Ctrl-Z

by Andrew Norriss

  So, when he found a box of fireworks in the back of the cupboard in the dining room that his father used as an office, there was never any doubt about what Alex would do with them. He only had to look at the box to see they were begging to be set off.

  It was a Saturday, and Alex had just set the time on his computer and collected the box from its hiding place when Callum appeared at the front door.

  ‘We’re going down to the park,’ he said, gesturing to the pavement where he had left Lilly in her wheelchair, holding Mojo the dog on a lead. ‘Lilly wants to feed the ducks and says can you come too.’

  ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ said Alex, and showed his friend the fireworks. ‘Dad’s gone to a conference and Mum’s not back for an hour, so we can let them off now. In the garden!’

  ‘If you let them off,’ said Callum, ‘won’t your dad notice they’ve gone?’

  ‘They won’t be gone, will they!’ Alex reminded him. ‘We fire them off, I press Ctrl‐Z and they’re back in the box in the cupboard!’

  ‘Yes…’ said Callum doubtfully. It was the same every time Alex suggested something like this. He would hesitate and wonder if it was safe. And fireworks definitely weren’t safe. Everyone knew that.

  ‘I’m not sure if Lilly –’

  ‘Lilly’ll be fine!’ Alex interrupted him confidently. ‘She’ll like the fireworks and afterwards she won’t remember, will she? Neither of you will.’

  Callum wheeled Lilly round to the back of the house, Alex locked Mojo in the kitchen and the two boys picked up a couple of fireworks out of the box and took them down the garden. The results were, to be honest, a little disappointing. Fireworks look their best at night when the coloured flames shine out against the dark, but in the middle of a summer’s afternoon it was difficult to see anything at all. The fireworks made quite a bit of noise as well, and Alex knew it wouldn’t be long before someone like Mr Kowalski came round to complain.

  ‘You should try this one next,’ Lilly told them. She had taken the largest firework from the bottom of the box and passed it to Callum. It was called The Mortar and was about the size of a large tin can on a stick. The instructions said to place the stick firmly in the ground, light the fuse and stand well back, so Alex took it down to the bottom of the garden, pushed the stick firmly into the soil and then Callum lit the blue touchpaper and they both ran back to stand by Lilly on the patio.

  Nothing happened. They waited for nearly a minute, but still nothing happened.

  ‘It must have gone out,’ said Alex, and he was heading down the garden with the matches to light it again when Callum stopped him.

  ‘You’re not supposed to go back to a firework once you’ve lit it,’ he said. ‘You have to wait.’

  ‘How long for?’ asked Alex. ‘I think at least an hour,’ said Callum. ‘You don’t want to have it explode in your face, do you?’

  ‘I need a drink,’ said Lilly, and Alex opened the back door so that she could wheel herself into the kitchen.

  He had forgotten about Mojo. Locked inside the house, the dog knew that he had been missing out on all the excitement and now that he was out in the open, he was determined to make the most of it.

  Mojo’s favourite games usually involved either a ball or a stick, and racing down the garden he found a stick in the earth at the far edge of the lawn. Perfect! He grabbed it in his teeth and did what all sensible dogs do with a stick – he carried it back to his master.

  Callum had been right when he told Alex that you should never go back to a firework once you had lit it. The blue touchpaper of The Mortar had been slightly damp, but it was still smouldering. Now, with the air blowing past it as Mojo raced down the garden it suddenly ignited and a moment later balls of phosphorous began bursting from the can at the end of the stick.

  If The Mortar had been stuck in the ground, the balls of fire would have shot up into the air, but because Mojo was holding the stick in his teeth, they shot out sideways. The first of them travelled across the ground at about knee height, straight towards Callum.

  Callum squeaked in panic and stepped to one side, but there were already others following. In a series of dazzling colours, they shot out from the firework to splatter all over the garden. One of them went into the fence, another flew over the fence to land on top of Mr Kowalski’s shed, and two more flew towards the house. The first of them bounced harmlessly off the brick, but the other went straight through the open back door into the kitchen.

