If I Could Fly (11 page)

‘So you haven’t written anything about me, or told anyone about me – not your best friend, your worst enemy, your auntie, your cousin, your newspaper boy?’ I press him, agitated.

‘Look, I just wanted to see if you were all right.’ He seems offended and is half turning, as if he is about to leave.

‘I’m sooty and tired and confused, but good, thanks,’ I tell him, holding out my hand.

‘Well, Sooty, it was nice to meet you.’ Alfie takes my hand and shakes it. His touch is so gentle I can hardly feel it.

‘You can visit me again, if you like,’ I say, as warmly as I can.

‘If I’m not too booked up.’ He’s smiling now,
pointing at my paperbacks. ‘And if the place hasn’t fallen down. Might be a good idea to live downstairs,’ he suggests.

‘So you’ll come?’

‘Yabradoodle,’ he barks.

‘Promise?’ I press him.

‘On my fart and hope to fly,’ he answers, hand on his heart.

‘Are you always this mad?’ I ask.

Alfie grins and starts to move away.

‘My name’s Calypso, if you want to know.’

He takes this in, frowns, then shakes his head.

‘Sooty’s better,’ he replies, giving me a little wave. Moments later, he is gone. When I glance at my clock, it reads seven a.m.

I’m moving house – downsizing. I decided I should take Alfie’s advice. It’s probably not safe to live on the first floor any more. He’s here helping me carry my stuff down to the café. He kept his promise.

‘Can’t you live in a sleeping bag like any normal runaway, Sooty?’ he asks, puffing under the weight of a big box of books. He’s the complete opposite of Crease, I’m thinking. Under that baggy Superman T-shirt, he’s probably just jelly.

‘I like having walls,’ I reply, following him down the stairs with a long column of novels between my hands. ‘And I don’t like nicknames, OK? You can call me Caly or Calypso. Not Paper Clip, not Miss Saigon and definitely not Sooty.’

Alfie is looking at me, quite perplexed. ‘Yes, Your
Highness.’ He’s resting his box on the wooden rail and letting it slide down to the point where the wood disappears.

After looking everywhere for Furball, without success, I’ve spent hours washing soot and grime from my things. Many of the books were beyond hope, but there are enough left to make a good-sized room. It will be a studio flat, rather than a bungalow, but I can always extend once I get my supplies up again.

Tea-light candles rescued from a skip are illuminating our path. The stairs have dried out and are no longer slippery. We’ve done at least twenty trips up and down already and my leg is being a pain. So is Alfie.

‘Nelly,’ he chortles, from the bottom of the steps, pointing out that my shadow resembles a two-legged elephant with a trunk.

‘Belly,’ I retort. Alfie wobbles his stomach obligingly, does a weird little pharaoh dance, then picks up his box and loafs off towards the café.

It’s like we’ve known each other a long time, yet
it’s only been a day. I’ve never met anyone so easy to be with. He’s really kind and funny. When I laugh, the horrible mesh of tangled wires in my head feels like it’s starting to unravel. Maybe the answers to my three big puzzles – my memory blank, the mystery of Dair’s disappearance and, now, Mum’s weird behaviour – will magically reveal themselves, like stars when the clouds pass.

I bet Alfie’s got loads of friends, especially girls. He really listens to what I’m saying and he doesn’t try to make me feel small, like other boys do. Like my dad does. Alfie knows loads of things about the world, sensible things, but he isn’t always showing off. He could use a few tips about hair care, though. I don’t think his crazy mop has ever seen a brush, let alone any conditioner.

I suddenly stop in my tracks. There is something I need to check out. Something so obvious, I should have thought of it straight away. I drop my books and return to the first floor, scrabbling over debris to get to
Dair’s bathroom. Lined up neatly on a shelf under the blackened mirror are ten different shampoos, all grimy with smoke deposits. There are also several containers of gel, treatments for split ends and henna oil for healthy gloss. He didn’t take them with him. So maybe he’s going to come back?

‘Don’t be too hopeful,’ Alfie cautions, when I tell him this hot piece of news in the café.

‘You don’t understand,’ I explain. ‘He was obsessed with his hair. He wouldn’t have gone without them, not for good.’

‘There’s no telling with crazy people.’ Alfie shrugs. He’s rubbing his eyes and blinking like a Thai bear-cat in headlights.

‘What happened to your X-ray vision?’ I ask, with mock seriousness.

‘Who said that?’ he answers with a grin, looking left and right.

I get the feeling he doesn’t want to talk about Dair. He’s pacing up and down now with a very silly walk.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Measuring up, so your walls are the same length.’ He looks like a chicken. I can’t help giggling. ‘You won’t think it’s funny when you get subsidence,’ he warns, waggling his finger at me. He reminds me of Mr Pepper, the security officer on our estate, who checks us in and out of the gates and whose face starts to twitch if he has to alter the computer entry more than twice an hour. ‘Don’t push your luck,’ he says to all the kids, in exactly the same tone.

‘I’d like it to be sunny,’ I tell Alfie. ‘The door should be here and the window there, so I look out over the garden.’

‘And what sort of style would Madam like her crib? Georgian, with pillars; Gothic, with gargoyles; eco, with grass on top?’ he asks, pretending to make notes.

‘I’d like it to be tall and preferably made of gingerbread.’

Alfie nods and scribbles on his imaginary pad. ‘And will that be a cherry on the top?’ he says.

‘Definitely.’

‘It might have to be a flower. I’m clean out of cherries.’ Alfie has found my plastic sunflower, which is still grimy with soot. He stretches and holds it above his head, indicating where the roof of my new house will be.

‘Perfect,’ I say, clapping with excitement.

‘Don’t speak too soon. I’ve never made a house before,’ warns Alfie.

