Word, The

By JL George

Teenager Rhydian was born with the Word — a preternatural power that compels other people to obey. Along with his best friend Jonno, almost-grown-up Rachel, and Cadi, he is studied and experimented on in a facility called the Centre. When they learn that the Centre’s purpose is to turn them into weapons of war, the teens go on the run.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Welsh Review
• Release date: Oct 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913830052

Book preview

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New Welsh Writing Awards 2019:

WINNER

Aberystwyth University Prize for a Dystopian Novella

The Word

JL George 

New Welsh Rarebyte is the book imprint of the

New Welsh Review Ltd, PO Box 170, Aberystwyth SY23 1WZ,

www.newwelshreview.com

Thanks to our partners in the New Welsh Writing Awards, Richard Powell, Curtis Brown, Literature Wales, Tŷ Newydd Writing Centre and Gladstone’s Library. New Welsh Review works with the financial support of the Books Council of Wales.

ISBN: 978-1-913830-04-5

(ISBN ebook: 978-1-913830-05-2)

First published by New Welsh Rarebyte in 2021

© JL George, 2021

The author has asserted her moral authority as author of this book.

Design and typesetting: Rebecca Ingleby Davies

Editor: Gwen Davies

This book is protected by copyright, and it is illegal to photocopy or reproduce any part of it by any means or for any purpose (except for reviewing), without the written permission of the publishers obtained in advance.

Printed by pulsioprint.co.uk in Europe

A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library

Contents

1 Rhydian Now

2

3

4 Irena Then

5

6

7

8

9

10

11 May Then

12

13

14

15 Sioned Now

16

17

18

19

20

21 Jonno Now

22

23

24

25 Rhydian Now

26

27 Irena Now

Acknowledgements

Author biography

Praise for The Word

For Dad, who showed me stars

1 Rhydian Now

‘This one,’ hisses Jonno, and I follow him through the gap in the hedge. Twigs tear at my clothing and the space isn’t quite wide enough, so I have to drop my shoulder and push, but on the other side, hidden from the road, I stand and stretch gratefully. My back aches from stooping to hide.

The house looks empty, like every other house left on this street, and the backdoor handle gives under Jonno’s hand without being forced. The inhabitants didn’t even bother to lock up when they left.

Back at The Centre, Rachel said her parents used to reminisce about a time when you didn’t need to lock your door after you left the house. Perhaps reminisce was the wrong word, she conceded, after a moment. It had been before they were born, after all. But it had been; and the important thing was to get it back. That was what all this was for. The war, the experiments, perhaps even The Word: a gift from a benevolent God to protect His island children.

Now, I follow Jonno inside, like I follow him everywhere, and secure the door behind us. Then I wedge a kitchen chair under the handle to be sure. The activity helps, keeps me from listening too anxiously to the quiet, and I roam from room to room, closing curtains, filling our water bottles, assessing the furniture for what might be most effectively stacked against the doors. Jonno stands at the kitchen table, leaning forward on flat palms, motionless. When I open my mouth to ask if he’s planning on helping me out anytime soon, he holds up a hand for silence.

‘Listen,’ he says. ‘They’re coming.’

It’s a distant, mechanical rumble. Could be any kind of heavy machinery, from this far away.

We both know better. And as it approaches, moment by moment, even my reluctant ears detect the high, thin wail of feedback from a cliff-face of speakers, the anticipatory crackle of enough amplifiers to blow open your skull.

Slowly, the sound grows closer. In the end, it grows deafening, turns our world into a silent film. I can’t hear the words Jonno’s mouth shapes when he turns to look at me, or the clomp of his boots on the kitchen floor. I spread my hands, helpless. There’s nothing I can say, anyway.

The sound cuts out; the machinery grinds to a halt.

In the ringing silence that follows, there’s still nothing I can say.

I start when Jonno’s hand finds mine and squeezes it. It would be a lie to say that Jonno’s not given to displays of feeling – but they’re shoutier, generally. More stomping and slamming of doors. I don’t quite know what he means by it, but I squeeze back.

#

There were four born into our generation with The Word. Imperturbable Rachel came first; Cadi, the baby, five years behind her; and the two boys in the middle, Jonno and I, only six months apart.

