Boy in the Tower (8 page)

It’s funny because sometimes when I was at school, especially if we had tests or long pieces of writing to do, I used to wish I was back at home, watching television and not doing anything much at all. Now that I was at home watching television all day, I wished I was back at school. I missed Miss Farraway and how our classroom was always warm and colourful. I missed listening to stories read aloud to us. I missed seeing Gaia every day.

My head sometimes hurt for no reason and I wished I could run outside and feel the air rushing by my cheeks as I ran but I didn’t dare leave the tower unless I really needed to. I felt foggy some days and nothing seemed to make me feel much better. I just carried on watching television, even if I had a headache, because at least that way I could hear people speaking.

One day I was watching television and they started talking about ‘the Blucher Disaster’. Blucher is the name of the road which Gaia and I walked down, the one where the first two men and the policemen who had died were found.

They were talking about everything that had been happening and whether or not the army should be sent in. The problem was that they didn’t know what they were fighting, so it was all well and good to send the army in but they didn’t know who or what the enemy was.

The people talking on the programme were getting very red-faced and blustery when not everyone agreed with what they were saying. Then they started talking to another man through a video link. He had large pink cheeks that wobbled when he spoke.

‘Prime Minister, what is being done to help the people affected by the Blucher Disaster?’ they asked him. ‘It seems like not a lot from where we are sitting.’

‘No, that’s not true,’ he started, and then he was speaking a lot of words but they weren’t making any sense at all. I don’t know how else to explain it. He was talking a lot but it was like it didn’t really mean anything.

I knew a little bit about the Prime Minister but I couldn’t really believe that it was this man, with his pink, jowly cheeks and nervous, dashing eyes, who was in charge of our country. I couldn’t stop thinking that he didn’t have any idea what to say, that he didn’t know what to do, and if the Prime Minister didn’t know what to do then what hope was there?

I didn’t watch it for long and I changed the channel to someone talking about the number of people who had died so far, and there were people who knew them, their families, crying and talking about how much they missed them.

I turned the television off for a while after that.

The funny thing about the programme which had the Prime Minister on was that after that, everyone started calling the whole thing the Blucher Disaster. People pronounced it wrong sometimes and said things like ‘Bloosher’ or ‘Bloocher’, but soon enough, everyone was saying it right, and made that funny little ‘uh’ sound that comes in the middle of words like book and look before the ‘ch’. Bl-uh-ch-er. You know you are saying it right when it sounds like something that would knock you round the head.

One minute, we weren’t calling it that, and the next, it had caught on so much that in the end, people were using it to describe anything horrible that was happening.

When a building collapsed and fell down on a group of teenagers, it was all part of the Blucher Disaster.

When a woman was found collapsed dead with her bag of shopping spilling onto the road, it was the Blucher Disaster.

It was all the same to them. And in the end, I guess they were right.

This was how the plants first got their name. Bluchers. Someone called them that once on TV and it stuck.

No one knew about the Bluchers for what seemed like a long time.

There were all kinds of reasons and ideas about why our buildings were falling down and why people were collapsing. After what happened to the two men and the policemen, people were being attacked every day.

It was a horrible, horrible time.

I could see from my window if there was a little blob of a person who was not moving. Then I would see an ambulance arrive and people in brightly coloured jackets would swarm around the body and carry it away.

I hadn’t left our flat for a really long time since school had shut down. I got into a rhythm each day which revolved around food, looking out of the window and television. The first thing I would do when I got up was to make breakfast for Mum and me and tidy up anything from the night before. I’d take Mum’s plate into her bedroom and leave it on her bedside table because she’d always be asleep. Then I’d watch the morning news for a few hours and find out anything new that had happened.

One day, I thought I’d switch on the news and they’d say that they’d found a way to make it safe for everybody again. It had to happen sooner or later, didn’t it?

After that, I would sit and look out of the window. From where I sat, I could see the little holes left by fallen buildings, as if someone had come along and taken bites of brick and concrete here and there. I’d spend some time updating Gaia’s map with any more buildings that had fallen. There were more and more dots to make each day.

I’d make lunch next. Something simple like crackers and cheese or a tin of soup. Then more television and window-watching before dinner.

It always felt like I was waiting for something to happen, whether it was for someone to make everything safe once more or something as simple as seeing Mum awake. I would be sitting watching television and then I would hear the sound of the door handle squeaking from her bedroom. I tried to stop myself from running up to her and asking her a hundred questions and giving her a hug, and instead I would just sit where I was, in front of the television.

I ran up to her like that once before, and she didn’t like it.

I sprang up as soon as I heard the door opening. ‘Mum!’ I said. ‘I’m home all the time now. They closed the school down because it’s not safe any more. There’s lots of people leaving. Do you think we should go? We’d have to be careful because there’s something that’s making you fall over and die . . .’

I was excited, I hadn’t spoken to anyone since the day Michael’s mum had tried to take me with her and I’d been to the shop for some food. That tall, nervous-looking man who served me in the shop was the last person I had spoken to. It had been six days.

Mum was saying something under her breath which stopped my flow of words.

‘Stop, stop, stop,’ she was saying.

She turned towards the bathroom and shot me the same look she’d given me the day I asked her to come shopping with me. Her eyes looked small and weren’t open properly, as if all the sleeping was making her eyelids stick together. But I could still see what they were saying:
Stop talking. It’s hurting me
.

She went to the bathroom and I heard the sound of the toilet flushing and then she went back inside her bedroom.

I knew better after that. I stayed still if I heard her come out. I might have turned my head towards her and sometimes she might have given me a little nod, but that was all.

