An Unwanted Gift

This is the first chapter of a book I'm writing about a teenager with a serious heart condition. He discovers some mysterious activity in an abandoned house across the fields, and sets out with his friends to investigate. Kinda long, but I'd appreciate feedback. Enjoy!

Chapter One

A telescope worth £2,299 sat in the middle of the sitting room, staring awkwardly at Noah.

There was a silence.

And the silenced continued.



And then, after what Noah thought could be a contender for the world’s longest pause, his mum couldn’t take the silence any more. So she blurted out the first thing that came into her head, trying her best to sound enthusiastic.
‘Woah, that’s, er… pretty cool, eh Noah?’
‘Don’t say cool mum,’ Noah said, a little harsher than he had intended. He started to apologise ‘Sorry, I-‘
‘It’s fine, I know that I’m ancient. Can’t hurt to try and be “hip” every now and then though.’ She paused, ‘Cringe?’
Noah couldn’t help but crack a smile, even though he was doing best to be as cold and emotionless as possible. The telescope was a gift from his dad, who was now paying more attention to his Blackberry than to Noah’s best I’m-not-bothered-about-your-stupid-telescope face. Since his parents separated last year Damian, Noah’s dad, had visited a grand total of five times, and that included Christmas. Noah had never visited his dad’s fancy city apartment in London. It was only a ten minute drive and then a forty minute train journey from their little house in the countryside, but Damian spent almost all of his time in the USA these days, and every time they’d tried to organise a visit “an important deal” had sprung up and his dad had to drop everything and catch the next flight to New York. Noah wasn’t entirely sure what his dad did for a living, but he knew that involved banks, and making enough money to be able to buy £2,299 telescopes at the drop of a hat.
Damian managed to put down his blackberry long enough to check that he had actually bought the right thing for his son. In fact, he hadn’t bought it at all; his personal assistant Michelle had. He’d just told her: ‘I think that he’s still into telescopes and planets and stuff…’ and left a blank cheque on his desk.
Damian was, unfortunately, one of those people that hadn’t quite worked out that the most a parent can spend on their child is time. The longer that he disappeared for, the more expensive the gifts became, and the more that Noah felt like he having his affection bought. It made him feel cheap, and a small voice in his head had even toyed with the idea of flatly refusing the gift when he had first arrived. This would be stupid though, he thought. It’s not like his dad was going to suddenly pack in this new trans-Atlantic lifestyle, so he might as well get some cool stuff out of it, even if he wasn’t going to get what he really wanted.
If he was honest with himself – which he always tried to be – Noah wasn’t actually sure what he really wanted. He supposed that if he played football on a Sunday, like the rest of his friends, then he would probably want his dad on the side-line every week, cheering him on and embarrassing him. But Noah couldn’t play competitive football because of his heart condition. He couldn’t really play any contact sports, not unless he was really careful. Every problem is an opportunity his mum had told him when he first started to feel down about missing out on the sorts of activities that other kids filled their weekends with. At the time, Noah remembered this sounding exceptionally stupid, and he had wondered if his mum even believed it, or if she had just been saying it to try and make him feel better. But, as he had got a little bit older, he had started to realise that if it wasn’t for his heart condition then he almost certainly wouldn’t have got into ‘telescopes and planets and stuff’ which was, actually, the thing that he loved most in the world.
“Is that one alright, buddy?” Noah’s insides twisted up at the last word. He hated it when his dad called him ‘buddy’, and had told him so since he was about nine. These days he’d given up trying to object though; it wasn’t like he saw him often enough for it to be a real problem. But the more time his dad spent in the states, the more frequent this little nickname appeared. Noah had decided that he would let ‘buddy’ slide, but if he started calling him ‘sport’ he’d draw the line. He thought about answering the question, but decided instead that he would carry on with the stony silence, and see how his dad reacted. He wanted to watch him squirm a little bit. It wasn’t like Noah was putting his dad through such harsh treatment for no reason. The telescope was a birthday present, but his birthday had been three weeks ago. Gracefully, Michelle-the-P.A. had called to inform the family that Damian would be unable to attend, as he was currently engaged in something far more important. She hadn’t said the last bit, but it was what Noah had heard.
So the silence, once again, became the loudest voice in the room. Noah didn’t want to be a ‘petulant teenager’ (this was one of his mum’s favourite phrases when he was being difficult), but his dad thoroughly deserved this behaviour. If he thought that he could swan in almost a month late with an expensive gift and everything would be happy families, he had another thing coming. And for about thirty seconds it seemed to work. His dad’s eyes flitted helplessly between Noah and his mum searching for a reaction, like a scrambling rock-climber grasping for any little nook to latch on to. While he thought that Noah wasn’t looking, he even mouthed the word ‘Help?’ to Noah’s mum Ella, who furrowed her brow, pretending not to understand.
As it was becoming apparent that the help wasn’t going to come, Damian turned his attention back to his Blackberry. For a moment Noah couldn’t believe it, but just as he opened his mouth to use some of his favourite words, his dad redeemed himself, at least partly. It turned out that he was bringing up the details of the telescope because, apparently, just reading them off the side of the box was far too twentieth century. He read aloud the list of bullet points that Michelle had emailed him explaining the specs.
