Oculum Page 15
She spies me out of one eye and says, “The Shiny Man is coming tomorrow. And Jonatan Briar, to talk to William1 and Miranda1. In fact, we got worlds of people coming to talk to us. My brother is going to be something surprised.” I never seen Grannie look so happy.
“Good people?” I ask. I think about that tall man at the gates with Grannie’s gun, and his guards who took Grannie’s goat and hen and more besides, and the shaved-head boy and his gang of thieves. Not everyone will be so happy to see us, maybe. I look over at Miranda1, William1 sitting beside her in the cart, and the two dogs trotting along beside. Good people or bad people coming to speak to them, no one is going to push those two around.
Grannie shrugs. “I don’t know, but these children here has a lot to tell them. Here, take Lisle.” Grannie unties the blue sling, I slide it over my shoulder, and Lisle settles into my arm. She’s sleeping and sucking on the soother I made her.
I fall back into the crowd and strike up a chat with a girl named Miranda32, who’s fascinated with Lisle. I discover that children don’t leave what’s called a nursery in her world until they’re four, so they seen a baby before through glass, but never up close. Once she tells the others, I got a lot of children coming close to peek at Lisle, stroke her soft cheek, and she just sleeps through all of it.
Hours we walk along the main road across the City, but it’s easy walking. All the piles of houses are cleared and away from us. I never talked to so many people in my life. I never laughed so hard, I never asked so many questions, I never struggled so hard to explain what my life’s been like up to now.
Sometime, just before dark, one of the boys about my age says, “Look!”
We all look back the way we come. Way off in the distance, a whole day’s walk behind us, we see the side of the dome start to fall in on itself. Then the whole thing collapses and a mighty cloud of dust blows up into the sky. A second later we hear the distant rumble as the great glass Oculum City Dome tumbles down.
It was going to happen; I’m just glad it didn’t crash onto our heads during our escape. The children from that place watch, and a few sigh a little, all their Mothers and homes must be gone now. But no one’s too upset. They were nothing but prisoners in a glass world, and now they know it.
And as far as I can tell, they like it out here in the rubble and the rocks.
Cranker comes up to me as we stop for the night and says, “Figure your rock and my metal piece brought down that dome, Mann?” I stretch into my sleeping roll on the grass beside the road, surrounded by one thousand sleepy Littluns, and look up at the stars.
“Seems impossible, but maybe. We started a little crack that brought down the door. Could be it grew and broke the whole thing. It’s old, like all the other buildings around. Maybe it couldn’t stand being broke? But who’d believe it? I know one thing. When I see Jonatan Briar tomorrow, I got a story for him. And William1 has his map, for the library on Briar’s island, and a few books to write for him, too.”
Cranker laughs. “How long you figure it’ll take us to grow a peach tree?” he asks a while later.
I open an eye, but I’m too tired to answer. I fall asleep, dreaming of something Miranda1 told me was called orchards, and the scent and beauty of apple blossoms and pear blossoms and cherry trees.
I can’t wait to get farming when we get to Grannie’s brother’s house.
It’ll take a long time, my whole life and then some, but I got only one wish: one day, when I’m a man, me and my friends, my family, everybody there is, will pick peaches big as barrels, sweet as honey, from trees tall as the sky.
Acknowledgements
I don’t often write an acknowledgement page, so thank you to publisher Barry Jowett at DCB for this one! And thank you to both Barry and Marc Côté, publisher of Cormorant Books, for welcoming me aboard. I’m so honoured to have my middle-grade dystopia in their talented hands.
This book began as a weird, vivid dream, in which mechanical arms tucked a human child into bed. I’m not sure whose arms they were (or whose child), but I did take inspiration for the Mothers in this story from parent-ing my own children, Sarah and Ben. Thank you to them for our bedtime ritual which always ended with a little extra tucking before the lights went out.
I’d like to acknowledge that the character of Grannie in this story is inspired by the heroic feats of grandmothers the world over, raising the next generation of children orphaned by AIDS, war, addiction or in the case of this book, the end of the world. I’ve also taken much inspiration from my lifelong friend Sarah, to whom this book is dedicated, who has fostered, adopted and supported many, many children over the years, all who needed loving arms.
Many thanks to the early readers of this book, Doris Montanera, Iris Wilde, and Rebecca Upjohn, who were so willing and so right. Another enormous thank you to friend and children’s author Monica Kulling, who not only read the book in its early stages, but who was a tireless champion of both it and me.
I must thank my steadfast editor too, Allister Thomp-son, who has worked with me through eleven books now, including this one. I can’t do what he does, nor can I imagine doing what I do without his expert help. And here’s a huge, grateful “WOW” to Emma Dolan, the illustrator of the beautiful cover of this book. The image of Mother of Miranda1 is exactly as I had imagined her, somehow. Thank you, Emma.
My influences for this dystopia come from my own childhood favourite books, like John Christopher’s White Mountains Trilogy, which was the first dystopia I ever read at age ten, and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids a few years later. Authors I revisited while writing this book were Lois Lowry, Cormac McCarthy, PD James, Margaret Atwood, Monica Hughes, Ursula K Le Guin, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury and others. Thanks all for the inspiration and the vision!
And here’s my chance to thank all those booksellers, educators, and librarians who care deeply about children’s books, who get the right book to the right child, and seed the next generation with readers and storytellers. You’re all superheroes to me, now and when I was the child seeking the right book. Thank you to parents, grandparents and caregivers who read to their children, too, and develop in them an early curiosity and a lifelong love of reading. We need readers and storytellers, now and always.
Finally a thought for readers of this book. While I hope no one ever inherits a world like Oculum, (who wants to live in a world without peaches?), I do hope that whatever may come, kindness and community will prevail as it does for Miranda and Mann in this story.
The very last thank you is for Paul, my partner of 35 years, who brings me lunch long after I forget, and who has never failed in all those years to keep the lights on!
Philippa Dowding
February 2018
Philippa Dowding has won many magazine awards and has had poetry and short fiction published in journals across Canada. Her children’s books have been nominated for numerous literary awards in Canada, in the U.S., and Europe, including the SYRCA Diamond Willow, OLA Silver Birch Express, OLA Red Maple, and Hackmatack awards. In 2017, she won the OLA Silver Birch Express Honour Book Award for Myles and the Monster Outside.