Launched! (12 page)

Bryce lay in the room. Every molecule in his body protested, and his head felt as if it had been through a washing machine. He closed his eyes, letting the darkness cloak him like a feather blanket. How long had he lain there? His eyes were too stubborn to open and check the time. Bryce sighed and rolled over, wincing at the pins and needles in his arm. His stomach gave an answering growl. His thoughts ventured back to the afternoon. To his father. Bryce sighed again, the sigh of a thousand lost souls. How would he explain this to his friends? Hunger got the better of him and he sat up, but his head whooshed with the sudden movement. He wondered if he should call Darcy’s mobile to explain, but he knew that as
soon as Darcy saw the call had come from him he’d refuse to answer. Bryce flopped back on his bed. It was all too hard. He’d deal with it tomorrow.

Downstairs the phone rang. He counted the rings, one, two, three, waiting for his father or Cara to pick up. On the ninth ring he heard the booming voice of his dad, ‘Wayne Tarrant speaking.’ There was a moment’s silence before, ‘Hello? Hello? Anybody there?’

‘Who was it?’ called Cara from the kitchen.

‘Some girl. Looking for Bryce.’

Bryce brightened, thinking it was Clem or Mio.

‘What girl?’

‘Don’t know. She hung up.’

How was Bryce ever going to make it up to his friends? He’d promised them he’d go to practice, he’d promised them he’d bring afternoon tea—and he hadn’t showed. They were already mad with him. Could he ever make it up to them? He shivered. Being a Freewheeler had been the best thing in his life.

Bryce rolled over, willing himself into a restless sleep. He was running, running through a tunnel, trying to reach someone, he didn’t know who. The floor of the tunnel was covered with sharp stones that shredded his bare feet as he slipped and slid, his head and shoulders banging against the cold
walls. No matter how hard he tried, he never caught up to the person. Someone was calling his name.

‘Bryce!’ The voice in his dream.

‘I’m coming,’ he called.

He woke, drenched in sweat, twisted up in his sheets like an Egyptian mummy.

‘Bryce.’

Bryce fought the voice but it persisted. ‘Bryce. Wake up!’ And then he knew where he was: in his bedroom. The voice was Cara’s. She was kneeling beside his bed, shaking him.

‘The baby?’ asked Bryce, snapping awake. ‘Is the baby coming?’

‘No. Nothing like that,’ said Cara, struggling to push herself back up onto her feet. ‘You were calling out. A name.’

‘What name?’

‘A boy’s name.’

‘Who?’

Cara crossed her arms over her belly, conscious of how big she looked, before saying, ‘Charlie.’

Charlie!
Bryce gulped. Not a boy. A girl.

‘Do you know him?’ asked Cara.

‘Don’t know any boys by the name of Charlie,’ answered Bryce, which was perfectly true.

Cara waddled towards the door, saying, ‘Must’ve been a bad dream.’ She stalled. Her voice grew hesitant. ‘Bryce?’ she said softly.

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t cross your father.’

‘No.’

But Bryce didn’t mean, ‘No.’ If he was going to find Tong’s bike, going to ride in the trials and going to find Charlie, ‘No’ wasn’t an option.

‘Night,’ called Cara. Pulling the door behind her, the last thing Bryce saw was her hand kneading at a pain in her back.

Bryce woke well before dawn. He threw on some clothes, brushed his teeth and left a note for Cara and his father, saying he’d left early. He had some business to attend to before school. He needed to check all his old haunts, see if someone had left a message for him. First he cycled to the High Road overpass and checked out the brick abutments of the bridge. Nothing.

He peered into the man-made gap. Someone had lit a fire there recently—the smell of ash and soot was still pungent. He took out his key-ring, grateful that it carried a small torch, and shone the light around. A pair of red eyes bored into him. Bryce sprang backwards. Whether they were human or animal it was impossible to tell. Bryce’s heart hammered like boxing gloves on a speed ball. ‘Who is it?’ he asked. There was a rustle, but when next he shone the torch he could see nothing. He tossed up whether to enter or not…
and decided not to. Whoever they were or whatever it was, they’d be out the other side and long gone before he blinked.

