He nodded seriously, his eyes wide.
‘Do you want me to hold it for you?’ Livy asked. ‘Until we get home?’
‘No. No. No.’ Tom looked up at her. ‘It is my balloon and I will hold it.’ After a glance from the nursery assistant, he added, ‘Thank you.’
Outside the church, Tom walked slowly, holding the string of the balloon away from his body.
‘Hold it carefully,’ Livy said.
‘You’re not the boss of me!’
It was no use, he wouldn’t be told. She would just have to watch him if he was going to get his beloved balloon back safe. But Livy was watching him so carefully that she almost tripped off the pavement.
‘Good day!’
She looked up to see a small man wearing a limp brown coat over a brown pinstripe suit. On his head he had a rather battered tweed hat and he was carrying a tatty carrier bag full of books. She was struck by how neatly he was dressed even though the clothes themselves were rather shabby.
‘It’s you!’ Livy gasped. ‘From the park!’ She felt suddenly so pleased to see him – a friendly face after all the difficulty of the day.
The man nodded and smiled. ‘Alan Hopkins. At your service.’ His face was thin and grey, quite different from how he had appeared in the park, and he seemed to be struggling with a cough. But his eyes still twinkled.
Tom said, loudly, ‘Mummy says I must not talk to strangers!’
The man looked crestfallen. ‘Oh, I know,’ he said. ‘You’re absolutely right. But we’re not quite strangers. I’ve told you my name.’
‘Who is the man?’ Tom interrupted. ‘Why is he talking? I do not know him.’
Livy and Mr Hopkins laughed, and then the man put his head on one side. He seemed worried suddenly. ‘And here you are. Dressed as a Temple College scholar!’
‘She’s Livy Burgess,’ said Tom. ‘Not a scholar. And I am Thomas Burgess.’
‘Ah, I see,’ said the man solemnly. ‘And have you read the book I gave you, Miss Burgess?’
Livy winced. ‘Not yet,’ she said.
Not only had she not read it, she didn’t know where it was. There were plenty of boxes that still needed to be unpacked since the move. Tom pulled on her hand, anxious to go.
‘Well, when you do, consider it a message from a distant friend.’
Livy nodded. She had once again the reassuring impression that he knew all about her day: about her feeling so lost and out of place.
‘We all need a friend, Miss Burgess,’ the man said to her, raising his hat. ‘Goodbye.’
Livy clutched Tom’s hand as they walked away. I don’t need friends, she thought again.
Tom started making punching movements with the balloon and laughing as it danced about.
‘I could wrap the string around your wrist,’ she said.
‘It is my balloon,’ Tom said. ‘Not yours. I will hold it tight. Like this . . . Oh!’ He had opened his paint-smeared hand in order to close it tighter around the string and in that sliver of a second the balloon had sailed up over his head. He turned his face to the sky. ‘My balloon!’ he cried. ‘Don’t go!’
He twisted his hand out of Livy’s and ran after the balloon, jumping, but it was already way above his head.
‘Oh, Tom!’ Livy ran after him.
‘Why has it gone?’ he wailed. Livy picked him up and he buried his curly head in her shoulder. ‘It is my balloon and it has flown away. Why can’t I reach it?’ he whispered, on the verge of tears. ‘When I want it so much?’
Livy climbed slowly up the stairs to her room, her feet heavy as she thought of how much homework she would have to attempt. Unlike her old school, the teachers at Temple College didn’t seem to be making any exceptions for her: she would not be allowed to settle in and find her feet, in fact she was already expected to work at the same furious pace as everyone else. She felt suddenly very tired as a wave of loneliness engulfed her. Who could she talk to?
