Bellis Perenis

The person sitting opposite Kaja has been watching her since they boarded the train at St Pancras. She flicks a glance in their direction, noting layers of dusky-blue fabric covering twig-like limbs. Chronic like her – like more than half of mid-21st-century humans – but undoubtedly with something more debilitating.

The train speeds past fenced-in fields and shady woodland. Kaja clasps and unclasps her hands in her lap at the sight of pigs grubbing beneath oak trees, goats grazing languidly, and chickens pecking at the ground and each other.

In the train window’s condensation, she draws a squiggle with one forefinger. The shape reminds her of a snake. She fattens the upper tip with her thumb and adds a forked tongue, creating a partial version of the World Health Organization symbol.

WHO is healthcare for, anyway? she asks herself, and wrinkles her nose as she imagines the media storm it would unleash to add that to her speech.

Every Healthy Hamlet has its own farm, keeping food-miles to a minimum and requiring residents to do their share of planting, reaping and caring for livestock. Community psychologists have reported boosts in mental as well as physical wellbeing.

Kaja plans to mention all of that at the celebration.

The person is openly staring now. One hand creeps across the train table towards her. She looks at the slim fingers, their shape elegant despite the roughened skin.

“Here.” She sets her tin of water on the table between them.

They shake their head, extend a grimy finger and follow Kaja’s example by writing in the window’s condensation: Do you feel safe?

Her throat tightens, prompting a cough she delivers into the crook of her elbow. “Rageth?”

It’s him, definitely him. The Cornish school friend she used to play tag and soccer with, and Do you feel safe? The latter was devised by their Personal Safety teacher, intended to teach teens to support one another. Except they’d warped it – made it all about fear and ghost-tales, and Never ever would you survive this climatic calamity…

“Kaja.” His voice grates as though speaking is painful. He nods at her ivory bamboo-silk blend suit and expensively tamed hair. “Looking good.”

“You too,” she responds automatically, and winces as he laughs.

“Liar!”

“Haven’t been back home in, wow, more than a decade. Have you?” She dredges up memories of gritty sand and the boulders that cast cold shadows where they, Jerem, Ilandra and the others, played their games.

He nods. “Beach Road is underwater, but yeah, my sister and her sprogs live further in.” He smiles, lips parting over yellowed teeth. “Never ever would you survive rising sea levels…”

She grins. “Never ever would you survive a world without trees.”

“And now you’ve fixed it.” His eyes glint. The next words arrive with brittle force on a breath that carries the reek of decay. “For some.”

She opens her mouth, but her retort dies in her throat.

I create solutions – it’s up to the government how they’re distributed.

At least I’m doing something!

And how can you afford a train ticket if you can’t pay the minimum tax to be rehomed to a Healthy Hamlet?

He sneers as if he can read the excuses and questions on her face. Then he heaves himself upright, bows in farewell, staggers down the aisle and disappears through sliding doors into the next carriage.

Kaja inhales deeply. She pushes down the swirling sensation in her stomach and tries to concentrate on her speech.

Today’s celebration marks the twentieth anniversary of the first successful Healthy Hamlet. Kaja’s enjoyed the congratulations and accolades – an award from the King, no less, and now a statue acknowledging her grand achievement for the good of all humankind.

Except, of course, it’s not all humankind. Only those with money.

Mucus clogs her throat. She coughs into a handkerchief and swills her mouth with a gulp of metallic-tasting water.

The parliamentary spin has always been that benefiting the rich helps the poor by default, although of course they put it much more prettily and have the stats to back it up. The Healthy Hamlets’ green spaces absorb carbon dioxide, produce oxygen for everyone and improve weather patterns.

But the venture’s logo sums it up – common daisies, once considered weeds, Day’s Eye, following the sun and closing up neatly, petal by petal, at night.

Keeping out undesirables.

What could be more innocuous than a daisy? The Hamlets’ marketeers spout that the Latin name, Bellis Perenis, means beautiful year after year, which isn’t false, merely simplified. Digging deeper, Kaja discovered that Bellis aka Belides was a nymph who turned herself into a flower to avoid being raped by a lusty Roman god.

Other interpretations read Bellis as War.

