by Siobhan Dowd
‘Salim,’ I said after a few minutes, ‘are you asleep?’
‘Nope. Not yet,’ he said. ‘It’s hot.’
‘It’s a new area of high pressure,’ I said. ‘Moving in from the Atlantic.’
‘Telling me.’
‘What are you thinking about?’ I said. I’d been thinking about convection currents, isobars and isotherms. I’d been imagining the shipping forecast. Lundy Fastnet, variable three or four. Perhaps Salim had been doing the same.
‘Nothing much,’ he said. ‘What about you?’
‘Weather still.’
We were quiet again. ‘ Becoming south or southeast five or six,’ I said out loud.
‘Sorry?’ said Salim.
‘I’m pretending to read out the shipping forecast and instead of this calm we’re having, a storm’s brewing. Out at sea.’
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‘A storm,’ he said. ‘Yeah. That would ground planes.’
‘It would take a very big storm system to do that.’
‘Would it?’
‘Gale-force eight or nine. A fog would be more likely to ground the planes.’
I heard him sit up again. ‘Ted?’
‘Yes?’
‘You know this – this syndrome thing you’ve got?’
he said.
‘Hrumm,’ I said, wondering who had told him.
‘Hope you don’t mind me asking. But what is it? What’s it like?’
No one had ever asked me that before. I lay back on my pillow and thought. ‘It’s this thing in my brain,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s not that I’m sick.’
‘No.’
‘Or stupid.’
‘I know that.’
‘But I’m not normal either.’
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‘So? Who is?’
‘It’s like the brain is a computer,’ I said. ‘But mine works on a different operating system from other people’s. And my wiring’s different too.’
‘Neat,’ said Salim.
‘It means I am very good at thinking about facts and how things work and the doctors say I am at the high-functioning end of the spectrum.’ I’d also once heard a doctor say to Mum that my developmental path was skewed. I didn’t tell Salim this because I looked up ‘skewed’ in the dictionary and it said
‘crooked’, which makes it sound as if I am a criminal, which I am not.
‘That sounds good,’ Salim said.
‘Yes. But I’m rubbish at things like football.’
‘So am I,’ said Salim. ‘Tennis is my game.’
‘My favourite sport is trampolining,’ I said.
‘Trampolining?’
‘Yes. I used to have one. I jumped on it every day and it helped me to think. Then it broke.’
‘Too bad. I love trampolines.’
‘My syndrome means I am good at remembering 37
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big things, like important facts about the weather. But I’m always forgetting small things, like my school gym bag. Mum says I have a brain like a sieve. She means that things drop through the holes in my memory.’
Salim laughed. ‘Maybe I’ve got the syndrome too. I forget things myself.’
‘What things?’
‘My mobile, sometimes. Or my homework.’
‘I never forget my homework. Kat says that’s why, at school, they call me a neek.’
‘A neek?’
‘It’s a cross between nerd and geek. They don’t like me because I only talk big. I’m trying to learn how to talk small. But it’s hard.’
‘You know an awful lot,’ Salim said. ‘I can tell from all these books.’ He pointed at my shelves of encyclopaedias. ‘Why bother trying to be something that you’re not?’
‘Mr Shepherd says if I learn how to be like other people, even just on the outside, not inside, then I’ll make more friends.’ Then I told him something I’d 38
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never told anyone before. ‘I don’t like being different. I don’t like being in my brain. Sometimes it’s like a big empty space where I’m all on my own. And there’s nothing else, just me.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Not even the weather. Only my thoughts.’
‘I know that place,’ said Salim. ‘I’m in there too. It gets real lonely in there, doesn’t it?’
I heard him lie down again. He whistled through his teeth. ‘Lonely as hell,’ he muttered, and was quiet. I thought he’d fallen asleep, but a moment later he said, ‘You got called a lot worse things than neek at my school. It was all boys, no girls, and really rough stuff.’
‘Rough stuff?’
‘Yeah. Fights and dares. One boy had a knife. I didn’t like it. But then I got friendly with my mate Marcus and it got better. He and I, we were the top moshers in Nine K. Marcus used to be Paki-Boy, like you’re a neek. But he isn’t any longer. He’s a mosher now.’
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‘A mosher?’ I said. ‘What is a mosher?’
‘It’s northern for “casual, cool dude”. Last term we starred in this play called The Tempest. Marcus was a huge hit. He’ll never be Paki-Boy again.’
‘ The Tempest?’ I said. ‘Is that about the weather?’
‘Yeah. It’s by Shakespeare and starts with this massive storm out at sea. It’s right up your street.’
After that he did fall asleep. I lay back listening to him breathing in and out. I wondered how The Tempest could be right up Rivington Street, where we live. Then I realized ‘up your street’ was another funny thing people say that doesn’t mean exactly that. My brain waves started whirling around the big hollow in my head, like molecules in a cumulonimbus cloud that’s about to burst. I made up my own shipping forecast. Malin Hebrides, northwest seven to severe gale nine, deepening low moving north- east, rain, becoming variable . . . A cool breeze came in through the window. Salim gave a sigh, as if he was working something out in a dream. I thought about what Aunt Gloria had said 40
THE LONDON EYE MYSTERY
about Andy Warhol being a cultural icon and maybe having what I’ve got. Then I remembered how some people say Einstein had it too. My brain waves calmed down. And then I fell asleep.
