Boy in the Tower Read online

  I tell him about what I saw when I was looking out of the windows. How I thought it might be someone who needed help. That I’d run down to get myself ready to help and that there hadn’t been time to go and find him or tell Dory.

  I describe how the Blucher burst all over me but how it hadn’t hurt and how one of them wrapped a vine around my leg to trap me and that I couldn’t find anyone out there in the end.

  Apart from just one thing.

  And I point to the cat, which is still sitting patiently at our feet, as if it is waiting for the story to turn to it.

  Chapter Forty-five

  ‘What are you going to call him, Ade?’ Dory asks me as she scratches the pink skin on his tummy.

  The cat is lying on his back in a little patch of sunlight on the sofa, in between us both. Dory was delighted when she heard how I’d rescued him.

  ‘You are made of stern stuff, Ade,’ she tells me. And she insists on feeding the cat one of our tins of tuna before Obi stops her and says that cat food will do well enough.

  Obi sends me off to a couple of flats whose owners used to own cats, and soon I have filled my rucksack with tins of cat food and bags of little fish-shaped biscuits. I also find a litter tray and a sack of tiny white stones to fill it with. The litter is heavy and I have to keep stopping to rest while I am carrying it. I wonder about asking Obi to help me, but even though he didn’t shout at me, I think he is still a little bit annoyed that I left the tower and brought back a cat with me, so I don’t ask him.

  ‘I’m not sure. What do you think?’ I say.

  ‘How about Bluchy?’ says Dory. ‘Because he survived the Bluchers. He’s quite the hero, isn’t he?’

  ‘Hmm, how about Mystery?’ says Obi. ‘Why cats? What is it about him that stops the spores from affecting him?’ He looks at the cat suspiciously and then shouts out, ‘Oh!’ as it jumps right onto his lap.

  ‘Get off! Get off!’ says Obi, but the cat ignores him and settles himself down comfortably.

  Obi’s right. It’s odd that the spores didn’t kill him. I wonder if there are other animals out there who have not been affected either.

  I can’t think what he should be called. There are lots of names I could have easily called him, like Smoky or Misty, because he’s a soft grey colour, with darker grey stripes from his nose to his tail. But I’ve always had this funny idea that animals already have names that their mums have given them, and when humans come along and give them a new one, they don’t like it very much. I know I wouldn’t like being called anything else other than Ade. I think he needs to show me what his name is and then that’s what we’ll call him. But I feel a little silly telling this to Dory because no one else seems to think it.

  ‘You must name him,’ Dory says. ‘He’s yours now. It will come to you. Look how he follows you around all over the room. He knows he belongs to you.’

  Dory starts humming the same tune she was singing this morning and goes into the kitchen to make some tea for us. Even Ben seems to like the cat. He came to Dory’s too to see how I was but he hasn’t left. He spent a long time tying bits of balled-up paper and corks to a piece of string which he is dragging across the floor for the cat to chase.

  It’s the first time that all four of us have been together without having a meal to eat before us. There’s normally so much to do that we don’t really spend time all together, unless we’re eating.

  My skin still feels a little bit scratchy from the anti-fungal powder that Obi made me put on. It turns out that the little room next to the outside door is where we get ‘decontaminated’ if we ever go outside. That basically means to get the spores off if there are any on us somehow. Obi wrote it down for me to put in my book when we got back upstairs.

  Obi had set up the room just before he went to the other tower where he found Ben and Evie.

  First you have to take off all your clothes and put them in a plastic bag which you then put into another plastic bag and then into another bin bag. When you are completely naked and feeling a bit cold by then, you close your mouth and eyes really, really tight and cover yourself with the anti-fungal powder.

  I mean really cover yourself. All over. And then, when you think you are done and finished, you do it again. I looked as white as anything. By the way, Obi was telling me what to do from outside the room, by shouting through the doorway; he didn’t see me do any of this.

