Boy in the Tower (16 page)

The sky looks blue. It will be another fine day.
There won’t be any rain today, there won’t be any rain today
. If I think it enough times, it will come true.

I have been thinking more about Mum. I’ve worked it out and Mum stopped going out about a year ago, just after the day I found her hurt and crying in the flat.

Ben said that his wife hadn’t been outside for seven years. That’s much longer than Mum. I can’t stop thinking that Mum must be a bit better than Ben’s wife was. Maybe she’s not as ill as before.

I think if we were rescued then she would come outside. Also, if she didn’t want to come, then there’s lots more of us to carry her out. Obviously, there’s me and Obi, but Dory would help and I think Ben would too.

She would have to come.

It wouldn’t be the same as when Ben’s wife had to go outside. I’d make sure of it.

Dory is singing to herself when I go downstairs for breakfast that day. She says we will have something special for dinner tonight but she won’t tell me what. It’s a surprise.

There’s no sign of Obi or Ben. Dory says that they have eaten already and they are doing something with the water tank on the roof. My face must look worried because the next thing she says is, ‘Don’t worry, you know they’ll be careful. And you’ve heard about Obi’s theory that the spores are not flying high over the ground.’

We eat peanut butter on crackers that morning and have a little cupful of tinned fruit each too. I have a funny thing about tinned fruit because I always think it tastes a bit metallic, even when no one else does, so I eat my cup quickly and try to swallow it down without chewing too much.

After I’ve taken Mum her breakfast I go up to a floor I haven’t searched yet, to start collecting more food. The first flat I go into is really smelly and I only find a couple of tins of dog food at the back of one of the cupboards. I don’t even have enough food to fill my rucksack, so I go into the next flat along.

Straight away, I can tell that the person who used to live here liked making cakes. There are lots of bags of flour and little red tins of cocoa powder and cartons of eggs and little plastic packets of hundreds and thousands and silver balls.

I stop to look at the photographs hanging on the wall. There is always a pretty woman in each photograph and two little boys. They are younger than me and they have dark, curly hair and big brown eyes. They are smiling in every photo and it makes me wonder where they are now and if they are still smiling as much as they are in the photos.

There are a few photos up in our flat of me and Mum. There’s one when I’m a tiny baby and Mum’s smiling so hard it looks like her cheeks might crack. There’s another one when it’s my birthday and I’m sitting on Mum’s lap in front of a white birthday cake. They make me feel sad when I see them because things are so different now. There aren’t any photos from recently. Everyone knows you don’t take photos if you look unhappy in them.

There is too much food to carry from this kitchen, so I start dividing it into piles in front of the window. It will make it easier for Dory when I bring it down.

I put all the flour in one pile and sweet things in another, and in the end I have about seven different heaps of various foods. I will need to take several trips to carry this down.

But just before I start loading it up, something catches my eye from out of the window.

I think I see something move outside.

From behind some of the trees.

It is something or someone just running out of sight to hide. I look again and stare and stare at the little spot where I think I saw something. I see again a flicker of movement in one of the bushes there.

As if someone is hiding just behind it.

I look again and again but I can’t see anything more after that. I could convince myself that there is nothing out there but I don’t. I keep looking, running my eyes over and over the same patch of bushes, trying to find out what moved there.

I feel sure there is someone there, looking up at the tower right now. Perhaps they have got a mask on like Obi had but are running low on air.

I think:
Maybe they need to come into the tower, just like Ben and his wife did
.

I think:
Maybe they need rescuing too
.

I know I am not a hero. Nothing like a superhero in a shiny red cape who knows they will save the day. I’m scared and worried and I don’t want to die.

And I know I might do if I go out of the tower.

But there is something bigger inside me that makes me turn round and run to the door. There’s the feeling I had when I sat next to Ben when he thanked me for giving him and Evie their last chance, and something else as well. It’s not a feeling I’ve ever had before, really. It’s just like a certainty that I know the right thing to do, and that is to try and save the person who is outside the tower.

I know I can’t waste any time; I need to go to them straight away. Ben said that Evie had died in just moments in the open air.

Suppose the person in the bushes doesn’t have very much air left? Or perhaps they are injured and can’t walk the very last bit of the way to our block?

Suppose this is their last chance?

There is no time to go and find Obi or Dory or Ben. I run downstairs to the basement as quickly as I can. My legs are taking me down the steps so fast that I think they might crumple beneath me at any minute, but I don’t fall.

I make it all the way downstairs to Obi’s room.

I pick up the tattered rucksack with one of the silver canisters we found all those days ago inside it. The mask is still attached to it. I fiddle with the top of it just like I saw Obi do, and I hear a small hissing sound come from the mask. I put it over my mouth and breathe in. It’s working fine. I struggle to put the rucksack on my back. It is too big for me, really, but I can manage it.

Then I start taping up the mask, just like I did when Obi put it on. It’s harder now I’ve got it on myself, and I keep getting the tape tangled so it sticks to itself, and then I have to start again.

Finally I am putting on the old swimming goggles and tying scarves around my face as best I can.

I am ready.

To get to the outside door, I need to pull down one corner of the sheet that Obi put up and take some of the tape off the swing doors so I can open one.

I feel guilty as I pull apart Obi’s protection for us and I try to put it back up behind me. The worst thing I could do is let spores into the tower. It wouldn’t matter if I rescued someone, if I managed to kill everyone else while I did it.

I only realize how scared I am when my hands don’t seem to be obeying me properly. They seem too big suddenly, and numb, as though I am cut off from them. I swallow and concentrate hard on unpeeling the first of the thick silver lines of tape. I have to tug it hard to pull it off and it makes a ripping sound as it comes off that pierces through me and then settles in a heavy feeling of sickness in my stomach.

I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing or not.

