The Astounding Broccoli Boy

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  I remember all this because it’s the last time in my life that everything seemed sort of normal.

  Everyone in the year group came running down the hill towards me. It was like the bit in The Lion King where the stampeding wildebeests come over the edge of the cliff and trample Simba’s dad. Parkas and puffa jackets flashed in the sun. The man with the bobble hat shouted to everyone to slow down, they might get hurt.

  I got to my feet. I was planning to walk out of the water, a smile on my face, and shrug it all off. I might say, ‘Come on in – the water’s lovely.’

  They were all lined up on the bank. Laughing, pointing, jeering. Ms Stressley had her arms folded. ‘I. Might. Have. Known,’ she sneered. ‘If anyone was going to fall in the river accidentally on purpose, it would be you.’

  There’s no way you can look good trudging out of a river after you’ve been pushed in. If you smile, it looks fake - and you look like a loser. If you look sad, you look like a loser. If you look angry, you look like a loser.

  Also, the bank was slippery so I got even more muddy climbing out. Bobble Hat offered me his hand to help me up. I was about to take it when he snatched it away and stepped back.

  I looked up.

  I noticed that everyone had gone quiet.

  Everyone was staring at me.

  Some of them covered their mouths with their hands.

  Bonnie Crewe burst into tears.

  Some of the boys laughed.

  Some of them came towards me, staring, but the Bobble Hat turned to them, aeroplaned his arms and shouted, ‘Back! Back! Right back! He may be contagious.’ I looked around, trying to see who he was talking about. I thought he might be talking about a Killer Kitten, but he turned to face me and shouted, ‘You follow me. Let’s get you out of here.’ Then he asked Ms Stressley to take everyone else up to the kayaks.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry,’ she said. ‘This is probably his idea of a joke. Rory thrives on negative attention, don’t you, Rory? He tried to kill one of his classmates with a biscuit.’

  ‘Maybe he’s contagious. Maybe he’s just a show-off. Either way he’s a health-and-safety risk,’ said Bobble Hat. ‘Come with me, Rory.’

  I followed him through the middle of the crowd. As I came forward, everyone stepped back. They drifted into two lines, one on either side of me. They were all silent now. None of them could take their eyes off me. Except Bonnie Crewe, who gave a little sob and turned away. I felt like a bride walking up to the altar. Which was weird.

  Bobble Hat took me all the way back to the centre. He asked me if anything like this had ever happened to me before.

  ‘Well, it’s the first time I’ve been pushed in a river, but they did push me into the pool in Perry Barr leisure centre once. They also pushed me into the Curly-Wurly canal, which really hurt because I actually landed on a shopping trolley. Mum said I was lucky I didn’t cut myself because—’

  He gave me a harsh look. ‘This isn’t some kind of stunt, is it? You haven’t just painted it on?’

  ‘Painted what on?’

  He showed me into a tiny room with a single bed in it. He brought me my bag and a cup of cocoa. ‘Change into some dry clothes,’ he said. ‘Get yourself warmed up. I’ll make a few calls.’ But as he was leaving, he seemed to change his mind. He looked back into the room and said, ‘Wash your face. Let me see you do it.’

  There was a sink in the corner. I scrubbed my face with soap and then turned to face him.

  ‘Good grief –’ he whistled when I’d finished – ‘that looks worse.’ Then he left and – unbelievable, this – he locked me in! As though I was the bad guy!

  There was a hand towel on a hook by the sink. I picked it up to dry myself off. That’s when I saw my face in the mirror.

  That’s when I saw why everyone was scared of me.

  My face had changed colour.

  My face had gone green.

  The Weird Mutation of Rory Rooney

  When I say green, I don’t mean greenish. I don’t mean looking-a-bit-pale-maybe-about-to-throw-up green. I don’t mean flesh-with-a-hint-of-green green. I mean a bright, lettucey green.

  I took off my wet shirt. The green wasn’t all over. It was just my face at first, and my neck. The rest of me was all right. I thought, Don’t panic. Read a book. Ciara had put Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared in my bag in case of emergencies. As soon as I picked it up, I noticed that my hands had gone green too. And when I put on a dry T-shirt, my arms were going green. Green colour moving up towards my elbows. That was almost the scariest thing about it.

