Boy in the Tower Read online

  ‘You have to smother it with golden syrup, Ade. It’s the only way to have it,’ Dory says, putting a large spoonful onto her bowl so it’s covered with a thick coating of the dark yellow syrup. ‘Delicious.’

  I do the same, but she says, ‘More than that, Ade!’ so when I do start eating it, I like it. It’s sweet and warm and I finish my bowl quickly.

  I go up to one of the flats I haven’t looked in yet, to search for food, and I start filling my rucksack, as usual. On the stairs I meet Obi and Ben, who are carrying bottles of water down.

  Obi says, ‘Good morning, Ade,’ as we pass each other but Ben doesn’t say anything. He just gives me a little nod and he tries to make his lips smile.

  ‘Hello, Obi. Hello, Ben,’ I say.

  I think: Be all right, Gaia, be all right, Gaia, wherever you are. Every time I see Ben it reminds me that she left. I think hard about her every day, willing her to be all right, wherever she is.

  The days pass in much the same way as before Ben arrived. Except he’s just there with us, usually helping Obi with something. He eats with us every day now, but doesn’t speak much. He is still very upset. Sometimes we hear him crying.

  Sometimes Ben helps me collect food at the end of the day if I can’t carry it all, and I realize when he does, how lonely I was before, when it was just me and my backpack and all of those empty, deserted flats.

  ‘That’s a good haul today, Ade,’ Ben says to me one day as we walk down to Dory’s flat, me with my heavy backpack’s straps digging into my shoulders and Ben carrying a huge, bright blue bag awkwardly at his side so it doesn’t hit his legs.

  ‘How are you doing?’ he goes on.

  I think about his question. ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘It’s OK, you know, if you’re . . . not,’ Ben says. ‘It’s not easy. Living with someone who’s . . . in so much pain.’

  I don’t say anything but concentrate on walking down the steps, one foot after the other.

  ‘There are good days and bad days. On the good days, you think it might be the beginning of something better, and on the bad days, well, it feels like the world is closing in on you.’

  I know exactly what he means, about the world closing in on you. Sometimes the world seems like an impossibly large place, but other times it feels like it is too small and too dark. Like a black cave that has walls which move closer and closer to you with every second that passes.

  ‘You have to believe in those good days, though,’ he adds.

  I think of the days when Mum used to buy me the big tubs of ice cream, and how they made me forget the afternoons when she wouldn’t get out of bed.

  They were golden coloured.

  I look over to Ben.

  ‘I do,’ I say.

  ‘Good,’ Ben says.

  We don’t say anything else on the way down. I feel like we understand each other.

  I think Obi seems different when Ben is with us. It’s like he’s always watching him a bit out of the corner of his eye. It’s funny, though, because it makes me sometimes wish that it was back like the times when Ben wasn’t here. When it was just me and Mum and Dory and Obi.

  I think that if Ben hadn’t arrived then I’d be the one helping Obi all day. Not Ben. But I don’t like thinking that, so I push the thought away.

  One day, though, Ben hurts his back when he is lifting something. He has to stop working and go and lie down for a while.

  I worry a little bit that I might have made it happen by thinking about Ben not being here, because just after it happens, Obi asks me if I’ll help him that day instead.

  But I forget about this soon enough.

  Because at last I find out why the Bluchers aren’t able to destroy our tower.

  Chapter Forty

  Obi takes me down to the basement again. I haven’t been there since the day he got ready to leave the tower. The day that I taped the oxygen mask onto his face.

  I walk past open doors leading to rooms with bottles and bottles of water stored in them. There are so many of them. I know Obi looks after the water but I had no idea that we’d got so much.

  I say as much to Obi but he doesn’t say anything back; he just makes a small noise that half sounds like a grunt and half like a sigh.

