Boy in the Tower Read online

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  The next day is much the same. I bring food from the top floor down to Dory and she puts it all into different piles in the flat. All the bags of rice and pasta are kept in the bath, bottles are put in the kitchen and tins are kept in the bedroom.

  Dory says I can take a break from carrying the food after lunch and tells me to arrange the tins for a bit. I spend a long time building them up into a castle with four tall turrets at each corner and battlements at the top of the walls. Dory laughs when she sees it.

  ‘That wasn’t exactly what I meant, Ade, but a splendid piece of work, nonetheless,’ she says, and I feel pinkly glad from her praise.

  Sometimes it feels like it has always been Dory, Obi and me and that it will go on this way, unchanging, for ever. That evening, though, as I approach Dory’s door for dinner, I hear something new, something different. It isn’t Obi’s low, deep rumble of a voice or Dory’s singsong way of speaking; it is someone else, someone new. I stop myself from opening the door straight away as though I want to prepare myself.

  It must be the person from Gaia’s tower, the person that Obi rescued. Someone who might be able to tell me where Gaia is. They might know her. They might have seen her leave, perhaps. My heart seems to skip two beats, one after another, and I feel excited and oddly nervous, which makes me dally in the doorway for just a few more minutes before I knock on the door.

  ‘That’s Ade,’ I hear Dory say. ‘Come in, Ade!’

  I push the door open slowly.

  ‘Now, Ade, what have I told you about knocking?’ Dory chides. ‘You know you can come straight in.’

  There is a tall thin man sitting at the table. He has sandy hair that looks like it is a bit overgrown and a wiry blond beard that makes his face look quite long.

  Dory says to me, ‘This is Ben, Ade, say hello.’

  ‘Hello, Ben,’ I say. I pause. I want to ask him about Gaia straight away but something about the way he looks stops me.

  Ben’s eyes are red as if he has rubbed them really, really hard and his hair is sticking up all over the place and looks greasy.

  Of course, we are all looking a bit grubby these days. We don’t wash hardly at all any more. Water is too precious to waste on washing, Obi says. Instead, we’ve all got lots of packs of baby wipes which we use but there’s nothing we can do about our hair. I’ve never seen Obi’s hair sticking up like that, though.

  I decide to wait until later to ask Ben if he knows Gaia and if she left the tower.

  Ben doesn’t talk much that evening. He doesn’t join in when Dory, Obi and I tell each other what our favourite animals are. (Me: dog, Dory: elephant, Obi: gorilla.) And he doesn’t say, ‘That’s great, Dory, thanks for dinner,’ when he finishes eating, like Obi and I always do.

  He just sits there, eating really slowly. After I finish, Dory spoons out some food on a plate for me to take up to Mum.

  ‘Do you want to take this now, Ade, and then come back for some cards? Or shall we see you in the morning?’

  I’m just about to say, ‘I’ll come back,’ when Ben starts speaking.

  ‘Where’s his mum?’ he says.

  And he looks from me to Dory to Obi.

  No one says anything.

  It’s one of the things that from the very beginning made me like Dory and Obi. They’ve always seemed to know, without me telling them, that I don’t want to talk about Mum not coming out of our flat. It’s not that we don’t talk about Mum. They often say, ‘How’s your mum doing, Ade?’ or, ‘I hope your mum likes dinner tonight.’ And sometimes I tell them little stories about Mum and me. But they’ve never asked me, ‘Why don’t we see your mum?’ or, ‘What’s wrong with your mum, Ade?’ And they never sound angry or cross with her when we do talk about her.

  Not like Michael’s mum. She used to say to me all the time, ‘I don’t know what that mother of yours is thinking.’ She would sound so mad when she said it, it was as if she was spitting the words from her mouth, like orange pips.

  ‘Why isn’t she with him?’ Ben is saying now. His voice is getting louder now and his stare is getting harder as he looks at each one of us. I think I can feel it zapping me in the face through the air.

