The Astounding Broccoli Boy

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

Nurse Rock gave me a new set of pyjamas. I asked her what they were supposed to be.

  ‘Pyjamas.’

  ‘Yeah, but they’re so bright blue. Are they supposed to be Fimbles or something?’

  ‘Pyjamas.’

  I’d never had a pair of pyjamas before that weren’t also some kind of dressing-up. When I was little Dad once got me a pair of Spider-Man pyjamas that were actually padded out with foam to make it look like I had massive Spider-Man-type muscles. I used to love turning the biceps inside out and waiting for them to pop back into place.

  ‘These pyjamas are hypoallergenic,’ said Nurse Rock.

  They were also very scratchy. They crackled with static electricity when you put them on. If you stroked one sleeve over the other sleeve, the two sleeves clung to each other, and then when you pulled them apart, sparks flew everywhere.

  ‘I think these might be a fire risk!’

  ‘There is a fully tested sprinkler system installed in your ward. So no need to worry about fire.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘The doctor asked me to say, “Sleep well.” So. Sleep well. That’s an order.’

  ‘OK,’ said Grim. ‘If that’s what the doctor says.’ He got into bed, closed his eyes and started snoring right away.

  Could anyone really get to sleep that quickly? I whispered, ‘Grim . . .’

  No answer.

  I went to turn the light off.

  His massive security-light eyes flashed open.

  ‘Where are you going? Doctor said go to sleep. Go to sleep.’

  ‘I was going to turn the light off.’

  ‘The light switch is in my territory.’

  ‘Your territory?’

  ‘Yeah. See that line there? That’s the border. This side is my territory. That side is yours. You can’t come into my territory, so you can’t turn the light off.’

  ‘What line? I can’t see any line.’

  ‘I drew a line. In my imagination.’

  ‘If it’s in your imagination, how can I see it?’

  ‘If you can’t see it, you’ll just have to be extra-careful, won’t you? I can see it. That’s what matters.’

  ‘So you’re telling me not to cross a completely invisible line and you’re not going to tell me where it is?’

  ‘I’m telling you to be very, very careful.’

  ‘But the light switch—’

  ‘Is in my territory.’

  ‘Right.’ I headed back to bed.

  ‘What did you call me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just before. You called me something not my name.’

  ‘Did I?’ I remembered now I’d called him Grim. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You didn’t call me leprechaun, did you?’

  ‘No! Why would I do that?’

  ‘You would do that if you wanted your life to end soon and painfully.’

  ‘Right. Well, I don’t. So I didn’t.’

  ‘Good. Go to sleep.’

  I climbed back into bed. My fire-lighter pyjamas made the sheets crackle like firewood. I actually moved the fire extinguisher a bit closer just in case.

  I had mutated into a green thing, been locked up in a high-security secret laboratory, forced to share a bedroom with my nemesis, and on top of all that I had to sleep with the light on! Why did he want to sleep with the light on? Because he was scared of the dark. It seemed that Grim Komissky was scared of all kinds of things. I almost thought about saying something about this. But I was every bit as scared of Grim as Grim was of the dark. I gave up on trying to find some darkness under the duvet. I thought I’d try reading myself to sleep, but when I pulled the duvet down, I nearly jumped out of my skin. When I pulled the duvet down, Grim Komissky was standing right in front of me. Breathing on my face. He wasn’t looking at me. He didn’t seem to know I was there. He just walked past me, straight to the door – a slow, dreamy walk, with his hands hanging down at his side, like spooky Playmobil.

  Sleepwalking.

  And then, just like that, he sleepwalked right out of the Fish Tank.

  I’d never seen anyone sleepwalk before. I followed him just to see what happened. It was interesting the way he never bumped into anything even though he was asleep.

  I’d thought the Fish Tank door was locked with some kind of special high-tech lock. I never even tried to open it. Now Grim Komissky pushed it open with one hand. It wasn’t locked at all.

  Nurse Rock was at her desk, staring at her phone – maybe she was playing a game or checking Facebook. Unbelievably she was eating chocolate. There was something in her hand that was blatantly a Toblerone.

