Boy in the Tower Read online

  ‘Anyway, enough of my rambling on. It’s time for breakfast!’ says Dory.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  The pigeon goes into a cage in Dory’s flat where it puffs up its feathers and flattens itself down. It looks a bit like a fluffy ball, sitting there. Pigeon watches its every move, but when he realizes it isn’t going to fly away, he comes and sits down at the bottom of the table, by our feet.

  We eat porridge again that morning. We are running low on golden syrup now and have to make do with a much smaller yellow blob in the middle of our bowls.

  After breakfast, we go back upstairs and Dory catches another two pigeons quite easily. Then she asks me if I want to have a go at catching them.

  She shows me how you need to choose the one you want to catch and then you keep your eyes on it so much, it seems like all the others disappear. When that happens, you swoop your arms down and pick it up. Simple.

  I don’t find it very easy. I keep hesitating about how to pick them up, and they fly away before I can get my hands around them. After about five tries, Dory says I must try and imagine that I am picking Pigeon up instead, and the next time I do it, I get one. It’s a little white and grey bird, with black beady eyes.

  I suddenly wish I could show Gaia the bird I’ve caught. I wish she could have seen me swoop down and pick it up and press it close to my chest to stop it from panicking. I know that she’d be good at catching pigeons too.

  I’ll show her how to do it when I see her again, I think.

  But then another thought fills my head: What if I don’t see Gaia again? What if we don’t make it out of the tower? What if I can’t find her? What if I never see Gaia again?

  The thought makes the world feel like it’s tipping over and I suddenly feel sick with the realization that I’ll never be able to speak to her again. It’s a horrible, horrible feeling.

  I can’t concentrate on what I’m doing and I loosen my grip on the pigeon I’ve just caught; and it starts flapping and I can’t hold onto it. I let it go and it flies off frantically until it becomes just a tiny dot in the sky. And then it disappears altogether.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Dory says. ‘Do you want to try again?’

  I nod, but I can’t catch another one after that. I can’t stop thinking about Gaia.

  ‘Let’s stop now, Ade,’ Dory says after a while. She puts her hand on my back and gives my shoulder a squeeze.

  ‘I think you’re missing someone, aren’t you? I recognize that face. I see the same one in the mirror when I am missing someone.’

  ‘Who do you miss, Dory?’

  ‘My husband, my children, my mother and father, my sisters and brothers.’

  I’m about to ask where they are but Dory carries on talking.

  ‘And then, you know what I realized, Ade? That it was a good thing to be missing someone because that means you really care for them. It means you have love in your life, whether that person is right there in front of you or not. Then I didn’t mind quite so much. So whoever it is you are thinking about, you know that all of your love and your caring is travelling to them right now. They’ll know it, they’ll feel it. They are probably sending it right back to you now, this very minute.’

  I don’t know what to say back to Dory. I just follow her down the corridor, playing a game in my head where I try to tread in exactly the same places where she treads. I find that I can do it quite easily and if I was winning points for doing it, I probably would have got about a hundred at least.

  I used to play it with Gaia but she would get annoyed and say, ‘Stop following me around, Adeola, and talk to me properly.’ I don’t think Dory realizes that I’m doing it, though, because she doesn’t ask me to stop.

  When we get back to her flat, Dory picks the first bird that we caught out of the cage and goes into the kitchen to fetch a sharp carving knife. We go into one of the flats which we are not keeping food in.

  ‘Have you ever seen anything be killed, Ade?’ Dory asks me.

  I think about the time I saw a dog run into the road, but when the car screeched to a halt, it walked off, quite unconcerned. I tell Dory that I haven’t.

  ‘These days, everyone’s kept at arm’s length from the fact that we kill to eat. Unless you’re a vegetarian, of course. You can just go into a shop and buy a lovely big chicken – well, you used to be able to, anyway – and you don’t have to get your hands dirty at all. It’s all plucked and trussed and packaged up and ready for you to bung in the oven. It’s someone else’s job to kill the animals. We don’t see it any more. It’s just the way things are these days.

  ‘When I grew up, everyone had chickens and ducks in the garden. Some would even have a goat or a few pigs. It wasn’t out of the ordinary. As children, we got used to seeing a headless chicken wandering around. It just meant that dinner was on its way.’

  ‘Dory, why did you see a headless chicken wandering about?’

  ‘Because my mum had just cut its head off, dear Ade. That’s one of the ways people killed them back then. But the thing is that their body still moves, so they start flapping about, but they haven’t got a head. It’s a little bit gruesome. My dad used to say it wasn’t very respectful, so he taught me another way to do it. It’s quick and there’s no blood. Shall I show you?’

  I nod.

  Dory grasps the legs of the bird with one hand and holds it up so its head is hanging down. She speaks to it in a low voice, but I can’t hear what she is saying. Then she puts her other hand around its neck so its head is tilted back a bit. Very quickly, she pulls up with one hand and down with the other.

  I’m not sure if I hear it really, but I think there is a sort of pop. The pigeon starts thrashing about but Dory just holds it still and keeps talking to it in the same gentle voice as before. It doesn’t take long before it hangs quite still.

