Boy in the Tower Page 10

  She asks me to hold it while she rummages around in a box on the floor for a couple of tins. One’s corned beef and the other’s chopped tomatoes. She adds both of them to the pan with the onions and soon her flat is filled with a rich cooking smell. Then she adds in a packet of ready-cooked white rice, and after that she spoons it into four bowls. One for me, one for her, one for Mum and one for Obi.

  ‘Eat up,’ Dory says. We sit at the table, not talking for a bit, finishing up the food.

  ‘I’d better take Mum’s upstairs,’ I say, and Dory opens the door for me even though I can carry the bowl OK with one hand.

  As soon as I open the door to my flat, I know something’s wrong. I can hear the sound of something breaking, a smashing, splintering sound that makes me think of someone screaming.

  ‘Mum?’ I call out.

  As if in answer, I hear another crash.

  ‘Mum!’ I’m worried now. Something’s not right.

  I go into the sitting room and place Mum’s lunch on the table. She’s not in there. I hear another smash coming from the kitchen and that’s where I find her. She has a plate in her hand that she’s about to drop to the floor, and as she releases it, I dash forward and surprise myself by catching it in mid air. I place it gingerly on the side but Mum tries to pick it up again.

  ‘Stop it, Mum!’ I cry. She looks at me and it seems to take her a moment to register who I am, and to remind her, I say, ‘It’s me, Mum. Ade.’

  She starts to cry then. Glassy tears that look too large to be real spring from her eyes.

  ‘What’s happened to us?’ she says. ‘What’s happened?’

  She makes a howling sound or a moan, I’m not sure which, and the tears keep pouring from her eyes.

  ‘It’s OK, Mum,’ I say, and I lead her over the smashed plates and then see that she’s not wearing shoes and I worry that she’s going to cut her feet but I need to get her out of our grey little kitchen and away from the rest of the plates.

  Mum runs to the window when we’re in the sitting room and bangs her wrists against the glass, so the panes rattle and shake.

  ‘What’s happened? What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s the Bluchers, Mum,’ I say, but of course that doesn’t help because Mum doesn’t know what they are.

  ‘Why? Why?’ she cries, and she tucks herself up into a small, tight ball in front of the window.

  ‘It’s OK, Mum. We’re going to be OK.’ I stroke her back, which is shaking from her cries. ‘It’s OK.’ I say it over and over until even I start to believe it.

  ‘Why don’t you go back to bed now, Mum?’ I say, and I didn’t think Mum was listening to me really but she starts to stand as soon as I suggest it and we slowly walk together towards her room, Mum leaning on me as if I was a walking stick.

  She climbs into bed by herself and I leave her lunch on the side table. I watch her for a few minutes before I turn away, closing the door quietly behind me.

  There is silence in the flat once more. I go to the kitchen and try to clear up the smashed plates as well as I can but I keep finding more and more little fragments that I’ve missed. They are thin and sharp and one of them sticks into my finger, making me wince and cry out.

  I miss Dory’s company and I want to go back there but I can’t help looking out of the window at Gaia’s tower. I wonder if I’ll be able to see Obi out there. For one dreadful moment, I look down and my eyes search the ground to see if there is someone lying there, and I let myself breathe again when I can’t see anyone.

  Obi must have made it inside, but why has he not returned yet?

  Already I can see the damage that the Bluchers are doing to the tower. It looks like it has shed another layer of skin. It won’t be able to stay standing for much longer.

  The next thing I think is so simple that I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to work it out.

  Before I met Obi and Dory, I’d been worried that our tower was going to fall, that the Bluchers would start eating it as well. Meeting them has made me feel safer. Like I haven’t had to look behind me all the time. But how can they stop our tower from falling? How can anyone be protected from the Bluchers? Surely we are also in danger?

  I wonder if the people in the other tower can see that our building is being eaten away, just like I can see that theirs is? And even if Obi manages to find them, why would they leave one falling-down home for another?

