The Roar (22 page)

30

BACK TO REALITY

A
fter the prize-giving dinner, the holiday was over for everyone else and the competitors and their families had to return to the real world of mould, work and school. Every few seconds, the hole in the dome opened and a pod shot out carrying a family away, but Mika and his parents couldn’t leave with the others, because he had to go back to the hospital unit so the doctors could pretend to finish healing his leg.

They walked there in silence, with David and Asha looking as if they had hours to live. The healing chamber hummed over his leg. Asha drummed her palm tree painted fingernails on the arm of the chair and David paced around the bed huffing impatiently until they left. Asha had already packed their suitcases, so they went straight from the hospital unit to the pod waiting to take them home. The hole in the top of the dome opened to let them out and the pod flew like a bee into a thunderstorm.

‘Jeez Chrise!’ David cursed, grabbing hold of Asha so she didn’t fall off the seat as the pod lurched sideways. Mika looked out of the window and before the view was completely obscured by rain he saw black waves that could have swallowed Barford North in one gulp. Bolts of lightning flashed through the clouds and stabbed the monstrous sea like spears.

‘Back to reality,’ David said grimly as thunder shook the pod.

Barford North looked more horrible than ever when they landed on the roof of their tower. The plague siren on the tank meat factory was hit by a bolt of lightning that lit up the town like a camera flash and it looked dreary, depressed and unwelcoming.

‘Quick!’ David shouted, his words snatched by the wind as he dragged their cases out of the pod. They hauled them down the stinking concrete stairs trying not to breathe through their noses. It felt bitterly cold in the tower after a week in the holiday complex, and outside the door to their apartment water dripped on their heads while Asha looked for the key. Her handbag was full of apples, bananas and soy cheese she’d brought home for the neighbours. She dumped it all in Mika’s hands so she could see what she was doing.

‘The key must be in here somewhere!’ she said, up to her elbows in her bag. ‘I swear this bag’s got a magical trap door in it for anything important.’

The fold-down felt as cold and gloomy as the rest of the building when they walked in and it smelled of mildew because the air conditioning had been turned off for a week. There was a new patch of black mould around the window frame where rain-water had seeped in. David felt it and sighed.

‘It’ll seem better when we’ve unpacked and put the cases away,’ Asha said, trying to sound cheerful. She turned on the lights and the air conditioning and brushed the frayed arm of the sofa as if that would make it look better. The air con unit started making a noise as if it was trying to eat chopsticks, then it stopped and the apartment filled with a burning smell.

‘Pooh!’ Asha said. ‘What’s wrong with this stupid thing? I despair with this apartment, I really do. As soon as we fix one thing, something else goes wrong.’

‘Just imagine how different it would be if we lived in the Golden Turrets . . .’ Mika said, seizing the opportunity to make them change their minds.

‘No,’ Asha snapped, bashing the control panel on the air con unit. ‘I will not imagine living in the Golden Turrets. What sort of people organize games for children that involve borg sharks and harpoon guns?’

‘But it was just an accident,’ Mika insisted. ‘Please let me try to win the apartment. We’d never have to worry about money again, there’d be no rent to pay, just bills. You wouldn’t have to wear the cowgirl outfit. Please, Mum.’

‘Just an accident?’ Asha snapped. ‘Your blood was spattered on the ceiling! What do you think that was like to see?’

The front fell off the air con unit and smoke began to pour out of it.

‘It must have been awful,’ Mika said, reasonably. ‘But I’m fine now.’

He did a little jig to show how perfectly fixed his leg was. David opened the window to get rid of the smoke and a freezing cold, rainy wind blustered into the apartment.

‘This place is our home,’ Asha continued, with her teeth chattering. ‘And that’s that.’

‘Dad, please!’ Mika said.

‘No,’ David replied, putting his dressing gown on over his coat. ‘And don’t ask again, the subject is closed.’

David turned his back on Mika and filled the kettle at the sink and Asha pretended to busy herself with the cases. Mika felt so angry and frustrated he wanted to yell at them. He knew they were right to want to stop him competing, he agreed with them completely; he’d almost got killed when it was supposed to be a game, but how else was he going to find Ellie? He had got so far, he couldn’t stop now, he just couldn’t.

But, he remembered, anger would do nothing for him in a situation like this. The angrier he was, the angrier they all were; it always achieved exactly the opposite result to the one he wanted. He thought for a moment. There had to be something he could do. There
was
. It was cruel and definitely a last resort, but the moment he thought of it, he knew it would work. He leaned against the wall, thought of Ellie and silent tears began to run down his face. The instant his parents noticed, the expressions on their faces softened and their eyes filled with pain. He felt mean making them upset but he knew he had no choice and could only hope that whatever price they paid now, they would consider it worthwhile in the end. He cried desperately and it wasn’t hard. All he had to do was imagine never seeing Ellie again and despair overwhelmed him. He told them how much he missed her and that the game helped him cope with her death and by the time they went to bed, they had said he could compete, but only if he absolutely promised not to get involved in any dangerous games. He promised and crossed his heart, then lay in Ellie’s bed feeling terrified.

31

THAT BOY WILL BE SCARED OF ME

I
n the early hours of the morning, after Mika and his parents had gone to bed, Mal Gorman sat at the desk in his office on the Queen of the North, staring at the screen. He didn’t know what time it was, only that supper had passed long ago and his butler, Ralph, had gone to bed. The office was almost dark, lit only by the clean light of planet Earth, glowing through the window and the much dimmer light cast from the screen that covered his desktop.

