The Detachable Boy (8 page)
‘Nooooo!’ Wilkin howled.
‘It’s a little game we play at home. Hide and seek. Don’t just sit there like a bad sport, pull yourself together!’
‘Noooo! Where’s my body? I can’t live without my body!’
‘Did you have a rough night, Wilkin? Feel like you’re falling apart at the seams?’
‘Where are my legs? I can’t feel my legs!’
‘Oh, they won’t be far away,’ I said, and stood.
‘Please help me, please. I promise I won’t do it again. I promise. Please.’
‘Okay, I’ll give you a hint,’ I said, and leaned close to Wilkin’s ear. ‘Your feet are in the toilet.’
‘Noooo!’
Just then, a guard opened the cell door. ‘What’s going on in here?’
‘I think Wilkin had a bad dre . . . ah . . . dre . . . ah . . . dre . . . ah CHOO!’
The sneeze came all the way from my toes and exploded with such force that it caused my head to detach like a cannonball. It shot across the room and butted into the guard’s forehead, knocking him wobbly. He bounced off the wall, tripped on the bunk and landed – head first – on top of Wilkin’s feet in the toilet bowl.
My own head ricocheted off the door and rolled to a stop at my feet.
If there was one thing I had practised again and again, it was collecting and re-attaching my head. My hands scooped it up and planted it firmly on my shoulders.
The guard’s body was slumped over the toilet, his head deep in the bowl. I saw my moment.
I yanked the mess of keys from the guard’s belt and unlocked the door. Wilkin had been right – the cells were soundproof with the door closed. It clicked shut and I slid a bolt home before scanning the corridor and making a random choice to run to the left. I passed cells with people sitting on bunks, cells with people pacing and a cell with a long-haired man dancing the Macarena, but the corridor was eerily quiet and empty. I ran and ran with my feet barely touching the concrete floor, cautiously peering around corners before bolting to the next.
The cells went on for ever. The faces that happened to look up as I raced past belonged to all kinds of people – African, Asian, Caucasian, Islander, Arabs, all penned in pairs in their plastic prison.
Around the next corner, I spotted what I’d been dreading – a posse of men in vinyl fifty metres away. They were chatting in low voices and heading towards me.
I backed against a cell door. It emitted a low beep. I turned and saw that it was dimly lit and devoid of furniture. Devoid of a roof. Devoid of a floor. The cell was in fact a lift and my backing against the door had activated it.
I could hear the tick-tacking of shiny black shoes on the concrete. I pressed my face against the clear plastic but couldn’t see the lift itself, either up or down.
‘Come on!’ I whispered at the door.
A bell pinged. The door opened with a faint hiss. But something was wrong. The lift must have malfunctioned. I could still see right down the shaft – a huge vertical tunnel illuminated every few metres by the light at each floor.
I almost swore out loud.
With the sound of footsteps bearing down on me, I did the only thing my dizzy brain could come up with.
I leapt into the lift shaft.
I
EXPECTED TO DROP
like a stone. Instead, I skidded – belly first – on a flat surface: the clear floor of the lift.
I froze.
The guards were at the door.
But the rhythmic click-clack of their collective footfalls didn’t break. They walked straight past and I heard the door hiss closed behind me.
The lift hummed quietly as I marvelled at the control panel. I was suddenly faced with more choices than I could ever remember having at one time.
There were one hundred floors. Seventy below and thirty above me. It was like an underground skyscraper. A dirtscraper? The bank of buttons stretched from the ceiling to the floor and my decision-making went like this: we came in from the desert and the desert is ground so I’m going to start looking for Crystal at the ground floor. But the button labelled ‘G’ was way up near the ceiling of the lift. It was well out of reach even when I jumped.
