by Siobhan Dowd
‘Maybe seventy/thirty. I don’t know.’
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‘Then why hasn’t he used his phone?’
‘Maybe he’s run out of credit.’
‘Then why isn’t he answering our calls?’
‘Maybe he’s run out of charge.’
Dad looked up at the three-quarter moon that was rising to the east of the city. ‘I know. A lot of maybes.’
He sighed. ‘Salim and your Aunt Gloria have a strange relationship, Ted. For all that she nags him and he backchats her, I think they are close.’
‘Close? Like weather gets close?’
‘No. Close, like near. Close to each other. That’s why I wouldn’t have thought he’d run away. Not in a strange city. Not without having anywhere to go.’
I remembered Salim’s joke fit, because he didn’t want to go to the art gallery. I remembered him stamping his foot when Aunt Gloria had tried to suggest leaving the Eye until later. I am good at counting things and timing things and remembering things. But I find it hard to know whether people like each other or not. I have a basic five-point code to reading people’s faces, which Mr Shepherd has taught me from cartoon pictures:
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1: Lips up, loads of teeth showing = very amused, happy.
2: Lips up, no teeth showing = slightly amused, pleased.
3: Lips pressed together, slightly turned down = not amused, slightly cross, or else puzzled (hard to tell which).
4: Lips pressed together, eyes scrunched up at the same time = very displeased, angry.
5: Lips round like an O and eyes wide open = startled, surprised.
I thought about Salim and the way his eyes shifted around the ground a lot and how he’d looked up towards the sky when Aunt Gloria was talking. But it didn’t fit into the five-point code. I didn’t know what emotion it matched. I thought of him in the queue to get on the Eye, squinting upwards, looking down, turning this way and that. I thought of him shuffling in his sleeping bag, sighing in his sleep. Recognizing the five basic emotions is one thing. Knowing how they mix together is another thing. It 92
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is like knowing about secondary colours as well as primary colours. Blue and yellow are easy paint colours to recognize. But it isn’t easy to predict that if you mix them together, you get green.
‘So, if they are close,’ I said to Dad, ‘that means Salim wants to be near Aunt Gloria always and wouldn’t run away?’
‘Not necessarily near always. But there again . . .’
Dad ran a hand through his hair so he looked like Stan Laurel. ‘We don’t really know your Aunt Gloria that well. Or Salim. It’s been five years since we saw them last.’ The arm of a shirt-sleeve on the line flapped into Dad’s face and got tangled around his neck. He laughed, which seemed a strange thing to do when you are in the middle of a crisis. He peeled the sleeve out of his way. ‘Maybe they are close like the weather, Ted. Combustible. Who knows? All I know is, it’s another fine mess.’
93
THIRTEEN
The Eye of the Hurricane
K at called out to us from the kitchen that we were wanted back in the living room. When we got there, Aunt Gloria had finished her brandy and was staring at the bottom of the glass and her lips were turned down, which meant she was sad, and her eyebrows were hunched together, which meant she was also cross. Inspector Pearce rose to her feet and promised to let us know if there was any news. Then she said there was one last thing. Did Aunt Gloria have a photograph of Salim? Aunt Gloria took a credit-card holder out of her handbag.
‘I’ve only got this,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit old. The rest are in the photo albums. They’re on their way to New York by sea freight.’ She handed the picture over.
‘Your son is thirteen, you say?’
Aunt Gloria nodded. ‘Fourteen in July.’
‘How old is he in this?’
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‘Eight,’ said Aunt Gloria.
The inspector said the police would need something more up to date. Aunt Gloria said, ‘You can get something from his father. When you contact him.’
I remembered Salim’s father only barely. He was an Indian man called Rashid and he worked as a doctor. Aunt Gloria and he had divorced years ago.
‘Shouldn’t you call Rashid, Glo?’ Mum said. ‘You never know. Salim might have gone there. It’s possible.’