  Scary but kind of cool too. When I was little, running around in my Spider-Man pyjamas, I liked to pretend that a radioactive spider had bitten me and that I could feel my muscles swelling up. OK, my muscles weren’t swelling now, but something was happening. Something weird. Inexplicable. Just like in a comic. As the green rose up my arms I could feel my skin tingling. Maybe it was excitement. Maybe it was a symptom.

  I looked in the mirror and my face was still green. No. More green. Before I had been lettuce-coloured. Now I was verging on broccoli.

  A key turned in the lock. Ms Stressley brought a man with funny little egg-shaped specs into the room. He took one look at me and more or less ran out again, shutting the door behind him. I could hear him arguing with Ms Stressley on the other side of the door. She was saying, ‘It’s your job. You’re a doctor.’

  ‘What if it’s catchy? Health and safety, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it’s health and safety; that’s why I called a doctor. So he could be healthy and we could be safe.’

  Ms Stressley shouted through the keyhole that I should stand as far away from the door as possible. The door opened and the doctor edged in with a handkerchief over his face and nose. He seemed to be asking questions, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying, just hanky-chewing noises.

  ‘He’s asking what colour you are normally,’ said Ms Stressley. Then she answered his question for me. ‘He’s normal colour. Dark normal. His father’s from Guyana. His mother is Irish.’

  ‘I know this may seem a strange question,’ said the doctor, ‘but have you been drinking at all?’

  ‘I just had some cocoa.’

  ‘He means alcohol,’ snapped Ms Stressley. ‘Have you been drinking alcohol?’ She made it sound like I was forever chugging vodka in class.

  ‘No, miss. Course not! Where would I get alcohol?’

  ‘It does seem unlikely,’ said the doctor.

  ‘So does turning green,’ said Ms Stressley.

  ‘Was anything unusual going on when this happened?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘He was in the river. Showing off.’

  ‘I wasn’t showing off. They pushed me in.’

  ‘He has a bit of a history,’ said Ms Stressley, as though that explained everything. ‘He tried to kill another child with a biscuit.’

  ‘Are you saying you think this is something he caught from the river?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re the doctor.’

  ‘The river feeds one of the main reservoirs for Birmingham,’ said the doctor. ‘If the infection is caused by the water, we could be looking at a catastrophe on a massive scale.’ He made it sound as though it was my idea to poison Birmingham. ‘Our resources are already stretched. So many of my staff are off work with this Killer Kittens virus. This could be very difficult.’ He seemed to think I should be locked up.

  Then they left, locking me up.

  A few minutes later someone opened the door very slightly. I said, ‘Hello?’

  A girl’s voice whispered, ‘Can you get far away from the door so we can look at you?’

  ‘I’m over by the window.’

  Around the edge of the door came the face of Bonnie Crewe. Bonnie Crewe – the girl with the longest, shiniest hair in the school. In eight years of school she has barely ever spoken to me. Now she looked at me and burst into tears. ‘The key was in the other side of the door so we thought we’d take a peek at you,’ said one of he
r friends. There were four of them, crowding into the doorway behind her.

  ‘Poor, poor, Rory,’ sobbed Bonnie. ‘I wish I could give you a hug.’ I thought this sounded like a good idea. I moved towards her but she jumped back. ‘Not literally,’ she said. ‘Not while you’re gravely ill.’

  ‘I actually feel OK.’

  ‘So brave.’ She sighed. The others agreed that I was brave. ‘It’s so unfair for this to happen to you. You’re only little.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Though you did try to kill poor Tommy-Lee with a biscuit, so maybe this is some kind of cosmic karma.’

  ‘Cosmic what?’

  She stepped into the room and dropped a huge greetings card on the floor. ‘We made you this,’ she said. It had a picture of the Columendy activity centre surrounded by flowers glued to the front, with a photo of my face glued to the flowers. The photo of me was from the chart in the foyer, where there were ID photos of all of us so that the people at the centre knew who we were. Underneath in glittery writing they had written:

  We will always remember you.

