Johnny and the Bomb Read online

  It was bad enough seeing the wretched cat. Not seeing it was worse.

  He scurried out and shut the door quickly, then went back into the house.

  He probably ought to tell someone official. The trolley belonged to Mrs Tachyon (actually, it probably belonged to Mr Tesco or Mr Safeway) so it might be stealing if he kept it.

  As he went back inside, the phone rang. There were two ways he could tell. Firstly, the phone rang. Then his grandfather shouted ‘Phone!’, because he never answered the phone if he thought there was a chance it could be answered by someone else.

  Johnny picked it up.

  ‘Can I speak to—’ said Yo-less, in his Speaking to Parents voice.

  ‘It’s me, Yo-less,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Hey, you know Mrs Tachyon?’

  ‘Of course I—’

  ‘Well, my mum was on duty at the hospital last night. She’s got horrible bruises and everything. Mrs Tachyon, I mean, not my mum. Someone really had a go at her, she said. My mum, not Mrs Tachyon. She said we ought to tell the police.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘We might have seen something. Anyway … er … someone might think it was … us …’

  ‘Us? But we called the ambulance!’

  ‘I know that. Er … and you’ve got her stuff …’

  ‘Well, we couldn’t just leave it there!’

  ‘I know that. But … well, we did have Bigmac with us …’

  And that was it, really. It wasn’t that Bigmac was actually evil. He’d happily fire imaginary nuclear missiles at people but he wouldn’t hurt a fly, unless perhaps it was a real hard biker fly which’d given him serious grief. However, he did have a problem with cars, especially big fast ones with the keys still in the ignition. And he was a skinhead. His boots were so big that it was quite hard for him to fall over.

  According to Sergeant Comely of Blackbury police station, Bigmac was guilty of every unsolved crime in the town, whereas in real life he was probably only guilty of ten per cent, maximum. He looked like trouble. No one looking at Bigmac would think he was innocent of anything.

  ‘And Wobbler, too,’ Yo-less added.

  And Wobbler would admit to anything if you got him frightened enough. All the great unsolved mysteries of the world – the Bermuda Triangle, the Marie Celeste, the Loch Ness Monster – could be sorted out in about half an hour if you leaned a bit on Wobbler.

  ‘I’ll go by myself, then,’ said Johnny. ‘Simpler that way.’

  Yo-less sighed with relief. ‘Thanks.’

  The phone rang just as Johnny put it down again.

  It started saying ‘Hello? Hello?’ before he got it to his ear.

  ‘Er … hello?’ he said.

  ‘Is that you?’ said a female voice. It wasn’t exactly an unpleasant one, but it had a sharp, penetrating quality. It seemed to be saying that if you weren’t you, then it was your fault. Johnny recognized it instantly. It was the voice of someone who dialled wrong numbers and then complained that the phone was answered by people she didn’t want to speak to.

  ‘Yes. Er … yes. Hello, Kirsty.’

  ‘It’s Kasandra, actually.’

  ‘Oh. Right,’ said Johnny. He’d have to make a note. Kirsty changed her name about as often as she changed her clothes, although at least these days she was sticking to ones beginning with K.

  ‘Have you heard about old Mrs Tachyon?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Johnny, guardedly.

  ‘Apparently a gang of yobs beat her up last night. She looked as though a bomb’d hit her. Hello? Hello? Hello?’

  ‘I’m still here,’ said Johnny. Someone had filled his stomach with ice.

  ‘Don’t you think that’s shameful?’

  ‘Er. Yes.’

  ‘One of them was black.’

  Johnny nodded dismally at the phone. Yo-less had explained about this sort of thing. He’d said that if one of his ancestors had joined Attila the Hun’s huge horde of millions of barbarians and helped them raid Ancient Rome, people would’ve definitely remembered that one of them was black. And this was Yo-less, who collected brass bands, had a matchbox collection and was a known spod.

  ‘Er,’ he said, ‘it was us. I mean, we didn’t beat her up, but we found her. I got the ambulance and Yo-less tried— Yo-less was definitely thinking about first aid …’

  ‘Didn’t you tell the police?’