Aunt Gloria shook her head. ‘Salim would never do that. Besides, Rashid and I are not on speaking terms. Salim goes over there every other weekend, and that’s it.’
Inspector Pearce examined a knuckle on her hand as if there was something wrong with it but I could see no cuts or bruises. ‘And what did he think, your former husband?’ she said. ‘About Salim and you going to New York?’
Aunt Gloria didn’t reply.
‘He must have said something about it?’
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‘Not a lot. I said he could have Salim for two weeks at Christmas and in the summer. That seemed fine by him.’
There was another silence.
‘Who knows?’ Aunt Gloria added. ‘Maybe he does have something to do with this. That’s what you’re driving at, isn’t it?’
Inspector Pearce tucked the snapshot into her pocket and didn’t answer Aunt Gloria’s question.
‘This, and your description, will do for now.’ She stood up. ‘This is my card, with my direct phone number. I’ll leave it here on the mantelpiece. If Salim comes home or gets in touch, or if you have any further thoughts, call me.’
Aunt Gloria shrugged and said nothing, but Dad said we would. Then he showed her and the other policeman to the front door and they left. I watched from the window as they got into a white and blue police car and drove away. Mum asked Kat to help her prepare some sandwiches. Aunt Gloria had another brandy. Dad came back and opened a bottle of wine. That made it just like Christmas 96
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evening except it was getting late and it was still light outside and nobody was telling jokes or acting jolly.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ said Aunt Gloria. Nobody answered. She took the silence as permission and lit up a cigarette and sat puffing in silence, even after Kat put a plate with cheese and lettuce sandwiches on her lap. She stared into space, inhaling and exhaling. Apart from her arm travelling with the cigarette holder up to her lips on average every twelve seconds, she was still. It was a strange silence. I realized that ever since Aunt Gloria had arrived in our house she’d hardly stopped talking or moving.
‘Well,’ said Mum, after everybody had munched what they could of their sandwiches. (Me: two. Dad: two. Mum: one. Kat: a half. Aunt Gloria: none.)
‘Well,’ said Dad. I almost expected him to say
‘Another fine mess’ again but he didn’t.
‘How was work today, Ben?’ Mum said. It was a question she asked him every day.
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‘Work?’ said Dad. He shrugged. ‘OK. The Barracks is empty now and all locked up. The concrete crushers go in on Thursday. I’ve a new job on now, down Peckham way.’
‘Peckham way?’ said Mum. She didn’t look that interested. Her eyes stared off into space.
‘Peckham Rye.’
There was another long silence. Kat kept winding a strand of hair around her little finger and then unwinding it. I wanted to ask her what she was trying to achieve but she saw me looking at her and scrunched up her face, so instead I said, ‘About Salim . . .’
Everyone started.
‘I’ve some interesting theories, which might—’
‘Hush, love,’ Mum said. ‘This isn’t the time for your theories.’
A deep silence fell on the living room after that. I heard the whirr of the central heating. A kitchen tap dripped. Dad jangled some change in his pocket. I wondered what the silence was in weather term
s. It was hardly the calm after the storm. Perhaps it was a 98
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calm in the centre of a storm: the eye of the hurricane. I imagined a whirlwind, dark and swift, and in the middle of it a gentle oval-shaped stillness, shaped like a bicycle wheel seen from an angle: the London Eye. Mum shuffled her feet. The central heating stopped whirring. Mum said it was time to go to bed.
‘It’s only nine o’clock,’ Kat protested. ‘Anyway, I’m here, on the couch, remember?’
‘That’s enough, Kat.’ Mum got up and walked over to the window and looked out. She drew the curtains. ‘This once, you can sleep in Ted’s room, on the lilo where Salim—’
She didn’t finish her sentence. But we all did in our heads. Where Salim slept last night. Aunt Gloria gave a low moan and leaned over her drink as if she felt ill. We were all thinking the same thought. Where in this big, dark, dangerous city was Salim going to sleep tonight?
