Hero Read online

  “It’s about the dog,” he said. “Well, we don’t know for sure, and I don’t want to get anybody’s hopes up …”

  People surged forward to hear, a murmur of expectation.

  The policeman blew out his cheeks, took another deep breath.

  “The heat sensing equipment shows blues and greens where it’s cold, reds and yellows if there’s body heat, if there’s someone there, if they’re …” He breathed, crouched and pulled me closer. “There’s a faint yellow glow coming from the sinkhole. It might be the dog.”

  People cried and laughed, held on to each other, shook hands, patted each other’s backs, held back their smiles. All I could do right then was try to breathe and stand upright.

  Words rippled through the crowd.

  “Is it the dog?”

  “Is it that little Jack Pepper?”

  “Is he alive?”

  There was so much commotion, so much hope.

  Then a roar of voices.

  The front of the building that was next to the dress shop crumbled.

  Tumbled.

  Collapsed.

  Smashed into the hole.

  More dust, more running. Engines started up; fire engines moved back. The police ducked under the barriers; even the people behind them took a step away. The ground wasn’t safe.

  I didn’t move. I couldn’t move, trying so hard to will this not to be happening.

  “Stop!” I shouted. “You’re supposed to be getting closer! You’re supposed to be finding the dog!” Words were no use. People started to leave.

  Then the search and rescue team came running back, with their ropes and clips and hard hats.

  “Where are you going?” I said, stirred and angry that they were leaving. I jumped in front of them. “There’s a yellow glow; he’s down there. You have to go back and get Jack Pepper out!”

  One of them looked back as the dust blossomed in the street from the spilled and smashed building.

  “Sorry, son,” he said. Another hand on my shoulder. “Nobody’s going to be a hero today.”

  The night swooped in. Everybody left except me.

  “Go home, son,” a policeman said. “There’s nothing you can do standing here.”

  The emergency services packed up, said they needed to go away to regroup, rethink, plan their next move. Everyone abandoned the sinkhole and what was in it to go home, to sleep, to sigh, to pray, to wish and warm themselves.

  Another slow day had gone past too quickly.

  George once told me that he read in a book that the earth is rotating at about six hundred and fifty miles an hour. He’d said that, if the earth suddenly stopped spinning, the atmosphere would keep going and pretty much everything would be scoured off the planet. I sat on a wall in Clarendon Road and imagined buildings, cars, people, everything in the street, everything in our houses, all the bikes from TrailBlaze sucked into the atmosphere, to spin and float around earth like an asteroid belt.

  I watched the sky. Jupiter stuck out his foot, stopped the earth from spinning, held on to us like a football.

  The earth threw everything up in the air: the rubble, the shop, everything that collapsed into the sinkhole. Including Jack Pepper. Then we were like astronauts, spacemen, swimming without gravity. I didn’t look twice at any bike from TrailBlaze. I took giant leaps to Jack Pepper, Jupiter smiling down, kicking aside any meteors and asteroids in our way with his giant foot. He laughed like thunder as I hooked Jack under my arm and showed him Sirius.

  “See that star, that burning light, that brightest star? That’s you, Jack Pepper.”

  We floated and swam in space some more to find Grizzly … then I was going to hand Jack back so the cave in our hearts wouldn’t be empty any more.

  My neck ached from looking up, wishing Jupiter and his mighty fist or foot would get Jack out, or the archer, the charioteer, the bear, any of them, would do something. But I didn’t have any control over the way things really were.

  “Wishing is for stupid people!” I shouted to them. “I wished for a bike for my birthday, that’s all, and now look what’s happened!”

  The gods and creatures were all fake, all hanging there and not able to do anything, not answer, not help. They looked like statues: grey, solid, pointless. We were all like statues.

  “And what’s the point of imagining things?” I told them. “What’s your imagination even for? It just lets you down in the end.”

  I grabbed my head in my hands as if that would help wipe them all away. “You’re not real! You’re … you’re just explosions from millions of years ago.”