  I come a bit closer to inspect the dead bird. Its eyes are still open but it’s quite lifeless. The force that made it flap its wings and peck desperately at our handfuls of seeds is gone.

  Where has it gone to? Is it still floating around us, ready to be carried in the wind to another place?

  ‘What did you say to it, Dory?’ I ask her.

  ‘Just nice things really. And thank you for feeding us. If someone was killing me for food, I would like them to say comforting things to me. I would like to know that they were grateful to eat me.’

  ‘Yes, I guess I would too.’

  We look at the dead pigeon a little longer before Dory puts it down on the table and goes to get the other birds we caught. Each one she treats with the same tenderness and speaks to in the same soft whisper. It doesn’t take long before there is just a small heap of their soft, warm bodies.

  Dory shows me how to pluck the birds. I am not sure if I want to at first, but once I start, I get quite good at it. Dory calls me Lightning Fingers because I am able to do it quickly. The feathers come out much more easily than I thought. Dory says that is because we have only just killed them. We can make a bit of mess, Dory says, because we can always use this as our Plucking Room from now on. Little grey feathers float all around us in the air and settle onto the carpet like snow.

  After that, Dory shows me how to cut off the bit of the wing that you don’t eat and she carefully cuts out two bits from the body of the bird which she says is called the breast meat. The meat looks rich and dark purple-red.

  ‘Look at all the goodness in this, Ade,’ Dory says. ‘This will keep us going.’

  There is one last thing to do, which is to get rid of the parts that we aren’t using and all the feathers that we have plucked. Dory says they’ve come from the air, so that’s where we’ll put them back.

  We throw them up, up, up into the light blue sky, from the balcony.

  For just a few seconds, the bodies of the birds look like they are flying before they plummet down to the bottom of the tower.

  But the feathers drift slowly down. Like a swirling grey storm.

  Chapter Forty-nine

&nb
sp; I think Mum likes the pigeon meat.

  She had started leaving bits of food on her plate that she didn’t like, but she never leaves any pigeon. I’ve been out of the flat so much in the day, collecting food or helping catch pigeons, that when one day I come back in the morning, I’m surprised to find her standing at the big windows in the sitting room.

  I go up to stand beside her. I can see my scrapbook is open on the table, not where I left it tucked under my pillow, so I guess Mum must have been reading it. It’s been left open on the page where I wrote down:

  How to Kill and Prepare a Pigeon.

  Instructions and Illustrations.

  Neither of us speak; we just stand there looking out. Everything outside has grown bigger and lusher and greener. The sun lights up the Bluchers, making them stand out. They are everywhere.

  Mum speaks first. Her voice sounds a little bit raspy and she has to clear her throat a few times before she can speak clearly.

  ‘Why’s our building still standing?’ she says in a small voice.

  I try to explain about the Bluchers and the salt and the spores which aren’t landing higher up on the building and that we’ve been lucky with the weather because there hasn’t been any rain for a long time so the salt hasn’t been washed away.

  I realize that I sound a little bit like Obi, that I’m saying everything just like he would do. I finish off by saying that if we could work it out about the salt stopping them, then someone else will too and that’s when they’ll come and rescue us.

  ‘How do you know all of this?’ she asks.

  There’s so much to tell Mum that I don’t know where to start.

  Should I tell her about the other day, when I went out into the middle of all the Bluchers and one of them burst all over me and I thought I was going to die?

  Or perhaps I should start on the day when I first met Obi and Dory and we all sat down together around the little red-and-white checked table and ate pigeon, even though I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time?

  Or maybe I should go right back and talk about the day when they closed the school, and how I never said goodbye to Gaia, and Michael’s mum tried to take me with her so I barricaded the front door shut?

  All this time, Mum’s been sleeping or sitting in her room, hiding herself away.

  I wonder if I look different to her. Older. Taller, perhaps. Is there something to show for everything that I’ve seen and done since we’ve been trapped in the tower?

  Mum looks just the same to me, except that her hair is a little longer. She’s got the same kind face and brown eyes that look like they are smiling. It’s like nothing much has changed because she hasn’t been doing anything different than she was before the Bluchers came. She hasn’t stood in front of one and seen how tall and silvery it is. She’s never spoken to Obi or Dory. She hasn’t seen Ben crying in front of her. She’s just the same. She hasn’t changed.

  Have you ever looked at someone for so long it seems like their face starts to change right in front of you? Their eyes might get smaller or their mouth seems larger or their nose looks like it’s growing outwards somehow? That’s what happens when I’m trying to answer Mum that day. Her face seems to go all funny and distorted and I forget it’s Mum I’m looking at. It’s just pieces of somebody’s face. It could be anyone.

  ‘What’s happened, Ade?’ she says. ‘Are there many of us left?’

  It is a weird feeling that comes over me then because really this is what I wanted Mum to do from the very beginning, but now that she is awake, standing in front of me and asking questions, I feel sort of strange.

  Mostly I am glad because it is much better than her just being asleep all the time, but I also feel something else too. Something a lot like anger.

  I remember the times before Mum stopped leaving the flat. I have a memory of us sitting on the grass outside together, and though I can’t remember where we were or what we were doing, I know that we were happy. In my head, it was a sunny day.