99
FOURTEEN
Eight Theories
I lay on my bed that night, trying to ignore the shuffling coming from less than a metre away. I could smell shampoo and hear breathing that reminded me of a restless panther. It was Kat, on the lilo where Salim had been the night before. The city noises came through the open window. Lorries pounded down the main road. Aircraft droned overhead. I imagined a great anvil-shaped cloud forming over southeast London and hot air rising in convection currents. There was an instability in the upper atmosphere.
I often don’t sleep at night. My brain is filled with all the strange facts about the world. I switch on my reading lamp and listen to the shipping forecasts on the radio on low volume. I get out my weather books. I study the charts of isobars and isotherms. I examine photographs of what the weather leaves behind: dried-up lakes, wrecked shanty towns, mud-slides, people rowing boats around the roofs of 100
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their houses. And I plan how when I grow up I will help people prepare for the disasters and save their lives and their money and advise governments on how to manage the weather.
But tonight I couldn’t switch on the light because of Kat. I think the molecules in my brain went haywire, because all I could think of were dodos chasing Lord Lucan, who was sailing away in the Mary Celeste towards an evening sky with a giant bicycle wheel for a moon. I saw Salim waving from the deck, just as he’d waved that last time before boarding his pod. I heard Aunt Gloria’s voice saying it was me that had suggested going to the London Eye, when it hadn’t been. I saw Mum’s hand flicking me away like a fly.
‘Ted.’ Kat was awake. ‘Ted.’
‘Hrumm. What?’
‘Are you awake?’
‘Yes.’
‘So’m I.’ She sat upright and I saw her arm reach over for the bedside light. She switched it on and we blinked at each other. ‘It’s no good. We’ve got to talk 101
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about it.’ She sat with her hands clasped around her knees and her head on her kneecaps. Her strands of brown hair flopped untidily over her shoulders.
‘Hrumm,’ I said.
‘Hrumm, yourself,’ she said.
It took me a moment to realize she was imitating me.
She smiled. ‘Maybe if I sound like you, I’ll think like you, Ted.’
‘I don’t think thinking like me is any better than thinking like you,’ I said.
We listened to my alarm clock ticking.
‘Ted, what strikes you as the oddest thing about Salim’s disappearance?’
‘The fact that he disappeared from a sealed pod,’ I said.
Kat nodded. ‘He went up the Eye and didn’t come down.’
‘Definitely odd,’ I said.
‘And nobody else – not the police, not Mum or Dad, not Auntie Glo – seems to realize how odd. They all ignore what we keep telling them and make 102
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out how we just weren’t paying attention and missed him somehow. But that’s not possible, is it?’
‘Possible, yes, probable, no,’ I said. ‘We saw two capsules empty out before his came down and several after. I timed how long he was up with my watch. There is only a small margin of error possible.’
‘So what happened? Where did he get to?’
‘I have eight different theories,’ I said. Kat was impressed. ‘Eight different theories?’
‘Eight. One of them must be correct, unless there’s one or more theories I’m missing.’
