by Polly Ho-Yen
Instead she clenches one of her hands into a tight fist and then brings it down on to her open palm – first in one thud and then two in quick succession. Tapping our code. Letting me know it really is her.
But then Steve is dragging me away. He turns to look back at Sylvia. And, as quickly as she sat up, Sylvia has fallen back on to her bed. Lying still and empty, just like she was before.
* * *
Steve has gone to see if he can find us some food. I said I wanted to wait in the corridor close to Sylvia, in case they say it’s fine to go back in.
Jo comes down the corridor, with a smile.
‘Okay, Billy? Sorry about all the kerfuffle. When your dad comes back, maybe you can go and see your mum again, if you’d like that?’
I nod and she nods back at me, her lips pursed together as though there is something else that she wants to tell me, but then she turns and I watch her walk away towards the nurse’s station down the corridor.
Other nurses go past, they all acknowledge me with a kind smile or a nod.
For a few moments, though no one is paying any attention to me, I don’t make a move. But then, very slowly, I walk towards the door where Sylvia’s room is.
Just as I put my hand on the door to push it open, I see one of the other nurses step out a little from the station, her back towards me. If she doesn’t turn, she won’t see me.
‘Who’s that wee chap waiting by himself?’
I hear Jo reply: ‘It’s Sylvia Weywood’s son. He and his dad are here… for their first visit since she was admitted.’
‘That’s Billy?’ another voice says. ‘She’s been asking for him since she got here. That time she escaped, I was sure she was going to him.’
‘Well, she’d been gone long enough to make it to Bristol and back, that’s for sure. I didn’t know if we were going to see her again.’
‘She wants to get better. She told me that when she came back. Amongst other things. She wants to get her son back and knows this is the only way.’
I hold my breath as I listen to them talking about us. Sylvia ran away?
Without looking back, I push through the door into the corridor and make my way to Sylvia’s room.
She’s lying still again.
Like she’s not really there.
When I get closer, I can see that she’s sleeping again.
‘Sylvia?’ I say, and when she doesn’t respond: ‘It’s me – it’s Billy. I’m here.’
I remember what Jo said and try to talk like normal even if she doesn’t reply.
‘I miss you,’ I say.
She doesn’t respond, her breath coming in soft waves.
‘It’s been kind of weird at the moment,’ I tell her. ‘I’ve made some friends in Bristol now. Anwar, from school, and Angharad, sort of, I guess. Angharad isn’t from school though, she’s Julie’s daughter, Julie is… well, anyway, they are the only other people that know what’s been happening. I saw this man. He had kind of grey skin and walked in a funny way. Now I think he made some people really sick and I saw this other man change when he got too close to him.’
I’ve been staring at a tiny patch on the hospital bed cover as I’ve been talking, so when Sylvia’s eyes fly open, I don’t notice at first.
‘Billy!’ Her voice comes out like a wheeze.
‘You’re awake!’ I can’t help but cry.
‘Was I asleep? They’ve put me on medication and sometimes I feel like I can’t tell the difference between being awake and asleep. But, Billy! My Billy, you’re really here. I thought I might be dreaming before.’
She reaches for my hand and I feel her vice-like grip around my wrist. Her eyes lock with mine, wide and urgent.
‘Are you okay, Billy? Are you safe?’ It feels like she is able to look right into me. ‘Has something happened?’
I tell her again about the fallen man and the way that Ted was changed, the people that got sick.
‘Have you told Steve?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Does he believe you?’
I give the smallest shake of my head.
‘Do you believe me?’ I ask in a quiet voice.
‘Of course! You wouldn’t lie, Billy. And this is too important.’
‘Do you think,’ I begin to say, although I know it’s a silly thought, ‘that if you spoke to him about it then he would believe me?’
Sylvia shakes her head fiercely. ‘He wouldn’t believe me either and I think it’s best if I don’t speak to your dad. It will only end in an argument. If he comes back, I’m going to pretend that I’m sleeping, okay? Like before.’
‘But maybe if we both told hi—’ I start, but Sylvia cuts me off.
‘Billy,’ she says. Her voice is hoarse, unused to speaking, but she talks rapidly. ‘You know what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to rely on yourself: Rule number three. You remember where I took you that time – our safe place?’ she whispers.
‘The tower?’
‘It’s not very far from this hospital. Do you remember the map I showed you?’
I nod.
‘The name of the place is Sandgate. Repeat it back to me.’
‘Sandgate.’
‘If something happens, if things get worse and you need protection – you know everything you need to look after yourself. You found How to Survive?’
‘Yes.’
‘Remember everything I taught you, Billy. Keep practising and never give up, okay? It’s important. I know what they are saying to you about me – that I’m sick. But our adventures, what I taught you, it’s all important. And you know where I’ll be if you need me. I’ll be at the tower at Sandgate. I’ll find a way to get there so we can be together.’ There’s urgency in her eyes.
‘Okay,’ I whisper.
‘There’s something else – remember the heliographs?’
‘Yes.’
But then I see something change. The light is gone again and Sylvia suddenly falls silent. She lies back on the bed and closes her eyes.