  I can see that Dory and Obi are trying to think of the right thing to say. They don’t want to tell him that Mum can’t leave the flat, but at the same time there isn’t much more to say than that. So I just tell him.

  ‘Oh,’ says Ben. ‘Can’t she walk very well?’

  ‘No, it’s not like that,’ I say. ‘She doesn’t want to go out of the flat. She doesn’t like it so much that she can’t do it.’

  Ben is looking at me so hard now that his eyes start watering. Then I realize his eyes aren’t watering, he’s crying. Dory puts a hand on his shoulder because he’s really sobbing now and he’s not looking at me any more, he’s put his face right down onto his plate of food.

  ‘Come on, Ade,’ Obi says, ‘I’ll walk up with you.’

  I stand up, and even though I don’t want to go because I haven’t asked Ben about Gaia yet, I walk to the door with Obi. We leave Dory’s flat and start climbing up the stairs. Because it’s summer there’s still plenty of daylight until quite late, which means we don’t need to worry about taking torches around with us after dinner. I say this to Obi and he nods.

  ‘Why did Ben cry when I told him about Mum?’ I ask.

  And what Obi tells me next really surprises me because I thought Mum was the only person who didn’t like going out.

  ‘Ben had a wife who was a bit like your mum,’ he says. ‘She didn’t like leaving her bedroom. But she died. And that’s why he’s so sad.’

  I can’t believe that there are other people like Mum. Especially that there was someone like Mum who didn’t live very far away, who was only down the street in Gaia’s tower.

  I suppose that only the people who really couldn’t leave would have stayed, like Mum and then me because I won’t leave her, and Ben’s wife and then Ben because he wouldn’t leave her.

  I wonder why Dory and Obi stayed. I’ll ask them sometime. They must have a reason too.

  I suppose there are so many of us in all these towers, all on top of each other, one family above another and another and another so that we are stretching to the sky, that maybe it’s not so strange that there was someone like Mum in Gaia’s tower.

  Maybe there was another Dory and another Obi too.

  Perhaps there was another Ade.

  And then we’re at my flat. Obi tells me to wait for a little while but to come back down in a bit if I want to. Then he leaves and I listen to his footsteps disappear down the corridor.

  Mum’s bedroom is quiet and dark. I pull open the curtain a crack, so the last of the day’s sunlight makes a yellow line on the wall.

  Mum doesn’t wake up. I take her dirty plate and carefully place her dinner on the table. It’s funny to think she hasn’t met Obi or Dory or even Ben. I wonder if she wants to know how I’m getting all this food now and where I go all day. Does she think I’m still going to school? Has she looked outside and seen what the Bluchers have done?

  I look at her sleeping face.

  She is so still and silent but I can hear the tiny sighs as she breathes in and out. I leave her then, tiptoe out of the room and close the door behind me.

  Only when I’m walking back down to Dory’s flat do I remember that I forgot to shut the curtain, but the thought makes me feel glad somehow. Because I know that tomorrow morning, Mum will wake up in the sunshine.

  Not in darkness.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  The next night Dory asks me to take a plate of dinner to Ben. I suppose he doesn’t want to eat with us for some reason. He has moved into a flat on the floor below Dory.

  Dinner was what Dory called a ‘mish-mash’ tonight. Some rice, some kidney beans, little chopped-up onions and thick slices of frankfurter sausage, all fried up together. I liked it.

  I knock on his door and Ben calls me in. He
is lying on the sofa, looking straight up at the ceiling. He doesn’t move when I come in. I put the plate down on a little table and go into his kitchen to find a fork for him.

  I put the fork down carefully next to the plate and say, ‘It’s nice and tasty.’

  Ben says, ‘Dory’s good at cooking,’ which surprises me because I don’t think he has ever said that to her.

  I think of asking about Gaia, but Ben’s looking away from me like he wants me to go, so I walk to the door to leave. Then I hear him call out to me. ‘Ade, come back here a moment.’

  I walk back into the room and see that Ben is sitting up now, looking directly ahead.

  ‘How’s your mum doing? Is she coping OK?’

