‘Calm down, Gloria,’ said Sandra, putting her hand on Aunt Gloria’s shoulder. ‘It’s time for you to do the roll call.’
I knew that this was an American phrase that means the same as taking the register.
Then I noticed that the Chinese woman was standing with her hands on her hips, as though she wanted to be in control. Her ponytail swung, and her eyes were narrowed. She had a square chin and broad shoulders.
‘I’ve checked my crew already,’ she said to Sandra. ‘All of us are here.’
‘Gloria still needs to do a full roll call,’ said Sandra. Her lips went very thin and she put her hands on her hips too. I saw that her nails were long and shiny. ‘It’s the rules. Go on, Gloria.’
She handed Aunt Gloria a clipboard, and Aunt Gloria began to read out names. I discovered that the pony tailed woman in charge of the maintenance team was called Helen Wu, and the other woman, the redhead, was called Lana Juster. The muscly man with freckles was Ben Katz, the young skinny man with the square hair was Ty Green, and Jacob Teller was the old man with the white beard and wrinkles. The man with lots of curly hair who had come out with Ben was called Rafael Rodriguez. I deduced that he must have been the person using the hoover earlier, so he was a cleaner.
Everyone standing outside had answered the roll call. But then Aunt Gloria called out, ‘GABRIEL GARCIA!’ and there was a gap in the noise.
‘Gabriel?’ she shouted again. ‘Has anyone seen Gabriel? He’s not still up on the scaffolding, is he? Oh, Lord—’
‘He’s there!’ said Helen sharply.
I looked, and saw a tall, muscular man with a wide face and brown skin like Rafael’s coming round the curve of the museum. He was wearing an orange boiler suit that was undone to the waist, and was holding a yellow helmet in one hand. With his other hand he was rubbing his face and yawning. I realized this was the man I had seen climbing on the scaffolding when I first arrived at the museum.
‘Gabriel!’ said Aunt Gloria, gasping. ‘Thank goodness. Oh, Lord. At least everyone is all right! But, oh God, the paintings!’
The sirens I had heard were getting closer. The smoke inside the museum door was very bad, and I pictured the fire eating away at the inside walls. I wondered why I still had not seen any flames.
‘The fire engine’s coming!’ said Mum to Aunt Gloria. ‘They’ll save them, Glo!’
‘I pray it’s not too late!’ said Aunt Gloria dramatically.
Then the fire crew did arrive, in a huge red truck with a screaming alarm. Four people got out of it in a rush, all wrapped up in grey-and-yellow-striped suits and heavy helmets, and went thumping into the building. I looked at my weather watch. It was now 10.32 a.m. in New York.
Inside the building, the fire alarm stopped.
Five minutes passed according to my weather watch before the four people in the fire crew came back out. One took off his helmet and said something to Aunt Gloria, and Aunt Gloria’s face dropped open. She turned and came staggering back over to us as though someone had thumped her.
‘Fai,’ she whispered. ‘The fire – there isn’t one. It’s just smoke. They found a smoke bomb in the first-floor stairwell, and another in the rotunda gallery, at the bottom of the ramp.’
Mum stared at her. ‘So – was it some kind of prank?’
Aunt Gloria shook her head. ‘I don’t know. At least – at least the paintings will be all right.’ Then she burst into tears. I thought it was odd that she was suddenly more upset than she had been, now she knew the paintings were safe.
Mum looked at her, and then at us. ‘Salim,’ she said. ‘Can you look after Ted and Kat for a while? Go across the road and into the park. I need to stay here with Glo.’
‘Fai, Salim can’t go on his own!’ said Aunt Gloria.
‘Of course he can,’ said Mum. ‘He’s fourteen, isn’t he? Glo, remember that he can look after himself. But Salim, don’t you move from where I’ve told you to go, do you understand? Stay where you can see us.’
Salim nodded at her. His face was a strange mix of emotions that I could not read. And I suddenly had a bad thought. Salim was a practical joker. What if Kat and Salim had been planning this joke? Could they have set off the smoke bombs?