  There’s only one thing that’s different about the basement now: the swing doors that lead to the bit of corridor with the door that opens to the outside are sealed shut. There’s tape over the crack between where the swing doors meet in the middle and the top of the doors. There’s also some kind of fabric which is wedged all along the bottom. As if that isn’t enough, there’s this huge clear plastic sheet stretching right across the corridor that has been taped to the walls, a little way in front of the doors, so there’s not even a tiny gap.

  Obi sees me looking at it.

  ‘To keep the spores out,’ he explains.

  There is another room that has lots of paint pots in it and another that is full of bags of something white and something brown. This is the one we go inside.

  When I get closer to it, I read the labels: ROCK SALT, DE-ICING SALT, ICE-BREAKER WINTER GRIT. Bags and bags of the stuff. Piled up almost to the ceiling.

  Obi throws one of the larger ones up onto his shoulder to carry in a single swoop. It looks heavy and cumbersome but he starts walking out of the room with it hanging there on his shoulder and I follow. We walk up to about the fifth floor and when we get there, there is a little pile of things sitting in the middle of the corridor.

  There are a couple of brightly coloured scarves, a small plastic trowel, like the ones you use to dig soil up in the garden, a bucket and a pair of goggles. Obi puts the goggles on and ties both of the scarves around his face so you can’t see any part of it. Just the dark plastic of his goggles sticks out.

  He empties some salt from the bag into the bucket and picks up the little black trowel, and it looks like he is about to go into one of the flats when he turns to look at me. It is like he’s only just remembered that it is me who has come to help him.

  ‘You need a scarf to cover your face. Go and get one from Dory and come straight back.’

  I run up the stairs, and by the time I get to Dory’s flat I am breathing so fast it’s hard to speak.

  But Dory can understand me, even though I am gasping so much. She gives me two scarves which she pulls out of the bottom drawer of a chest.

  I run back down to Obi, who is standing exactly how I left him, as if he’d been frozen the whole time I was away.

  He helps me wrap the scarves around my face and ties them so tight, I think it’s going to hurt. But it doesn’t, it just feels quite hot and snug.

  ‘I’m going to go into this flat and I’ll be back in five minutes. If I don’t come out again, you must not come back in to get me.’

  ‘What do I do?’ I ask.

  ‘Nothing. You just go back to Dory and tell her what happened.’

  ‘But what will have happened?’ I say. And I can hear that my voice has got a funny little waver to it. It sounds like it’s going to break, somehow.

  ‘Well, it means that the spores will have got me, Ade,’ Obi says gently.

  ‘But why?’ I say. ‘Why are there spores in there?’

  And that’s when Obi tells me how he’s been keeping us safe.

  Bluchers can’t touch salt. They shrivel up and die if they touch it. Obi didn’t know it would work at first but it has kept us safe all this time.

  He found out about it just after everyone had left us behind, so he wasn’t able to tell anyone. No one else knows.

  ‘It won’t take them long to find out though,’ says Obi. ‘Not if an old codger like me could work it out. But everyone’s running scared from the spores. They’re worried about spreading them around. That’s why they stopped flying over, why no one’s come to rescue us.’

  That’s what Obi reckons anyway.

  I ask Obi what he does with the salt and he says he just empties it out of the window, all over the bottom of the building. Mo
st of it falls to the ground, protecting us with a circle of salt, but some of it lands on the windows and ledges on the way down. However it’s landing, it’s working: it’s keeping the Bluchers away.

  And Obi says it tells us another thing about the spores too. Because they aren’t flying up and landing and growing on the higher floors. They aren’t able to float high up. They’re keeping close to the ground, for some reason.

  ‘But how did you know, Obi? How did you know to use salt?’ I ask him.

  ‘Well, it sounds a bit far-fetched, Ade, to tell you the truth,’ Obi says, ‘but when I was your age, my mama used to read to me. Does your mum read to you?’

  ‘Yes.’ I nod, thinking briefly how I missed those times. The room would be lit by a lamp, so we could only see the pages of the book in front of us. I’d lean into Mum while her soft voice took us to faraway lands, just by reading about them.

