Homecoming

“It’s beautiful,” says Sally, feeling overwhelmed by the scenery around them. The air is so cold that their breath freezes in front of them. Brown fields and broken ground seem to stretch on forever, into the grey clouds that hang low over the horizon. The giantesque trees, their bare branches hanging down, giving them a mournful yet dignified appearance, as though too sad to go on and yet, not able to consider giving up. She is not sure, actually, that beautiful is the right word. She is not sure of much these days, but she feels moved by what she sees, and she feels the need to say something, to break this awful silence and to escape the feeling that everything she says is the wrong thing to have said. Walking up ahead, some of her companions turn their heads but say nothing. Andrea, walking alongside her, shoulders hunched, with her head leaning forwards as though the strength required to keep it held high might break her, looks toward Sally, and sighs. It is an efficient look. It is enough to tell Sally that she should have kept her mouth shut. After one week of their journey, she is starting to realise how often her companions choose to leave her in the dark to spare her feelings. Being told all the things she is supposed to remember but cannot - her life with Andrea, The Organisation’s destruction of her homeland, her role in the resistance, her capture - is painful and frustrating for them all. She can see the effect this is having on Andrea most of all, who grows colder to her by the day. One does not need to remember the past to understand the pain that is written on her face. They continue walking onwards, and Andrea stays silent, opting to lose herself in her thoughts.

She thought back to that Sunday, the day it had all changed. It was one of those decadent lazy days that stretched out luxuriously before them. Where nothing else mattered but the two of them, lying there, together in each other's arms. She had snuggled into the little nook above Sally’s collarbone, while Sally stroked her hair absent mindedly and asked what Andrea was looking at. “The leaves,” she had replied, and Sally turned to follow Andrea’s gaze, and looked through the window. It was Andrea’s favourite feature of the apartment they shared, the safe haven of a home they had made together - the window which took up half the wall of their bedroom and through which they could see the giant eucalyptus trees outside. The view had changed over the years, as smoke and pollution had filled the air, a little at first and then always, until grey was the only colour they ever saw in the sky. The forest that had been there when they bought the apartment had been felled, two smoke billowing factories took its place, but somehow the eucalypts had remained. “The way the wind blows them, they look like they might take off,” said Andrea, “like a flock of birds.” Sally had tensed and Andrea had regretted mentioning the trees. She didn’t want to talk about the destruction outside, or The Organisation. She just wanted to snuggle down and enjoy this lazy day and pretend none of it was happening. She waited for the eruption from Sally, always on edge these days, as things got worse and worse in the outside world. “This is why we need to fight,” Sally had said “there's so much beauty here. We can't let them take it away from us”. Her voice was quiet. Resigned. Nowhere near the volume or intensity Andrea had expected. Until this moment, Sally had always said that ‘someone’ needed to do ‘something’. The shift to ‘we’ and ‘fight’ was confronting. The Sally in her memories looks identical to the person walking next to her, but the two could not be more different. That Sally was passionate, full of life. And once they got started, she was so confident, so inspiring, no matter how bleak their odds looked. Back then, being with Sally had felt safe. Hopeful. Sally of the past would not think that this place was beautiful. She would have passionately decried what was happening to their home. She would have been breathless in her fury that The Organisation could be so brazen and greedy as to continue on with their wide scale flattening, drilling, dumping and mining despite it being so clear they had gone too far. The more they expanded, the worse things got. That the people responsible for all this greed, pollution and destruction could run for an elected position of power, and worse, that they won, had been the final straw. Back then, Sally had a way with words. A way of turning the situation from one which seemed so impossibly big, into one with a solution. People wanted to fight with her. Sally’s fire had been the spark of the resistance. Andrea looks over to this stranger, this version of Sally walking next to her in the desolate wasteland that she had called beautiful just moments earlier. Andrea supposes that she was right to feel moved - it is overwhelming. Overwhelming in its destruction, in the horror that Sally would feel if she could remember what it had looked like before. The doctor has told them that they cannot force her memories back. That perhaps familiar things will speed up the process, but there are no guarantees. They will just have to wait and see.

