The London Eye Mystery (9 page)

‘Serious,’ I agreed.

‘Don’t keep repeating what I say!’

‘Hrumm.’

‘Don’t grunt. I’ve told you about that before. Remember?’

‘Sorry, sorry . . .’

‘And remember to look at me properly when I’m talking to you!’

I concentrated on making my eyes move so that instead of looking at Mum’s shoulder I was looking at her face. Her eyes were small and her skin was white and her lips were turned down.

‘Ted.’ She leaned over and touched my hand. ‘Just think for a minute. What if Auntie Glo had seen you? How would she have felt?’

My hand started to shake. ‘But Mum. We’ve got these theories. Eight of them. And—’

‘Ted. No.’

My head went off to one side. I checked out the swirls on the carpet. My hand flapped harder. Mum’s usually the one to understand me in this house. She’s stuck up for me countless times. When I try to explain my theories about weather systems, or other remarkable phenomena of the universe, and Kat tells me to shut up, it’s Mum who tells Kat not to be rude. But since Salim disappeared, it had been the other way round. Kat was listening. Mum wasn’t. I could hear Kat in the kitchen. Plates and pans clattered. I did something I’d never done before. I didn’t answer Mum. I didn’t even go
hrumm
. I went back into the kitchen. I picked up a glass from the draining board and smashed it to the floor. Kat looked at me, eyes wide.

‘God, what next?’ Mum wailed, coming through to the kitchen after me. ‘Our best crystal.’

‘Sorry, Mum,’ Kat said. ‘It was my fault, not Ted’s. It slipped.’

But Mum had seen it happen. We all looked at the glass on the floor and I
hrummed
and my hand flapped and I didn’t stop it and Mum didn’t tell me to stop it. She looked on in silence while Kat got out the dustpan and brush and swept up the mess. Then she sat on a chair at the kitchen table, her head in her hands, and I knew I had made her sad and I wanted to go back to my room.

Then Dad came in. He was wearing jeans and an old shirt, which meant he thought it was the weekend and he didn’t have to go to work, although he did because it was Tuesday. He went up to the sink, shuffled Kat to one side, took the mug she had just washed up, turned the cold tap on, filled it and gulped it down. He finished the water, filled the mug a second time and gulped it down again. Kat nudged me and nodded her head. There were two wine bottles and a half-empty brandy bottle and a thirdempty whisky bottle on the fridge. I remembered reading that alcohol, even though it is liquid, makes you thirsty. If you’re marooned in a calm sea, with barrels of wine and no water, there are two things you shouldn’t do: drink the wine, or drink the sea.

(Actually, there’s a third thing you shouldn’t drink. Maybe you can guess what.)

‘So,’ Mum said. ‘Someone’s not going to work today.’ I looked around the room wondering whom she meant.

Dad knocked back another glass. ‘Someone’s already rung in sick. Feel rotten, Fai, really do. Where’s Gloria?’

‘Still asleep.’

‘Thank the Lord for small mercies.’

‘Dad . . .’ Kat began. ‘Mum . . .’ She let out the suds, took the mug from Dad, rinsed it and upended it on the draining board. ‘Ted and I . . .’ she said. ‘We were wondering . . . We’d like to go out today.’

Mum’s lips pursed and her eyes rolled. ‘After what happened yesterday, not to mention Ted breaking that glass just now! It’s out of the question. You’re grounded. Both of you.’

‘But—’

‘No buts.’

Dad cleared his throat. He took Mum by the arm and led her into the living room. He closed the door behind him. I could hear them arguing in undertones. Kat leaned over and whispered, ‘Dad’s on our side! I know it. He’ll get Mum to let us go out. You wait and see.’

Kat was right. Forty-five minutes later she and I were walking out of the house, along with Dad. 

Mum said goodbye in the hallway. Her arms darted out as I passed her and she gave me a hug. The hug was very short because she knows I do not like hugs of any kind. I saw her face up close, and it was red and blotchy, which meant she had been crying and was unhappy still. ‘Have a good day, all of you,’ she said. Dad took his mobile phone in case of news. As we walked towards the tube station, Dad asked,

‘Where do you two want to go?’

‘The Science Museum,’ I said.

Kat kicked my shin, a very rude thing to do.

‘Actually, I want to go to the shopping centre first, Dad,’ she said.

‘Not
more
CDs, Kat.’

‘Oh no. I just have to nip into the chemist’s.’ She held out her hand and wiggled her fingernails, which were painted silver. ‘For some nail-polish remover.’