  I slid off the wall and kicked a can in the road.

  “That’s real! It’s solid and you can kick it!” I paced up and down and kept shouting – at nothing. My voice echoed off the houses. “Real Romans left behind real things! Things that are now buried underground because they’re so old …”

  Underground! My voice echoed off the walls. Underground! The emergency services were all trying to get into the hole from above, where buildings were falling down, where they couldn’t get close. Why hadn’t they tried to go underground?

  I ran to George’s. I didn’t know what else to do.

  George looked surprised when he opened the door.

  “I need your help. Please, George.”

  He flinched, took half a step back, as if he didn’t trust me any more.

  “You said you’d help,” I said. “I think I know what the emergency services need to do.”

  He let me in the hall, but no further.

  “Tomorrow Jack will have been down there for three nights, George.” He took that in. So did I. “They can’t get the crane close enough because the buildings aren’t safe. There must be another way in.”

  There was a kind of calm that I hadn’t felt before. Like clouds cleared from the sky. I thought about that day when I walked through town with Jack. Not so I could remember what people said about me. I didn’t care about that any more.

  What I remembered was what Jack had done for everyone. No words, but just a minute with that dog looking into you with nothing but loyalty made us all feel good. And it was only a minute he spent with each person, but look how long it had lasted; look how big it had become.

  Jack Pepper wasn’t even as tall as my knee, but we’d all looked up to him.

  “They’ll have to clear the other rubble away first before they can get closer anyway.” I saw George’s shoulders relax. He was at his best when you asked him to help. “Come upstairs,” he said. “I’ll show you something.”

  We went to his bedroom and he unfolded a map and spread it out on the floor. Lines and words and symbols, a code for the ground.

  “I’ve been studying this old Ordnance Survey map I got in the library yesterday.” He ran his finger over the roads that he was talking about. “Look at this. See how straight this road is? I bet it was once a Roman road.”

  “You know you said there might be a river or something that had eroded the ground below the road, the reason the sinkhole collapsed? What else is underground around here?”

  “I don’t know,” George said, looking at the symbol key, “but I could try to look it up.”

  I couldn’t wait for George to find out more. I just looked at the map and knew there was more to our town than what was on the surface.

  “What else could be under the shops and road?” I said. “Could somebody get to Jack from underground?”

  Then I noticed that George’s mum was outside the bedroom door. Her wary eyes flicked from me to George.

  “Leo, leave this to the professionals. You’ve already proved you’re a hero. There’s no need to prove it again.”

  Every time someone called me a hero I felt empty inside.

  “You’d better go. You can tell them about this tomorrow morning,” George said. But not before he looked at me for a long time then whispered, “You might need this,” and his eyes were wide as he secretly shoved the map inside my coat pocket.

  I c
ouldn’t sleep, thinking about what I should and shouldn’t do. I looked out of the window at Sirius, hoping for an answer. I saw a light on further down the road. Grizzly’s house. I wondered what he was doing up. Was he thinking like I was? Not sleeping, but worrying about Jack Pepper.

  The lion was outside my window, looking up at me, his strong shoulders flexing as he shifted his weight. I wiped the condensation away to see him more clearly. He turned and headed off towards the corner of Clarendon Road and Great Western. He watched me over his shoulder and I wanted to follow, just like Jack had tried to do.

  I put my coat and shoes on over my pyjamas and crept outside.

  The frosty air bit at my nose and ears and hands. There was still an eerie silence because of all the vehicles that were missing from our streets. The barriers were still up, flashing beacons, danger signs. The lion went along the alleyway behind the empty lot where the shop had been pulled down last year. I saw him through the chicken wire, then he disappeared behind the lot, his shadow shrinking into a small cat-like creature.

  I headed down Great Western towards the sinkhole. Nobody was there. I ducked under the barriers, hugged the pavement in front of the shops until I stood behind more barriers, just metres from the sinkhole. It was darker there because the street lights weren’t working, ripped up, the wires snapped. There was only the flashing of the yellow roadwork lights. I crawled under the barriers, testing each foot and hand before I put my weight on them.

