The Ant Colony Read online

  “Don’t leave me by myself,” I said.

  “Well, come with me then,” he said.

  When we got to his floor, I heard Isabel’s voice from downstairs. “She all right, Country?” she said.

  Sam signalled for me to be quiet and he said, “Yeah, fine. She’ll be asleep any minute.”

  “Where’s that bloody woman got to do you think?” she said, meaning my mum.

  Sam looked at me. “I don’t know, Isabel. I’m going to bed now. Goodnight.”

  “I’ve got a good mind to report her to someone or other.”

  “Not tonight, Isabel.”

  “No, the phones are out. But I should though. I should phone someone tomorrow.”

  I wanted to say maybe there was a reason my mum was out, an emergency or something. I wanted to say she wasn’t a bloody woman. I wanted to say that Isabel should be nicer if she wanted to stay friends with me, and that if she told anyone, I would never, ever speak to her again.

  But I had to keep my mouth shut or I’d get found out.

  Sam opened his door and we crept in without a sound.

  His room was the same size as ours, but tidier and weirdly empty. I thought it was just the darkness hiding things so when he found the torch I borrowed it and moved the beam around the room, looking for stuff. It was like nobody lived there. He had the smallest pile of clothes folded in one corner, a mattress by a window and a book or two. That was it.

  “Where’s all your stuff?” I whispered.

  He’d opened the window at the front and he was trying to see out. He shrugged and took the torch into the kitchen. “It’s all here,” he said.

  I pictured our flat with clothes everywhere and a pile of suitcases and everything falling over itself in the kitchen.

  “I think the front windows are shut,” he said. “I’ll have a look at the back.”

  He opened the window in his kitchen and pointed the torch up. All I could see in the dark was his throat.

  “That one’s open,” he said. “See?” And he pointed. It was a long way away.

  “Is that our kitchen?” I said.

  He was looking at the wall. He wasn’t listening. He said, “I can use the drainpipe that goes between them. That’s the quickest way to do it.”

  “All the way up there?” I said. It wasn’t giving me a good feeling.

  “I guess so.”

  “Maybe I should sleep on Isabel’s sofa.”

  “I’ve lied to her now,” he said. The circle of torchlight bounced while he climbed up on to the windowsill. “And you don’t want to.”

  I didn’t, he was right. Even more now I’d heard what she said when I wasn’t supposed to be listening.

  Sam gave me the torch before he put his top half outside. He was sitting on the windowsill and holding on to the edges. He leaned back to look up and I felt my stomach dropping. I pointed the torch out there for him, to be helpful. He looked into the light and screwed up his eyes.

  “Point it up there,” he said, nodding his head cos he wasn’t letting go with his hands.

  I put one arm out of the window next to him and aimed the torch. The bright circle of it travelled up the side of the building and turned the blackness back to bricks. “Please be careful!” I said.

  “It’s easy,” he told me. “I just have to grab the pipe for a second, then there’s a foothold there, Mick’s windowsill, a bit more pipe and I’m up.”

  He pulled himself out and stood on the outside of his window. All I could see was his legs and his trainers. All I could think was that this was a really bad plan and he was going to fall and maybe die, just cos I wanted to be in my room.

  “Shall we wait for my mum?” I said, but he didn’t hear me. His legs were suddenly only in the top half of the window, and then one foot, and then nothing, just the black, black sky and the quiet flicker of candles in other people’s houses.

  I stood in his empty flat in the dark. I heard a noise above me and I shut my eyes. I imagined the whoosh of his falling body, the crump of him landing far below.

  But it didn’t come.

  Instead I heard his voice and I shone the torch up and he was in, looking out of my kitchen down at me in his. “OK,” he whispered. “You can come up.”

  I looked up out of the window, at the way he’d climbed, and then down at the ground. “Can you believe that?” I said to nobody in particular.

  I made sure his door didn’t close behind me.

  I went as quietly as I could on the stairs. It was easy with a torch. Sam was standing at my door, holding the bag of candles.

  I said, “That was really cool.”

  “Where are your matches? Have you got any?”

  When I opened the loo door to find some, the light of the torch landed on Mum, fast asleep, curled up like a bug in the corner. At the same time, there was a pop in the hallway and the lights came back on. The sudden brightness made me blink and squint.

  Mick was in there too, lying in the empty bath with all his clothes on. He made a groaning noise and opened his eyes. Mum opened hers too and then shut them again. She said, “What time is it?”

  I was still holding the torch and its light looked weak and yellow in the white light of the bulb. I knew that Sam was behind me and I knew that he’d seen.

  “Is she OK?” he said.

  My smile felt weird on my face, like one of those cardboard ones you can hold with a lolly stick.

  All I could think of to say was, “She wasn’t out after all.”

  The Story of My Life Part Three by B Hoban

  Mum met Uncle Paul at the Casino. She told Nancy he was on a roll cos the first things she noticed about him were his suit and his watch and his winter tan. Later she said the suit must’ve been borrowed and the watch and the tan were fakes. She says a lot worse things about him when she’s been drinking, but I never minded Uncle Paul. He was nice to me and when he showed up I didn’t have to be on my own any more, or hardly anyway, cos Mum stopped working again. He didn’t like Mum going to work. I said that to Mum once, but never again cos she just gave me a list of reasons why he was the worst of them all.

