Opening extract from
Boy in the Tower
Written by
Polly Ho-Yen
Published by
Doubleday Children’s Books an
imprint of Random House
Children’s Publishers UK
All Text is Copyright © of the Author and/or Illustrator
Please print off and read at your leisure.
Boy in the Tower:Boy_in_the_Tower 29/4/14 09:00 Page iv
BOY IN THE TOWER
A DOUBLEDAY BOOK 978 0 857 53303 6
Published in Great Britain by Doubleday,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
A Random House Group Company
This edition published 2014
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Text copyright © Polly Ho-Yen, 2014
Cover artwork copyright © Daniel Davies, 2014
The right of Polly Ho-Yen to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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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.
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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 remem-
ber 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
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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.
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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
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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,
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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
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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 out-
side 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
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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.
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‘Miss Farraway’s saying this . . . is . . . this is
madness. Why they . . . let them . . . come out-
side, 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 every-
one 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 out-
side 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
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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 every-
one 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
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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 some-
times 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
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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.
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