How I Saved the World in a Week Read online

  ‘Fine,’ Sylvia says. But I know it’s not.

  She leans the edge of the axe handle against her shoulder, so its dull, sharp blade rears into the air, and stalks through the middle of the crowd that has built up around us.

  They part as we approach.

  I see the first woman who had spoken to us grab hold of her daughter as we pass by, as though she is worried that Sylvia might swing the axe towards them.

  Don’t be worried, I want to tell them. We are just practising, I want to explain. She wouldn’t ever hurt anyone, I want to say.

  But then we hear the sound of sirens in the distance and Sylvia tells me to run.

  HOW TO STAY SILENT

  There’s a growing list of things I want to ask Sylvia about.

  I want to know if I am ever going back to school. It’s been almost a month now since the new term began and I’ve not been in once.

  I want to know where it is that she still goes to almost every night and what it is she is doing.

  I want to know what we are getting ready for.

  But Sylvia stays silent.

  And so I do too.

  HOW TO CONSTRUCT AN EMERGENCY SHELTER: PART II

  You find a fallen tree.

  If you can’t find one, a largish rock will do.

  You clear away any old leaves or branches on one side of it (where you want to make your bed) and light a roaring fire on this spot.

  This will dry out and heat the ground. After the fire has been burning for about half an hour, you push the embers a couple of metres away from the log, where you want your main fire for the night to be.

  You cover the ground where the fire once was (taking care there are no embers left) with a deep layer of leafy branches, then fern leaves, then moss or grass. This will be your bed.

  You know that if you lie on this bed of plant material as close to the log as possible, you will be sheltered. You know that with the heat of the fire nearby, you will keep warm.

  If there is the possibility of rain, you support branches against the log on the side that you are not sleeping. You cover them with leafy branches to make a roof of sorts.

  Fig. 5. – How to construct an emergency shelter (Part II)

  ‘That’s exactly right,’ Sylvia says.

  She’s driving us somewhere in a white, battered van and asking me questions to stop me from falling asleep.

  ‘How do you make a fire using a magnifying glass?’

  ‘How do you navigate using a shadow-stick?’

  ‘How do you build an emergency shelter?’

  ‘Tell me the Rules for Survival.’ Over and over.

  I yawn. My eyes blink closed, even though I am excited that I’m finally going to find out where she has been going each night.

  ‘Why do we have to go at night?’ I ask her, trying to sit up straight in an attempt to stay awake.

  ‘Too many eyes in the daytime,’ she replies. ‘Strictly speaking, we are not supposed to be going to this place and so it’s best to go when there aren’t many people about.’

  As she explains this, I feel worries knot through me.

  What if we get into trouble?

  What if we are found?

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she tells me. ‘It’s a safe place. It’s our safe place.’

  * * *

  The van jolts to a stop and this is what wakes me.

  It’s dark outside. I can’t see any light coming from anywhere. Not from a neighbouring house, not from a streetlamp. We must be in the middle of nowhere.

  Sylvia doesn’t speak. She clutches at the steering wheel and pulls herself forward so she is closer to the windscreen. She is looking up at the night sky – looking for something. For stars, perhaps, but when I look up the sky is overcast.

  ‘Ready?’ she says. She climbs out of the car and closes the door softly behind her. I copy her but when I stand, I feel the weight of tiredness pulling me down. I feel disconnected from every footstep I take. I follow her in a slow shuffle, unable to see where we are going or to work out what has brought us here.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I ask, but Sylvia does not answer me. She ducks in and out of shadows and I have to hurry to keep up with her. I can smell salt in the air – it lines my nostrils and stiffens in my hair. ‘Are we by the sea?’ I ask Sylvia’s disappearing back.

  I don’t notice the building at first. I’m concentrating so hard on following Sylvia that I don’t see the squat, grey tower in front of us. It looks like a huge, oversized chimney that is growing up from the ground.

  ‘It’s called a Martello tower.’ Sylvia’s voice rings out clearly. ‘Defensive forts that were built in the nineteenth century. Some of them are just ruins now. Or they’ve gone the other way and have been turned into holiday homes. This one’s somewhere in between. It’s not in bad nick but there’s no one using it. It’s good for us.’

  ‘Good for us, for what?’ I say, although I can feel the answer lingering just ahead of me. I know Sylvia well enough to understand why she would have more than a passing interest in an unused defensive fort.

  ‘It’s the perfect place for an emergency shelter,’ Sylvia says. ‘And I’ve been making it even more suitable, every chance I get.’

  This is where Sylvia has been coming each night, this is what she has been working on.

  We walk around the tower to a small, narrow door. It almost looks like it’s just a shadow in the wall. Sylvia bends down and pulls out a pick and a wrench from her pocket and begins to fiddle with the lock. I hear the lock turn and Sylvia opens the door for me and hands me a torch.

  ‘You go first,’ she says. ‘I want you to see it. I want you to see everything that I have done.’

  I click the torch on and direct the thin beam into the tower. For a moment, I do not want to go any further. I do not want to follow the light of the torch. I do not want to see Sylvia’s preparations. I wish I was somewhere, anywhere else.

