But Mum got very upset when she saw my suitcase. ‘Ted, what about the rest of your clothes?’ she cried.
I had to explain that I was going to wear my school uniform every day, like I always do.
‘It’ll be sweltering, Ted! You’ll boil! And that radio won’t work in Gloria’s apartment in New York. American plugs are different – it’s the electricity— Oh, Ted, love, don’t look like that.’
My head had gone to the side. I was imagining New York air boiling me like water in a pan, New York electricity frying the twisting circuits of my radio. What if I did not work there any more than my radio did?
And what if I could not cope without Dad there with me, to help explain things to me when I did not understand them? This would be my first time going anywhere away from home without Dad, only with Mum and Kat.
When we arrived at our gate at Heathrow Airport, and I saw the aeroplane that was about to shoot us all the way across the ocean, I became even more worried. Odysseus’s boats keep on sinking in his story – sea travel is extremely dangerous – but I thought that I would still prefer a boat to the plane we were going to travel in. It didn’t look as though it should be able to even get off the ground. I stepped backwards.
‘Come on, Ted!’ shouted Kat, dancing away from us down the ramp that led to the plane. She was very excited. She wanted to get to New York, and Salim.
When the plane took off, it shook and rattled and shot upwards so fast that I felt as though my stomach had (literally, and not metaphorically) been left behind. I covered my ears with my hands. The plane was a rattling tube, and I was shaking inside it.
‘Look at the clouds!’ said Mum. ‘It’s all right, Ted.’
I opened my eyes and looked. The clouds were below me. They were cumulus congestus clouds, because it had been a warm, sunny day in London with a chance of rain. In Greek myths, which The Odyssey is part of, a god called Helios travels across the sky in a chariot with the sun, and that was how I was travelling, as fast and high as a god. But I was not sure that I felt like a god. I was still not sure that I was glad about this journey.
The plane rocked, and I groaned, but next to me, Kat bounced, just like the plane.
At last the aeroplane rattled us down through the clouds, and into New York. New York’s airport is called John F. Kennedy, after the president who was shot, and thinking that thought made me uncomfortable. When we came to the Arrivals hall, everything in it smelled like metal, and I didn’t know where to look. Even though we were back on the ground, there was a bad feeling still lodged in my oesophagus.
Then Mum said, ‘There’s Glo and Salim! Oh, Kat, Ted! Ted, look at them – remember, look them in the eye – and if Aunt Glo wants to hug you, let her.’
‘Hrumm,’ I said.
Then a woman came whirling towards us like a hurricane. That was the only way that I could be sure that she was Aunt Glo, because everything else about her was new. Her black hair was pulled up on top of her head in a new style, a little knot, and she was wearing a pale green dress the colour of mint ice cream. Her toenails in new sandals were painted shiny green too, which made me feel unwell. ‘TED!’ she shrieked, and I stepped back and looked up at the white beams of the ceiling.
Then Kat let out a squeal, and threw herself at a very tall boy with brown skin who was standing apart from Aunt Gloria. He still looked the same, and he was wearing a shirt I remembered him wearing in May – this was Salim. He grinned at me, and held out his hand. ‘Ted the theoretical joker!’ he said. This made me happy because Salim had called me this last spring. He had remembered.
‘Hello, Salim,’ I said politely.
Salim opened his mouth to say something more to me, but then Kat grabbed hold of his arm and pulled him round to her. I could tell Kat was happy to be near him, and Salim was happy to be near her. They were so happy that they were now both ignoring me. And noticing that made me feel as lost and far away from them as the white beams on the airport ceiling.
FIVE
The Odyssey, Part Two
Then everything went very fast. That was how things moved in New York, Aunt Gloria told us all, over her shoulder, as she rushed us to a yellow taxi which was big enough to fit five of us inside and smelled strongly of cigarettes. We raced down the motorway (it was called a freeway, shouted Aunt Gloria – everything in the USA seemed to have a different name, which made me worry that I had forgotten how to speak English while we were flying), and rushed across a huge iron bridge, honking and dodging all the other yellow taxis, which were also in a rush. The sun was burning in the sky (I thought of Helios and his chariot again), and the air was very still. Kat and Salim were talking very quickly and quietly, and both of them were ignoring me. My throat felt full.
