Boy in the Tower Read online

  It was funny, because when my mum gave me the ice cream, all I could think was: Where did she get it from?

  Chapter Four

  I should tell you a little bit about my mum. She’s not like other mums in some ways. And in others, she definitely is.

  She tells me to brush my teeth. Sometimes she reads to me just before I fall asleep. She has a beautiful face that tells people who haven’t met her before that she is kind but also that she is funny. I think she has the loveliest smile I have ever seen. It’s the kind that creeps up on you, and then before you know it her whole face is lit up by it and it beams down on you as well.

  Mum’s the one who came up with my name. I mean, I know that everyone’s mum gives them their name, but when I was in Reception, there were two of us called Adeola and a fair few named Adesoye and Adeyemi and Adefemi, so my mum just said to call me Ade.

  Add-ee.

  ‘Nice and simple,’ Mum said.

  Everyone calls me that now. I think they’ve forgotten my full name.

  Adeola feels a little bit alien even to me now. Only sometimes, Gaia says something like, ‘Adeola, I wasn’t finished talking, you know,’ if she gets cross with me for interrupting and it takes me a second to realize that she’s actually talking to me.

  The thing with my mum is, she doesn’t like going out of the flat much. She doesn’t go out at all, actually. It’s something that has made us change the way we do things so I’ve learned pretty much to get along with it.

  I remember a time when she sat me down and had a big talk with me about being grown up now, which meant that I could walk to school by myself. Not long after that, she said I’d been so grown up that I could do the shopping that week and we wrote out a list together. Then came the day when she gave me her bank card.

  ‘You are going to have to look all around you, Ade, and wait until there’s no one about. If someone suddenly comes up to you, then you’ll have to walk away and go back later. You understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Part of me knew that this was a little bit dangerous, that it wasn’t something I was meant to do, but mostly I just felt that Mum was trusting me. It was a good feeling.

  ‘So, tell me what you do. If there’s no one around.’

  ‘I put the card in the machine. And then I put the pin code in: 5-4-3-7. Then I press the button for cash and then I press the button for £50 and then I wait.’

  ‘And then you take the money. Don’t forget that part, Ade! The money will come through the little slot at the bottom. Then you come straight back to me.’

  ‘I won’t forget the money, Mum. You must think I’m really stupid!’ I was just trying to make a joke but Mum looked at me strangely.

  ‘Don’t ever say that. I don’t think you’re stupid. Not one little bit. Don’t let me catch you saying anything like that again, OK? You must never think you’re stupid.’

  I swallowed hard and looked away. Mum didn’t usually talk to me like that. It was like she was talking right up close into my face.

  Getting the money from the cash machine was easy enough, though. I did exactly as Mum told me and I never had any problems. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it. I always felt quite worried walking home in case something silly happened, like the wind blew the money out of my hand or something. The notes always felt silky and smooth in my hand at first, but by the time I’d made it back to the tower, they were crumpled and warm from being clenched in my sweaty palm. But I felt something like pride, something like happiness, when I delivered the money to Mum.

  ‘Good boy, Ade,’ Mum said the first time I got back from the cash point, and she smiled at me. It was a small, quick one, her lips drawing upwards hurriedly, but it made my heart swell up. I hadn’t seen Mum smile in a long time.

  ‘Right, now, take this.’ She shoved one of the crumpled bank notes back into my hand. ‘And here’s a list. Hurry back.’

  I looked down at Mum’s scrawled handwriting on the back of an old envelope. Large milk, white bread, spag hoops, Frosties.

  She was looking at me so expectantly and I knew she wasn’t asking me, she was telling me. Take this. Hurry back. So I went, and when I dumped the blue-and-white striped bag full of shopping on the floor, Mum rewarded me with an even longer smile and I knew that I would do anything to make her smile again.

