‘Or a Zebra eighty-four training camp,’ Kyle smirked.
Ryan cracked up laughing. ‘You’ve done your research, young Kyle. Maybe when you’re too old for CHERUB, you can come over and work for the good guys?’
James nodded. ‘Yeah, you’ve got a lot in common with each other. I mean, vegetarians and homosexuals, it’s all the same kind of thing isn’t it?’
James only opened his mouth to prove he was paying attention, but regretted it as soon as he saw everyone turn and scowl at him.
‘James, why don’t you go dig a great big hole and jump in it?’ Kyle asked.
‘I was just … Jesus, Kyle, there’s no need to get all touchy.’
Kyle tutted. ‘Here’s a tip, James: from now on, have a go at using your brain
before
you open your mouth.’
‘Cool it you two,’ Zara interrupted stiffly, as she burrowed into her handbag and pulled out a purse. ‘I’m sure our young ambassador for political correctness didn’t actually mean it. James, there’s some vending machines out in the hallway. Take my change and sort out what everyone wants to eat and drink.’
There was a queue at the machine that dispensed depressingly small cups of instant coffee, so it was nearly ten minutes before James came back and plonked a tray of drinks, crisps and Jaffa Cakes on the table. Meantime, Kyle had been out into the hallway and grabbed a couple of extra chairs.
As James sat down, Lauren opened up a packet of crisps. But as she dipped her hand in, Ryan snatched the bag out of her hand and began reading from the label.
‘Tyler’s Thick-sliced Tasty Chicken Flavour. Ingredients: potatoes, vegetable oil, chicken stock powder, monosodium glutamate, colour, salt.’
Ryan leaned across the table and stared intensely at Lauren. ‘Have you ever seen the inside of a chicken farm?’
Lauren shook her head.
‘The birds are stacked in mesh cages, eight or ten levels high, with ten or twelve birds crammed into each tiny cage. Chickens get extremely frustrated being huddled together like that, so the farmers cut their beaks off as soon as they’re born to stop them pecking each other.
‘Unfortunately, the beak isn’t dead tissue like a horse’s hoof, it contains hundreds of thousands of nerve endings and it feels about as painful as having your nose chopped off without being given any anaesthetic.
‘After six weeks crammed inside mesh cages, without ever standing on a blade of grass, or seeing a glimmer of sunlight, the birds are ready for slaughter. This whole time they’ve been crapping through the mesh down on to the birds below them. Right at the bottom, the sticky white chicken shit is so deep that some birds’ feet are torn out of their sockets as they’re pulled out of it for the ride to the slaughterhouse.
‘Once they arrive, the chickens are hooked upside down on to a conveyor belt. A rotating blade is supposed to slit the chicken’s throat. But chickens have a tendency to wriggle and the knife misses every seventh or eighth bird. Now, you might think that not getting your throat cut is a lucky break, but it’s not. Because all the dangling, bloody, chickens keep rolling along until they’re lowered down into a tank of boiling water to loosen off their feathers. And instead of having its throat cut, the poor bird gets boiled alive.’
Ryan pushed the
Tasty Chicken
crisps back across the table towards Lauren. ‘Tuck in,’ he grinned.
Lauren stared into the packet the way she might have stared if she’d found a bloody axe in her lap. ‘Well …’ she said uncertainly.
‘I’m in here because I believe that exploiting animals is wrong,’ Ryan continued forcefully. ‘I’ll probably catch a long sentence some time and end up dying in prison. I’ll never own a car or have a nice house. I’ll never have kids and I doubt there’ll be anyone at my funeral besides the priest and the undertaker. But, if I’ve made a few girls like you think about what they put in their mouths and persuade them to stop eating meat and wearing bits of dead animals on their feet, maybe it will have been worth it, eh?’
James saw that Lauren had been spooked by the lanky Irishman and it riled up his instinct to defend his little sister. ‘Cut it out, eh? She’s only eleven.’
Lauren shot a
don’t patronise me
glance at her brother, then looked up at Ryan and smiled respectfully at him. ‘It’s really cool that you fight for stuff you believe in so strongly. I know it’s kind of gross eating animals. We can’t eat meat on the mission anyway, so I’ll stop now and see how it goes.’
