Boy in the Tower (2 page)

I can’t clearly remember how many days it went on for, but people were saying things like it was the wettest month on record and were comparing it to a monsoon in India and things like that. All I can say is that it didn’t ever stop. Even when you thought it wasn’t raining any more, if you looked carefully out of the window you could still see the drops in the puddles. They made little circles in the water. It got to the point where you never felt properly dry, even if you were tucked up in bed at night.

The sound of water was all around us. Buildings sprang leaks, so not only did you hear the fall of the rain outside but also the loud, steady drips landing in buckets and bowls and pans.

Gaia liked the rain. She said it made her feel awake. Sometimes she would point her face up towards the sky and let the raindrops land on her and trickle down her cheeks, like tears. Some of the other children couldn’t understand what she was doing and would laugh at her. But I knew it was because she liked the feeling. Just like how I loved balancing on the tops of walls.

I think it was because of this – because we sort of understood things like that – that we were only really friends with each other.

I liked other kids well enough, but sometimes there seemed to be some sort of invisible barrier between us which I didn’t know how to make go away. Like with Michael. We walked to school every day for weeks, swinging our bags together as we walked side by side, but we never really spoke. I don’t know now if I ever tried to start a conversation, but all I can really remember is the sound of our footsteps in a steady beat, in place of the sound of our voices.

I don’t know when I first properly met Gaia, but I can’t remember a time when she was not there.

I think our mums were friends first, and although they’d stopped seeing each other, I still saw Gaia every day at school. She didn’t live in my block, though. Her tower sat across the road from mine but we both lived on the seventeenth floor. We liked that.

Our blocks looked almost identical, but not quite. When I was younger I thought that a giant, just like the one in
Jack and the Beanstalk
, could have come along and plucked both of our blocks from the ground and joined them together as neatly as two pieces of Lego. They just looked like they would fit together.

But I don’t believe in man-eating giants any more. Or beanstalks that grow up and up into the clouds and lead to strange, dangerous lands. I know now that there are things far more terrible. That are far more real.

One of the things I like best about our flat is that you can see just about anything from the window. You just need to know where to look.

I could always see the old man who slept on a bench in the park with no shoes on, and the delivery van that parked on the pavement to bring crates of milk to the little row of shops. I could even see the little grey bodies of the two thin dogs who walked behind their owner, in a line, every morning. I came to recognize different people and even knew what sort of time I would see them.

I always liked spotting new things, though. And things that you wouldn’t be able to see if you walked past on the street but that only I could see, from high up. Did you know, for instance, that buses have numbers and letters on the top of them? They are painted so large that I could read them from my window.

I didn’t only look down, though. I liked to see what was happening in the sky too. I thought that the tiny little aeroplanes that moved across the sky resembled pencils sailing through the air. It didn’t seem real to me that they were full of people. They looked so narrow and small up there.

‘That’s because they’re far away, Ade,’ a teacher told me once, when I said this.

I didn’t reply that it wasn’t that I didn’t understand. It just amazed me that people could be so high up in the air, in just a little metal capsule with wings.

In those days, I thought that being high up in my tower was safe. There were the flats below mine and the flats below those ones and the ones below them, all holding me up. There was no chance that I could have dropped to the ground. But there was nothing to hold an aeroplane up.

Mum loved the view from our flat too.

‘Just think, Ade. Some people would pay to see this but it’s ours. All ours. Whenever we want it. All we need to do is look out of the window.’

We would sit together, side by side, watching the world go by, finding pictures in the clouds in the sky. We used to do that all the time.

It’s been weeks and weeks since that happened but I can still remember the last time exactly. I had come into the sitting room, swinging my school bag and humming a song that Gaia had heard on the radio and would sing under her breath all the time, without realizing it. I don’t really like to sing out loud in front of anyone else, even my mum and Gaia. I usually just do it in my head, but I didn’t think Mum would be there.

‘That’s beautiful, Ade. Come and sing to me.’

