Looking back, I reckon this was the moment when my whole life started to go pear-shaped.
On Thursday evening we jumped onto a number 45 bus, got off at Canning Road and went into the park at the bottom of Mrs Pearce’s garden. Ideally we would have gone in after dark, but Mrs Pearce never left her house after dark so we had no choice.
We waited for a small group of boys to disappear from round the swings, then headed over to the fence. And it was only then that a really important question occurred to me.
“Charlie?”
“What?”
“How are we going to get in?”
He smiled and extracted a key from his pocket.
“You stole her house key?” I couldn’t believe it.
“No, Jimbo,” said Charlie. “I borrowed it. Last week. She puts it under the flowerpot when she goes out. I popped into town and got a copy made.”
I didn’t know whether to be impressed or horrified. Still, I reasoned, if you were going to break into someone’s house it was probably better to let yourself in through the door, rather than smashing a window.
“We don’t have much time,” said Charlie. “Let’s go.”
Once we were inside I began to see what Charlie meant. The house wasn’t just ordinary. It was super-ordinary. Creepy ordinary. Like a film set. Floral china. A tea tray. The Radio Times. A little silver carriage clock on the mantelpiece. A tartan shopping trolley by the front door. It really did look suspicious.
We opened drawers. We looked in cupboards. We looked under the sofa. Quite what we were looking for I had no idea. On the other hand, if were acting logically we wouldn’t have been in the house in the first place.
With every passing minute a cold hand was starting to close around my heart, and when the clock struck five I gripped Charlie’s arm so hard I left nail-marks.
Upstairs was just as characterless as down. There was a travel guide to Scotland. But that was the only piece of evidence that a real, living, breathing human being lived here.
“Right,” I said. “Let’s get out.”
“We haven’t done the loft,” said Charlie.
“Are you out of your tiny mind?” I whispered.
He was. On the other hand, I didn’t want to leave the house on my own. If I was going to bump into Mrs Pearce I wanted to do it with company.
Charlie climbed onto the banisters, lifted the square white hatch and moved it to one side.
“Please, Charlie,” I said. “Don’t do this.”
But Charlie wasn’t taking advice. He grabbed the side of the hatch and hoisted himself up into the darkness. He vanished briefly, then his head reappeared. “Now you. Climb onto the banisters.”
I climbed onto the banisters and he reached down and pulled me up. When I was inside the loft Charlie took a torch from his back pocket with his working hand and I followed the oval of light as it swept over the joists.
There was a box of Christmas decorations. There were some old floor tiles. There was an empty suitcase. There was a spider the size of a gerbil.
“There’s nothing here,” I said. “Please, Charlie. I want to go home now.”
But he was making his way over to the hot-water tank and the pile of elderly cardboard boxes sitting around it. One by one he started to open them and investigate the contents. I crouched next to him and started to help so we could get this over and done with as quickly as possible.
It was me who found it. A metal biscuit tin pushed into the recess beneath the tank. I pulled it out, blew the dust off, held it in the beam of Charlie’s torch and popped the lid open. Inside were seven brass wristbands, an Ordnance Survey map of somewhere in Scotland and a piece of paper. Except that it wasn’t paper. At least, not any kind of paper I’d ever seen. It was like tin foil, but smoother and softer. Yet when I unfolded it I could feel that it was as strong as leather. On it was printed:
Trezzit/Pearce/4300785
Fardal, rifco ba neddrit tonz bis pan-pan a donk bassoo dit venter. Pralio pralio doff nekterim gut vund Coruisk (NG 487196) bagnut leelo ren barnal ropper donk gastro ung dit.
Monta,
Bantid Vantresillion
“We have hit the jackpot, baby,” said Charlie.
And that was the exact moment when we heard Mrs Pearce come in through the front door downstairs.
“Don’t move,” said Charlie.
He stepped round me and slid the square panel back over the hatch, shutting us both into the attic, and for a couple of seconds I thought I might be sick, which would not have been helpful.
