Boy in the Tower (18 page)

I nodded. We both looked at him, playing with his own shadow in a square of sunlight coming through one of the windows.

‘Let’s have a closer look at him. Go and get him, Ade.’

I went over and picked him up. He immediately started purring into my shoulder. He was such a friendly cat.

‘Now, let’s see. What’s this?’

He fingered a thin, grubby red collar around the cat’s neck. He took it off carefully and moved it around in his hands until we could see the little metal buckle.

‘I’m not sure, but I think they were after that.’

‘But it’s so tiny!’ I said.

‘They’re hungry,’ Obi said grimly.

We didn’t speak about it again.

We spend the rest of the afternoon just sitting in Dory’s flat, eating a tin of ginger biscuits that I found a week ago, and playing with the cat. Obi and Ben look really tired for some reason, and they sit slumped on the sofa for quite a while as Dory fusses over the circle of bruising around my leg where the Blucher had hold of me. To take my mind off it, Dory makes us all sit round the table together and play a new card game which she calls Memory.

She lays out all the cards face down on the table, so its entire surface is covered. Then you have to turn over one card for everyone to see and then pick up another to see if you can find the same card in a different suit. If you find a pair, then you take those and put them on your pile.

The game goes on and on.

Ben, Obi and I aren’t very good at it and Dory keeps finding all the pairs. Then suddenly Obi starts picking out lots of pairs until he has quite a large pile. And then Ben and I find a few each too.

When we finish the game, everyone gets quite excited about who will pick up the last few cards.

Ben laughs out loud when Obi picks up the wrong card. The cat lies sleeping on my lap, warm and soft. And in those few hours, I forget that only earlier that day, I’d been quite sure that I was about to die.

That night, we eat well. Dory puts down plates of meat and rice, saying, ‘Ta-da!’ in a loud, happy voice as she does. It reminds me of the way Gaia shouted, ‘Happy birthday!’ when she jumped out from behind a tree right in front of me on my last birthday.

We haven’t eaten fresh meat like this since the very first time I ate with Obi and Dory. It’s the same meat. A bit like chicken, but it looks, and tastes, darker. It has more flavour and is more of a grey-purple colour.

We eat hungrily, and there is the quiet that comes when everyone is eating and enjoying what’s in their mouths so much that they don’t really want to talk. I like that kind of quiet. Just little sounds of forks and knives on plates and lots of small sighs that mean,
This tastes just great
.

It is Dory who breaks the silence. She can’t help herself. She looks so excited about something that she has to speak.

‘Do you like dinner tonight, everyone?’ she asks.

We all say, ‘Yes, Dory,’ and, ‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Can you guess where the meat’s from, Ade?’ she says.

I have a think. It’s nothing that I’ve found in another flat and we haven’t opened fridges and freezers for meat for a long time.

‘No,’ I say, ‘but we had it the first time I met you.’

Dory claps her hands to her cheeks. Obi smiles.

‘So we did!’ she exclaims. ‘Those were the last ones I had left in the freezer, just after the power went out. But these are fresh ones. Nice and fresh.’

She then turns to Ben. ‘Benjamin, do you like it? Do you know where I got it from?’

Ben says that he does like it and he doesn’t know.

There’s quiet again before Dory starts asking more questions.

‘Do you know what type of meat this is, Ade? Can you take a guess?’

I say, ‘Chicken?’

Dory shakes her head. Her mouth is in a small, tight smile that makes her whole face crinkle.

‘Ben?’ she says. ‘Do you know?’

He says, ‘No, Dory.’

‘Ade’s cat?’ she says, and throws the cat a little piece of meat. ‘I bet you know what this is.’ The cat sniffs the meat, eats it straight away and looks up, meowing as if he’s answering her.

‘That’s quite right, little cat. That’s what it is,’ Dory says back to him.

‘What kind of meat is it, Dory?’ I say.

‘Well, seeing as you’ve asked, Ade, I can tell you that this is none other than the tender breast meat from a lovely, fat, succulent pigeon!’ Dory says, beaming.

‘But where did you get it from?’ I ask. I didn’t know you could eat pigeons.

Now Dory looks even prouder and she sits a little taller in her chair. ‘I caught it,’ she says.