Rageth slips into her mind, not the wraith with stinking breath but the sweet boy she knew when they were young. He’d been her first love and first loss. Never would you ever survive seeing him kiss someone else.

She’d stayed late after school talking through university options and the extra credits for a scholarship she couldn’t gain her Sustainability Science degree without. When she left, the sun was dipping and she sprinted to the beach, eager to join the fun.

Scrambling over boulders, she half-slipped on a patch of bladder wrack. Arms flapping for balance, she heard the screech of gulls and, closer by, a sound that wormed a shiver up her spine.

Voices rose from below, deep and soft; peppered with giggles.

Jerem and Rageth coiled together in the sand, whispering with an intimacy that told Kaja more than she wanted to know. The indigo-weave t-shirt she’d save up to buy Rageth for his birthday lay bunched in the rocks’ shade.

The boys looked right together. Kaja felt less the wronged lover than a peeping perv.

She skulked away, hurried home, and the next day told Rageth they were too young for a relationship and that monogamy was for losers.

Her chest hurt as she lied to him, and hurts now remembering. Her later diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease doesn’t diminish the memory of that heartbreak.

*

At the station, an entourage of officials and media await. A tall, sharp-shouldered woman introduces herself as “Hileen, Hid of Markiteers” and ushers Kaja through the compound’s gates to the communal orchard. Figures in burgundy aprons are unboxing glasses and chilled bottles along the perimeter. One table holds an assortment of curious hand-sized ornaments shaped like birds with copper-speckled wings.

Kaja picks one up, turning it in the dappled sunlight.

“Fireworks.” A dark-haired teenager steps forward. “These are star-lings. The copper dots are detonation fluid.”

Kaja admires the wide-open wings. “How lovely. Can I keep it?”

The teen shrugs. “Watch out it doesn’t go bang in your bag.”

Trees stand laden with apples, plums and pears. Rows of chairs are fanned out as though for a wedding.

At the orchard’s heart Kaja sees a tarpaulin-covered statue.

“Can I have a peek?” She flashes the teen a smile. “I promise to act surprised when they unveil it.”

The teen frowns. “Nope. I’d get shunned if I let you.”

The word ‘shunned’ disquiets Kaja. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.”

The tall marketeer reappears and beams at Kaja. Large teeth crowd her mouth, as though borrowed from one of the Hamlet’s horses. “I kin give you a tour now, if yid like.”

“I’m sure you’re very busy, Hileen. Why don’t I take a mosey with…”

Kaja looks at the teen until they mutter: “Bikril.”

“Bikril,” she echoes. “Will you show me around, Bikril?”

Bikril shrugs. “Why not? What’d you wanna see?”

“Let’s begin at the meadows. I wanted to make sure every Healthy Hamlet was insect-friendly, and that was my starting point.” Kaja whisks the teen away before the marketeer halts their escape.

These meadows are amongst the most established she’s seen. Almond-scented hawthorns fringe jostling daisies, buttercups and bird’s-foot trefoil. Blue butterflies dip for nectar. In the shade of a sweet chestnut tree, red poll cattle graze. On the compound’s perimeter, turbines grind grain while converting wind power to electricity, vanes sweeping the sky. It paints her mind like a children’s book – bucolic and far-fetched. Only the reeking slurry pit, where animal waste rots down into fertilizer, mars the idyllic scene.

“How long have you lived here, Bikril?”

“Never been anywhere else.”

“Not even on a day out?” Kaja tries to imagine how that could feel. “You’re not curious about cities, and the coast?”

Bikril shrugs, pushing back a lock of hair. “Not as nice as here. Reckon this’ll do me all my years.”

Life expectancy in the Hamlets is estimated to be a decade longer than outside. Kaja thinks of living such a long yet confined existence with no exposure to anything real, and disguises a shudder with a cough.

She remembers being Bikril’s age, or thereabouts, and her own experiences of being shunned. After she broke up with Rageth to protect her own heart, Ilandra and the others closed her out, shutting down their chatter whenever she approached.

When she found Ilandra alone in the school music room and asked what she’d done wrong, Ilandra looked disappointed to have to explain. “You called him a loser,” she said, setting aside her tuba. “Everyone knows that’s a triggering term.”

“That’s not what I said,” Kaja protested.