  ‘Well, my mama used to read to me,’ Obi goes on. ‘Just from one book really. It was the only book we owned. It was full of stories. Stories, stories, stories. So many. My head’s full of them.

  ‘There was this one about a man who was so very angry with the people of his city that he salted it. The whole city. As a punishment. To curse it. How did it go again? “And Abimelech fought against the city all that day; and he took the city, and slew the people who were therein, and beat down the city and sowed it with salt.” The story went that if you salted the earth then the land became infertile, things wouldn’t grow in it. Well, when I was little I couldn’t stop thinking about Abimelech: the man who ruined a city just by using something as simple and common as salt! That whole city not being able to grow a single thing to feed it.

  ‘When the Bluchers arrived, it reminded me of Abimelech. I thought, Would they want to have a city that was salted, that was cursed? So I covered my face one day and went out there, even with those spores around. I didn’t get too close to them but I threw some salt out and some of it hit a Blucher. It wasn’t a direct hit but I’m telling you now, I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but it worked. It shrivelled right up before my eyes.

  ‘We already had a store of rock salt in the basement for when I grit the pathways in the winter, but I got as many extra bags as I could. And I tried to ring the police and tell them what I found out, but when I finally got through to someone, they just said they would make a note of it and thanked me for my call. I don’t think they understood the importance of what I was saying. Or maybe they had a lot of calls like that, people saying they had the answer. Either way, no one wanted to hear what I had to say.

  ‘We don’t have to burn them. We just need to salt the earth, and the Bluchers will go. But if I found this out, then someone else will too. And that’s when they will come and rescue us. It’s just a waiting game, Ade. We won’t be here for ever.’

  I have never properly thought about someone coming to rescue us. I think a part of me thought that we would always stay in the tower. Me, Mum, Obi and Dory. And Ben as well, now. Had I forgotten how big the world was beyond the tower walls? What it was like to be outside?

  Obi tells me that he has to start salting now and that he will come back out for salt after he has emptied each bucket. Then we’ll move on to the next flat along so that he makes sure he goes round the whole tower.

  My job is just to help put the salt into the bucket and make sure that Obi comes out of the flats OK. Obi says that he doesn’t think that the spores will be flying this high but you can’t be too sure, so that’s why we both have to wear scarves around our faces. Just in case.

  I ask if Ben goes into the flats with Obi but he says that he waited for him in the corridors just like I am going to.

  ‘There’s no point risking two lives,’ Obi says.

  We both pull our scarves tighter over our mouths and Obi goes into the first flat. He gives me his watch to look at, so I can see when five minutes have passed, and then he goes in.

  I watch the second hand go round and round the clock but the minute hand never seems to move. Obi’s watch is made of metal. I like feeling its weight in my hand. It’s smooth and cool to touch.

  In the end I give up looking at the hands of the watch and instead I pass it from one hand to the other and I count. On the two hundred and fifty-sixth pass, I hear Obi’s voice telling me to close my eyes, and when I say I have, I hear the door opening.

  After a few moments Obi says I can open my eyes again, and then we start putting more salt into the bucket and Obi moves to the next door. We do the same thing over and over at every door on the floor until we run out of salt. Then we have to go and get more salt from the room in the basement and keep going until all of that runs out too.

  ‘How do you know that’s enough, Obi?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t,’ he says. ‘We’ll have to keep an eye on them. See what they do next. If they look like they’re growing towards us in the morning, we’ll do it again. If the weather stays like this, we’ll be all right.’

  I ask him what he means.

  ‘Well, we’ve had dry weather for days and days now. If it starts to rain, then it will wash the salt away. Then there will be nothing to stop them.’

  ‘But it could rain at any time,’ I say, thinking of the days and days of rain that leaked from the sky just before the Bluchers arrived. Then I remember those days when you wake up to blue skies and sunshine, and by lunch time there are grey clouds and deep puddles everywhere.