“Charlie?” I whispered. “What the hell are you doing?”
He tiptoed back round me and picked up the piece of stuff that wasn’t quite paper.
“Charlie?”
“Shhh!”
He slipped the orange Spudvetch! notebook out of one pocket and a pen out of the other. Putting the torch in his mouth and holding the notebook open with the bandaged paw of his right hand, he began to copy the incomprehensible message.
I sat with my face in my hands and breathed deeply and counted slowly to calm myself down. It didn’t work. Through the ceiling I could hear Mrs Pearce moving about, opening doors, rattling the cutlery drawer, filling the kettle. It occurred to me that we might very well be stuck in the loft until she left for school in the morning. And then it occurred to me that I would need to go to the toilet sometime between now and tomorrow morning. And then it occurred to me that I was going to be arrested for weeing through the bedroom ceiling of my history teacher.
“Done,” said Charlie, sliding the notebook back into his pocket and putting the message back into the biscuit tin. He pushed it under the water tank and repositioned the rest of the boxes. “Now, let’s make our getaway.”
“How, precisely, are we going to do that?” I asked.
He got to his feet, cracked his knuckles and said, “Rev your engine, Jimbo.”
He put his hands against the roof, jiggled it and wiggled it, and after a minute or so a slate came free. He pushed his arm further through the hole and frisbee’d the slate out into the night. There was a second’s silence, then the slate hit a greenhouse with an almighty shattering of glass.
“Now,” said Charlie. “Listen.”
We waited for the sound of the back door being opened, then Charlie said, “Go, go, go.”
I lifted the hatch, slid it to one side and lowered myself onto the banisters. Charlie did the same and slotted the hatch back into place. We’d just begun to go downstairs when Mrs Pearce walked into the hallway below us. We froze. She hadn’t seen us yet, but it was surely only a matter of seconds before she turned round.
She was standing very still, staring at the front door, watching something or listening for something. I felt a single drop of sweat make its way down my spine.
And then she did something we’d seen Mr Kidd do in the playground, just after his eyes went blue. Carefully, she placed her right hand over her left wrist and lifted her head for a few seconds. We couldn’t see her face, we couldn’t see her eyes, but something about the gesture gave me the willies.
Then it was over. Her arms dropped to her sides, she picked up her keys from beside the telephone, took her coat from the rack, opened the front door and stepped outside, shutting it behind her.
We sprinted down the stairs, along the corridor and through the kitchen. We unbolted the back door, ran across the garden and vaulted the fence before you could say, “Barnal ropperdonk.”
We didn’t stop until we’d left the park and run for five or six streets. We finally came to a halt at a bus stop on the main road. I was petrified. I was out of breath. I looked at my hands and I could see them actually shaking.
“God,” said Charlie, “that was fantastic.”
“Next time, Charlie,” I said, “you’re doing it on your own.”
I got home expecting a grilling. About where I’d been. And why I’d been there so long. And why I hadn’t told anyone beforehand. But Mum was working late, Becky was out wi
th Craterface and Dad was so engrossed in his cooking that he wouldn’t have noticed me bringing a cow into the flat. I dumped my bag and sat down. He took a spoonful of something from the pan on the cooker and carried it carefully over to me. “Try this.”
So I tried it. And it was really very good indeed.
“Tomato and orange soup,” said Dad, “with basil and cream and a dash of cognac.”
“Wow,” I said. “Mum definitely won’t divorce you now.”
∨ Boom! ∧
6
Captain Chicken
Charlie’s bandages came off a couple of days later. To celebrate the occasion his mum decided that I should be allowed back into the house. He’d suffered enough, apparently. And learned his lesson. Clearly she knew absolutely nothing about her son.
On the other hand, it did give us the opportunity to show the secret message to Charlie’s dad. Obviously we didn’t want him leafing through the Spudvetch! notebook and finding out that Charlie had been following teachers around Sainsbury’s. So we made a second copy on a clean sheet of paper and handed it to him over supper.