‘Yeah, but Superman can do anything.’

Even in the dimly lit darkness, I can tell that Alfie is blushing.

Cold night air in my hair, eyes streaming winter tears, nose like an ice cube, mouth a big ‘O’, cheeks numb, arms outstretched, gloved hands gripping hard, body arched, foot flapping, scarf-muffled shriek of perfect pandemonium – we’re FLYING!

‘ALFIE!’ I’m yelling.

‘Whoaooh!’ comes the reply, from behind.

We’ve chosen our moment, waited until the road was clear, and now we’re careering to the bottom of the hill, weaving from tarmac to pavement, dodging the bumps and cracks, the potholes, rubbish cartons and parked cars. We’re travelling so fast everything around us is a blur. We’re superheroes on silver speed machines: invincible, unstoppable.

Two silver scooters. Two kids with a mission.
Two perfect minutes. Maybe good things always come in twos.

‘Sooty,’ Superman is calling. ‘My brakes don’t work!’

Alfie is zooming past me, a look of terror and delight on his flushed face. His cheeks are vibrating with the speed. His left foot is pressing down on the metal bar which is supposed to lock the back wheel, but nothing is happening, or so he wants me to think.

Up ahead, the road curves and levels out by a green. Both of us begin to slow and we roll to a halt next to a covered bus stop opposite the beach.

‘
Jaaeo!
’ I declare. ‘This is soooooo cool!’

‘Yabradabradoodle,’ agrees Alfie.

We are not alone. There is an old woman sitting on the wooden bench, waiting for a bus. She is staring with wide eyes at our scooters. Her eyes are moving on to me – not surprising as I must look a real sight in Alfie’s mum’s old pink raincoat and purple scarf-and-gloves combo. It’s not a good idea for us to hang about and I motion to Alfie that we should skedaddle, but there
is mischief in his eyes and he sounds the horn on his handlebars.

‘Holy Mother of God,’ the woman murmurs, crossing herself, before getting up and shuffling away. She glances back at us every so often and crosses herself again. Our adrenaline spills over into laughter and we sprawl across the seat, clutching our bellies.

‘What was that all about?’ I ask, between outbursts of snorting.

‘Banana head,’ Alfie replies, making loopy signs with his hand.

I’m sorry she was scared by the sight of two dishevelled kids on scooters. Maybe her eyesight was bad and we looked like aliens on silver skis. It’s about seven p.m., an hour before curfew, and people get jumpy.

It’s been the best night for treasure. We’ve been hunting for books. Books for walls, books for tables, books for a bed frame. We’ve found fifty already, most of them in the paper skip at the town’s official dump. It’s easy to squeeze on to the site through a gap in
the corrugated metal warehouse. We go there at night when it’s closed to the public. That way, we only need to avoid the security guards.

We found the scooters there, right on top of the metal bin. It was the first time I’ve seen Alfie nearly cry.

‘Always wanted one of these,’ he said. ‘That’s yabrakickingdoodle,’ he added, once we were far enough away and could try them out.

Checking out charity shop doorways was a piece of cake on two wheels. We whizzed round, filling our carrier bags with any books we could find amongst the piles of donated items left after closing time. We hung our wares from the handlebars and moved on to roadside skips, which added a backpack and a kite to our haul. Alfie wanted me to take a blue Perspex loo seat with shells in it too, but I told him we only ever take what we need. That’s the rule. Although, on second thoughts, it would have made my bathroom look ten times nicer.

I had such a good time I’d even forgotten about home and Dair and Furball for a while. And another really great thing – my leg isn’t hurting nearly so much. The horrible pain is more of an ache now. That’s another reason to celebrate.

‘Let’s play skidders,’ suggests Alfie, suddenly jumping to his feet and pulling me up by my arm.

‘No idea what that is,’ I say.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve never skimmed stones across the water, Sooty,’ he sighs.

‘We don’t come to the seaside much. My dad doesn’t like it.’ I have a mental image of my father throwing down his bag of chips in disgust after a seagull pooped on his shirt several summers ago.

‘It’s easy peasy scratch my fleazy,’ says Alfie. ‘Come on.’

We’re crossing the wide road, scooters in hand, and running over the grass that gives way to a tarmac promenade before I can say nobradoodle. We are racing down narrow steps on to the shingle, which is
bathed in deep lilac light from the half moon hiding behind purple clouds.

We stand on a ridge of stones and look out across the inky blackness rising and subsiding with a great
harrumph
, like an old dinosaur dragging its weight and sputtering spumes of white foam at our feet.

‘Take a flat one, like this,’ says Alfie, picking up a disc-shaped pebble near his feet. ‘Then you lean back, aim, shout, “Fly, filibuster, fly,” and you skim it – see?’ Alfie’s stone zips across the waves, four leaps in a row, before disappearing into the depths.

‘I’m not saying that out loud. It’s a stupid word.’

‘Then it won’t work,’ he tells me.

‘Yeah, right,’ I mutter, selecting my weapon, leaning back, aiming and flicking my wrist. The stone leaves my hand, travels no more than three metres, and plops straight down into the shallows.

‘Told you,’ he says quietly, shaking his head.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ I reply. ‘You’ve just had more practice.’

Alfie shrugs.

‘OK. Have it your way. Fly fili-whatever-you-are, fly.’ I hurl my next missile. It arcs into the inky sky and drops into the sea. I raise my arms in a silent question.

‘You’ve got to really shout,’ Alfie explains. ‘A filibuster is an adventurer, a troublemaker, a pirate. Think of the stone as his weapon, which he is hurling to escape capture. Fly, filibuster, fly!’ he yells, this time spinning in a circle before launching his missile. I watch open-mouthed as a stone as large as a brick bounces off the water eight times.