  :-(

  I said, ‘Oh, a get-well card. Thanks.’

  ‘It’s not really a get-well card,’ said Bonnie. ‘It’s more of a farewell card.’

  ‘Farewell?’

  ‘Everyone says you’re . . .’ She choked a bit, trying to get the word out, then wailed, ‘. . . incurable!’

  For days and nights I’d been worried about what Kian and Jordan might do to me. I thought I’d planned for every possibility. The one thing I never expected to happen to me on a school trip was that I would mutate. Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared tells you how to cope with spiders, kidnappers, forest fires, hurricanes, problems with your plumbing. It has nothing at all to say about what to do if you change colour.

  Maybe you would expect me to be upset to see my incurably green self. But I looked at the photo of myself that Bonnie had stuck to the goodbye card. Then I looked at myself in the mirror. The me in the photo was usual me. Puny me. Hiding-in-the-geography-store-cupboard, no-sandwiches, pushed-in-the-river me. The me in the mirror was . . . different. I didn’t yet know just how different. But just then any kind of different was good.

  Unless of course they’d decided I was too green to ever be seen again and were planning to keep me in a maximum-security bedroom forever.

  There was a sound like a cyclone somewhere outside, and shouts and doors banging and windows opening. Outside the window, the trees were thrashing about. Ms Stressley opened the door and told me to follow her, ‘but not too close’.

  She led me out on to the lawn in front of the activity centre. All the upstairs windows were full of staring faces. Bonnie Crewe blew me a kiss! I was going to blow one back, but as we turned around the corner of the building, the wind attacked us like a giant leaf blower. It swirled around us, making me screw up my eyes, or turn my back to it. Ms Stressley yelled into my ear, ‘Go on! Hurry up!’

  I turned round and saw . . . not a giant leaf blower but a neat blue helicopter, dangling over the back field like a mad Christmas decoration.

  ‘Hurry up!’ yelled Ms Stressley. ‘This is messing up my hair!’

  ‘Me?! In there?!’

  ‘Yes, please, at the double. Some of us have abseiling to do.’

  Destination – Secret

  I wasn’t surprised that someone had sent a helicopter. Once one weird and terrible thing has happened to you, you sort of expect more unusual stuff – for instance, someone sending you a helicopter, probably to take you to a secret government installation where they give you special training and gadgets. And for instance the pilot to be wearing a massive crash helmet with a black visor and also black gloves so that you can’t see his face or his hands and you think he might possibly be a robot.

  ‘Hi!’ I said.

  ‘You are a category-ten risk. Please confine yourself to the yellow area,’ he said in a voice that definitely sounded a bit electricky. Part of the floor and one of the seats in the back of the helicopter had been painted yellow. I clipped myself in and gave the pilot a thumbs-up to show that we were ready. I sort of thought helicopters just went straight up into the air. But they don’t. The tail shot up and the nose pointed down, like something on a thrill ride. Then it powered over the grass, nose still down, until it came to the edge of the hill, where it dropped like a stone. I pushed myself back into my seat, screwing my eyes up, thinking, This has all gone wrong, we are going to die. Maybe they were right to give me a farewell card.

  But we didn’t hit the ground. I opened my eyes. We were whirling up into the air. The centre was already far below us, falling away like a dropped toy. The roads and the hills spread out all around the building like a giant painted fan opening. The river meanders were a glitter-pen scribble.

  Mountains crowded up around the rim of the fields. There was snow on top of one and I swear I saw the sea. Then a city which I knew must be Birmingham. Houses, chimneys, factories, gasometers. I saw the Bullring, the station, the Lickey Hills. All these places that I knew really well – places I’ve been to on different days at different times – but now I was seeing them all at once. I felt like I was travelling in time instead of space. And my whole life had shrunk down to a minute. ‘This is amazing,’ I called to the pilot. The electric voice said, ‘Please do not engage the pilot in conversation.’