“What do you make of this?” asked Charlie.
Charlie’s dad was, in our opinion, the brainiest person we knew. So if anyone could help us translate the mystery language, it was him.
Dr Brooks cleaned his lips with the corner of his napkin, ferreted in his pocket for his reading glasses, eased them behind his ears and squinted hard. “A code. Gosh, how delightfully old-fashioned.” He smiled quietly to himself. “I thought kids these days just went around shoplifting and playing computer games. Where did this come from?”
“Confidential,” said Charlie.
“My, my,” replied his dad, winking at us. “What fun.”
“So…?” pestered Charlie.
Dr Brooks shook his head. “It’s all Greek to me, I’m afraid.”
“Greek?” I said excitedly.
Charlie’s dad looked over the rim of his glasses. “It’s a phrase, Jim. All Greek to me. Double Dutch. Nonsense. Gibberish.”
“Ah,” I said, blushing slightly.
“Mind you…” he continued, popping the last new potato into his mouth and chewing contentedly. “Coruisk. Now that rings a bell. I mean, it may just be a coincidence, but I think I’ve heard that word somewhere before. Coruisk, Coruisk, Coruisk…Do I get some sort of prize for working this out? Bottle of whisky? Book token?”
“I think we could manage something along those lines,” replied Charlie.
But the conversation was interrupted by Dr Brooks’s bleeper. He took the little black thingamajig from his belt and examined it. “That’s the hospital, I’m afraid. No rest for the wicked.”
“See you later,” said Charlie.
“And I shall have a jolly good think about that word.” He smiled, standing and taking his jacket from the back of the chair. “But right now I must go and have a poke around with a dead body.”
On my way out of the Brooks’s house, Charlie’s mum stopped me and told me to wait for a minute. I thought I was about to get a lecture about keeping her ill-behaved son on the straight and narrow, but she returned after a minute or so carrying a large, metal, fish-shaped object.
“I very nearly forgot,” she said. “This is for your father. He rang earlier to ask whether he could borrow my salmon mousse mould. Now, Jim, I am sure your father is a very trustworthy chap, but will you try and make sure he actually cooks with this? I don’t want it welded into a scaled-down Wellington fighter-bomber.”
“I will.”
I got home to find Dad with his sleeves rolled up, wearing a stripy apron and cutting a large aubergine into thin circular slices.
“Stir those onions, will you, Jimbo?” He pointed to a pan on the stove.
I dropped my bag, took off my tie and dutifully whisked the onions round a bit.
“What happened to the planes, Dad?” I asked.
“Planes, Jimbo?” He started dipping the aubergine slices in little bowls of egg and flour. “I can do planes. I can do helicopters. I can do radio control. I can do aileron wiring and stall cut-outs. I need a challenge. You’ve got to progress. Turn the gas on under the frying pan. Thanks. You’ve got to learn new things. Keep yourself sharp.”
“Stops you sitting on the sofa in your pyjamas watching breakfast television while everybody else goes off to work.”
“Indeed,” said Dad.
Mum thought the Aubergine Parmesan was delicious. I had to agree. Even Becky liked it. “It’s all right,” she said glumly, which is high praise from a teenage death metal fan.
Dad grinned stupidly all through supper as if he’d just won an Oscar. And Mum grinned back at him like she’d just met him for the first time and fallen madly in love. At one point they were holding hands at the table. All of which made me a bit queasy, though I guess I couldn’t complain.
The only sour moment was when Becky went to the cupboard to fetch a bottle of ketchup. Dad told her ketchup was an insult to good food. For a moment I thought there might be actual fisticuffs, but she looked around the table, realized it was three against one and decided to accept defeat.
After dinner I escaped to the balcony in case Mum and Dad did actual kissing and I vomited. Becky joined me soon after and said, “What’s got into him?”
“Into who?” I asked.
“Into Dad, stupid,” she said, lighting a cigarette and dropping the match down on Mrs Rudman’s balcony. “All this cordon bleu business.”
