Tall Story (17 page)

Soon villages up and down the hills of Montalban were buzzing with the news.

Everybody knew.

And that’s how Bernardo became a hero.

He had freed the people of Montalban from the tyranny of Nena and Gabriela.

Turning into a giant was actually a sideshow to the whole thing.

The fact that the earthquakes stopped was a bonus.

That night, I watched Bernardo sleep his silent sleep.

His hand lay across his chest and his head was thrown back, his Adam’s apple bobbing gently as he breathed.

My brother.

Home at last.

Things were going to be better from now on, I swore to myself. Bernardo didn’t deserve to be treated like a freak. He didn’t deserve to be treated like a stranger either. And I was going to be a great sister. At the game tomorrow, I would cheer for him until my tonsils fell out. And he was going to shock the Colts into a stupor and the Souls would play themselves to victory and it would be all because of Bernardo.

The door opened.

Mum’s face appeared in the crack.

Our eyes met and she quickly shut the door.

There was something in her expression that made me jump out of bed and follow her out.

‘Mum? What is it?’

I could hear the drone of the news on TV downstairs.

Mum turned away but not before I saw her flick tears from her eyes. My heart began to boom in my ears.

‘Mum! Something’s wrong? Is it Bernardo? Did you get more results back from the hospital?’

‘No! No, it’s not that.’

I pulled her shoulder round to face me. Her eyes were smudged from weeping.

‘Then what is it?’

Her mouth trembled. ‘It’s not Bernardo – there has been an earthquake in the Philippines. A massive earthquake.’

I stood there, my bare feet suddenly rooted to the carpet. I had never felt so small and so helpless, the blood rushing about in my head like a wild river. ‘An earthquake?’ I had stopped breathing.

Mum’s eyes were black holes.

‘Montalban was at the epicentre. San Andres … it’s been destroyed.’

‘S
lam dunk!’

Jabby looked resplendent in a brand-new red, white and blue Mountain Men kit.

I laughed. ‘You’re not tall enough!’ And he wasn’t. Only players over six foot ever managed dunks.

Jabby looked hurt. ‘Do you know the Americans banned dunking in the nineteen seventies?’

‘So you’ve told me a million times.’

‘And you know why they banned it?’

‘Yes I do. You told me.’

‘They banned it because Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, my
namesake
, was just too good! They banned it so other players could catch up!’

‘Whatever. You can’t do it, Jabby.’

‘Watch me.’

And with that, he jumped, jumped from standing, without even a running leap, up and up and up, up beyond the ring, up to the rafters of the dome, up to the big round glass light, up like a shooting star, so fast
that I thought he was going to crash right through and shower me with broken glass; but no, inches away, he peaked and then down he went, the ball raised aloft, muscles bulging, hard determination on his face.

And BANG.

He banged it in.

The ball shot through the basket and Jabby grabbed the ring, hanging on with a big grin on his face, swinging like a monkey, back and forth, back and forth. And then I realized that the whole stadium had begun to swing too, back and forth, slowly at first and then faster and faster and faster and faster, and then Jabby couldn’t hang on any more and let go of the ring, and then he was falling, falling, falling.

‘Nardo! Help!
Help!
’

I opened my eyes.

‘Jabby?’

Even as I said his name I knew it was just a dream.

Andi’s basketball duvet had fallen off her bed onto my face. Michael Jordan leaped high above me on the wall poster. Sunshine streamed in through the gap in the curtains.

‘Andi?’ I called up to her bed. But when I sat up to look, it was empty and the door was ajar. Andi was already up.

Slowly, morning noises drifted into my awareness. The TV’s chatter from downstairs. The trickle of water in the bathroom. Birds singing outside the window. There was a buzzing noise, like a saw. Uncle Will – Dad – was sleeping off the night shift in the next room.

I sighed and lay back, my arms under my head. A dream!

It was Jabby’s ambition to do slam dunks even though he was just five ten and not much of a jumper. He could list the names of all the NBA players under six foot who managed dunks on a regular basis and he spent hours practising and jumping around like a pogo stick. Maybe this was a portent of good things to come. Maybe Jabby was about to make a breakthrough.