  It seemed to start slowly with the not-walking-me-to-school and the not-going-shopping and the not-getting-money, and then, before I knew it, I realized I hadn’t seen Mum leave the flat for a couple of months. After that, Mum asked me to make dinner one night, and the night after that and the night after that. It was only heating a tin of something up in a pan and toasting a few pieces of bread. I didn’t mind doing it.

  But I decided to tell Gaia about it. I wanted to find out if her mum was asking her to do the same sort of things.

  I can remember exactly the day I told Gaia.

  It was the day the rain stopped falling.

  The day the first building fell.

  Chapter Five

  ‘It’s too hot to eat this,’ said Gaia. We were sitting in the hall with plates of roast dinner in front of us. A thin slice of meat, two greasy-looking potatoes and bright orange circles of carrot that were all floating in a pool of brown gravy.

  The day the rain stopped was one of the hottest that we’d had in ages. It was funny after all the soggy raincoats and wet socks, to find yourself feeling too hot all of a sudden. Everyone had basked in the sunshine during playtime and lain down on the black tarmac to rest.

  Gaia was right. It felt too hot even to eat. The sun was shining in through the hall windows so I had to squint when I looked up at her.

  ‘I’m going to make a run for it,’ Gaia said, standing up.

  ‘Gaia,’ I said. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  She sat back down again.

  ‘Does your mum ask you to do the shopping sometimes?’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘My mum’s asked me to do that now. Do you do it?’

  Gaia’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly.

  ‘What do you mean, she’s asked you to do it?’

  I realized that now I’d brought it up, Gaia wouldn’t leave me alone until she knew every little detail, so I told her what had been going on. From the very first time Mum had sat me down to tell me to walk to school by myself to the time she gave me her bank card.

  I didn’t tell Gaia everything, though.

  But I still wasn’t prepared for the worried, frowning look that took over her face.

  ‘You shouldn’t be doing that.’

  ‘Mum says I’m grown up now. She says I do a really good job.’

  ‘But . . . but . . . if you’re doing all of those things, then what’s your mum doing?’

  It was a good question. Mostly, she was sleeping. At the same time she stopped leaving the flat, she started feeling really tired all the time.

  ‘I just need to sleep, baby,’ Mum would say, and I would close the bedroom door behind me and not come in and sit down on the bed and tell her all about the nothing I had been doing at school that day.

  ‘When did you start doing this?’ Gaia asked.

  I speared a piece of meat on my fork. It dripped gravy onto the plate, each drop making a little circular splash just like raindrops falling into puddles.

  ‘Ade?’ Gaia said softly.

  It had been many months since the day I came home to hear Mum crying. Crying is probably the wrong word, although she certainly was crying. Tears were running all the way down her face and they fell from the tip of her chin onto a growing patch of wetness on her skirt. But it was also like moaning. And shouting. And screaming. And wailing. All mixed up together.

  It was a sound that terrified me.

  ‘Mum,’ I said. But my voice was lost in the sound of Mum’s cries. In the end, I put my hand onto her shoulder, and only then did she turn to look at me.

  She looked right through me as if I wasn’t there and then her eyes seemed to focus on me and
take in who I was. She reached out for me and clasped me tightly, too tightly, to her.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, over and over again. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right.’ But she didn’t stop crying.

  I felt like I was the one who should have been saying that to her, because as she looked at me then, I could see her face clearly.

  She was hurt. One of her eyes was so swollen that it wasn’t able to open properly and the other was bruised and half open. There was a violent purple bump on her forehead. A weeping gash cut across her cheek. It looked like a wicked gaping smile.

  ‘What happened? What happened?’ I said but Mum didn’t answer me. Her face creased as she sobbed harder, and the cut on her face looked like it was crying too.

  ‘Mummy?’ I said, although I didn’t know what I was asking until the words were on my lips: ‘Who did this?’

  ‘Oh, Ade,’ Mum was whispering under her breath. ‘Oh, Ade, oh, Ade.’

