The Astounding Broccoli Boy

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  I tapped on the radiator.

  It rang.

  I listened.

  No one replied.

  I tapped again. This time I seemed to hear the tap of the spoon shiver along all the twists and turns of the pipe leading to the great boiler room, echo in the boiler, swing back out through the heating pipes to all the radiators in the building, ripple through the hot-water pipes into the sinks where the surgeons washed their hands, and the cold water pipes where people filled the drinking jugs and the vases of flowers, travel under the floorboards, behind the skirting boards, behind the ceilings and in the walls, whispering to doctors, nurses, cleaners, visitors, patients, cooks, porters.

  Not one of them answered.

  Maybe I just wasn’t doing the right kind of tapping on the radiators. Maybe it wasn’t enough to make a noise, you had to send a message. In the back of Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared there was a section on Morse code. I tried to figure out how to send a cry for help and some information about where I was, but I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I was curled up in bed, listening to an inexplicable tapping noise.

  Someone had answered me!

  I slid out of my bed and crouched down next to the radiator, ready to tap back when the tapping stopped. It didn’t stop. It wasn’t coming from the radiator.

  Tap.

  Tap.

  Tap.

  Tap.

  Maybe from the door?

  No.

  From the walls?

  No.

  A tap dripping?

  No.

  I pressed my face against the glass to see if there was something out in the corridor. Yes. A little dark creature was pecking at the door of Tommy-Lee’s room.

  The Return of Peter the Penguin

  The Return of Peter the Penguin was our opportunity.

  My enhanced brain was moving so fast that it didn’t even tell me what I was doing. It just started moving. I tapped gently on my window. The penguin heard. Turned. Listened. Came over to my door to investigate. When it was right up against the woodwork, I clobbered the door as hard as I could with a chair. Peter was terrified. He flapped. He squelched. He waddled off down the corridor towards the officey bit where Nurse Rock sits. Five seconds later there was a scream, then the sound of a chair falling over, then bins clattering around. The nurse was trying to corner the penguin, but the penguin was too quick. Then came her voice – she was yelling into the phone, calling for help.

  I was ready.

  The Singing Duck door opened and two men in overalls dashed in. The door began to close itself, slowly drifting back on its hydraulic hinges.

  I was straight out of my fish tank and into Tommy-Lee’s. I shook him awake.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do as I say. We’ve got thirty seconds till the door closes. Move.’

  When I opened Koko’s door, she was already up and waiting. ‘What’s going on?’ she said.

  ‘We’ve been saved by a penguin. Move quickly while they’re busy.’

  ‘Green is for Go!’ she whooped.

  ‘Shh!’ I led the other two out into the corridor.

  It was early morning now. The first time we’d been off the ward in the daytime. Light piled in through the big, grimy windows. We looked greener than ever.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Keep moving. Follow me.’

  I led them to the waiting room with the Lego in and started pulling open drawers. I didn’t even know why I’d done it until I saw them all laid out in front of us.

  ‘Face paints,’ I said. ‘Tommy-Lee, you’re the best at art—’

  ‘I’m not good at art!’

  ‘What are you talking about? You drew that map. Here’s an instruction book.’ There was a kind of pull-out leaflet in with the colours that told you how to make different designs and how to get the paints to work. ‘You could try a tiger face – page three. You could make Koko into a butterfly – page forty-seven.’

  ‘A butterfly?! Why? Because I’m a girl?! No, thanks. I want to be a gorilla. Here – look.’

  ‘What,’ roared Tommy-Lee – sounding like a gorilla himself – ‘is going on??!!’

  ‘We’re going out to save the world.’

  ‘With face paint?’

  ‘Our distinguishing characteristic is our bright green skin. If we want to escape from here, all we have to do is cover up the green with face paint so we look like normal kids. Then we can walk around in broad daylight undetected.’ I stabbed my finger at the picture at page ten and told him I wanted to be Spider-Man.

  I thought of all the times I’d seen kids dressed up as superheroes – at parties, on own-clothes day. One time I’d seen a really big muscly Batman sitting in a KFC eating a bucket of spicy wings on his own. The streets were full of people who looked like superheroes but weren’t. I figured making yourself look like a superhero was probably the best way of concealing the fact that you really were one.