Bryce headed for the railway station. Dawn was breaking like a throw-down of light in a black landscape. He watched the colours of the sunrise and breathed a contented sigh. More of nature’s graf. He drifted more than rode, enjoying the way the cool air plucked at his skin, ruffled the hair on the back of his neck, and made his ears zing. Already there were sounds of the city waking, the thrum of car engines, the rumble of an approaching train, and the jolts of trucks and buses.

For a few moments he knew peace.

At the railway station Bryce headed for the entrance he’d exited from the last time. It had been deserted, but now it was bustling with railway employees bundying on for work, calling out to mates, trading a backslap or two. Bryce envied them their camaraderie. Sadness settled like a fish in a gullet. He swallowed, but the feeling wouldn’t go away. Back-tracking, he decided to go over the fence, although this time it wouldn’t be head-first-with-a-bruise-to-match. Gripping the handlebars Bryce lowered his bike over the railings. With a jump he was soon beside it, tying it up with the chain and moving it out of sight.

He padded to the courtyard. Even though he was expecting it, the sight of those magnificent pieces still caught him by surprise. The breath fanned in his throat, and his pulse fluttered. He felt tranquillity, as if for the first time he’d found ‘home’. Bryce savoured the moment.

After a while he gathered his thoughts and began to inspect the walls. Had anyone been here after him last night? More important, had shooting star or PHREE been here again? He checked each wall twice. There was no fresh graf. He couldn’t believe it. He’d been so sure they’d communicate with him through the night! Disappointment felt like soggy newspapers. Back in front of the station he scouted around, hoping he’d spot the runaways, or throwaways, as he’d heard people call them.

How could anyone throw away a kid?

When Bryce didn’t find them he felt a combination of loss and relief—loss because they may’ve been able to help him find the graf artist or the bike, yet relief that he wouldn’t have to do something to help them. He could picture it now, taking them to his house for a hearty home-cooked meal, a soothing warm bath and some clean PJs. Not!

Bryce spat. Two down, two to go. He headed for The Van, his van, and was relieved to see it just as he’d left it. But that’s what he’d thought last time,
so he knew he couldn’t go on till he’d inspected inside. Like the other two places, there was no sign of visitors. Bryce felt a nothingness. Where were PHREE and shooting star now? He turned to go when all of a sudden he spotted the empty marshmallow wrapper.

He bent to pick it up, then dropped it as though he’d been burnt. He remembered the last time he’d eaten marshmallow, as a Freewheeler, in The Van. The flutternutters they’d made. He could taste the sweetness and peanuts right now and was filled with a longing for the past. His mind raced. It was as if his tastebuds had a memory of their own. There was the rocky road they’d made with Mr Lark filled with marshmallow and gummy bears and peanuts.

It all became too much. His eyes stung with unshed tears. He was a Freewheeler. He loved being a Freewheeler.

And he would be one again.

By now it was time for school. The Peak would have to wait. Rush-hour traffic had banked up, and the air was thick with exhaust fumes and peppered with beeps and toots. Once again Bryce noticed the lemmings of workers, disappearing down the station steps, resigned as they went to their fate, and he vowed he’d never become one of them. He stopped at a supermarket and downed some chocolate milk. 9.4 seconds. A record. He burped, thinking how Mio would scold him for doing that. Mio! The hollowness inside expanded to the size of a cavern.

At school Darcy, Clem, Mio and Tong were waiting for him.

Darcy wasn’t comfortable with the decision they’d made, but he respected Mr Lark and he’d
agreed to take his advice. ‘We’re not too sure what’s going on,’ he began, ‘and to be honest I don’t really want to know, but the trials are in three days…’

‘…and we want you to ride with us,’ finished Clem.

Bryce didn’t move. He wanted to shriek, ‘Yes!’, to return to the group and put everything behind him, but he couldn’t, not till he found Tong’s bike. Not till he could clear his name.

The Freewheelers waited for Bryce to say something. As the seconds ticked past Bryce noticed Mio’s nostrils flare; her eyes were overly bright. Tong’s face was set into a mask. Clem clamped her lips into a straight line, not in anger, to stop them from quivering.

‘Well?’ asked Darcy. ‘What’s it to be?’

‘How can I explain?’ Bryce fumbled for a solution, then hit upon an answer, the only answer he could give. Softly, but building, he started to sing:

Wanting to fly

Willing to try

I don’t know why

I crash to the ground.