My school shirt stuck to my skin, and my collar itched my neck. My hand flapped. Everyone else was oohing over the sights, but I kept staring down at my grey knees. They have not changed since May. I have grown, but only half an inch. Our garden still takes twelve and a half steps to cross. Usually these thoughts make me happy, but now they didn’t. I wasn’t sure whether I would fit in to New York.
Then the taxi stopped.
I looked up, craning my neck out of the taxi window. We were in front of a tall red-brick building with a staircase on the outside. We went inside, into a lift that clanked. My suitcase hurt my arm. Kat would not stop wriggling. The sharp corner of her rucksack hit my arm. Then Aunt Gloria opened a door, waved her hand and said, ‘Voilà!’ Voilà is French for Here it is! but Aunt Gloria isn’t French, so I don’t know why she said that.
I looked through the door, and discovered that an apartment means a flat. This flat was very small, with wooden floors, and the living room and the kitchen were squeezed into one small space. Three walls of the space were painted white, but one was still brick. I wondered if the builders hadn’t finished it. Everything else, apart from the bricks and the floor, was very white. The sofa was white, and even the paintings on the walls were in shades of white. All the books, and what Mum calls knick-knacks, were missing from the living-room side of the room, and the kitchen side of the room was just a white strip of cupboards and a long white table. I wondered if Aunt Gloria had forgotten to bring the things from her house in England. Or perhaps there was not room for them. That made me worried that there would not be enough room for us.
‘Our dear little apartment! It isn’t much, but I hope you’ll be happy here,’ said Aunt Gloria.
Salim rolled his eyes and grinned at Kat.
‘It isn’t much,’ I agreed with Aunt Gloria.
‘Ted!’ said Mum. ‘He didn’t mean that, Glo.’
Aunt Gloria laughed and said that she was quite used to me by now. That made me cross, because she had told us that it wasn’t much. She had not given any warning that she was using a figure of speech.
I looked around the rest of the apartment, and saw that my worry had been right. The whole space wasn’t even half the size of our house. I could cross it in only eight steps. There were only two rooms apart from the bathroom and the living-room-that-is-also-the-kitchen. This meant that we had to share, and it was even worse than the time when Aunt Gloria and Salim had come to stay with us. Mum would be sharing Aunt Gloria’s room, Kat would have Salim’s, and Salim and I would be on futons in the white living-room-kitchen. This seemed very unfair to me, because Kat is one person, and there are two of me and Salim. But I thought about how I felt about Kat-and-Salim, and how I missed Salim-and-Ted, and decided that perhaps the arrangement would be good after all. It would give me time with just Salim.
That was the afternoon of 8 August. The rest of that day was a blur, because of jet lag. I fell asleep sitting on the sofa while Aunt Gloria and Mum talked, and then again at dinner. So did Kat, although she pretended she hadn’t. I kept my special weather watch on British Summer Time so that I could think about the weather at home, and when I woke up in middle of the night from a dream where I was Odysseus, lost at sea, I could tell that even though it was dark in
New York, 1.07 a.m., it was 6.07 a.m. and getting light in London.
There were two people whispering – Kat and Salim. Kat must have crept out of her room and into the living room. I kept very still and quiet and listened to them.
‘I’m so glad you’re here!’ whispered Salim. ‘I’ve missed you! I can’t wait to show you the city. You’ll love it. Mum’s got you all subway passes for the week, so we can go anywhere.’
‘New York!’ sighed Kat. ‘It’s so much better than London! I can already tell.’
I was indignant, which means upset, because nowhere is better than London.
‘Seriously,’ said Salim. ‘Though I can’t stop Mum hovering over me. She still thinks that – well, the spring might happen again.’
Salim, like most people, uses words in a very imprecise way. Of course the spring would happen again. It happens every year as the Earth goes round the sun. But I translated what he said into what he meant: Aunt Gloria was worried about him going missing again because of the time he had gone missing before, in London in May.
