Boy in the Tower Page 3

  ‘Let’s go together. It’s a good idea,’ she said.

  I looked up at her sharply. She looked like she might start crying but she was also nodding a little, as if to say, Yes, yes, I can do this.

  ‘Are you sure, Mum?’ I couldn’t believe it. I felt too glad even to smile.

  Mum gave me another of her funny nods. She stood up a little unsteadily and, holding my hand, she walked towards the front door.

  Every step was an effort and I was reminded of the way a snail moves, those tiny movements propelling it forward bit by bit. I felt so happy as she took those few shuffling steps past our front door but also daunted by the task that lay ahead. The shops and the doctor’s surgery seemed very far away. It was as if we had just begun to climb a mountain and we couldn’t see the top because it was surrounded by thick, white clouds.

  We’d made it as far as the lifts when she started doing the funny breathing again. Her hand tightened around mine and I tried to give her a reassuring squeeze back but I don’t think she felt it, she was holding on so tightly.

  ‘I can’t do it, Ade. I’m sorry, I can’t.’

  As she turned back to our flat, her eyes met mine for the briefest moment, and again they seemed to say, Don’t make me do this, this is hurting me.

  And just like that I was standing on my own in the corridor with the sound of our front door slamming, echoing in the emptiness.

  I did the shopping and I almost made it home without crying, apart from when the woman in the shop put a lollipop in my bag along with the bread and milk and said, ‘Looks like you need one, love.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘You’re welcome, honey,’ she said, and I shocked myself when my eyes filled with tears.

  I quickly ran out, leaving the whole five-pound note on the counter without waiting for my change just so I wouldn’t have to talk to the kind woman any more.

  I walked past the old pub that had fallen down. It was a pile of bricks but I could just about make out the sign that was sticking out of the bricks. It had a picture of a man’s face on it. I’d forgotten that had even happened, I had been so worried about Mum.

  When I finally got home, Mum was back in bed. I didn’t go in to check on her. I wanted to believe that she was sleeping, not lying awake in the dark, waiting for the morning to come.

  Chapter Seven

  I knew what I needed to do to make it easier for Mum, so I went back to doing all the things I did before.

  Before I tried to make Mum come outside with me, I’d got really good at being quiet when I arrived home from school so I didn’t wake her. I called it the Silence Game.

  I had all sorts of tactics. One of the things I did was leave the hat off our whistling kettle when I boiled water for tea. Another was tiptoeing around the flat as quietly as I could, before I realized that I made a lot less noise if I just walked very carefully and slowly and spread my weight over the soles of my feet. That way I could stop any floorboards creaking.

  I also made sure that I didn’t flush the toilet after I’d used it. I know that sounds a little bit disgusting but I just put the lid down straight away and it wasn’t too bad. Then Mum flushed it when she got up.

  Sometimes I would get a surprise and find something lying around that meant Mum must have left the flat that day. It didn’t happen often but enough to make me excited every day that I might find a clue that she had managed to go outside. Once it was just that her shoes were a little bit wet on their soles. I used to check the bottoms of her shoes every day, you see. Sometimes it was something that was left out, that had not been there before. You would not believe how happy I felt when a single orange appeared on our sofa one day. Or how fantastically pleased I was when I found a newspaper sitting on the kitchen table. The time gaps in between finding things like that were getting longer and longer but it still gave me a lot of hope.

  Then there were the precious few days when Mum really would surprise me. She would be awake when I came home from school. Sometimes she had even washed her face and put lipstick on. Then she would blow me away by casually producing something that hadn’t come from any of my shopping trips, and that she couldn’t even have bought from one of the shops close to the flat.

  The day she presented me with a bowl of chocolate ice cream set my mind racing. I knew she must have gone to the supermarket, because it was the only place you could get this particular flavour, which had bits of chocolate brownie and swirls of caramel in it. It was our favourite. Before Mum got hurt, we used to eat it all the time. ‘Too much of the time!’ Mum would laugh, in the old days, before patting the rounds of our bellies.

  She could have quite easily just bought some chocolate or sweets from the nearby newsagent’s, but she hadn’t. She’d walked right past it and gone all the way down the road to buy our favourite chocolate ice cream. Chocolate ice cream for me. The ice cream said, I’m getting better, Ade, I really am – and you know what? It tasted all the better because of it.

  There were no signs that she had left the flat the day after she’d tried to come shopping with me. Everything was lying untouched and silent when I got home that night.

  I started playing the Silence Game and slowly walked over to the window ledge. I didn’t make a sound.

  I looked down on the city below me and found the spot where the old pub had fallen down.

  I might only be saying this because I know what’s happened since, but I thought I did notice some things that were a little bit odd about that mound of rubble.

  Looking at it from my window, I thought I could see a faint blue tinge in the space where it had once stood. And it was strange that there was so little of it left, too. Not really what you’d expect from a big, tall building.

  I remember thinking that someone must have already started clearing it away. And that the blue tinge was just a trick of the light. I didn’t know at the time that these were all important details.

  I did put the pub into my scrapbook, though. I drew a picture of what it used to look like and what it looked like now it had fallen down. I wrote down the name as well. It was called The George.