  But at the same time I think this, I know it can’t be true. I’ve been down to the basement today and there isn’t any damage. There aren’t any holes or cracks in the lower walls. I know because I walked right past them.

  But why not?

  I sit up on the sill and put my head right next to the window, so I can look directly down. There is a thick cluster of silvery Bluchers surrounding us, but for some reason they are not touching our walls.

  It is as if there is a protective force field that they can’t get past. A little gap of space between them and us which means they can’t eat away at our walls.

  Something is stopping the Bluchers in their tracks.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  There is nothing to do but wait for Obi to get back.

  I go back to Dory’s flat and she calls me in. I find her sitting on one of her orange armchairs with her feet propped up on a little table, reading a book.

  ‘Do you like reading?’ she asks me.

  ‘I guess so,’ I say. She says, she has some books I might like the look of and starts picking up piles here and there to find them.

  ‘Try these,’ she says, and hands me a few.

  I pick one that just has a single word as its title: Boy.

  It’s about someone growing up and the funny things they remember from when they are a child.

  It takes me a little while to get into it, but soon I am right there next to him. He’s jumping into the sea on holiday in Norway. And now he’s putting a dead mouse into a jar of gobstoppers in a sweetshop.

  It seems like a faraway land to me, full of exciting things happening. And it fills my head with colour too. The blue of the sea, the craggy green islands, the orange spotty fish that he eats. It’s quite unlike the grey buildings and roads that used to surround us, and the weird sort of silver of the Bluchers now. I like it. It makes me forget for a minute or two that we are still waiting for Obi to come back.

  Just as I am reading about the island, we hear footsteps coming down the corridor.

  Dory and I look at each other for a quick moment, and then we both spring up and rush to the front door. Obi is standing there frowning, as if he is surprised to see us.

  I throw my arms around him, I am so glad to see him. He gives me a little pat on the back. I don’t think he knows what else to do.

  ‘Did you find anyone?’ Dory asks. ‘Did you bring anyone back?’

  Obi sits down heavily on one of the chairs.

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  We both wait for him to say more but he doesn’t. There is a big silence that I know I shouldn’t break, but I have to.

  ‘Did you find Gaia?’ I ask in a small voice.

  Obi looks at me then.

  ‘No. There were no kids there.’

  Then he looks away and none of us say anything.

  We sit there for quite a while like that.

  I have to stop myself from asking all the questions that are rising up in me like bubbles that are going to pop: Did you go to Gaia’s flat? Did it look like they had left? Had she left me a note or anything?

  Instead I just have to wonder: Who it is that Obi has brought to live with us?

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Only when Dory starts making dinner does she ask Obi again about who he found in Gaia’s tower.

  ‘Will they be eating, Obi? I need to know how much to make.’

  He just says, ‘Make one more plate up.’

  So that’s how we first know it’s just one other person.

  I really want to ask who it is and why they haven’t come to Dory’
s flat to say hello and do they know where Gaia is, but Obi looks tired, like there’s something else that he’s thinking about all the time, so I just help Dory with dinner and don’t say anything.

  It’s pasta with walnuts tonight. I’ve never had it before and I want to say that I don’t like nuts really but I don’t feel I can.

  Obi disappears with a plate of food after dinner and Dory asks me if I want to play Gin Rummy again before bed. We play twice, one win each, and then I go back upstairs to Mum.

  It’s strange that Obi won’t tell us what happened. I ask Dory if she knows why but she just says, ‘He must have his reasons,’ and, ‘We mustn’t rush him.’

  It’s a funny kind of sleep that night. There are no torch signals from the other tower any more. Just complete blackness outside. Even though I know there’s not just Mum now, but Obi and Dory too, I feel lonely somehow.

  There’s a moment in the middle of the night when I’m woken by the most terrific crashing sound.

  It sounds like a groan and a bang and a smash all at the same time.

