Boy in the Tower Read online

  I wished I was with Gaia again. Perhaps I could have gone with her family to Brighton and escaped as well.

  I knew it was a good idea to get out, but the problem was, I just couldn’t go anywhere without Mum.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Michael’s mum came round a couple of days after our school shut and told me to pack up my things.

  She marched into Mum’s bedroom and started shouting at her to get up. To save her son. To save herself. Mum looked right through Michael’s mum as if she hadn’t just been screamed at, and turned over on her side to go back to sleep.

  Michael’s mum grabbed my wrist then and started half yelling at me. She said that I would go with them, that I would be safe then. She told me to pack some of my clothes, that she’d be back soon.

  I closed the door behind her and locked it with the big key that we hardly ever use. I put the chain on as well. Then I pushed my chest of drawers in front of the door. It was too heavy for me to lift, so I had to move one side forward and then the other. It took me a while to move it like this, in little zigzags, but I got it there in the end. Just before Michael’s mum came back.

  She really started yelling when she realized I wasn’t going to open the door. Even louder than she did at Mum. Ade, Ade, Ade. She kept saying my name over and over. I even heard Michael’s sister shouting my name. But it didn’t last for ever. And then I heard their footsteps fade away. They had left too.

  I went out to buy some food from the shops after that. I knew it was dangerous but we were running out again and we had to eat.

  I walked out of my tower, but before I turned towards the shops, I looked down the road to where Gaia’s block was standing. Was she still in there? I counted the windows up until I found the seventeenth floor and tried to see through the dark panes.

  Maybe she was looking at me at this very same moment that I was looking towards her?

  Just in case she was, I put my hand up and waved a little bit. Then I started to feel silly, so I stopped and started running down the road to the shop.

  The one closest to us was closed, with the grey shutters pulled right down, so I had to go to a mini supermarket that was down the road.

  There was no one else in the supermarket when I went round filling my basket and there were lots of things missing from the shelves. I decided to buy some chocolate biscuits as a treat, the type that are filled with white marshmallow, and remembered to get some toilet roll for us too.

  The man who served me was very tall and looked quite nervous. He kept looking around us as if he thought that someone was going to jump out from behind the shelves at any minute. I filled up a couple of plastic bags and their handles dug into my hands, cutting bright pink lines into my skin. I’d only gone a few steps down the road when I saw that the sign on the door had been changed to CLOSED.

  I’d only just got there in time.

  The street was deserted, and all of a sudden I felt very alone. There weren’t many cars or buses on the roads either, which is very odd because usually the main road has a big traffic jam on it. People around here say it is the only thing you can really depend upon. You never know if the sun is going to shine or if the day is going to go your way but you know there’ll be a traffic jam, bumper to bumper, on the main road.

  I didn’t like the empty-looking street.

  I didn’t realize how much I liked the busyness of everything and how, without it, I felt more lonely. The bags of shopping were too heavy for me to be able to run, and walking felt slow and tiring. It made me play a secret game which I have never told anyone about, not even Gaia.

  I imagine that I see an animal wandering behind me on the street.

  Maybe it is hiding behind a dustbin or creeping round the corner. It could be any animal. I’ve had elephants, giraffes, horses and even rabbits in the past, although usually it is a dog or a cat. Sometimes the same one comes up, without me even thinking about it. There’s a black-and-white dog that often turns up, and a small tabby kitten that I’ve seen a few times.

  I imagine that the animal is following me home, so every time I look round, I can see it there behind me. By the time I get back to my block, it comes up right next to me so it’s by my side, and then we walk up the stairs together to my flat. I always take the stairs on those days because it’s fun to imagine them running up in front of me and then waiting for me to catch up with them. Or balancing on the banister and then leaping down in front of me.

  And I don’t think animals like the lift. It makes them feel like they are trapped.

  Then, when we get back to my flat, I feed them their favourite food. I make this part up too, of course. I don’t put down real food or anything like that. Then I make them a bed for the night and that’s it.

  I guess they are imaginary friends of sorts and that’s why I don’t tell anyone about them, because I don’t want people to think I am weird. I don’t talk to them or anything, other than in the normal way you might talk to any animal, like, ‘Here boy!’ or, ‘It’s OK, don’t be scared,’ or, ‘I won’t hurt you,’ but actually I do all the talking in my head, otherwise Mum might hear me and I’d wake her. The animals don’t really have names either.

  And the other thing is that they are always gone in the morning. The first time it happened, I spent a long time looking for the creature everywhere, even under the bed and in the kitchen cupboards, just in case it got trapped or was lost somewhere, but it was nowhere to be found. I still spend a while looking for them in the morning each time, just in case. Perhaps one day, it’ll still be there when I wake up and I won’t feel that stab of sadness that I’m alone again.

  That day, it was the black-and-white dog who strolled towards me, and because he knows me now, he gave my hand a lick and looked at me in that loving way dogs do. I was glad to see him. I gently stroked him from his eyes right to the back of his head, just the way he likes. As we walked together, he stuck close to me and I put my shopping bags into one hand and kept my other hand by my side, so I could feel his soft fur as we made our way back to the tower.

