Boy in the Tower (12 page)

‘She left,’ he says simply. He stands up. The conversation is over.

‘Now, let’s go and help your Gaia. Before those Bluchers get any further.’

Obi walks out of the tiny room and I spend a moment more looking at those smiling faces. Cicely’s bright, friendly smile. And I know now who the other person is. It isn’t Obi’s twin. It’s Obi, when he was very happy.

I run to catch up with Obi, who’s already disappearing down the corridor.

I soon learn that Obi knows about everyone living in the tower. He doesn’t just know about my mum. He knows about Michael’s mum and that she’s good at cooking. He knows about the man on the second floor who never used to leave his flat. He wasn’t like Mum, though; it was because he was too old. He had someone come round to bring him meals every day and when the buildings started falling, his daughter came and took him away.

He knows about the family with the mum who always made nice cakes. He knows about the woman who owned a cat that had kittens. He knows about everyone.

He takes me to a flat on one of the lower floors.

It has a funny, medicine smell about it. A bit like the stuff that people pour onto a cut and they say it won’t hurt, but it does. Everything in the flat is brown, the chairs, the sofa, even the walls and the lampshades.

Obi picks up two tall silver bottles which have thin clear plastic wires with a mask attached to them from behind one of the chairs. Then we go to a flat a few floors up.

It’s full of large photographs of jungles and deserts and things like that. There’s a large vase of flowers that have died on a table in the sitting room, and lots and lots of books too. But unlike Dory’s books, which look like they’ve been read about ten times, these ones are shiny and big, glossy and new-looking.

Obi comes out of the bedroom with one of those really big rucksacks that look so huge you can’t imagine how one person can carry it on their back. He gives it to me to carry. Although it’s so big, with nothing in it, it’s quite light. Then we go back down to Obi’s room in the basement, Obi carrying the oxygen tanks and me, the rucksack.

Obi hands me a roll of white tape. ‘You’ve got to stick this over the mask, kid, when I tell you. No holes, OK?’

He has put the silver bottles into the bag and fiddled with the top of one of the bottle, so we hear a little hissing sound. Then he puts the rucksack on his back and sits on the bed. He puts the mask on and tells me to cover it.

I try my best, I really do, but I’m worried. The woman on the TV said the spores are tiny and I’m sure they could get through the tape. When I’m done, Obi takes a scarf out of his drawer and wraps that over his face as well, so you can just about see his eyes but that is all. Then he pulls out a pair of swimming goggles and puts those on too.

He looks mad but he says, ‘You can’t be too careful,’ and I agree.

‘Wait in Dory’s flat for me. Don’t come downstairs, whatever you do. Promise me, Ade. I might let spores into the tower when I go out, so you must wait with Dory.’

‘OK,’ I say. ‘Good luck.’

But it doesn’t seem enough to just say that.

Because what I’m thinking is,
Please, please be all right, please, please come back, please, please save Gaia
.

And I’m thinking that Obi is the bravest man I have ever met.

It’s been about two hours since Obi left the tower.

Dory went white when I told her where he’d gone but she sort of shook her head quickly and said, ‘He’ll be back soon,’ and now she’s teaching me how to play Gin Rummy.

I haven’t played cards before, properly. I like the ones with the faces that are called the jack and the king and the queen. I tell Dory that and she says, ‘Why don’t we give them all faces?’ So we do just that. We both draw silly little eyes and smiles on each one. Dory’s good at drawing. She even makes one of them look a bit like me. Even I can see it’s got my fuzzy hair and my little smile that doesn’t look like it’s fully finished. It’s the two of diamonds.

Gin Rummy is fun. It’s miles better than any of the games I play by myself. Even the animal game. It goes on for quite a long time, too.

Dory tells me the rules. She gives us each seven cards and says that I need to collect three of one thing and four of another. Either the same number card, so three jacks or four sevens, or what Dory calls a run. That’s when you have the numbers going up like three, four, five. It’s hard to get a run though, because they have to all be in the same suit, clubs or hearts or whatever.

I thought I’d won ages ago and shouted out, ‘Rummy!’ like Dory told me to, but my run wasn’t in the same suit, so we had to keep going.

