The Boy Who Fell from the Sky, Jule Owen [classic romance novels txt] 📗

gets back in through the window, trying to thread the wire with him, he slips, the stool going from under his feet. Grabbing the window ledge before he falls, he dislodges the precariously attached amplifier and sends the whole thing hurtling into the olive tree growing next to the front room windows.

“Damn!” He drops to the floorboards and jogs downstairs, taking his stool with him. 

First he goes into the garden to try and retrieve the amplifier from the tree, but he can’t reach it. It’s stuck in the crook of two branches growing against the side of the house. He realises he would be able to get at it if he stretched from the window in the front room. 

Downstairs, he thumps the window open. It was as stuck as the one upstairs, but he manages to force it and leans across to grab the amplifier. As he does, O’Malley, whom he’s totally forgotten about, bounds off the window ledge onto his shoulder and out through the window. Mathew drops the amplifier. 

“Damn cat!” he says.

He opens the front door and goes into the street. As always, the heat hits him like a wall. 

O’Malley has disappeared. 

In the garden he starts searching on his hands and knees under the juniper and rosemary bushes. 

“O’Malley? O’Malley!” he calls, increasingly loudly, half-expecting the entire neighbourhood to come and tell him to get indoors. It crosses his mind that he may be breaking the terms of the All-Day Curfew. “O’Malley?” he says again. O’Malley’s distinct mew calls back to him, more half-strangled duck than cat. “Good boy, come here. Come on.” 

“Mew,” says O’Malley, but he doesn’t appear. 

Mathew thinks the meow is coming from Gen’s garden, and he peers over the fence separating their properties. 

“O’Malley, come here,” he says, aiming his voice at the garden. 

“Mao,” O’Malley says, but this time Mathew catches something moving in the bushes on the far side of Gen’s path. 

His bare feet burn on the pavement as he heads for Gen’s garden gate. Wondering if he should knock before he searches through her shrubbery, he decides he doesn’t have time and will explain if she comes. He gets on his hands and knees and starts lifting branches. In the corner of the wall, under a laurel bush, O’Malley’s turquoise eyes glimmer. Mathew pats the soil in front of him, “Come on, come on.” Finding a broken twig, he starts waving it in front of the cat. O’Malley obligingly responds and swats at the stick with his paw. Mathew slowly draws the waving stick towards him, and O’Malley edges forward.

“Don’t move or I’ll blow your bloody brains out!”

Somehow Mathew is now face down, with his cheek ignominiously pressed onto a hot paving stone, his arm painfully pinned behind his back, a heavy weight pressing on his spine and something hard, metal, and definitely life-threatening pushed into the side of his head.

“ID!” barks what Mathew assumes to be the man kneeling on him.

“What?” Mathew says, struggling to breathe. 

“Where is your ID card?” the man punctuates each word with additional pressure from his knee, so Mathew involuntarily finds himself groaning. 

“It’s in the house.”

“What’s it doing there? All citizens must carry their ID at all times with them during the All-Day Curfew.”

“I didn’t think I’d need it to hunt for my cat.”

“Your what?”

“My cat escaped.”

“There’s no cat.”

“He’s under there.” Mathew tries to lift his arm to point but the man slams him against the paving stone hard. 

“What on earth is going on?” 

This is another voice. A woman. A voice of reason. 

Mathew’s eyes, at ground level, see a pair of women’s shoes. 

“Why on earth are you kneeling on my neighbour’s son and pointing a gun at his head? Are you mad?” It’s Gen Lacey. 

“Please stand back. This boy is wandering around without ID during a government curfew, a criminal offence under the Special Measures Act 2042. This same boy I observed wearing Lenzes and spying on my client yesterday, which is not only highly suspicious behaviour, it is also a criminal offence under the Personal Privacy Act 2035.”

Gen says, “He’s Mathew Erlang, an educational apprentice to Hermes Link and son of Hoshi Mori, senior researcher at Panacea. I don’t think anyone would be especially happy if you arrested him.”

“I am making an arrest until his identity is vouched for.” 

“I am vouching for his identity. I have told you who he is. Please listen. I live here. You have seen me each day for the last year. So you should be able to vouch for my identity, at least.”

“Please don’t abuse me, madam. I am authorised to use my weapon.”

“I’m not abusing you. I’m helping you. You are assaulting a sixteen-year-old boy out searching for his cat, and I am trying to get you to stop before you do something you will regret.”

“Maow,” O’Malley says. 

“What was that?” the guard says. 

“My cat,” Mathew says. 

Mathew still can’t turn his head but hears a third voice, a strange but calm, soothing voice. It says, “I think we should stop this now.”  

The metal is lifted from the side of Mathew’s head. The knee is removed from his chest. He turns on the pavement, onto his back, and gapes up. Briefly registering Clara staring imperiously down at him, his eyes are drawn to Mr Lestrange. He has the muzzle of the machine gun in his hand and is gently handing it back to the guard, who now has a puzzled but soft look on his face. Mr Lestrange actually takes the guard’s hand in his and places the muzzle of the gun there, wrapping his fingers around it. “I think you should go back to your car now. Come back at five o’clock to collect Clara.”

