The Astounding Broccoli Boy Read online

  ‘He’s strong!’ I bawled. ‘Would he be this strong if we were sick?’

  When Nurse Rock burst in, I was lying on the bed noticing the fact that I didn’t hurt. Once you’ve jumped off a twelve-storey building, being shoved around a bedroom doesn’t bother you. I, I thought to myself, am possibly invincible. Or indestructible. But definitely quite comfortable.

  ‘If I’d Known There Were Going to Be Fist Fights, I Would Have Sold Tickets’

  That’s what Dr Brightside said as she looked down at the two of us sprawled on our beds. ‘Please don’t kill each other. You’re my favourite specimens.’

  ‘Yes, miss,’ said Tommy-Lee.

  ‘Your fates are intertwined. Your best hope of a cure, Tommy-Lee, is Rory – and Rory, your best hope is Tommy-Lee. You’re blood brothers. Well, skin-pigmentation brothers.’

  She pinned a big colour chart on the wall. ‘It’s got every shade of green known to man,’ she said, ‘from Light Pampas to Vivid Vomit. Come and stand with your backs to it.’ She pulled a big chunky camera out of her shoulder bag and pointed it at us. ‘Give me your biggest Superhero smiles, please.’ I am actually smiling in that photo, even though Tommy-Lee was crushing my little toe with his big, kick-boxing heel at the time. ‘You two get more interesting by the minute. We are on the brink of something really special here. Can you feel it?’ All I could feel was Tommy-Lee’s heel grinding into my toe.

  ‘I’m going to take a photograph like this every day so that I can monitor any fluctuations in your pigmentation.’

  There never were any fluctuations by the way. We went green and we stayed green.

  After the photos it was all the usual stuff. Blood test. Wee in a bottle. Blowing in a tube. Quinoa.

  Tommy-Lee reached over to take my quinoa. I tried to grab it back. He hissed. ‘You’re not hungry. You ate loads last night. I wasn’t allowed to eat then. You’re not allowed to eat now.’

  I glanced at the intercom, then the window. ‘Someone might be listening,’ I hissed back.

  ‘From now on, you do everything I tell you, or I’ll tell her what you did.’

  ‘What did I do?’

  ‘You went outside.’

  ‘No. You went outside. I followed you. I saved your life!’

  ‘When I tell her, then you’ll suffer. She’s a doctor. This is a hospital. That means she can do what she likes. She can stick needles in you. She can put you in a ward on your own with no telly. She can keep you locked up forever.’

  ‘She’s a doctor, not a Dalek. She’s trying to make us better.’

  ‘They do terrible things to you in hospital if you don’t do what they say. So we are going to do everything she says, including not jumping off buildings or robbing banks.’

  ‘Robbing banks was your idea.’

  ‘You led me astray. People are always leading me astray. From now on, whatever she tells you to do, you do.’

  And what she told us to do that day was drawings. Dr Brightside gave us a box of felt pens and some big sheets of paper. She said drawing would keep our minds active and also give her a window into our minds. Which might be useful if going green is psychosomatic.

  ‘You’re saying we made ourselves green with our brains?’

  ‘I’m not discounting anything at this point.’

  She asked us to draw something to do with Undersea Exploration. ‘Imagine going down into the darkest depths. What will you find?’

  I drew a giant squid attacking a submarine. One of the squid’s slimy tentacles was stuck in the propeller, and another one was reaching inside the submarine through the periscope. It was a masterpiece. I’d never drawn a masterpiece before.

  ‘Hurry up,’ snapped Tommy-Lee. ‘The doctor said to draw a picture, so draw a picture.’

  ‘I’ve drawn a picture,’ I said, and turned it around for all the world to see.

  ‘I’ve drawn one too.’

  Tommy-Lee had drawn a completely square house with a completely square lawn. At each corner of the completely square lawn he’d drawn a big lollipop-shaped flower. Bright yellow curtains on each of the four square windows. ‘What do you think?’ he said.

  I said, ‘It’s a house.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What’s it got to do with undersea exploration?’

  ‘It’s the house,’ he said, ‘of an undersea explorer.’

