by Siobhan Dowd
There was a long silence. ‘That’s not very helpful, Ted.’
‘There was the Mary Celeste too. The Mary Celeste was a hundred-foot brigantine ship from New York. It turned up in the Bay of Gibraltar with nobody on board. It was as if they’d been beamed into outer space by aliens.’
‘Ted, I don’t think this is a time for joking.’
I slammed the book shut.
‘OK,’ Kat said. ‘You weren’t joking. I should know by now. You never joke. So what do you mean?’
I didn’t really know what I meant. The only thing 72
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that linked the dodo, Lord Lucan, the people on board the Mary Celeste and Salim was that they’d all disappeared. I sat looking at Kat’s hunched-up shoulders. The room was silent apart from her breathing and mine. Somehow – it was a real effort but I managed it – I put out my hand and placed it where her shoulder hunched. It was bony and soft.
‘Kat,’ I said, ‘you and I are together in this. People disappear. And things. Most of them reappear.’
Kat rested her hand on top of mine and I saw some tears fall down her cheeks. Her head went off to one side – she was the one who looked like a duck that’s forgotten how to quack – and I felt a teardrop fall onto the hand on her shoulder. For a moment I didn’t know if it was her hand or mine. I hate touching people. The wetness of the tear and the confusion of hands felt as if neither of us knew where Kat started and I ended.
‘Ted,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘the Mary Celeste people never reappeared. Nor the dodo. Nor Lord Whatever.’ She stopped and blinked back another 73
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tear. ‘That policeman was right,’ she went on.
‘People don’t just evaporate. Salim must be some- where. If it’s my fault he went missing, I have to find him. But I need your help. I need your brains, Ted. Nobody’s better at thinking than you are.’
That was the first time Kat had ever paid me a compliment. I plunged both my hands into my jacket pockets and stared down at my trainers and went, ‘ Hrumm.’ Then I realized that in one of the pockets was an object that shouldn’t have been there. I drew it out and Kat and I stared at it.
‘Salim’s camera!’ whispered Kat.
74
TEN
Love–Hate
K at grabbed the camera from me and held it in the palm of her hand. ‘When you took that last photograph,’ she said, ‘in the queue for tickets . . . You must have put it away in your jacket pocket without thinking, Ted.’
I reached my hand over to take the camera back. She held it away from me.
‘How did you feel, Salim,’ she whispered, as if he was in the room, ‘when you realized you’d got into the pod without your camera?’
I tried to take it again. She slapped my hand away.
‘Keep away, Ted! It’s my find.’
Typical Kat. One moment she’s saying how brainy I am, the next she’s assaulting me and telling lies. Predicting what Kat is going to do next makes predicting the weather seem easier than counting to three. Kat is not only more unpredictable than the weather, she is also more unpredictable than a) volcanic eruptions or b) lunatics or c) terrorist 75
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attacks. It is a fact that her name sounds like the first syllable of words like:
Catastrophe
Cataclysm
Catatonic
In other words, Kat is a walking disaster story, which is what Kat says about me when I drop things, but I think it applies more to her.
But sometimes, when you least expect it, Kat is nice. When I was small, she’d read stories to me about talking bears and magic wardrobes and take me over to the pond in the park to show me the ducklings. At school, she’ll stick up for me in the playground when the rough boys pick on me.
Mum says we have a love–hate relationship. She says that when I was a baby and Kat was two, she found Kat leaning into my buggy one day and kissing me all over my face. Maybe I squirmed, because the next thing Kat did was grab a hairbrush 76
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and thump me on my head. Mum had to drag her away to stop her from murdering me.
When we got older, Mum was always telling us to play nicely together. Kat’s idea of ‘nice play’ was to line up her naked Barbie dolls with their savage haircuts and strange biro markings and play hospitals. She used toilet roll as bandages and cut into them with nail scissors and squirted tomato ketchup on them. She would tell me to help her as the patient was dying. ‘Pass me the scalpel!’ she’d order me.
‘What scalpel?’
‘Any scalpel.’
I looked about. ‘There is no scalpel.’
‘A pretend scalpel, Ted.’
‘There is no pretend scalpel, Kat.’
‘There is. It’s right by your hand.’
‘Kat. There is no scalpel by my hand. Only a toi let roll.’
‘You’re supposed to be the nurse!’ she shouted. I blinked. Nurses are supposed to be women and I was a boy. I could not be a nurse.
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‘Try to play, Ted!’ Mum said, looking on. So I went, ‘ Mnee-mna, mnee-mna, mnee-mna! ’ and turned the lamp switch off and on, and after that I was always the ambulance. But Kat always wanted me to be the nurse and maybe that was why she went on being angry with me. Then my syndrome was diagnosed by the doctors.
‘Why does he have to get all the interesting diseases?’ she moaned to Mum and Dad.
I don’t remember what they replied.
Right now, Miss Katastrophe was examining Salim’s camera and I swallowed the hot huffy feeling I had back down my oesophagus.
‘He used up eighteen shots,’ she said. ‘He kept clicking as we crossed over the bridge, remember?’