“You think you’re better than us, with your scholarship and your future.” Ilandra spat it like a dirty word.

“That’s not true. You don’t know anything about it.”

Ilandra’s eyeroll was so eloquent, Kaja backed away, nursing her damaged heart like a cat-mauled sparrow.

She discovered online by chance that Ilandra’s own heart petered to a halt before they reached thirty. That was twenty years ago.

“Twenty years is like forever!” Bikril marvels beside her, making Kaja panic for a moment she must have spoken aloud. “Two whole decades since this place was built. Was it the first?”

Kaja shapes her lips into a wry smile. “Oh, no, the first, trial Healthy Hamlet is fathoms underwater now,” she says, discounting the early attempts that failed so depressingly, with crops and animals dying while the experiment’s volunteers struggled to adjust from urban lives where most jobs demanded nothing more physical than a stroll from bedroom to home office.

“What’s the scariest thing you do for fun here?” she asks on impulse.

“What?” The teen looks nonplussed.

“I mean, what do you do for thrills, to get your heart pumping…?”

Bikril blushes. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“When I was your age, we’d take night walks when the stars shone,” Kaja says. “We lived by the sea and we’d test the tides, dashing to sandbanks that were exposed for just a few hours and setting off homemade explosives to make the waves look alight.”

“Sounds nutso.”

“My pal Rageth made the prettiest ones, shaped like salmon with copper scales so the flames burnt green. You’re telling me you don’t do anything like that?”

Bikril shrugs. “Not exactly no, but… Sometimes we climb the turbines, y’know?”

“The wind turbines?” Kaja stares at the towering structures turning their blades high above. “How does that work?”

“There’s one where the base is built into a hillside. If you jump at the exact right moment, you can grab a blade and sort of… squirm up. From there you can see the whole Hamlet.”

Kaja is moved by the pleasure lighting Bikril’s eyes. “And beyond, as well, I bet. I’d like to try it. Have we enough time before the festivities?”

Bikril traps their hair in a band like they mean business. “We’ll need to be quick. You ok to run?”

Kaja isn’t sure, but nods anyway. She tries to match the teenager’s pace as they dart across the compound, ducking past silos and barns to a slope of grassland behind a single turbine. It’s a different design to the structures she remembers from her childhood – almost silent and somehow more aligned with the landscape with its mottled brownish fins.

“Ready?” Bikril bends and hops upwards, grasping a blade as it sails by. Kaja follows suit and leaps, but her fingers barely graze the tip. It rises far out of reach and she sets her sights on the next one as it nears.

Dip, uncoil, spring, stretch.

Kaja’s fingers meet the lowest rung and grip on. Her chest aches as she sucks in air.

Bikril whoops. “You did it! Wasn’t sure you could. We need to go fast. Hold tight – the centrifugal force will wanna push you off.”

“That pesky centrifugal.” Kaja tries to grin as her whole body shakes with the effort of staying on the blade. She climbs the narrow rungs, aware that as the blade turns she’ll find herself doing a handstand two-hundred feet up in the rushing air.

She’s relieved she chose to wear a suit rather than a dress, but wonders how the luxurious fabric looks after being rubbed against patches of yolk-yellow lichen. The lichen gladdens her. It shows how clean the air is here. Maybe she can work that into her speech to explain the stains on her clothes.

At last she reaches the static central platform. Bikril crouches beside a maintenance panel. Its door hangs ajar. “That’s weird, right? Usually locked.”

“Let’s take a look,” Kaja says.

Bikril flips the small door back.

A bulb flashes among the buttons and wires, drawing Kaja’s attention to a silvery fish-shaped object. “Let me guess, that’s not normally there.”

“A firework? Why would someone put a firework here?”

“It might not be a firework.” Kaja touches the sculpted salmon with one forefinger, examining the coppery scales someone has painstakingly pressed into its surface. Raising the fish to her ear, she hears a faint ticking from its interior and guesses it’s timed to go off during her speech.

Grinning at Bikril as though nothing is wrong, she tucks the bomb into her bag. It clinks against the star-ling. She weighs the bird-shaped firework in her hand. “Are these dangerous?”

