Boy in the Tower (22 page)

I can definitely hear someone saying my name and I move again in that direction.

Finally, I see the black door and I squeeze through the gap and slip back into the tower.

I run.

I hear Mum’s voice calling me.
Ade, Ade, Ade
.

I sprint up the stairs and I pull off the mask and drop the rucksack as I go so I can get to her faster.

When we meet on the stairs, we are both running so fast towards each other that we almost make each other fall over. But we don’t fall, we hold each other so close for just a second before we both start running again.

Mum grabs my hand and she doesn’t let go. She’s stronger than me and she pulls me along with her. For just a split moment I think that there was a time when I was worried I would be the one pulling her from the tower, and that’s when I really start running.

Run, run, run. We sprint up the stairs, two at a time.

I don’t have time to ask where Dory, Obi and Ben are. If they have got Pigeon from Dory’s flat. If we are all going to be OK. Mum is pulling me so hard up the stairs, up towards the noise of the helicopter.

When we reach the roof, the door is already open. The sound of the helicopter is so loud, it fills my head with its deafening vibrations. The rain lashes down on us and it’s hard to keep my eyes open properly.

Suddenly Mum stops pulling me and lets go of my hand. She stands right in front of the doorway, frozen, as though someone has pressed her pause button and she’s unable to move forward.

‘Mum!’ I shout to her, but I don’t think she can hear me over the drone of the helicopter. ‘Mum!’

Her face looks slack and wax-like, her eyes dull and deadened.

‘Please, Mum,’ I say. ‘Please.’

I hold onto one of her hands and I squeeze it tight. At first it feels lifeless in my fingers, but then I feel Mum squeezing me back. I look up to her and see her face all twisted up as she stares at the helicopter. We take the steps over the doorway, together, side by side, and then we’re out on the rooftop, the wind whipping past our faces, making us squint in its force.

I can see the helicopter hovering right next to the roof. There is just a tiny bit of space you have to step over to get from the roof to the helicopter. Inside it, I can see Obi, Dory and Ben’s smiling faces, their hands reaching out to me.

I go first. There is a dizzying moment when I look down the gap between the helicopter and the tower. It goes down, down, down. The earth is so far away. I glimpse a flash of the silver-blue of the Bluchers that have reached the tower walls, and then I am in. Dory’s arms enclose me. I look around the helicopter cabin, searching for Pigeon among the bodies.

‘Where’s Pigeon?’ I shout, but no one can hear me over the noise of the helicopter’s blades. ‘Where’s Pigeon?’ I shout, again. ‘Where’s Pigeon?’

Only Obi can see I am trying to say something and he leans forward, right towards me, so I can shout directly into his ear. He looks troubled when he hears me but he doesn’t look at me. He just stands up from his seat, and as Mum is stepping into the helicopter, Obi jumps out of it. There is a lot of shouting then but no one can hear much of what is being said. No one but me knows what Obi is doing. He runs through the open door and he doesn’t look back.

I try to go after him. It was me who should have gone. But Dory and Mum keep holding me between them and I can only cry out for Obi to come back.

My cries are quite lost though. Eaten up by the roaring of the helicopter.

You know how I said that I’d never known time to slow down and stop as much as the moment the Blucher exploded over me? Well, I take that back now. Waiting for Obi to come back is the longest wait of my life. I don’t know if he takes five minutes or an hour, but to me, it feels like it will never end.

I remember learning at school how there are 365 days in the year and twenty-four hours in a day and sixty minutes in an hour and sixty seconds in a minute. It feels like every real second that passes is an hour, that every minute is a day.

I can’t take my eyes off the open doorway. I can’t stop willing Obi to appear through it. But however hard I think it, he doesn’t come. No one speaks now. It’s just the beating of the helicopter blades and the beating of our hearts.

Then something happens which makes me feel sick from the bottom of my stomach to the top of my head to the toes on my feet. The the roof is moving. A low, ghastly groan comes from the tower itself. It is going to fall.

Just as the top of the roof begins to slant, I see Obi appear in the doorway. A little grey bundle is clasped to his chest. Pigeon.

The helicopter’s pilot tries to keep us in line with the falling roof but the gap between us and the tower is much larger now. Obi runs towards us. He runs so fast. He sort of throws Pigeon towards us, and he lightly jumps across the roof into the helicopter.

And then Obi jumps too.

As he leaps from the tower, the building gives way beneath him. It is completely collapsing now.

The helicopter swerves away as the tower crashes downwards and Obi is left flying through the air. Flying in the space between the falling tower and us.

