Boy in the Tower (13 page)

Instead I just have to wonder:
Who it is that Obi has brought to live with us?

Only when Dory starts making dinner does she ask Obi again about who he found in Gaia’s tower.

‘Will they be eating, Obi? I need to know how much to make.’

He just says, ‘Make one more plate up.’

So that’s how we first know it’s just one other person.

I really want to ask who it is and why they haven’t come to Dory’s flat to say hello and do they know where Gaia is, but Obi looks tired, like there’s something else that he’s thinking about all the time, so I just help Dory with dinner and don’t say anything.

It’s pasta with walnuts tonight. I’ve never had it before and I want to say that I don’t like nuts really but I don’t feel I can.

Obi disappears with a plate of food after dinner and Dory asks me if I want to play Gin Rummy again before bed. We play twice, one win each, and then I go back upstairs to Mum.

It’s strange that Obi won’t tell us what happened. I ask Dory if she knows why but she just says, ‘He must have his reasons,’ and, ‘We mustn’t rush him.’

It’s a funny kind of sleep that night. There are no torch signals from the other tower any more. Just complete blackness outside. Even though I know there’s not just Mum now, but Obi and Dory too, I feel lonely somehow.

There’s a moment in the middle of the night when I’m woken by the most terrific crashing sound.

It sounds like a groan and a bang and a smash all at the same time.

It terrifies me, it’s so loud and close. My windows rattle and shake as if they’ve been hit with something. Something hard.

Then I realize I know what it is.

Gaia’s tower has finally fallen.

The next morning I ask Obi and Dory if I can do something to help. They’re talking about how much food we have left and how long it will last us.

I haven’t been listening properly to what they’ve been saying.

And then Obi says, ‘Ade, you can help with that, OK?’

‘Yes, you’ll do a fine job,’ says Dory.

I look up at their smiling, nodding faces and they tell me what they want me to do.

My job is to go into flats and bring back any food we can eat.

I also need to tell Obi if I find any water.

Since Gaia’s tower fell, I haven’t felt much like doing anything. Obi said that she wasn’t there but I know he didn’t have time to look everywhere in the block. What if she was hiding somewhere; somewhere other than her flat?

I really want to ask Obi more about it but I don’t like to ask him lots of questions. It’s not that I’m scared of him or anything, I’m just not sure he would like it.

It’s good to be doing something other than sitting around but it doesn’t stop me from thinking about Gaia. I can’t stop remembering times when we were together. Everything reminds me of her.

Eating dinner with Obi and Dory reminds me of the time just after I’d told Gaia about Mum not leaving the flat. She asked me if I would like to come round for dinner at her flat.

‘Come tonight,’ she said. ‘We’ll go straight to mine.’

‘Does your mum know? Have you asked her?’

‘No,’ said Gaia, looking surprised that I’d asked. ‘She’d say no if I asked her, but if you just turn up, she won’t be able to.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. There was some sort of unwritten rule that Gaia and I could only see each other at school. I’m not sure how it came about exactly but sometimes adults don’t need to tell us what to do all the time; we can sense what they want.

‘Your mum never has to know!’ exclaimed Gaia. ‘And you can see my garden. The mint is really tasty in tea. C’mon, Ade! Jollof! Tell me you don’t want it!’

I knew how kind Gaia was being. She was willing to risk her mum being annoyed with her to make sure I had a proper dinner, but I couldn’t bring myself to say yes. It felt like I would have crossed over a line if I had gone, not saying anything to Mum when I got back, while my belly was full from Gaia’s mum’s cooking.

‘Fine. Suit yourself,’ Gaia said, and I could tell she was cross with me.

‘It’s just . . . Mum . . .’

‘It’s fine, Ade. I said it was fine.’

Sometimes it’s those memories that are the most painful of all. More so than the happy ones. I hope that one day I may get the chance to say sorry to her.

I decide to ask the person that Obi brought back if they know what happened to her family, as soon as I can. Until then, I just think in my head:
You’re all right, Gaia, you’re all right, Gaia, you’re all right, Gaia
, because everyone knows if you think about something enough then there’s a good chance it’ll come true.