  Then you have to wait for ten minutes. Just in case. That was the worst bit, because you just want to go home and sit on the sofa or go and have something to eat at this point, but you have to just stand and wait in the middle of the room feeling shivery for what feels like a long time. But it’s a small price to pay for not bringing spores in, I guess, and at least I had the cat with me, who also needed a good coating of powder.

  He kept licking it off though, and then shaking his head afterwards as if to say, This tastes bad but I can’t bear to have this powder on me. After that, you take one of the towels out of the cupboard to cover yourself with and you can come out.

  Obi decontaminated himself after me, and while he did that, I went through the swing doors into Obi’s room, where he’d told me to help myself to some clothes. They were all far too big of course, but it was just until I went back upstairs to get some of my own.

  When Obi was dressed and he had sealed up the doors and the plastic sheet properly again, he decided it was a good idea to salt the corridor floor.

  ‘Just in case,’ he said. He was saying those words a lot today. We spent a bit of time pushing the salt over the floor to cover it, and then we came up to Dory’s flat, where we’ve been ever since.

  Obi didn’t speak to me a lot while we were clearing up the basement.

  I wanted to say, ‘Are you cross with me, Obi?’ but I couldn’t quite bring myself to say the words.

  In the end, I just asked him a question. I asked about something that was on my mind, because I thought it might be on his too, and I wondered if that was why he wasn’t talking.

  ‘Obi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did that Blucher hold onto me like that? They don’t eat humans. So why did it hold onto my leg?’

  ‘Yes, I was wondering about that too,’ Obi said. ‘I wonder if it had something to do with that little friend of yours.’

  ‘What? Gaia?’

  ‘No, Ade,’ said Obi gently. ‘The cat. You were holding him when the Blucher attacked you, right?’

  I nodded. We both looked at him, playing with his own shadow in a square of sunlight coming through one of the windows.

  ‘Let’s have a closer look at him. Go and get him, Ade.’

  I went over and picked him up. He immediately started purring into my shoulder. He was such a friendly cat.

  ‘Now, let’s see. What’s this?’

  He fingered a thin, grubby red collar around the cat’s neck. He took it off carefully and moved it around in his hands until we could see the little metal buckle.

  ‘I’m not sure, but I think they were after that.’

  ‘But it’s so tiny!’ I said.

  ‘They’re hungry,’ Obi said grimly.

  We didn’t speak about it again.

  We spend the rest of the afternoon just sitting in Dory’s flat, eating a tin of ginger biscuits that I found a week ago, and playing with the cat. Obi and Ben look really tired for some reason, and they sit slumped on the sofa for quite a while as Dory fusses over the circle of bruising around my leg where the Blucher had hold of me. To take my mind off it, Dory makes us all sit round the table together and play a new card game which she calls Memory.

  She lays out all the cards face down on the table, so its entire surface is covered. Then you have to turn over one card for everyone to see and then pick up another to see if you can find the same card in a different suit. If you find a pair, then you take those and put them on your pile.

  The game goes on and on.

  Ben, Obi and I aren’t very good at it and Dory keeps finding all the p
airs. Then suddenly Obi starts picking out lots of pairs until he has quite a large pile. And then Ben and I find a few each too.

  When we finish the game, everyone gets quite excited about who will pick up the last few cards.

  Ben laughs out loud when Obi picks up the wrong card. The cat lies sleeping on my lap, warm and soft. And in those few hours, I forget that only earlier that day, I’d been quite sure that I was about to die.

  Chapter Forty-six

  That night, we eat well. Dory puts down plates of meat and rice, saying, ‘Ta-da!’ in a loud, happy voice as she does. It reminds me of the way Gaia shouted, ‘Happy birthday!’ when she jumped out from behind a tree right in front of me on my last birthday.

  We haven’t eaten fresh meat like this since the very first time I ate with Obi and Dory. It’s the same meat. A bit like chicken, but it looks, and tastes, darker. It has more flavour and is more of a grey-purple colour.

  We eat hungrily, and there is the quiet that comes when everyone is eating and enjoying what’s in their mouths so much that they don’t really want to talk. I like that kind of quiet. Just little sounds of forks and knives on plates and lots of small sighs that mean, This tastes just great.