‘What if I write them down?’ Kat grabbed a piece of paper from my desk and I dictated to her the following list. This is what Kat wrote, with her own comment after each theory saying how likely she thought it:
1. Salim hid in the pod (under the seat, maybe) and went round three or more times, getting out when we’d given up looking. (Just possible. Worth checking out.) 2. Ted’s watch went wrong. Salim got out of his pod when we weren’t there to meet him. (Unlikely. Just 103
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checked Ted’s watch. 23.43. His alarm clock says same. It’s keeping perfect time. Ted says he checked it five times against Big Ben while we were out today.) 3. Salim got out of his pod but we missed him somehow by accident and he didn’t see us either. What parents, police think. (But we think only a 2% chance. We both kept a lookout on everybody that came out and there were never many people at once. Salim would have had to miss us too, unless . . .) 4. Salim either deliberately avoided us or was suffering from amnesia (memory loss). This theory means he must either have wanted to run away or was perhaps knocked on the head and somehow forgot about us. (But we were standing there, looking at everybody as they came off, and we still don’t know how we’d have missed him even if he didn’t want us to see him, or forgot what we looked like. So really as unlikely as 3.) 5. Salim spontaneously combusted. (I’ve never heard of this, but Ted seems to think people sometimes vanish into a puff of smoke. He says it’s a rare but documented phenomenon, and works like local thunderstorms. Huh. Not likely. Hardly counts.) 104
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6. Salim emerged from the pod in disguise. (Possible, but going by the other people who got out of the pod
– the Japanese tourists, women, tiny children etc. –
highly improbable. The person who looked most like Salim was the boyfriend of the girl in the pink jacket. But he was plumper, with a much fuller face. Definitely not Salim. Anyway, how would he have changed clothes without anybody in the tiny pod noticing?) 7. Salim went into a time-warp. He could be stranded in another time or even a parallel universe. (Probability factor zero, as with theory 5.) 8. Salim emerged from the pod hiding beneath somebody else’s clothes. When we got to this last theory, Kat looked at me over the top of her pen. She didn’t even bother writing down her comment.
‘You remember how Laurel and Hardy almost get out of the Foreign Legion camp in The Flying Deuces,’ I said. ‘It’s the film we watch with Dad every Christmas. Ollie, the fat one, is heartbroken because the girl he loves doesn’t love him and he wants to 105
SIOBHAN DOWD
forget her and a man tells him that if he joins the Foreign Legion, he will forget her. So he joins the Foreign Legion and Stan, the thin one, joins too. But the Foreign Legion is not very nice. They have to wash an endless mountain of clothes, which would take the rest of their lives to do, so they decide to escape.
‘Don’t you remember?’ I said. ‘They hide in the robes of these Arab men as they’re walking towards the gates . . .’
‘I remember,’ Kat said. ‘And that’s the daftest of the lot.’
‘But – you remember those African women,’ I said. ‘They had long flowing robes. And there was the big man in the long raincoat . . .’
‘OK, OK . . .’ She rolled her eyes so that I could see only the whites. She then wrote down after theory 8: ( Can Ted hide in my clothes without Mum noticing? I don’t think so. But we can try. )
Kat looked over the list. ‘They’re not very promising. Are you sure there aren’
t any better theories? 106
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Otherwise we’re just going to have to accept that the police and all are right.’
I thought hard. Then I had what people call an inspiration. An inspiration is an idea that seems to come from nowhere. In the olden days people thought inspiration came from the gods or God (depending on if you were a polytheist or a monotheist) breathing an idea into your brain.
‘There is a ninth theory,’ I said, my hand flapping.
‘Not something weird, like aliens beaming Salim up to their spaceship, or him slipping between dimensions or—’
‘No, not weird,’ I said. ‘In fact, I think it’s the best theory of all.’
But before I could say what it was, the phone rang. 107
FIFTEEN
Infinity
B y the second ring we’d dashed to the door. Kat pushed past me, elbowing me in the stomach. By the third ring we were on the landing. We heard Dad answering on the extension in his and Mum’s bedroom. We didn’t dare go in but we listened. But Dad’s voice is soft and I could hear nothing. Then Aunt Gloria staggered out of Kat’s room in a silky pale-blue nightdress. Her eyes were wide open and her hair was messy. ‘Salim!’ she whispered. Her teeth chattered as if she was cold although the temperature that night was not due to drop below fifteen degrees.
She flung open Mum and Dad’s bedroom door just as Dad hung up.
‘Salim?’ she repeated.
‘No,’ Dad said. ‘It wasn’t Salim. It was the police.’
‘They’ve found him? Please say they’ve found him.’
‘They’re not sure . . .’
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