I grabbed my cellphone from the side table and thumbed a text message to Jabby.

DREAMED U CD DUNK.

Then I remembered. The Souls game. It was today!

My stomach contracted and I sat up, my back suddenly cold with sweat.

The door opened. Andi was already in her school uniform. For a moment the amber eyes looked serious but it must have been a trick of the light because she
bellowed cheerily, ‘Mum says get up, sleepyhead, today’s your big day!’

I was in and out of the bathroom and down the stairs in less than ten minutes.

The TV’s drone cut off abruptly when I got to the bottom of the stairs. Ma appeared in the living-room doorway.

‘Good morning, darling!’

Her hair was mussed up, and there were tired lines around her eyes, which were red.

‘Oh.’ I searched her face. ‘What’s wrong, Mama?’

She rubbed her eyes. ‘It’s hay fever.’

‘Hay fever?’ I had never heard of hay fever. Perhaps she meant high fever?

She rubbed her eyes again. ‘It’s an allergy. I only get it here in England. In the summer. Never get it in the Philippines. Oh, I can’t believe I’ve got hay fever now. It’s not summer any more, for heaven’s sake. My eyes are so sore!’

She led the way to the kitchen and put some eggs out to fry for breakfast.

Andi was already sitting at the breakfast table.

‘Hey, Bernardo.’

‘Good morning.’ There was something overly bright about her smile. And the way she directed her
gaze back to her cereal bowl was just a little bit too quick. I looked from Ma to Andi.

No! Stop it
. What was wrong with me? Yesterday was a breakthrough! It felt like Andi and I had finally connected. I felt so close to her after we talked. So why was I now mistrusting everything I saw?

My Darth Vader ring tone began to play. I couldn’t believe it. Somebody was actually
calling
!

I’d had a few text messages of course, but in all that time no one had phoned – all my phone contacts were from San Andres … and nobody in San Andres could afford overseas calls. It was so pointless having the phone that I’d left it on a shelf in the kitchen and forgotten about it.

I picked it up and did a double take.

Mum eyed the phone.

‘Is it from the Philippines?’ she said.

‘I had a missed call last night. From Jabby!’

‘Is that so?’ Mum turned towards the kitchen sink.

‘And look, another call!’

‘Jabby again?’ Mum’s voice was muffled. She was bent over the sink.

‘Yes.’ I frowned. ‘Two missed calls from Jabby.’

But Mum was no longer listening, throwing water on her eyes and mumbling something about hay fever.

I
t had been a rough night.

Dad rushed in from work at two in the morning and the three of us watched the rolling reports on the twenty-four-hour news channel. The earthquake was a seven on the Richter scale, which is as strong as they come, and the village was so close to the epicentre, the place was totally destroyed.

Dad and I sat on the sofa, shoulder to shoulder. We could not take our eyes off the screen. And even though we had the heating on full blast, my hands were freezing.

Mum, frantic and sobbing, worked the phones, trying to get through to Uncle and Auntie, but of course there was no answer. All the lines were down. The news helicopters were not able to land for hours, and when they did, everything was still in such chaos, nobody could tell them anything. Then the army arrived and soon there were scenes of trucks filled with men and women carrying children, and dogs and
goats and chickens; and then the soldiers began to pull people out from under broken buildings.

One news crew stayed in an emergency room, and kept a tally of the casualties arriving. Fifty, one hundred, two hundred. The figures climbed by the minute.

Then tents began mushrooming in fields and there were doctors with surgical masks and nurses and bandages and splints and plaster casts.

And all the while Bernardo slept.

I was all for waking Bernardo up so that he could keep watch with us, but Mum shook her head.

‘No, no, don’t tell Bernardo anything.’

I stared at her. ‘That’s crazy, Mum. We’ve got to. Besides, it’s unfair.’

Mum took my hand. ‘Look, we will tell him. But not yet. First, we must make sure your Uncle Victor and Auntie Sofia are all right.’

All right? It was a gentle way of saying ‘not dead’.

Mum’s brown skin had a pale yellow cast, like the night had sucked some of the blood out of her.