I’m collecting cards with the same number now. It’s easier. I just need one more card, the five of spades, and I’ve won.

We don’t talk as we play but Dory grins at me from over the top of her cards a lot. I think she’s enjoying playing.

‘Rummy!’ Dory shouts and she slaps her cards on the table so hard that it shakes.

We play a few more times. Dory wins twice and I win once. Then it’s lunchtime.

‘Do you want to go see your mum while I get lunch together, Ade?’ she asks me.

‘Can I just wait with you until Obi comes back?’ I say.

‘Of course,’ says Dory. ‘You can give me a hand with lunch.’

She asks me if I know how to chop an onion and when I say I think so, she gives me a couple that have sprouted green shoots from the top and a little knife and a chopping board.

I’m not very good at it, as it turns out, so Dory shows me what to do. You make a sort of a bridge with one hand to hold the onion steady and then you cut it in half. Then you take off the top bit that’s got the green coming out of it and peel off the brown, papery skin. And only after you’ve done all that can you start chopping.

‘We need the pieces to be quite small,’ Dory says, so it takes quite a while to slice them into little bits.

My eyes begin to sting, and even though I don’t mean to, I find that I’m crying. Tears are running down my face and dripping over the onions.

‘Why am I crying, Dory?’ I ask. ‘Is it the onions or is it about Obi?’

Or is it about Gaia?
I think to myself.

‘It’s the onions, Ade. They make everyone cry. I like them for it. It’s good to have a good cry sometimes.’

I’m not sure I agree. I have to keep stopping and wiping my eyes because the tears blur my vision and I can’t see what I’m doing. But finally I finish chopping and Dory fries them up over a little flame that comes out of a small blue canister. Dory says that people use them for camping and that Obi had found quite a few in the tower.

The large copper pan is so much bigger than the little cooker, it looks like it might fall off, but Dory keeps one hand wrapped in a tea towel around the handle.

She asks me to hold it while she rummages around in a box on the floor for a couple of tins. One’s corned beef and the other’s chopped tomatoes. She adds both of them to the pan with the onions and soon her flat is filled with a rich cooking smell. Then she adds in a packet of ready-cooked white rice, and after that she spoons it into four bowls. One for me, one for her, one for Mum and one for Obi.

‘Eat up,’ Dory says. We sit at the table, not talking for a bit, finishing up the food.

‘I’d better take Mum’s upstairs,’ I say, and Dory opens the door for me even though I can carry the bowl OK with one hand.

As soon as I open the door to my flat, I know something’s wrong. I can hear the sound of something breaking, a smashing, splintering sound that makes me think of someone screaming.

‘Mum?’ I call out.

As if in answer, I hear another crash.

‘Mum!’ I’m worried now. Something’s not right.

I go into the sitting room and place Mum’s lunch on the table. She’s not in there. I hear another smash coming from the kitchen and that’s where I find her. She has a plate in her hand that she’s about to drop to the floor, and as she releases it, I dash forward and surprise myself by catching it in mid air. I place it gingerly on the side but Mum tries to pick it up again.

‘Stop it, Mum!’ I cry. She looks at me and it seems to take her a moment to register who I am, and to remind her, I say, ‘It’s me, Mum. Ade.’

She starts to cry then. Glassy tears that look too large to be real spring from her eyes.

‘What’s happened to us?’ she says. ‘What’s happened?’

She makes a howling sound or a moan, I’m not sure which, and the tears keep pouring from her eyes.

‘It’s OK, Mum,’ I say, and I lead her over the smashed plates and then see that she’s not wearing shoes and I worry that she’s going to cut her feet but I need to get her out of our grey little kitchen and away from the rest of the plates.

Mum runs to the window when we’re in the sitting room and bangs her wrists against the glass, so the panes rattle and shake.

‘What’s happened? What’s happened?’

‘It’s the Bluchers, Mum,’ I say, but of course that doesn’t help because Mum doesn’t know what they are.

‘Why? Why?’ she cries, and she tucks herself up into a small, tight ball in front of the window.