  ‘Go on,’ Sylvia urges me, cutting through my thoughts. She gestures towards the door. ‘See what I’ve done.’ Her voice sounds high and taut, like a kite that’s being pulled by a strong wind.

  I let the torch beam travel across the sides of the entrance. I can’t see anything in there – there’s nothing pinned to the walls, nothing blocking the pathway.

  ‘Hurry up, Billy.’

  I take a step in, and then another.

  ‘Take the door on the right,’ Sylvia says.

  I turn and push the door open. It’s stiff; I have to give it a hard shove to move it. My eyes struggle to adjust to the new darkness in this room but then I see it.

  There are tins and tins and tins piled up so they make a wall. There’s other food too – longlife cartons of milk, bags of rice, of oats.

  Lining every wall space, there are articles tacked up which have been circled and highlighted. In the darkness I can only really make out a few words and odd phrases. I recognize some of the pages as reports on climate change and the melting ice caps that used to be plastered to the walls in our flat. Sylvia had taken them down when we were being visited by someone from social services. I thought she’d thrown them away but clearly she had just found them a new home.

  There are other diagrams too. Images of the human body that are pinned up and have scribbled notes all around them. They’ve been shaded in with pencil or something so you can’t see their skin, only a grey sheen where the colour should be.

  ‘What are these?’ I ask, but Sylvia steps in front of the diagrams.

  ‘Don’t worry about those. Come on, I’ll show you where everything is,’ she says.

  She walks me round every part of the Martello tower, showing me exactly how she has organized it and where to find everything. There’s a room that already has two sleeping bags laid out, side by side – one for me and one for her. It’s a dark, dank room and smells like old mushrooms. I can’t imagine sleeping in it.

  ‘Are we moving here?’ I ask Sylvia when I see it, worry in my voice.

  ‘Well, tha
t’s the thing, Billy,’ Sylvia says. ‘We may have to move here. I’d hoped that we wouldn’t but we need to be ready in any case. Remember the number one Rule…’

  ‘Always be prepared.’ I speak the words without thinking, they are so etched into my mind.

  ‘There’s a strong possibility that we will have to stay here. I wish it weren’t the case but wishing doesn’t make things go away.’

  I swallow hard. I don’t understand why we would ever have to live here.

  ‘It’s not for now,’ Sylvia says, and I feel a tightness in my chest release. ‘But you need to know how to find it, just in case we get separated and have to make our own way here.’

  She pulls a map from one of the shelves and spreads it out on the floor.

  ‘But how will I know if it’s the right time to come if we’re not together?’

  ‘You’ll know,’ Sylvia says, without meeting my eye. ‘You’ll know.’

  HOW TO START A FIRE USING A SPLIT MATCH

  The wood of the match is spindly, almost impossibly thin.

  Sylvia holds it with a shaking hand.

  She places one of her fingers on the head of the match and presses it against the striker.

  ‘Your finger will be burnt,’ I call out to her. ‘Don’t light it!’

  She looks over to me. She sees me.

  She sees me.

  This morning there have been longer periods where she hasn’t seen me. I’ve spoken and my words have fallen around her like dead leaves. I’ve reached out to her and she has shaken me away, shrugged out of my grasp.

  But now she sees me.

  ‘It won’t burn me,’ she tells me. ‘I’ll lift my finger as soon as the head flares. I’ll show you again.’

  She’s taught me how to split matches before. She put the knifepoint just behind the match head, the sharp part of it angled towards its tip and drove the blade down so it would split into two.

  Fig. 6. – How to start a fire using a split match

  ‘If we split matches,’ she had told me, ‘we can double our supply.’

  But the problem came when lighting them. They would break easily now they were half as thin. You had to press the head on to the striker with your finger and take it away at the very last moment.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ I plead with her now. ‘Let’s not start a fire. We don’t need one.’

  ‘It’s easy,’ she says. ‘It’s easy to do.’

  Her hand shakes only a little, her finger is still pressing the head of the match against the striker.

  She draws the match along, holding it firmly within her thumb and middle finger. It sparks into flame.

  ‘See?’ Sylvia says. ‘You just have to hold it carefully so it doesn’t break.’

  She lights the little pile of tinder that she collected and flames lap around the twisted newspaper and the candle ends.

  She feeds it with the papers that arrived in the post and made her so upset, one after another, and the fire grows and grows.

  The fire grows where she made it.

  In the middle of our living-room floor.

  HOW TO FALL

  The flat fills with smoke. Not just like the smoke when rice burns on the stove or something like that; these are heavy, dense clouds of smoke that seem as impenetrable as walls.

  The fire grows across the carpet and spreads towards the sofa. She’d used something to make it catch, a spray, a liquid that fed the fire with a roar.

  Her eyes are wide with alarm and fear. I know that she did not mean for it to be so big.

  I know, too, why she was so upset about the letter that made her decide to burn our post. I read it when she crushed it into a ball and threw it down on to the floor. It was something legal about who was going to have custody of me. Steve wanted me to live with him and the letter said there was going to be a hearing.