‘And I told you about Mum and Dad!’ hissed Kat. Hissed is a word that is like whispered, but more angry, and it is a good word for the way Kat sounded when she talked about them. ‘They’re being so stupid. I keep hoping I can get Auntie Glo to change Mum’s mind.’
‘Yeah! And maybe Aunt Fai can tell Mum to calm down about me,’ whispered Salim. ‘We’ll work together, right?’
‘Right!’ whispered Kat. ‘We’re a team.’
I heard Kat getting up to creep back to her room and tried to breathe very quietly. My deductions had been correct: Kat and Salim had definitely been communicating. They were friends, working together – and there was no room for me. Just like my dream, I was as alone as Odysseus, floating on the wreckage of my ship, all my crew members drowned.
SIX
Acting Up
On Thursday 9 August Aunt Gloria took us to the Guggenheim. She led us out of the apartment and down in the lift, putting her earrings on crooked and smearing lipstick over her mouth as we descended, telling us that the Guggenheim was closed to ordinary tourists that day, because it was Thursday. But she wanted to take us to see it, as a ‘special private viewing’ (her words). She was helping with a new exhibition of paintings that was opening next week – the very first one that she had curated for the Guggenheim. For the rest of the time we were in New York, Aunt Gloria would be on holiday from working at the Guggenheim, so she could take us around the rest of the city and look after us. She was very excited about that, but I was disappointed. I had wanted to spend all my time in the Guggenheim so I could explore all the patterns there that my encyclopaedia had told me about.
I watched Kat and Salim again. They bent their heads close together as they talked, taking the same size steps. My teacher Mr Shepherd told me that when you are friends with someone, you mirror their movements and stay close to them, so I could confirm that this morning they were still definitely friends.
Outside, New York felt even more confusing than it had yesterday. The buildings were taller than in London, and they all had stairs on the outside. Everything seemed back to front, and even the people spoke differently. A man in a grey jacket, with dark glasses over his eyes, passed us on the pavement and said, ‘Morning, guys!’ He spoke through his nose, and when Aunt Gloria said, ‘Good morning!’ back, I noticed that the tone of her voice had changed to be like the man’s. It made me uncomfortable, and my hand flapped. Aunt Gloria was different this summer, just like Kat.
I think Mum must have seen how I was feeling, because she put out her hand towards me, and then put it back on her bag again, and said, ‘Ted. Look up.’
I looked up, and realized that the New York weather was moving in a pattern I could understand. That morning it was in a system of high pressure, with high cirrus clouds. The rising temperature was making my school shirt stick to the back of my neck just the way it had the afternoon before. I imagined the air above us being twisted by the Earth’s rotation into a cyclone. This is called the Coriolis effect. It behaves the same everywhere in the northern hemisphere (which contains both London and New York). I thought about that similarity, and I was happier.
Aunt Gloria hurried us through the hot square streets, which were too full of people and cars and whirling noise, until a wall of green appeared in front of us. It was a forest, with paths under the trees and lots of people in tight, bright-coloured outfits, cycling and jogging. There were five different breeds of dogs and seven babies in pushchairs, and my nose was full of the smell of grass as well as petrol. I made myself think through what I had seen in my encyclopaedia, and I realized that we must be looking at Central Park. Central Park was opened in 1857, and it is 843 acres large, which is almost 3.5 million square metres. It has a zoo, twenty-nine sculptures and seven lakes. It is even more famous than the Guggenheim.
‘Isn’t it lovely?’ cried Aunt Gloria. ‘And such a beautiful day! It’s like it knew you were coming!’
She was wrong. The weather is not sentient – which means conscious or aware – and so it does not care about people.
Aunt Gloria was fanning herself, and Mum was panting. The sun was very hot now, and an area of high pressure sat above us like a thumb pressing down. My school blazer made my neck and arms itch. The pavements were hot and white. We turned down Fifth Avenue, which ran parallel to the park, and I saw that wide blue banners on the street-lights read RICHARD POUSETTE-DART, OPENING 17 AUGUST. I recognized this name, and realized this must be the new exhibition that Aunt Gloria was working on.
