6

At Home with the Sprouts

The Tangle was a mixture of different structures: some were simple channels carved through rock, like the way to McGreasy’s. Others were old animal burrows or naturally formed caves and hollows. They had names dating back years, to a time when the tunnels were busy, well-lit thoroughfares: Forager’s Way, The Quick Road, Hidden Lane, Behind-the-Market Street. They also regularly intersected with the world of the Big Folk.

‘Put the torch out, Gob,’ said Gafferty, as their path steadily climbed towards daylight. It was the last stretch before home – and potentially the most dangerous.

The tunnel ended in a roughly hewn doorway. Gafferty and Gobkin cautiously peered out from its shelter. A vast factory floor lay before them, noisy with Big Folk and their machinery: gurgling vats of boiling syrup, taps that poured dollops of coloured sugar into moulds, rattling conveyor belts carrying brightly decorated boxes. It was a chocolate factory – another hunting ground of the Smidgens. They had no shortage of fudge and jelly sweets in the larders at home. The entrance to the Tangle was just a mousehole in one of its walls, as far as the humans were concerned.

As soon as she thought it was safe, Gafferty signalled to Gobkin to run. The young Smidgens skirted the edge of the factory, darting under moving trolleys and dodging busy footsteps.

‘Quickly!’ Gafferty had to gripe at her brother more than once. ‘Pay attention to where you’re going, Gob, you dizzy scatter-wit!’ He was so easily distracted by all the sweets passing by, and the many wonderful smells and mechanical sounds. He could be spotted by the Big Folk, or worse: not spotted and flattened by the giant tusked metal monster they called a forklift.

‘Stop nagging,’ said Gobkin. ‘What’s put you in such a bad mood?’

‘You!’ she snapped. ‘How did I get stuck looking after an empty-headed little worry-bug?’

Gobkin muttered something to himself but kept close to her anyway.

They reached the old broken pipe near the stairwell at the back of the factory that they used as a slide into the basement. Gafferty shoved Gobkin down it, then sent the chip after him, before following them both. In the basement, behind a forgotten pile of boxes, there was an iron gate that guarded an entrance in the stone wall. A rusty sign saying DO NOT ENTER was fixed to its bars. Ignoring the warning, the Smidgens slipped underneath the gate and followed a passage that led to a large cave.

Here stood the home of the Sprout family, and it was rather a grand home for just the five of them. It was more like an entire tower block carved into a wall of rock. Hundreds of windows were cut through the stone, windows for hundreds of rooms.

Once, long before Gafferty was born, the rooms had been filled with Sprouts, with Dustyheads, Glowblossoms, Pickety-Pocketys and their relatives and friends, and the House of the Smidgens was known for its laughter, light and life, a hive abuzz with activity and noise. At least, it was according to Mum and Dad, who were told so by their parents. Now, only a few of the rooms were occupied and the remainder were filled with nothing but silence. Some still had their furniture and fittings, dust-heavy objects whose owners had long since departed.

Gafferty and Gobkin’s parents, Gumble and Gloria, had claimed part of the building’s middle floors for the family: a cosy kitchen, two bathrooms, three bedrooms and a workshop, as well as a few storage rooms and larders. It was an island of life in the dead house. Heat, light and water were borrowed from the factory, thanks to cabling and pipes they had fashioned. Mum and Dad were experts in all things technical or mechanical, customising found, broken or stolen items from the Big World for their family’s use. That only left the food to be scavenged, and hunting was increasingly the responsibility of the children.

Dad was the first to notice their arrival, as they staggered up the stairs and into the kitchen.

‘Here’s dinner!’ he said. Gafferty saw him take in the dust on her clothes and the marks on her face and hands, and hide his concern under a smile. He rose from the kitchen table, where he was wrestling with the wiring in a lamp, reincarnated from an old Christmas tree light. A slab of a man, hair red like Gafferty’s, he spread his freckled forearms around his son, obviously relieved to see them both back safely.

‘All good?’ He raised an eyebrow at Gafferty over Gobkin’s shoulder, the simple question covering all manner of parental worries. She smiled weakly.

‘It was fine,’ she said, hauling the parcel on to the table. ‘The chip’s had a few bumps along the way. Gobkin did well, once he stopped whining.’

‘I didn’t whine!’ Gobkin immediately objected, before realising he was being let off lightly, and bit his tongue.

Mum appeared from a bedroom with Grub balanced on her hip. The child, wrapped in a human baby’s sock, stared malevolently at his older siblings, a dollop of mucus swinging from his nose like a gleaming pendulum.

‘That will do very nicely,’ Mum said, eyeing the chip and running her free hand through Gobkin’s brown hair, all frizz and curls like her own. She brushed the dirt off Gafferty’s jacket and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Well done, you two! Now, clean yourselves up and we’ll eat.’

Gafferty dunked her hands in the bottle cap sink, glancing around her at the familiar room. The kitchen was their main living space, where the family came together, and probably the place she had spent most of her life: eating, reading and drawing when she was younger, cooking, cleaning and washing clothes now she was older. The bundles of herbs hanging from the ceiling to dry, the tiles made from pieces of a broken willow pattern plate, the polished button dishes, the hollowed acorn storage jars, the matchbox dresser – it was all reassuringly familiar. But Gafferty was uneasy. Something had changed today: the frightening encounter in the tunnel, finding the atlas. She was seeing things differently.

She was hungry for food, but she was hungrier for answers. In Case We Forget. Those were the words written on the atlas. It sounded like a memorial, something you would write on a gravestone. The Big Folk had machines – The Big Book of Big Folk Facts called them kamras – that could instantly paint a picture of a person, a picture they could keep forever to remind them of a loved one. The Smidgens had nothing like kamras and fotoes. All the Smidgens that had gone before her, all the other Sprouts – their faces would never be seen again, she would never know what they looked like. There were no memorials, unless you counted empty rooms. Gafferty hadn’t much questioned her parents about their family’s history, but this sad book stirred her thoughts. Could they really be the last Smidgens in the world? And if they were the last ones, she wanted to know why.