‘He took one of you and me, Kat. And I took one at the Eye, just before the strange man came up who gave us the ticket.’
‘The strange man,’ Kat said, looking up. ‘I wonder . . .’
I nodded. I’d been wondering about him too.
‘Do you think these pictures might be a clue, Ted?’
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‘I don’t know.’ I tried to touch the camera one last time, but again Kat snatched it away.
She turned its sleek silver sides around in her hand. ‘I wish it was digital like Dad’s,’ she said.
‘Then we’d be able to see the pictures now. With this old-fashioned kind, you’ve to open it somehow.’ She shook the camera and shrugged. ‘Dunno how. You get the film out and take it to the camera shop to have it developed. It costs money and you have to wait. What a bloody palaver.’
She started fingering buttons and shaking it.
‘I think we should give the camera back to Aunt Gloria,’ I said. ‘Because she is Salim’s next of kin.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Kat said. I was about to explain how the next of kin inherits the property of people who have died and how perhaps this also applies to the property of people who have disappeared, when the doorbell rang. Kat and I jumped up.
‘Salim!’ Kat said.
She dropped the camera on the bed and we ran out of the room and down the stairs. But in the 79
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hallway, just coming in through the front door, which Mum was holding open, wasn’t Salim, only two grown-up people, a man and a woman. The man was in uniform, the woman wasn’t, and this meant the opposite of what you might think: that the woman was in charge. This was because she was
‘plain clothes’; he wasn’t.
It was the police.
80
ELEVEN
Margins of Error
M inutes later, in the living room, the atmosphere was hot and close. Everyone was polite. Everybody was calm. But you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. That’s what people say when invisible feelings vibrate in the air, like ions do just before an electric storm.
Mum and Aunt Gloria we
re on the sofa. Aunt Gloria held a glass of brandy. Dad was standing, leaning back against the wall near the door. Kat and I stood beside him. The man, a detective sergeant, took notes, seated at the table. His boss, the woman, had taken another chair and was sitting in the middle of the room. She was thin and short with a blue skirt and jacket and a white blouse and her eyes moved quickly around the room like lightning strikes.
First she said she was Detective Inspector Pearce and was in charge of finding Salim. Then she asked questions. Who everyone in the family was, why 81
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Aunt Gloria was visiting and why she planned to move to New York. Then she asked to see the contents of Salim’s backpack. She took his things out one by one. I looked on carefully because in good detective stories what people leave behind and don’t leave behind can be a clue to where they have gone. There was a spare sweater, a pair of jeans, a pair of socks, underwear, pyjamas, another sweatshirt and a tiny towel. These didn’t tell me very much. Then there was a battered paperback entitled Murder at Twelve Thousand Feet, a guidebook to New York, brand-new, with no creases, and a tiny address book. Finally there was a Swiss Army knife and a key ring with a model of the Eiffel Tower on it, but no keys.
There were no wash things, like a toothbrush, because these were still in the bathroom, I remembered, on the shelf over the basin. Detective Inspector Pearce held up the empty key ring with her eyes scrunched up. Aunt Gloria explained that Salim had brought the key ring back from a school trip to Paris, then that she had rented 82
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out her house in Manchester and given all but her own set of keys to the tenants. At present, she said, Salim had no keys to anywhere.
There was silence.
Then the inspector looked over to where Kat and I were standing.
‘You two were the last to see Salim, I understand?’
she said.
Kat told her in a quiet voice, not like her normal voice, all about the strange man, the free ticket, tracking the pod and waiting for Salim to come down, and how he hadn’t.
‘We should never have left them to get the tickets on their own,’ Mum said when Kat finished. The inspector’s hand waved through the air. What this meant I do not know. Then she turned back to Kat. ‘You say you tracked the pod?’
Kat nodded.
‘For half an hour you did nothing but stare up and watch the London Eye go round?’
‘Well . . .’ Kat considered. ‘We walked back, so as to be able to see better. If you’re too close, you can’t 83
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see the pods go round properly without getting them muddled. And we chatted a bit.’
‘ Without getting them muddled,’ Inspector Pearce repeated. She interlocked her hands and rested her chin on them. ‘ We chatted a bit.’
‘You don’t have to believe us—’
‘It’s not a question of believing or disbelieving.’
‘But we tracked it. We did. We’re sure, aren’t we, Ted?’
‘Hrumm,’ I said. ‘Sure – a hundred per cent: no, Kat.’ Kat’s eyes and lips scrunched up. ‘Sure –
ninety-eight per cent, yes,’ I said.
The inspector looked at me without saying anything. The corners of her lips turned up, which meant she was slightly amused. Then she tapped her nose with her interlocked fingers. ‘So,’ she said.
‘You’d allow for a margin of error?’
‘Only a small one,’ I said. ‘Two per cent.’
‘Two per cent?’
‘In every human observation,’ I explained, ‘there is a margin of error. This is because our senses are not foolproof. In fact, some people believe that one 84
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hundred per cent certainty is impossible to achieve.’
