The London Eye Mystery (2 page)

‘The ones who live in Manchester?’

‘That’s right. It’s been more than five years since we saw them, Ted. I just don’t know where the time’s gone.’

It sounded like she thought time was something that comes and goes like the weather. I shook my head. ‘No, Mum,’ I explained. ‘Time doesn’t
go
anywhere.’

‘It does in this house, Ted. Down a bloody black hole.’

I blinked at her, trying to figure out if she might have a point. She laughed and said she was joking and ruffled my hair again. ‘Go on, Ted. Off to school with you.’

So I went on my zigzag way across the common, thinking about time, black holes, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and storm warnings. I imagined Hurricane Gloria building up force as it drew nearer, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. My thoughts were so good that I nearly ended up walking into the pond on the wrong side of the common and got to school only just on time. ‘Down a black hole,’ I said to myself as I ran across the playground. My hand shook itself out. ‘Down a bloody black hole.’

The Hurricane Approaches

T hat night Mum read out Aunt Gloria’s letter. I tried to find it so I could quote it word for word but Mum said it had probably been thrown out because our house is too small to hoard things. I remember it went something like this:

Dear Faith
(that’s my mum),

I want to make up. I am sorry we argued last time
I visited. Salim and I are about to move to New York
City, where I have been offered a job as an art
curator. Please can we come and stay with you for
one or two nights in the half-term holiday on our way
to the airport? I know your house is small but we can
squeeze in somehow. Salim says he can sleep on the
ironing board.

Kat has just told me that this is not in Aunt Gloria’s style. Aunt Gloria, she says, writes with much more elaborate words. According to Kat, she lets it all hang out. I am not sure what this means. Kat wrote down what she remembered of the letter and this is her version:

Darling, dearest Faith,

I’m so sorry not to have been in touch more. Life
has been horribly hectic and the years have flown by
like so many swallows in the sky. I really regret how
we argued last time. It has been eating away at my
soul. I can hardly remember now what it was all
about, but I was a total mess then, having just split
up with Salim’s dad and not yet having discovered
Transcendental Meditation. I am much more centred
now.

I have some exciting news. I’ve been offered a
high-powered job as an art curator in New York.
Isn’t that fabulous? Salim and I have decided to go
for it. Salim is thirteen now and very grown up. He
is not happy at school here. He only has one friend,
who’s half Asian like him, and the other boys pick on
them. So it’s the Big Apple for us, a big exciting
adventure in our fascinating voyage through life. Can
 
we drop by your place on the way? Just for a night or
two, darling? I know your house is small, but Salim
is dead keen to meet his cousins again. He says he
can sleep on the ironing board!
So the only thing Kat and I both remember is the part about the ironing board.

After Mum read out the letter, Dad groaned and put his head in his hands. Kat said Auntie Glo sounded insane and I said that Salim must be tiny if he could expect to sleep on an ironing board. This made Kat, Dad and Mum laugh. My hand shook itself out and a bad feeling went up my oesophagus. I’d been caught out again. It was like the time I’d asked why footballers were still being kept as slaves when slavery had been abolished, after a newsreader announced that a Manchester United star had been bought by another club for twelve million pounds. When they all stopped laughing at me, Dad said did we have to say yes and Mum said yes, we did. Kat asked where everyone was going to sleep. Mum said that Aunt Gloria must have Kat’s room and Kat said no way, Mum. Mum said Kat would just have to lump it and it served her right for having skived off school, because a girl who skives isn’t entitled to make a fuss about sleeping on the couch for a night or two.

Kat folded her arms and her lips went inside her teeth.

‘What about Salim?’ I said, eyeing where the ironing board was propped against the kitchen wall.

‘He’ll share with you, Ted. We can blow up the lilo.’

I looked at Kat. I knew from the way her face was that she was angry. I wasn’t angry, but I felt a bad pain starting in my stomach. It was the thought of a strange boy coming into my room at night and having to hear him breathe when the lights were off and him seeing me get changed into my pyjamas and not being able to listen to the shipping forecast late at night like I do when I can’t sleep.

‘Uh-huh-huh,’ I said, with my hand flapping.

‘Too right,’ said Kat. ‘Uh-bloody-huh-huh.’