I really missed being able to talk to Gaia. Especially with everything that was happening. I wished I could have talked to her about it and heard what she thought. Did she still think that the fallen-down buildings had something to do with the collapsing people? Did she think it was funny, like me, that they were using the name of Blucher Road in all the news reports now? Didn’t she think it was actually quite a threatening-sounding word if you said it over and over to yourself?

I just had to have these conversations in my head and imagine what Gaia might say. It wasn’t the same as actually speaking to her, but it helped a little. Sometimes I would even replay old conversations we’d had in my head.

‘You know what I heard on the radio this morning?’ Gaia had said to me one day when we were sitting in the playground. ‘These scientists were doing a test with plants to see if they treated their sibling plants differently to stranger plants.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Guess what they found.’

‘That they don’t treat them any differently. They’re plants.’

‘No! They found that they did! They were less aggressive towards their sibling plants. They don’t take up as much root space, so their sibling’s got room to grow too. Isn’t that amazing?’

‘But how do they know which plant is their sibling?’

‘The scientists don’t know how they do it. They don’t know how they recognize them.’

‘That’s weird.’

‘It’s incredible. We really only know such a tiny amount about how plants behave.’

‘Yeah, I guess so.’

Gaia used to present me with these little nuggets of information that she picked up all the time. It was always something interesting that I hadn’t considered or realized or heard about, and quite often it was to do with plants because she loved them so much. I missed hearing her telling me something amazing she had just discovered about the world. Gaia had made me realize what a wonderful and strange place we lived in.

I kept filling in the map that she had given me. It was my way of feeling close to her, I suppose. Each day I drew in more and more numbered red dots. I was running out of space now. There were so many red dots close to each other, it was beginning to look entirely red.

I found myself missing Gaia a little bit more on the days when something new happened. I wanted to be able to talk it through with her. Otherwise it didn’t feel like it was real, like it was actually happening.

One of those days was when the news kept showing the same thing on every channel. A woman with curly blonde hair was talking. Her face filled most of the screen, so I could see that she had little lines round her mouth where her face would crease when she smiled. But she wasn’t smiling then. She had made a discovery about what was killing those people. She’d found something in their throats. It was so, so small that we would not be able to see it if we only used our eyes. She had discovered them using a special microscope.

She called them spores.

I didn’t know what spores were or where they came from but I was glad that I saw that lady on the news. She said it was best to stay indoors if you could and avoid going outside. I hoped Gaia knew about the spores so that, if she was still in her tower, she would know how dangerous it was to go out. Mum and I were going to be out of food again soon, so I had been planning to go to the shops, but I wasn’t going to leave the tower now.

In the end, I decided to knock on a neighbour’s door to see if they had any food. I hadn’t left our flat in a good few days now and as I opened the front door, I started to feel nervous about stepping out of it.

This is what Mum must feel like
, I thought.

The corridor was completely empty. I couldn’t hear a sound apart from the tread of my own footsteps. I crept out of my flat, looking all around me as if something was going to jump out at me.

The first door I came to was Michael’s mum’s flat, although I knew that they had gone, so there was no point in knocking. As I walked past it, though, I could see the door had been left ajar by just a few inches.

I gingerly pushed the door open and it swung wide, revealing the deserted flat.

‘Hello?’ I said, although I knew there wasn’t anyone there.

Inside, the flat looked like it had been turned upside down and shaken really hard. Clothes were strewn across the floor, books had been flung off the shelves. Cupboard doors were left gaping open, waiting to be closed. A lamp in the sitting room stood illuminating the chaos. I walked towards it and switched it off.

I went into the kitchen and plucked a couple of cans of beans and a bag of rice from the first cupboard I came to. I told myself that I’d make a list of everything I took, so that if things ever got back to normal, we could replace it all when Michael and his family came home.

I hurried back to my flat then, putting the cans and the rice into a sling I made with the front of my T-shirt.

I left the door ajar, just as I’d found it. Perhaps they had left in a real rush and forgot to pull the door closed to lock it. I’d never seen it left open before.

Or
, a voice in my head said,
perhaps Michael’s mum left their flat open on purpose, so I could take their food if I needed it
.

I’d never know, but I had a feeling in my belly that she did leave it open for me.

I watched so much television during this time that after a while I realized I wasn’t really watching it any more. It was just noise that was making my head sore. Gaia used to say that too much television was bad for you, so now and again I switched it off and tried to do something else.

Sometimes I would play this little game that I made up, called Five in the House. I had to clear a space on our table to play it.

I had collected lots and lots of little yogurt pots which I kept in a box under my bed. They all looked exactly the same because I had taken the labels off and I’d washed them so they didn’t smell or anything.

I’d put out loads and loads of yogurt pots upside down on the table, until it was completely covered with them.

It looked like a little city.

Then I would screw up five bits of paper, so I’d have five little paper balls, and I’d hide them under the yogurt pots. Sometimes I would put just one ball under five pots. Other times I might put three under one pot and two under another. I could do it any way I liked.

When I’d done that, I would move the yogurt pots round and round, so they were all mixed up. There was no way I could tell where I’d put the paper balls because I’d mix them up for a really long time.

The object of the game was to lift up the right pots to find all five balls, to find five in a house. I would let myself have ten chances to find them.

It was quite hard and I’d only managed to do it a handful of times, but I liked it because it took quite a long time to play it. It always took me a while to choose which ten yogurt pots I would lift up.

The other thing I spent my time doing was filling in my scrapbook.

Before, when I’d been able to go outside, I had cut out pictures from old newspapers I’d found on the street to stick into my scrapbook. But now I had to copy out pictures and words that I’d heard from the television instead. The pages were filling up.