Chapter 1 - The Photograph
Summers in Concord Valley seem to last forever. Not because of the sunshine, or the jade-green colour of the trees, or the neverending muggy heat, but because of how little there is to do here.
I guess that’s what comes from living in such a small village. There’s maybe two hundred people living here, of whom precisely one other, Anya, is sort of my age. Even then, she’s two years younger than me. The village is mostly full of manual labourers, you see. They’re the people who come up onto the hills not so far from here and fix the wind turbines. They come up from the city on fixed contracts, three months or so, because none of them can take being away from civilization for longer than that. I imagine the isolation drives them a little insane.
The rest of the village is mostly large residential houses. They’re owned almost entirely by elderly folks. A place in the countryside to retire to, peaceful and quiet. Even our house, the one I’ve lived in all my life, was our grandma’s before she died and left it to our mother. I never met her - that was about two years before I was born.
Where do I go to school? Well, it’s summer right now, so I don’t. But during term time, there’s a school bus that runs from here into the city. It’s about twenty miles drive down gravelly mountain roads. If you want to get out of here any other time of year, you’ve either got to trek almost a marathon distance out of the valleys, or, if you’re feeling particularly tough, climb the valley walls - only about four thousand feet if you take the shortest path! - and down the other side. That’s only about seven miles, as the crow flies. You come down in a small town, and from there you can catch the train through to Isidis City.
Needless to say, nobody does it.
And I won’t have to get the school bus much longer. I’m seventeen now, so this time next summer I’ll be a free woman. I’ll be at college, in a city, far from here. And from there, who knows? Maybe I’ll meet someone. Maybe I’ll get a good job, and buy a house. The future is endless, and I don’t feel pulled in any one direction or another. Other than down, out of the valley, and into the world.
As the opportunities for escape right now are a little limited, I’ve found several ways to spend my time wisely. It seems to me there’s exactly three things that you can get done in a place like this. You can lie down; you can stand up; or, my personal favourite, you can sit. That is to say, I spend most of my time sitting in front of the computer.
Me and Anya, you see, we’ve discovered recently a new video game called MyWorld. It’s like a life simulation game. You put your headset on, and you’re in another world, free to create whatever you want. The idea is to build houses, and the game will simulate villagers for you. But the reason why we like it is because you can connect with other people - everybody’s patches of land are all connected, so you can go and see your friends, no matter how far away from you in the real world they are.
Or, you can meet new friends! We’ve found a ragtag bunch of friends on MyWorld, and since there’s nothing to do in the real world, Anya and I spend most of our time on there, hanging out with our misfit pals.
Why not get a job, you ask? I’d like to remind you of the fact that there’s nothing here. The only business in town is a small corner shop run by a grumpy old man who’s worried (and has been worried for at least seventeen years now) that the mail drones will eventually put him out of business. That’s where most of us get our groceries, you see. They come by on the drones every morning at nine o’clock sharp.
Who am I? Have I not introduced myself yet? I’m awfully sorry. It’s not often I get to meet new people these days. My name’s Naomi Martin. Nice to meet you! I live in Concord Valley, boondocks capital of the Westford Territories. I live with my dad, and my younger brother - Ren - who’s six. Six-and-a-half, I should say. He gets cross if you just say he’s six, after having had his six-and-a-half-th birthday last week. I do have a mum, but she’s a research biologist, and spends a lot of time away from home. She’s currently in the northern oceans, studying the microbiology of icebergs. I, myself, am seventeen, and I’ve just finished my second-to-last year of high school.
What’s your name?
We’re lying on the east side of the valley, about a thousand feet up the slope, and a further thousand feet below the wind farms start. There’s a lovely spot here where an eroded rock makes a little table by a flat bit of grass, and we come here pretty often to relax. There’s also a small grove of genetically engineered cherry trees - they’re permanently in bloom. It’s a nice sunbathing spot, too, because the sun shines directly down here after about eleven o’clock in the morning. We’ve been here since about then, just lying on the grass.
“Anya,” I say, holding my hand up to my eyes to prevent the glare of the afternoon’s two o’clock sun from blinding me through the trees, “do you ever feel a bit like a raindrop?”
“What are you talking about, Naomi,” she replies. “It’s not raining.” She waves at the sky to prove a point I’m not arguing. I suppose that was a strange thing to say off the cuff.
“No, it’s not, silly,” I laugh. “Think about raindrops, though. They form way up there in the clouds, with nothing directing them but gravity. They fall, and they fall, and suddenly they hit the ground. And from there, who knows where they’ll go? Sure, gravity still works, but there’s so many obstacles and gradients of slopes that tell the raindrop precisely which direction it should go in. But the raindrop doesn’t know where in the world it’s going to go until the moment just before it hits the ground.”
“I sort of get what you’re saying,” says Anya tentatively.
“We’re a little like raindrops, I reckon. We form up here in Concord Valley, and as we get older, something pulls us down, towards the rest of the world. We don’t know where we’re going to go, or end up, or what we’re going to see along the way.”
“We’re not like raindrops, I don’t think. Where they fall is predestined. As soon as they hit the ground, their entire path is mapped out for them. They don’t get to decide, because they’re flowing downhill. But look at the valley floor, and the space beyond, out to Isidis. It’s flat!”