‘Can’t wait to see the back of that stuff,’ Dad said.

‘It makes you look like an alien in a B-movie.’

While Kat was in the chemist’s Dad and I waited outside and he told me what a B-movie was and how films like
Creature from the Black Lagoon
or 
Cat-Women of the Moon
, which Dad has in his collection, were made on low budgets with poorquality props and actors and were so bad that they were funny and had a cult following. I asked Dad what a cult following was. Dad said a cult following was a fan club of something that wasn’t mainstream, which means something that only a certain number of people like. I was asking Dad how many fans it took to make something move from being sidestream to mainstream when Kat reappeared brandishing a plastic bottle of blue liquid.

‘Got your paint-stripper?’ Dad said to her.

‘Yeah. Thanks, Dad.’

‘Where next?’

‘Ted had an idea, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, Kat. The Science Museum.’

‘Not that one. The idea before that one.’ Her little finger went round in a circle. She winked. Kat’s behaviour, from snapping eighteen pictures of the garden shed, to making me get under her dressing gown, to darting off to buy nail-polish remover, was making my brain spin.

‘Remember, Ted?’

‘Hrumm. Yes. The London Eye.’

Dad stopped walking. He folded his arms and looked at me, then at Kat. ‘So that’s what this is about,’ he said. ‘You two are on a trail, huh?’

Kat did a hands-raised-shoulder-shrug. Then she grabbed Dad’s arm. ‘Dad, it won’t do any harm. You never know. If we go back at the same time as we were there yesterday, he might even show up. He might not know his way back to our house – but anybody could find the Eye again, wherever they’d got to. We – we just wanted to have another look. Get in a pod. See what it’s like. See things as Salim—’

As Salim must have seen them
. It was another one of those sentences that everybody finishes in their heads, not out loud. Kat’s lips trembled. I once heard Mum say that Kat had Dad wrapped around her little finger. I’d no idea what Mum was talking about. I’d looked at Kat’s little finger, and imagined Dad going around it, in miniature, stretched and pummelled into an odd-looking, living ring. Dad drew Kat towards him and gave her a squeeze.

‘It’s really hard, Kitten, I know,’ he said. ‘Kitten’ is what Dad called Kat when she was small. He looked up at the sky. ‘The Eye it is. There’s a lot of cloud, which is good and bad.’

‘Why bad?’ said Kat.

‘We won’t see that far.’

‘Why good?’ I said.

‘Because it won’t be too crowded, Ted. Which means we won’t have long to queue. Let’s go.’

Lightning Strikes

When we got there, it turned out as Dad said. The crowds around the London Eye were

thinner than yesterday. A large tract of cumulonimbus cloud had rolled in. The area of low pressure was approaching. It was 990 millibars and falling, I estimated. Visibility was only fair. Getting tickets didn’t take long. Soon we were in the line for the ramp up to the Eye. We got to the point where we’d parted with Salim yesterday. A security man checked us over with a hand-held machine, like a giant bubble-blowing holder. Then we walked up the ramp. It was a zigzag, a back-tofront Z. We boarded the moving pod along with a group of eight foreign teenagers and a tired-looking mum with a folded-up buggy, her baby and her two older boys. We began to rise. I counted how many we were as we moved anti-clockwise from six to five o’clock: fourteen. (I decided not to count the baby as it was unable to walk around or look at the view and because it was too small to remember the experience.) Yesterday, in Salim’s pod, I’d counted twenty-one.

I drifted over to the side of the pod where nobody else was standing. I watched the other passengers. They looked out, turned, chatted in quiet voices and clicked cameras. Kat came over and stood beside me.

‘I did it,’ she whispered.

‘Did what?’ I said.

‘Shush! I dropped the film in at the chemist’s. By the time we get back it will be developed.’

I thought of the eighteen shots of the back garden and the eighteen other shots, our last link to Salim.

‘That is good, Kat.’

Dad joined us. ‘What a view,’ he said. ‘Look at how tiny the cars are.’

‘They’re like abacus beads,’ Kat said, ‘going left and right.’ I looked down but I couldn’t say I’d ever seen abacus beads like that.

Dad pointed south. ‘If you had binoculars, you could make out our street, maybe even our house.’

‘Typical,’ Kat said. ‘You come up here, just to see what stares you in the face every day.’

Dad laughed. ‘I’ve never seen where we live from this vantage before. There’s the Barracks – looking almost handsome, if you imagine it cleaned up, maybe – and there’s Guy’s Tower, and there’s the shopping centre. You can see its red roof . . .’

