There is an Old Man who lives on top of the Hill. St Catherine’s Hill, they call it, although as far as I can tell, St Catherine has never done anything to lay claim to it. She does not send police or anti-terrorist people in riot gear, to defend her hill and to turf us off. Perhaps that is because she is a saint? When the People bring us food and water, the Old Man says that they must be saints. Saints do good to other people, but property is a crime, so how can Catherine be a saint and own a hill?
It seems to me as if the Hill belongs to the Old Man. Not belongs the way that cars belong to their drivers, so that if you break into them and drive away, or even just take a device from the dashboard, they can lock you up or put you in care (which is the same thing), but belongs like washing hanging on a line belongs to people. It is their clothes. When they are dry the people the clothes belong to will want to wear them again, and if you creep into their garden and take their clothes, for example, if you really like the colour or your own shorts have worn a hole in them, then what will the previous owners do? Wear their pyjamas to work? Or take clothes from someone else’s line? The problem would go on forever that way.
I think that the Hill belongs to the Old Man because if someone were to take it away from him, where would he go? We usually live up there, and we sometimes live in the nature reserve, and sometimes in the winter we go north to Basingstoke and hide in an old warehouse, but only if we really have to, if it snows or is frosty for a long time, or if the police are after us. But the Old Man is always there. Skye said he is like a rock, and calls him Peter, because she says Peter was a rock. I do not know this Peter, the rock, but I like the colour of his name. In my head Peter is a bluish green colour, a little bit shiny. Catherine, the owner of the Hill, has a name which is softly grey and beige, and maybe a little pink, a gentle name, but not a name that goes with the Hill. The Hill is quite high (but Skye says, not as high as the hills in Wales, which she would like me to see sometime). It has a copse of trees on the top, and circular earthworks made a long time ago, before I was born, even before the Old Man was born. There is a sort of maze too, cut into the turf. Turf is one of the few words that looks the same colour in my head as it is in real life, pale green with a sort of straw colour mixed in. Turf is a word with lots of meanings. The first meaning is territory, like when a beggar in the High Street told me to scram, because this was his turf. The second meaning is, Skye says, a verb. A verb is a doing word, and Sky has been trying to teach us about them because, she says, everyone should know a little grammar. When turf is a doing word it means you get thrown out. They turfed us out of the multi-story car park once, and we were lucky they did not lock the lot of us up, they said, and throw away the key. But turf also means a patch of grass, with the roots all knotted up together underneath and sometimes some daisy roots in the mix, and if you cut it carefully you can make a fire on the bare earth underneath, and when you move on you can put the turf back and it will grow into place again, and after a little while it will be hard to tell you were ever there.
The Hill is green which, as I pointed out earlier, is not the colour of Catherine in my head, so I sometimes wonder whether Catherine took the Hill from someone else. Who knows? Skye says the world is full of things we do not know and from my experience I would say that seems true. I am trying to learn, though. We are all learning, all the kids. I heard Skye say so, to the Old Man. “They learn something new every day,” she said, and the Old Man grunted, which means he is pleased.
I can count as high as anyone, but I cannot count the number of kids here, in our camp. For one thing, the numbers keep changing. People come and go, which is normal, and once a new baby came, with a lot of screaming and fuss. But there is another problem with trying to count the number of kids, and that is not knowing when a kid turns into an adult. Kid means baby goat and it does not have a strong colour in my head, but it also means a child who is not yet old enough to go to prison or into a labour camp. A kid goes into care, but Skye says they always end up in prison in the long run.
I am definitely still a kid. None of us knows how old I am because, somewhere along the line, I lost my mum and dad. I do not know how I did that, but I know I lost them, because I heard Skye tell some other adults one night, when we were sitting round the fire after drinking the hot soup the People brought (the people who are supposed to be saints), and I was almost asleep with my head on Skye’s lap and my feet towards the warm, crackling fire.
“Is he your grandchild?” one of the adults had asked. Nobody would think I was Skye’s son because she is an old lady with a long white plait down her back and a wrinkled face.
“No, he’s not mine,” said Skye, “although he feels like mine, sometimes. I just picked him up when he was scrounging outside a supermarket. It seems he has lost his parents.”
I lost my favourite toy once. It was a little droid, a solar-powered thing with a cracked screen that I found down by the river. Skye said that I couldn’t get the internet on it, but I do not really know about the internet so I did not mind. If I left it in the sun, though, and it powered up, I could play games on it. Then I took it with me, in the pocket of my shorts, when we went into the High Street one Wednesday night, when all the shops put out the rubbish and we go gleaning, and when I got back, my toy had gone. I must have dropped it. I wanted to go back and find it, but it was beginning to get light, and they collect the rubbish early, and Skye said I might be caught and, although she did not say so, we both knew that they might put me in care. Skye said, “You’d better just accept it’s lost,” and gave me a hug. It was easy to lose that toy, but how could I have lost my parents, two fully grown adults?
I have a feeling in my tummy, or maybe it is in my head, that I will try to find my lost parents. I would like to have a mum and a dad, like some of the other kids have.