  Paul moved into Nancy’s flat, even though it was only supposed to be girls in there. They spent most of their time in our bedroom. I made friends with the family downstairs, which was big and didn’t mind me staying over. We could hear Paul and Mum through the ceiling, but from down there it was funny.

  That family worried about me. I know because they told people when I was there, in that way that grown-ups talk about kids and pretend we can’t hear them. Everyone in that family liked me. I was happy.

  So when Mum said that we were moving to the seaside, just like that, I said I wasn’t going. I sat in the corner of the hall where the wall met the stairs and I cried. Paul gave her this blank, cold look and said he’d be back in two hours to pick us up.

  Mum shouted at me when he’d gone. She said I had no right to talk to Paul like that when he was jut trying to put a better roof over our heads. She said my friends would be glad to see the back of me cos I was there all the bloody time. She stuffed my clothes into bin bags and threw them at the front door while she was shouting.

  I went downstairs to say goodbye, and thank you for having me, and sorry if I was there too much, but there was nobody home.

  We lasted about five minutes in Brighton.

  Paul left us and started going out with a nurse he met at the dentist. He’d been having root canal work done, which sounds gruesome, but Mum said it was far less gross than eyeing someone up while you’re doing it. She also said she wasn’t that bothered. She said she’d had enough of him anyway and that he was starting to get fat.

  We moved back to Nancy’s cos Nancy was going away for a while.

  It was better being just the two of us. About a week after we got there, Mum said to me, “God, you got tall!” like she hadn’t been looking or something.

  Ten (Sam)

  We used to lose power at home all the time. It was never
something that took you by surprise, not really. Everyone I knew had a stash of lamps and candles and torches and batteries. Everyone I knew could make a decent fire in the dark.

  Later, after I’d climbed in Bohemia’s window, I sat in my room in the dark. I suppose it was a welcome thing, to have been in proper blackness again. There was a hush I wasn’t used to, like everything was holding its breath until the lights came back on. My fingers tingled from holding on to the bricks. My whole body had this quiet hum in the middle of it, like a tuning fork, like pure adrenaline.

  I’d climbed up the side of Max’s house a couple of times. Once for a dare and once to prove to my friends that I’d actually done it. Rock climbing was never really my thing at all. Rock climbing centres smell of sweat and other people’s fear, and on a real rock everything takes too long, like putting up shelves. I’m too impatient. The dogs at Max’s barked at me, but nobody paid them any attention because they barked at anything. They’d barked wolf.

  The first time, they barked and yelped themselves crazy, and stood on their hind legs in their enclosure. I took a run up and grabbed the drainpipe a couple of feet above my head. It was a rough stone wall with plenty of good holes and lots of ivy. It was easier than the one I’d just done, not as high up.

  I was never scared of the climbing. I was more scared of getting caught, of Max’s Mum and Dad watching in the dark, their hands on the window, palms flat against the glass.

  I couldn’t get the sight of Cherry and Mick out of my head. The state of them slumped in the bathroom, half dressed, like corpses. And Bohemia, afraid and still smiling, pretending it was nothing.

  She was alone in a way I’d never be.

  I didn’t want to see it. I was way out of my depth in that much aloneness. I was useless. So I left her there.

  I shut the door behind me in my own empty room and I thought about phoning home. I imagined hearing it ring. I knew exactly where it was and exactly how it sounded. It’s dark in there, in the centre of the house, with only the reflection of light on the walls from windows in other rooms. Even on a bright day the tiles on the floor are cold and outside sounds far away.

  I thought about what Mum and Dad would be doing when the phone rang. Dad’s hands covered in soil, his palms thick and dry with it, rich brown in his nails where there used to be white. He’d shout to Mum to pick up because he wouldn’t get his boots off in time. Where would she be? Folding laundry, making a list, reading the newspaper with her glasses low on the bridge of her nose.

  Neither of them would be passed out half naked on a bathroom floor.

  It would mean something to them that the phone call was from me.

  Mum and Dad moved away from London before I was born. They always said that city people who move to the country are never at home. Wherever they are, they miss the things they love about wherever they’re not.

  You fall in love with the spaces and the air, while you pine for the crowds and the movement.

  You learn four hundred and fifty new shades of green, but everyone’s skin is the same colour.

  You crave the lights and the speed and the noise that when you get there are too bright and too fast and too loud.

  Mum said that the things she missed most about the city were the strangers. All the people she travelled to work near, or negotiated busy streets around, or went to the cinema beside. All the people she didn’t see the first time and never saw again. “They make up the landscape,” she said. “You have no idea how precious they are until they’re gone.”

  I liked the things about London they’d have wanted me to like. I loved how fast everything was and how changing.

  I loved strangers and I especially loved being one.

  I liked the fact that everything you needed was just there, around the next corner, at any time of day or night.

  I liked that you could get pretty much anywhere just using your feet.

  I liked graffiti and litter and the smell of eight different takeaways on any given street.

  I liked the way people talked to each other, and the way they didn’t talk to me.

