How to Live Forever (2 page)

At six o'clock Peter's mother came in. She slumped down in the chair, exhausted. It was the same every day. All day long people came to her wanting to know where this was or who had that or why those weren't where they should be. She was too tired to speak, and while she lay back in her chair staring out of focus into the dancing fire, Peter and his grandfather went downstairs to collect everyone's keys and lock up.

They stood by the great doors as one by one the gallery attendants handed in their keys and went back to the world outside. When all ninety-seven keys were collected and the last person had gone,
they crossed the museum yard to lock the outside gates with a key so heavy that Peter had been unable to lift it until he was three years old. As soon as he had been strong enough, he had begged his grandfather to let him carry the key and it had become their little routine that even now, after seven years, neither Peter nor his grandfather wanted to give up.

Then they came back inside, locked the great doors behind them and walked back up the stairs to their apartment.

‘Time for dinner,' said the old man.

‘You say that every night, Grandad,' said Peter.

‘Well, it is time for dinner,' the old man laughed, ruffling his grandson's hair.

‘And you always say it when we reach the fifteenth stair.'

‘Well, tomorrow then, I'll wait until I get to the sixteenth stair,' said the old man, and the two of them laughed because they both knew that he'd forget and say it at the fifteenth.

After dinner, Peter said to his mother, ‘I want you to tell me about my father.'

His mother went quiet and stared into the fire. She started to speak but then her mouth drew into a thin line and she was silent. Peter could see tears in her eyes. This always happened when he asked her about his father, and the sight of his mother's
unhappiness had always stopped him going further. But this time he wasn't going to let it drop.

‘Please,' he said.

‘He does have a right to know,'said Peter's grandfather, who usually kept out of the conversation.

‘There's nothing to say, really,' said Peter's mother. ‘He walked out just before you were born.'

‘Where is he then?'

‘Who knows? I've never heard a single word from him.'

‘But …' Peter began.

‘It wasn't like it sounds,' said his grandfather, trying to defend his son. ‘One night he left the apartment to do his rounds – he did the job I do now – and we never saw him again.'

‘Like I said,' Peter's mother repeated. ‘He walked out on us.'

‘I'm sure he never meant to,' Peter's grandfather said. ‘I mean, the keys to the main doors were here on their hook. Everywhere was locked up. There was no way he could have left the museum. He just simply vanished.'

‘What do you mean?' said Peter.

‘I mean, he simply vanished,' said his grandfather, ‘into thin air.'

‘But …'

It didn't make sense. People don't just vanish into
thin air, even in a place like the museum, where some of the air was anything but thin.

‘It comes to the same thing,' said Peter's mother. ‘He deserted us.'

She shivered, and moved closer to the fire.

‘Sometimes,' she added, ‘this place gives me the creeps.'

Peter's grandfather said they had searched every corridor and every gallery. They'd even called the police, but there hadn't been the slightest clue, no handkerchief dropped by a closed door or piece of torn fabric, no letter, no blood, nothing.

‘I know I should have told you about it,' Peter's mother said with an emptiness in her voice, ‘but there was nothing to say except that he vanished, and talking about it wouldn't bring him back. It would just keep reminding us.'

She sighed and got up. She went over to Peter and put her arms round him.

‘Anyway, now you know as much as we do,' she said sadly. ‘I'm going to bed.'

When they were alone Peter's grandfather sat the boy down and the two of them stared into the fire.

‘Something must have happened to him,' said the old man, shaking his head. ‘There was no way he would have just gone off without saying anything. Not from choice.'

‘What was he like?' said Peter.

‘He was like you,' said his grandfather. ‘He looked like you, skinny little boy the same as you, same brown eyes and same scruffy hair that still looks scruffy even when you've just brushed it. And he loved this place the same as you do. You are alike in so many ways.'

The old man closed his eyes and smiled.

‘You know,' he said, ‘I used to be able to shut my eyes and see him as if he was right here, but as the years go by it gets harder to remember all the details. But then,' he added with a smile, ‘all I have to do is look at you and there he is again.'

Peter felt the sadness his grandfather was obviously feeling. Like the old man, there was an empty place inside him where his dad should have been. He went over and sat on the side of his grandfather's chair and put his arm round his shoulder.

‘You know,' the old man continued, ‘I can't stop believing he's here somewhere.'

‘What do you mean?' said Peter.