I took a step back from the control panel, steadied my right fist, and threw it hard at the highest button. My mitt spun through the air and punched into a cluster of buttons fifteen centimetres below the target. The lift clunked and started moving. I was heading upwards. Up towards floor number . . . twelve. I backed into a corner and watched the frame of each floor flash into view as the lift whizzed past. I caught glimpses of guards leading prisoners, guards playing leapfrog and guards dancing with other guards. I saw trolleys of food and cleaning equipment and the lift whirred on. Then a deafening electronic siren howled into the lift and an unsmiling voice echoed over the PA.
‘Security breach, Level Sixty-two. I repeat, security breach in Level Sixty-two. Level Sixty-two is locked down. Control crews to elevator D three. Crews to D three.’
The lift had stopped between floors and become a very effective cell. A cell with nowhere to hide and no way out. Well, there was one see-through service door on the ceiling, way out of my reach.
Or was it?
I smiled as I stuffed my little foot, my right foot, into my pocket. I detached my left leg and attached it to where my little foot had been – an arrangement I liked to call ‘stilt’ that I’d often used to get the biscuit tin from its hiding place on the top shelf at home. An arrangement I could have used to press the ‘G’ button if I’d thought of it twenty seconds earlier. Using my single leg – now twice as long and unsteady with two knee joints – to lift myself high into the corner, I backed up the wall and shoved the service door with my head.
It would not yield. I butted and barged until my long leg threatened to buckle.
It was locked.
I took the guard’s nest of metal from my jacket pocket. There were close to thirty keys on that ring and I didn’t have time to try them all. I wished and prayed and let my fingers sift through the pile until my right hand triumphantly pinched one key clear.
‘You reckon this one?’
The keys jangled.
‘Okay.’
I punched the key into the lock and held my breath.
It opened.
I kissed my hand and rubbed it against my cheek before lifting my body through the service door. The alarm was quieter in the lift shaft. I reeled my leg in and was about to reattach it when the lift jerked up. I flipped backwards and fell down the narrow gap between the lift and the well. My ears whistled as the floors strobed past.
My head screamed.
A
PARACHUTE WOULD
have been nice. A handful of plastic shopping bags would have helped. Even an umbrella might have done the job. One of those big rainbow-coloured ones. Without any of these, my mind kept throwing up images of smashed pumpkins.
I eventually rained onto the floor. When my head came to rest against the cool wall of the lift shaft and I had time to collect my senses (if nothing else) I thought ‘That wasn’t too bad. In fact, I’ve bounced harder falling off the swings at the park’. I’d landed on a bed of – fine leaves, was it? Or soft grass, maybe. But what was that smell ? Phweeoar. An overwhelming pong like a hundred unflushed toilets. It made my eyes water.
‘Do you mind?’ came a small voice. ‘Will . . . you . . . get . . . off . . . me!’
I realised:
1 – that the little voice sounded rather like Alvin the Chipmunk
2 – that the little voice was inside my head
3 – that the little voice belonged to a creature that had been pinned under my head and even now was scratching uselessly at my left earlobe, tickling me and making my head giggle.
‘Gedd off,’ the voice went on, squeaky with indignation.
‘Hee hee,’ I thought. ‘Righto – ho ho ha ha – as soon as my body gets itself together – ha ha.’
‘
Today
if you don’t mind,’ the little voice whined.
Without conscious effort on my part, the animal’s memories began to unfold.
It was a rat. The memories were all in dull light but the smells that accompanied the images were as strong and colourful as a colour wheel, with a little too much emphasis on brown.
The rat’s name was Argus and he had a wife, six sisters and a hundred and eight children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren all nesting at the base of the Hive’s lift.
A low moan echoed around the room. It was a haunting, mournful sound, like a choir of a hundred voices all singing just off-key.
‘What was that?’ I asked.
Before the rat could answer, the hundred voices began chanting together. ‘An itch, an itch, I have a nasty itch. An itch, an itch, I have a nasty itch.’
The rat sighed. ‘The smell and that infernal noise is Titania.’
‘Titania?’
The voices screamed, ‘Oh, blessed be the scratcher of the itch!’
Silence.
‘If you take my advice you’ll forget you heard anything,’ Argus whispered. ‘Titania is not a place for rats or . . . or . . . or whatever you are.’