‘There you are,’ I hear Steve say from behind me. ‘How is she?’
‘She’s asleep,’ I say. ‘She’s just sleeping.’
HOW TO FALL OUT WITH YOUR DAD
We’re on the train on the way back from seeing Sylvia. I feel glad that it’s so crowded that Steve and I can’t sit next to each other. I’m wedged into a window seat with a woman who looks like she is about to fall asleep as she reads things on her phone while Steve is a few seats away at a table sitting opposite two businessmen and a woman who has a tiny sausage dog puppy on her lap.
I look out of the window at the countryside that blurs past. I stare at it so hard that it stops seeming like trees and fields and instead I just see threads of colours – greens and browns and yellows – that can’t be identified as one thing or another. I feel a little bit like that. That I don’t really feel like myself, that I’m just lines and blocks of colours merging into one another.
I can’t work out what I think about seeing Sylvia. Whether I’m glad that I’ve seen her, or that it’s made things worse somehow. Unlike Steve, she believed me instantly about the fallen man, but seeing her in hospital made me wonder how ill she really is. She said it was medication making her drowsy but I can’t stop thinking back to the shock of seeing her lying in the hospital bed, as still as a sack.
The train announcer tells us that we are about to reach another station and the woman next to me starts to rouse herself and reaches down for her bag. She’s getting off.
Before she’s even left her seat, Steve is inching his way past the woman with the dog and is heading towards me.
‘Just so I can sit with my son,’ he tells the woman when she sees him there waiting for her to leave.
‘Oh, sorry, you should have said,’ she mutters as she reaches for an umbrella and a coat that she stuffed into the shelf over our heads. Steve goes to help her but only seems to get in the way as she tries to move past him. He slots into the seat next to me with a humph.
/> ‘It’s busy, isn’t it?’ he says.
I don’t even answer him. It’s the kind of thing that strangers would say to each other.
I continue to look out of the window as the train pulls slowly out of the station. Being so close to Steve makes me feel uncomfortable, like I can’t quite stretch out or something. There’s a knot in my back that won’t leave me.
‘Are you hungry?’ Steve asks.
‘A bit,’ I reply through a half-closed mouth.
‘We’ll get something to eat before we change trains. See if we can make the best of Paddington Station restaurants, shall we?’
‘Okay.’
I can feel him still looking at me. I know that he wants to talk.
‘What did you think…’ he starts to say, but then something catches in his throat and he starts coughing. He goes a bit red-faced and then finds a water bottle in his bag to drink from. ‘How do you feel after seeing your mum?’ he says, in the end.
I shrug for an answer.
‘I think she was pleased to see you,’ he says quickly. ‘I mean, I know she was asleep, so it might not seem that way, but I’m sure she knew you were there and was really happy. The nurses told me she’s been talking about you non-stop. But, Billy, I hope that you could see what I mean about your mum needing rest and help?’
I can feel myself growing hotter and hotter with every word he speaks.
‘She’s got a way to go before she recovers.’
‘She spoke to me,’ I say, staring hard at the pattern of the seat cover in front of me. Steve’s wrong about Sylvia. She understands what is happening and I can’t stand to hear him keep talking about her like she’s not really all there. ‘She told me to keep practising.’
‘What? When? She was asleep the whole time.’
‘She woke up, before you came in the second time. And then she… she pretended to be asleep when you came in. So she didn’t have to speak to you. She told me that I’m going to really need the survival training we did.’ I take a deep breath before adding: ‘And she believed me.’
‘Believed you about what?’
‘About the fallen man. Sylvia knew I was telling the truth.’
‘Billy, that’s enough.’ The look on Steve’s face tells me that he doesn’t even believe that Sylvia actually spoke to me. ‘All those things your mum taught you were because she wasn’t well. She was wrong when she told you that you should miss school, not have any friends, move around all the time. She thought that the survival stuff was more important than anything else.’
‘It is important,’ I say.
‘No, it’s not, okay? It’s not important.’ Steve’s voice grows into a shout. I see people looking over at us. He notices and drops his voice a little, but he’s finding it hard to contain his anger. ‘You have got to stop this. I don’t want you going down the same path as your mother, I just won’t let that happen. You have to move past this, Billy. See it for what it really is. Just plain nonsense. Sylvia is not well and she’s filled your head with rubbish. The sooner you can believe that, the better.’
‘And what if I don’t?’ I say. ‘What if I won’t believe that?’
Steve flounders for an answer.
I stand up and start to move past him.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I don’t want to sit with you,’ I say simply.
‘Billy, come on. Don’t make a scene.’
But I barge past his knees, his water bottle falls to the floor and rolls down the aisle, and I go and wedge myself into the seat that he was sitting on before, with the woman with the tiny puppy and the two businessmen who don’t even look up from the laptops that they are tapping on loudly.
I don’t speak to Steve again the whole way home.
HOW TO MAKE A POCKET SURVIVAL KIT
I go to Anwar’s house early before school the next day, but before I leave I look through How to Survive and collect up a few things that we have around the house to take with me.
Anwar’s sister Nadifa opens the door to me. Her face is painted like a zombie, with dark shadows beneath her eyes, a trail of blood dripping from her mouth.
