PART ONE

Before

Chapter One

When you wish that a Saturday was actually a Monday, you know there is something seriously wrong.

I look at the ceiling. At the spot of flaky paint and the stain that looks like a wobbly circle, and at the swaying, wispy spider’s web, and I think of all those cold, grey Mondays when I had to make myself get up for school. I would have to force my legs off the mattress and I’d dress in a daze, unwilling to believe it was time to be upright again.

I wish I could wake up to another Monday like that.

Those days are gone now that the Bluchers are here.

When they first arrived, they came quietly and stealthily, as if they tiptoed silently into the world when we were all looking the other way.

I guess I was one of the first people to see them. It’s not something I’m proud of. When you know the kind of terrible destruction that just one clump of Bluchers can cause, you wouldn’t want to have been there first either.

I think the reason I knew about them before most other people was because I used to spend a lot of my time sitting on my windowsill, looking down over the world. I could see everything from there: the miniature-looking roads, the roofs of the buildings, the broccoli-tops of the trees. And then, of course, the Bluchers themselves and the devastation that followed in their path.

The view has changed so much now that sometimes I wonder if I just made up everything that came before. I have to make myself remember what I used to see: the shops and the bustle, the cars and the people, the red-brick walls of my school and the grey patch of the playground.

Some people say you shouldn’t live in the past. But I can’t stop putting things into two boxes in my head: Before and After. And it’s much easier to think about the Before things.

Before, if there was a day when I didn’t go into school because I was ill or Mum wasn’t well, I used to sit on my windowsill and watch the other children coming out to play. Everyone would rush out of the tiny black door so fast that I wouldn’t be able to tell one little coloured ant from another.

I could always recognize Gaia in the crowd, though. She wore this bright pink coat that stood out a mile. I would see her walking along the edge of the playground. Never in the middle, never in a group. Always walking round and round by herself. Walking in circles.

But like I said, this was all before.

I don’t see any other children any more.

I don’t know where Gaia is.

Chapter Two

It all began with the rain.

‘Don’t forget your wellies today, Ade,’ Michael’s mum would say to me each morning. ‘And your proper coat.’

Michael and his family lived in the flat next to ours and we would often hear their voices through the walls. I came to be very familiar with the particular wail that Michael’s sister made when she didn’t get her own way.

Michael’s mum had started knocking for me before school. I now walked there with Michael and his little sister, with their mum shepherding us into the lift and across the road.

I liked them but I preferred walking on my own, to be honest. If I was by myself I could walk along the tops of the walls, trying not to fall off once, which I’d never managed, but Michael’s mum didn’t like me doing that. She tutted very loudly the first time I tried to step up so I didn’t do it again.

It would have been really hard to walk all the way along the wall that week because it had not stopped raining. Everywhere was slick with water. The puddles had grown so big that you had to jump and leap across them and still they grew larger each day. Some of them formed little lakes that were so deep you had to walk all the way around the edge of them. They looked like they might swallow you up if you stepped into them. You couldn’t see to their bottom.

I liked the deep, brown-coloured puddles. I liked how you could walk right into them so that your feet would completely disappear.

The first day the rain started falling, we spent most of our playtime doing just that: wading into the murky puddles that had filled any dip or crevice the water could find in the playground.

I remember it was really thundering down all morning, but it had turned into more of a drizzle by lunch time. When we were eating lunch that day, Gaia noticed the teachers all looking out of the windows and having hurried, harassed conversations with each other.

‘They’re talking about wet play,’ she said, and I looked up from the soggy pile of broccoli I had been wondering if I could get away with not eating. I had piled it up on one side of my plate so that it looked as small as possible.

‘Mr Benton is saying that we need to . . . to have a run around,’ she continued, and I looked over to the group of teachers who were looking agitatedly around them with their hands on their hips.

‘And Miss Farraway is saying only some children have . . . got . . . have got coats. Today. That not everyone’s got coats with them today.’ Gaia scrunched up her eyes a bit so she could see what they were saying.

She wasn’t listening to them as such, you see. Gaia was able to understand what most people were saying by looking at how their lips moved. I think it all started because she couldn’t hear very well when she was younger and now, even though she has something inside her ear to help her hear, she still does it all the time. The person has to be looking her way, of course, so she can see their lips moving. Sometimes it’s not always completely right but she can usually get the gist of what they are saying.

‘OK. We are going outside. Mr Benton’s getting really cross and saying that it’s more important that we have fresh air . . . than . . . if we are . . . if we are wearing . . . coats. Yep. It’s outside play.’

Just a few minutes after that, they blew the whistle and told everyone it was outside play today and to wear a coat if you had one.

Gaia smiled at me. Just a small one. She wasn’t showing off or anything but we both liked how her lip-reading meant that we often knew what was going on before everyone else. We’d found out about all sorts of things that way. We discovered that Mr Weaver and Miss Brown were living together after Gaia saw them bickering over what takeaway to order for tea. (Miss Brown wanted Chinese and Mr Weaver, fish and chips.) We even found out what Mr Benton’s first name was when Mr Chelmsford, the head teacher, was chatting to him in the corridor. It was something we would never have guessed in a hundred years: Gordon.

The playground was grey and cold but full of shrieks and cries of everyone playing in the puddles. I looked around for Gaia. She had come out before me while I was made to force the last of the broccoli into my mouth. In the end, it hadn’t tasted of anything much at all. Just wetness. Green wetness.

