How I Saved the World in a Week Page 3

  A week later, Sylvia just decided out of nowhere as she was walking me to school that we should go on an adventure instead.

  And it kept on happening.

  Each time I tried to tell myself they were just our fun adventures like always, but I knew really that they were different now. It was almost like Sylvia needed us to go and practise, to keep calm. Like it stopped something spilling out from her.

  Then Sylvia left her job in the laboratory and things got worse.

  It was just a few weeks after the time with Steve in the park, and he was supposed to be coming down on Saturday to see me again. On the Friday I saw Sylvia standing by the school playground. The window of my classroom looked out to the patch of the playground where the parents would wait for their kids at home time and I could see her standing at the gate, waiting to get in. There wasn’t anything particularly unusual by then about Sylvia picking me up from school much too early and I thought she might be collecting me for another adventure, but she didn’t actually come in to get me. There was a class that were having their P.E. lesson in the playground and Sylvia just stood there outside the gates the whole time, not really watching them; her gaze seemed to stare past them. She looked almost like a statue; she didn’t seem to move the whole time. I could make out the sun picking out the silvery grey of her hair.

  When school finally finished, I ran down to her as quickly as I could. She wrapped me up in the tightest hug and she didn’t let go. It went on for just a bit too long. This felt like more than a greeting, it was like a prison. I wiggled a little but she only clung on tighter. Her arms felt rigid around me.

  ‘Sylvia,’ I said. ‘It’s hurting.’

  She let go of me then but immediately kneeled down, so her face was just centimetres away from mine. She studied me as though she was looking for something. Then she locked eyes with me and I saw, just for a moment, a flood of emotions that seemed to dart from the hazel of her irises right into me, like a beam of light: pain and hurt, worry and tenderness, fear and love.

  ‘I thought that you had come to pick me up for an adventure,’ I said. ‘I saw you come early.’

  Sylvia whipped her head quickly from side to side, as though she were trying to shake something off.

  ‘I just had to think,’ she murmured. ‘I just needed some time…’ She trailed off.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ I asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said, standing up. She gripped my hand tightly and set off at a pace that was just a little too fast.

  That was the night she wrote up the Five Survival Rules. She made me copy them down on to the inside of the back cover of How to Survive.

  Early the next day, before it was even properly light, Sylvia took me on an adventure. I asked about Steve, and the fact I was supposed to be seeing him, but she just told me he wasn’t coming after all. She didn’t say why, even though I asked her. It had never happened before. I couldn’t quite understand how I felt when I first heard Steve wasn’t coming. I was disappointed, but then we were out for nearly the whole weekend and stayed overnight in the woods in an emergency shelter that we made, so I was distracted from thinking about it.

  Sylvia didn’t mention anything about her job to me until Monday morning. She said that I didn’t need to go to school. That we were going out again.

  ‘But don’t you need to go to work?’ I’d asked.

  ‘Not any more,’ she replied with a firm, brisk shake of her head.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re my job now,’ was all she said.

  We moved house for the first time that very week. And I haven’t seen Steve since.

  HOW TO HAVE AN ARGUMENT

  Sylvia has gone out every night since Christmas Day, and on New Year’s Eve I decide I have to say something.

  She’s holding another box of stuff and is heading towards the front door when I confront her. As though my legs are not my own, I feel myself run over and stand between her and the door.

  ‘Thanks, Billy,’ she says, misunderstanding me. ‘I don’t think I can manage the door with this one.’ Her fingers grip on tightly to the large box she’s struggling to keep hold of. It’s stuffed full of papers, old work documents that I didn’t know she still had. She has spent the day sifting through them and packing them away.

  ‘Sylvia.’ My voice comes out much quieter than I think it will, more like a whisper.

  She shifts the box in her arms, heaving it upwards before it begins to slip again.

  When I don’t open it, she says, ‘Hurry up, will you, Billy. I can’t hold on to this for ever.’

