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Kat was holding my arm and squeezing it hard. Her mouth was round like an O. A very big O. She was staring at Dad’s face and something she saw there had made her startled. So I looked at Dad too. I could see strange movements going across his lips and eyebrows. There were small globules of sweat on his forehead. It was not an expression I’d ever seen on him before.
‘What do you mean they’re not sure? They’ve either found him or they haven’t,’ Aunt Gloria said. Her voice had a strange wobble in it that made a pumping start in my ears.
‘It’s – it’s like this,’ Dad said. ‘They’ve found someone. Not far from the London Eye. Near the river. A young Asian boy.’
That’s it, I thought, remembering theory number four. They’ve found somebody who’s lost his memory and doesn’t know who he is any more. He’s been wandering around all day without knowing where to go.
‘That must be him,’ Aunt Gloria said. ‘Why didn’t they bring him right here?’
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‘They couldn’t,’ Dad was saying. ‘Because, you see, this boy – whoever he is, he could be anyone, anyone at all – this boy . . . this boy is . . .’
I was waiting for him to say he’d lost his memory or maybe that the blow to his head had landed him in hospital so it was not safe yet to move him. I didn’t expect what came next.
‘He’s in the morgue.’
I won’t say much about what happened next. Aunt Gloria was sick on the carpet. Mum leaped out of bed. She sobbed and hugged Aunt Gloria, saying it couldn’t possibly be Salim, while Dad started throwing outdoor clothes on over his pyjamas and Kat stood there, gripping me. I turned to the door and started thumping it. Dad put a hand on my arm and the next thing I knew the police had arrived and taken Dad away to look at this young Asian boy in the morgue who might or might not be Salim. Aunt Gloria was too ill to go. She lay on the sofa, covered over in a blanket, saying,
‘Salim, Salim, don’t let it be you on that cold slab, Salim, Salim . . .’ Her teeth chattered and 110
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Mum sat on the arm of the sofa, stroking her hair. Then Kat did something brave. She made a pot of tea, even though her hands were shaking. That’s Kat. Horrible about small problems, like missing a bus, or being ten pence short for the CD she wants, but good about the big problems, like when Mum had a big operation the year before. She made us frozen dinners and asked Dad how his day at work had been while we ate them. Then when Mum got home, she ran up and down stairs with cups of tea, flowers and magazines and Mum said she didn’t know how she’d have coped without her.
The others had tea in the living room, waiting for Dad’s return, and Mum had to bring the mug up to Aunt Gloria’s lips to get her to drink as if she was a baby. I brought my tea back upstairs to my room. On the desk I found the list of theories and the souvenir photo that Kat had bought at the wheel. I stared at them without seeing them. Dover Wight Portland, I thought; northwest six to gale eight, becoming cyclonic . . .
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went out of the door with the police and when he came back. That’s 3,240 seconds. I read somewhere that as you get older, your brain speeds up. You think time goes by faster. So perhaps I felt the 3,240 seconds the longest. But Kat said later she was sure Aunt Gloria must have found them longer than me. She said the more agony you feel, the more time slows down. And Aunt Gloria must have been in more agony than anyone else because it was her son that might or might not be lying on that cold slab. A young Asian boy.
Salim or not Salim.
Something terrible happened during those fiftyfour minutes. No amount of making up shipping forecasts could stop me from thinking about it. Death. I realized it was real. I would die one day. Kat would die. Mum would die. Dad would die. Aunt Gloria would die. Mr Shepherd at school would die. Every living thing on this planet would die. It was not a question of if but when. Of course, I’d known about death before. But during those fifty-four minutes I really knew it. That’s when I realized that 112
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there are two kinds of knowledge: shallow and deep. You can know something in theory but not know it in practice. You can know part of something but not all of it. Knowledge can be like the skin on the surface of the water in a pond, or it can go all the way down to the mud. It can be the tiny tip of the iceberg or the whole hundred per cent. I thought of the long chain of all the days of my life and wondered how far along that chain I’d already got. Was I still just starting, halfway along, or nearing the end? If it was Salim on the cold slab, did he know when he got up this morning that he’d reached the last link on the chain?
I thought about God and immortal souls and eternity. I remembered how years ago, when Father Russell in our church taught me that God had made me, I’d asked him, ‘If God made me, who made God?’ Father Russell had smiled and said I was a born theologian but didn’t answer my question. ‘Did another God make him?’ I’d said. And in my mind’s eye, I saw a chain of Gods, each having made the last, going back into infinity. Father Russell had sat 113
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down beside me and said, ‘There is only one God, Ted. One God who has always been there. He is outside of time. He is beyond our understanding. He is always with us.’
I wondered now about this God who was beyond our understanding. I closed my eyes. I tried to imagine him. But no matter how hard I thought, all I could see were clouds of confusion in a vast and silent universe and if I’d still had my trampoline, I would have jumped extra hard and extra high. Dad came through the front door 3,240 seconds later. I went downstairs a different Ted from the Ted that had gone up. I had stared death in the face. When I saw Dad, I knew that he too had stared death in the face. His eyes were looking far away into the same vast void.
Mum, Aunt Gloria and Kat threw themselves at him. ‘No,’ he kept saying, drawing the three of them into an embrace. ‘Don’t worry. It wasn’t Salim. It was somebody else. Some other boy.’ Then he looked over their heads at me and I looked back at him, and I knew we were both thinking the same 114
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thing. The someone else, the boy-who-wasn’t-Salim, the young Asian who was lying on the slab. If not Salim, who?