TWELVE
The Phenomenon of Spontaneous Combustion
We crossed the street into Central Park and stood under the leafy green trees – in New York, I thought, it was easy to go from the city to the country and back again in a few steps.
We were on a rectangle of grass under one big tree, with a path to our left and the edge of the park on our right, and six trees with thick bushes beneath them in a row blocking us from the road. I could just see a slice of the Guggenheim and its scaffolding between the bushes and the sky. I drew lines from us to the path, and from us to the trees, to triangulate us in space, and that made me feel good. I wiped the whole of New York out of my brain, so that there was only the park, and us, and the sky.
‘Can you believe that about the smoke bombs?’ said Kat, her eyes wide. ‘Who do you think did it?’
Was Kat being truthful, or was she only pretending not to know? I stared at her, trying to work it out.
Then Kat narrowed her eyes. ‘Salim,’ she said. ‘You didn’t—’
‘Hey, it wasn’t me!’ said Salim. ‘I like a joke but I’d never do anything that dangerous, all right? Setting off smoke bombs – they cost serious money, and they might do serious damage. And Mum would go spare.’
I looked at Salim’s face. He was staring straight at Kat, his hands held up. I have read that people who are lying look away from the person they are talking to, and fold their arms, so I thought that the balance of probability was that he was telling the truth. I remembered what had happened in the Guggenheim. Salim had been with us since we had arrived, and I had not seen him setting off any smoke bombs. That was good. I was very glad that my suspicion had been incorrect. Salim was not guilty, and so neither was Kat.
‘So, do you think—’ Kat began. Then she stopped. I have noticed that lately Kat has begun to stop sentences halfway through, like an adult. ‘I mean, who—’
‘Hey!’ said Salim. ‘It’s Ty!’
The boy from the Guggenheim was coming towards us, out of the bushes. He was walking a bit stiffly and he was wearing the blue jumpsuit that all the crew had, undone to his waist, with a white T-shirt showing under it. His head jerked upwards as he heard Salim call his name. His face was thin, his eyes were large, and his mouth was flat, not smiling.
I took a careful step backwards. There are older boys at school who laugh at me – the ones who call me a neek – and this boy looked tall and strong enough to be one of those. His shoulders and his eyes said that he was not afraid of anything, and his big square haircut was definitely cool. I tried to stand like Salim had showed me, upright and open, but my hand shook itself out and I couldn’t stop it.
Then Salim said, ‘Hey, Ty!’ and stepped towards him, not away. I remembered what Aunt Gloria had said – that Salim knew everyone at the Guggenheim. So Salim and this boy, Ty, were friends.
‘My man Salim!’ said Ty, and his mouth smiled and he held out his hands. He stepped onto the grass where we were. ‘What are you doing here? Where’s your mom?’
‘Very funny,’ said Salim, although his face did not look as though anything was funny at all. ‘Aunt Fai got Mum to let us go off on our own for once, while they check the museum.’
‘Yeah, that’s why I’m here too,’ said Ty. ‘We have to keep out while Lionel’s doing a sweep to make sure there’s no damage.’
‘Ty’s the coolest member of the maintenance crew,’ said Salim to Kat. ‘It’s always great when something electrical breaks, and he can come round.’
Ty smiled at Salim, and now that I knew that Ty was not a bully like the boys at my school, I could breathe deeply again. Kat and Salim and Ty flopped onto the green grass, and Salim put his hands behind his head to hold it up.
‘Sit down with us, Ted!’ said Kat.
I shook my head. Standing felt safer, because I wasn’t sure whether Kat and Salim really wanted me there. But then Kat and Salim and Ty began to talk about the smoke in the museum, and I listened, because I was also interested in it.
Before I had heard about the smoke bombs, I wondered whether I had finally witnessed spontaneous combustion. Spontaneous combustion is an Unexplained Phenomenon, like the Bermuda Triangle. I am fascinated by Unexplained Phenomena, and when I grow up, as well as being a meteorologist, I would like to solve some of them. When Salim disappeared, one of our possible theories was spontaneous combustion. It didn’t turn out to be true, which was good but also sad because it meant that I was no closer to understanding what it was. It was a very complicated feeling.