  ‘I think so,’ I say.

  ‘When my wife Evie found out about the spores, I thought she was glad that there was a real reason why she couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t force her any more because she would say, “But what about the spores? We can’t leave the block now.”’

  He pauses and then asks, ‘Does your mum do that?’

  I don’t say anything but I come to sit down next to Ben.

  We both sit looking forward, not looking at each other. Ben keeps talking.

  ‘I pleaded with Evie to leave. You know, when everyone was packing up. I told her that our tower would fall if we stayed there, that we would die when that happened, but it didn’t bother her. She didn’t hear what I was saying. She’d stopped hearing me. I knew she couldn’t do it, she hadn’t been outside for five years, but I couldn’t stop pleading with her, trying to reason with her.

  ‘Then one morning we woke up and it was so quiet. I thought we were the only ones left here. Everything stopped working, the water, the electricity, and I knew we didn’t have long. The Bluchers were taking control and there was no one to stop them.

  ‘And then there was the night I saw the lights coming from this tower. It was you, right? Obi said it was you . . .’

  I nod.

  ‘I could see that your tower was protected somehow, that the Bluchers weren’t touching it. Ours was slowly crumbling beneath us. I hoped – I hoped that you would come for us. You were our very last chance. No one else would come. I couldn’t believe it when I heard Obi’s voice calling to us from the corridor. It was like a miracle.

  ‘But Evie wasn’t ready to go. She didn’t want to come with us. She told us to leave her there. But I could never have left her. We made her come with us. She struggled and hit out, she spat in Obi’s face. She was crying and shouting. I’d never heard her voice like that before. She sounded like a different person, not like the woman I married. Evie was such a gentle person, she would never have wanted to hurt anybody.

  ‘We got her down to the lower floors, though, and Obi said that he would take her first. We put the oxygen mask on her, and wrapped her up in scarves and anything we had. She wasn’t lashing out any more; all the fight had gone out of her. Obi had to carry her. She couldn’t stand properly. I watched them leave from the window.

  ‘They made it almost halfway to your tower; they didn’t have far to go. But then she seemed to come alive all of a sudden. She started thrashing about and Obi couldn’t hold her. I don’t blame him. I blame myself. I should have carried her. Maybe she wouldn’t have started struggling if I had been holding her. She fell to the ground and she pulled off her mask, pulled off the scarves. That’s how she died. Just by breathing in a lungful of the outside air. It only took moments.

  ‘From where I was standing, I could see Obi trying to revive her, but then he had to just take her mask and walk away. He came back to the tower for me. He didn’t speak to me when he came back; he just said, “We don’t have much time,” and then he started getting me ready with Evie’s mask and covering my face. He marched me out of the building and across to your tower, but he couldn’t avoid us going past Evie on the way, she was right in the middle of where we needed to go.

  ‘She looked like she was sleeping: her hair was spread out from her head like a fan, her eyes closed. She looked sort of lit up from the glow of the Bluchers that were all around her. Lit up. Lit up and beautiful. The last time I shall ever see her, that is how she looked.’

  I don’t know what to say, but before I can speak, Ben starts talking again.

  ‘I got so mad with Obi when we got here. I started taking it out on him. I blamed all of you. If you’d left us, we’d have died together when our tower fell, and now she’s gone and I don’t know why I’m still here without her. I couldn’t make sense of it. I’m not sure if I ever truly will. But I know now it wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just the phobia inside her, it was stronger than I knew. Obi’s helped me to start to see that. And I want to thank you, Ade, for finding us in the tower. When you saw my torch and signalled back to us. You gave us our last chance that night. You weren’t to know that Evie didn’t want it. But thank you. Thank you for trying to rescue us.’

  Tears run down Ben’s face and fall onto his trousers, making little wet circles, but he doesn’t stop to wipe them away. They just keep falling. It is so quiet that I think I can hear them fall. Plop, plop, plop they go, each time they splash onto his jeans.

  We sit together for a long time, neither of us saying anything at all. Ben’s plate of rice lies on the table, untouched, in front of us.