  There was a faint whoompf as the burning ball landed in a bowl of paraffin that Mrs Howard had been using to soak the grease from a section of engine mounting, and ignited. The bowl was actually an old ice‐cream tub, and two seconds later, one side of the tub melted in the heat of the flames and the paraffin, still alight, poured out on to the floor.

  The pool of fire spread rapidly from the back door to the door that led into the hall and then over towards the sink, where Lilly was in her wheelchair, getting herself a drink. The flickering blue flames meant she was trapped, Alex realized.

  The burning paraffin cut her off from both the back door and the door to the hallway and there was no way out. She looked across at Alex. She didn’t say anything, but her eyes were wide and frightened.

  By now the newspaper Mrs Howard had placed under the tub of paraffin to catch any drips was alight as well and burning fiercely in the doorway. There was a pop as something in one of the kitchen cupboards exploded in the heat and there were more flames licking up the varnish on the door to the hall.

  What Alex needed to do was press Ctrl‐Z, but his computer was in the dining room. He had left it there when he collected the fireworks – ready and set with the time before he started so that all he had to do was walk in and press Ctrl‐Z – and now he couldn’t get to it without walking through burning paraffin. There was no other way into the house. The front door was locked and there were no windows open. The only way to the dining room was through the knee‐high flames and he didn’t think he could do it. He didn’t even have shoes on…

  Callum appeared, white‐faced, beside Alex. The boys watched, frozen, as the flames moved across the floor until they were lapping at the wheels of Lilly’s chair. She screamed.

  ‘Hang on!’ said Callum. ‘I’m coming…’

  Alex pulled him back. It might sound callous, but he knew the important thing was not to rescue Lilly, but to get through to his computer. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, and was about to step into the fire when a hand descended on his shoulder and pulled him back.

  It was Mr Kowalski, old Mr Kowalski with his unshaven chin and his cardigan with the holes in the elbows, and he was pushing both boys away from the door.

  ‘Stay back,’ he said gruffly. ‘Both of you!’ And then he was walking into the kitchen, taking no more notice of the flames around his feet than if he were wading through a patch of long grass, and he was scooping Lilly up and out of the wheelchair and carrying her in his arms with long, careful strides back through the door and out into the garden and safety.

  ‘Everything OK,’ he was murmuring to her, his voice nothing like the rough tones he normally used. ‘Everything all right. No worry…’ One hand was stroking her hair and he looked carefully along her body. ‘You hurt?’

  Lilly shook her head. ‘Mr Kowalski,’ said Callum, ‘your trousers are on fire.’

  Some of the burning paraffin had splashed up on to Mr Kowalski’s clothes and little flames were spotted over his shoes and the bottom half of his trousers. Mr Kowalski ignored them as he turned to Alex.

  ‘Go next door. Quick,’ he said. ‘Phone fire brigade.’ Then he placed Lilly carefully on the grass before beating out the flames on his trousers with his hands.

  Alex ran along the side of the house, his heart pounding, and when he got to the front, did what he realized he ought to have done when the fire first started. He picked up a large rock from the front garden and threw it as hard as he could towards the sitting‐room window. The glass shattered, Alex reached in through the
hole to undo the catch, opened the window and climbed inside.

  In the hallway he could see that some of the paraffin had leaked under the kitchen door and was burning on the hall carpet, but he ignored it and ran into the dining room. The computer was sitting on the table and all he had to do was reach out to it…

  … and press Ctrl‐Z.

  ‘We’re going down to the park,’ said Callum, gesturing to the pavement where he had left Lilly in her wheelchair, holding Mojo the dog on a lead.

  ‘Lilly wants to feed the ducks and says can you come too.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Alex. ‘Right…’ It was taking him a moment to catch his breath.

  ‘What have you got in there?’ Callum pointed to the box of fireworks Alex was holding.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Alex. ‘I was just… tidying up.’

  ‘Are you coming or not?’ Lilly called from the pavement.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alex. ‘Yes, I’m coming. Definitely.’