‘It’s OK, Mum. We’re going to be OK.’ I stroke her back, which is shaking from her cries. ‘It’s OK.’ I say it over and over until even I start to believe it.

‘Why don’t you go back to bed now, Mum?’ I say, and I didn’t think Mum was listening to me really but she starts to stand as soon as I suggest it and we slowly walk together towards her room, Mum leaning on me as if I was a walking stick.

She climbs into bed by herself and I leave her lunch on the side table. I watch her for a few minutes before I turn away, closing the door quietly behind me.

There is silence in the flat once more. I go to the kitchen and try to clear up the smashed plates as well as I can but I keep finding more and more little fragments that I’ve missed. They are thin and sharp and one of them sticks into my finger, making me wince and cry out.

I miss Dory’s company and I want to go back there but I can’t help looking out of the window at Gaia’s tower. I wonder if I’ll be able to see Obi out there. For one dreadful moment, I look down and my eyes search the ground to see if there is someone lying there, and I let myself breathe again when I can’t see anyone.

Obi must have made it inside, but why has he not returned yet?

Already I can see the damage that the Bluchers are doing to the tower. It looks like it has shed another layer of skin. It won’t be able to stay standing for much longer.

The next thing I think is so simple that I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to work it out.

Before I met Obi and Dory, I’d been worried that our tower was going to fall, that the Bluchers would start eating it as well. Meeting them has made me feel safer. Like I haven’t had to look behind me all the time. But how can they stop our tower from falling? How can anyone be protected from the Bluchers? Surely we are also in danger?

I wonder if the people in the other tower can see that our building is being eaten away, just like I can see that theirs is? And even if Obi manages to find them, why would they leave one falling-down home for another?

But at the same time I think this, I know it can’t be true. I’ve been down to the basement today and there isn’t any damage. There aren’t any holes or cracks in the lower walls. I know because I walked right past them.

But why not?

I sit up on the sill and put my head right next to the window, so I can look directly down. There is a thick cluster of silvery Bluchers surrounding us, but for some reason they are not touching our walls.

It is as if there is a protective force field that they can’t get past. A little gap of space between them and us which means they can’t eat away at our walls.

Something is stopping the Bluchers in their tracks.

There is nothing to do but wait for Obi to get back.

I go back to Dory’s flat and she calls me in. I find her sitting on one of her orange armchairs with her feet propped up on a little table, reading a book.

‘Do you like reading?’ she asks me.

‘I guess so,’ I say. She says, she has some books I might like the look of and starts picking up piles here and there to find them.

‘Try these,’ she says, and hands me a few.

I pick one that just has a single word as its title:
Boy
.

It’s about someone growing up and the funny things they remember from when they are a child.

It takes me a little while to get into it, but soon I am right there next to him. He’s jumping into the sea on holiday in Norway. And now he’s putting a dead mouse into a jar of gobstoppers in a sweetshop.

It seems like a faraway land to me, full of exciting things happening. And it fills my head with colour too. The blue of the sea, the craggy green islands, the orange spotty fish that he eats. It’s quite unlike the grey buildings and roads that used to surround us, and the weird sort of silver of the Bluchers now. I like it. It makes me forget for a minute or two that we are still waiting for Obi to come back.

Just as I am reading about the island, we hear footsteps coming down the corridor.

Dory and I look at each other for a quick moment, and then we both spring up and rush to the front door. Obi is standing there frowning, as if he is surprised to see us.

I throw my arms around him, I am so glad to see him. He gives me a little pat on the back. I don’t think he knows what else to do.

‘Did you find anyone?’ Dory asks. ‘Did you bring anyone back?’

Obi sits down heavily on one of the chairs.

‘Yes,’ he says.

We both wait for him to say more but he doesn’t. There is a big silence that I know I shouldn’t break, but I have to.

‘Did you find Gaia?’ I ask in a small voice.

Obi looks at me then.

‘No. There were no kids there.’

Then he looks away and none of us say anything.

We sit there for quite a while like that.

I have to stop myself from asking all the questions that are rising up in me like bubbles that are going to pop:
Did you go to Gaia’s flat? Did it look like they had left? Had she left me a note or anything?