Hero Read online

  We ran. Everyone was scrabbling to get away from the crossroads. Dust and car alarms clogged the air; with the aching sound of bending metal, overhead wires sizzled, snapped; glass smashed. Groaning and screaming, gagging dust. We kept running.

  I turned to look back. The whole front of the shop tipped forward. Bricks, roof tiles, the door, the window, all the dummies buckled and collapsed into the cavernous hole.

  My eyes stung from the thick dust that was blooming, growing, rising, gagging my throat. I rubbed my eyes and blinked and looked at where the crossroads of Great Western and North Road used to be.

  There was nothing but a massive hole there.

  There was an empty space about thirty metres wide in the middle of our town. The crossroads had gone. Caved in. Disappeared.

  The air was full of dust and sirens.

  George’s mum held on to me and George.

  “It’s a sinkhole!” George gasped. “The sonic boom must have shaken something underground.”

  “Sinkhole?” I repeated, watching firemen helping people out of their cars, telling them to come away, backing everyone up the street.

  “A sonic boom creates vibrations. Sound can do that, break things.”

  More sirens grew louder. Fire engines, police, ambulances, coming from all directions towards the crossroads. But not too close.

  “The ground must have been unstable already,” George said. “Maybe burst pipes had eroded the ground underneath.”

  George talked and talked about rocks and erosion and stuff and then I couldn’t hear him because I was replaying the last few minutes over in my head.

  “There probably wasn’t anything holding up the surface any more,” George said.

  The hairs spiked on my neck.

  I couldn’t blink. My mouth was dry.

  There was nothing but a hole where Jack Pepper had been sitting.

  I got on my knees. Jack Pepper wasn’t under the parked cars.

  There was dust on everyone. People looked like ghosts; they shook and cried, breathed scared, their mouths open, but I pushed them aside.

  I ran in circles; my eyes darted to every small space where Jack might be hiding, calling for him through the din of sirens because I couldn’t bear to think what I was thinking.

  “Did you see him, George?” I yelled. “Did you see Jack Pepper when we came out? Did you see him, George?”

  I called, I shouted, “Jack Pepper! Jack!” I tugged at people, asking, “Did you see him, did you see a little white dog.”

  No. No. No.

  “George!” I shouted. “Help me look! Help me look!”

  He shook his head. His eyes were full of panic.

  “Jack Pepper’s not here,” he said.

  My eyes stung. My chest caved in like a bottomless sinkhole. I looked up at the sky, at the meteor’s vapour trail left across it, collapsing and falling down. I’d left Jack Pepper on the pavement. I’d told him to wait.

  I was sinking.

  Falling.

  There was nothing I could say about the fact that it was me who left Jack Pepper on the pavement outside the shop that collapsed in the sinkhole. Me that told him to wait. Me. Why did Jack Pepper have to be such a good dog?

  Dad’s belly was soft. I didn’t deserve to be there, with Dad holding me, kissing my head, wrapping his arms round me.

  “You’re still a hero in my eyes,” Dad murmured. “You rescued Jack Pepper from the pond. Nobody can take that away from you, son.”

  The girls huddled together on the other sofa. Milly held tight to Kirsty. Kirsty’s silent tears nearly killed me.

  “It’s not your fault, Leo,” Kirsty said. “If anyone could have saved him it would be you.”

  I didn’t know how to get back from here. I didn’t know how to tell the truth about everything now. The weight of people thinking the wrong thing – even if they thought I’d done something good – pressed down on me. I didn’t want to be that boy any more. The fake hero.

  It was three hours since the sinkhole opened up on the crossroads, since a dark hole opened up inside me.

  “What’s going on down there now?” Dad asked when Mum came in.

  Mum’s sigh devastated me.

  “The fire brigade are still checking if the ground and surrounding buildings are safe. They’re keeping everyone away.”

  “What about … did anyone …?” Dad asked.

  “Nobody’s missing, just a few bumps and bruises. Seems everyone was away from the crossroads, distracted by the meteor. Lucky when you think about it.” But I saw then how much she wished she hadn’t said that.

