Boy in the Tower (5 page)

Gaia looked at me, softly.

‘It’s quite bad, Ade. They don’t know what’s causing it. People are getting scared.’

I looked away from her gaze.

‘We just need to wake up tomorrow and hear that nowhere else has fallen down,’ she said. ‘Then I think everyone will calm down. Did you hear about that little house that fell?’

I shook my head.

‘There was an old woman living there. They found her body underneath some bricks.’

We both went quiet for a moment.

‘But this is the weird thing,’ Gaia continued. ‘There weren’t nearly enough bricks left where the house fell. There should have been loads and loads more. The same thing happened with the pub and the warehouse and the other place.’

‘The workshop,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘The other place was the upholsterer’s workshop.’

‘Right, the workshop. So I think someone is taking the bricks.’

‘So you think a person is doing this?’ I asked. ‘To steal bricks?’

‘I don’t know,’ Gaia said. ‘But I can’t think why else it’s happening. Why do you think they are falling?’

‘I dunno. I guess I thought there was just something wrong with those buildings.’

‘But why those ones? And why is it happening all of a sudden? All at the same time?’ Gaia said.

‘But why would anyone want to steal bricks like that?’

‘I don’t know,’ Gaia said. ‘How about . . . how about . . . because there’s a monster . . . who only likes the taste of bricks from Camberwell?’

‘Yes!’ I said, warming to the idea. ‘And he hates the taste of bricks from anywhere else.’

‘Yeah, he tried the ones in Elephant and Castle and spat them all out!’

‘And don’t get him started on the bricks in Peckham, they’re far too salty.’

‘He only comes out at night because he’s very shy about people seeing him eat.’

We laughed at each other.

‘He doesn’t mean anyone any harm,’ I continued. ‘He’s quite a nice monster, really. He’s really sorry about the lady who died.’

Quickly, our grins fell from our faces. It wasn’t a joke, a story we had made up. Someone had gone to bed one night thinking everything was OK, but the next morning they wouldn’t ever wake up, lying buried under the rubble of their own home.

‘I wonder what’s really going on,’ said Gaia. ‘And when is it going to end?’

I didn’t say, but there was a question in my mind too: I wondered if more people would get hurt along the way.

It turned out I was right to worry.

That night, our school was on the news. There was the entrance that we went in every day on the screen, just by where the newsreader was standing. It had a stone over the entrance that had
BOYS
inscribed on it in curly capitals from the olden days when girls and boys had to come in through different doors. The newsreader was saying something about whether our school should be closed down or not.

I raced into Mum’s room, flinging the door open so it clanged against the wall.

‘Mum! Wake up! My school’s on telly!’

There was a funny, stale smell in her room and the curtains were drawn although it was still light outside.

‘Mum?’ I sat down next to her. She just looked like a lump in the bed. She lay so still that for one moment I wondered whether, if I pulled the covers back, I would find just a pile of cushions and realize Mum had been tricking me this whole time. Maybe she was out at the supermarket this very moment buying the ice cream we liked.

I threw back the pink blanket but there were no pillows, just Mum with her eyes tightly closed, her body compacted together as though she was making herself into a ball. I prodded her but she didn’t move, so I shook her, gently at first and then with more force. She moaned and turned onto her front. I was worried she wouldn’t be able to breathe if she slept face down, so I turned her back onto her side. She sighed deeply but she didn’t wake.

‘Mum!’ I shouted. ‘Mum!’

More loudly this time: ‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’

Her eyes flickered and then opened.

‘Ade,’ she whispered. She tried to moisten her lips.

‘Mum! Wake up!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘My school’s on the news. You’ve got to see it.’

‘Not now, Ade. Not now. Get me some water, would you?’

‘But we’ll miss it,’ I said. Remembering what I had heard, I added, ‘And they might close the school down.’

‘Oh,’ Mum said, and her eyes flickered shut as she fell back to sleep.