There were shrieks, tears, laughs, there were countless Thank God s, I-knew-it-wasn’t-him s, I-told- you s. I didn’t say anything. Dad stood still among the confusion, shaking his head.
Then he said in a quiet way, ‘It was a boy. Some young boy of the street, maybe a bit older than Salim, but smaller, brown and skinny, a bit of a moustache just like Salim had when he arrived—’
‘Before he shaved it off!’ Kat said.
‘And the same black jeans. A kind of lost innocence in his face. A boy who’d never had much in the first place, I’d say. There was dirt in his fingernails and bruises on his arm . . .’
Dad shook himself as if he was waking up from a nightmare.
‘How did he die, Dad?’ Kat said.
He didn’t answer. ‘I need a drink, Faith,’ he said.
‘A Scotch.’
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whispered. I heard Aunt Gloria crying again, quietly this time. Kat went back upstairs and I followed her. Without saying anything, Kat curled up on the lilo and I got into bed. The boy on the slab, a boy of the streets. I turned off the light and listened to Kat’s breathing, which showed that she was alive. Dirt in his fingernails, Salim or not Salim. The words went round in my head like a scary nursery rhyme, echoing into infinity. It was a long time before I went to sleep.
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SIXTEEN
Cloud Cover
T he next day I woke up early. I looked out of the window to find thick cloud covering London. Humidity had increased overnight. If I’d been the weatherman that morning, I would have said an area of low press
ure was moving in from the west, with closely packed isobars and a chance of thunder. Kat was already up. She was sitting at my desk, arranging the list of theories on one side, the souvenir photo she’d bought at the Eye and Salim’s camera on the other side. ‘These are theories,’ she said. ‘And these are clues. I’ve thought it out during the night, Ted. I have a plan.’
I know about Kat’s plans. They always involve doing things Mum and Dad have told us not to. I shuffled up to her side. ‘A plan,’ I said.
‘Three plans. First, we develop this film. The photographs may reveal another clue. You never know.’
I nodded. This seemed good.
‘Then we test theory number eight.’
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I wasn’t sure what this involved but said nothing.
‘And then we take another ride on the Eye.’
I thought about this. Revisiting the place where Salim had disappeared was a good idea. In detective stories, when the sleuth revisits the scene of the crime, he nearly always finds a clue that has been overlooked by the ordinary police. But there was a problem.
‘Mum will never allow it,’ I said.
‘If she says no, we’ll sneak out.’
‘That would be wrong, Kat. Besides, we haven’t got the money for the tickets.’
Kat reached for her leopard-skin backpack. She took out some large notes and three one-pound coins. ‘Mum and Auntie Glo gave me this money yesterday. Remember? For the five tickets. The souvenir photo was seven pounds. This is what’s left.’
‘Shouldn’t you give it back to Mum, Kat? Stealing is bad. It says so in the Bible.’
‘Shut up, Ted. She hasn’t asked for it. She’s forgotten.’
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‘Hrumm,’ I went.
Kat shrugged. ‘Mum thinks it’s my fault Salim went missing. Fine. I’ll give her her money back. In my own time. It’s a loan. Not stealing.’
She turned to the window, threw it open and leaned outside. She put Salim’s camera to her eye and clicked eighteen times. She took eighteen photographs of our back garden with the washing on the line and beyond that the shed. I did not think these would make very interesting shots. When she finished clicking, the film rewound itself. She examined the camera carefully.
‘Found it!’ she said.
She pressed a button on the side and the back of the camera jumped open. She shook out the roll of film.
‘That’s plan A,’ she said. ‘Now plan B.’
She put on her long dressing gown over her nightdress and stood there with the back of the gown draped over her arm.
‘C’mon,’ she said.
I stared.
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‘Don’t you want to test your theory?’ she said. She picked up the sheet with the eight theories and read the last one out loud, about Salim hiding in somebody else’s clothes. Now it came down to it, I didn’t much like the idea of getting in under Kat’s dressing gown.
‘Hrumm,’ I said.
She took me by the elbow and dragged me downstairs. In the hallway she made me crouch down behind her, and humped the back of the dressing gown over my shoulders. She made me put my hands around her waist and practise walking up and down. Then we walked into the kitchen. It reminded me of the time Dad had played the back half of a donkey in the school pantomime. I could hear, but not see, that Mum was washing up glasses from the night before. She must have looked round.
‘Hello, Kat,’ she said. Her voice had a sighing sound in it. ‘What on earth’s Ted doing up the back of your dressing gown?’
I got out and stood up, blinking.
‘Told you,’ said Kat.
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‘Is this some kind of joke?’ Mum said.
‘We were checking a theory of mine, Mum,’ I said.
‘About how Salim might have left the pod without us noticing. It is only one of eight—’
Mum looked at me and she looked at Kat. A grimy glass was in her hand. It dropped back into the suds. She took off her rubber gloves.
‘Kat,’ she said, ‘can you finish this?’
Her words were ordinary but her face was a Siberian permafrost.
Kat took over the washing-up without saying a word. Mum went through to the living room and sat there, very still. ‘Ted,’ she called, ‘I want to talk to you.’
I was in trouble. I didn’t know why. ‘Hrumm,’ I said, going through and standing before her.
‘Ted,’ she said. Her left hand stroked her forehead.
‘You and your theories. Salim’s gone missing, Ted. It’s not a game.’
‘Not a game,’ I repeated.
‘I don’t think you realize how serious it is.’
‘Serious,’ I agreed.
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‘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 122
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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.
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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 124
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already rung in sick. Feel rotten, Fai, r
eally 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. 125
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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.’