  Part of me wants to move out of her way and pull the door open for her, but the other part keeps my feet rooted to the floor, my arms rigid at my sides.

  ‘You have to tell me where you keep going each night,’ I say, in a burst. ‘You have to tell me what’s happening.’

  Sylvia heaves the box up one more time and then, quite suddenly, she drops it. It falls with a huge thud and I leap backwards. The lid flies open from the impact and some of the papers scatter on the floor around us.

  I catch sight of reports with CONFIDENTIAL stamped across them, in red. There’s a notebook filled with Sylvia’s handwriting that lies open at an angle.

  I don’t dare look at Sylvia’s face. I am sure she is upset. But then her hand is on my cheek. I can feel the ridge of the callouses on her fingers, smell the scent of the soap she uses, feel the warmth of her palm on my face.

  ‘Billy,’ Sylvia says gently. ‘You have to trust me. You know everything that I do is for you. To keep you safe.’

  I nod.

  ‘Do you trust me?’ she asks.

  I hesitate in replying for just a second too long.

  I see Sylvia’s mouth twitch.

  Words spring from my lips. ‘I do trust you, I do. But I don’t understand what you’re keeping me safe from. Where are you going to each night? Are we moving? Please tell me if we are leaving again.’

  Only as the question is spilling from my mouth do I realize how much I fear that we are going to start again someplace new. It isn’t that I love my current school or have any friends or anything like that, there is just a grey tiredness inside me that tells me I can’t move yet again.

  Sylvia sighs but it sounds more like a hiss.

  ‘I told you already that we’re not moving.’ She speaks through clenched teeth.

  I hear myself exhale, I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath. I’m glad to hear that we’re not moving again.

  ‘I just have to take these things to somewhere safe. We need to get ready.’

  ‘Get ready for what?’ I say. I hear my voice rising. It doesn’t sound like my own. ‘What are we getting ready for?’

  ‘I have to keep you safe. I have to keep you safe.’

  ‘Safe from what?’ I question her again. ‘What’s happening?’

  Sylvia just shakes her head.

  ‘Is this about Steve?’ I suddenly blurt out. I’ve stopped myself from mentioning him so many times but now his name just bubbles up; it’s out of my lips before I know it.

  Sylvia’s face jolts and for a second I see it flash across her face. Naked worry. It is about Steve.

  ‘He’s my dad – doesn’t he want me to be safe too?’

  ‘He doesn’t understand.’ Sylvia’s voice comes out like a growl. ‘He doesn’t want to understand.’

  ‘Why don’t I see him any more?’ Suddenly all the things that I’ve been bottling up are fizzing up, out of my control. ‘Why doesn’t he come?’

  Sylvia clamps her hands over her ears and shuts her eyes.

  ‘Tell me,’ I continue. ‘You need to tell me.’ I feel desperate with a longing that I didn’t know until that moment was living inside me always. Where was my father and why didn’t he want to see me any more?

  All of a sudden, Sylvia roars: ‘Your father doesn’t want to know, okay? He’d much rather believe in something convenient. I’ve tried to t
alk to him, I have… I did try. I tried to explain. But he doesn’t believe me, okay? His mind is closed. That’s why you don’t see him any more. Because he just doesn’t understand how important this is. And I can’t risk it, I can’t risk you not being ready. This is serious, Billy.’

  I try to absorb what it is that she’s telling me. I realize that there’s always been a voice telling me that I’m the reason that Steve doesn’t come to see me. I’d done something wrong, something that made him not want to see me any more. That was why I felt so empty whenever I thought about him. But now Sylvia is saying it was something else, something he wouldn’t believe. That it’s not my fault, it’s his.

  ‘What is it? What doesn’t he want to know about?’ I ask urgently.

  ‘I’ll tell you soon, I promise. And I will show you – where it is that I am going to.’ She says it again: ‘I promise.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In the next couple of weeks,’ she says. ‘I’ve got more that I need to get ready before then.’