Ryan smiled triumphantly. ‘And maybe you’ll not be in any hurry to start again when your mission’s over?’
Lauren shrugged. ‘Maybe. There’s tons of veggie girls on campus, actually.’
Zara cleared her throat. ‘Anyhow Ryan,’ she interrupted, ‘you’ll have plenty of time to indoctrinate this lot over the coming weeks. Right now, we desperately need to discuss details: names, dates, faces, and pick-up times. You’re out of here in less than a week and there’s a lot of things to be done to get our little show on the road.’
James reached in front of Zara and grabbed Lauren’s crisps. ‘Seeing as you’re not eating them.’
Zara swatted James’ arm with the back of her hand. Unfortunately one of her rings rapped painfully against his knuckles.
‘Bloody hell,’ James howled.
Lauren giggled. ‘Serves you right.’
‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, James,’ Zara said brusquely. ‘But can’t you at least
try
showing a little sensitivity towards other people’s feelings?’
Five days later, Zara and the kids got up early and packed all their stuff into a seven-seat people carrier. A tearful Joshua had to be pacified with the promise of presents before they set off towards Bristol in the south west of England.
Ten miles shy of the city itself, the sat-nav told Zara to pull off the motorway at the next junction and take the second exit from the roundabout. After drifting past a line of superstores and a housing estate that had spawned around the motorway, the land opened out into fields, with tall hedgerows blocking in the sides of the twisting A-road.
Kyle wound down his window to feel the benefit of the country air, only to close it seconds later as the car filled with a pungent blast of manure.
‘Phew,’ Lauren gasped, as she wafted her hand in front of her face. ‘My eyes are watering. That’s worse than having to use the bog after James.’
‘I think,’ Zara said, as she ignored the sat-nav’s instruction to take a left, ‘if we take the next road in, we’ll still reach the village, but we’ll get a glimpse of the Malarek laboratory on the way.’
‘It won’t take much longer will it?’ James asked. ‘I’m busting
for a piss.’
‘Two or three minutes,’ Zara said. ‘I can pull over if you’re really desperate.’
James shook his head. ‘It’ll hold for another ten minutes.’
‘
Take the first safe opportunity and make a U-turn
,’ the sat-nav said in its politely synthesised voice.
Zara leaned across the dashboard and switched the navigation screen off. She’d visited the area while preparing for the mission and knew her way around.
‘This is the one,’ she said, as she slowed up for a tight turn. The direction sign pointed towards the village of
Corbyn Copse, ½ mile
, but as soon as they were around the bend a very uncountrylike sight came into view.
All the hedges had been replaced by tall concrete sections, topped with barbed wire and video cameras. Reflective yellow signs had been placed along the roadside by Avon police:
No Stopping or Loitering, 10MPH SLOW
and
Drivers entering Malarek Research premises lock windows and doors NOW
.
Zara obeyed the order to slow down, giving the kids a chance to view the carnage along the grass verge: tonnes of litter and sodden placards abandoned by protestors, who’d also daubed thousands of slogans on the concrete walls.
As the car rounded a slight bend and approached the entrance, the road turned into abstract art, thickly layered with streaks of red, blue and yellow paint that protestors had aimed at vehicles entering or leaving the research facility.
James recognised the location from an archived Sky News report he’d watched in Zara’s office. It had shown a battle between police, Malarek security guards and more than a hundred protestors, chanting, hurling objects at cars and trying to batter down the front gates. A few protesters did manage to force their way inside the laboratory compound and smashed more than a hundred windows before they were arrested.
But there wasn’t much action on this particular Friday lunchtime. The scene outside the corrugated metal gate was subdued. Two police officers in yellow bibs stood guard and more sat around in a Portacabin across the road.
The protest was confined to an area marked out with crowd barriers fifty metres from the entrance. It consisted of three middle-aged women and an elderly man. They sat in deck chairs, eating sandwiches and sharing a flask of coffee, while their placards rested against the wall behind them. A banner painted on bed sheets had been tied to the police’s metal barriers:
HOOT TO STOP THE SUFFERING!
These protestors were some of the people Zara and the kids would be getting to know over the coming weeks, so she waved out of her window and gave a good blast on the horn. The four protestors smiled and waved back.