‘All the old corridors and rooms, all the places you go exploring every night, where no one ever goes. Some of them seem to go on forever, don't they? I keep thinking that he's lost somewhere or trapped somehow and can't get back,' said his grandfather.

Then, seeing the expression on Peter's face, he added, ‘Did you think your adventures were a secret? Well, they might be from your mother, but not from me. I just wish I was young enough to go with you, but I seem to need a lot more sleep nowadays.'

‘Surely he'd have found his way back by now,' said Peter.

‘Maybe, but there are places here that you can't just walk to. You'll see.'

Before Peter could ask him to explain, his grandfather went back into the kitchen.

‘Go and do your homework,' he called out. ‘It's getting late.'

‘It's the end of term, Grandad. I don't have any homework,' Peter called back, but his grandfather was clattering pots and pans in the sink and singing to himself.

Peter sat in his mother's chair and stared into the fire. Well, he'd asked his mother, but he hadn't really learnt anything. He wondered if there was something they weren't telling him. Of course, knowing his father might be trapped somewhere in the museum gave his explorations a whole new importance. Now he had something to look for – though there was the frightening thought that if he did find his father, after all this time, he might be dead.

The dancing fire had begun to hypnotise him
when there was a loud crash from the kitchen, followed by silence.

Peter ran in to find his grandfather sitting on the floor looking as white as his hair.

‘What's the matter, Grandad?' said Peter, afraid to touch him.

‘It's nothing,' said the old man, ‘just a bit of a twinge in the old ticker.'

‘Shall I get Mum?'

‘No, no, old chap, we don't want to bother her. She'd only worry. It's just the old Eisenmenger's. It's nothing. I'll be fine in a minute.'

Peter was scared. He had never seen his grandfather like this before and it made him realise something was wrong. He hadn't the faintest idea what an Eisenmenger's was but it sounded serious. Things that didn't matter usually had much shorter names, like a cold or a cough.

‘Nothing to worry about,' said his grandfather. ‘I'll just sit here for a bit. I'll be all right.'

‘Are you sure?' said Peter.

The old man nodded. Peter went over to him and put his hands under the old man's arms, but he couldn't lift him, so he knelt there not knowing what to do.

‘We won't tell your mother about this, will we?' his grandfather said. ‘You know what's she's like.'

When Peter started to object, the old man told him again that it was nothing, but Peter knew he was lying.

Peter had always assumed his grandfather would be there forever. It was scary because if his grandfather died, Peter and his mother would probably have to leave the museum and live outside. Peter had always thought that when he was older, his grandfather would retire and Peter himself would take over his job.

He finished the washing up, and by the time he'd dried the last dish, his grandfather was sitting on the chair with the colour back in his face. Peter made the old man a cup of tea and then, with more reassurances from his grandfather and promises not to tell his mother, he went to bed.

There was too much stuff dancing round inside his head to go exploring that night. He lay in bed staring into the darkness with a muddle of different thoughts trying to grab his attention, making it impossible to sleep. His restlessness disturbed Archimedes and the cat went off for some explorations of his own.

In the middle of the museum was the library, a circular room as big as a cathedral. Around its high walls were thirteen galleries of books, each linked to the one below by a metal staircase. And above the galleries, a ring of one hundred and four windows supported a huge domed room painted blue like a sky.

In this library and the hundreds of storerooms behind the galleries, which were known as the Stacks, was every book that had ever been written. Some books had been on the shelves for as long as the museum had been there, and thousands of them had sat unread for hundreds of years.

Some had never been read at all.

No one knew what fantastic secrets were hidden in their pages. The secrets of alchemy or immortality or how to teach chickens to talk could have been there just waiting to be rediscovered.

And all day long the library was filled with the clatter of feet as people ran up and down the stairs gathering books. You couldn't just walk into the place and pick up a book like your local library. You had to fill out forms to tell the librarians why you wanted to see a particular book. Nor could you take the books away with you. You had to study them at one of the hundred and fifty leather-topped tables that spread out in lines from the great librarians' desks at the centre of the room. Each morning at nine o'clock queues of people from all over the world waited at the library doors to pick the brains of every writer who had ever written anything about anything.

Once inside, you went to the librarians' desks and made your request. Messages were then sent to an army of assistants who pored over the endless shelves, scrambling up and down the thirteen galleries and searching outside in the Stacks until they found what you wanted. There was a never-ending movement of books as the librarians constantly rearranged and recatalogued them. No sooner was
everything in its right place than new books would arrive and everything would need to be moved up to fit them in.