  Instead of answering I step out of the way of the door and swing it open. I feel exhausted, like I’ve been running non-stop for hours on end. My mind flashes again with the hazy memory of Steve packing things into a bag when he left. This time, though, I remember more. I see myself stepping towards him and reaching out. His fingers closed over my hands as I see tears streaming down his face.

  Sylvia stuffs the papers back into the box. I go to help her but she grabs the papers from my hands as I do. I read a snippet of a sentence from her notebook before she jams it into the box. It’s just a fragment and it doesn’t make much sense at all: has to be a better way. I try to read more but Sylvia closes the notebook with a thump and shoves it on top of the papers.

  She hauls up the box into her arms.

  She doesn’t say goodbye. She doesn’t look back.

  HOW TO LEARN (THE HARD WAY)

  I don’t go back to school when the new term starts up.

  The days before I’m due to go back I’m on high alert, looking for any sign from Sylvia that she might know it’s approaching.

  Perhaps she’d start thinking aloud about what to buy for my packed lunches. Maybe she’d dig through my school bag to uncover the reading project I’d forgotten to do. But deep down, I knew none of these things were going to happen.

  On the first day of term, I lie in bed past the time I know I should be up and the funny thing is that although I don’t really want to go to school, I feel sort of twitchy and hot because I know I’m doing something wrong. Eventually, I put on my school uniform, picking it up from the floor where it has sat since we got home from making the firebow in the woods. There is still dirt from the wood clinging to the trousers that I try to brush off as best I can. But when Sylvia sees me, she tells me to ‘get dressed properly’, that I need clothes to keep warm because we’ll be out all day. We spend the whole day navigating using a compass and Sylvia teaches me how to use the sun to measure time as it sets, when you can see the horizon.

  Fig. 3. – How to measure the time using the sun

  The next day, Sylvia wakes me early, and we are out before it’s even light. That whole first week of term is the same, each day like a repeat of the one before; we spend most of the day on an adventure and then Sylvia leaves in the evening to go to the ‘safe place’, wherever that is.

  Now it’s Monday morning, and all I can think about is how I should be going into assembly at just this moment. But then, Miss Browning is probably telling everyone off for being too noisy in the corridor; what does it really matter if I’m missing out on that?

  I try to ignore the little part of me that wants to be just going into school, like any other day, like any other person.

  I can’t help but think about the assembly we had at the end of term. The head teacher presented a brand-new bike to the junior who had the highest attendance in the whole school. There were lots of people who thought that they might have a chance of winning and just before they announced who’d won, excitement filled the hall. I felt as if I could almost see it: an oversized, quivering jelly, balancing in the air.

  I knew that there was no way that I was in the running, partly because I hadn’t been at the school that long and partly because, in the time I had been there, I was absent so often. But even I hoped for a second that it might be my name that they read out.

  I knew that Sylvia got in trouble for keeping me off school. I’d seen the letters that she received. But she didn’t seem to care and at first neither did I. I loved our adventures. And the less I was in school, the less lonely I felt. I didn’t have friends and so being with Sylvia, learning all the survival stuff, was much more fun than being in school.

  But somewhere along the way it turned into something different.

  It changed from fun to me being worried about what might happen if I wasn’t there with her.

  It had transformed into me lying here in bed very still when I knew that I should be somewhere else and having a very different sort of day.

  * * *

  I hear the floorboards softly squeak in the room next to mine and I get up and get dressed. I go downstairs and have a poke about in the kitchen cupboards but can’t find anything that will make a breakfast.

  When Sylvia appears, her silver hair is scraped up in a ponytail, making her face look thinner than usual. She starts to pack her rucksack with matches, a ball of string, her penknife. She seems like she’s in a hurry.

  ‘Let’s get out as soon as we can,’ she says in place of ‘good morning’.

  I nod but I can’t stop myself from saying the words: ‘Do you think I should go into school today?’