Zara picked up speed once they were past the entrance and another few hundred metres brought them to a miniature roundabout, with the white cottages at the edge of Corbyn Copse facing towards them.
As they pulled up, a Land Rover that had been following close behind cut on to the opposite carriageway and squealed to an aggressive halt alongside them. The driver looked twentyish and wore dirty blue overalls, suggesting a morning spent working on one of the surrounding farms.
‘Why don’t you
piss
off back where you came from?’ he shouted.
Zara was startled by the outburst. ‘Pardon me?’
‘You heard,’ he shouted. ‘Bloody grockles, coming up here to gawp. You’ve seen it now, so turn around and sling your hook.’
James opened the electric window beside his head and gave the young driver a two-fingered salute as he sped off, ‘Up yours, you hick.’
‘What was that in aid of ?’ Lauren asked.
Zara explained as she cut over the centre of the roundabout, turning right into the village. ‘The locals don’t like protestors. I mean, living out here in the middle of nowhere and suddenly finding that you’ve got hundreds of demonstrators and the TV news turning up on your doorstep twice a week.’
The car headed up a steep hill, through a main street that consisted of a pub set in a large garden and a strip of shops. Except for a convenience store on the corner, the shops had all been converted into homes.
Beyond Main Street lay two modern housing developments where most villagers actually lived, but Zara pulled on to the driveway of a detached cottage without leaving what the locals called the Old Village.
The tiny front garden was overgrown and the exterior was shabby, but it would only have taken some pruning and a lick of paint to make it fit the picture-postcard image of an English cottage.
‘Man, what a hole,’ James said as he stepped through the front door and caught a lungful of musty air, before bolting upstairs to find the toilet.
‘Must have been built by hobbits,’ Kyle said, lowering his head to avoid ceiling rafters, as he dumped his suitcase on the carpeted floor of the pokey living-room.
‘The owner wasn’t keen on renting to a family with kids,’ Zara said. ‘We ended up buying her out, because this location is
just
perfect. You can cut through the fields at the back and be at Malarek’s front gate within five minutes and some of the protestors drink in the pub down the road. The downside is that we’ve only got three bedrooms.’
‘Bags not sharing,’ Kyle and Lauren both shouted, as James came back from the toilet with wet hands.
‘No towel,’ he explained, as he wiped them on his tracksuit bottoms.
‘Two of us have got to share,’ Kyle said.
‘Great,’ James said sourly. He realised he had no chance of getting a room to himself because he could share with his sister or he could share with another boy, but Lauren and Kyle couldn’t share with each other.
‘I don’t know what you lot are complaining about,’ Zara said. ‘I’ve got to share a bed with Ryan Quinn.’
James burst out laughing. ‘And he’s gonna be
horny
after three years in prison.’
‘
Not
funny, James,’ Zara said stiffly. ‘I’ve had a king-size bed put in that room and I’ve made it clear to Ryan that if so much as a finger crosses the middle I’ll have his nuts in a jamjar.’
They flipped a coin and for the third time in his life James ended up sharing a bedroom with Kyle. Another flip earned Kyle the top bunk. It wasn’t the end of the world, but James was used to the comfy double bed in his room on campus and hated having his feet dangling over the sides and the way the springs creaked whenever Kyle changed position. At least it was better than sharing with Lauren, who snored like a pig.
It was Saturday morning. James was still buried under the covers at ten o’clock when he got woken up by Kyle jumping off his bunk and heading down the hall to take a shower. Deciding it was time to haul himself up, James threw off his duvet and gave himself a good scratch as he pottered across to the window in his boxers. He pulled back the curtain.
‘Holy crap …’ James spluttered, as he looked down and saw half a dozen people standing on the tiny square of lawn at the front of the house. They all held polystyrene cups and a few had cameras strung around their necks.
‘Kyle, get out here,’ James yelled.
‘What?’ Kyle yelled back. ‘I’m getting in the shower.’
James leaned out into the hallway. ‘Screw that Kyle, there’s millions of journalists standing on our front lawn. What are we supposed to do?’
Wearing a hand towel around his waist and covered in beads of water, Kyle disbelievingly hopped up to the leaded window and peeked between the curtains.
‘Someone must have told them Ryan’s coming out today.’
‘Well
duh
,’ James said. ‘What are we gonna do about it?’