  It was one of those times, he thought, when feeding the ducks was about as much excitement as he wanted.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The incident with the fireworks was a sharp reminder to Alex that if he was going to do anything dangerous, he needed to make sure that either he or Callum was standing very close to the Ctrl‐Z button, preferably with a finger poised, ready to push down the moment anything went wrong.

  As it happened, nobody had been hurt, but the more he thought about it the more Alex realized he had been very lucky. If Mr Kowalski had not appeared when he did, if the flames had moved a little closer to Lilly, if he had tried to run across the kitchen and failed… it could all have ended very differently.

  In the days that followed, Alex found he couldn’t stop thinking about it. At odd times during the day pictures of what had happened would flash into his mind and he would find himself going through the whole business again in his head. Try as he might, he couldn’t make the pictures go away and the image that came up most deter‐minedly was of Mr Kowalski. Mr Kowalski pulling him back from the door… Mr Kowalski walking through the flames to scoop Lilly up into his arms … Mr Kowalski with his trousers on fire calmly putting her down on the grass before beating out the flames with his hands…

  Alex had always thought of his neighbour as a grumpy old man who only spoke if he wanted to complain, but he knew now that he had been mistaken. Mr Kowalski might be old and grumpy and shoot at dogs in his garden with an air pistol, but he was more than that. Mr Kowalski was… a hero. On the day the kitchen caught fire he had shown the sort of courage you read about in stories and had walked into the flames to save Lilly’s life at the risk of his own. He probably deserved a medal.

  The trouble was that nobody knew Mr Kowalski was a hero. Not even Mr Kowalski. Alex wanted to tell him how grateful he was for what he had done and how much he admired him, but he couldn’t do anything like that because Mr Kowalski wouldn’t know what he was talking about. How could you say thank you to someone for something they didn’t know they’d done?

  It was Sophie Reynolds who gave him the answer when she came into school two days later and presented him with a cake that she said she had baked herself.

  Sophie had behaved differently to both Alex and Callum ever since that day at the shopping mall. These days, she smiled and said hello when she saw them in the morning, she lent Callum a pen when his own had run out of ink, and she sorted out Alex when he had a problem with his maths. The boys didn’t mind this, but baking him a cake was, Alex thought, going too far and it was quite a relief when Sophie said it was not for him.

  ‘It’s for your mum,’ she said. ‘For what she did on Friday.’

  The previous Friday, driving into town, Alex had seen Sophie and her mother with their car stopped by the side of the road. The bonnet was up and Mrs Reynolds was in her wheelchair, peering anxiously at the engine.

  They had stopped to see if they could help. In the close, most people came to Mrs Howard if anything went wrong with their cars; even if she couldn’t fix it herself, she could almost always tell you what the fault was and what you should do about it. In this case, Alex’s mother had found a loose connection to the battery and dealt with it in a matter of seconds.

  ‘They should have spotted that at the service,’ she told Sophie’s mother as she closed the bonnet. ‘You should come to us next time. It wouldn’t happen where I work.’

  The cake Sophie had made was a large Victoria sponge, lavishly filled with strawberries and cream.

  ‘Mum likes strawberries,’ said Alex. ‘It looks good. Thanks.’ And it was the cake looking so good that gave him his idea.

  He couldn’t say thank you to Mr Kowalski in words because words were no use when you wanted to thank someone for something that had, technically, never happened…

  … But you could bake them a cake.

  Alex made the cake after school the next day. Sophie gave him the recipe and his mother found him the ingredients, though he insisted on doing all the work himself. He wanted it to be his cake, and the result wasn’t bad. He only had to use Ctrl‐Z twice while he was making it – once when he put in the wrong number of eggs and a second time when he forgot to take it out of the oven – but the result was quite tasty. He and Callum tried a slice themselves when it was finished, and then Alex used Ctrl‐Z to go back to before they had eaten it, and took the cake round to number 16.

  It was some time before Mr Kowalski came shuffling along the hall in his slippers to answer the bell, and when he opened the door he frowned down at Alex.

  ‘What you want?’ he demanded. ‘I came to give you this,’ said Alex, holding out the cake.