  When she came back, Dr Brightside said Tommy’s drawing was ‘very good’ and she gave him a little gold star to stick on the corner of it. I thought, If she thinks that’s worth a gold star, wait until she sees mine! She’ll probably call the National Gallery and tell them to get over here quick. In fact all she said about mine was ‘very good’ too and gave me a gold star. Our Fate was in the hands of someone who thinks ‘Giant Squid Swallows Entire Submarine’ is about the same level of artistic as ‘Square House with Lollipop Flowers’. It was the I’ve-Been-Brave certificates all over again, only without the blood.

  There is no justice in the world.

  Which is why we need superheroes.

  She asked us to do another drawing. This time the subject was ‘My Favourite View’.

  I sucked my felt pen. ‘Get drawing,’ growled Tommy-Lee. He was already scribbling away. Apparently his favourite view was another square house with lollipop flowers.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ I said. (I was actually thinking, Is this worth the effort?)

  ‘The doctor didn’t ask you to think, she asked you to draw.’

  ‘Yes, but she doesn’t want you to draw another square house with lollipop trees outside.’

  Tommy-Lee couldn’t have looked more surprised if I’d told him I’d been asked to join the Power Rangers. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She doesn’t want you to hand in some neat little box. She wants you to look into your imagination and see what you can find.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to think about.’

  In the end, I drew ‘The West Midlands in the Ice Age’, which was slightly cheating, but it gave me a cosy feeling to think about the papier mâché model in the geography store cupboard, which also helped me remember various sandwiches I had eaten safely there. Then I thought maybe I would sketch some sandwiches. If I never got to eat food, at least I could draw some. I was just deciding on the fillings when Tommy-Lee said, ‘Get me some more paper.’

  He’d already covered one sheet in furious scribbles. I couldn’t see what it was supposed to be so I said, ‘What’s it supposed to be?’

  ‘It’s supposed to be my favourite view. It’s too big for one piece of paper.’

  He wasn’t drawing his usual square house.

  He was drawing a whole city.

  A sunburst of roads, streets, avenues and lanes and bypasses and dual carriageways spread out from the middle of the page. It was the view from the window cleaners’ cradle. It was already spilling off the edges of the page. I helped him sticky-tape some more sheets together so he could spread out.

  ‘Colour the houses in,’ he said, without looking up. Now that I looked more closely I saw that it wasn’t just roads – it was houses, pubs, churches, schools, supermarkets, car parks, crammed into every bit of space. I coloured in their fronts and doorways, roofs and road signs. Tommy-Lee drew in the river, with the big Ferris wheel on its bank. The rockety tower with its huge yellow clock. There was the dome – a big, blank bubble blowing out of it all. Once he made me stop what I was doing and rubbed out a great big patch of the drawing.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Where the streets and a chunk of river had been, he drew a pigeon flying over the city like a big, raggy jumbo jet. It really made you feel like you were looking down from the cradle. I said, ‘Tommy-Lee, that was a brilliant idea.’

  ‘It wasn’t an idea. It’s real.’

  That’s when I realized he wasn’t looking into his imagination at all. He was looking into his memory. Tommy-Lee remembered everything. Every corner. Every doorway. Every passing c
ar. This wasn’t a picture. This was a map.

  ‘It’ll look better,’ I said, ‘if we stand on the bed.’ It really did. Looking at it from up there, it felt as if we were really flying over a real city. We stayed up there for ages.

  ‘Any good?’ asked Tommy-Lee when Dr Brightside came in.

  ‘You did this together?’

  ‘No,’ said Tommy-Lee. ‘I did it. He just sharpened the pencils.’

  ‘And did the colouring in,’ I added.

  ‘You both cooperated – that’s my point. Also you spent some time on it . . .’

  She was right. We didn’t realize until we looked at the clock, but we’d been doing this for HOURS.

  ‘Well, this picture shows a marked improvement in your powers of concentration and cooperation.’

  ‘So we’re getting better? If we keep drawing, will I stop being green?’