  It terrifies me, it’s so loud and close. My windows rattle and shake as if they’ve been hit with something. Something hard.

  Then I realize I know what it is.

  Gaia’s tower has finally fallen.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  The next morning I ask Obi and Dory if I can do something to help. They’re talking about how much food we have left and how long it will last us.

  I haven’t been listening properly to what they’ve been saying.

  And then Obi says, ‘Ade, you can help with that, OK?’

  ‘Yes, you’ll do a fine job,’ says Dory.

  I look up at their smiling, nodding faces and they tell me what they want me to do.

  My job is to go into flats and bring back any food we can eat.

  I also need to tell Obi if I find any water.

  Since Gaia’s tower fell, I haven’t felt much like doing anything. Obi said that she wasn’t there but I know he didn’t have time to look everywhere in the block. What if she was hiding somewhere; somewhere other than her flat?

  I really want to ask Obi more about it but I don’t like to ask him lots of questions. It’s not that I’m scared of him or anything, I’m just not sure he would like it.

  It’s good to be doing something other than sitting around but it doesn’t stop me from thinking about Gaia. I can’t stop remembering times when we were together. Everything reminds me of her.

  Eating dinner with Obi and Dory reminds me of the time just after I’d told Gaia about Mum not leaving the flat. She asked me if I would like to come round for dinner at her flat.

  ‘Come tonight,’ she said. ‘We’ll go straight to mine.’

  ‘Does your mum know? Have you asked her?’

  ‘No,’ said Gaia, looking surprised that I’d asked. ‘She’d say no if I asked her, but if you just turn up, she won’t be able to.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. There was some sort of unwritten rule that Gaia and I could only see each other at school. I’m not sure how it came about exactly but sometimes adults don’t need to tell us what to do all the time; we can sense what they want.

  ‘Your mum never has to know!’ exclaimed Gaia. ‘And you can see my garden. The mint is really tasty in tea. C’mon, Ade! Jollof! Tell me you don’t want it!’

  I knew how kind Gaia was being. She was willing to risk her mum being annoyed with her to make sure I had a proper dinner, but I couldn’t bring myself to say yes. It felt like I would have crossed over a line if I had gone, not saying anything to Mum when I got back, while my belly was full from Gaia’s mum’s cooking.

  ‘Fine. Suit yourself,’ Gaia said, and I could tell she was cross with me.

  ‘It’s just . . . Mum . . .’

  ‘It’s fine, Ade. I said it was fine.’

  Sometimes it’s those memories that are the most painful of all. More so than the happy ones. I hope that one day I may get the chance to say sorry to her.

  I decide to ask the person that Obi brought back if they know what happened to her family, as soon as I can. Until then, I just think in my head: You’re all right, Gaia, you’re all right, Gaia, you’re all right, Gaia, because everyone knows if you think about something enough then there’s a good chance it’ll come true.

  We’ve decided to put all the food into one of the flats next to Dory’s, so we can see how much we have. There isn’t space to store it all at Dory’s. Obi gives me one of those bags with wheels at the bottom that you pull behind you, to carry the food in. He tells me to start from the top floor and gives me a large bunch of keys so I can open everyone’s door.

  I have to leave them unlocked because we need to start using everyone else’s toilets now. Ours aren’t flushing any more, so we have to start using different ones or the smell will get too bad.

  The first flat I go into has lots and lots of food in it. It looks like a big family lived here. There are lots of kids’ drawings stuck onto the fridge and toys scattered about the sitting room. I think they must have left in a hurry because there are heaps of clothes about the place and drawers left open. I don’t look around the flat much, though, I just head to the kitchen.

  Even though everyone has gone, it’s strange to go into these people’s homes. It was a bit different when I went into Michael’s mum’s flat because I knew them and I had been there before. This feels a bit different, like I’m trespassing. But we need to eat and the people who lived here don’t need the food right now, so I pull a chair over to be able to open the cupboards. They are full of things we can take. And that’s when I have a good idea. I’ll do the same as I did when I took the tins of beans and bag of rice from Michael’s mum’s flat: I’ll keep a list of everything I take from every flat I go into. If the tower stays standing and the world goes back to normal and the people who live here come back, then we’ll just replace everything that we took using my list.