We’ve decided to put all the food into one of the flats next to Dory’s, so we can see how much we have. There isn’t space to store it all at Dory’s. Obi gives me one of those bags with wheels at the bottom that you pull behind you, to carry the food in. He tells me to start from the top floor and gives me a large bunch of keys so I can open everyone’s door.

I have to leave them unlocked because we need to start using everyone else’s toilets now. Ours aren’t flushing any more, so we have to start using different ones or the smell will get too bad.

The first flat I go into has lots and lots of food in it. It looks like a big family lived here. There are lots of kids’ drawings stuck onto the fridge and toys scattered about the sitting room. I think they must have left in a hurry because there are heaps of clothes about the place and drawers left open. I don’t look around the flat much, though, I just head to the kitchen.

Even though everyone has gone, it’s strange to go into these people’s homes. It was a bit different when I went into Michael’s mum’s flat because I knew them and I had been there before. This feels a bit different, like I’m trespassing. But we need to eat and the people who lived here don’t need the food right now, so I pull a chair over to be able to open the cupboards. They are full of things we can take. And that’s when I have a good idea. I’ll do the same as I did when I took the tins of beans and bag of rice from Michael’s mum’s flat: I’ll keep a list of everything I take from every flat I go into. If the tower stays standing and the world goes back to normal and the people who live here come back, then we’ll just replace everything that we took using my list.

It makes me feel a lot better about taking the food. I run off to my flat and find my scrapbook and a pen so I can start straight away. I write the flat number at the top of the page and then I start my list. There’s cans of coconut milk and bags of rice and brown beans. I find some old yams which will still be OK to eat, but not any other kind of vegetable. Obi told me not to open the fridges. They’ve been off for a long time now, so everything will be bad inside them.

I fill the bag quickly and there’s still plenty to come back for. And then I start the trip downstairs to Dory’s floor. It takes quite a long time because of all the stairs and the bag is heavy. It judders down each step with a loud thump. Finally I reach the flat we’re keeping the food in and Dory is there waiting.

She takes everything out and starts sorting through what I’ve found. Her job is to put everything away. I go back upstairs with my empty bag, but on the way I stop at my flat and go to my bedroom to find my red rucksack. It’s not as big as the one Obi gave me but it’s big enough, and much easier to carry.

The next time I just fill my rucksack, and that means I can run down the stairs with the food. I can’t carry as much each time but it makes me much faster, and after a few runs up and down the food is starting to pile up. There are lots of tins and bags of food and bottles of oil. I also find quite a few packets of biscuits, and in one flat, six bars of chocolate.

‘I think it’s time for a rest. And lunch,’ Dory says.

She picks up a couple of tins from a large stack and we go back into her flat. It’s potato and leek soup. I’ve never had it before and I’m not sure if I’ll like it.

Dory sees my spoon hovering over the bowl.

‘Even if you don’t like it, Ade, you must eat some,’ she says.

It doesn’t taste too bad. In fact, it doesn’t taste much of anything. When we’ve finished eating, we play a quick game of cards before we get back to work.

Obi doesn’t come to eat with us today. Dory says we’ll see him later. Before I leave, Dory gives me a box of crackers to take Mum with a little bowl of the soup.

The day seems to be over more quickly than usual. I find some good things after lunch. Some big bottles of water that I’ll tell Obi about later, and a large orange net bag of onions which Dory was really pleased about. My scrapbook’s filling up with all the lists of food. I must have done about four pages today.

Before I know it, I can hear Dory and Obi’s voices from inside Dory’s flat and I can smell something cooking for dinner. When I get to the front door, though, I don’t go in straight away. I’m not sure why.

I wait for a moment and listen to what they are saying.

It’s about how upset someone is.

They must be talking about the person Obi rescued from the other tower. I hear Obi say, ‘He’s not in a good way,’ and, ‘No one should have to see that,’ and, ‘We’ll have to keep an eye on him.’ And then they start talking about the food we have and I go in.

After dinner, Dory says that I’ve worked hard today so I should go to the flat where we’re storing all the food and pick something for dessert.

It’s a little bit like being in a funny sort of shop. I go to the sofa where Dory said she put all the sweet things and there’s a big pile of different types of biscuits, bags of cakes that look like little boats and large blocks of chocolate.