  During the last school holidays, Miss Farraway had given each of us a large green scrapbook to draw or write about things that we saw around us.

  ‘Anything?’ I’d asked her.

  ‘Anything you see that is interesting, Ade,’ she’d said. ‘Or you can stick things in. If you find something you like the look of.’

  She called them our Eye Spy books. I hadn’t filled mine up with much so far. I’d only stuck in a bit of a Happy Meal box that I’d had once and drawn the buildings I could see from my window. It was hard to draw the straight lines of the towers, though. They always came out wobbly.

  Now I’d drawn the pub too.

  How was I to know that this was only the beginning?

  Chapter Eight

  There was one person other than me and Gaia who knew about my mum, and that was Michael’s mum.

  There was a time, a couple of weeks before I told Gaia, when I stopped going into school for a few days because Mum stopped getting out of bed and I didn’t want to leave her.

  I knew something was wrong because she had stopped eating.

  She forgot to flush the toilet when she got up to go, too. The smell was getting really bad, so in the end I had to flush it anyway.

  It had been days and days since I had found anything that showed me that she’d left the flat. I always spent the first twenty minutes after coming home searching and searching for any sign that she’d made it outside. I was getting desperate to find a clue that she was getting better.

  I knew she wasn’t eating because I’d always bring her a bowl of cereal in the morning and some more food in the evening and the plates were all left untouched.

  It was a little bit like years ago on Christmas Eve when I’d put some biscuits out for Santa and they were still sitting there in the morning, just as I had left them. I asked Gaia what happened at her house and she said that al
l she was left with was a few crumbs and the stump of a carrot.

  The same sort of thing happened with the tooth fairy. I kept putting my teeth under my pillow but they were always still there in the morning. Gaia said that maybe there was a problem with my block because she got a silver fifty-pence coin for every tooth.

  Now I know differently.

  On one of the days I was off school, we’d run out of food and money, so I left the flat with Mum’s cash card. I knew I shouldn’t have. I had a twinge of worry about what would happen if someone I knew saw me, but I put that fear to the back of my mind because I was hungry and hadn’t eaten since the day before.

  I waited behind a tree until an old man with a walking stick had finished at the cash point. He took a long time, but once he’d hobbled off I couldn’t see anyone else on the street and I tapped in Mum’s pin code and waited for the money to appear in the little letter box.

  ‘Ade!’ Someone said my name just as the machine started bleeping at me to take the money.

  I didn’t turn round to see who it was. I just grabbed the money and ran back home as fast as I could. I didn’t go to the shops, and all afternoon I tried to ignore the rumblings in my stomach.

  A few hours later, there was a knock on the door. I wasn’t going to answer it, but then I heard Michael’s mum say, ‘I know you’re in there, Ade. Open up.’ When I still didn’t open the door, she added, ‘I saw you at the cash point today, y’know. I need to speak to your mother.’ I opened the door then.

  She spent a long time in Mum’s bedroom and I tried to listen through the door to what they were talking about but they spoke in such low voices, I couldn’t pick out any words.

  Then she took me next door to her house for dinner.

  We ate chicken and rice and I had to sit next to Michael’s little sister, who kept poking me in the side with her pink plastic fork. Michael wouldn’t look me in the eye. I don’t think he wanted me to be there and he was just trying to pretend that it wasn’t really happening.

  There was a sweet, sticky sauce all over the chicken. It was delicious. A lot better than anything I was able to make myself. I ate greedily, licking my fingers clean when I had finished until I noticed Michael’s mum looking at me with a worried frown on her face.

  The next day, Michael’s mum turned up at my front door at quarter to nine. There had been no explanation and Mum hadn’t said anything to me about it but I knew I had no choice but to go with her.

  ‘Ade, you ready?’ she would call out to me. ‘We’re going.’ I would have to run to catch up with the three figures of Michael’s mum, Michael and his sister disappearing round the corner. They never waited for me, they just expected me to catch up with them before they got to the lifts.

  ‘Ade, you ready? We’re going.’

  The same, every day. Always at the same time, each day. Every day until they closed the school down, right around the time the rain stopped and everything changed.

  Chapter Nine

  I sort of liked school. I liked that you always knew what was coming next. You just had to look at the timetable for the day on the board to find out. I also liked that our teacher, Miss Farraway, was always there, no questions asked. She would come and collect us from the playground at nine o’clock every single day, with the same sort of smile on her face each time, and there was not a day when she wouldn’t turn up.

  The thing I liked most about school was Gaia.

  I liked nothing more than to see her smile or to make her laugh and I never got more upset than when she got hurt by someone.

  Like on the day we planted our seeds.

  I’ll never forget it.

  Everyone at school had been talking about a warehouse that had fallen down, just like the pub. Some children had walked right past it to come to school and they were telling us about the broken glass and the funny bits of metal that were left in place of where the warehouse had once stood.

  We were talking so much that Miss Farraway had to clap her hands together to stop our chatter. When we were quiet she announced that we would plant sunflower seeds today. I didn’t have to look at Gaia’s face to know that she was smiling.