  ‘No—’

  ‘Honestly, I don’t know what would happen if I wasn’t around! You’ve got to tell them now. I’ll meet you at the police station in half an hour. You know how to tell the time? The big hand is—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Johnny, miserably.

  ‘It’s only two stops on the bus from your house. You know about catching buses?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, of course I—’

  ‘You need money. That’s the round stuff you find in your pockets. Ciao.’

  Actually, after he’d been to the toilet, he felt a bit better about it all. Kirs— Kasandra took charge of things. She was the most organized person Johnny knew. In fact she was so organized that she had too much organization for one person, and it overflowed in every direction.

  He was her friend. More or less, anyway. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been given a choice in the matter. Kirs— Kasandra wasn’t good at friends. She told him so herself. She’d said it was because of a character flaw, only because she was Ki— Kasandra, she thought it was a character flaw in everyone else.

  The more she tried to help people by explaining to them how stupid they were, the more they just wandered off for no reason at all. The only reason Johnny hadn’t was that he knew how stupid he was.

  But sometimes – not often – when the light was right and she wasn’t organizing anything, he’d look at Ki— Kasandra and wonder if there weren’t two kinds of stupidity: the basic El Thicko kind that he had, and a highly specialized sort that you only got when you were stuffed too full of intelligence.

  He’d better tell Grandad where he was going, he thought, just in case the power went off or the TV broke down and he wondered where Johnny had gone.

  ‘I’m just off to—’ he began, and then said, ‘I’m just off out.’

  ‘Right,’ said Grandad, without taking his eyes off the set. ‘Hah! Look, there he goes! Right in the gunge tank!’

  Nothing much was going on in the garage.

  After a while, Guilty crawled out from his nest among the black plastic sacks and took up his usual position in the front of the cart, where he was wont to travel on the offchance that he could claw somebody.

  A fly banged on the window pane for a while and then went back to sleep.

  And the bags moved.

  They moved like frogs in oil, slithering very slowly around each other. They made a rubbery, squeaky noise, like a clever conjurer trying to twist an animal out of balloons.

  There were other noises, too. Guilty didn’t pay them much attention because you couldn’t attack noises and, besides, he was pretty well used to them by now.

  They weren’t very clear. They might have been snatches of music. They might have been voices. They might have been a radio left on, but slightly off station and two rooms away, or the distant roar of a crowd.

  Johnny met Kasandra outside the police station.

  ‘You’re lucky I’ve got some spare time,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

  Sergeant Comely was on the desk. He looked up as Johnny and Kasandra came in, then looked back at the book he was writing in, and then looked up again slowly.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Er, hello, Sergeant Comely,’ said Johnny.

  ‘What is it this time? Seen any aliens lately?’

  ‘We’ve come about Mrs Tachyon, Sergeant,’ said Kasandra.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  Kasandra turned to Johnny.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Tell him.’

  ‘Er …’ said Johnny. ‘Well … me and Wobbler and Yo-less and Bigmac …’

  ‘Wobbler and Yo-less and Bigmac and
I,’ said Kasandra.

  Sergeant Comely looked at her.

  ‘All five of you?’ he said.

  ‘I was just correcting his grammar,’ said Kasandra.

  ‘Do you do that a lot?’ said the sergeant. He looked at Johnny. ‘Does she do that a lot?’

  ‘All the time,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Good grief. Well, go on. You, not her.’

  When Sergeant Comely had been merely PC Comely he’d visited Johnny’s school to show everyone how nice the police were, and had accidentally locked himself into his own handcuffs. He was also a member of the Blackbury Morris Men. Johnny had actually seen him wearing bells around his knees and waving two hankies in the air. These were important things to remember at a time like this.

  ‘Well … we were proceeding along …’ he began.

  ‘And no jokes.’

  *

  Twenty minutes later, they walked slowly down the steps of the police station.

  ‘Well, that wasn’t too bad,’ said Kasandra. ‘It’s not as though you were arrested or anything. Have you really got her trolley?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘I liked the look on his face when you said you’d bring Guilty in. He went quite pale, I thought.’

