by Siobhan Dowd
‘Can’t wait to see the back of that stuff,’ Dad said.
‘It makes you look like an alien in a B-movie.’
While Kat was in the chemist’s Dad and I waited outside and he told me what a B-movie was and how films like Creature from the Black Lagoon or 126
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Cat-Women of the Moon, which Dad has in his collection, were made on low budgets with poorquality props and actors and were so bad that they were funny and had a cult following. I asked Dad what a cult following was. Dad said a cult following was a fan club of something that wasn’t mainstream, which means something that only a certain number of people like. I was asking Dad how many fans it took to make something move from being sidestream to mainstream when Kat reappeared brandishing a plastic bottle of blue liquid.
‘Got your paint-stripper?’ Dad said to her.
‘Yeah. Thanks, Dad.’
‘Where next?’
‘Ted had an idea, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, Kat. The Science Museum.’
‘Not that one. The idea before that one.’ Her little finger went round in a circle. She winked. Kat’s behaviour, from snapping eighteen pictures of the garden shed, to making me get under her dressing gown, to darting off to buy nail-polish remover, was making my brain spin.
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‘Remember, Ted?’
‘Hrumm. Yes. The London Eye.’
Dad stopped walking. He folded his arms and looked at me, then at Kat. ‘So that’s what this is about,’ he said. ‘You two are on a trail, huh?’
Kat did a hands-raised-shoulder-shrug. Then she grabbed Dad’s arm. ‘Dad, it won’t do any harm. You never know. If we go back at the same time as we were there yesterday, he might even show up. He might not know his way back to our house – but anybody could find the Eye again, wherever they’d got to. We – we just wanted to have another look. Get in a pod. See what it’s like. See things as Salim—’
As Salim must have seen them. It was another one of those sentences that everybody finishes in their heads, not out loud. Kat’s lips trembled. I once heard Mum say that Kat had Dad wrapped around her little finger. I’d no idea what Mum was talking about. I’d looked at Kat’s little finger, and imagined Dad going around it, in miniature, stretched and pummelled into an odd-looking, living ring. Dad drew Kat towards him and gave her a squeeze.
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‘It’s really hard, Kitten, I know,’ he said. ‘Kitten’ is what Dad called Kat when she was small. He looked up at the sky. ‘The Eye it is. There’s a lot of cloud, which is good and bad.’
‘Why bad?’ said Kat.
‘We won’t see that far.’
‘Why good?’ I said.
‘Because it won’t be too crowded, Ted. Which means we won’t have long to queue. Let’s go.’
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Lightning Strikes
W hen we got there, it turned out as Dad said. The crowds around the London Eye were
thinner than yesterday. A large tract of cumulonimbus cloud had rolled in. The area of low pressure was approaching. It was 990 millibars and falling, I estimated. Visibility was only fair. Getting tickets didn’t take long. Soon we were in the line for the ramp up to the Eye. We got to the point where we’d parted with Salim yesterday. A security man checked us over with a hand-held machine, like a giant bubble-blowing holder. Then we walked up the ramp. It was a zigzag, a back-tofront Z. We boarded the moving pod along with a group of eight foreign teenagers and a tired-looking mum with a folded-up buggy, her baby and her two older boys. We began to rise. I counted how many we were as we moved anti-clockwise from six to five o’clock: fourteen. (I decided not to count the baby as it was 130
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unable to walk around or look at the view and because it was too small to remember the experience.) Yesterday, in Salim’s pod, I’d counted twenty-one.
I drifted over to the side of the pod where nobody else was standing. I watched the other passengers. They looked out, turned, chatted in quiet voices and clicked cameras. Kat came over and stood beside me.
‘I did it,’ she whispered.
‘Did what?’ I said.
‘Shush! I dropped the film in at the chemist’s. By the time we get back it will be developed.’
I thought of the eighteen shots of the back garden and the eighteen other shots, our last link to Salim.
‘That is good, Kat.’
Dad joined us. ‘What a view,’ he said. ‘Look at how tiny the cars are.’
‘They’re like abacus beads,’ Kat said, ‘going left and right.’ I looked down but I couldn’t say I’d ever seen abacus beads like that.
Dad pointed south. ‘If you had binoculars, you could make out our street, maybe even our house.’
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‘Typical,’ Kat said. ‘You come up here, just to see what stares you in the face every day.’
Dad laughed. ‘I’ve never seen where we live from this vantage before. There’s the Barracks – looking almost handsome, if you imagine it cleaned up, maybe – and there’s Guy’s Tower, and there’s the shopping centre. You can see its red roof . . .’
‘Come and see the Houses of Parliament, Dad.’