When I came back into the sitting room, they’d stopped showing my school but they were still talking about what was happening with the buildings. It ran all night, or at least right up, to where I switched it off to go to bed. They couldn’t stop talking about it.

That was when I knew that Gaia was right. People were getting scared. And the only way they would stop feeling scared would be if they woke up the next day and no more buildings had fallen down.

But it didn’t happen like that. More and more fell. I saw on the news that some people had died because they’d been sleeping in their beds when the walls had fallen down around them and then their floors had given way.

Lots of people who knew all about how to make houses were on the television talking about foundations, and other people were talking about terror or something like that.

It always seemed to happen at night time, when the buildings would fall. No one had actually
seen
it happen. We just kept waking up in the morning to find out that another and another had gone. It was beginning to look really bad from what I could see from my window. There were all these funny little patches in between the buildings now. More and more each day.

They decided to send in lots of policemen who sat in vans or walked around at night to see if they could find out what was happening. We all watched too. I could see lots of lit-up windows in the blocks around us. In a strange sort of way, I felt less lonely seeing lots of other people looking out of their windows. I wasn’t the only one any more. One night I counted seventy-eight faces. We all wanted to find out what was going on.

There was the horrible day when we all had to go for an assembly. All the teachers looked red-eyed and wouldn’t meet our stares. Mr Chelmsford told us that Leyla in Year Five and her brother Mehdi in Year One were no longer with us. Their house had collapsed when they were inside it. It took me a moment to realize what he was trying to say.

We couldn’t believe that they’d really gone.

It did not seem real at all.

The day after that, the Reception teacher, Mrs Brook, didn’t come to school, and instead they had a teacher no one had ever seen before. There was another assembly where they told us that she had died too. Everyone was crying a lot now, not only because we were sad about Leyla, Mehdi and Mrs Brook but because we knew someone else would be next.

In the days that followed, there were always a few more people who we were missing, and eventually we stopped having assemblies.

Every day, I looked for Gaia.

I could feel the knot in my stomach getting tighter and tighter until I saw her. I didn’t realize that she was just as worried about me until one day she said to me, ‘Maybe it’s not a good idea for you to be walking about after school.’

On the news that morning, they said another five buildings had fallen. It wasn’t stopping, as we had all hoped. The number of fallen buildings was getting bigger each day.

‘I need to get some more food, though. We’re about to run out,’ I said.

Although that was what I said, I was actually starting to feel funny about being out on the streets by myself.

For one thing, I would have to walk past a lot of the buildings that had fallen down. In some of them, I knew that the people who had lived inside them had died when the walls and floors collapsed around them.

The real reason, though, was that even though I knew the buildings only seemed to fall down at night, our streets just didn’t feel safe any more. Even with the sunshine streaming down. Our little world kept changing and no one knew why.

It felt like Gaia was able to read my mind. She knew exactly what I was thinking.

‘I know it always happens at night but things have changed around here,’ she said. ‘I just think it’d be better if you went with someone else.’

I shook my head. Mum was sleeping as much as ever. She hadn’t been outside for a long time. The only other person I could ask was Michael’s mum, but I’d accidentally knocked into Michael in the playground a couple of days before and he’d turned round to me, scowling. ‘What you do that for?’ he’d said.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It was an accident.’

‘Just stay away, you hear?’

I’d never really had a conversation with Michael before, if you could call this one, and I was surprised by how quietly he spoke and how angry he sounded.

‘OK,’ I said.

‘I don’t know why my mum is looking out for you, but I’m not your friend, all right?’

‘OK,’ I said again, unsure of what else to say.

‘Don’t cry, Ade,’ Michael said, and he walked off.

I wasn’t going to cry but I did feel surprised. Shocked, I suppose. I knew Michael wasn’t that keen on me but I didn’t realize how much he disliked me.

Gaia said he wasn’t worth the brain space but I saw her trip him up on purpose as he walked past in the dining hall.

‘Sorry,’ she said sweetly, and Michael just scowled in much the same way as he’d scowled at me.