41
SIX
We Go to the Eye
W hen I woke up, the sleeping bag on the lilo on the floor next to my bed was empty. I looked out of the window to do a weather check. The sun shone. The anticyclonic pattern of the recent days continued. Barometers would be set to dry and fair and isobars would be far apart, just as I’d predicted yesterday.
I found Salim with Kat in the bathroom. He had Dad’s razor blade in his hand and was shaving off the faint hairs over his upper lip and laughing at the same time.
‘But I thought it looked good, Salim,’ Kat said. Salim turned and winked at me. ‘Thing is, the more you shave it, the more it grows back. It’s like lawnmowing.’
This made Kat hoot with laughter. When owls hoot, it doesn’t sound like humans laughing so I don’t know why people say ‘hoot’ but they do. Nor could I see any logic in hairs or grass growing longer 42
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by being cut off. But I laughed too because I wanted to be Salim’s friend. Then I ran a finger over my own upper lip. There were no hairs there and this was good. I wasn’t sure about the idea of hairs growing on my face. For one thing shaving is dangerous. Dad often comes out of the bathroom with bits of blooddrenched toilet paper stuck to his skin. For another thing facial hair is a sign that we have evolved from apes. And when you remember that we evolved from apes, you have to admit how limited human intelligence is mostly.
Then we had breakfast. I had forty-three Shreddies, Kat had toast and Salim started on a bowl of cornflakes but didn’t finish it. Then we left the house with Mum and Aunt Gloria walking behind us, talking up a storm. This is one of my favourite
things people say. It doesn’t mean they were arguing, which is what it might sound like. It means that they were talking non-stop and not paying attention to anything else around them. When storms happen, it is hard to pay attention to anything else.
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Kat and Salim and I walked in front together. I was on the side nearest the kerb, hopping across the cracks in the paving stones and around the lampposts, with my hands in my pockets, which is how I like to walk best when I’m with other people. Then we passed the Barracks. Salim said how huge it was and I said it had twenty-four storeys and Kat said it would be flattened any day now by our dad.
‘Never,’ said Salim.
‘Yeah,’ said Kat.
‘Why’s it got to go?’
‘Dad says it was full of drugs and needles and sui cidal mums. And cockroaches.’
‘Yuck.’
‘Yeah. And the postman wouldn’t deliver things there any more.’
Salim looked up at it. ‘Some height.’
Then Kat pointed to another big tower. ‘That’s where our mum works, Salim. Guy’s Tower.’
‘No way.’
‘Yep.’
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The tower was silver and tall and I could see Salim was impressed with London because he looked at the tall buildings with his eyes wide open and his mouth open. Then we had to go down onto the tube. Kat and Salim sat next to each other and I sat two seats down between two strangers. I folded my arms across my chest to stop my hand flapping and shaking itself out, which is a habit Mr Shepherd says I must lose. I stared at the tube map of London. It is a topological map. A topological map is a very simplified map, not to scale, so with no relation to the real distances. The stops stand for places where you can get on or off or sometimes change trains, and these are ordered into straight lines with junctions, whereas in reality they are all higgledy-piggledy. If I’d been next to Salim, I would have talked about different kinds of map, and explained how topo logical maps should never be confused with topo graphical maps, but when I looked over to where Salim was sitting, Kat was showing him the silver nail polish on her fingernails and asking him about his social life, which is the thing she always talks about. I tried to see if he 45
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was bored. When people are bored, Mr Shepherd says the muscles in their face don’t do anything and they stare without really looking and he says I should always check to see if this is how people are looking when I talk to them. Salim was laughing and nudging Kat so I deduced that he was not bored, although I would have been.
We got out at Embankment Station so that we could walk over one of the Golden Jubilee Bridges and see the view. The sky was blue. The river was grey. The Eye was white. The capsules moved so slowly they hardly seemed to move at all. Halfway across the Thames, Salim took an oldfashioned camera, the kind where you have to use a film, from his pocket.
‘That’s an interesting camera, Salim,’ Kat said.
‘My mum gave it to me for going to New York. I wanted a digital one, but she says this kind will make a better photographer of me in the long run.’
Then he snapped everything in sight, including one of Kat and me together, with the London Eye behind us. After he clicked, his mobile phone rang 46
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with its James Bond theme tune. He leaned over the bridge’s rail and spoke into it like a spy on a double-o mission, as if he didn’t want anyone to overhear.
‘That phone of yours!’ Aunt Gloria said when he’d finished the call and folded the mobile away.
‘Who was it this time?’
‘Just another friend,’ Salim said. ‘Calling from Manchester to say goodbye. Let’s keep going. We’re running late.’
‘Late for what, Salim?’ I asked.
‘Late for the Wheel.’
‘You can’t be late for the London Eye,’ I said. ‘It turns all day long, two times an hour, every hour. Until after dark.’
Big Ben donged eleven o’clock as we reached the ticket queue, which was very long. The two mums groaned.