  I remember Mum walking me to school and I can picture us going to the shops together and eating in a restaurant, like other people do sometimes. But there’s too many other memories clouding out the good ones from before. Memories of her sleeping in her bed, her back to me. Or me taking out empty plates and cups from her bedroom and refilling them again. That’s what I think of, mostly, when I think about Mum.

  I say something that I used to imagine saying all the time. So much that I stopped thinking it long ago.

  I say, ‘If you come out of the flat with me, I’ll tell you what happened.’

  If you come out.

  If.

  Chapter Fifty

  Mum looks at me hard for a moment or two.

  ‘All right, Ade,’ she says.

  And it’s as simple as that. I open the front door and she peeks her head out of the doorway and looks down the corridor, and then she walks right through it. She follows me down the stairs.

  She’s slower than I am and I have to keep stopping so she can catch up. We stop and look out of the windows at each floor.

  ‘It’s all gone,’ Mum keeps saying, over and over. ‘Can you believe it, Ade? It’s all gone.’

  We start to play a little game. It’s Mum’s idea. We close our eyes and pretend that everything is how it was before and say out loud what we can see.

  Mum says, ‘I can see a plane going over in the sky,’ and I say, ‘I can see the tops of the buses with numbers on them,’ and Mum says, ‘I can see the City,’ and then Mum counts down from three and we open our eyes.

  Everything that we saw with our eyes closed vanishes and is replaced by the silvers of the Bluchers and the greens of the plants and the trees. We play it a few times, and each time, it surprises me when I open my eyes. Mum’s making me remember what it used to be like.

  I think I had begun to forget a little bit.

  We get to Dory’s front door and I knock on it, which seems a bit odd because usually I just walk in and call out to her, but it feels different with Mum with me. I hear Dory’s footsteps come to the door, and then she opens it with a big smile.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ she says. ‘It’s lovely to see you.’

  She bustles us into the sitting room, and in no time at all we are all sitting down with cups of hot tea in our hands, chatting away, as if we have always done this. Dory and Mum talk about everything that has happened and about how Obi’s been keeping us safe, not only with the salt he puts down but with the water that he rations out.

  Mum asks Dory if she thinks we’ll be rescued soon.

  ‘There’s no doubt, dear,’ Dory says. ‘No doubt. Who knows, they might be on their way right this minute.’ And she winks at me.

  I tell Mum a bit about the pigeons that we’ve been catching and how I can do it now. Dory is just saying, ‘You have a fine young man there,’ when, quite suddenly, Mum puts her cup down on the table so it makes a bit of a rattle and says that she’d better be getting back upstairs.

  She gets up to leave too quickly and she bangs her knee on the table; She looks like she might be sick or something; her face looks like it’s lost its colour.

  She doesn’t wait for me to come with her.

  She walks straight out of Dory’s flat without saying goodbye.

  My ears feel hot and red and I don’t know where to look. I hope Dory likes Mum even though she left so suddenly and didn’t say thanks for the tea or anything.

  When I finally look up, Dory’s looking right at me and she says in a soft voice, ‘You do understand, don’t you, Ade, that I think your mum’s a brave woman? I hope she comes to visit again, if she’d like to.’

  I don’t know how to answer Dory because I’m not sure how to tell her that I don’t think Mum will ever come downstairs again.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  The next morning, though, when I go into Mum’s bedroom to collect her dinner plate, she’s not there. She’s not anywhere in the flat. Not in the corridor. Not on the stairs.

 
; I call out her name and Pigeon follows me, making loud meows as if he’s calling out to her too.

  Muu-um, Muu-um.

  I can’t find her.

  I’ve never before not known where she is, and it scares me.

  What if she went outside the tower? What if she didn’t believe what Dory and I told her about the spores?

  I run down to Dory’s so that everyone can help me look for her, but I come to a stop before I push open the door. I can hear Mum’s voice in there. And Dory’s. And Obi’s and Ben’s.

  The only voice that is missing is mine.

  When I go inside, everyone is sitting down to breakfast like we do every day. Except there’s an extra chair for Mum. They all say, ‘Good morning, Ade,’ and, ‘Did you sleep well?’

  Mum reaches across to me and ruffles my hair, and she looks good. Not sick like she looked yesterday.

  She doesn’t stay for very long that morning but she comes back to eat dinner with us. The next day she does the same. And the day after that she helps Dory and me pluck the pigeons for dinner and stays with Dory while she cooks.

  No one mentions the time when they didn’t see her. No one talks about how they’re glad she’s come out of the flat. They are just pleased to see her each time she turns up.

  After only a few days, it seems normal to find Mum helping Dory or Obi with something or other and having an extra place for her at the dinner table. Sometimes she still has to rush off very suddenly, but she’ll come back a few hours later.

  One day, I come downstairs with some supplies and I overhear her talking to Dory through the open door and something about the way she is talking stops me from walking in. I stand still and I listen.

  ‘I didn’t see their faces,’ she is saying.

  ‘My dear,’ says Dory. ‘I can’t imagine.’

  ‘There were five of them.’

  ‘Five? Against one? What must they have been thinking?’