  More injustice!

  There was a tapping noise.

  The Singing Duck door was locked with a security code. Grim was typing numbers into the keypad.

  Obviously they couldn’t be the right numbers.

  Thunk!

  The door opened.

  He had unlocked the door in his sleep.

  He did the Spooky Playmobil out into the corridor.

  I followed him down the million-door corridor. But he didn’t go back the way I came in. He turned right. There were no doors, no exit signs, no lifts, just a long, long corridor with no windows and a massive silver pipe running down the middle of the ceiling like an armour-plated draught excluder. Finally we came to a door.

  I was expecting a room full of screens and monitors and phones and buttons – the technological nerve centre of the building.

  It was the staff-only cafe.

  A deserted cafe in the middle of the night is a creepy thing. The chairs were all at funny angles to the tables, as though invisible people were sitting in them. The vending machines hummed like ghosts. Where the food should have been, there were empty tin trays. There were big, soggy footprints in the anti-Kittens disinfectant mats in the doorway. The only thing that moved was Grim – floating past the empty tables, like a waiter that no one was waiting for.

  Grim kept moving. I kept following. It made no difference to him whether it was dark or light. He was asleep anyway. I brushed against something. A door handle. Maybe it would lead to a room with a light in. I yanked the handle. Light and cold and mist burst out. It was a massive freezer – a house with walls of ice, just like the Iceberg Lounge – secret lair of Batman’s arch-enemy, the Penguin. The light from the freezer lit up the whole room. Now I could see that we were in a kitchen. I don’t mean a sitting-on-the-table-eating-cake-mix-off-a-spoon-while-your-mum-is-baking type of kitchen. I mean a kitchen the size of a railway station. Everything in it was made of steel – steel knives, steel shelves, steel floor even, and rows and rows of steel pots and pans hanging off steel pegs like bits of armour. If medieval knights ever went to a swimming pool, this is what the changing rooms would have looked like. The cooker was the length of a bowling alley. It gonged when Grim sleepwalked into it.

  He didn’t wake, but he stopped. Maybe he was trying to sniff out where he was. All around him there were shelves and shelves of food. Boxes of cereals and rice, baskets of fruit, rows of fresh loaves, towers of biscuits. This was a warehouse of snacks! I was starving due to Grim having eaten all my ‘food’. Now I could eat what I liked as long as he was in the kitchen.

  There was a wardrobe-sized fridge packed with hunks of cheese, fat red tomatoes, buckets of milk and yogurt and juice, a tower of thinly sliced bacon and even a pie. I didn’t take the pie because it had a card propped up against it with ‘Maureen’s – do Not touch!!!’ written on it. There was something about those exclamation marks that said that if I did touch that pie, Maureen would hunt me down like a dog. So I broke off a chunk of cheese and grabbed a packet of crackers from a shelf. Then went to look in the freezer on the off-chance that there’d be ice cream.

  I stepped inside it.

  Rory Rooney – Prisoner of the Ice!!!

  As well as being inside the Rory Rooney comic book, this was also the front cover. There was me, looking around inside the freezer, trying to decide between a gigantic tub o
f Raspberry Ripple and a bucket of Honeycomb Smash, while Grim sleepwalks by. You can tell what’s going to happen. Grim sleepwalks past the freezer door, nudges it with his shoulder.

  CLUNK.

  It shuts.

  I’m locked inside.

  And it’s very dark.

  I dive for the door.

  Too late.

  I look for the handle. There is no handle. I try to force the door open with my shoulder.

  Nothing.

  Push.

  Nothing.

  Push harder – HRRRRRRRRRR GRRRRRR . . .

  Still nothing.

  It gets colder and colder.

  I’m only wearing pyjamas. I try to call Grim, but my teeth are chattering too much to speak. They shiver the words to pieces.

  I think to myself: What would Batman do?