  ‘This?’ Mr Kowalski looked at the cake and then at Alex. ‘Is some sort of joke?’

  ‘It’s not a joke,’ said Alex patiently. ‘It’s a cake.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Mr Kowalski suspiciously. ‘Why you give me cake?’

  ‘Well, I thought you’d like it,’ said Alex, ‘and I…’ He took a deep breath. ‘I wanted to say sorry. For all the things coming over the fence into your garden. It must have been very annoying, and I wanted to apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused.’

  Mr Kowalski stared at him for a moment, then took the cake and without a word closed the door. Alex didn’t mind. His neighbour could be as grumpy as he liked, it wasn’t going to make any difference to how Alex felt about him.

  And, grumpy or not, Mr Kowalski had at least taken the cake.

  *

  Two hours later Alex was lying upstairs on his bed, listening to his parents downstairs in the kitchen having an argument. They were arguing, as far as he could tell, about whether his mother should apply for a job that was advertised in the paper. His mother thought the job was too far away and didn’t want to spend half her day travelling, and Mr Howard was telling her that when you started out you needed to go for any job you could get.

  They weren’t actually shouting at each other yet, but Alex suspected it was only a matter of time and was wondering whether it was better to go down now or to wait. He was still trying to decide when the front doorbell rang.

  Mr Howard answered it and found Mr Kowalski standing in the porch, though at first he hardly recognized him. Instead of the cardigan he usually wore, with the holes in the elbows, he was dressed in a suit. It was clean, freshly pressed and there was a gold watch chain hanging across the waistcoat. Mr Kowalski looked clean and freshly pressed himself. He had shaved and he was wearing a hat, which he took off when Mr Howard opened the door.

  ‘Apologies if I disturb, Mr Howard,’ he said. ‘Is possible I speak to your son?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Mr Howard, and he called up the stairs. ‘Alex? Down here, please!’ He turned back to Mr Kowalski. ‘Has he done something to annoy you? Because if he has –’

  ‘No, no, he is no trouble.’ Mr Kowalski looked slightly embarrassed. ‘He give me cake.’

  ‘Cake?’ Mr Howard looked puzzled. ‘What… you mean as a joke?’

  ‘Was not a joke,�
� said Mr Kowalski. ‘Was a cake. But I not polite. Very bad manners.’ He looked up as Alex appeared on the stairs and smiled. ‘So I come now to say thank you.’ Still smiling, he clicked his heels and gave Alex a little bow. ‘And to say that cake was… much appreciated.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Alex. ‘Good.’

  ‘And I bring you these.’ Mr Kowalski produced a bag and, reaching inside, took out a cricket ball, three tennis balls, a frisbee and a football. ‘I find them in my garden. They are yours, yes?’

  ‘Yes! That’s great!’ They were all the things that Alex had lost over the fence during the last few months – all, that is, except the football, which seemed to be new. ‘This one isn’t mine,’ he said, passing it back.

  ‘No?’ Mr Kowalski gave a little shrug. ‘You keep it anyway, eh? Play football with your friends!’

  ‘Right,’ said Alex. ‘Thanks very much.’

  ‘Mr Kowalski!’ Alex’s mother had come out of the kitchen. ‘How nice to see you. Would you like a drink?’

  ‘Well…’ Mr Kowalski hesitated. ‘I not want to disturb…’

  ‘Come on!’ Mrs Howard took his arm and led him down the hallway. ‘We haven’t seen you for ages. We don’t often get a chance to talk.’

  Mr Kowalski stayed for a drink, then a second one and then stayed for supper. One way and another it was a surprisingly jolly evening. The four of them sat round the kitchen table and talked. They talked about Alex’s cake, they talked about jobs and work, they talked about cars – and then somehow the conversation came round to Callum and his accidents. Mr Kowalski said that he had had a lot of accidents when he was growing up in Poland and then Mr Howard started talking about things he had done as a boy that were every bit as disastrous as anything Callum had done and Alex found it all very interesting. Best of all, while they were talking, nobody argued about anything.