We Used to Be Kings Read online

  Our feet tap on the floor, we put our hands on our knees to stop them.

  I want to pee.

  Already?

  Mr Stride takes off his glasses.

  ‘What was that?’

  I need to—

  Nothing.

  ‘Do you need the toilet?’

  Yes.

  No.

  He closes his file and knocks it on the table.

  ‘So . . . now you are eighteen.’

  He is.

  I am.

  ‘Do you know what happens next?’

  We’re leaving?

  Dr Smith shakes his head. Mr Stride smiles.

  I don’t think he means it.

  I know.

  Mrs Unster comes back and sits beside us.

  ‘You can’t stay any longer,’ she says.

  We know.

  We’re leaving.

  ‘Yes.’

  We’re going home.

  ‘No.’

  What?

  What?

  ‘No . . . you being transferred.’

  Transferred?

  What does that mean?

  It means they’re going to let us go.

  Yes!

  But then they’re going to lock us up again.

  Oh.

  ‘You’ll be transferred tomorrow.’

  Why?

  ‘Because you still misbehave,’ she says.

  We don’t.

  We’ve got better.

  She shakes her head, makes her chins wobble. ‘How you say that? I hear you last night. I hear you talk, I hear you through the floorboards. I hear you make funny noise. I see you smash the light.’

  But we were only bombing—

  I told him to stop.

  ‘You see? Who you tell to stop?’

  . . . Him.

  Me.

  ‘Who?’

  —

  Frost.

  Good answer.

  Thanks.

  Dr Smith leans forward and puts his head in his hands.

  Did I do something wrong?

  ‘Stop this!’ Mr Stride raps his knuckles on the table.

  Sorry.

  We’re very sorry.

  ‘Tomorrow you will be transferred.’

  Why?

  ‘Because you’re eighteen.’

  But I’m only ten.

  They look at each other and shake their heads.

  ‘Tom.’ Dr Smith stands up, walks around the table towards us. ‘Tom, we need to try something different, something that will take Jack away.’

  ‘Alternative therapy,’ says Mr Stride.

  What’s that?

  —

  What’s alter—

  It doesn’t matter.

  But—

  We stand up, put our hand on our suitcase.

  What about Dr Watts?

  ‘What about Dr Watts?’

  He hasn’t said anything.

  ‘I concur,’ says Dr Watts.

  What does that mean?

  It means he agrees.

  We pick up our suitcase. Mrs Unster goes to hold our arm, but we pull it away.

  ‘Be calm,’ she says.

  Why did you tell them we bombed Hamburg?

  ‘But—’

  Why did you tell them we bombed Berlin?

  We run for the door. Our hands slip on the knob as we try to open it. Mrs Unster runs after us. Her face turns red and a blue vein starts to bulge out of her neck. We flail our arms like an octopus. She reaches for our wrist.

  ‘You talk. You damage. You misbehave.’

  The door springs open, two men in blue coats run in. We barge between them, knock them against the door and go out into the corridor. We run down the hall, our suitcase bangs against the walls and our knee. The walls and doors pass so quickly that they turn into a blur except for the door at the end.

  Hurry up.

  I’m trying.

  We run out into the yard. The sun shines bright and blinds us.

  This way.

  This way.

  We run around in circles.

  Men in blue coats seem to jump out of the bushes, hold their arms out wide like they’re trying to scare sheep. We run around the side of the house towards the car park.

  In here.

  Where?

  Here.

  We crouch down behind the bins by the kitchen. Footsteps come around the corner.

  ‘They wouldn’t make it across there.’

  We hold our breath, see the shoes stop by our side.

  ‘In here.’

  The bins are pulled away one by one until we are left alone against the wall. We wrap our hands around a drainpipe. They pull at our waist, bits of paint and rust fall down on our head. Mrs Unster pushes the men in blue coats out of the way. She screws up her forehead and stares into our eyes like she can see something inside.

  ‘Calm down,’ she says. ‘You calm down.’

  We try to breathe and talk at the same time.