The pedestrian crossing in front of us told us DO NOT WALK in bright orange stripes, but Aunt Gloria hurried us forward into the road anyway. There was a scream of tyres to our left, and a yellow taxi pulled to a stop, its driver leaning out of the window to shout at us. I felt Mum’s muscles go hard under her skin, and she said to Aunt Gloria, ‘Glo! You might have got us all killed!’
‘Oh, Fai, I’m sorry!’ Aunt Gloria panted. Her green toenails were squeezing themselves out of her very tight high shoes. The shoes looked painful to walk in. Perhaps that was why she had not noticed the taxi.
Salim snorted air out of his nose. When I turned to look at him, his eyes were rolling. ‘Mum!’ he said to me. ‘She never looks where she’s going. She’s the one who needs to be looked after, not me.’
‘Hm,’ I said. I didn’t know what to say to this Salim, who enjoyed New York and was friends with Kat, but not with me.
Salim wrinkled his forehead at me. ‘Hey, Ted?’ he said. ‘Are you OK? I mean – you’ve been acting strange since we got here.’
I wanted to tell him that this was not true. I had been acting exactly the same as always and it was everyone else who was acting strangely.
Salim said, ‘Listen. I know why you’re upset. When I first arrived I hated it too, Ted. I really did. But I got used to it, and now I think it’s great. You’ll get used to it too, I promise.’
‘Get used to it?’ I repeated.
‘Yeah!’ said Salim. His mouth was turning up in a smile. ‘I love it now. And – listen, all you’ve gotta do is copy someone who looks like they know what they’re doing. That’s the way to fit in anywhere – that’s how I fit in here. Just act.’
‘Act?’ I asked.
I looked at Salim. His shoulders were back and his feet were apart, and one of his thumbs was stuck through the loop in his jeans. I didn’t have a belt loop, so I held my thumb out in front of my hip. I shuffled my feet apart and raised my neck to make my shoulders go down.
Salim showed more of his teeth as he laughed. ‘Take your hand down, Ted, it looks like it’s floating. But other than that, good.’
I was pleased. Salim and I had talked, and it had been a good talk. As we walked down the street, parallel to Central Park, I copied Salim. My feet took big strides, and my arms swung. Then Kat wrapped her arm round Salim’s and dragged him away from me, talking loudly. But there had been a moment when Salim had remembered how to be Salim-and-Ted agai
n, and I held onto that thought in my head.
SEVEN
Cracks
Then Aunt Glo pointed down the hot white street and said, ‘There! There it is!’
I looked ahead and saw the Guggenheim. But it was not the Guggenheim I had expected. Its round white outside was covered in scaffolding, sticking out from its surface in ugly lines. There was a man climbing on the scaffolding, in a yellow hard hat and an orange boiler suit.
‘It’s being repaired!’ Aunt Gloria called to us. ‘Didn’t I tell you? The facade is cracking, so it needs repainting. The builders are doing a wonderful job, but it is a little inconvenient. They broke a pane in the skylight a few days ago! Luckily it should all be finished by the time the exhibition starts next week.’
I looked at the blue caps at the end of the scaffolding spokes. One was loose, and I wanted someone to put it on straight again. My chest suddenly felt tight. The Guggenheim had not been covered in scaffolding in my encyclopaedia. It was smooth, clean and white. But this Guggenheim, like Aunt Gloria, Salim and Kat, had changed.
As we came closer to the main entrance, I heard more and more noise. There were people in front of the Guggenheim, taking photographs and talking. I jerked back to make sure they didn’t touch me, and my head went to the side. I saw a tourist woman with a camera round her neck and a pink T-shirt that was too tight for her. I saw an old man wearing a brown coat, even though the day was hot. I saw a girl, younger than me, with trainers that lit up on the heels. These people were not allowed in, because the Guggenheim was closed to the public until the new exhibition opened. There was a barrier in front of the entrance, but the barrier was not for us.
‘It’s such an exciting opportunity!’ Aunt Gloria was saying to Mum, very fast, as my feet stepped over the smooth circles on the floor outside the museum. ‘My first exhibition!’ she continued. ‘It’s an honour. I hope I can do Solomon Guggenheim proud. Now, come this way – this door isn’t usually open unless the museum is, but I asked for it specially!’