We were a bumper crop. For the most part, in previous years, there had been just one or two every couple of decades. People muttered about what it might mean, not that we knew they were muttering at the time. I didn’t even really know what The Word was until The Centre took me in.

In my memories of home, my father’s eyes were always wide with terror. He moved in unwilling, marionette jerks, compelled to whatever it was that I, in some childish tantrum, had yelled at him to do. By the time I arrived at The Centre, I didn’t even remember what it had been – an extra helping of sugary cereal, a cartoon on the TV. It had stopped mattering, the moment I saw he was afraid of me.

I didn’t speak for three months afterwards.

A black car came to the house, carrying a man with some plasticky substance stuffed into his ears. He told me, in an awkward, too-loud voice, that I was to go with him to a special school for children who had been blessed, and because I was still angry at my parents for being so afraid, I went without complaining. I wasn’t sure I could have opened my mouth to protest, anyway.

There were few voices at The Centre, and there, I felt secure in my silence. May, who looked after us, had been born deaf, and between them, she and Rachel taught me Sign Language. I picked up the essentials quickly enough, but mostly I kept to myself, drawing, or reading the books that May brought in for me, or watching the three available channels on our shared TV, while they talked with their hands and their faces.

For weeks, it was the three of us, and peaceful enough that every sound in the quiet of the place felt like an intrusion.

Jonno clattered into The Centre like a colt skidding on new legs, the unfamiliar echo of his voice off the walls setting me on edge.

He came right up to me as I sat drawing. I’d never had much talent for it, and my pictures of my mother’s face and the ginger cat who used to sleep on our porch came out squat and lopsided. Still, it helped to have them in front of me, contained within the white square of the page.

Jonno plopped down in the chair opposite mine, making me start and wrinkle the paper.

‘Hiya,’ he said. ‘I’m Jonno.’ He frowned. ‘Well, I’m Jonathan, my mum says, but everyone calls me Jonno. Who’re you?’ I frowned and looked down at the paper. Jonno sighed. ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’ I grabbed another sheet of paper and wrote it out in a sullen scrawl. Jonno squinted at it, ‘Ruh-hye – this is no good. How are you supposed to say it?’

The thought of speaking aloud made my heart race in my chest, my father’s revulsion flashing before my eyes. I dropped the orange pencil I’d been drawing with, and it clattered to the floor and rolled away. My head dropped forward into my hands and I registered that I was breathing as hard as though I’d just run the whole length of the corridor.

Jonno’s hand found my shoulder. ‘Shit,’ he said. Then he paused. ‘I’m probably not supposed to say that, am I? Mum says it’s common. I mean, we are common, but she still doesn’t like it.’ The inconsequential chatter made it easier to breathe, somehow, and I raised my head. ‘Anyway, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want. I’ll just make something up.’ He grinned and stooped to pick up the pencil. ‘How about Ginger? Marmalade? Carrot-top?’

‘Rhydian,’ I heard myself say. My own voice sounded strange after the weeks of disuse: higher-pitched than I remembered it, my accent stronger. ‘I’m Rhydian.’

Jonno grinned and helped himself to a sheet of paper. Hi Rhydian, he wrote.

That was how my mother started her letters, too. She wrote often enough – snippets of news about the cat and my father, and the cousins I’d never seen, even when I was living at home – but she never called, and eventually I forgot the sound of her voice.

Rachel was slow to admit it when I asked if her parents had been afraid of her.

‘I think they would have sent me here, however they felt,’ she said, at last, her words weighed and careful as they always were. ‘They knew it was their duty to the country. We’ve been given this power for a purpose, after all.’ She was quiet for a long moment. ‘But yes, sometimes I think they were a little afraid.’

Jonno snorted and kicked at the table leg when I asked him. ‘Yeah, not likely. They’d have to give a crap I existed to be scared. Anyway,’ here, he looked down, ‘I only ever used it to make them go to bed instead of opening another bottle. Now I’m here, Dad’s probably gonna drive himself into a ditch somewhere. And he’ll only have himself to blame.’

Cadi, new to The Centre and still so timid she almost fell off her chair with fright when I spoke to her, lowered her eyes and shook her head. ‘Not my parents. I don’t think they were scared. But Nerys. My little sister was scared of me.’ She sniffled and I froze, paralysed on the spot by the sight of a crying girl. Nobody had ever told me what to do with one.