Now that I knew about the smoke bombs, and also that Salim had not set them off, and that there had been no actual fire, I was sad because once again I hadn’t witnessed spontaneous combustion, but also interested because this explanation left many questions unanswered. For example, who had let off the smoke bombs, and for what reason?
‘But why would anyone do it?’ asked Kat. ‘It must have been a joke, right?’
‘What a joke!’ said Ty, raising his shoulders. ‘If the smoke’s stained the walls, we’re gonna be smoked. We’ll have to paint everything again. Look, Salim, be real with me: you didn’t have anything to do with it, did you?’
I thought that this proved to me that Ty did know Salim well – he knew that he was a practical joker.
‘No!’ said Salim. ‘Why does everyone keep saying that? You know Mum’d kill me.’
‘Well, someone did it,’ Kat pointed out. She was squinting, and I could tell that she was thinking. ‘Salim,’ she said after a pause. ‘We need ice cream.’
THIRTEEN
Ambitions and Sinkholes
That was not what I had been hoping for. The conversation had just begun to get interesting. But I do like ice cream, so I agreed.
We went to a cart across the path – it meant stepping outside my triangulated area, which was not good, but the cart had the same Magnum ice cream that I always get in London, and that was good. When I get a Magnum I like to zip open the plastic wrapper and then crack off and put aside the chocolate outside before I can eat any of the vanilla middle. I imagine to myself that I’m pulling away the surface of the Earth in perfect sections, tectonic plate by tectonic plate, and underneath is the smooth vanilla-flavoured magma core. I like the fact that even though a Magnum is one ice cream, it is chocolate on the outside and vanilla on the inside, as though it is two versions of itself at once. It changes, but actually it is still the same.
‘I’ve never seen anyone do that before,’ said Ty. ‘That’s cracked!’
‘Ted’s weird,’ said Kat, biting into the rainbow sprinkles of her cone.
‘Hey, Kat, Ted’s cool,’ said Salim.
I gave Kat my best glare. She usually eats the chocolate plates once I have finished with them, but she was not getting them this time. I offered them to Salim instead, because he had said I was cool, but he shook his head no.
‘Can I have them?’ asked Ty.
I looked at him. He had called me cracked. But Ty’s mouth was smiling, and he was holding out his hand without touching me. I thought about it, and then I realized that although cracked was a word that means insane, it was also a word that was a good and accurate description of what I had done to the Magnum. I also realized that Ty had used the word on purpose, because he knew that. He was someone who played with words, a theoretical joker, just like me.
‘You’re a crack ice-cream demolisher. You should be a professional!’ said Ty. He was showing me that I was right in my deductions. I saw why Salim was glad to be his friend.
‘My dad demolishes buildings,’ I said. People don’t usually think that Dad and I are similar, but what Ty had said made me realize that in one way, at least, we are. As a reward, I held out the chocolate casing to Ty. He balanced it on his palm, and before it melted he built it into a new shape, a sort of domed bridge. I liked that. I decided that Ty had a good brain.
‘When I get older I want to do the opposite,’ said Ty. ‘Design buildings, not break them. Maintenance crew’s just for now. I’m saving money to enrol on a course, and one day I’m going to be an architect.’ Then, when his sentence had come to an end, he pushed the whole chocolate bridge into his mouth at once. Kat laughed, and so did Salim.
‘So, what about you?’ Ty said to Kat.
Kat’s brows pulled together and her arms folded. ‘What about me?’ she repeated.
‘I want to design buildings,’ Ty said. ‘Salim wants to be an actor as well as a photographer – right, Salim?’
Salim nodded.
‘So what about you?’ Ty asked Kat.
Kat paused. Then she said, ‘I want to be a fashion designer.’
People in stories, especially in myths, never change. In the book The Odyssey, no matter what happens, Odysseus is always clever and arrogant (which means rude), and Athena is always wise. This is very reassuring to me.