  It is Dory who breaks the silence. She can’t help herself. She looks so excited about something that she has to speak.

  ‘Do you like dinner tonight, everyone?’ she asks.

  We all say, ‘Yes, Dory,’ and, ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘Can you guess where the meat’s from, Ade?’ she says.

  I have a think. It’s nothing that I’ve found in another flat and we haven’t opened fridges and freezers for meat for a long time.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘but we had it the first time I met you.’

  Dory claps her hands to her cheeks. Obi smiles.

  ‘So we did!’ she exclaims. ‘Those were the last ones I had left in the freezer, just after the power went out. But these are fresh ones. Nice and fresh.’

  She then turns to Ben. ‘Benjamin, do you like it? Do you know where I got it from?’

  Ben says that he does like it and he doesn’t know.

  There’s quiet again before Dory starts asking more questions.

  ‘Do you know what type of meat this is, Ade? Can you take a guess?’

  I say, ‘Chicken?’

  Dory shakes her head. Her mouth is in a small, tight smile that makes her whole face crinkle.

  ‘Ben?’ she says. ‘Do you know?’

  He says, ‘No, Dory.’

  ‘Ade’s cat?’ she says, and throws the cat a little piece of meat. ‘I bet you know what this is.’ The cat sniffs the meat, eats it straight away and looks up, meowing as if he’s answering her.

  ‘That’s quite right, little cat. That’s what it is,’ Dory says back to him.

  ‘What kind of meat is it, Dory?’ I say.

  ‘Well, seeing as you’ve asked, Ade, I can tell you that this is none other than the tender breast meat from a lovely, fat, succulent pigeon!’ Dory says, beaming.

  ‘But where did you get it from?’ I ask. I didn’t know you could eat pigeons.

  Now Dory looks even prouder and she sits a little taller in her chair. ‘I caught it,’ she says.

  ‘But how did you catch it?’ I ask. ‘They always fly away when you go near them.’ I remember running past them on the pavement and their soft wings rising up around me like a grey cloud.

  ‘Maybe I could show you tomorrow. We could do with some more,’ she says.

  She catches Obi’s eye and he smiles back at her. As if he knows a secret which we don’t.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  The next morning, I walk down the stairs to Dory with Pigeon following me close behind.

  After Dory fed him the piece from her plate last night, he didn’t stop meowing for scraps of the pigeon meat, and he even jumped up onto the table when we had finished, to lick the plates.

  I wondered if he was trying to tell me that his name was Pigeon, and even though it sounds a bit funny at first, the name fits. It seems to suit him. His grey stripes could be feathers and they are exactly the right sort of pigeon colour.

  He seems excited, like me, that we are going pigeon-hunting today. He keeps close to my heels so I almost trip over him, and then he jumps up onto my shoulders where he perches like a bird.

  Dory is wearing a flat kind of hat this morning and she’s sitting on the arm of the sofa waiting for us.

  ‘We’ll have breakfast later. When we’ve caught our first one,’ she tells us.

  She goes into the corner of the room and wheels out one of those trolleys that you use for shopping, just like the one I first used to carry food in from the top flats. ‘It’s got everything we need inside it,’ she says, and gently taps it twice.

  ‘Pigeon is going to have to wait here for us,’ Dory tells me.

  Pigeon looks at both of us with really big eyes. They say, Don’t leave me here alone.

  I think Dory’s thinking the same thing because she says, ‘Sorry, Buster, but that’s the way it has to be.’ She puts some cat treats in a saucer that has little pink roses on it and bits of gold around the rim, and while he’s eating them, we leave.

  ‘I wasn’t able to risk it for a while because of the spores, you see. Otherwise we could have been eating it all along. We’ll wear scarves just in case, but you know Obi doesn’t think the spores are able to fly very high, so as long as we go to one of the top floors, we’ll be just fine.’