Peter usually only saw the library at night, because you had to be at least eighteen years old and doing some serious work or research to be allowed in there. There had been a few times when he'd wanted to find out stuff for school. Then, he waited for the hour at the end of each day when the last visitor had left and the librarians and their assistants put all the books away.

‘Hello, Peter,' said Beryl, one of the librarians. ‘More homework research?'

‘Yes,' said Peter.

He asked her to look up Eisenmenger's, but he couldn't tell her why. If anyone realised Peter's grandfather was ill, they might make him give up his job.

‘That seems very advanced for a ten year old,' said Beryl.

‘I know,' said Peter. ‘That's why I need to look it up.'

‘Have you any idea what it might mean?'

‘Something to do with being ill,' said Peter, hastily adding, ‘I think.'

Neither of them was sure how to spell it, but after a few attempts Beryl found it on her computer.

‘Yes, you're right,' she said. ‘Follow me.'

She led Peter up to the ninth gallery. She stopped and looked down over the handrail at the floor below and smiled. Librarians were too important to hunt the galleries for books. They spent all day at the island of desks in the centre of the floor. It was their army of assistants who ran the errands.

‘It must be ten years since I was up here,' she said. ‘Come on, it's this way.'

There were over three hundred medical dictionaries in English and countless others in every language you could imagine and some you couldn't.

‘Take your pick,' said Beryl.

Peter lifted down a book and found the right page. It said:

Before he read the description, Peter had one word he didn't know the meaning of. Now he had lots more, but there were some words that needed no explanation. ‘Defect' and ‘severe' were two of them, and they sounded bad. Tension was bad too, and Peter assumed that ‘hypertension' was the same only
worse, like when a child runs around crazy and adults say they're being hyperactive. He pulled more dictionaries off the shelves and looked up the other words, but every one brought yet more words he couldn't understand, and soon he was surrounded by a pile of books and even more confusion. But he had discovered that his grandfather had a hole in his heart.

‘Find what you wanted?' said the librarian as she followed him out of the library.

Peter couldn't say anything, he just nodded. He hadn't found what he wanted. He found something he didn't want, something that had confirmed his worst fears, and now he wished he hadn't looked it up. Eisenmenger's on its own didn't sound too bad, but the stuff in the dictionary sounded terrible. The dictionary said it was severe. Peter's grandfather was going to die and Peter was helpless to save him. If there had been a cure, surely the dictionary would have said so.

Whenever he felt sad, Peter went away to the secret corridors where he knew he would be alone. Behind the public galleries there were dozens of storerooms, dark and cluttered with treasure and cobwebs and, in some cases, unvisited for thirty or forty or maybe even a hundred years. No one seemed to know how many rooms there were, nor what was
stored in them. On her computer, Peter's mother had records which ran into the millions, but they only covered the things that were on display and in the regular storerooms. They barely scratched the surface of the treasure inside the larger museum.

Under the roof, squeezed into the rafters, were old attics and this was where Peter always went when he wanted to be alone. He felt more comfortable there than in the other places. The corridors were narrower and the rooms, with their low sloping ceilings packed in tight under the roof, felt small and friendly. And they were always full of comforting things like teddy bears and old worn-out armchairs. Apart from Archimedes the cat, Peter's feet were the only ones that had climbed the stairs for years.

There were skylights in the attics, thick with grime and cobwebs. They looked out over the acres of museum roofs and on to the rooftops of the city. The glass was so dirty Peter imagined he was looking at the city as it had been a hundred years ago. He was so far from the ground that the sound of traffic was inaudible and he imagined sometimes that he could hear the clip-clop of horses and distant voices.

Peter went to his favourite room and sat on the old faded sofa surrounded by a sea of threadbare teddy bears. Archimedes was asleep on one of the cushions and Peter pulled him onto his lap and wept
into his fur. He hated Doctor Eisenmenger even though he knew it was ridiculous to blame him for what was wrong with his grandfather.

Maybe the huge sadness of his father vanishing had put the hole in his grandfather's heart.

That had to be it. People don't just get holes in their heart for no reason. And if that was what had happened, it would mean if he could find his father and bring him back, the hole might close up and his grandfather could be well again.

‘We have to find him,' he said to Archimedes. ‘He has to be somewhere.'