“There’s a cave and a row of prisoners chained up facing a wall. They can only face the wall; they can’t see anything else.”
“That sounds cruel,” I say.
“That’s not the point. Anyway, they—”
“Do you know what they were in prison for?”
Farah cracks a begrudging smile. “Do you want to hear this story or not?”
“Of course.”
I place my hands primly in my lap. Sitting knee to knee with Farah is a rush. I have to resist the smile that keeps forcing its way on to my face. Farah clears her throat and begins:
“They’ve been locked up this way for generations, they don’t know anything else. All they can see are the shadows of the courtyard outside, cast on the wall by the light of a fire behind them. They watch the shadows and they mistake them for reality.”
“It’s cruel, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Kyle!”
I grin. I’m enjoying myself. Farah Rafiq is telling me a cool – OK, slightly weird – story and I’m cracking jokes. I fantasized about having this level of conversation with her a thousand times and now here I am.
“Sorry. Go on,” I say.
“They begin to study the shadows, make up rules to predict what kind of shadow will appear next. When a prisoner gets it right they’re praised by the others. They call them: master.”
“OK, I get it,” I say. “It’s an analogy. The prisoners are doing what scientists do: looking for patterns, trying to guess at the nature of reality. And some of them guess right and so everyone looks up to them.”
Farah smiles. “Not just a pretty face.”
I like the way she smiles with her whole face, even her eyebrows.
“You don’t need to sound so surprised,” I say. “I want to do A-levels too. After my retakes.”
Farah nods shortly. I appreciate that she doesn’t feel the need to remind me that there probably won’t be retakes, or A-levels, or anything else now.
“One day, one of the prisoners escapes,” she continues. “They blunder out into the real world. Plato called it ‘the ordinary world’. And instead of seeing shadows, they see physical three-dimensional people for the first time.”
“That … would be scary,” I say.
“What do you think happens next?”
“They go all Ironman on them for locking everyone up? Blast the place to hell.”
Farah smiles thinly. “You’re not taking this seriously.”
“I am, I promise.”
“They go back into the cave and try to explain what they’ve seen. But nobody believes them. They think they’re a fool.”
I take a minute. “I see what you’re saying. Everything we’ve known until now, the thing we call reality, might not be the reality. It might just be shadows on the cave wall.”
“Right,” Farah says.
“But we’re still not really here, are we? In this corridor.” I gesture around us. “I’m still passed out on the street or in the back of an ambulance on the way to hospital. You’re probably on a ward too by now.”
Farah shakes her head. “You’re being too literal. The idea of you lying on the pavement in town is no more real than the idea of you and me sitting here. They’re both different representations of something else entirely.”
I think it through. “The thing we call ‘real’ is only the ‘real’ we’re most used to.”
“Exactly,” Farah says.
“You think we’ve stepped outside the cave, don’t you?”
“Outside, or into another one.”
We find a cupboard filled with bandages and dressings and we fashion elbow pads and helmets from them. We fight with mop handles, swinging wildly, making thick whapping sounds against each other’s paddings. We giggle so hard we can hardly stand and we fall into each other and stagger around like we’re drunk or delirious. I swing my mop back over my head and it catches a glass panel in the door behind me and the glass shatters, turning into an astonishing cloud of jagged light.
We fall silent, staring in disbelief at our destruction. Then Farah places her hand over her mouth and guffaws. My heart thuds in my ears and I can feel my pulse behind my eyes and I can’t help but feel guilty in spite of everything.
“Are you sure people in the ordinary world can’t see this?” I say.
“Pretty sure,” Farah says.
“How?”
“Think about it. We can’t be the only people this has happened to. There’s the guy in Casualty, the baby. I’ve seen a few others.”
“I guess.”