  The hole was huge, about thirty metres across but it was hard to tell how deep. The pavement stopped, a broken edge, darkness beyond.

  I lay down, shuffled on my elbows, not knowing how safe the ground was underneath me, until I could peer over the edge.

  The depth of gloom, the chaos of the rubble down there scared me.

  My eyes got used to the blackness. Loose fragments crumbled below me, scattered into the dark. I heard them land, bounce, rattle into the distant emptiness.

  “Jack Pepper,” I whispered. “Someone will come and get you.”

  I said his name over and over again. I rested my face on my arms, turned my head so my ear was listening down there. I whispered his name again and again. I thought he should hear me call. I thought he should know I was fighting.

  I knelt up. In the sky, Jupiter hung there, hard and cold. There was no show for him to see. No hero to watch. It wasn’t me that was the hero anyway.

  I thought of all the people in our town helping to clear up the damage. My dad handing out food, the girls warming people with hot tea. All those people from our town sharing words of encouragement. I thought of Kirsty, sitting by the phone all day, waiting for news of Jack Pepper. I thought of Jack pulling me out of the pond.

  They were all heroes in small but great ways.

  I walked home again, willing the night to go quickly, for the emergency services to come back so I could tell them what George had found on the map. I couldn’t go back to bed, that felt like giving up, so I sat outside our back door in the bitter night with the frost stinging my eyes.

  The bathroom light came on upstairs, cast a beam over me. Then it went off. Then the hall light came on, then the kitchen light. The back door opened. Mum was in her dressing gown.

  “What are you doing out here?” she said. “It’s half-past four in the morning.”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “I don’t know. I saw your bed was empty … I don’t know. I didn’t know I’d find you here.” She crouched down, ran her hand over my hair. “Oh, Leo. You mustn’t blame yourself about Jack Pepper going missing.”

  But before she could say any more neither of us could believe our eyes when someone else came through the back gate. Warren Miller. And he had my old bike.

  Startled to see us, he hesitated. Whatever he was doing, he hadn’t expected to see us either. His eyes looked like they were searching, looking for the best possible outcome from this situation.

  “Leo? What’s going on?” Mum said. “And who are you? What are you doing here at this hour of the morning?”

  All I did was take a breath. Warren Miller wasn’t only big, he was a quicker thinker than me.

  “I couldn’t sleep, not after what happened. I got Leo’s bike out of the pond,” he said. “Even though I didn’t agree with what he did—”

  “Mum, don’t listen to him!”

  “Leo, let him finish. What didn’t you agree with?”

  “I don’t want to get Leo in trouble and I really didn’t want to say anything, but it’s been bothering me a lot, Mrs Biggs.”

  “What has?”

  “Mum, please—” I tried to interrupt. He was lying!

  Then he told her everything. Well, his version. That I’d sunk Grizzly Allen’s scooter in the pond at the Rec because I was trying to impress everyone. He said I’d tripped up Mr Patterson because I hated doing presentations. That I had chased Grizzly’s dog, but he wasn’t sure why. That I’d fallen in the pond, not dived in, and lost my bike in there.

  The dog didn’t go in the pond. It was too scared of me, he said. And he was sorry that he hadn’t said anything sooner, but he couldn’t keep it to himself any longer.

  I didn’t have a whisper of strength to fight back.

  Mum straightened her back. “Stay here,” she said. “Both of you. I need to get your father, Leo.”

  I looked up at Warren. It was pointless trying to defend what I’d done and all I could think was that if I gave my version of what happened it would just sound like I was trying to cover up my part in it and make me look even more guilty.

  “Why are you doing this?” I said.

  “I’ve got plans for you.” Warren smiled his lopsided smile. “You’ll thank me in the end.”

  “Plans?”

  “You’ll see.”

  It all made sense now. Warren didn’t need a gladiator.

  “You need someone stupid like me to take the blame for you,” I said.