“Free will lets us choose our own path, you think?” I ask.
“Sort of, yeah.”
“So what pulls us forward? Raindrops have gravity, but even if they could choose, they wouldn’t be able to move without it. What gives us the pulling force? And what gives us direction?”
“Love gives us our pulling force,” Anya says. A typically idealistic answer from her. It feels naive, innocent, perhaps, but then I consider myself and my lack of experience in the realms of romance, and I don’t think I’m in any place to talk about naiveté. “And destiny gives us the direction. That’s what I think, anyway.”
“I wish I had some direction,” I reply.
Blossom from the tree above comes gliding past on the breeze.
On my way home in the evening, as the rain begins to start, I walk past the corner shop. The man who runs it, whom I mentioned before, he’s been here in Concord Valley for as long as I can possibly remember. My dad doesn’t remember a time when Jackal’s Market wasn’t run by John - Mr. Sandford, as we always were told to call him (or ‘sir’, if he looked particularly grumpy that day) - though my dad only came to Concord Valley two years before I was born.
I was twelve years old when I learned to ride a bike. I’d have learned sooner, had I been able to. As a child, it was my dream to be able to glide down the streets like cyclists do. But my mother was struggling to get research contracts for most of my pre-teen years, and my dad never worked, always opting to stay at home and look after me. But after two years of decently-paying gigs, my mum was able to save enough money to buy me a bike and fulfil my childhood dream.
The first time my dad let me go cycling out on my own, after a few days of teaching me how to steer, and pedal, and not fall off, I decided to try to cycle to the shop by myself. It’s only on the other side of the village, about ten minutes walk, but for twelve-year-old me, it could have been the same distance as the city.
So I’m cycling down the road, and I can see the sign for the shop just in front of me, when a loud dog barking from a garden to my right spooks me. Looking around in panic to check it’s not near me, I lose control of the bicycle and ride directly into a large, ornate china plant pot in Mr. Sandford’s front yard, shattering it.
I couldn’t really offer to pay him back for the damage, no matter how much he yelled at me, given that I had no income, so he and my dad arranged that I would help him out with some of the chores in his house that hadn’t gotten done in years - namely, clearing out the garage.
It was dusty, and probably contained enough spider web to knit a bag big enough for all of Mr. Sandford’s possessions, so the first day started with bashing around with a feather duster. He was struggling at the time - and still struggles, I think - with a bad back, and couldn’t lift heavy boxes himself. I couldn’t have, either, but the two of us managed to load boxes full of old or broken items onto the back of his truck.
It was probably the fifth or sixth box we looked in on that day that contained the dusty photograph. A beautiful young woman with a long red dress, the arm around her waist belonging to a young man with sharp hair and a warm, friendly look on his face. The young man looked familiar, I remember thinking, as I asked Mr. Sandford who the people in the picture were.
He took it from me, and wiped the dust off the glass with his hand, and his normally harsh expression softened in a way I’d never seen happen, before or since.
“She was always too ambitious for her own good, my Laura,” he sighed. “That’s my wife and I, the year after we got married. Thirty-five years ago next month.”
“She’s really pretty,” I remember saying.
“She was,” he began. “And smart too. But what really drew me to her was her courage. Military mindset, I guess. She went to space, and the bottom of the ocean. She jumped out of planes, fought bad people hand to hand… she was a superhero.”
“Where is she now?” I asked.
“She’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
I saw his eyes flash slightly, perhaps at my insolence in pushing him (though I maintain that as an ignorant twelve-year-old I have an excuse in missing his subtlety there), but nowadays when I think back on this, I think of him simply being overcome for a second, missing his wife.
“She died,” he said, voice cracking slightly. “A long time ago.”
“What happened? Did she do something dangerous?”
“No. It was cancer. I remember the night she told me she was dying. It was the only time I ever saw her afraid.” He shuddered, and paused for a moment to compose himself. “After she died, I had nothing left. She was a trailblazer, and I was always following in her wake. I woke up in the middle of the ocean without a paddle. I came back to Concord Valley and took the shop over from my father. I hated working in it when I was a teenager. But after Laura passed, it was the only thing I knew how to do. I still hate it, but what else do I have? No family left, no friends, no direction…”
“You’ve got Concord Valley, sir. You’ve got us.” I said.
He smiled at me - the first time I’d ever seen him smile - with a faint hint of tears glistening in his eyes. “Thank you, Naomi.”
Half an hour later, he sent me home. I asked when I should come back the next day to finish the job, but he said I shouldn’t. He’d manage himself, he said. At the time, I thought he was cross with me - even more so than he was after I broke his flowerpot - but I realise now he needed to be alone with his thoughts for a while.
I feel a little like I imagine he did. What does a person do when they can see everything, but have nothing? Even if there’s not much here in Concord Valley, it’ll soon become a part of my life I can only see in the rear-view mirror. Looking forward is hard, when I can’t see the path I’m supposed to take.
In the five years since then, Mr. Sandford has changed his garden around more times than I have fingers. But he’s never put anything new on the spot where the flowerpot used to be. And whilst he’s still a grumpy old sod, he’ll smile at me if he sees me on the street corner.
As I open the front door to my house, I notice raindrops splashing into puddles on the pavement.