  I started crying then too, even though I wished myself not to. I wished I had rang up the police and an ambulance. I wished I’d got something to make Mum’s face feel better. I wished I was able to do something other than howl into Mum’s shoulder as she rocked us both back and forth, trying to make us forget she was so badly injured. But for all my wishing, I let myself huddle down into her lap and cry desperate tears for what had happened.

  We fell asleep like that, locked together, but when I woke up, Mum was gone from the bedroom and the room was dark.

  ‘Mum?’ My voice sounded very small and alone in the dim light.

  ‘I’m . . .’ Mum’s voice sounded hoarse and sore. ‘I’m in here.’

  She was sitting on the sofa in the darkness. I felt glad that there were no lights on so I wouldn’t have to look at her poor mangled face, and then I felt ashamed of myself.

  ‘Mum!’ I cried out like she had been lost to me, and I climbed into her lap once more and buried my face into the soft fabric of her jacket. It struck me then that she hadn’t even taken her coat off all this time.

  ‘It’s all right, Ade. It’s all right. Go back to sleep,’ Mum said. And I did.

  I knew that something bad had happened but I couldn’t ask Mum what it was. I tried to. I really did. But I couldn’t force the words out of my mouth.

  I felt scared. Scared wondering why Mum had been so terribly hurt. Scared that it would happen again. Perhaps that was one of the reasons I didn’t mind doing the shopping: at least if I did it, I knew nothing bad would happen to Mum. She was safe if she was at home.

  I didn’t tell anybody about what had happened, not even Gaia. I didn’t want it to be real, and if I didn’t tell anyone then that stopped it becoming more real, didn’t it? I think Mum felt the same, and that’s why she didn’t tell the police or go to hospital.

  Mum did start to get better, in some ways. Her face started healing straight away. It went very purple and then a sort of blue and after that it was very yellowy. You could still see the scar on her cheek but it stopped looking painful. I thought things would go back to how they were before, back when Mum used to tell me funny things that had happened at the shop she worked in. She was always so good at describing customers, it felt like they appeared right in front of me. Or when she would open the fridge and then slam it back shut again and say, ‘Ade, let’s get out of here,’ and we’d go to McDonald’s for a treat.

  But instead Mum retreated into herself, locking herself away from the outside world.

  Gaia somehow seemed to understand all this, without me even having to say it. ‘Maybe your mum’s got something wrong with her,’ she said gently, cutting through my memories.

  I screwed up my face when she said this, so I knew she tried to stop herself from saying the next words on her mind, but they came tumbling out anyway: ‘Maybe she should see a doctor?’

  It was only in a whisper, but I heard it.

  A doctor. Someone to make Mum better again. It seemed like a good idea. Her face had mended itself but there was damage on the inside, wounds I couldn’t see, that needed healing as well.

  When I came home from school that day I went straight into her bedroom and said in a loud voice, ‘Mum, I’m home.’ She stirred in her sleep and then gave a sort of shrug that buried her body deeper into the bedclothes.

  ‘Wake up, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’m home. I’m home.’

  There was a stale smell in Mum’s bedroom. It wasn’t unpleasant exactly, but neither was it clean or fresh. An image of Mum, ready for work, appeared in my mind. Her clothes were neat and they smelled nice, like flowers, and what I think clouds might smell like.

  ‘Ade,’ she said in a small voice. ‘Be a good boy and go and play in the sitting room, will you? I’m so, so tired. I’ve got to sleep some more. Then I’ll come out, OK?’

  ‘You’re always tired all the time,’ I said. ‘Mum, do you think you should go and see someone?’

  ‘Someone? What do you mean?’ Mum’s voice sounded sharp, like the screech of a violin.

  ‘Someone . . . like a doctor,’ I said.

  ‘I’m just tired, Ade. I have to sleep,’ she said. ‘That will make me feel better. A doctor can’t help me.’ Just saying those few words seemed to make her more tired.

  ‘They might, Mum.’