Gaia was by one of the larger puddles and I ran over to join her. She was standing at the very edge of it so I thought that if she wasn’t careful, she would fall right in. She wasn’t wearing wellies or anything and I saw her dip the black rounded toe of her shoe into the water and then quickly bring it back out again. Then she did the same with the other foot.

Just as she did that, at the very moment she dipped her other foot in, a group of kids barged right past her. She had to take a few steps forward, just to keep her balance. Right into the middle of the puddle.

I’d caught up to her by this point.

‘Did you get wet, Gaia?’ I asked. We both looked down at her shiny, soaked black shoes. Then we looked at each other.

Her face broke into a smile first and before we knew it, we were both laughing so hard that it didn’t matter about anyone else in the whole world. You know how sometimes when you laugh, you feel like that? We were laughing and laughing and people splashed us with puddle water and pushed into us, but we didn’t care.

‘Miss Farraway’s saying this . . . is . . . this is madness. Why they . . . let them . . . come outside, I don’t know. They’re all . . . soaked.’ Gaia and I had taken shelter underneath the old shed. Everyone was wet now. I don’t mean just a little bit wet, I mean sodden, wet right through. Gaia was watching the adults on duty carefully so we could find out if they were going to send us back inside.

‘Mrs Brook’s saying it’s almost now. No . . . it’s almost over now. Let’s get . . . everyone . . . under the shed until the . . . Oh, she’s looked away.’

Quickly, we moved to the benches at the back just before Mrs Brook blew the whistle and everyone stampeded under the shed. It was the best place to stand, you see. You got a little bit more space.

After that day, we weren’t allowed to go outside to play. Instead, we had to spend each playtime watching films on a screen in the hall. We would all bundle onto the floor in an uneasy, fidgeting mass. The windows would steam up so we couldn’t see the rain coming down, but we could still hear it. The teachers would turn up the volume high so the film was blaring, but it couldn’t block out the pitter-patter of the rain on the roof.

I remember the thunder too. It would come in the afternoons mostly. The dark grey clouds would roll in from the distance and everyone would shriek when they heard the deep rumbles. We didn’t get a lot of work done on those afternoons.

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.

Chapter Three

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?

Chapter Four

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.

Chapter Five

‘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.

She was hurt. One of her eyes was so swollen that it wasn’t able to open properly and the other was bruised and half open. There was a violent purple bump on her forehead. A weeping gash cut across her cheek. It looked like a wicked gaping smile.

‘What happened? What happened?’ I said but Mum didn’t answer me. Her face creased as she sobbed harder, and the cut on her face looked like it was crying too.

‘Mummy?’ I said, although I didn’t know what I was asking until the words were on my lips: ‘Who did this?’

‘Oh, Ade,’ Mum was whispering under her breath. ‘Oh, Ade, oh, Ade.’

I started crying then too, even though I wished myself not to. I wished I had rang up the police and an ambulance. I wished I’d got something to make Mum’s face feel better. I wished I was able to do something other than howl into Mum’s shoulder as she rocked us both back and forth, trying to make us forget she was so badly injured. But for all my wishing, I let myself huddle down into her lap and cry desperate tears for what had happened.

We fell asleep like that, locked together, but when I woke up, Mum was gone from the bedroom and the room was dark.

‘Mum?’ My voice sounded very small and alone in the dim light.

‘I’m . . .’ Mum’s voice sounded hoarse and sore. ‘I’m in here.’

She was sitting on the sofa in the darkness. I felt glad that there were no lights on so I wouldn’t have to look at her poor mangled face, and then I felt ashamed of myself.

‘Mum!’ I cried out like she had been lost to me, and I climbed into her lap once more and buried my face into the soft fabric of her jacket. It struck me then that she hadn’t even taken her coat off all this time.

‘It’s all right, Ade. It’s all right. Go back to sleep,’ Mum said. And I did.

I knew that something bad had happened but I couldn’t ask Mum what it was. I tried to. I really did. But I couldn’t force the words out of my mouth.

I felt scared. Scared wondering why Mum had been so terribly hurt. Scared that it would happen again. Perhaps that was one of the reasons I didn’t mind doing the shopping: at least if I did it, I knew nothing bad would happen to Mum. She was safe if she was at home.

I didn’t tell anybody about what had happened, not even Gaia. I didn’t want it to be real, and if I didn’t tell anyone then that stopped it becoming more real, didn’t it? I think Mum felt the same, and that’s why she didn’t tell the police or go to hospital.

Mum did start to get better, in some ways. Her face started healing straight away. It went very purple and then a sort of blue and after that it was very yellowy. You could still see the scar on her cheek but it stopped looking painful. I thought things would go back to how they were before, back when Mum used to tell me funny things that had happened at the shop she worked in. She was always so good at describing customers, it felt like they appeared right in front of me. Or when she would open the fridge and then slam it back shut again and say, ‘Ade, let’s get out of here,’ and we’d go to McDonald’s for a treat.

But instead Mum retreated into herself, locking herself away from the outside world.

Gaia somehow seemed to understand all this, without me even having to say it. ‘Maybe your mum’s got something wrong with her,’ she said gently, cutting through my memories.

I screwed up my face when she said this, so I knew she tried to stop herself from saying the next words on her mind, but they came tumbling out anyway: ‘Maybe she should see a doctor?’