‘You’ll probably end up arguing again,’ Dad said to Mum. He sounded like a weatherman when he’s predicting a really bad storm. I have looked in the thesaurus for the right word and it is ‘gleeful’.

‘No we won’t,’ said Mum. ‘Because I won’t let it happen. Not this time. I’ll just take a deep breath every time she says something annoying and in my mind’s eye I’ll meditate on the shape of a teapot. And since she’ll be doing the same, we’ll get along fine.’

I tried meditating on a teapot in my mind’s eye but all I saw was hot water spilling from the spout and coming straight at me like a scalding hot tsunami wave. Which is how the thought of Aunt Gloria coming and Salim sleeping in my room made me feel. A real hurricane would have been much better. 

The Hurricane Makes Landfall

Aunt Gloria and Salim came at 6.24 p.m. on Sunday 23 May, the start of our one-week halfterm holiday. It was a fine day with some scattered showers, moving northeast. Kat and I watched as a black London cab pulled up outside our house. Aunt Gloria came out first. She was tall and thin with straight black hair, cut to her shoulders. (Kat says the style is called a bob.) She wore tight jeans and dark pink sandals. You couldn’t help notice her two big toes sticking out from the gap, because they were painted with matching dark pink nail polish and were very bright. But the thing I noticed most was the cigarette holder she had in her hand. A long, slim cigarette was stuck in the end and it was lit. A trail of smoke floated up from it.

Kat said Aunt Gloria looked like a fashion editor. Kat has never met a fashion editor so I don’t know how she knew this.

Salim was tall and thin with jeans on, like his mother. He wore an ordinary backpack and wheeled Aunt Gloria’s suitcase on wheels behind him. His black hair was cut short. His skin was brown. Kat says it was not just brown but caramel. She says I should say that he was very good-looking. She is always thinking about whether people are goodlooking or not. I think people just look like who they are. I suppose I am ugly because nobody has ever said I am handsome. People are always saying how pretty Kat is so I suppose she is. To me, she just looks like Kat.

So I don’t know if Salim was handsome, but he looked like his thoughts were not in the same place as his body, and I liked this about him. I think this is how I often look too.

He and Aunt Gloria walked up to our front door through our front garden, which Mum says is the size of a postage stamp. In fact, it’s three metres by five and I once worked out that it could fit 22,500 stamps. Before they had a chance to ring the doorbell, Mum flung open the front door.

‘Glo,’ she said.

‘Fai!’ Aunt Gloria shrieked.

There was a muddle of arms and laughing and I wished I could go up to my room. Behind them Salim stood looking on. His eye and my eye met. Then he lifted his shoulders, gazed up at the sky and shook his head. Then he smiled straight at me, which meant that he and I could become friends. And that felt good. I only had three other friends and they were all grown up. They were Mum, Dad and Mr Shepherd, my teacher at school. I didn’t count Kat as my friend because she was rude to me most of the time and interrupted me when I spoke.

‘Ted,’ Mum was saying, ‘say hello to your Auntie Glo.’

I looked at Aunt Gloria’s left ear. ‘Hello, Aunt Gloria.’ I put out my hand for her to shake. She dragged me into a hug that smelled of cigarettes and perfume and made my nostrils itchy.

‘Hello, Ted,’ she said. ‘Just call me Glo, won’t you? That’s what everyone calls me.’ I escaped from between her arms. ‘God, Faith,’ she went on. ‘He’s the spit of our father. D’you remember? Dad in his suit and tie, even on holiday? Ted’s the image of him.’

There was silence. It was true that I wore my school trousers and shirt every day even if I wasn’t going to school. It’s what I liked to do. Kat was always on at me to put on a T-shirt and jeans and be

‘normal and chilled’ but that made me want to wear my uniform even more.

Salim said, ‘No, Mum. He looks a right cool dude. The formal look’s all the rage again, didn’t you know?’

‘Hrumm,’ I said.

‘The look’s a disguise, Mum. It hides the rebel within – right, Ted?’

I nodded. It felt good being called a rebel.

‘Hey, Ted, shake hands?’

As I shook hands, we were eyeball to eyeball and I felt my head going off to one side in what Kat calls my duck-that’s-forgotten-how-to-quack look.

‘Welcome to London, Salim,’ I said.

Kat pushed me aside. ‘Hey, Salim,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘That’s some accent you have. Is that how
yers foolk tourk oop north
?’