Jonno came over and put his arm around her shoulders. ‘Don’t cry, kiddo,’ he told her. She didn’t object to the kiddo, even though he was only two years older than her. ‘She’ll get over it, you’ll see. She’ll figure out you didn’t mean to scare her. You know what you should do, though? You should write to her right now, tell her you’re sorry and you won’t ever use it to hurt her. It’ll help, if she has that to look at, any time she starts to freak out.’

The sniffles ceased, and Cadi scurried off in search of paper.

I turned to look at Jonno’s profile. He was still watching Cadi, biting his lip in thought, his big brown eyes distant.

‘Are you going to write to your parents?’ I asked him.

There was a moment before his expression turned to scorn. ‘What would I do that for?’ he asked. ‘They don’t write to me. Got all the family I need here, anyway.’ He nudged me with his shoulder and something warm curled in my stomach. ‘Who needs parents, eh?’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed, ‘who needs them?’ and thought guiltily of my mother’s last letter sitting unanswered in my nightstand drawer.

‘Let’s make a pact,’ Jonno said. ‘We’re family. We stick up for each other. And whatever happens, we never, ever use The Word on each other.’

I nodded, feeling that he understood something I’d never spoken. Anybody who didn’t have The Word could not really get it, I thought; how it felt like something alien exploding from the core of you, when you used it. Reaching down, into the part of yourself from which it emanated, was like touching an electric fence, except that the shock was inside of you, and then in the air and in your words when you spoke, and only when The Word was obeyed, were you free of it.

It made you tremble with relief in another person’s fear. It made a monster of you, if only for a moment.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘alright. Family.’

Jonno’s face turned thoughtful. ‘We should be blood brothers,’ he said. ‘D’you know what that is?’ I shook my head. ‘It’s when you cut your palms, and then you press them together, like this.’ He clasped my hand in his, making me blink in surprise. ‘So that your blood mixes together. And that makes you family, just like if you were born related.’ He frowned and looked around. ‘Maybe I can get May to lend us some scissors. Tell her we need to do a craft project, or something.’

At that moment, someone cleared her throat, and we found May standing behind us, hands on her hips. We were late for our Maths class, and Mrs Jamison would be looking for us. Jonno let loose his usual litany of grumbles about why did we need to learn Maths anyway, because it wasn’t as if we had to do our own shopping or pay our own rent, but we trooped off to class, where Jonno grinned and mimed jabbing at the palm of his hand with his compass. By that time, I’d lost my nerve, and I grimaced and shook my head, and Jonno teased me the rest of the afternoon for being a chicken.

Two days later, Maths class was cancelled. Mrs Jamison didn’t show up for two weeks, and she came back pale and subdued, her gaze sliding window-wards midsentence as Jonno and I passed notes at our desks. May told us our teacher’s husband had died. Of course, she should have been prepared for that when she let him go back into the army.

‘Is it that dangerous, being in the army?’ I wondered aloud. Back home, before The Centre, the uniformed patrols had been a simple fact of life; something to be grumbled about when they blocked a main road at rush hour, but ignored the rest of the time. It was difficult to imagine those bored-looking men running for their lives from gunfire.

May cocked her head thoughtfully, then patted my arm and told me that of course, I knew no different. The war had started before I was born.

#

Through a crack in the curtains, I see men in khaki striding up and down the street, pounding on doors. They’re all men – they’re always all men, though I remember May telling me that when she was a girl, women were allowed to join the armed forces. She mentioned it after Mrs Jamison’s husband died, telling us that her sister had wanted to be a pilot, and that she’d been selfishly glad when they changed the rules.

The soldiers get no response to their knocking. No surprise there. All the residents fled after the bombing that left the two houses at the end of the street in rubble. The one we’re hiding in now bears the signs of their hasty departure: an empty box file on the kitchen table, the all-important papers bundled up before they ran; a forgotten scarf draped over the back of a chair; a child’s picture-book, open at a picture of a smiling cartoon tiger. Not that I’ve ever seen a real tiger, but from the stripes, I assume that’s what it is.

A knock on the front door of the house we’re in. It hits me like a blow to the head.

