The Roar (10 page)

11

DESERTED

T
he next morning was blown in by howling winds that whipped around the towers of Barford North like joyriding banshees. Mika awoke before his alarm went off and lay with his hands behind his head thinking about the Pod Fighter. How had he flown like that? It had been like dream flying, as if he’d just jumped off the ground and flapped his arms. He got thrills of excitement remembering it and he couldn’t wait to go to the arcade that night and do it again.

He was surprised to hear someone knock at the door and he strained to listen as his father opened it and a few words were mumbled. A few seconds later, David stuck his head in the bedroom.

‘We’ve got a letter from Helen,’ he said. ‘And it’s
handwritten
.’ He left Mika’s room, taking the rare object back to bed to read it.

Helen? Mika sat up feeling uneasy. He was supposed to be
seeing Helen the next day, why had she sent his parents a handwritten letter? In seconds he was at their bedside, watching them read it.

‘What does she say?’ he asked, impatiently. They didn’t reply for a few moments, then his father held out the letter and Mika took it. It was written on real paper that looked about a hundred years old.

Dear Mr and Mrs Smith,

I am writing to inform you that Mika has made such excellent progress with his counselling I feel he no longer needs to see me. I have enjoyed his company very much, and it has been a pleasure to work with him – he is an intelligent boy with a bright future.

Since you paid me in advance for his treatment I am refunding one hundred and twenty credits on the enclosed credit card.

Please pass on my fond regards to Mika.

Best wishes,

Helen Green

Mika’s hands were shaking by the time he finished reading the letter and he felt as if his intestines were being yanked out through his belly button. He looked up at his parents. Asha was holding the credit card and her sleepy face was glowing as if she was looking at an angel.

‘Thank odd for that,’ David said, his shoulders sinking into the pillows with relief. ‘We can pay Mika’s school fine with twenty credits to spare! We should celebrate tonight! We could have pizza!’

‘Good idea,’ Asha replied, smiling. ‘Let’s have a
big
tikka pizza. Two slices each. Oh Mika, I’m really pleased! Well done!’

Mika wasn’t pleased. His eyes were as black as a starless night. He threw the letter on the bed, his face twisted with disgust, and stumbled back to his room.

‘Mika!’ Asha called after him. ‘What’s wrong?’

He threw himself down on the bed.

She didn’t even tell me to my face, he thought bitterly. Helen’s the only person I can talk to and she’s deserted me!

‘Mika?’ Asha said uneasily, standing in the doorway. ‘Don’t be upset. It’s good news, isn’t it? That you’re feeling better?’

‘But she knows I still need her!’ Mika shouted.

‘But she says you don’t,’ Asha said, ‘and you
do
seem better, Mika. You seemed really happy last night when you got back from the arcade: completely different from a week ago.’

‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone.’

‘She sent a packet of biscuits for you,’ Asha told him, hoping it might make him feel better.

‘I don’t care. I don’t want them.’

He cried silently, his angry tears soaking into the cover, and Asha crept out of the room and shut the door. A few minutes later Mika appeared, fully dressed and scowling.

‘I’m going to see her,’ he said.

‘What? Now?’ Asha replied, watching him with exasperation as he put his coat on. ‘You can’t go now; it’s half past six in the morning! She won’t be awake and it’s pouring with rain!’

But before she’d finished her sentence Mika was out of the door and running down the stairs.

He arrived at Helen’s tower on the other side of town breathless and soaking wet. He hesitated by the door, realizing his mother was right and Helen was probably fast asleep. He ought to go home and return later, but he didn’t want to.

What are you supposed to do, he thought, when the person who’s upset you is the person you want to talk to?

Halfway up in the lift, he heard a familiar sound. Not sure if he’d imagined it, he stopped the lift and listened. He could hear the beat of his heart and his breath catching in his throat, the wind whistling up the lift shaft and the metal ropes creaking, but he thought he’d also heard Awen snarling as he had done when the Knife Sharpener was in Ellie’s cupboard, but now the noise was gone.

I must have imagined it, he thought. Of course I imagined it,
the dog doesn’t even exist, he’s just an invention of my crazy brain.