  ‘But why do we want to walk around in broad daylight?’

  ‘Think about it, Tommy-Lee. They’re never going to let us out of here. Think of all the blood and wee tests you’ve had. All the quinoa you’ve eaten. And you haven’t got any better. They won’t let us out until we’re better. But we’re not getting better. If we want to get out, we have to break out. If we want to be astounding, we have to do astounding.’

  Looking around the room, my 200-per-cent brain could pick up the traces of all the families that had waited in there. Families like mine. There were newspapers. Magazines. Drawing pads. The bin was full of sweet wrappers and broken crayons. There was even a road atlas with loads of pages turned down at the corner, like in my dad’s, and a bag with drinks cartons, a sandwich box and a tin of Spam.

  ‘It’s the only way,’ I said, ‘that we’re ever going to see our mums and dads again.’

  ‘So,’ said Tommy-Lee, ‘we’re breaking out of hospital because you want your mum?’

  ‘No. We’re breaking out of hospital because England needs us. Including my mum.’

  Is It a Bird? Is It a Boy?

  Tommy-Lee turned out to be a face-paint genius. You couldn’t see any green on us anywhere. We raided the dressing-up box for hats and capes and masks.

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Tommy-Lee.

  ‘Blend in with the crowd.’

  ‘There isn’t any crowd.’

  ‘Wait and see.’

  We could hear the hospital beginning to wake up. Doors banged. An electric floor polisher hummed up and down the corridors. The breakfast trolley went past. Then a mum and dad came in with a kid in a stripy top. He played with the Lego while they talked quietly. They were waiting for test results. Then a mum came in with a little girl with curly hair and fairy wings attached to her coat. Another mum with a boy in a Batman suit. There was so much dressing up going on, no one noticed three kids in face paint. We could have left right away but I think we were all quietly enjoying the sound that families make. Even the grown-ups telling kids off and the kids moaning about being bored reminded us of home and what life was like before we were locked away for being green. A nurse came in and started taking names. That’s when we sneaked off.

  Everything was fine until we got up on to the roof. When I opened the door that led to the outside, Tommy-Lee grabbed hold of the handle and wouldn’t let go. ‘I’m not going out there,’ he said.

  ‘You go out there all the time. You’ve been out there practically every night since we got here.’

  ‘In my sleep. I’m not going out there awake. I’m not stepping off the roof into that cradle thing.’

  ‘But you’re always awake when we come back here. And you always step out of the cradle on to the roof.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll step OUT of it. I’ll step out of it because I hate being IN it. I’m not going to climb INTO it awake, am I?’

  I tried pleading with him. I asked him to think of the West Midlands and its people, suffering under a possible alien invasion. Koko didn’t say anything. She
just grabbed a plastic Iron Man mask and pushed it right down over his head, so he couldn’t see.

  ‘What’re you doing?! Gerroff!’

  ‘You don’t mind doing this when you’re asleep. So pretend you’re asleep. Or go to sleep. Whichever. We don’t mind. Here. Give me your hand.’

  Tommy-Lee obediently gave her his hand and she led him across the tarmac roof. The chains that held the window cleaner’s cradle jingled in the wind.

  ‘I know we’re near the edge,’ said Tommy-Lee, ‘because the backs of my legs feel sick. I always get a bad feeling in the backs of my legs when we’re up here.’

  ‘We’re not that near yet,’ said Koko. Which was a lie because we were right at the very brink of the roof. ‘Lift your foot up high and then put it down slowly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You don’t want to trip over when you’re twelve storeys high, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then do as you’re told.’

  I said, ‘We’ll get you into the cradle, and then just don’t look down and you’ll be all right.’

  Koko guided Tommy-Lee’s foot on to the step that led down to the cradle. Then, without warning him, she reached up and pulled his Iron Man mask off and let it drop. It was quite scary how quickly it fell out of sight.

  ‘Arrrgghh. What d’you do that for?’