So I wasn’t about to start asking his mum for favours.

‘Mum’s not great at the moment,’ I told Gaia.

‘I didn’t mean your mum,’ Gaia said, her eyes shining. ‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No,’ I said. I think I shouted it. The last thing I wanted was Gaia close to the fallen buildings. It was funny that we both had the same strong feeling that we should stay away from them if we could.

‘Anyway,’ I went on, ‘your mum and dad wouldn’t let you.’

Gaia smiled.

‘They don’t have to know,’ she said.

‘Let’s see your list then,’ Gaia said as we turned off down the road towards the shops.

The thing is, Mum had stopped giving me lists by then. I knew the right stuff to get, it wasn’t a big problem or anything, but I knew Gaia wouldn’t approve. When I first started going shopping, Gaia had said that at the very least Mum was making sure I was getting proper food by giving me a list so I wasn’t just buying rubbish like crisps and chocolate and nothing else.

I didn’t want Gaia to get cross with Mum about it, so I said, ‘I get the same things all the time now. I know what to get,’ and hoped she’d leave it at that.

She didn’t say anything, though, and I felt glad until I realized why she was so quiet.

We were standing in front of one of the fallen buildings.

I’m not sure what it used to be because it had been empty for quite a long time, even before it fell. It was big and had crumbling red bricks and large windows with lots of panes that had been smashed.

Now that it had gone, it was a massive empty space. The police had put up lots of red-and-white tape all around it and we could see a couple of men with yellow hard hats on who were having a look at some of the rubble left on the ground.

‘Let’s keep going,’ I said, and I tugged at Gaia’s arm. We kept walking and then we passed the old pub, the first building that had fallen.

Gaia stopped to look but I kept walking, so she had to run to catch up with me.

‘Did you notice . . .’ Gaia started. I waited but she didn’t carry on.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Did you notice something funny—’ Again, she stopped herself. She looked behind her to where the pub once stood. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What?’ I asked again.

‘I thought the bricks looked a bit . . . this is going to sound really strange. But I thought they looked a bit . . . blue.’

‘Blue?’

‘I know it sounds weird but I’m sure I saw it.’

‘We’ll have a look on our way back.’

‘OK. Well. It’s just . . . I don’t know. I get the feeling that we shouldn’t hang around there. There’s a funny feeling about it.’

I’d felt it too. Was it just because we knew what had happened in those buildings or was it something else? I couldn’t explain but I didn’t want to stand there for long either. Something was telling me to move away.

We did the shopping as quickly as we could and headed home.

We didn’t see anyone on the way back. There was no sign of the two men in the yellow hard hats who’d been sifting through the rubble and we only stopped briefly to look again.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe it
is
a bit blue.’

‘Do you think there’s something on the bricks?’ Gaia said.

‘We’d need to get closer to really see.’

‘Maybe we could do it tomorrow. After school. Not now.’

‘No, not now,’ I agreed.

We hurried off down the road.

‘Thanks for coming with me,’ I said.

‘It’s OK,’ Gaia replied. ‘We were probably getting scared over nothing. I mean, apart from being unlucky if your building falls down when you are inside it, people aren’t getting hurt just by going past the fallen down ones.’

‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I said.

We said goodnight and walked off in opposite directions, back to our own homes.

That very night, I was watching the telly when they suddenly stopped the programme with a breaking news story. I had been eating my dinner. Tonight I’d made baked beans on toast and I was chasing the last two beans round my plate with my fork. However quickly or slowly I tried to shovel them up, I couldn’t quite get them onto my fork. However hard I tried.

I was looking down at my plate when I heard the newsreader’s voice. She sounded so anxious.

‘We’ve just heard news of another development following the growing number of collapsing buildings in South London which, as yet, cannot be explained. Two council workers were discovered dead at one of the sites earlier tonight. Both men were examining the remnants of an abandoned warehouse, which collapsed only two nights ago. We are going live to Bill Franklin, who is at the scene.’