The man had been right about Mika’s memory recording; it was so dark, Gorman had to watch it in darkness to see anything and most of it made no sense whatsoever. All he could make out were a few shapes moving around and static, then the odd birthday cake or smiling face, just childhood stuff, so he’d spent a boring evening frowning at it, waiting for something interesting to happen. Then, right at the end, he found what he had been
waiting for, a memory so vivid, Mika hadn’t been able to suppress it, and just as it shocked and frightened the boy, so it shocked and frightened Gorman. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing and he watched it over and over again for hours as if that would make it better. Lurking in the shadows of a place where dark walls seemed to press in all around was a man in a black suit with a television for a head. It was an inbetween moment, a moment in which nothing much happened and yet it was horrible. The man’s face flickered in black and white on the curved glass screen and his eyes gazed blankly out of it as if he was feeling nothing, as if he had no soul. He just stood there in the darkness crushing a bird in his hand that was struggling feebly to get away. But it wasn’t the bird’s plight that scared Gorman, or the darkness or the blank-eyed face on the flickering screen, it was the fact that
he
was that man. Somehow, a refugee child from Barford North had a memory of
him
in his head, looking like a freak, a monster.

He woke up his butler and asked for hot chocolate. Ralph arrived looking sleepy in his dressing gown with his grey hair fluffy on top.

‘Good evening, sir,’ Ralph said politely, placing a small tray on the desk. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’

‘Yes,’ Gorman grunted. ‘Watch this.’ Gorman pushed the tray aside and played Mika’s memory again so Ralph could watch it.

‘Is that me?’ Gorman asked when it had finished.

‘It does look quite like you, sir,’ Ralph replied, nervously.

‘But that’s impossible!’ Gorman shouted, immediately flaring up. ‘How could I be in that boy’s mind? He’s never met me! He’s just some scruffy urchin with holes in his sneakers! How dare he think such a thing? How dare he have me in his head looking like that?’

Gorman tried to lift the cup of chocolate to his lips but his hand was trembling so much he had to return it to the saucer.

‘Then it must be somebody who looks like you, sir,’ Ralph said, carefully. ‘How can it be you if you’ve never met the boy?
In fact, now I look at it again, the nose looks altogether the wrong shape.’

‘Really?’ Gorman asked, hopefully. ‘You think so?’

‘Without a doubt,’ Ralph lied.

Ralph took away the tray of chocolate and returned to bed and Gorman stood up and walked towards the window and gazed at Earth wondering why he was scared of a memory in the mind of a twelve-year-old boy.

And it isn’t even me, he reassured himself. But perhaps I should get rid of the boy just in case.

No, I can’t do that, he might be one of the best.

But how would he feel, knowing he had to deal with a boy who had an image like that in his head? Gorman needed these special children; they were the only ones who could do the job he had planned for them. But he had assumed they would be scared of him, not the other way round. How could he control a boy he was scared of? It would be like having a pocket full of fireworks that had started going off. He remembered what Ellie had done to him while she was lying in that coffin in The Shadows and felt his heart palpitate. But, he reminded himself, they’re just children, and until I tell him, Mika Smith will have no idea what he can do.

I am Mal Gorman and that boy will be scared of
me
.

32

FLOATING PANTS

M
ika and Audrey went to the arcade the first night after they returned from holiday, but instead of the warm welcome they were hoping for from their friends, everyone rushed off to start Pod Fighter games without even saying hello.

‘What’s wrong with them?’ Audrey whispered. ‘We haven’t seen them for a week, why are they ignoring us?’

‘I dunno,’ Mika replied, watching them curiously – they seemed excited and he realized something must have happened while they were away.

They played a couple of games on their own and still nobody invited them to join in and it wasn’t until the end of the night that they discovered the reason why: that coming weekend, there was a special event at the arcades for all the children who had not qualified in the competition. The YDF were giving away loads of prizes including a thousand credits and vouchers for real food,
and clothes and sneakers.

‘So they don’t hate us,’ Audrey said, as Tom walked straight past as if they were invisible. ‘They’re just hopeful again.’

* * *

Mika and Audrey would be competing in the final round of the competition the next weekend so Mika decided to practise his new trick in bed at night, just in case he was asked to do it again. He didn’t have a marble so he used a frozen pea, which he smuggled from the freezer into the bedroom in his hand. He sat in bed for half an hour staring at it and willing something to happen and when nothing did, he began to wonder if he had just imagined doing it before, because the pea just sat there, defrosting on the cover. But just as he was about to give up because his eyes were getting tired, the pea began to glow inside. Feeling excited and a little afraid, he lost his concentration and it faded again. It was like trying to make a fire by rubbing sticks together over a bit of fluff – you had to blow on the ember very carefully so it made a fire but didn’t go out. It was another quarter of an hour before he made the pea glow again and this time he moved it, only a bit, it rolled once and stopped, but he did it. He jolted and hit his head on the bunk bed above him, then lay in the darkness with his eyes wide open feeling afraid of himself. But the next night his heart thumped with excitement each time the pea began to glow, and once he got the hang of it, his progress was fast; after a couple of hours he could make it roll through the valleys in Ellie’s cover. By the end of the third night, he could lift it into the air so it rolled in front of his face as if it was boiling in water, and by Thursday morning, he had progressed to larger objects. Asha walked into his room unexpectedly to find a pair of pants floating in the air. Mika panicked and broke eye contact so the pants dropped to the floor and tried to look busy with Lilian.

‘I swear I just saw your pants floating in the air,’ Asha said.

‘What?’ Mika replied, screwing up his face as if he had no idea what she was talking about.

‘Your pants . . .’ his mother said doubtfully. She stared at them on the floor for a moment. ‘I must be going mad,’ she muttered, and left the bedroom shaking her head.