  There were some more hills. Another city came marching over them towards us in ranks of towers and steeples and skyscrapers. We followed a river for a little while like a winding shining road. Then we dropped on to the roof of this tall, grey building. A man in earmuffs and a high-vis jacket came to help us out of the helicopter. I strode across the roof next to him towards a door marked ‘Access Limited’, feeling exactly like a proper hero. I thought that probably the Prime Minister or some kind of secret super-genius would come out of the door and shake my hand and say, ‘Ah, Mr Rooney, we’ve been expecting you.’

  But it wasn’t the Prime Minister. It was three men in high-visibility jackets and big orange plastic earmuffs. One of them had a walkie-talkie. It took me a minute, but I recognized the middle one.

  ‘Dad!’ I said.

  ‘What?’ said Dad. I pointed to his big orange earmuffs. He said, ‘Oh,’ and lifted them off. ‘This is him,’ he said to the others.

  ‘I can see that,’ said the one with the walkie-talkie. ‘Please don’t make any physical contact. Follow me.’ He led us inside, talking into his walkie-talkie ‘Yes, he’s here. We’ll take him straight down to A & E to be processed. We’ll use the emergency stairs to avoid unnecessary human contact.’

  The one with no walkie-talkie kept looking back at me as we clattered down the stairs. ‘No offence,’ he said to Dad, ‘but your kid is really very green.’

  ‘Well, yes, he is. He is indeed,’ said Dad, then added, ‘I think kids are like wine gums. The green ones are the best.’

  Mum and Ciara were waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs. When they saw me their mouths opened. No sounds came out but they wouldn’t close again. They looked like shocked fish.

  Dad said, ‘So our Rory’s travelling by helicopter now! Not like us normal people. We had to deal with a contraflow on the A38. Then we took the M6 toll. Once we got on the M1, we had a good run – with a loo stop and a sandwich at Newport Pagnell. Then the A5 which becomes the Edgware Road . . .’

  Whenever Dad’s feeling emotional he gets all geographical.

  Mum doesn’t worry about the geography. She focuses more on the question of who is to blame. ‘Rory Rooney,’ she said, when she finally got her mouth working, ‘what have you done to yourself?!’

  ‘If you’ll follow us to A & E,’ said the man with the walkie-talkie, ‘they’ll do your paperwork.’

  ‘We can’t let people see him like that,’ said Ciara. ‘Can’t we put a bag over his head or something? Everyone’s going to be staring at him.’

  ‘Don’t you think,’ said Mum, ‘people will stare just as much if he’s got a ba
g over his head? He’s my son,’ she said, ‘no matter what he’s done.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything. This just happened.’

  ‘Whatever. We’ll stand by you. That’s the point.’

  Diagnosis – Super

  Me walking into Accident and Emergency was a double-page spread in the comic-book of my life. Everything else was in black and white, but I am really, really, bright, bright green. There were people there whose heads were dripping with blood, whose children were weeping in pain. There was a little girl with a potty stuck on her head. There was a television showing a report about how the Prime Minister had decided that Figaro – the Downing Street cat – would have to be put down due to concerns about Killer Kittens. No one was looking at the television. No one was looking at any of these things.

  Everyone was looking at me.

  Everyone except the reception nurse, who was too busy typing my details into her computer. She asked for our address so Dad went geographical again. ‘Handsworth Wood. Not far from Perry Barr. If you’re coming north on the M6, you merge with the A38 at—’

  ‘Thank you. We don’t need directions. Just a postcode. And door number.’

  ‘163.’

  ‘Thank you. Name?’

  ‘I’m Len and this is my wife, Siobhan, and . . .’

  ‘Patient’s name.’

  ‘Oh. Rory. Rory Rooney.’

  ‘Thank you. So, has Rory had any recent contact with cats or cat-like creatures?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you own a pet cat or cat-like creature?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank you. And what seems to be wrong with Rory?’ She hadn’t looked up yet.

  ‘Well,’ said Mum, ‘he’s gone green.’

  ‘And is that not something he’s done before?’

  ‘Love, it’s something that no one has ever done before in the whole of history.’