  Gaia loved growing things. She told me once about a little garden she had made on her windowsill. She had a little pot of mint and an old house plant her mum was going to throw away when it looked like it was dead, but that Gaia had brought back to life. She would collect bits for it all the time, too. A green leaf from the pavement or a prickly conker case and its shiny brown conker. I’d never seen her little garden but I could picture it perfectly in my head.

  We were working on different tables that day. I had picked out my orange flower pot and I was trying to scratch my name onto it. It wasn’t working, though. The pencil wouldn’t make a mark on the plastic, however hard I pressed down.

  Then I looked at the others on my table and I saw that they were all writing their names on white labels. I put my pencil down and tried to cover the dents and lines I had made on my pot with my sleeve. I looked everywhere for the labels but I couldn’t see them anywhere. By now everyone else was chatting about something else. I couldn’t ask them. I was going to have to put my hand up and ask Miss Farraway and then explain why I had not listened in the first place.

  I never meant not to listen, but sometimes when someone apart from my mum or Gaia was talking to me, I felt like I was floating away, far up above where they were. Their voice would become very muffled, so I couldn’t make out the words they were saying. A lot of teachers used to get quite cross with me when this happened. They would bellow, ‘You are not listening!’ at me to make me pay attention. Miss Farraway was not like that. She was much kinder and sometimes would repeat things several times, just for me. It still didn’t stop it from happening, though.

  I was just about to put my hand up when Gaia caught my eye and raised her eyebrows at me as if to ask, Are you OK?

  I mouthed, ‘Labels,’ as clearly as I could, so she would be able to read my lips. She gave me a little nod and stood up from her table and went up to Miss Farraway’s desk where there was a pile of white labels in a little green basket.

  ‘Gaia, haven’t you already had one of those?’ Miss Farraway asked.

  ‘I made a mistake, so I need another one,’ Gaia replied, and Miss Farraway nodded and turned away. Gaia dropped the label in front of me as she went back to sit down, and I quickly wrote my name on it and stuck it onto my pot so that it looked just like everyone else’s.

  ‘Thank you,’ I mouthed to Gaia. ‘I owe you.’

  She just smiled and looked away.

  After that, we filled our pots with soil. It was sticky and black and smelled of the outside when it rains. I liked the feeling of it between my fingers. I could see that Gaia did too because she, like me, was playing with it. She was taking a pinchful of soil between her fingers and then rubbing it together so that it fell into the pot like snow.

  ‘Miss Farraway, Gaia’s making a mess!’ someone from her table called out.

  ‘Gardening’s a messy business – you have to get your hands dirty,’ said Miss Farraway. ‘But it’s better to be outside to get really messy. Can you stop that in here, Gaia? Thank you.’ Gaia nodded, but I could see by the way she sucked in her cheeks ever so slightly that she felt a bit embarrassed.

  After that we chose a sunflower seed to plant. One each. I spent a long time choosing mine. It had thick stripes down the middle and then thin ones down the sides. I made a little hole in the soil with my finger for the seed and then covered it up so I could not see it at all.

  I looked over at Gaia. She hadn’t planted hers yet. She was still holding it in her hand and it looked like she was whispering something under her breath.

  ‘Miss Farraway, Gaia’s talking to her seed!’ a girl from her table shouted out. The whole class laughed loudly. It took Miss Farraway a few minutes to get everyone to be quiet again. By then, Gaia had shoved her seed into the pot and was looking down at her lap so that I couldn’t see her
face.

  We went out to play not long after that, Gaia marching ahead of me. I hurried after her, but overheard two people talking:

  ‘Did you do it?’

  ‘Yeah, I just went in and Miss wasn’t there. She’s looking at us right now. Freaky Gaia.’ Hearing her name made me stop right behind the two girls.

  ‘Where did you put it?’

  ‘In the bin. She’s going to be talking to just an empty pot from now on.’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘She’s such a weirdo.’

  ‘Yeah, she’s such a weirdo.’

  They were looking right at her as they talked. They couldn’t have known she could understand what they were saying from all the way across the playground. Only I could see from the look on her face that she had understood exactly what they had said.

  I don’t know if I’m a very good friend to Gaia. I felt very, very angry but I’m not the kind of friend who, hearing that, would go up to those girls and say, ‘Leave Gaia alone!’ and then maybe hit them across the face for being so mean. There are people who are like that but I am not. I’m not even the kind of friend who knows the right thing to say to cheer her up. I didn’t run straight over to her and say nice, comforting things that would make her feel better.

  I thought about it for a minute before I decided what I would do.

  I went back inside and into our classroom. Miss Farraway was still not there but I had to be quick. I went to my pot and pushed the soil away until I found my seed. Then I found Gaia’s pot, with her neat, curly writing on it, and I buried the seed deep inside the soil.

  In the end, mine was not the only pot that didn’t have a little seedling in it. A few others didn’t grow at all.

  But Gaia’s did.

  It grew taller than all the rest.

  Chapter Ten

  The next day, another two buildings had fallen down.

  The first was an upholsterer’s workshop and the second was actually somebody’s house. It was one of those quite small ones which joins onto the houses next to it, in a little row.