She pulled out her phone – the phone that Martha had said was from the Dark Ages. But she didn’t want to change it; it had pictures of her and Mahalia and she still hadn’t deleted Mahalia’s contact details. She scrolled over her friend’s name. What would she tell her about the day? She pressed the green button and heard the number dial. She knew Mahalia’s message off by heart but still had a weird little shiver as she heard her friend’s voice:
‘Hi, it’s Mahalia! Just leave me a message and I’ll get back to you!’ There was a gap here and Mahalia giggled before adding, ‘Ciao!’
Livy threw herself on her bed. She lay quite still for a moment, staring at the ceiling before turning on to her side.
On the floor next to her bed, her mother had put a box of her books that must have been put in the wrong room in the chaos of their move. Livy could see the book that the man who had introduced himself as Mr Hopkins had given her.
Consider it a message from a distant friend.
It was such an odd thing to say, and yet she felt that the man understood she needed such a message desperately.
She pulled the book out of the box and traced the shape of the seagull with her finger. Was this book really meant to make her feel better?
She read the first page and sighed. No – just some weird story about a seagull. The book was old and useless, nothing special. It couldn’t possibly help her deal with the way her life had been altered.
She caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. Something drifted past the window, too slow for a bird. She glanced up and just caught a blob of red against the darkening sky as it went out of view.
Tom’s balloon!
Livy pushed the book to one side, jumped off the bed and threw open the window. The chill of the evening air caught at her throat and made her feel light-headed. She pushed her face into the dark air but couldn’t see the balloon. She dragged her chair to the window, her pulse racing, climbed up and leant right out.
Floodlights and Sentinels, clouds banked up high and expectant like an audience. But what were they waiting for? As she pulled her legs on to the ledge and twisted her torso to find a handhold on the window frame, she had an extraordinary feeling of weightlessness as if, were she to carry on pulling herself through the window, she could get on to the sloping roof at the side.
Yes. She could swing her legs round, use the side of the window to steady herself and then climb quickly up to the roof. And now. Look! Here she was, clinging on to the chimney pots! Looking out across the Court of Sentinels. She could see the shattered window of the Temple.
‘Whoooo!’ she cried out to the sky. She let go of the chimney pots and raised her arms like wings. ‘I’m a Sentinel!’
She laughed. It was such a strange feeling, this bubbling up of air in her chest. She hadn’t felt like this for so long, not since she could laugh with Mahalia about how she would tell that boy with the black spiky hair that he was ‘the one’.
But she never did get to tell him.
Livy saw the balloon. It was bobbing along the roof of Temple College towards the Sentinel who guarded the tower. The White Tower.
A gust of wind whipped her hair across her face. A second later, the wind had moved along the spine of the roof and caught the balloon. It floated up and hovered a few feet above the tiles.
Livy had two options: she could climb back down into her room or she could walk along the roofs of these narrow little houses until they joined the outer wall of Temple College. She scanned the roofscape. Would it be that hard?
She could hear sirens screaming and the slow growl of London traffic. The air was cold, now, and she blew on her fingertips. They were tingling just as they had when she had first arrived at Temple College for her interview.
She watched the balloon. If she was going to go, it would have to be now because in a few more seconds it would float off across the Court of Sentinels towards the Temple.
She ran and, as she ran: she no longer had to watch her step or feel for the tiles under her feet. All she had to do was cut thr
ough the air as if she were the blade of a sword or the edge of a bird’s wing.
The balloon was up ahead, held still in the folds of stone-carved wings.
Without realizing, she had run towards the Sentinel and now she, too, was on the roof of the White Tower. It was flat here, the roof beneath her feet was covered with lead; she could feel the spine where the metal folded over itself beneath her feet. The circle of dull metal was surrounded by a shallow gulley and a wall of three bricks in height. She looked back towards her open bedroom window and her head began to spin. How had she got here so easily?
She reached out towards the stone figure to steady herself and touched the edge of the broken wing.
‘Who did this to you?’ Livy asked the blank carved face. ‘Does it mean that you can’t fly?’