  The girls huddled together on the other sofa. Milly held tight to Kirsty.

  “What are we going to do?” I said.

  “We go back there and tell them there’s a dog missing,” Kirsty said.

  “We need to let Grizzly know,” Dad said.

  Thump. There was a chasm the size of a black hole inside me and it was swallowing me up.

  “Look, we can’t be sure that’s what happened,” Mum said, crouching down, touching each one of us in turn. “What if Jack Pepper ran off? For all we know he could be sitting outside Grizzly’s front door right now, waiting for someone to let him in, or he’s already inside in the warm with not a scratch on him.”

  “Someone’s going to have to go and find out,” Kirsty said.

  My heart pounded in my ears. Once you did something that made your family proud, their expectation of what you can achieve next is even higher.

  It had to be me.

  I sat on a garden wall three doors down from Grizzly’s house. I was bracing myself because I had nothing on the inside holding me together right then. And I didn’t know what I was going to do if Jack Pepper wasn’t there.

  I walked up to Grizzly’s gate. I spent a long time in the tiny front garden and porch, checking behind the bin again and again, checking every tiny space as if he’d shrunk and might even be under a pebble.

  Jack Pepper wasn’t waiting outside.

  I knocked, stared at the door and waited.

  The hall light came on. Grizzly’s shadow appeared behind the glass that was like weird frost, making him look shattered.

  He opened the door. I looked past him into the hall to see if Jack was at his heels. If he would come and greet me.

  “You’re all right, aren’t you?” Grizzly said. “What a terrible thing I heard today.” And he looked past me too, to see if I had anyone at my heels. “Nobody hurt?”

  I swallowed. “Did Jack Pepper come home?”

  There was just Grizzly breathing because I don’t think I could. I thought I heard his heart creaking, like the ache of rusty hinges on a closing castle door.

  “Leo?” he asked. It was only my name, one small word, but I felt all the hope and pride in me evaporate like Grizzly’s heavy breath in the cold night in his porch. Disintegrated like the tiny remnants of the exploded meteor that fell and scattered into the sea off the coast. Grizzly’s eyes looked far away. I wondered if he was thinking of Lucy.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. It didn’t sound like my voice, as if it came from the bottom of a pit. But I meant it more than anything else.

  Grizzly rested his hand firm and warm on my shoulder.

  “You’ve nothing to be sorry for,” Grizzly said. “I could have asked anyone else to walk him, but I wanted you to do it. He wanted to go with you.”

  “He’s a clever dog though, Grizzly, isn’t he? He might have run and hid somewhere,” I said. “I’ll find him.”

  I saw Grizzly’s chest heave and I think if his legs could have managed he’d have run out of the door and up the road right that moment to look for Jack with me. He steadied himself against the door frame.

  “I’ll keep looking,” I said. “I’ll call and shout and keep looking.”

  “That’s it, son. I know you’ll do your best.”

  “I’ll keep trying,” I said.

  I turned left at the other end of Clarendon Road. I called, I shout
ed into the night, I kept looking. I turned left again into North Road, but I couldn’t go any further because the road was blocked off with police and emergency services guarding people against our broken town.

  I turned back, retraced my steps. I looked in all the places I looked before, under cars, behind walls, next to bins, in doorways, and all the places I thought I’d missed. I knocked on someone’s door.

  “Have you seen a little white and ginger dog? Have you seen Grizzly Allen’s dog?”

  “No,” they said. “Is it that little dog we heard about? Do you know the boy who saved him from the pond? Ask him – he might know.”

  I slid down the wall and hunched on the pavement in the shadow between the lamp posts. In my mind I tried to blame Mrs Pardoe’s cat, for knocking over the bin, for making me fall off my bike, for meeting Jack Pepper, for everything. It made me angry; it made me mad as anything.

  The lion stood on the white line in the middle of Clarendon Road. Like he was waiting for me.