  Tommy-Lee’s face was pointing straight down the sheer side of the hospital, roofs of houses, shops, cars, ambulances were far, far below us. The wind gusted.

  ‘Shut your eyes, Tommy-Lee. Shut them and you’ll be OK.’ That was me by the way.

  ‘Don’t close your eyes,’ said Koko. ‘What’s the point of being up here if you’re not going to look down?!’

  Tommy-Lee was already looking down. His neck went stiff like it had been hit by some kind of freeze ray. His eyes bulged. He swayed. I gripped his pyjamas a bit tighter. ‘This,’ he hissed, slowly spreading his arms out wide, ‘is –’ and his pyjamas rippled in the wind like a hypoallergenic kite – ‘the –’ his arms wide now – ‘best thing EVER!’ He whooped. He spun around. I lost my grip and he did one of his kick-boxing moves, right out over the edge of the parapet.

  ‘Tommy-Lee, you’ll fall!’

  ‘I feel like I can fly!’

  ‘But you can’t, so . . . please don’t try.’

  ‘Why not?’ His bare toes were poking over the edge. He was leaning forward. If he sneezes now, I thought, he’ll fall.

  ‘I bet we could if we tried,’ he said.

  ‘Could what?’

  ‘Fly. Come on, put your arms out.’

  ‘We can’t fly.’

  ‘How do you know if you haven’t tried?’

  ‘You don’t need to try gravity. Gravity is not in any way unreliable.’

  ‘But we’re superheroes. That’s what you said. Superheroes can fly.’ He leaned further out.

  ‘He’s got a point,’ said Koko. She climbed up right next to Tommy-Lee, poked her toes over the edge, stretched out her arms and peered down at London as though it was a pond and she might dive in. I was standing in between the two of them.

  Just for a second, it really did feel as though we could fly.

  If you stand on top of a high building without feeling scared, you feel like you can do anything. It felt as if my whole body had had an upgrade, not just my brain. I was 200-per-cent Rory.

  Far away a church bell chimed.

  ‘Nearly midday,’ said Koko. ‘Hey, we’ll hear Big Ben striking twelve.’

  ‘On the bong of twelve,’ announced Tommy-Lee, ‘I’m going to give it a go.’

  ‘Give what a go?’

  Bong . . .

  ‘Flying. I’m going to try and fly.’

  Bong . . .

  It’s great to have superpowers (Bong . . .), but I strongly believe you should test them (Bong . . .) in controlled conditions (Bong . . .) before chucking yourself off a roof.

  Bong . . .

  Tommy-Lee was up on his toes with his arms stretched wide (Bong . . .), ready to jump. I could see he wasn’t going to listen to health-and-safety warnings.

  Bong . . .

  ‘Here I go!’ whooped Tommy-Lee.

  ‘No! Tommy-Lee! Don’t jump!’

  Bong . . .

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Too conspicuous. Think about it – flying children whizzing around the place (Bong . . .). People notice things like that. They point. They film you with their phones. They tweet the pictures. They put you on the news. We haven’t got time for that. We’ve got work to do. Hero work.’

  Bong . . .

  ‘He’s right,’ agreed Koko. ‘We’ll take the window cleaners’ cradle and save the jump for another time.’

  Bong.

  As we wobbled past the tenth floor, I realized that since we were covered in face paint we could just have caught the lift and walked out of the front door.

  Why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t any of us think of that? Because we’d started to think like superheroes.

  Superheroes do not use the lift.

  It was strange-in-a-good-way to be just walking around the city with normal people as though we were normal too. It felt like being invisible.

  We strode along, shoulder to shoulder, buzzing with Superness. ‘Standing on the edge of the roof,’ said Tommy-Lee, ‘has filled my Superness tank to the limit. Let’s fight aliens!’

  I pointed out that we’d need to find some aliens before fighting them.

  ‘How come London’s so full now,’ asked Tommy-Lee, ‘when it was completely empty before?’

  ‘Last time we were out it was five o’clock in the morning,’ explained Koko. ‘Also we were in one of the exclusion zones. It looks like everything’s just normal here.’ Extra normal in fact. Everyone was chatting and texting and going about their business. It was not the way I’d expected things to be during an alien invasion.