“Not really. Our cow Juniper ate one once and it made her guff the most ginormous fart.” Bikril laughs.

“Perfect.”

Kaja chooses a blade on its downward sweep and grabs hold, shuffles to the outer tip and secures the star-ling between a rung and the blade. Then she drops to the ground, reminding herself to bend her knees as she lands. Even so, the distance is enough to jolt her joints. She swallows a whimper.

“Better head to the orchard.” Bikril bounces down beside her, cat-like. “Don’t wanna be late.”

“Yes, let’s go via the slurry pit.” Kaja links her arm through the teen’s as though she’s just being friendly, rather than seeking support as she limps. “I’ve got an idea.”

*

Kaja is mid-way through her grand speech when she spots Rageth on the edge of the crowd. In his rough clothing he looks like just another Healthy Hamlets resident, if an undernourished, ailing example. He’s standing beside a farmer who resembles Bikril so strongly that Kaja envisions the adult Bikril will grow into – glowing with wellness. Despite the shame Rageth stoked on the train, the sight makes her grateful for the ‘Never ever would you’ games that led to her audacious plan, embodied by the teen’s family.

And yet, she thinks, there’s so much beyond the daisy’s petals Bikril has never seen. She wants the teenager to understand Healthy Hamlets aren’t the whole world.

The sun skates towards the horizon, ushering in a cobalt dusk.

Behind Kaja, the statue has been unveiled, revealing a supersized version of her with disproportionately large facial features and stumpy limbs. Vast hands designed like buckets hold pots planted with lavender to attract bees and other pollinators.

“Very clever,” Kaja says, trying not to visibly recoil from her giant misfit twin. Momentarily she wishes she’d kept the salmon bomb to destroy the statue instead.

Turning to the assembled crowd of residents, dignitaries and media, Kaja delivers a few lines about no one being too short to see the path to a more positive future, aware she’s paraphrased that from somewhere and that it makes a surreal statement uttered beneath her huge doppelganger.

Then she delivers the part of her speech she’s neither checked with her governmental liaison, nor briefed her marketeers on; the part, in fact, she devised while clinging two-hundred feet up in the air contemplating a sky-high handstand.

“We’re now twenty years into the Healthy Hamlets’ scheme, which makes this the ideal time to commence Stage 2,” she says, lips stretched wide as she watches the press type their notes. “Healthy Homes for everyone, regardless of income, status or biometrics. I’ll unveil the details in the coming weeks, so stay in touch.”

On the periphery of her vision, Rageth’s hunched posture alters. He’s scanning the sky, chin tilted and eyes wide. Kaja’s heart flutters with anticipation.

The firework on the wind turbine explodes first, with a pretty torrent of green and silvery glitter that prompts startled waves of cheers and applause.

Rageth isn’t the only one gazing up when his bomb detonates. Deep in the waste heap, the salmon won’t do much harm, but sends a tsunami of putrefied animal waste high into the air.

The sound and smell as it splatters down is both grotesque and satisfying.

To Kaja’s left, the tall marketeer whimpers and claws at the excrement smearing her body. On the orchard’s far side, Rageth is covered with brown sludge from head to feet. Kaja raises one hand and nods in reply to his querying head tilt, taking credit for the disarray. He grins, bows low, and wanders from the scene.

Kaja wipes manure off the shoulder of her once-ivory suit. “Bikril, could you please escort me to the train station?”

The teenager blinks but nods. “Ah, sure. Why not?”

Linking arms, the pair leave the shocked and slurry-showered crowd. They walk towards the compound’s gates, and beyond.

_______________________________________________________

Judy Darley is an award-winning writer, editor and workshop leader living in Clevedon, southwest England. She is endlessly intrigued by the complexities of the human mind. Judy is the author of short fiction collections ‘The Stairs Are a Snowcapped Mountain’ (Reflex Press), ‘Sky Light Rain’ (Valley Press) and ‘Remember Me To The Bees’ (Tangent Books) and runs innovative writing workshops encouraging participants to find original, meaningful ways to express themselves. Her fiction has been published globally and performed on BBC radio, aboard boats and on coastal paths, as well as in museums, caves, a disused church and artists’ studios. Judy has been artificially alive since 1985. Find Judy at https://x.com/JudyDarley