  In answer, Mum rolled away from me. I walked round to the side of the bed she was facing. She wasn’t even asleep. She was just staring at the wall. Maybe all this time I’d thought she was sleeping when she wasn’t. She was just staring at the walls, unmoving.

  ‘Mum,’ I said, but her face remained expressionless. ‘Mum!’ I insisted, but she didn’t even flinch. ‘Get up. You have to! You have to go to work!’ Again I thought of Mum dressed up all nicely, like she used to be.

  At first I thought she hadn’t heard me but then I saw round, swollen tears roll down her cheeks.

  ‘I can’t, Ade. I can’t go out there.’

  ‘But what about your job?’

  ‘I told them I’m not going back. It happened . . . it happened . . .’ Mum’s breathing was quickening as though she couldn’t get enough air. ‘It happened just by the shop.’

  ‘What did, Mum?’ I said. ‘What happened?’ I’d not dared to ask her that again since the night I’d come home to find her bleeding and injured.

  ‘They were there,’ she said simply, and she rolled over, away from me, and her shoulders shook with her sobs. I put my hand on her and felt the vibrations up my arm, all her pain racking her body. After a long time she was still and I trod softly out of the room and left her to sleep.

  Before she started crying, I’d felt cross with her and I hated it. Part of me knew she couldn’t help it but another voice had whispered into my ear: Is she trying to get better? Why won’t she try to get up?

  But now, I only felt achingly sad and alone.

  I switched the television on and turned the volume up high so Mum would hear it through the walls. We used to watch television together all the time. She’d watch my programmes and I’d watch some of hers too. She used to really like cookery shows so I flicked through the channels to see if I could find one. If she couldn’t see it, she could at least hear what they were cooking.

  There was nothing like that on, though, so I put on the news. They were talking about an old abandoned pub that had fallen down. I recognized the pub straight away. It was right by my tower. I walked right past it to go to one of the bigger shops. It was one of those tall, old-fashioned pubs but it had been empty for a while and its windows had been boarded up. Last time I’d walked past I’d noticed that plants had started growing out from in between the bricks. They had grey-green leaves and purple flowers that clumped together to look a bit like an ice-cream cone.

  It was reported as just one of those strange, bizarre happenings that no one could explain. Someone or other was cross because they had just bought it and had big plans for it. And now it was just a pile of rubble.

  Then the newsreaders started talking about something different and I realized how lo
ud the voices from the television were and I felt bad that I had turned up the volume so high in the first place. I pressed the down button on the remote control and made the voices get quieter and quieter until they disappeared altogether.

  Then I sat in silence, just watching the pictures, trying to work out what people were saying by how their lips moved, like Gaia could.

  But I couldn’t understand them.

  Chapter Six

  I didn’t give up trying to talk Mum into getting help.

  The next day she was up and tried to give me a shopping list but I wouldn’t take it unless she came with me.

  ‘Come on, Ade,’ she said when I refused to put out my hand for the fluttering piece of paper. ‘The bread’s gone green. You don’t want to eat green bread, do you? I know I don’t.’

  ‘Why don’t we go together and we could go to the doctor’s afterwards?’ I asked.

  Mum didn’t say anything. She just started taking little gasps of air and tried not to look at me. But she did catch my eye as she took those little, painful breaths, and in that tiny moment I could tell that she was blaming me for making her breathe like that because I’d asked her to go with me. I snatched the list from her hand and ran out of the flat and went down in the lift and across the road to get the food. It was only when I’d gotten all the way to the shop that I realized I’d forgotten to bring any money with me.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ade,’ Mum said as soon as I came back in. She was still standing in exactly the same position as when I’d left, as if she’d been frozen the whole time I was away. ‘I know this can’t be fun for you.’

  I didn’t say anything but just reached up to the jam jar where we kept our money and took out a five-pound note that had been folded tightly in half again and again until it was only a little square.

  I couldn’t look Mum in the eye. I felt like I’d failed her and it was an unbearable feeling, a pressure that had settled over my chest and wouldn’t let up.