‘Hello, Billy,’ she says, smiling, as though she’s completely unaware of her make-up.
‘Is Anwar here?’ I ask her.
She doesn’t answer but runs off into the flat and so I follow her in.
Anwar’s standing on the sofa, putting the finishing touches on his other little sister’s face. Taifa stares over at me, her face a ghostly white, her lips grey and blood-stained.
‘Billy!’ He sounds surprised to see me, mixed in with something else that I can’t quite put my finger on. He doesn’t stop painting Taifa’s face, keeping his back to me so I can’t see his face. He carries on talking but his voice sounds a bit funny. ‘They have to dress up as book characters for school but they both wanted to be zombies. There’s probably a book that’s got zombies in it.’
‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ I say quickly. We got back so late last night and I was still so cross with Steve, that I didn’t have the energy to explain in a message all that had happened in the day. Instead I sent Anwar something short just saying I was sorry I couldn’t meet up and that I didn’t get the chance to tell him.
‘Were you with Angharad?’
‘No. It was… actually… Steve took me…’
I start to speak but I’m reluctant to, in front of Taifa.
‘Go away, then,’ Anwar says to his sister. She launches herself from the sofa and runs after Nadifa, a low-deep howl emerging from her bloodied lips.
We start to speak at the same time.
‘I saw Sylvia yesterday,’ I tell Anwar, just as he says: ‘I thought—’ but as soon as I mention her name he stops himself.
‘What? How?’
‘I think Julie told Steve to take me. They think that Angharad and I made up seeing the…’ I trail off as I remember all that has happened since I saw Anwar on Friday. The fallen man infecting Ted, seeing the people who’d got sick on the news, knowing Sylvia really does believe something bad is coming, my argument with Steve. This weekend has felt like a lifetime.
I go back to the beginning and try to tell Anwar about what I saw with Angharad in the alleyway and all that’s happened since. I don’t think I do a good job of it. I can’t fully explain how weird and terrifying it was all at the same time; what it sounded like to hear the fallen man and Ted shrieking.
‘It was as though his voice had been completely broken into pieces and then sewn back together with everything in the wrong place. It was horrible – I can’t explain it properly. And their skin was grey, but it was more than that, it was like all the shades swirled up together.
‘And there’s something else… I remember that Sylvia had these diagrams in this emergency shelter she was preparing. They were of people that were grey, I’m sure of it. I asked her about it but she didn’t explain what they were. But I think she knew about them somehow – something to do with her old job, I think.
‘She told me that if I needed to, I had to get to the tower, that she would meet me there.’
‘Where is it? The tower?’
‘It’s on the Kent coast. A place called Sandgate. Hold on, I’ll show you.’
I tap at the map on my phone and zoom out further so I can see what other areas are close by to it. I see blue – the tepid, bland blue that depicts the roar of the sea – on the map. It’s by a little jagged part of the coast. I can imagine the Martello tower standing there, close to the sea.
‘This is it,’ I say, pointing at the screen. ‘She only took me once.’
Anwar examines it closely.
‘Do you think Sylvia knew about it all the time?’
‘She always said that we were getting ready for something,’ I say. ‘We had these survival rules. One of them was all about only trusting yourself, following your instincts if you think something is wrong – even if everyone is telling you not to. I think this was what she meant.’
�
��How was your mum?’ he asks.
‘Umm…’ I feel hot all of a sudden. ‘Well, Steve says that she’s… she’s still… not well. But she spoke to me, only me, and I think she’s…’ I don’t know how to put it into words.
I look up and see Anwar’s face, his steady brown eyes hold mine in his, and in that moment, I’m suddenly so sure of a truth that until that moment I had not fully realized. I know that if I don’t want to say anything then Anwar won’t push it. But, if I do, then there’s someone who will listen.
I take a deep breath and tell him more. ‘Sylvia was pretending to be asleep when Steve was there – I guess so she didn’t have to speak to him. But we just had a few minutes together alone when I was able to tell her about the fallen man and what happened at the garages.’ I remember it now as though Sylvia is right in front of me. I feel my arm strain to reach out and touch her. ‘She said that I knew what I had to do. And there was something she wanted to tell me about heliographs.’
‘Heliographs? What about them?’
‘I don’t know. Steve came back in and she pretended she was asleep before she could finish. But I wanted to ask you if you can help me make something?’
‘Of course,’ Anwar says, packing up the face paints carefully, screwing on the lid to the bottle of fake blood. ‘What is it?’
‘A personal pocket survival kit. It’s from my mum’s book. It’s things that you might need if you are caught out with nothing else. I’ve got some of it already.’
I hadn’t stopped thinking about it since I’d seen Sylvia yesterday. The more I thought about what she said, the more it made sense. She just wanted me to be ready, to remember everything that she had taught me; she knew I understood what I needed to do.
Fig. 9. – How to make a pocket survival kit
I open up the bag I have with me and show Anwar the matches and the candle, the tubing and the string, the whistle and the safety pins.
‘I need to waterproof the matches,’ I tell him. ‘And there’s a few more things that I have to get.’ I show him the list.
He nods and disappears off.