“Right.” The guard hesitates for a moment and then retreats to the car, glancing over his shoulder, puzzled. They watch from Gen’s garden as the car drives away.

Gen hurries to Mathew and helps him to his feet. “Are you okay?” she asks. 

O’Malley comes from under the bushes and rubs against his ankles. Mathew bends and picks him up. “I’m fine,” he says.

O’Malley starts to purr loudly. 

Mr Lestrange is tall and thin, dressed conservatively but not oddly. His face is long, his skin pale, almost translucent, the skin of someone rarely touched by the sun. He is clean-shaven and of an indeterminate age. His eyes are dark and framed by extraordinarily long, thick eyelashes. 

Mathew realises too late that he is staring open-mouthed. 

Mr Lestrange has something in his hand. Mathew doesn’t know where it came from because he didn’t notice it when he was talking to the guard. It’s his acoustic amplifier and a tangle of wire. Mr Lestrange hands it to him silently, with the faintest hint of a smile.  

Gen Lacey has opened the front door and is guiding Clara through it. 

“Mathew, come in for a minute. I’ll make you some hot tea. You must be in shock.” 

Mathew is still staring at Mr Lestrange. Indiscernibly, he urges Mathew forward, so he finds himself walking towards Gen Lacey’s beckoning hand without consciously planning to. 

“This is my fault. I’m sorry. But I think it will be alright,” Mr Lestrange says as if talking to himself. 

Mathew is distracted by Gen, who’s ushering him into the house and helping him with his complicated burden of the cat and a bundle of wires. 

He turns back again, but Mr Lestrange has disappeared through his own front door. 

Clara and Mathew are in Gen Lacey’s large front room. Gen doesn’t have a HomeAngel – she says the Royal College of Music doesn’t have the budget – so she has gone off to make the tea herself. They are sitting on either end of the sofa, something Mathew is grateful for because as they walked in, he realised Clara was taller than him. 

They are both staring at the grand piano. He glances across at her. She has a long nose and freckles, three dark moles on her cheek. 

“So you were watching me?” she asks.

Mathew feels unwell. “No.”

“Why did the guard say you were watching me then?”

“The man’s a psycho. You saw him.”

“He takes care of me when I travel and is nothing but nice to me.”

“Your nice man had me pinned to the floor with a gun to my head.”

“It was quite extreme,” Clara admits.

“Yes, it felt quite extreme.”

“But he must have had a reason. What were you doing sneaking around like that?”

“I was searching for him,” he says nodding in the direction of O’Malley, who jumps onto the piano stool. He explores the room, his legs retracted to short stumps in fear, his neck extended in curiosity, starting back as he encounters each new thing. Mathew gets up and retrieves him before he jumps onto the piano.

“It’s a pretty cat,” Clara says. “Is it a Siamese?”

“His name is O’Malley, and he’s half-Siamese,” Mathew says. 

“Oh, it’s a he. Isn’t he allowed into the garden?”

“Used to be, but he has to stay in now because of the birds.” 

“The birds?” 

“The government passed a law making it illegal to kill birds and included a house cat clause. So he’s now shut away in the house all the time and doesn’t understand, and he’s always trying to run away.” 

O’Malley is straining to get at Clara. She extends one of her long hands and strokes him. Mathew is holding O’Malley back.

“It’s okay, I love animals,” she says. 

Released, the cat climbs onto her lap and starts to purr like he has a motor. 

“He likes you,” Mathew says, wanting to tell her how much he enjoys listening to her playing, but he doesn’t know how to form the words.

She says, “You’re the weirdo.”

“What?”

“Yesterday the guard said someone was watching me, and it was you. He called you a weirdo.”

“I happened to be at my window when you arrived. I wasn’t watching you. Alright?”

“Why would he say that then?”

Mathew hesitates. “It might have appeared like I was watching you.”

She raises an eyebrow and assesses him sceptically. “Right,” she says. “Whatever you do that makes him think that, can you stop, please? I’m too spooked out by everything going on at the moment with the government. My parents are on some frickin watch list, and the last thing I need is a teenaged stalker.”

Mathew’s face colours purple. “I am not watching you, but if you want to know the truth, the man who lives next door to me, the one you just met, has been at his window each time you came and went ever since I’ve been home from school, and your awesome guard hasn’t even noticed.”

“You’re making it up.”

“If you don’t believe me, come and see. When you’ve finished your lesson here, come round and I’ll show you.” He stands.

Gen comes through the door with a tray of tea. She glances between the two of them curiously. “Everything alright here?” she says.

“Fine,” Clara says, smiling brightly. 

“How are you?” Gen asks, frowning at Mathew with concern. “Shouldn’t you be sitting?” 

“I’m fine,” Mathew says. “I should be going.”

“Stay and have some tea, at least.”

Mathew shakes his head. “I’ve disturbed your lesson. I should leave.”

“I should call your mother,” Gen says. 

“No, please don’t. She’s so busy. She’d worry and come home, and there’s nothing she can do.”

“I’ll make a complaint. That guard was crazy,” Gen