  Sylvia doesn’t stop packing, and I think that she can’t have heard me. But then, as she fills up one of the water bottles from the tap, with her back to me, she answers.

  ‘I can teach you more about what you need to know than you will ever learn going to that place.’

  I don’t know how to answer.

  I don’t know how to explain to her that I don’t want to go on adventures any more. That I’m all mixed up inside because I’m scared to leave her alone but I just want to do what everyone else is doing. That I’m full of complicated feelings, knowing a distance is growing and growing between me and other kids my age and not being able to do a thing about it.

  HOW TO CONSTRUCT AN EMERGENCY SHELTER: PART I

  Sylvia found a tree she said was dying.

  It would be good to practise on, she said, and so that afternoon, we made our way over to the park. We’d spent the morning studying pictures of the lopped-tree bivouac, a type of emergency shelter, in How to Survive and reminded ourselves how to make one.

  Fig. 4. – How to construct an emergency shelter (Part I)

  Before we left the flat, Sylvia looked out of all the windows and insisted on checking the corridor too.

  ‘All clear,’ she told me.

  * * *

  We go on a complicated route to the park, with sharp turns down alleyways, and sometimes we break into a run. Sylvia keeps looking over her shoulder as though she thinks there is someone following us.

  ‘There’s no one there,’ I tell her but it’s like she can’t hear me. She keeps turning back to look.

  ‘Are you sure it’s okay for us to cut it down?’ I ask as we finally walk towards the tree.

  ‘This tree’s dying, they’ll probably thank us for doing them a favour. If we do it, they won’t have to.’

  ‘Really?’ I ask, eyeing the families all around us. The school next door to the park has just finished.

  She sighs; it reminds me of air streaming from a punctured tyre. She looks around us and I think she must see the same as I do: mothers standing in groups by their pushchairs, children running around screaming, still in their grey school uniforms. There is no one else like us. No one else who has an axe in their bag.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ she snaps. She rubs her eye suddenly, like there is something in it that is irritating her. ‘The tree is dying. And w
e have to practise more, Billy. You have to be ready.’

  ‘Ready for what?’ I ask, but in such a quiet voice that I don’t think she hears me.

  She swings the axe up high and when it hits the tree it’s like everyone around us feels the cut, the way that they startle and look over. Sylvia’s axe swings make dull, rhythmic thuds as she hits the tree again and again, her cheeks flushed from the effort. In no time, a crowd has started to grow around us.

  ‘Umm, I don’t think you can do that,’ someone says.

  Sylvia gives a small laugh.

  ‘I can do that,’ she says. ‘Because I am.’ She swings the axe again, hard, and it sinks deeply into the trunk.

  I pull at Sylvia’s sleeve. I want to go.

  A man steps forward then. ‘I really think you should stop,’ he says, his hands on his hips.

  Sylvia doesn’t look at him but swings the axe again into the trunk. As she lifts it, the blade glints in the afternoon sunshine.

  ‘Can’t you see that this tree is dead?’ Sylvia mutters. ‘Idiots.’ She lifts the axe once more and strikes the tree with all her strength. The axe bites deep, it’s the final blow needed for the top of the tree to be pulled down, for us to start to thatch the inside branches to make the shelter.

  ‘I’m going to call the police if you don’t leave,’ a mother says.

  ‘Sylvia,’ I say. ‘Maybe we should go.’

  Despite my worries that we shouldn’t be using the tree, I had actually almost been looking forward to making the shelter. If we did it right, it would resemble a sort of wigwam by the end and I thought it would be fun to have our own den of sorts. But now I just want to leave.

  ‘Oi!’ shouts a man who is walking a sausage dog. He is running towards us; his dog’s stubby legs can barely keep up with him. ‘You can’t cut that tree down! Is it even legal to have an axe like that in the park? There are children here.’

  ‘Sylvia, let’s go,’ I say.

  I can feel people watching us. With every person that arrives I can feel another pair of eyes boring into our skin as though they are fierce rays from the sun, as though they can burn us.