  My head feels too full of information, like it is full up now and things are falling out the top of it. I am thinking about how sad Ben is and how sad it is that his wife is not with us now. And I feel funny that Ben thinks I saved him. I was only thinking of Gaia, really; that’s who I thought I was rescuing. And when I think about all these things, I can feel tears suddenly appear in my eyes but I blink them away.

  I don’t want to cry in front of Ben.

  I don’t know how I can stand up and leave Ben on the sofa crying, but in the end he says, ‘You’d better get going. Thanks for bringing the food down.’

  I know that he wants me to go.

  I don’t think I was afraid of Ben before exactly, but I didn’t trust him in the same way as I did Obi and Dory. Now that he’s told me about his wife and cried in front of me and everything, it’s different. I think we understand each other a bit better now. I think I can trust him too.

  I get up to leave but before I go out through the door, I turn round.

  ‘Ben, did you know Gaia? She lived on the seventeenth. She had two brothers.’

  Ben looks up at me and I can see he is trying to think.

  ‘The family with the three kids? Yes, one girl and two boys. Yeah, I think I know them.’

  ‘Do you know where they are?’

  ‘They packed up and left. Like everyone else. There was no one but me and Evie there, in the end.’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ I say. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  ‘See you tomorrow, Ade. Sleep well.’

  Even though my head hurts from thinking about everything, I can’t stop myself from smiling as I walk down the corridor.

  I speak to Gaia in my head.

  You’re all right, I say. You’re all right, you’re all right.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Before I go downstairs the following morning, I look out of the window. I sit up on the windowsill like I used to and press my forehead against the glass.

  I don’t recognize the view below me. You can’t see where the buildings used to be any more or where cars used to drive or where my school playground was. It all looks the same now. I can’t even make out the exact space where Gaia’s tower once stood.

  The space would be completely flat but the trees are still standing. I can see a tall cluster of them in the distance and I wonder if that’s where the park was. The trees look very green and leafy and bushy, as if they prefer life without buildings all around them.

  The moving silver-blue colour of the Bluchers shimmers. It looks a bit bluer than before, I think. I can see another colour around it now, though. I can see green. Things are starting to grow among the Bluchers, in the places that used to be covered in ta
rmac or built on with bricks.

  We are the only building standing now. The only tower left. I can’t decide if the world looks bigger or smaller now that it hasn’t got any buildings. In one way, it looks like the ground stretches on and on, but in another way, without the towers and blocks and houses, it’s just an empty space. Even the really tall building that looked like it was going to have a point at its very top has fallen now. Someone told me at the time that it was a skyscraper. They hadn’t even finished building it after all those months and months of work, but it had still towered over everything else. And now you can’t even see where it used to stand.

  I draw a picture of our tower block surrounded by the Bluchers in my book, but I get the sizes wrong so the Bluchers look bigger than they are in real life and are as high as the fifth floor.

  But when I think about it I’m not sure how tall they are now because I’ve only seen them from looking down on them, not looking up.

  Obi’s left some water outside our door, which I put in the kitchen for Mum. Down at Dory’s, we try only to use water for drinking and not for anything else. Dory never washes up our plates, for example. She just takes some fresh ones from someone’s kitchen cupboards every mealtime. ‘Ta-da!’ says Dory when she hands us a fresh new plate. There’s a flat on her floor which is full of piles and piles of our dirty old plates. There’s quite a bad smell in there now and I try to avoid going in as much as I can, but sometimes it’s my turn to stack up the dirties, in which case I have to take a really big breath before I open the door and hope for the best. I still prefer that to washing up, though.

  I do worry what we’ll do if we run out of water. I can’t forget the time when the taps stopped working. It feels like a long time ago, but just the thought of it makes my head start to spin again because when I remember, I’m right back there again, lying on the sofa, floppy and sleepy and helpless.

  Dory has made porridge for breakfast this morning. It’s thick and grey-looking and sticks to the bowl. I’m not sure I’m going to like it.