Jasmin Kanth

Nic & Aubrey

Novel extract

This is a fictional story, but Monsanto is a real company – now operating under the name Bayer. Roundup, Monsanto’s weed killer, can cause cancer. In 2017, there was a landmark case which forced them to release the infamous ‘Monsanto Papers’: documentation that proves they were aware of the link to cancer, but intentionally deceived the public – pursuing profit at the cost of human life. They have ghostwritten “independent” peer-reviewed journals, influenced journalists to attack their critics and spread a pro-Roundup narrative, and there is even evidence of collusion with regulatory bodies. As of 2025, Monsanto have paid around $11 billion in settlement agreements for 100,000 lawsuits, but there are still 61,000 active lawsuits against them. Roundup is still on the market.

When Aubrey was eleven, her mum Carrie was diagnosed with cancer from exposure to Roundup. Carrie recovered, but now her cancer has come back. In this chapter, Aubrey is part of a demonstration to block workers from getting into Monsanto’s office on Victoria Street. Nic is not aware that Carrie has been diagnosed with cancer again.

We confirmed our strategy, then took our positions around Monsanto. Sam and I crouched on the first step leading to the entrance. The ground was wet from spilt coffee. I tried to squat to avoid getting my jeans wet, then gave up and let my bum touch the floor. 

We were going to be here a while.

A man in an orange jumpsuit emptied rubbish from a brown wheelie bin; the air filled with the stink of rotten eggs and cabbage. Sam offered me an earphone, but I shook my head. I liked to savour this snapshot of time – this twenty minutes before the city came to life. It was like lying in bed suspended between sleep and wakefulness, drifting in and out of dreams. This week, my dreams had been more like distorted memories.

Eight years old. Slipping into another skin that was prettier and sparklier than my own. Sliding hoop earrings over my wrists like bracelets and spinning myself into silky shawls. Carrie put music on, the Spice Girls, and we danced together in high heels. She was graceful: fluid as water, light as air, a ribbon floating in the breeze.

Until she wasn’t.

Thunder and lightning.

Silver stilettos kicked off as she twirled like a tornado around my bedroom; I was caught in the eye of the storm that was my mother. My first taste of intoxication. It was delicious.

Carrie had always been a force of nature, but in those dreams it was my feet stomping – the heels of my shoes tearing holes in the floorboards. The dreams blurred the boundaries between us, tangling up what belonged to her and what belonged to me. I thought that connection was gone, but here it was – like a stubborn tendril of an umbilical cord, hanging onto my bloody core long after it should have been cut loose. 

Sam shook my arm, jolting me back, and I looked down Victoria Street. A group of workers were coming towards us – Pret coffee cups in their hands, shiny shoes and high heels tapping against the pavement. The first person approached us, swinging his leather briefcase close to Sam’s head. She ducked, then laughed and winked at me. He glared at her.

People demanded we leave – they had meetings to attend, presentations to give – but we were sitting cross-legged in a tight circle. They couldn’t break through us. Security men threatened to move us by force – or politely asked us to disperse, as the papers would say tomorrow. Employees were supposed to stand back but some of them came closer, bubbling over with indignation.

‘You’re all pathetic. Why don’t you get a real job like the rest of us?’

Sam didn’t miss a beat. ‘We refuse to work for businesses like Monsanto that are destroying agriculture and making people sick.’

Police started to arrive, but there were only four of them to twenty of us – not enough to start making arrests. Not yet.

But they started preparing.

Section 12.

Public Order Act.

Section 14.

My hands started to shake. I hid them inside my pockets and tried to focus on the chants.

‘Their profit, our loss!’

Construction workers and dustbin men joined Monsanto’s employees, gathering to see what was happening and filming us on their phones. I closed my eyes. We were like an exhibit at a zoo, stripped naked and bare. It was a desperate sort of liberation that made me think of Janis Joplin, giving in to reckless abandon.

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. 

I opened my eyes to the flash of blue lights from police vans. Green high-visibility jackets and hard hats. More of them now – outnumbering us. Silver handcuffs clanking against each other. A policeman crouched in front of me. I watched his lips move without taking in sound. Over his shoulder, a little boy pointed us out to his mum. She hurried him along, but he turned back to look at us; she tugged his hand, and he ran to keep up with her. 

They put my wrists in handcuffs, and I flinched at the shock of cold. There were three of them, surrounding me. They gripped my shoulders. I let myself go limp, like a rag-doll, and they dragged me to the side of the road.

The spilt coffee soaked the leg of my jeans as it scraped the pavement.

I thought prison was iron shutters and dark black rooms, like an olden-day dungeon. Really, it was just endless waiting. Getting a crick in my neck from leaning my head against the window in a police van; trying to sleep on the floor of an empty room, using my hoodie as a pillow. I thought I’d at least have Sam, but they took her somewhere else.

I had been here for hours and needed to pee. Badly. Pins and needles pricked the sides of my legs, cramped from sitting on a stiff wooden chair, but I was afraid to stretch them. Just when I thought my bladder would burst, I was allowed to go to the toilet. As I sat there – shivering in a damp cubicle and trying not to look at the shit-coloured stain on the carpet – I forced myself to remember why I was doing this. Carrie: her hollow cheeks and pasty skin, the way she reached for a strand of hair before remembering there was nothing there.