  ‘Look!’ hissed Tommy-Lee. ‘Over there!’ There were four or five people standing on the corner with blue skin, massive bellies and antennae sticking out of their heads. ‘They have got to be aliens.’

  ‘Maybe they’re just foreign,’ said Koko. ‘The whole world comes to London.’

  ‘Not with antennae sticking out of their heads.’ Tommy-Lee barged through the crowd towards the blue people, ready to do battle. We followed him. I noticed that people were stopping to have their photos taken with the aliens and then dropping money into a kind of crash helmet painted with stars which was on the pavement in front of them. ‘Comic Relief! Give generously,’ shouted one.

  ‘Do you come in peace?’ asked Koko.

  ‘Yes, but we do want all your money.’

  ‘Tommy-Lee,’ I whispered, pulling him back towards me, ‘I don’t think these people are from Mars.’

  ‘Mars? No, son. We’re from Chelsea. Hence the blue.’

  ‘OK,’ mumbled the disappointed Tommy-Lee, ‘we’ll let you off. This time.’

  But by now my 200-per-cent brain was working. It’s amazing how much information leaks out of a crowd of people – the words they say, the clothes they wear, the stuff they carry, it all tells you things. Without even trying, the crowd was telling a story. I could have stayed and listened to it forever. A man with a newspaper, for instance. The front-page headline read: ‘Alien Ate My Hamster’.

  Three girls waiting for some more friends to turn up were looking at Facebook on their phones. One of them liked a group called ‘Happy Christmas, Aliens’.

  There was a big screen on the other side of the road showing mostly adverts. Across the bottom of the screen ran a stream of information about weather, gossip and what was trending on Twitter. #AliensforChristmas was number one.

  Further down the street, a newspaper seller was using a little black radio to weigh down his pile of papers. I could hear a phone-in playing. A woman had rung in to say aliens had stolen milk from her doorstep. ‘I seen them do it, Keith,’ she said, ‘and with my very own eyes. Two pints of semi-skimmed they had off me. Plus I
wasn’t the only one. Mrs Gable at number eight got a photo of them. There’s a big one, a tiny one and a bossy one.’

  ‘You’re not the first caller to say this, Eileen. We’ve had calls from Brent and Brixton, from Southall to Bromley, people saying they’ve seen aliens. Though you are the first to say that aliens drink milk, Eileen.’

  There was a girl in a sweatshirt that said ‘Loving This Alien’.

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘let’s go.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘There are sightings of aliens all over the city. They’re obviously moving quickly. What’s the quickest way to move around a massive city?’

  ‘Is it jet packs?’ asked Tommy-Lee.

  ‘Think about it. What’s got no congestion, no traffic lights, no roundabouts, no flyovers, no parking meters? It’s obvious, isn’t it? The river.’

  KEEP. AWAY. FROM. MY. PENGUINS.

  If you are in a city that is in danger of being destroyed by bombs or missiles or by riots, you should try to travel by water. It’s safer, quicker and helps with orientation.

  Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared

  Waterbuses and pleasure cruisers were jostling in and out of the piers and jetties, heading upriver and downriver. We slid in behind a school group that was boarding a boat heading east. Everyone, including the teachers, was dressed up for charity. I stood next to a fairly short Darth Vader and really tall Yoda, who were having an argument about the Future of Arsenal. We fitted right in. A teacher dressed like Professor Umbridge from Hogwarts counted us on.

  Considering we were about to go and save the world, it was all quite relaxing. The wind blew in our hair. There were free packets of Pickled Onion Monster Munch. Tommy-Lee couldn’t eat his, but we described the flavour for him. Going under Tower Bridge was probably the best bit. It was funny to think that only a few days ago we didn’t even know we were in London.

  Then things got slightly complicated. First of all, Tommy-Lee spotted a small black-and-white object in the water speeding towards us. ‘Peter!’ he yelled, and spread his arms out wide – as if the penguin was going to jump in like a puppy.