‘Titania is a place?’
‘In a manner of speaking, yes. And a person.’
That made no sense at all. Time was wasting. ‘Come on,’ I thought. ‘I have to find Crystal.’
‘Crystal.’ Her name echoed in my head.
‘No, that wasn’t an echo. That was me,’ Argus said.
‘You’re looking for a crystal?’
‘No . . . yes . . . I mean, I’m looking for a person
named
Crystal.’
‘Yes, that’s what I meant. There’s a Crystal up on the sixteenth floor.’
‘Really? Have you seen her?’
‘Well, not exactly, but she’s been very generous with her food. Hasn’t eaten a morsel since she was brought in.’
I scanned Argus’ memory and found small fingers, possibly Crystal’s fingers, poking bits of bread through a hole in the brickwork. Argus and his relatives were collecting the morsels, whooping and catcalling to one another with excitement. But surely that couldn’t be Crystal? Normally she hoovered up every crumb of food within a two-metre radius. If she was giving away food, she must be sick. My heart sank.
‘Where were you when you saw her?’
‘In the vent, of course’
‘The vent?’
‘How do you think we Rattus could live down here? How do you think those pasty-skinned people could live down here if there was no vent? Where do you think we got all this bedding?’
‘The vent?’
‘Yes, our major route to Aboveground. Not that we have much cause to go up there. Dangerous.’
In Argus’ memory, I could see that the vent the rat was referring to was joined to the lift shaft where we were via a small pipe, a pipe just big enough for . . .
My hands snatched my head into the air and reattached it to my shoulders. In the gloom, I saw the rat dart off.
‘Dumb body! Stupid body!’ I cursed, and bit at my own hands. ‘I hadn’t finished talking to the rat!’
A breeze rattled the grass and leaves of the rats’ nest at my feet. Air was pouring from the lift shaft into a horizontal pipe, a pipe just big enough for . . .
I looked up and saw the flash-flash of a lift in motion. I couldn’t tell if it was going up or down but it was definitely moving.
The air was surging out of the horizontal pipe. The pipe that led to the vent.
The lift was coming down.
I decided that I should be surging out of the pipe, too. And into the vent. And up to the sixteenth floor.
The pipe was too small for a seven-year-old boy. Too small even for a big five-year-old boy.
But not too small for pieces of a boy.
I tore off my head and bowled it like a bowling ball along the pipe. My arms detached from their shoulders and reattached to the stump of my neck – a manoeuvre I call ‘skinny minnie’ – making me as long as I could be with both feet on the ground and only as wide as my hips. My hands felt down the wall until they found the pipe, then dived in. My feet pushed and my hands pulled until my entire body was like a rat in a drainpipe. Well, the jumbled remains of a rat-boy in a drainpipe.
‘Come on, guys. You can do it!’ my head cheered.
The wind forced from the lift shaft now pushed at my feet and blasted around me like a hurricane. It sent my head rolling. As my body inched its way to safety, my bottom became wedged in the pipe, all but blocking the passage of air into the vent.
Still the lift came down.
The air pressure under the lift soared until, with a dull pop, the blockage was cleared. My body shot from the pipe as though it had been fired from a cannon – across a chamber, and into the opposite wall. My detached limbs slumped wearily onto the floor like discarded burger pickles.
‘Bravo!’ my head sang, only half sarcastically. ‘Come on. Chop chop. Pull yourself together. We’ve got work to do!’
My hands ran around putting bits together, leaving my head until very last. Then I saw I was in a long vertical tunnel, the ventilation shaft of the Hive. It was like the lift shaft but there was no lift and at the very top I could see light. Not fluorescent lights, but a happy explosion of sunlight. Sunlight! I could feel hope smiling its way into my limbs. All in one piece, I began scaling the wall. I was definitely in luck. There were neat hand- and foot-holds in the bricks, spaced evenly like a huge ladder. I counted the floors aloud as I climbed towards number sixteen.