An unsmiling policewoman, with hair scraped back into a tight bun, led me to a reception area. It smelled of bleach. She asked me questions I knew I didn’t have to answer – details of other people in the demonstration – and marked my silence with a scribble of her black biro in the correct box. She was wearing a silver ring from Pandora: a blue heart outlined in diamanté. It was similar to the one Nic had given me for my birthday. I wondered if hers was a gift from a boyfriend.

Her eyelids twitched when I answered honestly that I did this because nobody was holding Monsanto responsible for their crimes.

‘Why can’t you arrest them?’ I finally burst out. ‘Everyone knows Roundup causes cancer… all those thousands of people. You know that. And they’re still selling it! How is that not against the law?’

She looked at me blankly, then checked the time on her watch.

Then, just like that, I was free to leave. I thought they would keep me until the next morning, but they released me into the black night at twelve o’clock with another woman. She’d been arrested that afternoon for being drunk and disorderly. I borrowed her phone to call Nic. He was annoyed, I knew, but maybe he had stayed up to wait for me…

He answered, but his voice was hard. ‘Where are you?’

‘Brixton.’

‘Where in Brixton? What’s the street?’

‘Um, I don’t know…’

‘For God’s sake, Aubrey.’

‘I’ll send a location pin.’

The woman tapped her foot impatiently while I found our location on Google Maps, then she took her phone and disappeared.

After a few minutes, I started walking. Someone stumbled down the street. I pressed my back against the wall. When I breathed out, it sounded too loud – as if I was revealing myself to whoever might be lurking around the corner. There were voices, shrill and intoxicated, but I didn’t know where they were coming from. I found a small bench, the left side sunken with rotten wood, but it was mostly hidden from sight beneath a tree. It seemed like a safe place to wait.

Minutes passed. It felt like hours.

Nic wasn’t coming.

My eyes stung with exhaustion and I tipped my head up, letting the tears slide invisibly into my hair. Wet drops trickled into my ears.

Finally, as I was trying to work out how to get home, his car pulled up on the other side of the road. That familiar washed-out green, unknotting my stomach. He got out to look around, and I ran towards him.

‘There you are,’ he said. ‘I’ve been driving around this fucking street for ages.’ 

I tried not to flinch at his tone. ‘I didn’t see you.’

‘Let’s go.’ 

Inside the car, I fumbled with my seatbelt. He pressed down with his right foot and we sped down the road. I jerked forward. He switched on the radio: a late-night station playing jazz music. I opened my mouth to speak, and he pressed the volume button. Brassy sounds filled the air.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said after a few minutes. ‘I couldn’t take my phone, in case they confiscated it…  I didn’t know how else to get home.’

Nic stayed silent. I moved the window down, trying to air out the tension between us, but it had started to rain. Nic moved the window back up.

I rubbed my hands along my legs. ‘Can you please stop ignoring me?’

He leaned forward to fiddle with the radio station. I thought he was turning up the volume again, drowning me out, but he switched it off completely. The sudden silence rang loudly between us. 

‘Did it work?’ he asked. ‘Have you destroyed this big evil corporation?’  

It was so new, so strange – the sarcasm in his voice.

‘Have you brought down capitalism?’ 

I leaned my head against the headrest. Actually – it wasn’t so new, or strange. Not really. I just had to think back far enough.

‘I’m sorry,’ Carrie said, trying to make up with Dad.

He said something I couldn’t hear, ice in his voice, and I shivered in my thin nightie. Dad never talked like that.

‘I don’t mind you doing the peaceful stuff,’ Nic started. ‘But…’ 

Then a fire came out in Carrie, like he’d taken a lit match to almost burnt-down embers of a flame. Insults and swears, muffled through blankets and cushions as I burrowed further beneath my duvet. 

‘You don’t mind?’ I interrupted. ‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t realise I needed your permission.’

He sighed loudly, pushing air through his lips in a harsh breath.

‘They think they’re fucking invincible, that they can do anything…’

‘Who?’

‘Monsanto,’ I spat. ‘Who else?’ 

He shook his head. ‘Do you even know what you sound like?’

‘Do I sound crazy?’ I demanded. ‘That’s what you think, isn’t it? That we’re all just a bunch of pathetic, flowery little hippies.’

He swore as we flew over a speed bump, and I put my hands on the dashboard to stop myself from flying forward. I watched his leg struggle to press the brake as we swerved too quickly around a corner. This was Nic, who kept safe and steady, who I was unravelling the way Carrie had always unravelled Dad. I turned away from him, trying to see where we were through the darkness. I only realised it was my own street when he pulled up outside my flat. 

‘I’m sorry, okay?’ I said.

I hated the crack in my voice – that pathetic, clingy neediness from Carrie as she asked Dad to forgive her, please, for whatever it was she’d done. Cheating and lying, disappearing for a week without a word, selfish and irresponsible. That was all she ever knew how to do: tear holes through our lives. Now, I was the one ripping things apart.

I held my breath as Nic looked at me, properly looked at me, like he had that first day in Shoreditch. That knowing gaze, like he thought he could see straight to my core. I rubbed my legs again, wanting to scrape the whole day off my skin; scrub myself clean of Carrie’s spiky energy that erupted out of me in uncontrollable bursts. And even worse than that, her desperate need – the delicate beat of my pulse beneath the tough skin I’d grown around it. I wanted Nic to reach inside me, right to the tender pulp of my heart, and help me unravel its sticky pieces.

‘I love you,’ I told him.

His fingers clenched around the steering wheel. My stomach twisted as his knuckles turned white, as if it was me he was squeezing. ‘I can’t deal with you. Not when you’re like this.’