I stand frozen until Jonno, finally galvanised into movement, tugs me into the front room. We sit on the carpet for fear of our shadows showing through the curtains, and wait for the soldiers’ footsteps to retreat. Back to the far end of the street, past the bombed-out houses, to where the machine waits.

At The Centre, we were told the bombings were the fault of the Europeans. Stepping up their attacks, in order to force us to open our borders.

Two weeks ago, squatting in the dirtiest part of the city centre, newspaper pasted over the windows and borrowed blankets keeping out little of the cold, Jonno and I pored over the cramped type of a photocopied newssheet. What you saw on television was a lie, it insisted. The government had done this themselves, to get rid of local dissidents and whip up hysteria about the Europeans in the process.

The place was filthy. Someone had been sick in a carrier bag and left it hanging off the door handle, and the lingering smell crept in, even when I hooked my jumper up over my nose. I kept thinking about opening the window to throw it outside, but every time I got to my feet, some sound in the street convinced me there was a patrol standing outside, and I scurried back to my place.

At the far end of the room, a girl with dirty blonde hair sat in a nest of sleeping-bags, eating potatoes from a tin. Jonno waved at her and held up the newssheet. ‘Is this stuff right?’

She wrinkled her nose, noncommittal. ‘Likely as not.’

I sighed and looked down at the cramped type. In this place, believing the worst seemed easy.

There’s a crash a few doors down. A door being kicked down. Jonno’s hand tenses in mine and he glances toward the stairs.

‘We should hide,’ I say. ‘See if there’s an attic.’

Jonno nods and we creep up the stairs on our hands and knees, for we haven’t thought to close the curtains on the first floor. We each hold our breath as we let down the ladder that leads up there, praying no creak or crash will give us away, and we’ve still not breathed out as we pull it up behind us.

#

No classes today, May had told us. The Centre had something different for us to do.

We trooped out to the lab in varying states of curiosity. Rachel, who had long since finished all the schooling that ordinary people had to do, and now spent her days writing to her parents and reading what she pleased in the library, stayed quiet and patient. Cadi bounced with excitement at a break in the monotony, so that even Jonno smiled at her.

‘What do you think this is about?’ I asked him, when May’s back was turned.

He shrugged. ‘Don’t get too excited. Not like they’re going to let us do anything fun.’ He stopped and grabbed my arm then, gesturing toward the window of the lab. ‘Is that Norton?’

Caleb Norton, director. He’d been there to greet each of us with a stiff handshake, but for the most part, he kept his distance from us, talking with the staff behind closed doors and soundproof windows, and eyeing us like we were exhibits in a zoo. Today, though, he stood beside a woman in a white coat and a bank of equipment that looked like nothing we’d seen before, all blinking lights and screens covered with numbers and diagrams.

Jonno blinked and leaned toward the window. ‘Is that a computer?’ he asked, face screwing up with incredulity. I found myself watching the way his eyes crinkled up, and how his freckles got lost in the creases. ‘Like they used to have in the olden days?’

I shook myself. ‘Aren’t those dangerous?’

We’d learned about them in History. Miraculous devices that let you contact anybody, anywhere, anytime, and that you could use to find out anything. But they’d been as good as useless, anyway, Mr Absalom had warned us, because anybody could say anything they liked, and there was no way to tell the truth from the nonsense. And then the government had discovered the radiation was making people sick and had to ban them. There had been plenty of objectors at first, hiding their devices and logging on in secret, but there were hardly any left now, not since the batteries and power cables started drying up. If you wanted to spread lies, Mr Absalom had said, you had to get a pen or a typewriter and do it the old-fashioned way, like everybody else.

‘Well, not too dangerous for Norton and his doctor mate, anyway,’ said Jonno, and shouldered through the doors into the lab. I hesitated on the doorstep a moment – surely Norton and May wouldn’t put us in danger? – and then joined him.

Rachel was already there, nodding as the white-coated woman signed. Norton looked at us briefly. He nodded in greeting, touched one hand to his ear to check the plug was in place, and turned back to white-coat. ‘If you’d like to explain for the others, Doctor Tremain?’