  I liked reading the same mortgage advert for seven stops on the Tube because nobody said you had to look at an actual person.

  I liked that I didn’t have to think about what I’d left behind and how much trouble I was in.

  But at the same time, if I’d had the guts to ring, if I could have talked to them about coming from one place and living in another, here’s what I would say.

  These are the things a country person misses in the city:

  The smell of air. And cow shit (honest). And clothes that have dried outside in the sun.

  The soothing properties of the colour green.

  The incessant whisper of trees.

  The size of the sky.

  That a river is never the same twice and is always a surprise in the morning.

  How loud birds can actually be.

  That what you know is there, however much you didn’t know it when you had the chance.

  These are the things that were glowing and flashing and beeping and whirring when everyone woke up the next morning. I only know because Steve did a tour of the place, counting all the appliances. He came to the door, banged on it like the police, started talking before I got it open, walked in before I asked him. He was this ball of energy and it was early.

  “What are you doing?” I said when he started opening things in the kitchen, sniffing the milk.

  “I was going to make you some coffee.”

  “I don’t drink coffee.”

  He looked at me like this was a possibility he had never in all his life considered. “I can’t even open my eyes without coffee,” he said.

  He’d made a list and he showed it to me. He read it out loud while I tried to wake up.

  One amp for an electric guitar (Steve’s), four stereos, three iPods (on charge), one computer, two laptops, three modems, three telephones, two answer machines, two mobiles (on charge), two TVs, one fish tank (Mick’s), two microwaves, four ovens and their timers, four radios, two alarm clocks, two fridge freezers, one boiler, one electric blanket (Isabel’s), eight lamps and one portable sunbed (Steve’s).

  It was only one house. He said it didn’t even include the flat where Cherry and the girl lived because they wouldn’t let him in. He couldn’t believe there had to be that much plugged in. He said we had to do something about how much power we were wasting.

  He said, “I don’t know where to start.”

  Then he poked around in my room. “Haven’t you got anything electric?” he said. “Not even a radio?”

  I shook my head. “Not here,” I said.

  While he was talking, I thought again about how the quiet and dark of the power cut had reminded me of home. Black at night, every night. It made me remember that the city was built on the same land I was used to. Underneath the streets somewhere were the same soil and rocks and stretches of water. With the power, everything came back on in our one house and all the countless other houses around it, and you could forget about the underneath again.

  “Imagine,” I said, “how easily it might just turn back to the land if a power cut lasted forever, if nothing ever switched back on again.”

  “What are you on about?” Steve said, looking up from his list.

  “About everything being the same underneath, however you try to disguise it,” I said.

  It was the most I’d ever said to him. I don’t think he was that impressed.

  The Story of My Life Part Four by B Hoban

  After Paul, Mum met Ray and I wish she hadn’t. Ray wasn’t very nice to her, or me, or even Nancy whose house he was always in. In the end, Nancy and Mum had a big fight and she made us leave. Nancy said to me she was really sorry but there was nothing more she could do. I didn’t like the sound of her saying that.

  Ray had a nearly empty flat that was full of people all the time. I didn’t even bother unpacking my Mary Poppins bag there cos all my good stuff would’ve
got broken. Mum and Ray slept a lot and couldn’t ever be bothered to move, and I played with the kids in the downstairs playground, until their mums found out what number flat I came from and then they weren’t allowed to play with me any more.

  When they weren’t sleeping, Mum and Ray were fighting and she was unhappy all of the time. And then one day Ray was gone and we were just some of the people in his horrible flat. I went back to Nancy and said please would she get Mum out of there. And Nancy did, and she got Mum a job with Mr Thing, and she said that was the last thing she was ever doing.

  She said she was washing her hands of us. And she meant it.

  I wish Ray had vanished into thin air, but he hadn’t, and even though we didn’t see him all the time like we used to, whenever Mum saw him, or even thought about him, I could tell, and it gave me a scared feeling, right in the middle. He was bad for her, like sweets and smoking and fried Mars bars and not enough sleep.

  Eleven (Bohemia)

  When I woke up I stayed in my tent and I ate a whole packet of Pink Panther biscuits. They make your mouth really dry, especially if you eat a load of them. I had to get up for a drink and to go to the loo. I was busting. I had that feeling when you wish someone else could go for you, but they never can. When I got back into bed it was all prickly with pink sawdust and I had to get it all out, and that was it then, I was up.

  There was a knock on the door right when I was walking past it. It made me jump and I spilled water all down myself. It was a serious knock, like ONE-TWO-THREE and it made me think of police and people with clipboards, like straightaway. I sucked the water off my arm and I didn’t say anything. ONE-TWO-THREE it went again. I stayed totally still cos I thought if I moved they might hear me.

  Maybe Isabel phoned the people like she said she would. I was scared it was them.

  Then this voice said, “Hello?” and it didn’t sound like clipboards at all. It sounded more like someone with messy hair, dressed in a tracksuit with bare feet. It sounded like Steve. I wished we had one of those things you see in films, like a special glass hole in your door so you can see who’s knocking. I tried to look through the keyhole, but it was too small and low down and full of fluff to be useful.