Tall Story - Candy Gourlay [54]
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?
4
Andi
Saint 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.
It’s not quite like that in London.
The Americans invented basketball. So it couldn’t compete with English sports like cricket, football and rugby. But then school cricket, football and rugby didn’t make it to TV either.
That’s why even though the new gym was smart and had all the right lines, it wasn’t designed to have an audience. In fact, there was barely enough room for the players to sit on the sidelines, let alone cheerleaders.
And yet.
When I walked into the gym at lunch time, the gym endlines were crammed so full of sixth formers that the referee had to patrol the sidelines, threatening anyone who stepped over the boundary.
Rocky waved cheerily from where the Souls were bouncing up and down on the end line, eager to get on with it. ‘Andi! Andi!’
I hurried over. ‘Rocky, this is massive!’
Rocky winked. ‘I spread the word in the sixth form that we were going to blast the Colts with a secret weapon.’
‘Secret weapon? You must be kidding!’ Bernardo was their secret weapon? Bernardo was purely decorative. Weren’t they planning to, erm, shoot some balls as well? Score some goals? Isn’t that how you win a game?
Rocky grinned. ‘Shock and awe. We’re gonna shock and awe them with our giant.’
Louie suddenly appeared. He threw an arm around me as if we were best friends for ever. Someone made loud kissing noises. Lucky I couldn’t see who it was because if I had, he wouldn’t have been able to crawl on the court once I’d done with him.
I shrugged Louie’s arm off, my nose wrinkled. His uniform was already drenched with sweat and the game had not even started yet.
‘Man, look at that giant!’ someone said and the crowd erupted in cheers