  In the end we go to the fifteenth floor and we find a flat that has an empty balcony. Dory pulls out some scarves that we wrap around our faces. She says something to me but I can’t hear her through her scarf, so she makes a little hole for her mouth and says, ‘First we need to get their attention.’

  She pulls out a clear plastic bag of seeds from the trolley.

  ‘Do you want to come with me? Or wait inside?’

  I say that I will come with her. Dory checks something in her pocket and then says, ‘Ready?’

  She pulls her scarf around her mouth to cover up the hole, opens the balcony doors and we go outside.

  As far as we can see there is just the green of plants and the funny colour of the Bluchers. The tops of the trees look like bubbly green clouds, all in different shades, and the patches of thick grasses make odd little shapes among them. There are other colours too, reds and yellows and blues, which must be flowers that have sprung up here and there.

  I can’t see any pigeons though. And then Dory starts calling to them.

  She cups both her hands over her mouth and makes a hooting sound.

  Hoo, hoo, hoo.

  Over and over.

  First one way and then the other. Then she grabs a handful of seed from the bag and gestures to me to take one.

  From out of the trees, we see their little grey bodies take to the air and start to fly up to where we are. We hear the sound of their wings beating just before they land in any space they can on the tiny balcony. In the moments before they arrive, Dory throws her handful of seeds onto the floor, and within seconds, each seed has been furiously pecked and eaten.

  I throw my handful then, and there is a flurry of movement as they move on to the new lot of seeds. We keep this up for a couple of handfuls each and then Dory passes me the seed bag to hold.

  She throws a large scattering of seeds next to one of the walls and then she bends down low straight away. All of the pigeons’ backs are to her, pecking away, and then, as quick as a step, Dory picks up a pigeon that is right in front of her. She presses the startled, fat-looking bird to her chest and brings out a bag from her pocket which she puts the bird inside.

  Dory throws a last handful of seeds out into the open air, beyond the balcony, and we watch all the pigeons fly off to follow them. When they are all gone, we go back inside.

  With the doors firmly shut and our scarves off, Dory opens the bag slowly so I can see its face. She holds it so firmly, it doesn’t seem panicked, just mildly curious about what is happening. Dory
looks as comfortable holding the bird snugly on her lap as I felt when I was holding Pigeon asleep on my legs last night.

  ‘Good girl, good girl. No need to fret there.’ Dory speaks in a low voice which sounds very much like the Hoo calls that she made when we first came out onto the balcony.

  ‘How do you know how to do that, Dory?’ I ask.

  ‘My father showed me how. It’s as easy as pie. You just have to do it quickly. They don’t like a ditherer, do pigeons. I must have caught my first pigeon when I was much younger than you are now. Maybe four or five years old. I got my first one in the bag, and I haven’t stopped doing it since. Before all this Bluchers business, pigeon meat was pretty much the only meat I ever ate. I’d go down to that little garden bit – you know where there was some grass at the bottom of the tower, call to my pigeons and then, bam! Dinner! If only the ovens were working and I could make you roasted pigeon and pigeon pie as quick as looking at you. But the stew’s quite nice and you can fry it up. It’s not as good, but it’s all right.

  ‘People round here used to think I was awfully strange. I am, I suppose. Always feeding the pigeons, you see. They don’t like them, they call them flying rats and things like that. Don’t know what’s good for them. Don’t realize it’s their dinner flying right past their noses!

  ‘One lady called the police about me – she said that they should make me stop feeding them! I said to them, I’m not breaking any laws, am I? And I wasn’t, you see, so they couldn’t do anything about it. Just asked me to have a bit more consideration. I started coming down at night after that, so no one would say anything. I suppose some people just don’t like them. They feel a bit of fear for them. They can’t see how beautiful they are, like this little one here.’

  ‘I like them,’ I say. A memory of a grey morning pops into my head then. Of an old woman who was feeding the pigeons at the bottom of the tower. Michael’s mum had tutted when we had to walk past. The woman was completely surrounded by birds, with piles of snow-white breadcrumbs scattered over the ground. I had seen Dory before, after all.