A hurricane that could use its eye to see?

    Uh-oh. Paranoia. Too little sleep was starting to get to him.

    Freddie rubbed his eyes, got up from his chair and peered through the curtains.

    It was getting light. He desperately needed to get to bed. He’d have to be up again in a couple of hours. Today, unfortunately, was a school day. Later, he’d be down at FlowMotion, the local skatepark, practicing his Ollies. He’d need all his energy for that.

    His best mate, Cap, a veteran skater, had just gotten him into skateboarding and Freddie was still trying to master the basic moves.  An Ollie was the first one you needed to learn. Once you’d mastered an Ollie, you could move on to all kinds of other skateboarding tricks. But there was a lot to remember.

    First, the stance – ball of the back foot on the tail, other foot between the front trucks of the deck. (‘Deck’ was the skater name for the board. ‘Trucks’ housed the wheels underneath.)  Second, the ‘pop’ – jumping into the air, off your back foot. Then, nudging the deck with your front foot to guide it as it flew upwards (pretty tricky, this bit). Next, pulling both knees up to actually hit your chest before flattening the board out beneath you in mid-air (don’t even think about how hard this is). Finally, bending the knees again, ready for the landing. You had to bend the knees, to absorb the shock as the deck connected with the ground. Otherwise, you could find yourself collapsing in a pitiful groaning heap while all the other skaters looked on smirking …
 
    Easy, Cap had said when he’d first demonstrated it to Freddie. Right, Freddie had replied as he kicked his deck’s tail, jumped up and then looked down, only to see it scoot away from him before – you guessed – he crashed to the ground in a pitiful groaning heap with all the other skaters looking on smirking …

    But when it came to anything to do with the weather, he was a natural. It had been his passion ever since he’d heard the BBC’s Shipping Forecast as a little boy. The crackly radio broadcasts conjured up vivid pictures of mysterious places far out to sea. Places that he could only imagine, where rain and wind and thunder ruled and sailing ships with creaking masts ran aground on treacherous rocks.

    Fisher German Bight, north or northwest 4 or 5, increasing 6 or 7 for a time in east Fisher – showers at first mainly good – Humber Thames Dover Wight north or northeast 4 or 5, occasionally 6 or 7 later –
mainly fair,  moderate or good – Portland, Plymouth Biscay, north or northeast 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later – mainly Fair, moderate or good – Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea north or northeast 4 or 5, occasionally 3 later – mainly fair, moderate or good – Shannon east veering southeast 4 or 5, occasionally 3 at first in north …    
   
    He wasn’t into the poetry they did at school much, but these words inspired him, spoke to him at some deep level he couldn’t name …

    Freddie set up his first weather station when he was only eight. It was modest, to say the least. Just a map of the world stuck on the wall, a weather-vane on the roof of the garden shed and a rain-gauge on the window-sill.  

    He’d devoted most of his time to studying the weather ever since. Too much time, in Cap’s opinion. He counted it as a small victory that he’d actually managed to get Freddie interested in skateboarding. Lissen, bruv, don’t you think you should get out more and maybe have a bit more fun? Though, actually, Freddie wasn’t a total recluse.

    His other passion was the Arctic Monkeys. They were his top band. The only band, in his opinion, that mattered. He loved the sharp, witty lyrics, the crashing edgy guitars. The thundering drums. He regularly went to their gigs, mostly in London, and would stand in a corner, entranced, black hoodie pulled up over his head.  They kicked up their own kind of storm onstage, blew him away every time.

    Next to come on Cap’s list of things to get Freddie into was girls. Since Freddie was the trainspotterish type, he knew it might be tricky.  But Cap was a Rashid. Like his mother, father, six sisters and seven brothers, he was a wheeler-dealer, with oodles of charm. Even though he was still at school,  at the weekends he ran his own market stall and did a roaring trade in baseball caps. He boasted he could sell ice to Eskimos if he had to. So Cap knew it was only a matter of time before Freddie caved in on the girl front.

    Currently, though, Freddie only had eyes for his beautiful, shiny high-tech equipment. Every time he booted it up, he practically drooled.