Kat pulled him over to the other side of the pod. I took Dad’s place at the southeast side and looked out but without taking in what I was seeing. We got to twelve o’clock. Visibility decreased further. The Thames estuary dissolved into cloud. I thought of the Mary Celeste, a ghost ship with no crew, sailing over the horizon. I thought of the last dodo dying on a remote rock. I thought of Lord Lucan standing on a cliff, deciding whether or not to throw himself off. I thought of a chain of Gods, each having been created by the next, vanishing into infinity, the great vast void. I thought of the boy on the slab, the young boy with bruises and dirty fingernails, the boy who wasn’t Salim.
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Where are you, Salim? I wondered. Then, suddenly, it was as if I became Salim. I felt his laughing presence inside me, almost like a ghost, while I stood looking out. I tried to imagine what he’d have done, alone among strangers in his pod. Would he have chatted to somebody? Would he have stayed quietly in a corner? I divided into two, with the Ted half asking the Salim half what had happened. But the ghost of Salim, like the dodos, lords and crew of the Mary Celeste, vanished before we reached nine o’clock.
An announcement came on from a speaker in the corner of the pod, suggesting that we all group together facing northeastwards towards the spiral staircase to pose for the souvenir photo.
‘Shall we?’ said Dad.
‘Yes, let’s,’ said Kat.
Kat and Dad gathered on one side of the pod with the other passengers, while I stayed out at the edge, half posing, half looking at the others posing. The camera flashed. The pod came down.
A young man with a London Eye T-shirt, a 133
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member of staff, stood at the door beckoning us to come out. The others filed out first. Dad and I were next. But Kat hung back, her eyes darting around. She crouched down by the seats, but the man came in and shooed her out, then picked up a piece of litter that the woman holding the baby had dropped and got out himself.
‘What was that all about?’ Dad said.
I nearly said, ‘Theory number one, being disproved,’ but remembered how Mum had reacted to theory number eight.
‘I thought I’d dropped something,’ Kat said.
‘Well, shake a leg,’ Dad said. (‘Shake a leg’ is Dad’s favourite way of saying ‘Hurry up’, although if you tried to run and shake a leg at the same time, you would fall over.)
Kat nudged me. We’d both realized the same thing at the same time. You couldn’t stay on for another go. Exit, enter, exit, enter – it was a smooth operation.
The way out led past the souvenir photo booth, close to where we�
�d said we’d meet Salim. There 134
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were several television-like screens with different shots of each passenger load. Our one was number 2,903. There was Dad, there was Kat, there was the mum and her two boys and her baby. The teenage tourists were bunched around them, grinning and waving. You could only see my shoulder and ear, sticking out on the right, behind everybody else.
‘Ted’s cut off, and I look a fright,’ Dad said. ‘But you look all right, Kat.’
Kat had her arms folded and her hair was tied in what girls call a topknot. Her skinny, bony face jutted out. With her tilted chin and dark eyebrows she seemed sharper, somehow, as if she was more in focus than other people round her, or more real. You couldn’t help noticing her, whether you were looking for her or not. Maybe that’s what being pretty meant, I thought.
‘God,’ she said. ‘My hair looks icky.’
Dad bought the shot anyway.
Then we left the Eye and walked along the river. The Thames was flat and brown. The pleasure boats cruised along with hardly any passengers. You could 135
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hear aircraft, but not see them. The blanket of cloud grew thicker. I kept looking out for Salim. Whenever we passed a boy of about his build, with dark hair, I’d stare. But when we drew close, it was never him. Dad stopped to look out across the water. He pointed out two cormorants that dipped and dived into the water, disappearing for ages, then reappearing ten metres or more from where they’d gone down.
‘Is Salim like the cormorants, Dad?’
‘Sorry, Ted?’
‘Will he reappear eventually? Like they do? Maybe not where he disappeared but somewhere else?’
Dad didn’t answer straight away. He looked downstream, with his lips turned down, which meant he was sad. Perhaps he was thinking of the boy on the slab, the boy who might have been Salim, but wasn’t. ‘I certainly hope Salim is like the cormorants, Ted.’
We crossed the river to the Embankment Gardens and had sandwiches in the Park Café. When we’d 136
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finished, we walked around the beds of colourful flowers. Then, just as I’d predicted that morning, a thunderstorm started. First rain dripped, then splattered. There was a thunderclap. The instability in the upper atmosphere erupted. I thought of theory number five: spontaneous combustion. If thunder was possible, why not that?
‘Good thing we’re not on the Eye now,’ Dad said. Lightning flashed. Ten seconds later it thundered again.
‘Dad,’ I said, ‘the storm is three kilometres away. Even if it was nearer, your chance of being struck is approximately one in three million.’
We dashed for the underground station. By now it was raining cats and dogs (which is the strangest expression of all, but my personal favourite. When I imagine cats and dogs coming from the sky, I see white fluffy kittens and Dalmatian puppies). Then it turned to hail. The lightning and thunder were four seconds apart.
‘Twelve hundred metres,’ I said, ‘and it is sheet lightning, which means—’
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‘Shut up, Ted,’ Kat said. She had her jacket collar up over her head. ‘I’m soaked.’
Dad looked at his watch. ‘Three o’clock. No calls on the mobile. So no news.’