  We thought . . .

  We thought . . .

  Our blood bumps in our chest, in our hands, in our head.

  We thought we were leaving.

  ‘I know.’

  She slides her fingers between ours. One by one she peels our fingers away from the drainpipe. We close our eyes.

  To stop us crying?

  To imagine we are somewhere else.

  We should be in the car going through the lanes, grabbing sticks from the hedges, catching air with our mouths. We should be getting out at the main road.

  Because we like walking?

  So they don’t see where we’re going. We could thumb a lift. We could get a taxi. We could get on an aeroplane and go where no one knows about us, all the things that happened to us, all the things we are supposed to have done.

  Are we giving up?

  We can’t.

  Why not?

  Because.

  Because what?

  Because they’re going to take you away.

  We reach down for our suitcase and swing it around. It misses Mrs Unster and smashes against the wall. The buckle breaks, the lid flips open and everything is quiet, everything is slow, as our rockets and planes fly though the air. We watch them climb high in the sky. We wish we were pilots, we wish we were cosmonauts, flying up over the walls towards the sun. We’d go up through the atmosphere, jettison the booster rockets, make ourselves lighter, make ourselves faster. We would keep going. We would never look back. But our rockets and planes have started to slow, until for a second they stop and float in mid-air. Their propellers have stopped turning, the fuel has drained from their engines, their tails flip up and their noses turn down. Our back slides down the drainpipe. Our heart is thudding and our head is howling as our rockets and planes dive like swallows towards the ground.

  We slide down onto our knees and screw up our eyes. Everything is black, except for smoke trails screeching a line through the middle of our head. We rock backwards and forwards, try to make the noise go away. We hear the sound of someone crying, open our eyes and realise that it is us.

  ‘Tom.’

  We see a pair of brown shoes. Dr Smith crouches down by our side. We look up at him, he blinks, wipes his eyes with his finger. He reaches behind him, picks up our Hawker and holds it in front of us. The windows are misty, the Union Jacks are blurred like the Hawker is flying towards us through fog. We wipe our tears on our sleeve. Dr Smith puts his hand on our shoulder.

  ‘Any damage, Tom?’

  We take the plane and turn it over in our hands.

  —

  —

  Dr Smith edges closer. ‘Tom, is there any damage?’ We feel his breath in our ear.

  The Hawker has scratches on its wings and one of the tyres is missing but we think we lost that on its last mission. We check everything else is in place.

  Propellers?

  Check.

  Rudder?

  Check.

  Guns?

  Check.

>   Bombs?

  One’s missing.

  Let me see. It’s OK . . . it wasn’t in the box when we made it.

  We give the Hawker to Dr Smith. He puts it on the ground and hands us our Lancaster.

  Propellers?

  Check.

  Rudder?

  Check.

  Dr Smith gets up and walks behind a bin.

  ‘Tom,’ he says, ‘I think you might need to look at this one.’ He hands us Soyuz 11.

  Booster rockets?

  Check.

  Capsule?

  Dented.

  Not cracked?

  I don’t think so.

  Soyuz 11 has a dent just above the hatch door. We open and close it; it is still sealed tight, no poisonous gases can get in, no air can get out.

  So it’s OK?

  Yes, it’s OK.

  —

  —

  I’m sorry.

  —

  I’m sorry I bombed Hamburg.

  It’s OK.

  —

  We close our eyes, bury our head in our arm and try to block out the sun, and the sound of boys shouting and screaming, and cutlery crashing, and chairs screeching across the canteen floor. But it doesn’t matter how hard we try to block them out – we can’t because the noises are already locked inside.

  We feel a hand on our shoulder and look up. Dr Smith kneels down in front of us with our book in his hands.

  ‘It’s OK, Tom,’ he says. ‘It’s OK, we can stay here a while.’

  We hear the shuffle of shoes. Dr Smith looks back over his shoulder as Mrs Unster and the men in blue coats move away.

  —

  —

  I’m sorry.

  —

  I’m sorry I bombed Berlin.