White-coat – Tremain – nodded. ‘It’s a simple experiment,’ she said, noting down something on the clipboard she held as she spoke. ‘All we’re trying to do here is broadcast The Word. See at what distance it remains effective.’

She gestured toward the large window set into the far wall, overlooking The Centre’s central courtyard. At one end stood a bank of speakers, perhaps fifteen feet high, black and monolithic and too big for the space. Still outside – at the other end – a man, in a white coat like the doctor’s, though without her clipboard or air of authority.

‘Rachel?’ said Tremain. ‘Would you start, please?’

Another white-coat handed Rachel a microphone. She took it gingerly, almost dropped it, and there was a loud crackle from the speakers in the courtyard. The man outside flinched visibly.

‘Sorry,’ murmured Rachel, righting the microphone.

‘No problem,’ Tremain told her. ‘Begin with a simple instruction, please.’

Rachel nodded and raised the microphone to her mouth, gripping it tight. She swallowed. Sit, she said.

Her voice bore the timbre of The Word – not quite a vibration, not quite an echo, not quite a buzz, but the sense that some other voice spoke alongside your own, somewhere on the other side of a veil. Her face didn’t screw up as the current flowed through her, the way that mine sometimes did, but her expression stiffened for a moment, became waxen.

The man in the courtyard sat down hard on the concrete, as if his legs had been kicked from under him. Rachel exhaled.

Tremain nodded. ‘Very good,’ she said. ‘Now let’s see if someone else can replicate the result.’ Abruptly, she turned and held the microphone out to me. ‘Tell him to stand up.’

I blinked in surprise, but took the microphone.

As I waited, I felt it rising inside me, as though it knew I was about to call on it. The pressure of it, like a balloon blown almost to bursting point and starting to turn transparent. It pressed against the insides of my ears as though I were underwater, cut off from everything, sounds and images distorted. I wondered for a moment if the doctor could tell, if she could see through me to The Word and its impatience.

She nodded at me. ‘Go on,’ she said, her voice muffled by the pressure in my head.

There was a thrill of relief in opening my mouth – the release of all that pressure, even as the cold bright current of The Word ran though me. Stand up, I said, and that other voice whispered around my skull, and the man in the courtyard climbed jerkily to his feet. The cold shock vanished.

‘You alright?’ It was Jonno’s voice at my shoulder. I realised I was breathing hard. ‘C’mon, Rhyd, let me have a go.’ Carefully, he took the microphone. My hand relinquished it with ease; all the strength had drained from me. ‘Go and sit down.’

I did as I was told. Doctor Tremain made another note and didn’t bother to watch me go.

I sat beside Rachel. Up close, I could see that she was paler than usual, her hands clenched tightly in her lap. I looked sideways at her. ‘You feeling okay?’

She nodded, automatically, then bit her lip. ‘Do you…?’ She trailed off.

I nudged her with my elbow. ‘Do I what, Rach? What’s up?’

She was quiet a moment longer. ‘Do you think it gets harder, using The Word, the older you get?’

‘Harder?’ I frowned. ‘What, d’you mean, like, it doesn’t work as well?’

‘No.’ She looked at her hands. ‘Not that. That man in the courtyard… it was like I felt him. His fear. He must be a volunteer, right?’

I nodded, not knowing what else to do. ‘Yeah, of course,’ I said. ‘I’m sure he’s fine.’

‘Fine,’ Rachel echoed. She didn’t say anything else.

#

We sit in silence for a long while. Every few minutes, we hear the thud of a door being kicked off its hinges, but I don’t get used to it. Each time, I flinch; and each time, Jonno’s hand squeezes my arm or my shoulder, as though he means to tell me everything will be fine.

It’s not conscious, of course. Jonno’s a lot of things, but he’s not a liar.

My eyes get used to the gloom of the attic in time, and I can just make out the shape of Jonno’s profile in the dark, his upturned nose and curly mop of dark hair. It’s strange to see him so still, not sneering or laughing or asking endless awkward questions of some unfortunate member of Centre staff, hands flying as he signs nineteen-to-the-dozen. Now, his eyes are fixed on some point ahead in the darkness and, even without light, I can picture the sleepless hollows beneath them.

We’ve been running for weeks, cramming into corners, sleeping in shifts. Hasn’t exactly been restful for me, either; my bed at The Centre was all