I have to rummage around for a little while before I find what I’m looking for. I found it in the first flat I went into this morning. A little plastic box full of chin chin. Little crunchy pieces of chin chin.

Mum used to make it for me as a treat but I haven’t had it in a long time. She used to let me cut the dough into small squares and then she would drop them into a pan of hot oil to fry them. She’d stir, stir, stir and then scoop them out of the pan onto a plate with a square of kitchen roll on it. The smell they’d make when they were cooking used to hang around for days afterwards, long after we had finished eating them all.

I shake the little box that I found and it rattles.

‘Good choice, kid,’ Obi says, and we sit eating the chin chin until it’s all gone.

The next day is much the same. I bring food from the top floor down to Dory and she puts it all into different piles in the flat. All the bags of rice and pasta are kept in the bath, bottles are put in the kitchen and tins are kept in the bedroom.

Dory says I can take a break from carrying the food after lunch and tells me to arrange the tins for a bit. I spend a long time building them up into a castle with four tall turrets at each corner and battlements at the top of the walls. Dory laughs when she sees it.

‘That wasn’t exactly what I meant, Ade, but a splendid piece of work, nonetheless,’ she says, and I feel pinkly glad from her praise.

Sometimes it feels like it has always been Dory, Obi and me and that it will go on this way, unchanging, for ever. That evening, though, as I approach Dory’s door for dinner, I hear something new, something different. It isn’t Obi’s low, deep rumble of a voice or Dory’s singsong way of speaking; it is someone else, someone new. I stop myself from opening the door straight away as though I want to prepare myself.

It must be the person from Gaia’s tower, the person that Obi rescued. Someone who might be able to tell me where Gaia is. They might know her. They might have seen her leave, perhaps. My heart seems to skip two beats, one after another, and I feel excited and oddly nervous, which makes me dally in the doorway for just a few more minutes before I knock on the door.

‘That’s Ade,’ I hear Dory say. ‘Come in, Ade!’

I push the door open slowly.

‘Now, Ade, what have I told you about knocking?’ Dory chides. ‘You know you can come straight in.’

There is a tall thin man sitting at the table. He has sandy hair that looks like it is a bit overgrown and a wiry blond beard that makes his face look quite long.

Dory says to me, ‘This is Ben, Ade, say hello.’

‘Hello, Ben,’ I say. I pause. I want to ask him about Gaia straight away but something about the way he looks stops me.

Ben’s eyes are red as if he has rubbed them really, really hard and his hair is sticking up all over the place and looks greasy.

Of course, we are all looking a bit grubby these days. We don’t wash hardly at all any more. Water is too precious to waste on washing, Obi says. Instead, we’ve all got lots of packs of baby wipes which we use but there’s nothing we can do about our hair. I’ve never seen Obi’s hair sticking up like that, though.

I decide to wait until later to ask Ben if he knows Gaia and if she left the tower.

Ben doesn’t talk much that evening. He doesn’t join in when Dory, Obi and I tell each other what our favourite animals are. (Me: dog, Dory: elephant, Obi: gorilla.) And he doesn’t say, ‘That’s great, Dory, thanks for dinner,’ when he finishes eating, like Obi and I always do.

He just sits there, eating really slowly. After I finish, Dory spoons out some food on a plate for me to take up to Mum.

‘Do you want to take this now, Ade, and then come back for some cards? Or shall we see you in the morning?’

I’m just about to say, ‘I’ll come back,’ when Ben starts speaking.

‘Where’s his mum?’ he says.

And he looks from me to Dory to Obi.

No one says anything.

It’s one of the things that from the very beginning made me like Dory and Obi. They’ve always seemed to know, without me telling them, that I don’t want to talk about Mum not coming out of our flat. It’s not that we don’t talk about Mum. They often say, ‘How’s your mum doing, Ade?’ or, ‘I hope your mum likes dinner tonight.’ And sometimes I tell them little stories about Mum and me. But they’ve never asked me, ‘Why don’t we see your mum?’ or, ‘What’s wrong with your mum, Ade?’ And they never sound angry or cross with her when we do talk about her.