  Obviously Batman would have a special gadget on his belt for blowing doors off inadvertently locked freezers. In this picture my thought bubble says, ‘Maybe I can dig my way out with an ice-cream scoop.’ Then there’s a close-up of me noticing a button that glows with a dim red light. I go closer. It has ‘Emergency’ written on it. I press it. It glows a bit brighter. It’s only then I notice it has two words written on it: ‘Emergency’ and ‘Superfreeze’.There’s a hissing sound and the icy mist begins to swirl and thicken around me like accelerated fog. It’s getting colder. I still have cheese in my hand. I can feel it turning hard and brittle. I try screaming for help but the speech bubble is empty with icicles hanging off it – my voice freezes in front of me. Words clunk to the floor like ice cubes. I try screaming again. Desperately I shoulder-charge the door.

  It opens and I almost fall out.

  Warm air pours in.

  I can breathe.

  I stroll out into the kitchen and close the door on my potential icy grave.

  Looking back at this picture now, it’s obvious what happened. When I first went in, the temperature in the freezer rose a bit because I’d left the door open and let the warm air in. The door sealed itself automatically to allow things to get back to the right temperature. Then when I pressed Emergency Superfreeze things got cold enough almost immediately, and that meant the automatic seal on the door was released. So I could open it again.

  The next picture in the comic was me with my eyes popping as I realize with horror that there’s no sign of Grim.

  There was a sound like a boiler starting up. A sudden square of light. It was a small access door. He must have gone through it. I followed him. There was a ladder on the other side. At the top everything was dark, but there were little flecks of light high up. One massive yellow light over to the left. Something quick and quiet flittered past my face. Then there was a crack of brilliant light. So bright I had to blink.

  Lightning.

  We were outside.

  We were on the roof.

  Grim was standing right at the edge of the roof. A few big drops of rain fell. The storm was starting.

  There’s a picture of Grim, his Playmobil arms straight down at his sides, X-rayed by lightning. And . . . well you already know what happens next.

  Tommy-Lee fell off the roof.

  THREE . . .

  I don’t remember anything about that first second after the fall. One moment I was standing in the doorway, looking at the space on the edge of the roof where Grim had been standing. The next I was standing in that space myself. I’d gone from there to here but I didn’t remember moving. It seemed like I’d teleported.

  TWO . . .

  I remember everything that happened then – as though someone had got hold of Time and stretched it like a rubber band. I remember thinking, Don’t look down! Then thinking, Well, if you don’t look down, how are you going to save him!? I looked down. It was amazing – miles below, the blue light of a tiny ambulance was flickering as it pulled out of the hospital. A pigeon flew by just below Grim’s falling feet. I felt like I was just arriving on planet Earth from some distant galaxy. Everything looked new. I was noticing every detail. I wondered why my brain didn’t always notice everything. What had it been doing with itself all these years? Didn’t matter. Now, finally, it had switched on. It saw everything. Knew everything.

  My brain had been upgraded.

  There was thunder. The storm was unexpectedly close. My hand swept through the air and grabbed Grim’s wrist and . . . yes! I saved his life!

  Then my brain said . . . very slowly . . . Oh . . .

  no . . .

  you . . .

  for . . .

  got:

  he weighs more than you do . . .

  much . . .

  much . . .

  more . . . so this won’t work . . . isn’t working . . . you’re falling . . . let go . . . let go . . . go . . . go . . .

  no . . .

  oh . . .

  too . . .

  late . . .

  oh.

  Big Grim Komissky pulled me right off the roof.

  ONE . . .

  I thought the elastic band of Time had been pulled to its limit. But now it just kept on stretching.

  And stretching.

  And stretching.

  I was falling like a stone but I felt as if I was drifting like a leaf. I was moving like a bullet, but my brain was moving superfast.

  The billion pixels of the city below twisted and tangled. On either side of me were big bright billboards. When I looked though, the billboards weren’t showing adverts.

  They were showing bits of my life. Scenes and memories of stuff that had happened to me. These weren’t photographs, like memories usually are. They were drawings, like the drawings in a comic. They had captions, speech balloons, thought bubbles and words like:

  ‘CRASH!’