But in real life, people are not like that. They change all the time, faster than I can ever learn them. I knew that Salim liked to act and take pictures, but Kat had never said anything to me about being a fashion designer. I had never thought of Kat wanting to be something. Kat is just my sister. That is who she is. Then I thought about the way she had been behaving that summer, and started turning facts into new conclusions in my head:
Fact: Kat hates history, and maths and science, and wants to do art and design GCSEs. Old conclusion: she prefers smoking behind the bike sheds to lessons, and so wants to do GCSEs that would let her do that. New conclusion: she really likes art and design, the way I like science and history.
Fact: Kat has been driving Mum and Dad spare (Mum’s word) about her GCSEs. Old conclusion: she is being Mad, Mean Kat. New conclusion: she actually cares which GCSEs she takes, because she has an ambition.
Fact: Kat gets angry when Dad teases her about her fur-collared jacket, or her haircuts, or her painted nails. Old conclusion: Kat is angry at Dad in general. New conclusion: Kat is very interested in clothes and hair and nails. Final conclusion: Kat is telling the truth. She wants to be a fashion designer.
There are things called sinkholes that can open up without warning in the street, or even in someone’s house. You don’t know they’re there before they appear, but then they do, and beneath them there can be miles and miles of empty space, ready to suck everything down into them. That was how my final conclusion made me feel. There was a cavern opening up in the Kat I knew, a sinkhole that changed the shape of her for ever.
‘Really? Cool,’ said Ty. ‘How do you become one of those?’
‘You make your parents let you study art and design,’ said Kat, sticking out her bottom lip. ‘And then you have to make a portfolio, and do internships. But to be chosen for the best internships, and the best design schools, you have to have money, or you have to get discovered.’
I frowned, because I could see Kat standing in front of me.
‘Hey,’ said Ty, nudging her. ‘I found you! There you go, you’ve been discovered.’
Salim laughed. I decided that I definitely liked Ty.
Kat’s mouth wrinkled. ‘Not like that,’ she said. ‘You know. Discovered. By a fashion designer. They need to see me and see how interested in fashion I am so they’ll hire me as their intern and pay for me to go to design school and I won’t have to live in stupid south London with my stupid parents until I’m old, studying maths and science and becoming a nurse like Mum.’
‘Kat’s really good at designing!’ added Salim. ‘She’s been sending me pictures of what she’s been working on.’
Salim’s face and body were pleased, but I was upset. ‘What she’s been working on,’ I repeated.
All three of them turned to look at me.
‘Oh, Ted, don’t make that duck face!’ said Kat. ‘I couldn’t tell you – I couldn’t tell Mum and Dad. They’d just say
that I wasn’t being serious.’
I was angry, because I would not have said that to Kat. If her drawings were good, I would have told her they were good. This was what Kat and Salim had been emailing about. They had kept me out of the secret of Kat’s ambition.
So I decided that I could do something without Kat or Salim, right there and then. I made a list in my head of the possible perpetrators of the smoke-bomb trick:
A tourist had crept past Lionel and set off the smoke bombs. (This was unlikely. Lionel had been standing by the entrance to the museum, watching who came in and out.)
The smoke bombs were set by someone who worked at the Guggenheim. I tried hard to remember all the names I had heard at the roll call earlier – Lionel, Aunt Gloria, Sandra, Rafael or one of the five members of the maintenance crew: Helen, Ty, Lana, Jacob and Ben. This was very possible.
The smoke bombs were set off by Gabriel, the builder. This was more likely than the tourist theory, but less likely than one of the people inside the museum, because Gabriel had been working on the outside of the museum, on the scaffolding. I thought that he could still have thrown the smoke bombs inside the museum through the broken pane of glass in the skylight, but they would have made a loud noise when they landed on the floor, which someone would probably have heard.
The smoke bombs weren’t smoke bombs at all, but examples of spontaneous combustion. I already knew this was not true, but it was still a good thought.
I stared back across the road at the bit of the Guggenheim I could see. Perspective made it look very small.
Ty’s phone beeped and he flicked it open. His eyebrows went up. ‘Something’s happened,’ he said. ‘Come on – we need to go back!’
He turned back to the Guggenheim and began to move towards it quickly. Kat and Salim followed him, and so did I. My body copied Ty’s, not Salim’s, because I was still angry with Salim. I noticed that Ty was moving less stiffly than he had before. He was worried.