‘I know that it’s going to be powerful enough for you, it magnifies at x72 and x180. It’s got a dual encoder, whatever that means, so apparently the computer will automatically track the meteors and stuff for you. What else, let’s see… Oh, it’s got a built in HD video camera and 500GB hard drive, which should hold about 200 hours of video. Just let me know when you fill it and I’ll send you more storage’.
Noah stared determinedly ahead. His eyes weren’t even focussed; it almost felt like he was staring through the wall. His vision became fuzzier as he stared harder, which amused him. ‘I wonder if you could see through a wall if you stared hard enough,’ Noah thought. He had read somewhere that atoms are made up almost entirely of empty space. In fact, if the nucleus of an atom were the size of a grape, the electrons that whizz around it would be over a mile away. That’s a lot of space in between the actual stuff, so maybe his vision wasn’t becoming fuzzy. Maybe he was starting to stare through all of this space in the atoms of the wall, and through the wall. All of the wall staring was starting to give Noah a bit of a headache, so he decided to re-focus his vision. Trying to look through the wall was fun though, and Noah still held on to the childlish belief that he might have a superpower that he was just waiting to uncover. He reluctantly let his attention return to his dad recite a list of stuff that he already knew. Noah had an encyclopaedic knowledge of telescopes, and although he was only 14 he knew more about astronomy than most university graduates. There was, however, one little device attached to side of the telescope that he didn’t recognise. He had noticed it as soon as his dad took the telescope out of the box, and was surprised that there could be such a glaring gap in his knowledge. This frustrated Noah, and he couldn’t resist the urge to snatch another good look at it, hoping that his memory would fire.
He studied the device - which consisted of two parts - listing each of its attributes in his head: firstly there was a small, metal cylinder, around 4 inches long. It reminded Noah of a cigar, as the bottom was rounded, with the top end flattened off. The metal had been oxidised to a dull black. A small hole had been drilled into the centre of the flat top of the ‘cigar’. This cylinder was mounted on the second part of the device: a black box, about the size of a packet of chewing gum. There was only one button, an on/off switch which stuck out from one side, ‘So it must be touch screen’, Noah thought. If he waited until he got the telescope in his room, Noah knew that he could work out what it did by playing with this display. Or he could look it up on the internet.
It was at this moment that Noah realised that he had been staring at this little tube with some intensity. He felt his dad’s gaze from the other side of the room, and cursed himself under his breath for letting his body language betray his interest. Damian let an ugly smile spread across his face, delighted at finally getting some sort of reaction. Noah faced up and looked squarely at his dad, whose expression seemed to be a mixture of relief and a sort of smug satisfaction. He knew that Noah would be too proud to ask what it was, so after a few uncomfortable seconds of staring each other out, he put down his Blackberry and continued.
‘This,’ he moved off the sofa and sat next to the telescope so that he could touch it, ‘is a “LOAF.”’ The smug expression spread from the corners of his mouth to the rest of his face. He could tell that Noah didn’t have the foggiest what a LOAF was, or what it did. Noah tried to look uninterested as his Dad poked at the device. He gritted his teeth and tried to ignore that inside he was screaming out to know what the heck an LOAF was, and what it did. Noah hated it when someone else knew something that he didn’t about astronomy, and it was especially irritating when that person was his dad, who didn’t know the difference between Mercury and the moon.
‘A Laser Operated Automated Focus’ he continued, unprompted. ‘which means if you want to study anything short range, within a couple of miles, turn on this little baby and point at whatever it is that you want to look at. It fires a laser, which judges the exact range and automatically focuses the telescope.’
‘What a useless gimmick,’ Noah snorted, and the four words swiftly wiped the smile off his dad’s face before he’d finished saying them.
‘Noah-,’ his mum started, and he could tell by the tone of her voice that he was about to be on the receiving end of a “being angry doesn’t excuse rudeness” lecture. And so, before she could even begin, Noah decided to use his tried and tested get-out-of-a-telling-off-free card:
‘I’m feeling really tired, I think that I need to rest.’
His parents exchanged looks. Noah thought that he saw a flicker of suspicion in his mum’s eyes, but if she had caught onto his tactic she let it slide, possibly just to avoid another family row. The really big rows had a funny habit of arriving at about the same time as the really big presents.
‘Well, I suppose you better have a lie down then,’ his mum began sternly, and then softer: ‘It is getting kind of late. An early night wouldn’t hurt anyway.’
Noah had to be careful how often he used the ‘I’m really tired’ excuse. It was true that his energy levels were much lower than his friends because of his heart condition, so it wasn’t exactly a lie, but as he had got older he had got much better at using this excuse to his advantage.
‘Night then,’ Noah said, and as he moved towards the sanctuary of his room he thought it best to mutter ‘thanks for the present’ in his dad’s general direction.
‘No problem buddy’ his dad said brightly, but Noah was already up the stairs.