‘But how did you catch it?’ I ask. ‘They always fly away when you go near them.’ I remember running past them on the pavement and their soft wings rising up around me like a grey cloud.

‘Maybe I could show you tomorrow. We could do with some more,’ she says.

She catches Obi’s eye and he smiles back at her. As if he knows a secret which we don’t.

The next morning, I walk down the stairs to Dory with Pigeon following me close behind.

After Dory fed him the piece from her plate last night, he didn’t stop meowing for scraps of the pigeon meat, and he even jumped up onto the table when we had finished, to lick the plates.

I wondered if he was trying to tell me that his name was Pigeon, and even though it sounds a bit funny at first, the name fits. It seems to suit him. His grey stripes could be feathers and they are exactly the right sort of pigeon colour.

He seems excited, like me, that we are going pigeon-hunting today. He keeps close to my heels so I almost trip over him, and then he jumps up onto my shoulders where he perches like a bird.

Dory is wearing a flat kind of hat this morning and she’s sitting on the arm of the sofa waiting for us.

‘We’ll have breakfast later. When we’ve caught our first one,’ she tells us.

She goes into the corner of the room and wheels out one of those trolleys that you use for shopping, just like the one I first used to carry food in from the top flats. ‘It’s got everything we need inside it,’ she says, and gently taps it twice.

‘Pigeon is going to have to wait here for us,’ Dory tells me.

Pigeon looks at both of us with really big eyes. They say,
Don’t leave me here alone
.

I think Dory’s thinking the same thing because she says, ‘Sorry, Buster, but that’s the way it has to be.’ She puts some cat treats in a saucer that has little pink roses on it and bits of gold around the rim, and while he’s eating them, we leave.

‘I wasn’t able to risk it for a while because of the spores, you see. Otherwise we could have been eating it all along. We’ll wear scarves just in case, but you know Obi doesn’t think the spores are able to fly very high, so as long as we go to one of the top floors, we’ll be just fine.’

In the end we go to the fifteenth floor and we find a flat that has an empty balcony. Dory pulls out some scarves that we wrap around our faces. She says something to me but I can’t hear her through her scarf, so she makes a little hole for her mouth and says, ‘First we need to get their attention.’

She pulls out a clear plastic bag of seeds from the trolley.

‘Do you want to come with me? Or wait inside?’

I say that I will come with her. Dory checks something in her pocket and then says, ‘Ready?’

She pulls her scarf around her mouth to cover up the hole, opens the balcony doors and we go outside.

As far as we can see there is just the green of plants and the funny colour of the Bluchers. The tops of the trees look like bubbly green clouds, all in different shades, and the patches of thick grasses make odd little shapes among them. There are other colours too, reds and yellows and blues, which must be flowers that have sprung up here and there.

I can’t see any pigeons though. And then Dory starts calling to them.

She cups both her hands over her mouth and makes a hooting sound.

Hoo, hoo, hoo
.

Over and over.

First one way and then the other. Then she grabs a handful of seed from the bag and gestures to me to take one.

From out of the trees, we see their little grey bodies take to the air and start to fly up to where we are. We hear the sound of their wings beating just before they land in any space they can on the tiny balcony. In the moments before they arrive, Dory throws her handful of seeds onto the floor, and within seconds, each seed has been furiously pecked and eaten.

I throw my handful then, and there is a flurry of movement as they move on to the new lot of seeds. We keep this up for a couple of handfuls each and then Dory passes me the seed bag to hold.

She throws a large scattering of seeds next to one of the walls and then she bends down low straight away. All of the pigeons’ backs are to her, pecking away, and then, as quick as a step, Dory picks up a pigeon that is right in front of her. She presses the startled, fat-looking bird to her chest and brings out a bag from her pocket which she puts the bird inside.

Dory throws a last handful of seeds out into the open air, beyond the balcony, and we watch all the pigeons fly off to follow them. When they are all gone, we go back inside.

With the doors firmly shut and our scarves off, Dory opens the bag slowly so I can see its face. She holds it so firmly, it doesn’t seem panicked, just mildly curious about what is happening. Dory looks as comfortable holding the bird snugly on her lap as I felt when I was holding Pigeon asleep on my legs last night.