‘Hey, Kat,’ said Salim, taking her hand. ‘Is that how
yauw lot tork darn sarff
?’

Everyone laughed their heads off, which is not what literally happened but I like the idea of laughing heads becoming detached from bodies through extreme hilarity, so it is a good way to describe things. I didn’t know what was funny but I laughed too. Mr Shepherd says it’s a good idea to laugh when others do as it means you can fit in and become friends.

‘How come you talk all South-Londony,’ Salim continued, ‘and Ted sounds like the BBC?’

‘That’s a very good question, Salim,’ Mum said.

‘Not even Ted’s neurologist can explain it. But come through to the kitchen, everyone. Dinner’s ready.’

In the kitchen Mum had extended the table to its full length of nearly two metres so that six could fit around it, but as the skinniest person, I had to squeeze in at the far end with my back to the patio door. Mum had covered the surface with a white tablecloth and had made me lay it because that was my job. Then Kat went round checking I’d put everything the right way round. This was unnecessary as I’m very good at laying tables. I think of the knife, spoon and fork as an electric current. The knife feeds the end of the spoon and the front of the spoon feeds the prongs of the fork, and the table edge is the last part. And between each object is a ninety-degree angle, so the circuit becomes a perfect square. And if you do it that way, nothing ever goes wrong.

Kat had put flowers from the garden in a glass vase in the middle and a wooden board with stacks of bread. She’d put out our best tumblers for drinks and folded up paper serviettes into them so that each one stood up over the glass rim like a mitre, our school emblem. She added wineglasses for Dad, Mum and Aunt Gloria. She’d tried putting one at her own place but Mum whisked it away and called Kat Madame Minx, which is what she calls Kat when she is annoyed with her, but only moderately. We all sat down. Mum served out chicken

casserole, one of my favourite things to eat, from a big orange pot. Aunt Gloria talked a lot. She said she and Salim were ‘dead excited’ to be leaving Manchester as they’d had enough of the rain. I tried to point out that the number of wet hours in the north was far less than people realized but she’d already moved on to what a ‘dead fast’ city New York was. I knew by then how people often say ‘dead’

when they mean ‘very’ so I didn’t need to ask about that, but I did ask her how a city could be fast.

‘Well, Ted,’ she said. ‘Everything in New York moves in quick motion. Like a film, speeded up. People, cars, even the underground trains. They have express trains that flash past the boring stops. When you’re there, you feel as if time itself is rushing by at twice the normal rate.’

‘Which means, Mum,’ Salim said, ‘you’ll grow old twice as fast in Manhattan.’

Aunt Gloria laughed. She put an arm out and touched Salim’s shoulder. ‘He’s such a joker, my boy.’

Salim’s eyes stared at the tablecloth and I saw his lips move but no sound came out. Then he saw me looking at him and his eyes looked up to the ceiling and he tapped his temple and pointed at Aunt Gloria, grinning. Kat said later that this was body language for how Salim thought his mother was crazy. Next he took a mobile phone out of his pocket and put it next to his plate and looked at it very seriously.

Mum passed Aunt Gloria the bread. Aunt Gloria said she was off wheat of all kinds because of being on a gluten-free diet.

‘My nutritionist swears by it,’ she said.

‘Aunt Gloria,’ I said. I took a slice for myself.

‘Wouldn’t it be better for your health to give up cigarettes?’ Dad coughed as if something had gone down the wrong way. ‘I read some interesting figures yesterday. If everyone in Britain gave up smoking, the National Health Service would save—’

‘Ted!’ Mum said.

Aunt Gloria chuckled. ‘No, Fai, Ted’s right to ask. Trouble is, Ted, I’m totally hooked on nicotine and can take or leave bread.’ She looked over to Kat.

‘
You
don’t smoke, do you, Kat?’

Kat twisted her serviette around on itself. ‘Course not.’

I frowned because I’d seen Kat with a cigarette in her mouth with her school friends only the week before. ‘But Kat, that’s—’

‘What do
you
think about going to New York, Salim?’ Kat interrupted.

Salim hunched up his shoulders and smiled but didn’t look up from his mobile.

‘He’ll love it,’ said Aunt Gloria. ‘I just know. The Empire State Building. The Chrysler. Salim adores big buildings. He wants to be an architect one day. Isn’t that right, love?’