  We didn’t meet anyone else on the way. At one point, he sniffed the air as if he could smell something, but then he carried on walking and soon enough we were back at my tower. We climbed the stairs to my flat, the dog bounding a few steps ahead of me all the way and then turning every once in a while to see where I was.

  He slept at the bottom of my bed that night. I fell asleep more easily than I had done in a while with him there, and when I woke in the early morning, when it was still dark outside, he was still there, sleeping in the tight circle his body made.

  But when I woke in the morning, with the sun streaming through my curtains, he’d gone. I thought I could see the indent his body had made in my duvet, which felt warm to touch, so maybe he’d only just left.

  I didn’t spend as long looking for him this time. I knew in my heart that I was alone once more.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  I’ve already told you about the TV crews that arrived, haven’t I? Well, lots more came after they closed my school.

  It was funny seeing streets that I know on the television. They didn’t look right. They looked greyer and darker and smaller somehow.

  Sometimes they interviewed people who lived nearby and they talked about how scared they were and they often said that they were packing up and leaving their homes.

  ‘You aren’t safe inside your home and you aren’t safe on the streets any more. There’s nowhere left to go,’ I remember one woman saying. She had a baby sitting on her hip the whole time she was talking, playing with her hair.

  I always wondered if Gaia or her mum might suddenly appear on the television. Maybe they would tell me that they were leaving, so I would know for sure that they had gone and that Gaia would be safe.

  I would always run back to the television if I could hear different voices other than the serious tones of the newsreaders to see if it was them. But they never turned up.

  I spent a lot of time
watching television because there wasn’t much else to do. Sometimes I dreamed I could hear Michael’s mum calling for me to walk to school and I would wake up with a start and think I needed to rush out, before I remembered that Michael’s mum had gone now and that school didn’t exist any more.

  It’s funny because sometimes when I was at school, especially if we had tests or long pieces of writing to do, I used to wish I was back at home, watching television and not doing anything much at all. Now that I was at home watching television all day, I wished I was back at school. I missed Miss Farraway and how our classroom was always warm and colourful. I missed listening to stories read aloud to us. I missed seeing Gaia every day.

  My head sometimes hurt for no reason and I wished I could run outside and feel the air rushing by my cheeks as I ran but I didn’t dare leave the tower unless I really needed to. I felt foggy some days and nothing seemed to make me feel much better. I just carried on watching television, even if I had a headache, because at least that way I could hear people speaking.

  One day I was watching television and they started talking about ‘the Blucher Disaster’. Blucher is the name of the road which Gaia and I walked down, the one where the first two men and the policemen who had died were found.

  They were talking about everything that had been happening and whether or not the army should be sent in. The problem was that they didn’t know what they were fighting, so it was all well and good to send the army in but they didn’t know who or what the enemy was.

  The people talking on the programme were getting very red-faced and blustery when not everyone agreed with what they were saying. Then they started talking to another man through a video link. He had large pink cheeks that wobbled when he spoke.

  ‘Prime Minister, what is being done to help the people affected by the Blucher Disaster?’ they asked him. ‘It seems like not a lot from where we are sitting.’

  ‘No, that’s not true,’ he started, and then he was speaking a lot of words but they weren’t making any sense at all. I don’t know how else to explain it. He was talking a lot but it was like it didn’t really mean anything.

  I knew a little bit about the Prime Minister but I couldn’t really believe that it was this man, with his pink, jowly cheeks and nervous, dashing eyes, who was in charge of our country. I couldn’t stop thinking that he didn’t have any idea what to say, that he didn’t know what to do, and if the Prime Minister didn’t know what to do then what hope was there?

  I didn’t watch it for long and I changed the channel to someone talking about the number of people who had died so far, and there were people who knew them, their families, crying and talking about how much they missed them.

  I turned the television off for a while after that.

  The funny thing about the programme which had the Prime Minister on was that after that, everyone started calling the whole thing the Blucher Disaster. People pronounced it wrong sometimes and said things like ‘Bloosher’ or ‘Bloocher’, but soon enough, everyone was saying it right, and made that funny little ‘uh’ sound that comes in the middle of words like book and look before the ‘ch’. Bl-uh-ch-er. You know you are saying it right when it sounds like something that would knock you round the head.

  One minute, we weren’t calling it that, and the next, it had caught on so much that in the end, people were using it to describe anything horrible that was happening.

  When a building collapsed and fell down on a group of teenagers, it was all part of the Blucher Disaster.

  When a woman was found collapsed dead with her bag of shopping spilling onto the road, it was the Blucher Disaster.

  It was all the same to them. And in the end, I guess they were right.

  This was how the plants first got their name. Bluchers. Someone called them that once on TV and it stuck.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  No one knew about the Bluchers for what seemed like a long time.