  It’s not your fault.

  —

  It’s not our fault. It’s not our fault we’re here, it’s not Dr Smith’s fault either. We didn’t know it would be like this. We wouldn’t have bombed Berlin if we thought it was going to start a war.

  Dr Smith puts our book on our lap. We sniff and shake our head as he gently places his hand on our shoulder.

  ‘It’s OK, Tom,’ he whispers. ‘Just read . . . You have to keep reading.’ He opens our book. His finger shakes as he points at the top of a page. ‘There,’ he says. ‘Start there.’

  We blink, try to read, but the words and pictures are blurred like they have been splattered by rain. We wipe our tears on our arm. Dr Smith sits down next to us against the wall. We feel his body against ours as he takes a deep breath.

  ‘Just read, Tom. Just read.’

  The sun comes out, shines over the wall, across the car park onto the bins and all the things in this place that we thought we’d left behind.

  Dr Smith taps the page.

  We look down at our book and read about the last summer when we were home.

  Summer 1971

  It was hot, but I was cold the day after Jack died. I was staying with Auntie Jean. She wasn’t a real auntie, she was just a neighbour who used to come round our house a lot and talk to Mum. She was old and said the same things over and over again about her husband, Eric. Eric was a policeman and he was dead.

  But we didn’t kill him.

  No.

  And we—

  Are you going to interrupt all the time?

  —

  —

  Sorry.

  —

  —

  I wasn’t sure how long I was going to stay with her. She said it depended on the authorities, but I thought it was because she wasn’t sure if there was enough room for me to live amongst all her newspapers. They were piled high in every room I was allowed in and even higher in the ones I wasn’t. She spent all day in her sitting room reading them, tapping her foot to the songs on the radio. Since her Eric had died, Auntie Jean couldn’t afford a telly.

  I stood at the window and watched the firemen carry their ladders away from my house, across the path to the fire engines parked on the kerb. They strapped them to the top, got down and turned the crank. The hoses snaked away through the grass with water spurting from their nozzles.

  Auntie Jean put her hand on my shoulder, moved her fingers up and down like she was playing the piano. The paperboy walked along the path with his head down, reading the front page. He stopped and looked up at my house. Auntie Jean’s fingers wriggled like spiders.

  ‘Hurry up. Hurry up.’

  The paperboy folded the paper like he had heard her, and Auntie Jean rushed out into the hall. I had only been with her for one day but already I knew that reading about other people’s lives was the best part of hers.

  She came back in, sat down in her chair and, while I watched the firemen lift the covers from the drains and brush the water away, she sat behind me making tutting noises like a rabbit munching on a cabbage.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  She looked over the top of her paper.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. She closed the paper and folded it in half.

  ‘Show me,’ I said.

  ‘It’s nothing . . . really . . . Gosh . . . is that the time already?’ She turned the radio off, tucked the paper under her arm and went into the kitchen.

  Outside the firemen were climbing into their cabs and closing the doors. The engines started to rumble and the rumble rattled the windows. I rested my head against the glass like I did on the bus. My head droned, my teeth started to vibrate. Smoke blew out the exhausts and I watched as the fire engines pulled away. They went up to the top of the hill, turned around and came back down again. At the end of the road I saw their brake lights shine bright, then disappear.

  I was alone, all I could hear was the tick of the clock and a high-pitched whine in my head.

  A group of people huddled together outside in the road: Mr Thomas, Mrs Holloway and Mrs Green – people I’d waved at but never spoken to. Three more people walked slowly along the pavement towards them: a man with a black dog, a lady with a shopping bag, a girl with a skipping rope – people I’d never seen. They stood together in a circle with their arms folded, heads nodding, fingers pointing in the direction of my house. Then they saw me looking and one by one they disappeared.

  My head was heavy and fuzzy like it wasn’t connected to my body. I found myself floating through Auntie Jean’s hallway and out of her front door.