‘Come and see the Houses of Parliament, Dad.’

Kat pulled him over to the other side of the pod. I took Dad’s place at the southeast side and looked out but without taking in what I was seeing. We got to twelve o’clock. Visibility decreased further. The Thames estuary dissolved into cloud. I thought of the
Mary Celeste
, a ghost ship with no crew, sailing over the horizon. I thought of the last dodo dying on a remote rock. I thought of Lord Lucan standing on a cliff, deciding whether or not to throw himself off. I thought of a chain of Gods, each having been created by the next, vanishing into infinity, the great vast void. I thought of the boy on the slab, the young boy with bruises and dirty fingernails, the boy who wasn’t Salim.

Where are you, Salim?
I wondered. Then, suddenly, it was as if I became Salim. I felt his laughing presence inside me, almost like a ghost, while I stood looking out. I tried to imagine what he’d have done, alone among strangers in his pod. Would he have chatted to somebody? Would he have stayed quietly in a corner? I divided into two, with the Ted half asking the Salim half what had happened. But the ghost of Salim, like the dodos, lords and crew of the
Mary Celeste
, vanished before we reached nine o’clock.

An announcement came on from a speaker in the corner of the pod, suggesting that we all group together facing northeastwards towards the spiral staircase to pose for the souvenir photo.

‘Shall we?’ said Dad.

‘Yes, let’s,’ said Kat.

Kat and Dad gathered on one side of the pod with the other passengers, while I stayed out at the edge, half posing, half looking at the others posing. The camera flashed. The pod came down.

A young man with a London Eye T-shirt, a member of staff, stood at the door beckoning us to come out. The others filed out first. Dad and I were next. But Kat hung back, her eyes darting around. She crouched down by the seats, but the man came in and shooed her out, then picked up a piece of litter that the woman holding the baby had dropped and got out himself.

‘What was that all about?’ Dad said.

I nearly said, ‘Theory number one, being disproved,’ but remembered how Mum had reacted to theory number eight.

‘I thought I’d dropped something,’ Kat said.

‘Well, shake a leg,’ Dad said. (‘Shake a leg’ is Dad’s favourite way of saying ‘Hurry up’, although if you tried to run and shake a leg at the same time, you would fall over.)

Kat nudged me. We’d both realized the same thing at the same time. You couldn’t stay on for another go. Exit, enter, exit, enter – it was a smooth operation.

The way out led past the souvenir photo booth, close to where we’d said we’d meet Salim. There were several television-like screens with different shots of each passenger load. Our one was number 2,903. There was Dad, there was Kat, there was the mum and her two boys and her baby. The teenage tourists were bunched around them, grinning and waving. You could only see my shoulder and ear, sticking out on the right, behind everybody else.

‘Ted’s cut off, and I look a fright,’ Dad said. ‘But you look all right, Kat.’

Kat had her arms folded and her hair was tied in what girls call a topknot. Her skinny, bony face jutted out. With her tilted chin and dark eyebrows she seemed sharper, somehow, as if she was more in focus than other people round her, or more real. You couldn’t help noticing her, whether you were looking for her or not. Maybe that’s what being pretty meant, I thought.

‘God,’ she said. ‘My hair looks icky.’

Dad bought the shot anyway.

Then we left the Eye and walked along the river. The Thames was flat and brown. The pleasure boats cruised along with hardly any passengers. You could hear aircraft, but not see them. The blanket of cloud grew thicker. I kept looking out for Salim. Whenever we passed a boy of about his build, with dark hair, I’d stare. But when we drew close, it was never him. Dad stopped to look out across the water. He pointed out two cormorants that dipped and dived into the water, disappearing for ages, then reappearing ten metres or more from where they’d gone down.

‘Is Salim like the cormorants, Dad?’

‘Sorry, Ted?’

‘Will he reappear eventually? Like they do? Maybe not where he disappeared but somewhere else?’

Dad didn’t answer straight away. He looked downstream, with his lips turned down, which meant he was sad. Perhaps he was thinking of the boy on the slab, the boy who might have been Salim, but wasn’t. ‘I certainly hope Salim is like the cormorants, Ted.’

We crossed the river to the Embankment Gardens and had sandwiches in the Park Café. When we’d finished, we walked around the beds of colourful flowers. Then, just as I’d predicted that morning, a thunderstorm started. First rain dripped, then splattered. There was a thunderclap. The instability in the upper atmosphere erupted. I thought of theory number five: spontaneous combustion. If thunder was possible, why not that?