  ‘Tommy-Lee, when you first came in here you were so miserable I wasn’t sure there was any point trying to cure you. I thought, This boy is getting so little out of life, he might as well spend the rest of it in isolation. Now you’re starting to wake up, I’ll try a bit harder.’

  Then she gave us a ‘Very Good’ sticker to stick on the bottom of the painting.

  We put the picture up on the wall when she’d gone. Nurse Rock looked at it with her head on one side.

  ‘What’s it supposed to be?’

  ‘My favourite view. It’s what she told us to draw.’

  ‘London is your favourite view?’

  ‘London? Is that London?’

  ‘Where else could it be? There’s the Thames. There’s St Paul’s.’ The rockety thing with the big yellow clock turned out to be the Houses of Parliament. I’d never been to London before. Now Tommy-Lee seemed to have a map of the whole city in his head.

  ‘What I’m wondering is,’ said Nurse Rock, ‘where anyone could stand where they’d get that view of London.’

  I looked at Tommy-Lee. Tommy-Lee looked at me. I thought he was going to say something that would give the game away, but he just shrugged and said he couldn’t remember.

  ‘You saw the whole of London and didn’t even know it was London?’ said Nurse Rock. ‘What did you think it was? Disneyland?’

  ‘I thought it was . . .’ said Tommy-Lee, ‘. . . like nothing else on Earth.’

  What Adventures Does the City Hold for Our Heroes Tonight?!

  I lay in bed that night – Tommy-Lee still wouldn’t turn the light off – just hoping and waiting for him to sleepwalk again. Every now and then I’d ask him a question just to see if he was still awake.

  ‘Where do you think we’ll go tonight?’

  ‘We’re not going anywhere. I’m not going outside again until we stop being green.’

  ‘But, Tommy-Lee, we’ve got superpowers. You can’t have superpowers and not use them.’

  ‘What superpowers have we got?’

  ‘You can open locked doors in your sleep.’

  ‘Opening doors is not a superpower.’

  ‘It is if they’re locked.’

  ‘I always look out for the codes on the doors when they put me in hospital,’ he said. ‘If you watch where their fingers go, you can work it out. I hate being in hospital, so I always look for the codes. Then at least I know I can escape if it gets too bad.’

  ‘Are you in hospital a lot?’

  ‘I was in for months when I was little. That’s how I learned kick-boxing.’

  ‘They gave you kick-boxing lessons in hospital?’

  ‘No. They gave me blood tests. So I kicked them.’ Apparently that was when his mum decided he had a talent for violent footwork and that it was only right to nurture it.

  He didn’t say anything else. I thought he might be asleep. I tried another question.

  ‘Your brain has got bigger – don’t you think that’s a superpower? Before you could only draw one house. Now you’ve drawn a whole city.’

  No answer. I slipped out of the bed to turn the light off.

  ‘I’m watching you,’ he growled. ‘I can’t get to sleep. Read me a story.’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘From a book.’

  The only book I had was Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared so I read him bits from that. He particularly liked the bits about jumping out of a moving car or off a moving boat. He made me read those three times. On the third time I put in a bit about the boat rocking like a cradle. His eyes drooped. Then they closed. For a few minutes he looked like a big, sweetly sleeping baby. Then he gave a snore that sounded like a tiger gargling treacle. Then he rolled over. Plonked his feet on the floor. Stood up and started to do the Spooky Playmobil.

  I followed him, hoping he was going to go straight to the window cleaners’ cradle and out into the night. Or at least go to the staff canteen where I could get some cheese.

  But he didn’t. He just wandered up and down the top corridor, going in and out of the side rooms and rest areas, as though he was looking for something. Finally he found a kind of waiting room for kids – with a slide and a drawer full of face paints and some colouring books. All the pictures had been started but none of them had been finished. There was fake snow on the windows, a big picture of Santa and a bucket of Lego with tinsel wrapped around it. It was nice doing some Lego with Santa looking down – you could pretend it was Christmas morning. Even though Christmas was weeks off. I ended up building a really tall Big Ben. I only stopped when the sun was coming up and Tommy-Lee was properly asleep in a Wendy house. I managed to get him half awake and make him sleepwalk us back to the Singing Duck door. I’d found an old Spider-Man Annual in the waiting room that I’d brought back to the Fish Tank. Dad had exactly the same annual under his bed back home.