  ‘What’s next-of-kin mean? He said she’d got no next-of-kin.’

  ‘Relatives,’ said Kasandra. ‘Basically, it means relatives.’

  ‘None at all?’

  ‘That isn’t unusual.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Johnny, ‘but generally there’s a cousin in Australia you don’t know about.’

  ‘Is there?’

  ‘Well, apparently I’ve got a cousin in Australia, and I didn’t know about her till last month, so it can’t be that unusual.’

  ‘The state of Mrs Tachyon is a terrible Indictment on Society,’ said Kasandra.

  ‘What’s indictment mean?’

  ‘It means it’s wrong.’

  ‘That she’s got no relatives? I don’t think you can get them from the Governm—’

  ‘No, that she’s got no home and just wanders around the place living on what she can find. Something Ought to be Done.’

  ‘Well, I suppose we could go and see her,’ said Johnny. ‘She’s only in St Mark’s.’

  ‘What good would that do?’

  ‘Well, it might cheer her up a bit.’

  ‘Do you know, you start almost every sentence with “Well”?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Going hospital visiting won’t do anything about the disgusting neglect of street people and the mentally ill, will it?’

  ‘Probably not. She just might be a bit cheered up, I suppose.’

  Kasandra walked in silence for a moment.

  ‘It’s just that … I’ve got a thing about hospitals, if you must know. They’re full of sick people.’

  ‘We could take her something she likes. And she’d probably be glad to know that Guilty is OK.’

  ‘They smell bad, too,’ said Kasandra, not listening to him. ‘That horrible disinfectant smell.’

  ‘When you’re up close to Mrs Tachyon you won’t notice.’

  ‘You’re just going on about it because you know I hate hospitals, aren’t you?’

  ‘I … just think we ought to do it. Anyway, I thought you did things like this for your Duke of Edinburgh award or whatever it was.’

  ‘Yes, but there was some point in that.’

  ‘We could go towards the end of visiting time so we won’t be there very long. That’s what everyone else does.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Kasandra.

  ‘We’d better take her something, too. You have to.’

  ‘Like grapes, you mean?’

  Johnny tried to picture Mrs Tachyon eating grapes. It didn’t work. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  The garage door swung back and forth, slowly.

  Inside the garage there was:

  A concrete floor. It was old and cracked and soaked in oil. Animal footprints crossed it, embedded in the concrete, suggesting that a dog had run across it when it was being laid. This happens in every patch of wet concrete, everywhere. There were also a couple of human footprints, fossilized in time, and now filled with black grease and dust. In other words, it was more or less like any piece of concrete. There was also:

  A tool bench.

  Most of a bicycle, upside down, and surrounded by tools and bits of bike in a haphazard manner which suggested that someone had mastered the art of taking a bike to bits without succeeding in the craft of putting it back together again.

  A lawnmower entangled in a garden hosepipe, which is what always happens in garages, and isn’t at all relevant.

  A trolley, overflowing with plastic bags of all kinds, but most particularly six large black ones.

  A small pile of jars of pickles, where Johnny had carefully stacked them last night.

  The remains of some fish and chips. As far as Guilty was concerned, catfood only happened to other cats.

  A pair of yellow eyes, watching intently from the shadows under the bench.

  And that was all.

  Chapter 3

  Bags of Time

  To be honest about it, Johnny didn’t much like hospitals either. Mostly, the people he’d gone to visit in them were not going to come out again. And no matter how they tried to cheer the place up with plants and pictures, it never looked friendly. After all, no one was there because they wanted to be.

  But Kirsty-Kasandra was good at finding out things and getting harassed people to give her answers, and it didn’t take long to find Mrs Tachyon’s ward.

  ‘That’s her, isn’t it?’ she said.

  She pointed along the line of beds. One or two of them didn’t have visitors around them, but there was no mistaking the one belonging to Mrs Tachyon.

  She was sitting up in bed in a hospital night-gown and her woolly hat, over which she had a pair of hospital headphones.

  Mrs Tachyon stared intently in front of her, and jigged happily among the pillows.

  ‘She looks happy enough,’ said Kasandra. ‘What’s she listening to?’