‘Good girl, good girl. No need to fret there.’ Dory speaks in a low voice which sounds very much like the
Hoo
calls that she made when we first came out onto the balcony.

‘How do you know how to do that, Dory?’ I ask.

‘My father showed me how. It’s as easy as pie. You just have to do it quickly. They don’t like a ditherer, do pigeons. I must have caught my first pigeon when I was much younger than you are now. Maybe four or five years old. I got my first one in the bag, and I haven’t stopped doing it since. Before all this Bluchers business, pigeon meat was pretty much the only meat I ever ate. I’d go down to that little garden bit – you know where there was some grass at the bottom of the tower, call to my pigeons and then,
bam!
Dinner! If only the ovens were working and I could make you roasted pigeon and pigeon pie as quick as looking at you. But the stew’s quite nice and you can fry it up. It’s not as good, but it’s all right.

‘People round here used to think I was awfully strange. I am, I suppose. Always feeding the pigeons, you see. They don’t like them, they call them flying rats and things like that. Don’t know what’s good for them. Don’t realize it’s their dinner flying right past their noses!

‘One lady called the police about me – she said that they should make me stop feeding them! I said to them, I’m not breaking any laws, am I? And I wasn’t, you see, so they couldn’t do anything about it. Just asked me to have a bit more consideration. I started coming down at night after that, so no one would say anything. I suppose some people just don’t like them. They feel a bit of fear for them. They can’t see how beautiful they are, like this little one here.’

‘I like them,’ I say. A memory of a grey morning pops into my head then. Of an old woman who was feeding the pigeons at the bottom of the tower. Michael’s mum had tutted when we had to walk past. The woman was completely surrounded by birds, with piles of snow-white breadcrumbs scattered over the ground. I had seen Dory before, after all.

‘Anyway, enough of my rambling on. It’s time for breakfast!’ says Dory.

The pigeon goes into a cage in Dory’s flat where it puffs up its feathers and flattens itself down. It looks a bit like a fluffy ball, sitting there. Pigeon watches its every move, but when he realizes it isn’t going to fly away, he comes and sits down at the bottom of the table, by our feet.

We eat porridge again that morning. We are running low on golden syrup now and have to make do with a much smaller yellow blob in the middle of our bowls.

After breakfast, we go back upstairs and Dory catches another two pigeons quite easily. Then she asks me if I want to have a go at catching them.

She shows me how you need to choose the one you want to catch and then you keep your eyes on it so much, it seems like all the others disappear. When that happens, you swoop your arms down and pick it up. Simple.

I don’t find it very easy. I keep hesitating about how to pick them up, and they fly away before I can get my hands around them. After about five tries, Dory says I must try and imagine that I am picking Pigeon up instead, and the next time I do it, I get one. It’s a little white and grey bird, with black beady eyes.

I suddenly wish I could show Gaia the bird I’ve caught. I wish she could have seen me swoop down and pick it up and press it close to my chest to stop it from panicking. I know that she’d be good at catching pigeons too.

I’ll show her how to do it when I see her again
, I think.

But then another thought fills my head:
What if I don’t see Gaia again? What if we don’t make it out of the tower? What if I can’t find her? What if I never see Gaia again?

The thought makes the world feel like it’s tipping over and I suddenly feel sick with the realization that I’ll never be able to speak to her again. It’s a horrible, horrible feeling.

I can’t concentrate on what I’m doing and I loosen my grip on the pigeon I’ve just caught; and it starts flapping and I can’t hold onto it. I let it go and it flies off frantically until it becomes just a tiny dot in the sky. And then it disappears altogether.

‘Don’t worry,’ Dory says. ‘Do you want to try again?’

I nod, but I can’t catch another one after that. I can’t stop thinking about Gaia.

‘Let’s stop now, Ade,’ Dory says after a while. She puts her hand on my back and gives my shoulder a squeeze.

‘I think you’re missing someone, aren’t you? I recognize that face. I see the same one in the mirror when I am missing someone.’

‘Who do you miss, Dory?’

‘My husband, my children, my mother and father, my sisters and brothers.’