  I got up and walked right up close to him. He couldn’t do anything to me; he was just in my imagination.

  “I’m not moving for you!” I yelled at him. You don’t belong here! Jack does!”

  He didn’t move for me either. He turned his broad nose to the air and his eyes to the sky. His ragged mane fell back; his mouth opened and he grumbled a breathy growl. I saw the abandoned amphitheatre up there. Jupiter had gone. Everyone had gone. Nobody wanted to watch me any more. There was a star though, brighter than all the rest, holding its place in the sky. Sirius, the eye of the Great Dog.

  I remembered Jack Pepper waiting, his glossy nose against the pane of glass at the shop, the expectation in his eyes that I would return. Was he still waiting for me? I wanted to reach out and hook that star right under my arm and carry it back with me. But that star didn’t move either.

  I went home. Kirsty and Milly had drawn posters. I wrote on them, Please help us find Jack Pepper. Words helped George; they were like a key to make him feel good. But they were hopeless black marks on paper to me.

  Everyone in our house went to bed. I should have gone too. But I walked the streets. I stuck the posters up until Jack Pepper shined in the copper beams of every lamp post in our road.

  I was still in bed, trying to forget, to fill the hole in me with sleep, but I couldn’t find much of that either. Kirsty and Milly were hovering in the doorway.

  “Leo, you have to get up,” Kirsty said. “You’re not going to find Jack Pepper lying there.”

  I’d tried to find Jack in my dreams. I tried to bring him back with my imagination. But it was no use. He wasn’t really there. I didn’t want to think about Grizzly any more. I saw Jupiter, giant like a mountain, and the audience outside my window, leaning in, bearing down on me, Jupiter’s outstretched thumb about to crush me. The lion trembling as Jupiter held him back.

  “Did anyone phone after seeing the posters?” I said.

  “We’ve had a few calls,” Kirsty said, “but it’s only people asking if he’s the little dog from town, Grizzly’s dog. Nobody’s seen him, but they’re all going to look in their garages and sheds and under their hedges.”

  “You should keep looking, Leo,” Milly said.

  “You should go to all the places Jack Pepper has been before,” Kirsty said. “Where else did you take him?”

  Everything I’d done, all of it, including going to the Rec, made me feel small and weak.

  “I’ll stay here in case anyone else rings,” Kirsty said. “Now get up, Leo; anyone would think you don’t care.”

  “I do!” I yelled, throwing back the covers. “More than you understand.” Jack was my partner, my lion in the amphitheatre. He made me feel strong. It was all down to him. Not me.

  “What don’t I understand?” Kirsty said.

  She had no idea about all the events, the truth that led up to this. Nobody did. How did wanting to be a hero turn out like this?

  “It’s all my fault,” I moaned, sitting down heavily, hiding my face in my hands.

  “Then do something about it,” Kirsty said. “Or can’t you do anything unless Warren Miller says so!”

  “It’s nothing to do with him,” I said quickly. “Why did you even mention him?”

  “He phoned.” She left that hanging in the air with a question in her eyebrows, as if she had more information than she was letting on.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he’d seen you with Jack.” Was she deliberately leaving big gaps between her words?

  “What else?”

  “He said … Jack was scared of you.”

  “That’s not true!” I said.

  I couldn’t defend myself. I was too afraid I’d let the whole story slip out.

  “He had no right to say that.”

  Kirsty frowned. She went downstairs, taking Milly with her. I heard Milly say, “What’s happened to Leo?”

  The Rec was a big open space edged by the old Roman wall, so I knew straight away that Jack wasn’t there because there was nowhere to hide. I had to go back there though, to the places we’d been together. I was looking around the bike park in case Jack was hiding behind the half pipe when Warren Miller and his mates arrived and skidded around me on their bikes.

  “Sad about you losing your bike, Leo,” Warren said. “How’s old Grizzly Allen?”

  I felt my jaw tighten. Warren’s eyes narrowed. Was he threatening me? Showing me he was in control of the truth? Why mention Grizzly? I didn’t think Warren knew him.