Feeling stupid, he took a deep breath and pressed the button to start the lift again, but as soon as it began to rise, he heard the snarl for a second time, and although Mika couldn’t see him, he felt the warmth of Awen’s body pressed against his leg. When the lift door opened on Helen’s floor, the dream dog grabbed his sleeve with his teeth and tried to hold him back.

‘Stop it,’ Mika whispered, impatiently. ‘Get off.’ But Awen wouldn’t let go and Mika had to push him aside to get out of the lift. ‘Stay,’ he whispered, feeling completely mad because he was giving commands to an invisible dog. But Awen ignored him and Mika could hear the tap of the dog’s claws on the floor as he walked towards Helen’s apartment.

He was surprised to find the door open and a figure standing inside. Hearing male voices he leaned against the wall just out of sight and listened. Where was Helen, and why were there men in her apartment? He heard a flump as something hit the floor and realized it was one of her books being knocked from the shelves. He felt a wave of protective anger. Helen’s books were her friends, ‘the kind you invite for dinner in the middle of winter,’ she’d told him, ‘and spend all night talking and never go to bed’. He heard another book hit the floor and edged closer to the door so he could see in. The apartment was messy; an odd-looking jumble of clothes hung out of the drawers, and there was an assortment of wild-looking sun hats and sunglasses on the table and a litter of bags on the floor. Helen had obviously packed and left in a hurry.

The men were wearing black suits and white shirts and had a skinny, flint-eyed look about them, and as they searched through Helen’s things they reminded Mika of magpies. Then Mika noticed a gun on the kitchen work surface next to the teapot; a big black gun. He ducked out of sight and held his breath. Awen tugged desperately at his leg, urging him to leave, and this time he obeyed the dog and turned and ran as quickly as he could
towards the staircase, not wanting to risk the lift because the door would make a noise. Then, no longer able to control his panic, he ran down the stairs.

Where had she gone? Had she left because she wanted to or because she was in danger? In his heart he knew the truth and he ran down the stairs consumed by guilt, sure that Helen’s departure and the horrible Magpie Men with their guns had something to do with him.

12

FIT CAMP IS FUN!

M
ika tried not to think about what the Fit Mix was doing to him, but after a few weeks of drinking it he could no longer deny that his body was changing. He was growing so fast his feet had split the sides of his new sneakers, his T-shirts looked as though they’d shrunk in the wash and his jeans were displaying an unfashionable strip of hairy ankle.

‘Come here a moment,’ Asha said, as Mika rushed past her from the shower.

‘Why?’ Mika asked suspiciously, clutching his towel to his chest. He didn’t want his parents to notice he was growing and start asking awkward questions, but it had become impossible to hide.

‘Stand against the wall,’ she said. ‘I want to measure you.’

‘Can’t we do it later?’ Mika said. ‘I’ll be late for school.’

‘It’ll only take a second,’ his mother insisted. ‘I swear you’ve grown another two centimetres since last week. You banged your
head again as you came out of the shower.’

‘OK,’ Mika said reluctantly. He stood against the wall at the side of the television and she was quiet and chewed her bottom lip while she made the mark over his head.

‘You have as well!’ Asha exclaimed. ‘That can’t be normal.’

Mika turned and looked at the new mark she’d made on the wall. Beneath it were many more marks made since Ellie and he had learned to walk eleven years before, each one with a date beside it. Ellie’s marks finished a long way below his, and he felt a pang as he looked at the last; he’d grown loads since she’d disappeared.

While he was getting dressed, Asha read the mailing she’d been sent by the school about the Fit Mix. Rapid growth wasn’t listed under the heading
Abnormal side effects
. Instead it was under the heading
Health benefits
.

‘Mmm,’ she mused, standing in the bedroom door way, watching Mika ram his feet into his sneakers. ‘You do look healthier, I suppose, and you don’t have those black rings under your eyes any more, and your skin’s not so pale.’

She didn’t sound entirely convinced.