It had not felt like a rescue to Sally, because she did not know she was a prisoner. This is a fact she has struggled to explain to her rescuers. Her two years on the prison ship had followed a monotonous routine that had become her whole reality - work, eat, watch The Organisation’s broadcast. There was no before. No Sally - just Prisoner 8315. Just each day, like the one before it. Until a shuttle of new recruits docked one day, and as they shuffled past the deck she was working on, a woman locked eyes with her. That night, the dreams had started. Trees with flocks of birds sitting on their branches, flying off into grey smoke, and a huge bed and that woman, the new recruit, calling her name. She dreamed of Andrea every night. And when Andrea came to speak to her, she told her things that a stranger would not know. She knew about the ache in Sally’s right knee. About the birthmark on her collarbone. She knew her name, and though Sally had not heard her name in two years, had not thought it, would not have been able to tell you if you had asked her, when Andrea stood before her and called her Sally, she knew that. And so, weeks later, after the explosion, when the alarms were ringing, were deafening, and there was smoke everywhere, and in the confusion Andrea had come for her, Sally went. Her rescuers told her that she had memory damage. That The Organisation wiped her memory daily, and kept her drugged. Sally had stared at them blankly, not recognising the people with whom she had spent night and day for years before her capture. How could they get her to remember? Andrea suggested starting at the beginning. Between them, they told her about Miller & Sons, a wildly successful family business with catchy jingles, personable spokespeople, and a charitable ethos. It had been an unbeatable match - their growth was unprecedented and within a few short years they had beaten or bought all their competition. They did not stop there. Once their annual revenue surpassed that of the United States, the first concerned outcries from politicians and advocacy groups started to be heard. But it was already too late. After the final merger, following which they were richer, more influential and more powerful than the world’s superpowers combined, there had been a rebrand. “We can’t pretend to be a regular company anymore. We are so much more. We are The Organisation” said the broadcasts, diffused at first on radio, television and social media and eventually, in every office, shop, classroom, train and billboard all over the world. These broadcasts promoted their promise - a responsibility to make sure that everyone would be taken care of. They continued to gain popularity. Political elections became a joke as politicians and international member groups realised they were powerless against the opposition. Their expansion before those fateful elections was nothing compared to that afterwards. Like a cancer, The Organisation grew, destroying everything in its wake. Every new project turned out the same way - sickness as the chemicals they used entered the water and the food, mass migration as people fled the land which now promised only a slow and painful death, and then, nothing. No growth, no animals, not even weeds. All that remained were the factories. The factories that continued their work even as the land around them transformed into a toxic wasteland and workers had to be transported in to work in hazmat suits and special ventilated lorries. By then, people could not oppose, even if they wanted to. The disappearances began, the re-education camps, the chilling reality of the evil that had taken over. Sally looked at her companions blankly as they told her this. “But you said there was a resistance.” An accusation, or question, it was not clear. “Yes,” replied the doctor, finally. “There was one person who stood up to fight when it all seemed too much, too big, and too awful to do anything about. There was one person who inspired hundreds, and then thousands, and then resistance cells spread up all over the world.” She looked around at their hopeful faces with the crushing knowledge that they meant her. This person, capable of inspiring a revolution, is her. These people who she knew but could not remember. This awful problem that has happened in another version of her life, that motivated her to fight and risk everything and, for what? They had taken her memories and she no longer knew who she was. Sally was sure only that she was not the person this revolution needed. She started to sob as the terrible truth of it weighed down on her. She wanted to yell, to tell them that they had the wrong person. But she knew from the looks in their eyes that she did not need to say it. They were thinking the same thing.

They have been walking for hours when the doctor suggests that they stop for a break. As they each find a place to sit, he shares the rations out between their little group. Despite the meagre spread, the gloom and the pressure of their mission hanging over them, someone cracks a joke. Others start to smile and soon, the atmosphere is light and they are tucking into their food and everyone is talking.

These are good people, Sally thinks, as she looks around. People who can find the good in any situation. She can not remember these memories that seem to bring them so much joy, does not fully understand their jokes. But the mood is contagious, and soon they are all laughing. A sudden rumbling shocks them all, and they stop laughing. It is nothing to worry about, says one of the men in the group, an old factory nearby. No immediate danger to them. “Look,” exclaims the doctor, “the birds!” Shocked by the sudden loud noise, a flock of black birds had taken flight, far across the wasteland. “You don’t see many of them anymore,” says Andrea, and they all watch while they finish their rations. Sally stares at the birds, and then the place they have been, for many minutes without taking a bite of her food. Andrea moves closer to her. “What’s wrong?” she asks. “The birds,” says Sally, and turns to look at her. “They reminded me of the eucalyptus trees. There was a big window. You were there, I think,” she blushes, feeling strange at the thought of telling this person she is remembering the two of them lying in bed together. Andrea puts her hand on Sally’s. “Yes, I was there. That was the day everything changed.” Sally nods, not fully understanding. “Do you remember anything else?” Sally shakes her head, no. “Well,” says Andrea, “it’s a start.” There are tears in her eyes as she lifts Sally’s hand to her mouth and kisses the back of it. “Welcome home.”