Soaring up high

Touching the sky

Never say die

But before he could get to the crucial last line,
Look what I found,
Darcy cut him off. ‘What sort of answer’s that?’ he growled, then turned and strode away, feeling let down. When he got to the edge of the playground he stopped and yelled, ‘This is important. If you can’t take this seriously, don’t bother coming up to The Peak. You’re not welcome. Only Freewheelers allowed.’

Clem’s heart screamed,
Yes, he is welcome,
but her head said,
No. He’s blown it.
Clem knew that this time Darcy was right. It was obvious Bryce didn’t want a bar of them any more. She stumbled towards her brother, unable to believe that after all their adventures together it had come to this.

Bryce turned to Mio and Tong, fighting to keep his voice steady. ‘I want you to practise hard. I want you to win the bike trials.’ He thought of their team name, The DEHD, and sniffed. He was dead alright. He grabbed Mio’s arm and whispered, ‘Please. Win it for me.’ Then he dropped it and scurried away.

Mio and Tong looked at each other, eyes wide. Wordlessly, they followed Clem, Mio thinking that four Freewheelers no longer felt right. In Japan, the number four was pronounced the same as
shi,
the word for death. No, four would never do.

That afternoon, the kids detoured via the Jacobs’s house to pick up Bella. Jonas was shooting
hoops near the garage and Bruno, Tim and Drew were collecting snails.

‘To give to Mum,’ explained Tim.

‘Gee,’ said Clem peering in at the seething, slimy mass and trying not to shudder. ‘She’ll be pleased.’

‘She will.’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’

Clem watched Drew pick up a snail in his pudgy hands. The snail recoiled. Drew peered under the shell, trying to work out where the soft body had gone, making Clem laugh.

‘People eat those, you know,’ called Jonas.

With the complete trust of a baby Drew put the snail in his mouth.

‘Ha!’ Jonas doubled up with laughter as Drew spat it out.

‘Ucky,’ said Drew, pulling a face like a melancholy clown.

Clem raced over to him
tsk, tsking,
then saying, ‘Go inside and rinse your mouth, little one.’

‘Don’t tell Mum,’ pleaded Jonas.

Clem laughed when Drew shouted ‘Gonna’ and ran inside. Jonas knew better than to follow.

Clem looked around at her brothers and smiled. Though annoying at times, she also took great comfort from their presence. Then she swung away and called, ‘Bella-a-a-a!’

There was an answering scuttle of claws on wood floors.

Seeing Clem, Bella bounded over, baying with excitement and whizzing around like a Catherine wheel.

‘Honestly, Clem,’ said Mrs Jacobs. ‘I swear that dog misses you so much she thinks she should go to school.’

With Bella firmly ensconced in Clem’s basket and Tong once again doubling with Darcy, they rode to The Peak. For everyone except Bella, the zing had gone from the riding and the uphill climb was plain hard work. They stopped at the entrance. Underneath the Bike Trials sign someone had nailed up a copy of the obstacle course they would be required to ride. The kids hopped off their bikes to study it.

‘Starts at the base and ends at the tower,’ said Darcy. ‘That’s uphill all the way.’

‘Tough,’ said Clem.

‘Very.’

Tong traced the course with his finger. ‘We can do it.’

‘Yes, we can.’

They weren’t the only ones who’d come to do a practice run of the course. There were kids everywhere, swarming like a queen and her bees looking for a new hive. Frustration mounted as
everywhere they went they had to queue and wait their turn. After waiting for more than twenty minutes at the barrels they decided to climb the tower to see which areas were the most empty. But even the tower had a long line so they gave up.

‘Let’s practise back at the station like we used to,’ said Darcy in disgust.

‘What about the guards?’ asked Mio. ‘Won’t they stop us?’

Darcy grinned. ‘Have we ever been stopped before?’ Without waiting for an answer he turned his bike and beckoned for Tong to come.

Tong hesitated. In Vietnam, to beckon someone with your palm upwards and your finger curled was rude. Darcy beckoned again and Tong shook his head to show his confusion.

‘Come on!’ insisted Darcy.

They picked their way down The Peak, stopping at shallow passes to let other teams through.

‘Well, look who!’ exclaimed one boy, the same boy who had baled them up the week before. Behind him his motley crew jostled. Clem scanned the group for the smaller rider that Bella had attacked but he wasn’t there. Bella growled. The boy fixed her with a glare, saying, ‘Nothing a bait or two won’t fix.’ Clem threw her arms around Bella, whispering at her to be quiet. The boy sized up Darcy, then Tong, who was still straddling
Darcy’s bike. ‘Can’t be in a bike trial without a bike,’ he hissed at Tong.

