Tall Story - Candy Gourlay [60]
I clicked through.
All of them from Jabby.
13
Bernardo
I didn’t know, of course, that Andi found the phone.
I was busy, lying on two operating tables laid end to end to accommodate my length, my shaven scalp peeled away from my head as the surgeons probed for the source of my troubles.
I didn’t know, but when I heard the story later, there was a strange familiarity to it, as if I had been there, as if I’d seen it all unfold with my own eyes.
It was the day the Arena would have opened, the day the Mountain Men would have played the Giant Killers. But of course things had not gone according to plan. The current contractor (was it the fourth or the fifth?) had insisted that half the building ought to be torn down because the foundations were substandard. He was fired and another contractor hired and then fired, and then suddenly they were all suing each other and there were newspaper articles about bribery and corruption and illegal building permits and …
It had turned into a huge mess.
That very day it was announced that the owners were finally washing their hands of the Arena. They were going to rip out its insides and turn it into a covered market. Wreckers were scheduled to come in a week.
Jabby was devastated. All his dreams of glory had amounted to nothing. His immediate reaction was to call me, and his cellphone was ringing before he remembered that I was in London and that the call was going to cost a fortune and anyway it was probably four in the morning on the other side of the world. So he hung up before I could pick up.
That was Missed Call Number One.
And then he thought there was no time like now and he had better make the most of the Arena’s basketball court while it was still there.
And he thought of inviting one of the other boys, revealing his secret entrance, having a play … but no. There was still time before the wreckers came to dismantle the courts. He could show it off later. For now, he just wanted to enjoy having the Arena to himself. It was evening: there would be nobody there.
And that’s why Jabby was in the dome when the earthquake struck.
The first time the Earth moved, he was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he ignored it.
To be fair, earthquakes had been so frequent in San Andres that most village folk paid them no mind.
And then the bright yellow sports floor jerked up as if some great creature had shrugged its shoulders underground.
Jabby stood very, very still and realized that the ground was continuing to move. The creature was travelling the length of the court in one long motion. The stadium gave a loud groan. Snap! The glass light at the very top of the dome suddenly exploded into a thousand brilliant shards. He threw himself out of the way, cowering behind the first tier of seats as glass fell in a deadly rain.
The ground continued to move and the building groaned again. There was a series of popping noises and, looking up, he realized that the window panes were breaking, one after the other. A long crack split the ceiling and pieces of concrete were falling away in huge chunks.
Suddenly the seriousness of the situation hit home. The dome was cracking up. If he didn’t get out, he would be killed. Jabby began to run.
He made it to the entrance of the tunnel by which he’d entered, when the dome collapsed.
He remembered a lesson taught by Sister Mary John, a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, when San Andres was still the rock-and-roll capital of the world (at least according to the Book of World Records). ‘If you are caught indoors during an earthquake,’ Sister Mary John advised, ‘look for triangles.’ Put yourself in a triangle and you might survive, she said. Stand under a door frame, under a table, under a sofa – triangles would give you some protection from a collapsing building.
Sister Beaulah had dismissed the theory. ‘That was a hoax, Sister,’ she’d argued with Sister Mary John. ‘You are wrong!’ And then they’d quarrelled while the class had fidgeted.
It was too dark to see anything, much less a triangle.