  “We all need a fall guy,” he said. “Yours was the dog.”

  I shook my head. Numb. With cold, with guilt. He was right though: I’d used Jack Pepper to get myself out of trouble and to make people believe I was something that I wasn’t.

  I heard voices, all of my family coming to the door.

  The light from the kitchen faded as Dad filled the doorway. Mum and the girls pressed at his back to find a gap to see from behind him. A different wave of panic and hurt cut into me when I saw the pride gone from Dad’s questioning face and the disappointment left there.

  “He hurt Jack Pepper,” I said, pointing at Warren, but Warren was too clever for me.

  “It was an accident,” Warren said, his voice higher pitched, trembling at the sight of my dad. “I feel really bad. But it was an accident, just like Leo’s accident with Mr Patterson.” He was far too clever for me, spinning the story to make himself look good – which was what I’d done too.

  “I only came to bring Leo’s bike back because I was sorry for him that he didn’t have it any more and couldn’t come out with us. I even had to go in the pond to get it.”

  Slowly I shook my head. It was even worse than I thought when he said it out loud. And he and his mates were right: all I had to do was get rid of Grizzly’s scooter and I’d be like them.

  “Does your dad know you’re here?” Dad said to Warren.

  “No.” Warren twitched.

  “Then I suggest you go on in the kitchen and wait for me.”

  Warren stepped over me.

  “Go to your room, Leo,” Dad said. “We’ve got a lot of talking to do.”

  I heard someone sit against the back of my bedroom door. They sighed then went away again.

  Then I heard whispering. The floorboards outside my door creaked.

  “Go on,” Milly whispered.

  “All right, all right,” Kirsty whispered back.

  I heard moving around downstairs then the girls’ footsteps running and closing Milly’s bedroom door. A few minutes later the girls came back.
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br />   “I don’t believe the things Warren said,” Kirsty whispered through the door. “Tell me the truth. What really happened?”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt Grizzly,” I whispered. “Why would I do that? He was good to me – he tried to fix my bike.” I put my face by the crack of the door. “I didn’t know it was his mobility scooter. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known.”

  Whispering.

  “Does that mean you would have done it if it was somebody else’s, not Grizzly’s?” Kirsty said.

  “I know it was wrong,” I said. “I hate that I did it and I wish …” What was the point of wishing? I started to think I wouldn’t have done it if Warren and his mates hadn’t cheered me and lied to me. But that wasn’t true. I wanted to be somebody worthwhile, to feel brave like a gladiator, but I’d got it all wrong.

  “I shouldn’t have done it,” I said. “If I could take it all back, I would …”

  I had to tell someone the truth.

  “I got scared …” All my pride was defeated now. I whispered, “I got scared because I wasn’t anybody special. And I lied about what happened because I thought it wouldn’t matter if people thought I was the hero, not Jack.”

  The girls were quiet for a minute.

  I waited, and then Milly said. “You made me not scared of the meteor, Leo. You said it was going to burn bright and I’d like it. And I did, except not what happened to Jack Pepper.”

  All I could think then was that Jack needed a gladiator on his side to protect him, and it was going to have to be me.

  “I’m going to put this all right again,” I said. “I need your help though.”

  Kirsty took a big breath. “What do you want us to do?”

  Kirsty kept a lookout and Milly made sure Mum and Dad stayed in the kitchen. I didn’t have time to think or care about what they were saying.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Kirsty whispered as I crept down the stairs. “Good luck.”

  I slipped out of the front door and ran all the way to the sinkhole.

  I put on my gladiator helmet, took up a stance and wielded my pretend shield to the sky. Jupiter looked amused. He shifted his toga on his shoulder, stroked the lion at his side. I could hear them, the audience, the amphitheatre filling again, murmuring with the expectation of life and death. And even though I knew that they were just in my imagination, what I was about to do was not. I threw down the helmet. I wasn’t going to be blind-sided this time. This battle was going to take place in the real world, and I had to win.