I’m not Obi; I don’t know what I am doing, I’m just the kid from seventeen.

But I guess there is one way in which I
am
like Obi. When I told him about the lights in the tower, he said that we must try to rescue the people, and that is what I am doing.

I am trying to rescue the person I saw. It’s the only thing I can do.

The floor through the swing doors is covered in a thick carpet of grit salt. My feet sink into it so that it reminds me of walking through icy snow, but it looks browny-orange instead of white. Funny how you notice things like that, as though your brain is trying to fool you into forgetting what you are about to do. To lure you into a sense of safety and dismiss the fear that is pulsing through your veins and filling every corner of your mind.

There’s more tape on the outside door and most of that needs to come off too. It makes one final screech, a deafening sound that seems to echo down the corridor, but finally I have done it and I pull down the handle and push.

How can I describe what outside looks like when it is so different from anything I have ever seen?

When I open the door and feel the first rush of air on my face, it feels so cold and startling that it makes me want to step back into the safety of the tower. But after the shock of it, it feels fresh and cool and wonderful.

I’d forgotten about that.

There is a crunching sound as I tread on the salt surrounding the bottom of the tower. It is scattered all about me. I can hear my breath going in and out, in and out. It sounds loud because of the mask I am wearing.

It makes me feel worried how easily one of those tiny little spores might just slip under my mask so I would breathe it in. I must be surrounded by the spores that are floating and swirling all around me but I can’t see them at all. It just looks like empty air to me.

Then I come to the Bluchers. In some places they have grown higher than my knees, but in others, they have grown much, much taller and they tower above me. Close up, they look beautiful. And weird as well. As if they are filled with some kind of liquid that is always moving. Swirling around, making circular patterns that are never still.

You can see the inside of them because they have a sort of clear skin which you can see right through. The liquid reminds me of when you see a little puddle of petrol on the road and it has swirls of colours in it. Or when you blow a bubble and it doesn’t pop straight away and there’s a tiny moment when it is full of moving colours. Pink and green and yellow.

Except it doesn’t look like any of those things, not really. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever seen before.

Not like a plant, not like a tree.

When they are fully grown, their stems are as thick as the ropes we used to hang from on the apparatus in our school hall. The rope would feel bulky in our hands when we used to climb up it and most of us could make it to the very top. I don’t think you would have been able to climb up a Blucher, though. They look so smooth and shiny that you might slip right down one if you tried.

I have the urge to reach out to touch one of them. They look like they would feel wet and slimy, a bit like jelly. Or like when we used to let snails slide across our fingers if we found one in the playground.

At the top of the stem is a large, roundish shape that comes up to a little tip. Depending on how tall they are, some of these heads are as small as my finger, but when the stem is really high, they are much, much bigger than my head.

The large ones are swollen and bloated like blown-up balloons, and look like they might pop if you poked them sharply, so I tread carefully, anxious that I will burst one if I hurry past.

Among the Bluchers, all kinds of things are growing.

There are tall, stalky plants that have large, long leaves, and green, bushy shrubs that have little blue flowers on top. Grasses have grown so much that they stand tall and thick, quite unlike the patchy lawns that I knew from before.

These blades of grass look silky and dense, as if they would be difficult to walk through.

I can’t understand how everything has sprouted over the buildings that once stood here. There isn’t a trace of the homes and shops and roads, not one trace, and when I look down to the ground, I can see that my path is covered in tiny little yellow-green leaves that coat the earth like a carpet.

I dig the heel of my shoe in to lift some away and I see that the soil beneath looks almost black now. It isn’t the brown, sandy stuff which would fly from our trowels like dust. It is much, much darker and looks moist and crumbly, like the rich chocolate cake we ate for Gaia’s birthday. Only darker still.

I stand among the Bluchers, so shocked by everything I see that I almost forget the reason I am outside in the first place.

The movement in the bushes.

The person who is lying there, waiting to be saved, needing to get to the tower.

I look around at the trees to try and work out which direction I need to go. It all looks so different from what I could see from the window, I can’t figure out which bit of green I saw move, at first. It takes me a while, and I have to circle the tower a couple of times before I recognize a craggy branch of a tree which looks a bit like someone’s arm bent right over, which was close by to where the person was hiding.

I am not far away from there now and I think I see another rustle in the undergrowth. I freeze, but once again I have the eerie feeling that I might have seen something or I might not have seen anything at all, and now that the moment has passed, I have no way of telling.

My voice is muffled through the mask.

I call out, ‘Is there anyone there?’ but my voice can’t pierce through the plastic of the mask and all the scarves I am wearing. It is trapped beneath the layers.

I can’t take anything off, so I creep towards the bushes and keep my eyes fixed on the spot that I think just moved. It’s difficult to walk through all the Bluchers as well as all the bristly, wild leaves and grasses that are in my way. I have to move slowly and it takes a long time.

I have just reached the place when I hear someone call out my name from far away. It’s a voice I know well: Obi’s voice.

I look up to the tower and can just see two tiny little specks on the roof of the block. Obi and Ben. They have seen me. I can’t make out their faces but I can hear what they are shouting down to me.

They keep saying the same thing over and over. Louder and louder, each time.

‘
Get back inside
.’

‘
Get back inside
.’

It’s funny when time slows down or speeds up again.

I’ve heard people talk about time like that. They say, ‘This week is going so slowly,’ or, ‘Today’s rushed by.’

I hadn’t really taken any notice of that before.

Sometimes night felt like a long time because I would wake up and think it must be morning and time to get up and have breakfast, and then realize that it was still dark outside and the middle of the night. But I’d never really known time to seem like it had stopped. Not until now, when I am standing outside the tower, with Obi and Ben calling down to me, wearing my air mask, in front of the leafy green bushes.