  ‘I couldn’t say for sure,’ said the nurse. ‘All I know is the headphones aren’t plugged in. Are you relatives?’

  ‘No. We’re—’ Kasandra began.

  ‘It’s a sort of project,’ said Johnny. ‘You know … like weeding old people’s gardens and that sort of thing.’

  The nurse gave him an odd look, but the magic ‘project’ word did its usual helpful stuff.

  She sniffed. ‘Can I smell vinegar?’ she said.

  Kasandra glared at Johnny. He tried to look innocent.

  ‘We’ve just brought some grapes,’ he said, showing her the bag.

  Mrs Tachyon didn’t look up as they dragged chairs over to her bed.

  Johnny had never spoken to her in his life, except to say ‘sorry’ when she rammed him with her trolley. He wasn’t sure how to start now.

  Kasandra leaned over and pulled one earphone aside.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Tachyon!’ she said.

  Mrs Tachyon stopped jigging. She turned a beady eye on Kasandra, and then on Johnny. She had a black eye, and her stained white hair looked frizzled at the front, but there was something horribly unstoppable about Mrs Tachyon.

  ‘Indeed? That’s what you think!’ she said. ‘Call again tomorrow, baker, and we’ll take a crusty one! Poor old biddy, is it? That’s what you think! Millennium hand and shrimp? Free teeth and corsets? Maybe, for them as likes it, but not me, thank you so much. Wot, no bananas? I had a house, oh yes, but it’s all black men now. Hats.’

  ‘Are they treating you all right?’ said Kasandra.

  ‘Don’t you worry! Right as rain and twice as ninepence. Hah! Tick tick bang! I’d like to see them try. There’s puddings. Of course, I remember when it was all fields, but would they listen?’

  Kasandra looked at Johnny.

  ‘I think she’s a bit … confused,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t understand anything I’m saying.’
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  ‘But we don’t understand anything she’s saying, either,’ said Johnny, who felt confused all the time in any case.

  Mrs Tachyon adjusted her headphones and started to boogie again.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ said Kasandra. ‘Excuse me.’

  She pulled the headphones off the woolly hat and listened to them.

  ‘The nurse was right,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing at all.’

  Mrs Tachyon bounced up and down happily.

  ‘One born every minute!’ she chortled.

  Then she winked at Johnny. It was a bright, knowing wink, from Planet Tachyon to Planet Johnny.

  ‘We’ve brought you some grapes, Mrs Tachyon,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what you think.’

  ‘Grapes,’ said Johnny firmly. He opened the bag, exposing the steaming greaseproof fish and chip paper inside. Her eyes widened. A scrawny hand shot out from under the covers, grabbed the packet, and disappeared under the blanket again.

  ‘Him and his coat,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t mention it. Er. I’m keeping your trolley safe. And Guilty is all right, although I don’t think he’s eaten anything apart from some chips and my hand.’

  ‘I blame Mr Chamberlain,’ said Mrs Tachyon.

  A bell tinkled.

  ‘Oh dear that’s the end of visiting time my word don’t the hours just fly past what a shame,’ said Kasandra, standing up quickly. ‘Nice to have met you Mrs Tachyon sorry we have to be going come on Johnny.’

  ‘Lady Muck,’ said Mrs Tachyon. She nodded at Johnny.

  ‘What’s the word on the street, mister man?’

  Johnny tried to think like Mrs Tachyon.

  ‘Er … “No Parking”?’ he suggested.

  ‘That’s what you think. Them’s bags of time, mister man. Mind me bike! Where your mind goes, the rest of you’s bound to follow. Here today and gone yesterday! Doing it’s the trick! Eh?’

  Johnny stared. It was as though he had been listening to a lot of static on the radio and then, just for a second, there was this one clear signal.

  The other Mrs Tachyon came back.

  ‘He’s mixing sugar with the sand, Mr McPhee!’ she said. ‘That’s what you think.’

  ‘What did you have to go and give her them for?’ Kasandra hissed, as she strode out of the ward. ‘She needs a proper healthy balanced diet! Not hot chips! What did you give her them for?’