‘… and whatever we find out, I need time to pull myself together. And I want to choose my words carefully. It’s … it’s just too awful. I don’t know how to tell Bernardo what happened.’

And she suddenly looked so tiny and so sad that all I could do was put my arms around her.

Poor Mum. Poor Bernardo. The villagers had tried to stop him from coming to England, hadn’t they? They believed that without Bernardo, they were doomed. And now … and now …

Mum was right. Bernardo didn’t have to know just yet.

My brain was a hive of buzzing as Bernardo and I walked to school. I could barely hear him talking for the swarm in my head, but I could have won a Best Actress trophy for all my laughing and smiling, strolling along as if I didn’t have a care in the world, as if I hadn’t spent the night watching a horror story unfold on the other side of the world, as if my heart had not turned to lead.

We were almost up to the school gates when Bernardo suddenly stopped.

‘Andi! I forgets the uniform of Rocky.’

‘Oh no,’ I said, still acting to the hilt. ‘You’ll have to play basketball naked!’

Bernardo grinned. ‘No, no, I just go back. There is many time.’

I slapped him on the arm, maybe a little bit too
heartily. ‘And don’t you dare try to get out of the game.’

Bernardo waved as he turned back towards home. ‘Why I do that? Nothing will stops me from playing.’

M
a had given me my own key.

I didn’t knock or ring the doorbell. Ma was on the night shift and she would be resting upstairs. Uncle Will was probably asleep as well. No point disturbing them. I crept in as quietly as I could.

The TV was on. Was that the news? I thought the breakfast news ended after nine o’clock in the morning.

I called out in Tagalog, ‘Mama! Would you believe Andi and I went all the way to school before I realized I’d forgotten the basketball kit!’

I poked my head into the living room. ‘Ma!’

But Ma wasn’t there.

‘Ma! Are you upstairs?’ I called. But the volume was turned up so loud she couldn’t possibly have heard me.

I glanced at the screen and froze.

Mad Nena.

Her face filled the screen. The eyes empty. The lips
moving. There was a news commentary over the shot but I could read her lips repeating the one word.
Gabriela. Gabriela. Gabriela
.

The camera zoomed out.

At first I thought it was some sort of scrap heap or a messy lumberyard or a garbage mountain. But no. The scraps of corrugated iron that lay broken over everything were once rooftops. The blocks of broken concrete were once walls. The shrouded figures on the ground … were once people. There was an army truck full of survivors, their faces bruised, their clothes covered in grime. A woman cuddled a tiny baby, her face expressionless. Was that Sister Len-Len?

It was as if my knees had suddenly turned to water. I grabbed at the door frame to stop myself falling. But I missed and landed hard on my elbow.

I crawled up to the TV on my knees.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry
. It was a long moment before I realized the voice whimpering was mine.

The commentator droned on over more pictures of crumbled buildings, trees snapped like twigs, bodies. I searched the faces of the people being interviewed. Auntie? Uncle? Old Tibo? Jabby?

But I didn’t recognize anyone else.

San Andres was not the only village hit by the earthquake. I recognized San Isidro. Camachile. Santa Rita. All of Montalban had been reduced to ruins.

The commentator chattered on but only one word rang clear in my head.

Earthquake. Earthquake. Earthquake.

What have I done?

S
aint Sim’s was the usual.

Everyone was laughing and talking and comparing MP3 players and copying each other’s notebooks. You really wouldn’t think, to look at the playground, that hundreds of people over on the other side of the world had just had their lives crushed by a horrible earthquake.

And the weird thing was, everybody probably knew about it. Everybody had glanced at the newspaper headlines or heard the radio in passing or glimpsed something as they changed channels on the TV.
Hundreds of Casualties in Massive Philippine Earthquake
. But ‘hundreds’ are not people, are they? And blank faces on TV are not people either.

I shook myself. Andi, I told myself sternly,
don’t think about it. Don’t drive yourself crazy. Think about something else. Think about basketball
.

Huh. Basketball.

Bernardo was telling me this morning that high
school league basketball in the Philippines had such a following that it was shown on television. And the team captain was a hero. And not just the whole school but the general public and the sports press turned out to watch all the games, and there were cheerleaders and drums and blaring horns.