  Steve. I felt the old familiar hole opening up inside of me as I read the letter, the emptiness that grew in my stomach any time that I thought about him. It had been so long since I’d seen him now that he felt like just a name to me. I couldn’t quite admit to myself that I couldn’t even properly remember his face or the sound of his voice. But he did want to see me again, the letter proved that.

  What would it be like if I didn’t live with Sylvia? However difficult it could be, I knew with a heavy, sure certainty that I couldn’t be separated from her. I just couldn’t.

  I’d scrunched the letter back into a ball and left it on the kitchen floor so that Sylvia didn’t know I’d read it too.

  For ages she had paced the flat, walking from wall to wall to wall, an energy raging inside her. Then she had the idea that she wanted to burn it…

  Now the smoke from the fire grows thicker and thicker.

  I think of ringing 999. I think about the very small fire extinguisher that we have in the kitchen; it seems far too tiny to be able to put out a fire like this. I think of wrapping wet tea towels around our faces. But in the time these short thoughts have darted through my mind, the fire has grown even bigger. Too big.

  Then I feel Sylvia’s hand in mine. She is coughing violently from the smoke and I can feel it too, a burning in my chest. It feels like I will never be without it, that pain.

  She pulls me towards the fire but I’m paralysed with fear. I don’t want to move.

  ‘Come on, Billy, you must,’ she says.

  I shake my head violently.

  ‘You can do this,’ she says. ‘I know you can do this.’

  I find that I am on my feet, that I am following her past the raging fire.

  Sylvia drags me towards the window and wrenches it open. She lifts me and suddenly I am spiralling out of the window, tumbling in the air, waiting for the moment that I land, my eyes tightly shut.

  I think I can’t possibly survive a fall this big, I think: I am going to die.

  HOW TO SAY GOODBYE

  I cough and I cough.

  I can’t cough hard enough.

  I feel like I need to cough something up before I will ever be able to breathe again, like a black twisted piece of tar or a jagged stone that has sharp, cutting edges. There are tears welling in my eyes although I’m not crying, not really, although I can still feel the weight of heavy teardrops forming. And the funny thing is that I want to cry. I want to curl up and sob. I am suddenly very aware that there’s a hole inside of me: a pit, a black and bottomless pit, and I could fall down into it at any moment, I know this. But for now, I must just—

  ‘Breathe, breathe,’ a voice commands.

  They try to fasten a mask over my mouth. At first I try to push them away but there are hands, strong hands, that hold me down and keep me still. And then the mask is on me and I can feel it helping.

  I can breathe without coughing.

  I can breathe even though it still feels that something inside me is torn.

  I can hear voices talking all around me and my ears strain to hear the sound of the only voice I want to hear.

  Sylvia.

  Where is she?

  I struggle to get up and try to pull the mask from my face but someone, a paramedic I think, leans over me and says, ‘No, no, keep it on, mister.’ She presses the mask back over my face. ‘That’s it,’ she says.

  But then I hear her radio scramble. A voice rings out, tinny and faraway. I hear scraps of the words it is saying: ‘Urgent assistance required – code 119 – all available units respond.’ She turns her back to answer it, I wrench the mask off in one movement and struggle away from the bed and the blankets that feel like ropes tying me down.

  There are people gathered outside our building. Our neighbours mostly, but also people that I do not recognize. I look for Sylvia’s face amongst them but I only see strangers.

  I want to shout out her name but my lungs are too painful; if I try to shout I will only make a strangled-sounding wheeze. I know that my voice has shrivelled, like a plant that hasn’t been given enough water and its leaves have turned into crispy spirals.

  Flashing
lights from police cars bathe everything in a pulsing blue beam.

  I look up to our flat, to the window that Sylvia had thrown me through. It’s dripping with water; the glass is blackened, cracked. How did I survive falling from such a height? But as I look at the ground beneath the window, I instantly know the answer. There are large shrubs growing which must have acted like a cushion; Sylvia had known they would break my fall, made sure that was where I’d land. But even though I’m here, alive with just bruises and cuts, I still can’t believe the height, the fall.

  The fire crew are milling around the entrance to our building. I wait for the right moment, when they have walked just far enough away, and then I make a run for the door. Sylvia must still be upstairs, I decide. I have to find her, I have to know she’s okay.

  But I am not as fast as I want to be, my legs move sluggishly beneath me as I try to run, and they easily spot me.

  ‘Hey, stop there!’ someone shouts as someone else comes stomping towards me.

  I only just manage to slide past them and run up the stairs to our flat.

  Everything has been blackened and singed by the fire and the smell of smoke hangs in the air.

  ‘Sylvia!’ I call out in a cracked whisper. I run from room to room.

  She is not there.

  I hear the pounding of the fire crew’s footsteps down the corridor.

  I am suddenly sure that I will not be here again. I know that I will be taken away. It will be just like in the letter that Sylvia received this morning.

  I reach out for something, anything that I can take with me. A piece of us that can come with me.

  My fingers grip around Sylvia’s old penknife that lies on the floor. It’s tarnished from the fire but it feels just the same in my hand.

  And then there are arms around me, there’s blankets and more flashing lights. They smother me, they carry me away.

  I still can’t find Sylvia. And no one will tell me where she is.