovers like it’s nothing.
I swallow. ‘Oh?’
‘Yup. Took a camera in specially. Sat at the back – although you’d think I’d brought in a fricking clown from the dirty looks I was getting. You’re welcome, by the way.’
I pick at my nails. ‘That’s okay. Thank you, but I don’t need to watch it.’
Forgetting is a far more difficult task at a funeral.
He stops eating. ‘Alice. This is Wesley we’re talking about. I know you never met him in real life, but you were with the bloke every morning on that bike. You were with him when he died, for crying out –’
‘Yes, oka
Dad looks at me. Hard. I take a breath.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’ll watch it. Thank you.’
Dad pats my hand. ‘Let’s get you ready, then, and we’ll pop it on.’
Getting ready. Walking unsteadily to the en suite. Brushing my hair. Brushing my teeth. Having a wash. Staring at myself in the mirror for a good long time and wondering if I’d look less like my Black Moor goldfish if I bleached my hair blonde, or lost the fringe.
Getting ready = 5 spoons
I’m at eight spoons already and it isn’t even ten o’clock, so Dad helps me back from the en suite and into the black dress I wore for my sixteenth birthday last month. I climb into bed, panting like I’ve been cycling up a hill.
The footage Dad took at the funeral is set up on the laptop, ready to go.
I want to complain. Make up an excuse. Tell him that I don’t need to watch this after all, thank you. That I’m happy in my room, keeping my mind on meadows and music and goldfish.
But there aren’t enough spoons left to protest.
Dad leans over and presses play.
3
daddycool-007
And now I am at a funeral with my dad.
We’re sitting at the very back, but he’s holding me up high enough so that I can see over the heads. There are probably around a hundred people in front of us, all sitting in rows like black crows on telephone wires.
And there’s Wesley. The one inside the coffin with the shards of the camera still wedged inside his chest.
That camera had been my Christmas present last year. Dad gave it to me because I’d started to see the walls and he wanted to give me a window. At first, he would just go on adventures with it strapped to his chest, filming things for me to watch later. But then he discovered Stream Cast – a streaming site with a private channel open only to me, where I could log on any time through my laptop and watch the world Living live. And there was something magical about that.
Wesley was my first streamer. He worked with Mum at the school down the road, and she convinced him to live-stream his commute in the morning. Then Dad got my cousin Roy involved, who was born the day after me and plays a lot of computer games. And Dad met a friend at tae kwon do who takes me training, and my old babysitter, Hana, streams all the way from Tokyo, where she lives now.
But Wesley was always my favourite. When I was with him on his bike, it was like I’d banished the Illness and I was Living fast. I saw pheasants bursting out from bushes like feathered rainbows, and rabbit tails bouncing like ping-pong balls into burrows. I saw crops reaching up and flaming, until whole fields were ablaze with yellow fire. I saw puddles turn into rivers turn into wide lakes, the water as many different colours as the sky.
I did my very best Living with Wesley, so it does feel like this is my funeral somehow, too.
If this were my funeral, though, I suppose Dad wouldn’t be sitting at the back, the camera he’s holding up receiving angry stares.
A man who I think is a priest stands up at the front and starts talking. I can’t hear what he’s saying because we’re too far away, but it’s probably about how Wesley Lived his life by the clock and how time does seem to have stopped now he’s no longer Living.
If he were talking about me, it’d probably be about what I was like before the Illness came and took me, because people do seem to find that easier to remember. He’d be talking about me as if I died at ten, when I went on adventures with Dad, won that trophy for breaststroke, ate aniseed balls by the bag, listened to music at full blast and wanted nothing more than to be a marine biologist one day.
He wouldn’t be talking about me after the Illness. When I caught some silly virus going round at school and then didn’t seem to get better while everybody else did. He wouldn’t be speaking about the girl who slowly stopped being able to go to school. Then outside. Then leave her bed. He wouldn’t mention the Illness and how no one knew quite what it was, even after all those years, and all those tests, and all those Google symptom searches. If I’m honest, I wouldn’t blame him for that. Who wants to hear about a girl who’s exhausted after having a wash?
The thing most people don’t understand, though, is that I don’t have to Live inside these four walls. I don’t have to be trapped inside my body. I can be strapped to the chest of brilliant people and I can watch them Live lives that could perhaps be my own, and that’s a thing of wonder.
That is, until one of them dies.
The priest stands aside and a woman I think is Wesley’s wife gets up and I use my last spoons to lean over and slam the laptop closed.
Welcome back to Stream Cast, Alice
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4
destroy_roy
And now I am balanced on the desk of my sixteen-year-old cousin Roy as he hammers at his keyboard like he’s playing some ferocious piano.
There’s no music that I can hear, though. Instead, I watch his screen as he stalks through an apocalyptic landscape, his hands clutching a gun as he runs towards a derelict building.
I don’t recognize this game. Usually Roy streams himself playing games that involve building up whole worlds from nothing. And even though he never takes the camera outside, there’s something brilliant about watching him breathe life into building blocks.
This game is different, though. His fingers are white on the keyboard. He pulls open the door to the building and crouches under an empty window, wrapping bandages round his computerized hands.
And then I hear the popping. Far away at first and then louder and louder. And I want to warn him, but he can’t hear me and he probably doesn’t even know I’m here with him, because that’s not how Stream Cast works. It’s not a two-way conversation. I just watch and shout into silence.
He reacts too late. His fighter stands up at the window as we see the van racing towards him, killers wearing tin helmets hanging out of the windows and speeding his way.
Pop-pop-pop-pop.
And the bullets hit him and hit him and the screen splashes red and the health bar drains to nothing and Roy is shouting in a way I’ve never heard him shout before and –
You have disconnected from this stream.
5
Alice
I throw the laptop down and grip the sides of my bed and, of course, Mum sees.
She hurries forward. I try to smile as if nothing’s wrong, but my breathing’s giving me away. She pinches each of my wrists between her forefinger and thumb.
‘Nice steady breaths,’ she says.
I close my eyes. Take myself away to another place for a moment, where I’m suspended in a whole ocean of multicoloured life.
I am safe. I am happy. I am alive.
I think it until I start feeling that it’s true. The bad thoughts tie themselves into nice little bows and I fold them neatly in a drawer at the very back of my mind.
I open my eyes and smile at Mum as she searches my face for any wisps the thoughts left behind.
‘Perhaps you should give Stream Cast a rest. Just for a while.’
I grab her hands. ‘No! I’m fine, honestly. I was just being silly.’
Mum sighs. ‘You can talk to me, you know. About Wesley. About anything.’
‘I know.’ I smile and try to shake Wesley’s name away before it sticks. ‘And I was going to talk to you, actually. About maybe getting me a new streamer. Someone who doesn’t play shooting games, or fights, or walks round a busy city. Someone who just does normal, everyday things that I might do.’
Mum slides her hands away and picks up the blanket that slipped off the bed when I was trying to get away from the bullets. ‘I’ll think about it. But, Alice – think about what I said, too. I’m here if you want to talk.’