Mika muttered something and left for school. He was feeling more uncomfortable by the day about going along with the Fit For Life programme. Now Helen had disappeared he had nobody to talk to about it or reassure him that he was doing the right thing. Weeks had passed since he’d started drinking the Fit Mix. He’d kept his mouth shut and done what he was told, but he still knew nothing about where Ellie was and why he’d seen a Telly Head in his classroom, and the pressure to keep going along with it all without saying anything was almost too much to bear. Every day he arrived in his classroom to see smiling children drinking Fit Mix on the screen of his workstation, with the message
You are the future! Drink up your Fit Mix!
written underneath, and every day it got harder to drink it; it was as if his body was staging its own rebellion.

‘You look a bit green, Mika,’ Mrs Fowler said. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘Yes thanks,’ Mika replied, trying to stop gagging all over the desk.

But drinking the Fit Mix and almost vomiting every morning was entertainment compared to Fit Camp. Two weeks after Fit Mix started, Mika arrived in school to see
Fit Camp is Fun!
written across his screen. They all got free sandwiches again that day, and a packet of sweets to take home with them, and everyone assumed it would be like normal sports lessons, just longer. They figured they’d run around for half an hour or so every afternoon, climb a couple of ropes, then go home. How wrong they were. How very wrong.

When Mrs Fowler told them to change into their new YDF sports kit, everyone moaned that it wasn’t cool and asked if they could wear their own stuff, and Mrs Fowler said, ‘Shut up and get dressed,’ so they did, grumbling and giggling. Kobi looked the most ridiculous in the new kit because he was so long and bony. His skin looked almost blue from a childhood of light deprivation in The Shadows.

The first surprise they got was when they were told they would not be transported to the leisure centre as they were expecting (it was several kilometres away), they would have to run along the walkways, and since the only running any of them had done recently was up the red walkway in the arcade to get to an empty Pod Fighter simulator, they were half dead by the time they got there, lungs splitting, dripping with sweat and feet covered in blisters. But that was only the start of it.

Their instructor, Mr Blyte, was short and bald with big feet. When he stood next to Kobi, who was taller than the rest of them, the new instructor looked like a hairless gnome. Mika thought this was funny until the man opened his mouth to speak – then everyone shut up and started quivering, even Ruben. Mr Blyte rasped menacingly, as if he had liquid nitrogen for innards.

‘Right,’ said Mr Blyte, frogmarching back and forth in front of them, swinging his stopwatch, his feet flapping and his eyes ripping them apart. ‘Let’s see what you’re made of.’

He made them run up and down the basketball court until Roland, the Spelling Bee champion, was crawling on his hands and knees. Then they lifted weights in the gymnasium until their arms felt so weak they hung like boneless jelly at their sides. Then they were put on a line of bikes and cycled up a virtual Mount Everest, blinking away tears of pain.

‘Faster,’ Mr Blyte snarled, the veins on his bald head throbbing like worms. ‘Faster!’

At the end of the session, which lasted three hours, they had to run back to school. Most of Mika’s classmates crawled, dribbling on the concrete.

‘This is outrageous!’ Asha gasped, when Mika hobbled through the door and she watched him try to undress for a shower. He was so stiff, he couldn’t bend down to take off his sneakers and she had to do it for him. He sat on the sofa wincing while she peeled his socks off. They were soaked with sweat and blood and his feet looked as if he’d contracted bubble disease.

‘Chrise,’ said Asha. ‘Your feet are bleeding! Look at all these blisters! I don’t think you should go to the arcade tonight, you need to rest.’

Mika looked up at her, his eyes burning.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll be fine in a minute.’

‘No, you won’t!’ Asha insisted. ‘You need to rest!’

‘But I’ve been looking forward to playing Pod Fighter all day,’ Mika snapped. ‘It’s what got me home.’

Asha turned to David for support, ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

David shrugged and grinned, mixing Fab mash for their tea in a bowl. He was pleased to see Mika taking an interest in something normal like all the other kids. ‘Let him go,’ he said. ‘If he can get there.’

‘Thanks, Dad,’ Mika replied.

It was going to take a lot more than bleeding feet to keep Mika away from the arcade.