I looked up to see Mum sitting by the window. Her eyes looked a bit red and she was wearing a dress that I hadn’t seen in a long time but for some reason made me think of bedtimes in the summer. The times when you go to bed and it is still light outside and you have the funny tiredness in your head that comes from playing in the sun all day.

‘Sit with me. Tell me about your day.’

I dumped my bag on the floor and went to sit next to her. She rested her hand on my head, as if she was checking to see if I was ill.

‘What did you do at school today?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing? Again? I see,’ she said.

‘What did you do today, Mum?’

She looked at me mischievously, her eyes twinkling.

‘Today?’ she said. ‘Nothing.’

She laughed and gave me a little knock-knock on the head and went into the kitchen. She came back out holding a couple of bowlfuls of chocolate ice cream. ‘Here you go, pet. Sometimes doing nothing can be tiring,’ she said, handing me a spoon and a bowl.

It was funny, because when my mum gave me the ice cream, all I could think was:
Where did she get it from?

I should tell you a little bit about my mum. She’s not like other mums in some ways. And in others, she definitely is.

She tells me to brush my teeth. Sometimes she reads to me just before I fall asleep. She has a beautiful face that tells people who haven’t met her before that she is kind but also that she is funny. I think she has the loveliest smile I have ever seen. It’s the kind that creeps up on you, and then before you know it her whole face is lit up by it and it beams down on you as well.

Mum’s the one who came up with my name. I mean, I know that everyone’s mum gives them their name, but when I was in Reception, there were two of us called Adeola and a fair few named Adesoye and Adeyemi and Adefemi, so my mum just said to call me Ade.

Add-ee.

‘Nice and simple,’ Mum said.

Everyone calls me that now. I think they’ve forgotten my full name.

Adeola feels a little bit alien even to me now. Only sometimes, Gaia says something like, ‘Adeola, I wasn’t finished talking, you know,’ if she gets cross with me for interrupting and it takes me a second to realize that she’s actually talking to me.

The thing with my mum is, she doesn’t like going out of the flat much. She doesn’t go out at all, actually. It’s something that has made us change the way we do things so I’ve learned pretty much to get along with it.

I remember a time when she sat me down and had a big talk with me about being grown up now, which meant that I could walk to school by myself. Not long after that, she said I’d been so grown up that I could do the shopping that week and we wrote out a list together. Then came the day when she gave me her bank card.

‘You are going to have to look all around you, Ade, and wait until there’s no one about. If someone suddenly comes up to you, then you’ll have to walk away and go back later. You understand?’

‘Yes,’ I said. Part of me knew that this was a little bit dangerous, that it wasn’t something I was meant to do, but mostly I just felt that Mum was trusting me. It was a good feeling.

‘So, tell me what you do. If there’s no one around.’

‘I put the card in the machine. And then I put the pin code in: 5-4-3-7. Then I press the button for cash and then I press the button for £50 and then I wait.’

‘And then you take the money. Don’t forget that part, Ade! The money will come through the little slot at the bottom. Then you come straight back to me.’

‘I won’t forget the money, Mum. You must think I’m really stupid!’ I was just trying to make a joke but Mum looked at me strangely.

‘Don’t ever say that. I don’t think you’re stupid. Not one little bit. Don’t let me catch you saying anything like that again, OK? You must never think you’re stupid.’

I swallowed hard and looked away. Mum didn’t usually talk to me like that. It was like she was talking right up close into my face.

Getting the money from the cash machine was easy enough, though. I did exactly as Mum told me and I never had any problems. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it. I always felt quite worried walking home in case something silly happened, like the wind blew the money out of my hand or something. The notes always felt silky and smooth in my hand at first, but by the time I’d made it back to the tower, they were crumpled and warm from being clenched in my sweaty palm. But I felt something like pride, something like happiness, when I delivered the money to Mum.