  Up to now, we’ve been lucky with the weather, but it could change at any moment.

  ‘We’ve got a lot of salt, Ade,’ says Obi. ‘And remember, someone else will find out that it works against them too.’

  I don’t say anything, my mind still pondering the heavy rain clouds that until recently had choked our skies.

  ‘Then they’ll come and get us. They surely will.’

  I know Obi is trying to make me feel better, but his voice sounds a little bit different as he’s speaking to me. He’s too insistent, too bright, and his eyes look sad although he’s smiling with his mouth.

  It seems very much as if he is trying to hide something.

  Chapter Forty-one

  The following morning I climb onto my windowsill and look out to see if the salt is working against the Bluchers. It is. There is still an invisible line that they aren’t able to cross.

  The sky looks blue. It will be another fine day. There won’t be any rain today, there won’t be any rain today. If I think it enough times, it will come true.

  I have been thinking more about Mum. I’ve worked it out and Mum stopped going out about a year ago, just after the day I found her hurt and crying in the flat.

  Ben said that his wife hadn’t been outside for seven years. That’s much longer than Mum. I can’t stop thinking that Mum must be a bit better than Ben’s wife was. Maybe she’s not as ill as before.

  I think if we were rescued then she would come outside. Also, if she didn’t want to come, then there’s lots more of us to carry her out. Obviously, there’s me and Obi, but Dory would help and I think Ben would too.

  She would have to come.

  It wouldn’t be the same as when Ben’s wife had to go outside. I’d make sure of it.

  Dory is singing to herself when I go downstairs for breakfast that day. She says we will have something special for dinner tonight but she won’t tell me what. It’s a surprise.

  There’s no sign of Obi or Ben. Dory says that they have eaten already and they are doing something with the water tank on the roof. My face must look worried because the next thing she says is, ‘Don’t worry, you know they’ll be careful. And you’ve heard about Obi’s theory that the spores are not flying high over the ground.’

  We eat peanut butter on crackers that morning and have a little cupful of tinned fruit each too. I have a funny thing about tinned fruit because I always think it tastes a bit metallic, even when no one else does, so I eat my cup quickly and try to swallow it down without chewing too much.

  After I’ve taken Mum h
er breakfast I go up to a floor I haven’t searched yet, to start collecting more food. The first flat I go into is really smelly and I only find a couple of tins of dog food at the back of one of the cupboards. I don’t even have enough food to fill my rucksack, so I go into the next flat along.

  Straight away, I can tell that the person who used to live here liked making cakes. There are lots of bags of flour and little red tins of cocoa powder and cartons of eggs and little plastic packets of hundreds and thousands and silver balls.

  I stop to look at the photographs hanging on the wall. There is always a pretty woman in each photograph and two little boys. They are younger than me and they have dark, curly hair and big brown eyes. They are smiling in every photo and it makes me wonder where they are now and if they are still smiling as much as they are in the photos.

  There are a few photos up in our flat of me and Mum. There’s one when I’m a tiny baby and Mum’s smiling so hard it looks like her cheeks might crack. There’s another one when it’s my birthday and I’m sitting on Mum’s lap in front of a white birthday cake. They make me feel sad when I see them because things are so different now. There aren’t any photos from recently. Everyone knows you don’t take photos if you look unhappy in them.

  There is too much food to carry from this kitchen, so I start dividing it into piles in front of the window. It will make it easier for Dory when I bring it down.

  I put all the flour in one pile and sweet things in another, and in the end I have about seven different heaps of various foods. I will need to take several trips to carry this down.

  But just before I start loading it up, something catches my eye from out of the window.

  I think I see something move outside.

  From behind some of the trees.

  It is something or someone just running out of sight to hide. I look again and stare and stare at the little spot where I think I saw something. I see again a flicker of movement in one of the bushes there.

  As if someone is hiding just behind it.