Tong looked down but said nothing.

‘What you going to do? Fly?’

Still Tong said nothing, but a boy at the back piped up, ‘Shame it was stolen.’ The words were blurted without thinking, and the boy received a cuff for his stupidity.

‘What do you know about a stolen bike?’ demanded Mio, her eyes like laser beams.

‘Nothing,’ said the ringleader. ‘It was just some big-mouth remark that doesn’t mean anything.’ Then he grabbed the other boy by the collar, almost strangling him as he pulled him away.

‘Stop!’ yelled Darcy, trying to sidle through the narrow passageway to follow.

The boy gave a two-finger gesture which made Tong flinch, then went on his way, the rest of his crew sticking close behind.

‘Do you think
he
stole Tong’s bike?’ asked Clem.

Darcy shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

Mio fiddled with her bell. ‘They seem to know something. Should we follow them?’

Darcy growled with frustration. ‘Not with two riders on one bike, plus a dog in a basket. We may as well be dragging a dinosaur.’

‘So we’re just going to let them go?’ demanded Mio.

‘We’ve no other choice,’ said Darcy.

Things went from bad to worse.

On their way down The Peak they passed Bryce, wheeling his bike up.

‘Too late,’ snapped Darcy.

Bryce didn’t balk, for unlike the others, he’d prepared for this possible encounter. ‘I haven’t come to join you,’ he said.

‘What’ve you come for, then?’ demanded Darcy.

Bryce wanted to say, ‘To look for clues,’ but all he did was shrug and say, ‘Dunno.’

Darcy scoffed, ‘Of course you know. You’ve come to meet up with your scumbag mates.’ He thought of the boy who’d threatened to bait Bella, saying, ‘We’ve just seen them. They went thattaway.’

They left Bryce standing there, a forlorn look on his face. He watched them till they rounded a bend, yearning to follow, then trudged up to the tower, where he lay his bike down and peered up. It looked a lot higher than it had last night. In the darkness it seemed to have shrunk, but now it reared higher than a two-storey house. Adrenaline surged through his veins at the thought of the climb, adrenaline laced with fear.

Bryce walked to the ladder. Refusing to look up, he grabbed the rungs and started to pull himself towards the top. His breathing grew shallow, so
shallow he felt light-headed. He swayed, then clung to the ladder, his palms greased with sweat. His head flooded with falling-thoughts, thoughts of falling. He could almost hear the bone-shattering thud. Bryce froze.

‘Hurry up!’ yelled a girl perched several rungs below.

Bryce hadn’t even noticed her.

‘What you waiting for?’ said the girl. ‘Christmas?’

The riders congregated around the tower started to laugh. Bryce had no choice but to continue. It was a matter of one foot after the other, one hand after the other till he reached the top. Bryce climbed as high as he could go then stepped off onto the platform, sitting immediately as his legs buckled, and bum-shuffled away from the edge. He sucked in mouthfuls of air and tried not to look down, but every so often the lure was too much and his gaze descended to the kids below. As his stomach lurched he wondered how anyone could possibly do this for
fun?

‘You going to have a turn, or what?’ The intrusion forced Bryce to open his eyes. The girl was tugging the flying-fox rope and reaching for the handle.

‘Go right ahead,’ said Bryce. ‘I’m, um, looking for something.’

The girl looked around the empty platform, saying, ‘Well, you won’t find it up here.’ Then she sat and swung her legs over the edge.

Bryce couldn’t watch.

‘Watch out be-low-ow-ow-ow!’ The girl pushed herself into the air, as fearless as an acrobat. The last thing Bryce saw was a ponytail saluting the heavens.

Bryce could hear her voice fade in the distance but he didn’t dare follow her with his eyes—he knew he’d end up going all wonky again. Only when he heard a voice float up saying, ‘That was awesome!’ could Bryce relax enough to take note of his surroundings. There on the wooden boards were the shooting star and the word
PHREE.
And there beside it, in his own inimitable style, was another
PHREE.
But it was what was beside it that sent Bryce’s heart whooshing again.

The words painted on the weathered wood read,
Loneliness is the price of flight.

And in that instant Bryce knew.