I see his face as he jumps. He isn’t scared or panicked like you would imagine him to be. He looks so peaceful, somehow. And happy, perhaps. Happy. I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense but that’s what I think.

He would have fallen downwards for sure. He would have plummeted down just like those bodies of the pigeons did when Dory and I threw them off the balcony. Or perhaps Obi would have floated softly down, like the feathers.

Gently and softly, making little circles as he went.

But he doesn’t fall.

The helicopter moves downwards in such a way that Obi falls onto one of the long poles that are right at the bottom of the helicopter. The bits that look like they are the helicopter’s feet. He falls right onto one of them and manages to just hold onto it.

Ben and Mum reach out to him and pull him up into the cabin, right onto our laps.

And as the helicopter rises up into the sky, with the tower crashing down behind us, we all clasp Obi to us.

We hold each other tight.

There’s a spot at the top of the road where you can just make out the blue line of the sea over the roofs of the buildings. You can’t see it if it’s foggy or raining hard, but most days, Gaia and I stop to look at it for a moment or two.

It’s there today. I mean, I know it’s always there, but we can see it today. It sparkles in the sunshine.

Gaia and I walk side by side the rest of the way back home. Gaia talks about what happened at school today but I don’t talk much. I like just listening to her voice sometimes.

We go the quick way home, which is past a few shops and down a couple of busy streets. There are so many people on the pavement that at times we have to walk in single file, but we always go back to walking side by side again when there’s space. And Gaia doesn’t stop talking.

When we first moved here, we could never walk this way because people recognized me and would try to stop us and want to talk to us. Sometimes they were nice people who wanted just to shake my hand, but sometimes I didn’t like the way they spoke to me, and that’s when Gaia found a long route to school where you didn’t run into so many people.

We sort of became a bit famous after we had been rescued, you see. Lots of people wanted to interview us but Obi said he’d rather have stayed in the tower than be on television or in the newspapers, and then none of us wanted to do it after that.

In the end, Obi was quite right about someone else working out how the salt stopped the Bluchers from growing. They discovered that not long after everyone had left the city, and so, after everything, for all the worry about contamination, the Bluchers never made it out of London.

We were the only city to be destroyed.

No one else who stayed, like we did, survived.

Pigeon’s doing OK. Although we have a little dog now, called Ollie, who he’s not too keen on. Mum takes Ollie for a walk every morning and night, so that’s good.

We don’t talk about the time Mum didn’t go out much, but I just have a feeling it’s not going to happen any more.

We see Ben quite often. He likes to walk with Mum and Ollie most evenings. I told him that maybe he should just get a dog too, but he said he likes Ollie well enough, so he’ll just walk with them for now.

I see Gaia the most, though.

After we left London, there was only one place I wanted to go. Where Gaia was. And we all ended up staying there.

We eat together a lot, Obi, Dory, Ben, Mum and I. Just like in the old days when we were trapped in the tower. We still eat a lot of pigeon, but now we can have it roasted or in pies and it’s just as good as Dory said it was.

We’re having dinner tonight, all of us, and Gaia’s coming along too. She comes round for a meal most weeks, and sometimes when we are all together, sitting round Dory’s table, with Gaia too, I almost forget that she wasn’t with us all those times from before. She likes everyone and they like her. She even caught her first pigeon the other week. She didn’t want to eat it though. She let it go before Dory could get the bag out. She told Dory it was an accident, but I saw her lift it up to the sky and let it fly away.

We aren’t in the same class any more but it doesn’t matter. We just make sure we walk home together and see each other at weekends. We’re just down the road from each other again, but not in towers any more. We’re just walking towards Gaia’s house now.

It has marigolds in pots on the windowsill, and because of their cheerful yellowness, I think it looks like the happiest house on the street. We say goodbye at her gate and I watch Gaia walk towards her door. She always turns round to give me one last smile, and then I watch the door close behind her. I only go when I know she’s safely inside.

My house is just a little way down the road. I counted the steps once and got to sixty-eight, which I thought was quite a big number, because to me, it seems like our houses are right next to each other.

Pigeon’s waiting for me on the wall and he screeches when he sees me and jumps up onto my shoulder, just like in the old days, in the tower.

The tower feels far away from where we are now. Sometimes I get the feeling that I miss it, but then I think I don’t ever want to go back and I’m not sure what the word for that feeling is.

I’ve come to like living by the sea. I like how its saltiness reminds me of what protected us for all of those days. And I like seeing its blueness all around us.

Only sometimes do I get the jolt of a memory, of being surrounded by a silvery-blue that almost engulfed us.

I have to remind myself that it’s just a memory. That it’s just the sea I’m seeing.