This close, the Sentinel was much taller than it had appeared from the ground, even from Dr Smythe’s study. She thought that she could easily sit beneath what remained of his broken wing. She grabbed at one of the spines of the feathers and swung herself round so that she could look up at the face.
‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t mean to be rough.’
She wasn’t sure why she spoke, but it seemed that she shouldn’t treat him just like a tile on a roof, scrambling over him without a care. Of course, he was stone, she told herself, but there was something about that face that seemed so lifelike that she didn’t want to think he was no more than a flagstone.
‘You should be alive,’ she whispered, and, without thinking, she stood on tiptoe and reached up to stroke the Sentinel’s beautiful stone cheek. She thought she saw the Sentinel shiver at her touch.
Despite the chill in the dark night air, the stone was warm, like skin.
The heat of the Sentinel made her realize that she was cold. She tucked herself under its wing and stared across the river, made herself see what he saw. How would it feel to have her face always turned in the direction of the setting sun? If she were carved from stone, would she feel the heat of the sun in summer? Would frost make her carved lips crack in winter? She shivered. It was getting colder. She leant back against the Sentinel’s stone gown and immediately felt the chill leave her shoulders.
Soft blurry light from the embankment turned the trees into glowing lollipops. Livy rested her head against the carved folds of the Sentinel’s robes. It seemed as is if she was being told things of such importance that she had to listen very carefully.
It is time . . . That was what he said, she was sure. And she felt as though those words had been floating here for hundreds of years.
‘Of course,’ she whispered.
She felt herself stand up once more.
She stepped forwards and climbed up on to the parapet that ran round the roof of the tower.
The bricks were hardly wide enough for her feet; as she wiggled her toes forward she remembered the summer her father had taught her to dive. They had sat together on the side of the pool. Her father had told her to put her arms above her head and then bend over so that her arms and head were between her knees. And then he had gently tapped her on the back, and she had rolled forwards into the cool water. She could still remember the shiver of delight as she realized the very instant that it was too late and she couldn’t step back from the edge.
It was so simple. She felt the building beneath her feet, immense and solid, but, as she sensed in that moment, no more solid than the air.
Yes.
That was what the Sentinel – because it was the Sentinel, she was sure – was telling her. She looked up at the impassive face, high forehead and full expressive lips. Those large stone eyes under half-closed lids stared ahead and lichen bloomed on the high cheekbones. There were no words from those lips, of course: the mouth was still. But what she heard, deep in the recesses of her mind, was a language, nonetheless. It was the sound of wings beating, the rush of air through the lungs.
Livy gulped the night deep into her chest and felt how the air was not held in her lungs, but was absorbed into every part of her body. She felt herself dissolve the weight of her body and mix herself with the air.
Should she?
Putting one foot back up on to the ledge, then the other, Livy steadied herself as she stood up. She put one foot forward now, into the air, as if a bridge had appeared before her. Livy smiled and thought about the boy in the window and how she had been worried when he had looked so serene. How stupid she had been! Of course the boy would be happy standing on top of the tower; he only had to step forwards and the air would support him. She, too, would step into the air, would feel it become solid under her feet.
Livy looked back at the Sentinel. He looked so noble, so brave, so sure. He seemed entirely alive and weightless even though he was cut from stone.
The air swept up from the ground below. She felt it climb up her body, move over her and through her. It became solid and she knew she could lean against it, tipping even further forwards. It was as if her body was dissolving into the air. The feeling of being both lighter than the air, but somehow the very air itself made the blood jump in her veins.
‘I don’t need wings,’ she laughed, ‘or clouds to step on.’
Livy put her arms out in front of her.
She closed her eyes – one breath more – and stepped forwards.
She cried out as she felt a sharp tug on her arm.
What was she doing?
She looked down. Mistake. Her right foot hung in the air high above the flagstones. She had stepped forwards, transferred all her weight and felt the air support her. Hadn’t she? And yet here she was, in the split second after it was too late to step back!