‘It’s infinite,’ Mum said.
‘No, it’s not,’ I said. ‘Infinity—’
‘Why don’t we come back later and go to the Tate first?’ Aunt Gloria said.
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‘You promised!’ Salim shouted. He stamped his foot and his eyebrows went down over his eyes.
‘Salim’s right,’ Mum said. ‘We did promise, Glo. Let’s stick to last night’s plan. Here, Kat. Take this . . .’ She handed Kat some money in large notes.
‘You get the tickets and Gloria and I will sit at the café over there and wait. When you’ve got them, we’ll join you in the queue.’
Kat’s eyes went large and round as she took the money. She put it carefully away in her leopard-skin backpack. Then she, Salim and I found the end of the ticket queue and joined it. A lady in front asked the lady in front of her if she knew how long the wait was and the lady two people up the queue said it was half an hour to get tickets and another half-hour to board.
‘A whole hour,’ Kat groaned. ‘Maybe that is too long.’
‘Kat,’ I said, ‘an hour is a Drop in the Eternal Ocean of Time.’ This is what Father Russell at our church said once about the human lifespan. Salim grinned. ‘Too right.’ He took out his camera 48
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again and did another shot from where we were standing. I asked if I could take one.
‘Don’t let him, Salim,’ Kat said. ‘Ted’s useless at stuff like that. You’ll end up with a paving stone and half a trainer.’
But Salim didn’t listen. He gave me the camera and I aimed through the viewfinder to the crux of the wheel. It jogged when I pressed the button. I took the camera away from my eye to see a man walking towards us. He wore an old leather jacket, unzipped, and a black T-shirt with writing on it but I didn’t notice what it said. He was dark-haired with an afternoon shadow on his chin, which is what Dad says he gets at weekends when he has a day off shaving. As the stranger drew near, he threw a cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out under his heel, for which he could have been fined a thousand pounds for dropping litter, but nobody seemed to notice apart from me.
He came right up. ‘Excuse me,’ he asked. ‘Are you looking for a ticket?’
Kat explained that we were queuing for five 49
SIOBHAN DOWD
tickets. The strange man said he’d give us the one he had if we liked. He said he was up near the front of the queue to board but he’d changed his mind. He just couldn’t face it.
‘You can’t face it?’ said Salim. He stared at the ticket in the man’s hand and then up at the Eye.
‘I’m claustrophobic. I’d pass out, being stuck in one of those perspex pods.’
Forgetting that it is wrong to speak to strangers, I said, ‘The pods are made of steel and glass, not perspex.’
‘That’s worse! Glass? No thanks.’
‘The glass is reinforced. It’s very strong and safe—’
‘So you don’t want your ticket?’ Salim interrupted.
‘It’s yours for the taking.’ The strange man held it out. ‘It’s the eleven-thirty boarding. That girl over there’ – he turned and pointed to a girl in sunglasses and a pink fluffy jacket – ‘is holding my place. They’ll be boarding soon.’
Salim turned to Kat. ‘What d’you say?’
‘Dunno,’ said Kat. ‘Mum said to get tickets for everyone. It’s a very nice offer but—’
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My hand was shaking itself out because I had just remembered that you are not supposed to speak to strangers or accept gifts from them. But Salim had his hands up, saying, ‘We’ll none of us get up at the rate this queue is moving,’ and Kat, I could see, was weighing things in the balance, which means she was deciding what to do. As the oldest, she was in charge.
‘OK,�
� she said. ‘Mum and Auntie Glo will be glad to save the money, I bet. Not to mention the time. And Ted and I’ve been up already. You take it, Salim. You’re the guest.’ The man handed over the ticket and led us over to where he’d been standing in the queue. My hand shook itself out because this meant I wouldn’t be flying the Eye that day after all, and it was down to a stranger with an afternoon shadow whom we shouldn’t even have talked to.
‘Have fun,’ the man said, smiling.
‘Thanks a million,’ said Salim. The edges of his lips nearly reached his ears. Kat and I kept Salim company in the queue until we got to the man who collected the tickets, who was shouting, 51
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‘Eleven-thirty boarders step this way!’ Salim gave up his free ticket and winked at us and laughed. Then he went with a group of people to the zigzag ramp at the Eye’s entrance.
‘We’ll meet you by the exit,’ Kat called. ‘Over there.’
Salim nodded. We saw him through the glass, advancing up the gangplank until he’d become just a shadow. He reached the spot where the pod doors opened and closed and his silhouette gave us a last wave. Then he hurried on with several others. I counted how many got on. Twenty-one, including him. The pod door closed behind them.
I looked at my watch. It said: 11.32, May 24. ‘He’ll be down at twelve-oh-two,’ I told Kat.
52
SEVEN
The Wheel Turns
‘L et’s see if we can follow Salim on his way round,’ Kat said. The pod he was in was rising. By walking backwards we found we could track it as it slowly arced from six o’clock anti-clockwise to four o’clock.
While we watched, I started to tell Kat the facts I knew about the Eye: how it was not really a Ferris wheel at all and how on a clear day you can see for twenty-five miles from it, but she interrupted me and said, ‘D’you like Salim, Ted?’