  There were all kinds of reasons and ideas about why our buildings were falling down and why people were collapsing. After what happened to the two men and the policemen, people were being attacked every day.

  It was a horrible, horrible time.

  I could see from my window if there was a little blob of a person who was not moving. Then I would see an ambulance arrive and people in brightly coloured jackets would swarm around the body and carry it away.

  I hadn’t left our flat for a really long time since school had shut down. I got into a rhythm each day which revolved around food, looking out of the window and television. The first thing I would do when I got up was to make breakfast for Mum and me and tidy up anything from the night before. I’d take Mum’s plate into her bedroom and leave it on her bedside table because she’d always be asleep. Then I’d watch the morning news for a few hours and find out anything new that had happened.

  One day, I thought I’d switch on the news and they’d say that they’d found a way to make it safe for everybody again. It had to happen sooner or later, didn’t it?

  After that, I would sit and look out of the window. From where I sat, I could see the little holes left by fallen buildings, as if someone had come along and taken bites of brick and concrete here and there. I’d spend some time updating Gaia’s map with any more buildings that had fallen. There were more and more dots to make each day.

  I’d make lunch next. Something simple like crackers and cheese or a tin of soup. Then more television and window-watching before dinner.

  It always felt like I was waiting for something to happen, whether it was for someone to make everything safe once more or something as simple as seeing Mum awake. I would be sitting watching television and then I would hear the sound of the door handle squeaking from her bedroom. I tried to stop myself from running up to her and asking her a hundred questions and giving her a hug, and instead I would just sit where I was, in front of the television.

  I ran up to her like that once before, and she didn’t like it.

  I sprang up as soon as I heard the door opening. ‘Mum!’ I said. ‘I’m home all the time now. They closed the school down because it’s not safe any more. There’s lots of people leaving. Do you think we should go? We’d have to be careful because there’s something that’s making you fall over and die . . .’

  I was excited, I hadn’t spoken to anyone since the day Michael’s mum had tried to take me with her and I’d been to the shop for some food. That tall, nervous-looking man who served me in the shop was the last person I had spoken to. It had been six days.

  Mum was saying something under her breath which stopped my flow of words.

  ‘Stop, stop, stop,’ she was saying.

  She turned towards the bathroom and shot me the same look she’d given me the day I asked her to come shopping with me. Her eyes looked small and weren’t open properly, as if all the sleeping was making her eyelids stick together. But I could still see what they were saying: Stop talking. It’s hurting me.

  She went to the bathroom and I heard the sound of the toilet flushing and then she went back inside her bedroom.

  I knew better after that. I stayed still if I heard her come out. I might have turned my head towards her and sometimes she might have given me a little nod, but that was all.

  I really missed being able to talk to Gaia. Especially with everything that was happening. I wished I could have talked to her about it and heard what she thought. Did she still think that the fallen-down buildings had something to do with the collapsing people? Did she think it was funny, like me, that they were using the name of Blucher Road in all the news reports now? Didn’t she think it was actually quite a threatening-sounding word if you said it over and over to yourself?

  I just had to have these conversations in my head and imagine what Gaia might say. It wasn’t the same as actually speaking to her, but it helped a little. Sometimes I would even replay old conversations we’d had in my head.

  ‘You know what I heard on the radio this morning?’ Gaia had said to m
e one day when we were sitting in the playground. ‘These scientists were doing a test with plants to see if they treated their sibling plants differently to stranger plants.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘Guess what they found.’

  ‘That they don’t treat them any differently. They’re plants.’

  ‘No! They found that they did! They were less aggressive towards their sibling plants. They don’t take up as much root space, so their sibling’s got room to grow too. Isn’t that amazing?’

  ‘But how do they know which plant is their sibling?’

  ‘The scientists don’t know how they do it. They don’t know how they recognize them.’

  ‘That’s weird.’

  ‘It’s incredible. We really only know such a tiny amount about how plants behave.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess so.’

  Gaia used to present me with these little nuggets of information that she picked up all the time. It was always something interesting that I hadn’t considered or realized or heard about, and quite often it was to do with plants because she loved them so much. I missed hearing her telling me something amazing she had just discovered about the world. Gaia had made me realize what a wonderful and strange place we lived in.

  I kept filling in the map that she had given me. It was my way of feeling close to her, I suppose. Each day I drew in more and more numbered red dots. I was running out of space now. There were so many red dots close to each other, it was beginning to look entirely red.

  I found myself missing Gaia a little bit more on the days when something new happened. I wanted to be able to talk it through with her. Otherwise it didn’t feel like it was real, like it was actually happening.

  One of those days was when the news kept showing the same thing on every channel. A woman with curly blonde hair was talking. Her face filled most of the screen, so I could see that she had little lines round her mouth where her face would crease when she smiled. But she wasn’t smiling then. She had made a discovery about what was killing those people. She’d found something in their throats. It was so, so small that we would not be able to see it if we only used our eyes. She had discovered them using a special microscope.