And now, as she hung in the air, like a puppet held by a single string, she could feel the air collapse beneath her.
She could hear herself breathing, a ragged sound as if she couldn’t get the air into her lungs fast enough. And the air tasted like burning metal. It made her eyes water.
And then she felt herself pulled backwards with such force that she fell off the parapet on to the grey lead of the roof.
The cool disc of the moon regarded her with a haughty disdain.
A sly wind had picked up and she felt suddenly cold, unable to stop her teeth chattering. She crawled across the roof and pressed herself to the Sentinel’s stone gown, but it did not warm her. She felt unbalanced, as if she were again in that moment where she had tipped too far forwards and would surely fall.
‘What was I thinking?’ she said, blowing into her hands to try and warm them. She stood up and stamped her feet. She should go. She should never have come. Livy edged her way around the back of the Sentinel, climbed on to the parapet and dropped down on to the outer wall of Temple College. This part was easy because the wall was wide. But when she got to where she must drop down on to the narrow roofs of the houses in the street behind, even though her open window was in sight, she froze. How had she got up here? And how would she get back down? Livy hung her feet over the edge and gingerly felt for the tiles below. Once she was on the spine of the roof, she took her time, inching forwards over the curved tiles, walking with her arms out like a tightrope walker. She clung to every chimney pot, hardly daring to let go and continue her journey.
But getting down to the window was the worst part. She had to be able to slide down the tiles and then hang on to the window to stop herself falling to the street below. She sat clinging on to the chimney pot and thought about whether it would be better to wait in the cold until morning came and then shout down to someone in the street to help her. But she looked up and kept her eyes on the moon, letting her feet find the way as she slid down to her window.
She almost slipped, caught herself just in time.
Hours later Livy woke with a start, flung out her arms as if she were falling. Grey morning light filled her tiny bedroom. She wasn’t falling, she was lying in her bed.
‘Liveee! Liveeeee! You must wake up. You must look with your eyes!’
‘No, Tom.’ Livy groaned, pressing her heavy he
ad deeper into the pillow. ‘Leave me alone. I’m sleeping.’
‘But you must see!’
Livy felt a weight moving over her legs and stomach, and felt Tom’s hot little hands on her face as he tried to prise open her eyelids.
‘Go away, you annoying boy!’ she cried. ‘I don’t want to see anything! I want to sleep!’
He sat back on her chest, which made it even harder to breathe.
She opened one eye. ‘What?’
‘My balloon!’ Tom looked overjoyed. In his hand was the string of his balloon. He tugged it and the balloon danced.
‘Where did you get that?’ She tried to sound puzzled when clearly her mother had just got him another balloon while he was asleep.
‘It was outside.’
She frowned when she saw that someone had tied a small stone to the bottom of the string. And around the stone, loops of red thread.
‘Was the balloon on your windowsill?’ She forced herself to talk to Tom.
He nodded slowly.
‘When you woke up?’
Tom’s eyes were like big round buttons, his face serious.
‘But who could have done that?’
‘Mummy says that she doesn’t know. So it’s probably Count Zacha. He does lots of secret and powerful things,’ Tom said wisely. ‘He is my friend and he said he would find my balloon.’
‘That’s very kind of him,’ Livy murmured.
Her father roared up the stairs, ‘Livy! Get up!’
Tom tugged on his balloon once more. ‘You must get up. I heard Daddy say it to Mummy too.’
‘Well, move then, you little idiot!’ Livy pushed his body away.
Tom slid off the bed, carefully pulling his balloon along in the air behind him.
‘Livy!’ Her mother’s voice now. ‘Are you up?’
Her head heavy, she heaved herself into a sitting position. As she did, the book with the seagull on the cover fell to the floor. She picked it up and put it on her bedside table. She would have liked to stay in bed and read whatever was written inside, however useless it might be. Even reading The Adventures of Count Zacha would be better than having to go to Temple College to feel stupid and lost.
The White Tower Page 6