  “Why did you tell my sister that Jack Pepper was scared of me?” I said.

  He shrugged, like he couldn’t see why I was getting angry about something like that.

  “That’s what it looked like to me,” he said and I took a step forward thinking about punching him, but he was much bigger than me and there were too many other people.

  “Leo, Leo,” Warren said, all calm and in control, showing that sharp tooth under his crooked lip. “We miss you, buddy. We want you with us, not against us. Why don’t you have a go on my bike? Try it out if you want.”

  I was stunned for a minute when Warren got off his bike and held the handlebars out to me.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’re still mates, aren’t we? Have a go. I bet you miss your bike, don’t you?”

  I couldn’t work out what was going on; my head wasn’t clear. I remembered Grizzly saying if you’re going to fight you needed to think straight.

  “Come with us,” Warren said. “You can borrow it.”

  And you know what? I thought of Jack Pepper twisting and turning right beside me, like he was part of me, stuck to me whatever I did. Right then I remembered that little white dog running across the Rec. Towards me. I wondered for the first time: did he think … did he think I would save him back then?

  “Ten minutes,” Warren said. “Then we’ll help you find the stupid dog, won’t we, lads?”

  I took in a breath, but I couldn’t say anything. I’d already called the dog stupid in front of him. I’d made this as bad as it was.

  “Come on, you’re not choosing that mutt over us, are you? The dog can wait ten minutes.”

  My stomach tensed with knowing I’d already asked Jack to wait outside the shop. I felt the sky rumbling with a new audience, stamping their feet as Jupiter drummed his great impatient fingers. Think!

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m choosing Jack Pepper.”

  There was a silence I’d never heard before in Great Western Road. There were no cars, buses or lorries, no dull hum of our town or the people. The traffic had been diverted. Shopkeepers and shoppers, a few dozen people who would have been on North Road, were being kept away by the barriers. They stood staring with the police who had their backs to the disaster behind them. They were all at least a hundred metres away from the sinkhole and nobody was allowed through.

  I kept on walking to the barriers. There was only one place that Jack could be.

  “Jack Pepper’s down that sinkhole!” I shouted
to a policeman. “You have to get him out!”

  Radios crackled; messages were relayed. The words rippled through the people. Someone was missing; someone was unaccounted for.

  “We thought everyone was safe.”

  “Jack Pepper? We know that name.”

  The policeman let me through. He rushed me closer, over to the fire engines. I could see the dark rim of the sinkhole now, the huge open space where cars and buses and lorries used to make their way across the centre of our town. Layers of tarmac and stone and earth, the crust of the ground that had gone.

  More police and rescue services gathered round me.

  “When did you last see Jack?”

  “Are you sure? Have you checked?”

  “He’s not gone home, he was here in town,” I said.

  “How old is Jack Pepper.”

  “About three years old,” I said.

  “Call in a search and rescue team!”

  “We need heat sensing equipment!”

  There was worry and urgency in their voices. They hadn’t secured the surrounding buildings yet. They didn’t know what they were dealing with; the ground was unsteady, whatever was under there, unknown.

  “Where are Jack’s parents?” The policeman asked. “Why aren’t they here?”

  “A three-year-old boy has fallen down the sinkhole!”

  “It’s not a boy,” I told them. “Jack Pepper’s a dog.”

  Radios crackled. The activity calmed.

  “It’s just a dog,” a fireman said into his radio.

  “He’s not just a dog!” I shouted because I knew what he meant. “If you knew … if you saw Grizzly’s face when I didn’t bring Jack back …” I could hardly speak. “Please, he’s just as important as anyone else around here.”

  And more important than me.

  The fireman put a gloved hand on my shoulder, led me back to the barriers. I looked at the fireman’s uniform. That meant he could rescue people. Surely he could rescue dogs too.

  “You can save him. I can’t.”

  “Son, we can’t go sending crew down that hole just yet, not at risk to their own lives. Not for somebody’s dog. Are you sure he’s down there?”