    Occupying pride of place were three 21” ViewSonic computer screens arranged iside by side on his desk. These were connected via a tangled spaghetti of cables to three towers underneath, one HP and two Dells. From left to right, they showed satellite images of the Atlantic coast of the United States, mainland Europe, and the Southern Pacific Ocean. He could easily switch images and zone-in on any area he wanted to. So he had weather activity anywhere in the world pretty much covered.

    The ever-changing patterns of areas of high and low pressure systems across the planet were colour-coded in various shades of red, green, yellow and blue.  The weather was in constant flux and, as the different colours tumbled and twirled, merged and separated,  they took on a hypnotic beauty. Freddie often sat and watched them for hours on end, wondering what it would be like to drift weightless, miles and miles above the planet, just like an astronaut, gazing down at this amazing restless kaleidoscope.
   
    Altogether he had a mighty 6GB of memory at his disposal.  Not bad. But the computers, although impressive, weren’t brand-new. Freddie simply couldn’t afford the latest gear. Fortunately, when he’d decided to update his hardware a few months ago, Cap and his father had come to his rescue. Mr Rashid ran an electronics shop in Halstead, the Essex town where they lived. You could trade-in old computer equipment, or exchange it for cash. Out of the blue one afternoon, Cap and Mr Rashid turned up at Freddie’s place in their rusty old white Transit van. It was brim-full of all sorts of computer gear. All of it for Freddie.

    Freddie’s room was soon stacked high with boxes, some of them bearing the logos of the very best brand names. His eyes almost popped out.  He couldn’t believe it.
   
    Not that he was complaining.

    “Thought maybe you can use this stuff,” said Cap, tilting the NY Yankees baseball cap he always wore to a jaunty angle. “Yes, they are only collecting dust and taking up valuable space on my shelves. Please to accept them,” said Mr Rashid and then both of them were off again. “Later, bruv. Text me,” yelled Cap, as they sped away.

    The next day, after he’d set the equipment up, his bedroom wouldn’t have looked out of place on an orbiting space station. In the twilight of the room, the tiny lights of the computer towers winked on and off like constellations of stars.

    Apart from the computers, Freddie had many other pieces of kit essential for a fully functional weather station.

    At one end of the desk sat a small mahogany box with glass sides, like a little aquarium. Inside was a brass cylinder with graph paper wrapped around it.  This device was a barometer and over a hundred years old. Freddie had come across it in a junk shop and paid hardly anything for it. Its function was to record changing atmospheric pressure – which it did, slowly, patiently and – despite its age – with complete accuracy.

    In a corner on a wobbly IKEA coffee table, was a small, matt-black console, with a VDU screen displaying ever-changing red numerals. This was connected to an electronic weather vane mounted up on the roof, which recorded not only wind speed and direction, but also wind-chill factor, humidity and air temperature.

    From high up on a shelf, a globe of the Earth and a model of the moon gazed down on Freddie in his very scuffed black vinyl swivel chair (also second-hand). Piles of CDs, DVDs and well-thumbed magazines littered the floor.  These included Deck, Thrasher and Skatedork, essential reading for a recently converted skater.

    Files were stacked high, notebooks lay open, computer printouts with endless lines of numbers resembling Egyptian hieroglyphics spilled onto the floor from a LaserJet printer.  Horrible Geography, How Weather Works and Earth – Emergency!  were just a few of the books Freddie regularly consulted. They lay scattered all around him, their pages flapping open like birds about to take flight.

    And, in one corner, was a special collection of newspaper and magazine articles, DVDs and videos that Freddie had been building up about the recent disastrous effects of climate change. It was a big pile. And, unfortunately, growing bigger everyday.

    On the computer desk, his other best mate, Spike, sat happily in his little plastic pot. Spike was a cactus. He had two small upright arms sticking out of either side of his body. It looked as if he was being held up at gunpoint. Freddie had rescued him from an overturned bin a long time ago and liked chatting to him.  He may have been just a cactus, but Spike was good company in the lonely hours of early morning.
 
    So this was Freddie McBain.

    The boy who spent days on end alone in his bedroom.

    The boy who couldn’t Ollie to save himself.

    The boy who chatted to cacti.

    The boy who was beginning to think that hurricanes might be living things.