  ‘THUD!’

  ‘KERPOW!!’

  splashed across them.

  There was a picture of Grim X-rayed by lightning as he fell off the roof.

  One of my hand grabbing his wrist just in time.

  One of my face staring into his blank eyes while two thought balloons bubble out of the back of my head. One says, ‘Saved him!’ The other, ‘But how did I get from there to here so quickly!? I must have teleported!!’

  How one-hundred-per-cent annoying is that – discovering that you can slightly teleport and then immediately using that ability to teleport yourself to certain death.

  The last picture shows the two of us falling off the top of the twelve-storey hospital. The word:

  AIIIEEEEEEEEE!!

  is splattered across our tumbling bodies.

  It was just me screaming, not Grim. He was still fast asleep. Snoring and falling.

  A New Age of Superheroes Begins . . .

  THUNK!

  There were black walls around me. A gap above me. I was in some kind of box, open at the top. The opening was full of stars. I was ninety-three-per-cent sure that I was lying in the bottom of the hole I’d made in the pavement when I’d smacked into it at a million miles an hour.

  But the other seven per cent of me was still wondering . . . maybe I was in Heaven.

  There was metal under my hands. Also there were thick oily cables shuddering in the air above my head. It didn’t seem heavenly, but then who knows?

  At the edge of the box of stars I could see the slope of the hospital roof. It wasn’t in the distance.

  It was three, maybe six metres away.

  I lifted my head a little.

  Grim was standing next to me. Staring into the night. Not looking at me.

  Where was I?

  If Grim could stand up, so could I.

  Very slowly, I tucked my knees in, put my hands on the floor, pushed myself up. I was inside some kind of metal skip. The oily cables were holding it to the side of the building. There was a thick plastic water tank strapped to the inside.

  We had landed in the window cleaners’ cradle.

  We had fallen just a metre or two.

  The whole plunging-to-our-doom, life-flashing-before-my-eyes thing had only t
aken one millisecond.

  I was alive.

  And so was Grim.

  He was holding on to the side of the cradle staring into space. He wasn’t screaming or panicking. He was staring straight ahead. He was still asleep! He had fallen off the side of a twelve-storey building and not even woken up!

  His fingers fumbled along the metal sides of the cradle, searching for something. They found it. A catch. A bolt. They grabbed it. They rattled it. The whole front of the cradle was a sort of gate – so that the window cleaner could step out of it when he reached the ground. Grim was trying to open the gate. But we weren’t on the ground. We were twelve storeys up.

  It seemed that he just loved to sleepwalk off great heights. Quietly I slid myself between him and the lock. He reached around behind me. One of us must have knocked a switch. There was an electric groan. The cradle swayed. Then it started to sink, very slowly, down the side of the building, heading for the ground. As soon as we started to move, Grim stood still. In his sleep he probably thought he was in a lift.

  The air was freezing. It was like breathing lolly ices. There was a tower block to the left, a multi-storey car park off to the right. We were alone in the air, in the middle of the night. We weren’t dead. We weren’t even in danger really. The lights of a hundred thousand streets glittered like hot confetti. We could see a million houses, but no one could see us. This must be what it’s like for Spider-Man. When you see him swinging from skyscraper to skyscraper, you think it’s just his spidery way of avoiding traffic. But when you are actually dangling off the side of a skyscraper, like we were, it’s not like that. It’s windy, strange, lonely and amazing. The thing that’s most amazing isn’t the height or the cold, it’s you. You’re up there. No one else is. You’re looking down at everything and everyone. No one can even see you! No one even knows you’re there. You feel . . . Super.

  You notice that the wind has different smells in it – frost, car exhaust, the oil from the cradle cable, the toasted dust from the top of its electric motor. You notice all the sounds of the air – the way it creaks through the cables, snuggles in the cradle, fidgets in your hair. You feel that the night belongs to you. You know without looking everything that’s in the cradle – the motor, the rivets that hold it all together, the pair of dropped cigarette ends in the corner, the oily hinges of the gate.