  The sun was right above me and shone bright, but all I could see were circles of purple and black in front of my eyes. I walked up her front path and headed up our hill, but I had only got halfway before I heard a whining noise and realised it was me. I turned around and looked down at our house. Our gate had fallen down and the garden fence had gone and the path led to a black hole that used to be our front door. All the windows were black, and where they were not black they were smashed. They stared at me with dirty smoke lines pulling like eyebrows up to the roof. And no matter how long I looked, how hard I stared back, I could not see my reflection or anyone else inside. I felt chicken bumps on my skin. The newspapers said it was the hottest summer but no matter how much I hugged myself I couldn’t get warm.

  I didn’t want to go back down but I knew I couldn’t stay staring at our house all day. Auntie Jean came out and met me on the path that joined our house to hers. She put her arm around me and looked at me with her head on one side like a dog.

  ‘Oh, my love,’ she said. ‘I wondered where you’d gone.’ I shivered like there was snow in my veins. She hugged me tighter, rubbed my arms so fast she gave me a Chinese burn. She put her head on my shoulder, I put mine on hers. She used to be taller than me, but now we were the same size. We used to stand, back to back, like I did with Jack. When I was nine I was up to her shoulders, when I was eleven I was up to her earlobes. I didn’t know it was because she was shrinking as quickly as I grew.

  We looked back at our houses. Auntie Jean shook her head. I could tell she was wondering how the fire hadn’t burned through our walls and into hers.

  She let go of me. She had t
ears magnified by her glasses that bulged out of her eyes and glistened on her cheeks. I shivered again.

  ‘It’s the shock,’ she said. ‘I had the same with my Eric.’

  I felt a lump in my throat, so big I couldn’t speak or breathe. I knew Auntie Jean was only trying to be kind, I knew she thought it would help, but her Eric and Jack dying wasn’t the same. Her Eric was ninety-two, Jack was only ten.

  I went to bed, but I should have been outside climbing the hill with Jack, not trying to sleep in my football kit in the middle of the afternoon. I lay and stared up at the ceiling. Pictures of Jack and ambulances and fire engines flashed through my head. And when I turned over I could see them doing exactly the same. I remembered what Mum said, that sometimes writing things down made her feel better. I picked up a pen and our book and tried to write what had happened. But the ambulances kept crashing, the fire-engine lights kept flashing and our house kept burning and in the middle of the rubble and metal I kept seeing Jack.

  I soon gave up. If I couldn’t write our book I had to write something else.

  I crept down the stairs, looked through a crack in the door. Auntie Jean was squinting through her glasses, knitting at the end of the sofa.

  I went into the room.

  ‘I want to write an obituary,’ I said.

  ‘Tom!’ Her needles dropped into her lap. A ball of blue wool fell off the edge of the settee and rolled across the floor. Auntie Jean put her hand on her heart. ‘For a little boy you’re very quiet on the stairs.’

  I told her I was sorry, that everything seemed so quiet, that even the sound of my own voice seemed to make me jump since Jack had died. I picked up the ball of wool and gave it to her. She moved a knitting pattern out of the way and I sat down beside her.

  ‘So, my love,’ she said. ‘What was it you wanted?’

  ‘I want to write an obituary,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know what to write.’

  She put her arm around me.

  ‘It’s Deaths,’ she said. ‘Next year you write the obituary, this year it goes in the column titled Deaths.’

  I screwed up my eyes, my heart bumped hard and my throat throbbed and ached. I started to unfold the piece of paper and showed her this:

  Auntie Jean shook her head.

  ‘I don’t think they’ll take pictures, my love.’

  We sat in silence and listened to the putt-putt-putt sound of Mr Green’s lawnmower in the distance. Auntie Jean sniffed, reached up under the sleeve of her dress like she was trying to scratch an itch. A tear ran down her nose and got stuck on the rim of her glasses. I saw my reflection in them: my blond hair, my brown skin, my red eyes, my Arsenal football shirt. I leant in closer, felt hot and cold at the same time. I tried to swallow but wanted to be sick, because where Jack always used to be sitting in his Chelsea kit there was now an empty space.