  It makes me feel a lot better about taking the food. I run off to my flat and find my scrapbook and a pen so I can start straight away. I write the flat number at the top of the page and then I start my list. There’s cans of coconut milk and bags of rice and brown beans. I find some old yams which will still be OK to eat, but not any other kind of vegetable. Obi told me not to open the fridges. They’ve been off for a long time now, so everything will be bad inside them.

  I fill the bag quickly and there’s still plenty to come back for. And then I start the trip downstairs to Dory’s floor. It takes quite a long time because of all the stairs and the bag is heavy. It judders down each step with a loud thump. Finally I reach the flat we’re keeping the food in and Dory is there waiting.

  She takes everything out and starts sorting through what I’ve found. Her job is to put everything away. I go back upstairs with my empty bag, but on the way I stop at my flat and go to my bedroom to find my red rucksack. It’s not as big as the one Obi gave me but it’s big enough, and much easier to carry.

  The next time I just fill my rucksack, and that means I can run down the stairs with the food. I can’t carry as much each time but it makes me much faster, and after a few runs up and down the food is starting to pile up. There are lots of tins and bags of food and bottles of oil. I also find quite a few packets of biscuits, and in one flat, six bars of chocolate.

  ‘I think it’s time for a rest. And lunch,’ Dory says.

  She picks up a couple of tins from a large stack and we go back into her flat. It’s potato and leek soup. I’ve never had it before and I’m not sure if I’ll like it.

  Dory sees my spoon hovering over the bowl.

  ‘Even if you don’t like it, Ade, you must eat some,’ she says.

  It doesn’t taste too bad. In fact, it doesn’t taste much of anything. When we’ve finished eating, we play a quick game of cards before we get back to work.

  Obi doesn’t come to eat with us today. Dory says we’ll see him later. Before I leave, Dory gives me a box of crackers to take Mum with a l
ittle bowl of the soup.

  The day seems to be over more quickly than usual. I find some good things after lunch. Some big bottles of water that I’ll tell Obi about later, and a large orange net bag of onions which Dory was really pleased about. My scrapbook’s filling up with all the lists of food. I must have done about four pages today.

  Before I know it, I can hear Dory and Obi’s voices from inside Dory’s flat and I can smell something cooking for dinner. When I get to the front door, though, I don’t go in straight away. I’m not sure why.

  I wait for a moment and listen to what they are saying.

  It’s about how upset someone is.

  They must be talking about the person Obi rescued from the other tower. I hear Obi say, ‘He’s not in a good way,’ and, ‘No one should have to see that,’ and, ‘We’ll have to keep an eye on him.’ And then they start talking about the food we have and I go in.

  After dinner, Dory says that I’ve worked hard today so I should go to the flat where we’re storing all the food and pick something for dessert.

  It’s a little bit like being in a funny sort of shop. I go to the sofa where Dory said she put all the sweet things and there’s a big pile of different types of biscuits, bags of cakes that look like little boats and large blocks of chocolate.

  I have to rummage around for a little while before I find what I’m looking for. I found it in the first flat I went into this morning. A little plastic box full of chin chin. Little crunchy pieces of chin chin.

  Mum used to make it for me as a treat but I haven’t had it in a long time. She used to let me cut the dough into small squares and then she would drop them into a pan of hot oil to fry them. She’d stir, stir, stir and then scoop them out of the pan onto a plate with a square of kitchen roll on it. The smell they’d make when they were cooking used to hang around for days afterwards, long after we had finished eating them all.

  I shake the little box that I found and it rattles.

  ‘Good choice, kid,’ Obi says, and we sit eating the chin chin until it’s all gone.