‘Good boy, Ade,’ Mum said the first time I got back from the cash point, and she smiled at me. It was a small, quick one, her lips drawing upwards hurriedly, but it made my heart swell up. I hadn’t seen Mum smile in a long time.

‘Right, now, take this.’ She shoved one of the crumpled bank notes back into my hand. ‘And here’s a list. Hurry back.’

I looked down at Mum’s scrawled handwriting on the back of an old envelope.
Large milk, white bread, spag hoops, Frosties
.

She was looking at me so expectantly and I knew she wasn’t asking me, she was telling me.
Take this. Hurry back
. So I went, and when I dumped the blue-and-white striped bag full of shopping on the floor, Mum rewarded me with an even longer smile and I knew that I would do anything to make her smile again.

It seemed to start slowly with the not-walking-me-to-school and the not-going-shopping and the not-getting-money, and then, before I knew it, I realized I hadn’t seen Mum leave the flat for a couple of months. After that, Mum asked me to make dinner one night, and the night after that and the night after that. It was only heating a tin of something up in a pan and toasting a few pieces of bread. I didn’t mind doing it.

But I decided to tell Gaia about it. I wanted to find out if her mum was asking her to do the same sort of things.

I can remember exactly the day I told Gaia.

It was the day the rain stopped falling.

The day the first building fell.

‘It’s too hot to eat this,’ said Gaia. We were sitting in the hall with plates of roast dinner in front of us. A thin slice of meat, two greasy-looking potatoes and bright orange circles of carrot that were all floating in a pool of brown gravy.

The day the rain stopped was one of the hottest that we’d had in ages. It was funny after all the soggy raincoats and wet socks, to find yourself feeling too hot all of a sudden. Everyone had basked in the sunshine during playtime and lain down on the black tarmac to rest.

Gaia was right. It felt too hot even to eat. The sun was shining in through the hall windows so I had to squint when I looked up at her.

‘I’m going to make a run for it,’ Gaia said, standing up.

‘Gaia,’ I said. ‘Can I ask you something?’

She sat back down again.

‘Does your mum ask you to do the shopping sometimes?’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘My mum’s asked me to do that now. Do you do it?’

Gaia’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly.

‘What do you mean, she’s asked you to do it?’

I realized that now I’d brought it up, Gaia wouldn’t leave me alone until she knew every little detail, so I told her what had been going on. From the very first time Mum had sat me down to tell me to walk to school by myself to the time she gave me her bank card.

I didn’t tell Gaia everything, though.

But I still wasn’t prepared for the worried, frowning look that took over her face.

‘You shouldn’t be doing that.’

‘Mum says I’m grown up now. She says I do a really good job.’

‘But . . . but . . . if you’re doing all of those things, then what’s your mum doing?’

It was a good question. Mostly, she was sleeping. At the same time she stopped leaving the flat, she started feeling really tired all the time.

‘I just need to sleep, baby,’ Mum would say, and I would close the bedroom door behind me and not come in and sit down on the bed and tell her all about the nothing I had been doing at school that day.

‘When did you start doing this?’ Gaia asked.

I speared a piece of meat on my fork. It dripped gravy onto the plate, each drop making a little circular splash just like raindrops falling into puddles.

‘Ade?’ Gaia said softly.

It had been many months since the day I came home to hear Mum crying. Crying is probably the wrong word, although she certainly
was
crying. Tears were running all the way down her face and they fell from the tip of her chin onto a growing patch of wetness on her skirt. But it was also like moaning. And shouting. And screaming. And wailing. All mixed up together.

It was a sound that terrified me.

‘Mum,’ I said. But my voice was lost in the sound of Mum’s cries. In the end, I put my hand onto her shoulder, and only then did she turn to look at me.

She looked right through me as if I wasn’t there and then her eyes seemed to focus on me and take in who I was. She reached out for me and clasped me tightly, too tightly, to her.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, over and over again. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right.’ But she didn’t stop crying.

I felt like I was the one who should have been saying that to her, because as she looked at me then, I could see her face clearly.