I stopped and put my head on one side. ‘As humans, we cannot even be sure that the sun will rise the next day. Our assumption that it will do so is arrived at by a process of induction. This is a process where probability based on past observation allows us to predict things like weather patterns—’
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ Aunt Gloria interrupted.
‘Sunrise, sunset, up and down wheels, tracking pods. This is not a fun fair. This is about my son. My only son. He’s missing. What I want to know is, what’s being done about it?’
‘We’re doing all we can,’ Inspector Pearce said. She unlocked her fingers and smoothed her skirt. ‘I know you’re fretting—’
‘Fretting? You make it sound as if I’ve lost a handbag.’
‘It’s early days. He’s only been missing a few hours. And in the vast majority of cases, young people who disappear like Salim are found within forty-eight hours.’
‘Forty-eight hours! We’ll miss our flight to New York.’
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‘Forty-eight hours, but usually sooner. But from the word go, we take the disappearance of minors very seriously. That’s why I’m here.’
‘He’s not a minor. He’s my boy.’
Mum put an arm around her. ‘Glo . . .’ she whispered.
‘We’re doing everything possible,’ Inspector Pearce repeated.
‘Such as?’ Dad said quietly. Everyone turned to look at him.
The inspector sighed. ‘We’ve begun checking the CCTV footage of the pods. No camera can see everything or everybody, but there’s no sign of anything untoward happening that morning. Just the normal shots of normal tourists, enjoying the view. We’ve also been taking statements from other people who rode the Eye at that time. Unfortunately the numbers run to three hundred plus. And we can only check the ones who paid by credit card. We’ve no way of checking those who paid cash. But again, so far nobody remembers a boy matching your son’s description. We’ve also checked hospital 86
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admissions.’ Aunt Gloria’s eyes went round and large at the word ‘hospital’. ‘But nothing.’
‘Perhaps he’s still just – lost?’ said Dad.
‘That’s indeed the likeliest explanation,’ Inspector Pearce said.
There was a pause. Perhaps everyone was doing what I was: imagining where ‘lost’ was. I pictured Salim lost on London’s underground system, getting on and off trains, wandering down passages, not sure if he should be on a north-or south-bound train, confused by the colours, not knowing that black stood for the Northern Line, our line. I was thinking how if I’d sat next to him on the tube earlier in the day, instead of Kat, I could have explained all about the London Underground map being topological and how you are meant to read it and then Salim would have found his way home with no problem and perhaps be here now.
‘We need some more personal details,’ Inspector Pearce said. She leaned towards Aunt Gloria. ‘I’d like to ask you some private questions.’
Mum got up. ‘Let’s leave,’ she said to the rest of us. 87
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Dad opened the living-room door, leading Kat out by the elbow, but Aunt Gloria grabbed Mum by the hand. ‘You stay, Faith. I need you. Please.’
Mum sat down again. She stared over at me as I waited to see if Aunt Gloria would need me too. Mum mouthed something but no sound came out. It was as if she thought I was deaf and dumb and able to lip-read. I blinked. Then she said the word out loud. ‘Scoot.’
That was the second time that day Mum had told me to go away.
I shuffled out after Dad and Kat and went into the kitchen with my hand flapping. Dad closed the kitchen door behind me. The police would find out more than I would and it wasn’t fair. A heavy feeling like you get when you eat more calories than you can burn off efficiently came down inside of me. Kat had her face pressed against the fridge-freezer. A tear trickled down her cheek and she was punching the side of her head with her fist. This meant she had the same feeling. It was called ‘frustration, extreme’.
88
TWELVE
Another Fine Mess
T he wall between our kit
chen and the living room was not thick, and we could hear murmuring voices.
‘Well, Kat,’ said Dad. ‘Well, Ted.’ He quoted a line from his film favourites, Laurel and Hardy. ‘ Another fine mess. ’
Kat started crying more and didn’t seem able to stop. Dad put his hand on her shoulder but this was not a good idea because it made her cry louder. Through her sobbing noises, I tried to hear what the voices from the living room were saying. I heard odd words. ‘Salim.’ ‘No.’ ‘Never.’ It was always Aunt Gloria’s voice. I deduced that this was because a) she was nearer the kitchen and b) she spoke more loudly than either Mum or the inspector. Then I made out a whole sentence. This was because Aunt Gloria shouted it out like a thunderclap.
‘SALIM WOULD NEVER RUN AWAY FROM
ME!’
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I put my hands over my ears. I felt air pushing itself against my face. My mouth opened and closed.
‘ Hrumm,’ I said. Dad opened the door to our back garden. It was early evening outside. He motioned for Kat and me to go out with him, but Kat shook her head. So I went out with Dad on my own. We walked down the path towards the garden shed, past our line of washing, which flapped in the breeze (light, southwesterly).
‘Dad?’ I said.
‘Yes, Ted?’
‘What’s the probability that Salim has run away?’
Dad gave a scrunched-up look. ‘I’d hardly blame him if he had.’ Then he shook his head as if he didn’t mean what he’d just said. ‘I don’t know, Ted. I think it’s more probable he’s lost somewhere, trying to get back.’
‘Sixty/forty?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Sixty per cent probability he’s lost, forty that he’s run away?’