  Home. Home was so far away it sounded like the name of a different planet.

  It was the same story the next night and the night after and the night after that. We’d get into our beds. I’d ask him questions to see if he was awake. He would answer the first few, such as why he hated leprechauns (long story), how he turned green (same story), what it feels like to have an allergic reaction (you feel like a football and someone is inflating you) and how come he was so good at talking like a Supervillain.

  ‘First time I was in hospital, my mum couldn’t come to see me because she was working. There was no telly. All I had was the Batman Annual for 1996. I know everything the Joker said off by heart. That’s how I know you haven’t got a superpower.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because the minute someone gets a superpower, they get big muscles. Even Spider-Man. There’s no such thing as a puny superhero. You are puny.’ I thought about the Spider-Man pyjamas I’d had when I was little – the ones with the foam muscles. I measured my muscles every day after that in case there were signs of improvement.

  Some nights Tommy-Lee would ask me questions, such as, ‘Who would win in a fight between a python and a crocodile?’ Or – his favourite – ‘Who would win in a fight between Rory Rooney and Tommy-Lee Komissky?’

  ‘You would win, Tommy-Lee.’

  ‘Yeah. So go to sleep before I come and check that fact.’

  After ‘Question Time’, when it was quiet, he’d float across the Fish Tank and open the door. The scariest bit was making sure that Nurse Rock didn’t notice. But she was almost always staring at her phone and eating chocolate.

  She ate a different kind of chocolate every night, by the way. Toblerone one night, Galaxy the next. What kind of person can’t settle on a favourite type of chocolate? A one-hundred-per-cent untrustworthy kind of person, that’s what.

  I tried everything I could to make Tommy-Lee go back to the roof. I tried to put the idea in his mind by saying the word ‘roof’ over and over when he was drifting off to sleep. I tried walking in front of him to see if he would follow me, but he’d keep veering off into side rooms and cupboards. Like the time he opened one door and thick wet clouds came pouring out. I thought it must be the door to the outside world and that it was foggy outside. But the cl
ouds were warm and smelled of lavender. Then there was a break in them and I saw three dark-haired women staring straight at us from behind a row of ironing boards. The minute they saw us, they dropped their irons and made the sign of the cross. The smallest one shouted, ‘Aye! Madre de Dios!’ I realized we’d walked into the hospital laundry.

  Or the time I looked back and he gone into this little round room. It had a circle of chairs arranged around a table with flowers, a book and a shoe box on it. The book was the Bible. The room was a chapel. I opened the shoe box. It was stuffed with yellow Post-it notes. Each of them had some sad thing written on it.

  ‘Help our Sammy get well.’

  ‘Look after my mum. I need her.’

  ‘Let Niall come home from hospital soon.’

  ‘Please make our baby better.’

  There were hundreds and hundreds of them.

  There was a poster on the noticeboard too – showing some little sick kids playing with Mickey Mouse in Disney World. Underneath it said: ‘The Wish Factory – granting magical wishes to children and young people fighting life-threatening conditions’.

  I thought how the whole hospital – the twelve storeys, the long winding corridors, the locked wards – was really one massive shoe box stuffed with sadness. The 200-per-cent brain could almost hear all the sighs and the worries – the mums and dads sitting in the canteen waiting for something to happen. Frightened, sleepless children twisting in their beds at night. Patients hooked up to machines that bleeped and buzzed. Relatives watching the machines, wondering what the bleeps and buzzes meant. Nurses and doctors who understood what the machines meant and wished they didn’t have to translate. And the injustices too – such as I’ve-Been-Brave certificates being given to children who weren’t even a tiny bit brave. The children who were made to eat nothing but frogspawn by people who stuffed themselves with different kinds of chocolate night after night. So much sadness. I felt as if I was going to burst.

  What was the point in having a 200-per-cent brain, or being able to slightly teleport, if you couldn’t fight injustice?!

  We had to get out of here and do something!