The Signal on the Roof

Source written for Revision Library (original, copyright-free). Fictional narrative created for 11+ comprehension practice.

Aaliyah had lived on the ninth floor of Nelson House for as long as she could remember, yet she had never once been through the door at the end of the corridor marked ROOF ACCESS - STAFF ONLY. It was painted the same tired grey as everything else in the block, and the handle rattled uselessly whenever anyone tried it. Today, though, someone had wedged a folded newspaper beneath it, and the door hung open by the width of a hand.

She should have gone straight to the shops, as her mother had asked. Instead, she found herself climbing the last flight of concrete steps, her trainers slapping against stone that smelled of rain and pigeons. At the top, a second door led out into daylight so sudden and bright that she had to blink several times before the roof came into focus.

It was nothing like she had expected. Rows of terracotta pots lined the edge nearest the railings, sprouting runner beans and a tangle of nasturtiums the colour of flame. A wooden bench, silvered with age, stood beside a shed no bigger than a garden cupboard. Crouched beside the shed, sorting through a wooden crate of brightly coloured flags, was a man she recognised at once: Mr Adeyemi from the third floor, who fixed clocks in his kitchen window and never seemed to go anywhere in a hurry.

'You found the garden, then,' he said, not looking up. His voice carried the trace of an accent she could never quite place, softened by forty years in the city. 'Took someone long enough. I stopped locking that door months ago.' Aaliyah stayed by the railings, unsure whether she was in trouble. 'What are the flags for?' she asked.

'Semaphore,' Mr Adeyemi said. He held up two flags, one yellow and one blue, and crossed them into an X above his head before letting his arms fall. 'Before radios were reliable, sailors signalled to each other across open water this way. Each position of the arms means a different letter.' He nodded towards the horizon, where the glass tower of an office block caught the afternoon sun. 'There is somebody over there who still remembers it, if you know where to look.' Aaliyah followed his gaze but saw only windows, dozens of them, blank and identical. 'Nobody could see flags from all the way over there,' she said doubtfully. 'Watch,' he said simply, and began to move.

She had assumed the flags would be clumsy in his weathered hands, but instead they became fluid, almost graceful, cutting sharp angles against the sky. Left arm high, right arm low; both arms wide; both crossed at the chest. He repeated the sequence twice, unhurried, as though he had all the patience in the world and nowhere better to spend it.

For a long moment, nothing happened. Aaliyah began to suspect the whole thing was a game, harmless but pointless, the kind of story old men told to fill an afternoon. Then, high on the seventeenth floor of the glass tower, a single light flickered. On. Off. On, on. Off.

'There,' Mr Adeyemi said, and for the first time he smiled properly, deep creases folding around his eyes. 'My brother. Eighty-one years old and still faster with a torch than most people are with a telephone.' 'He lives all the way over there?' Aaliyah asked. 'He cleans the offices at night,' Mr Adeyemi said. 'Has done for eleven years. We are not permitted visitors, and neither of us much likes the telephone, so.' He shrugged, as though this explained everything, and perhaps, Aaliyah thought, it did.

She looked again at the flags in the crate, their colours dulled by years of sun, and then at the small steady light still blinking its patient reply across the rooftops. Somewhere beneath her, buses groaned along the high street and a siren rose and fell, but up here, none of it seemed to matter very much. 'Could you teach me?' she asked.

Mr Adeyemi held out the yellow flag without a word, and Aaliyah realised, taking it, that her hand was shaking, though she could not have said whether it was nerves or something closer to excitement. She lifted her arm the way he showed her, felt the flag catch the wind and pull taut, and for a moment she was not a girl who had forgotten to go to the shops. She was a signal, waiting to be read.