“I bought him a cookery book,” I said.
She gave me a funny look. “So it’s your fault.”
“I think it is,” I said proudly.
“God,” she sighed, “it’s like he’s turning into a woman.”
I patted Becky on the back. “Women going out to work. Men cooking. You’ve just got to face it, sister. This is the modern world.”
It felt very strange being taught by Mrs Pearce on Monday. I kept wondering if she knew we’d been inside her house, whether she’d found something out of place, whether we were under suspicion. But her behaviour was no different from usual. So I soon relaxed and started to feel rather smug. We’d got away with it. She might have a secret. But we had a bigger one. It was one of the very few times in my life that I knew something a teacher didn’t. Mr Kidd seemed less scary too. We were on to them.
He might have scared the living daylights out of us. But if he knew how close we were getting it would probably scare the living daylights out of him.
We thought we were absolutely brilliant.
And it wasn’t until the following Saturday morning that we realized how wrong we were.
I got up early and helped Charlie with his paper round. When it was done we cycled over to the shopping centre for a late breakfast at Captain Chicken. I bought myself a strawberry milkshake and an apple pie. Charlie opted for turkey nuggets and a black coffee, which he thought was more sophisticated.
“Any developments?” I asked.
He took out the orange Spudvetch! notebook and opened it at the page where he’d copied out the mystery message.
“I’ve googled everything,” he said. “Fardal is a surname. Rifco make bathroom cabinets. Bassoo is the name of a creek in Montana. And Pralio sell sports equipment.” He took a sip of his black coffee. “On the other hand, you can stick any combination of letters into Google and find something. But here’s the interesting thing. Remember Dad saying Coruisk rang a bell?”
“Uh-huh.” I blew bubbles into my milkshake.
“Well – ” said Charlie. Then he fell silent.
“What?” I asked.
He was looking over my shoulder. I turned round. A man in a very expensive light-grey suit was walking towards us from the counter carrying a paper cup, a napkin and a burger box. The place was pretty much empty at this time in the morning but he came and sat down on the spare seat at the end of our table.
He was fifty or sixty years old and ridiculously tall. His face was tanned and wrinkly, like he’d spent
most of his life outdoors. And despite the suit there was something worryingly military about his cropped grey hair.
He adjusted his suit, opened the burger box, unfolded his napkin, took a sip of hot chocolate, and began eating his chicken burger, carefully keeping his pressed white cuffs away from the onion relish.
“Excuse me,” said Charlie. “We’d like some privacy. If you don’t mind.”
He said nothing. He looked at Charlie. He looked at me. He finished his mouthful. He wiped his mouth with his napkin. “You think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?”
It was a posh voice, the sort of voice that introduces classical music on Radio Three. He didn’t sound like someone who usually ate his breakfast in Captain Chicken.
I said nothing. Charlie slid the Spudvetch! notebook back into his pocket. “Sometimes we’re clever,” he said. “Sometimes we’re stupid. It kind of depends.”
The man smiled and took another bite of burger. Charlie and I began shuffling our bums towards the aisle.
“I don’t know exactly how much you know,” the man continued, washing the burger down with another sip of hot chocolate. “You know a little. That much is quite clear.”
He was clearly not your average weirdo.
“The Watchers brought you to my attention a few days ago. We have had you under surveillance since then. They are of the opinion that you are not dangerous. I’m not so sure.”
The Watchers? Surveillance? Dangerous? I felt the building tilt slightly to one side. Or was it me? I held the sides of my seat for support.
“The Watchers get nervous.” He brushed the bun-crumbs off his silk tie. “The Watchers do not enjoy people poking into their affairs. And if you carry on as you have been doing, then they may decide that action has to be taken.”
He let the word ‘action’ hang in the air.
“Who are you?” asked Charlie.
I kicked him under the table. I wanted this conversation to end. And I wanted it to end now.
But Charlie took no notice. “What right have you got to come in here and tell us what we can and can’t do?”