‘Let’s go home,’ Kat said. ‘It’s too wet to stay out.’
‘OK, Kat. We’ll call it a day.’
We went down into the underground. By the time we were back up on street level the storm had moved away. The rain had stopped. The pavements ran with moisture.
‘It was a very localized storm system,’ I said.
‘Dad,’ said Kat, ‘d’you mind if we stop by the shopping centre again? I want to get a present for Auntie Glo. Some bath oil to help her relax.’
Dad’s lips went right up. ‘That’s a great idea, Kitten.’
We waited as Kat went into the chemist’s again. She emerged with a plastic bottle of syrupy, raspberry-coloured liquid. Dad unscrewed the lid, smelled it and crinkled up his nose. This meant that he didn’t think it smelled pleasant, but what he said was, ‘That should do nicely.’
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What he didn’t see, but I did, was the top of a wallet of newly processed photos, bulging from the pocket of Kat’s fur-collared jacket.
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EIGHTEEN
The Ninth Theory
W hen we got home, there was a smog in the living room caused by Aunt Gloria’s
cigarettes. A smog is technically a mixture of smoke, fog and chemical fumes but this was a mixture of smoke, smoke and more smoke. Mum said there had been no news but we already knew this because Dad’s mobile phone had not rung. I tried to tell her and Aunt Gloria about our trip to the London Eye but Kat started coughing and Dad said we had had a very pleasant walk by the river. Then Kat gave Aunt Gloria the bath oil, saying it was a present from both her and me, and when Aunt Gloria looked at the label, her lips went up. She said thank you, Kat, and thank you, Ted, and added that it was the kind she’d used when Salim was little.
‘The little devil that he was,’ she said. ‘Forever pinching it. He liked the bubbles. Blowing them up. Giggling when they burst.’
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Then she started crying and Mum told Kat and me to go upstairs.
Upstairs, Kat got out the wallet of photos and flicked through them at the rate of one a second. I was very excited to see them but she wouldn’t let me. In eighteen seconds eighteen pictures of our back garden and the washing and the shed were all over my duvet cover. When she got to the first eighteen shots, the ones taken the morning of Salim’s disappearance, she slowed down. I tried to look over her shoulder but she jerked away. She went through them twice, then dropped them on the bed as if she was no longer interested. I picked them up and looked.
‘Just a set of stupid touristy shots,’ Kat said. ‘Like any others.’
There were scenes of the Houses of Parliament, Lambeth Bridge and the Eye, from different angles. The best shot was the one Salim had taken of Kat and me on the Jubilee footbridge. It had Kat’s face and mine close together and behind us was half of the Eye and some bridge and river and sky. Kat 141
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was smiling. My head was off to one side and my eyes were looking upwards as if I was thinking. Kat was taller than me. My head ended where her chin began.
The last shot was the one I had taken. It had gone wrong. Instead of the London Eye, I had snapped some legs and headless bodies of the people near where we’d been queuing. I arranged the photos on my desk alongside the souvenir shot of the capsule in which we thought Salim had been a passenger and the list of theories.
We sat in silence.
Kat breathed out long and hard. ‘I don’t even know what I expected to find,’ she said, shuffling the pictures about. ‘I wish we’d just given Auntie Glo Salim’s camera when we first found it. Now we’ll have to explain why we didn’t give it to her. And I bet when she sees Salim’s last photos she’ll just start crying again.’ She picked up the shot of her and me on the footbridge and threw it down again. ‘A clue? As if!’
I picked up the photo. ‘Let’s keep the photos and 142
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the camera safe in my room until Salim returns,’ I suggested.
‘ If he returns,’ Kat said, biting her lip. She shook her head and swept all the photos up into a rough pile. ‘But I agree. There’s no point upsetting Auntie Glo. You don’t have to lie, Ted. Just say nothing.’
Then Kat picked up the list of theories. ‘As for this’
– she scrunched it up and threw it in the waste-paper basket – ‘it’s beyond us, Ted.’
I watched the paper crackle softly as if it was trying to re-open itself. When the corners reappeared, I took it back out of the rubbish and smoothed it flat on the desk.
‘Forget it, Ted,’ Kat said.
I picked up a pen. ‘Let’s try a process of elimination,’ I said. The world’s most famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, said that once you have eliminated all the possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true. I was eager to see if we could eliminate all the theories except my favourite theory of all, which was that Salim had spontaneously combusted. This would not have 143
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been a good outcome for Aunt Gloria or for Salim, but it would mean that spontaneous combustion was a real phenomenon and my discovering this would have been an advance in science.
‘Theories one and eight can go,’ I began. ‘Today we have proved that Salim couldn’t have stayed in his capsule after it came down and he couldn’t have come out hiding under somebody’s else’s clothes.’ I crossed them out.
‘Drop it, Ted.’
‘That leaves six.’
‘While you’re at it you can cross off the one about spontaneous explosion or whatever it’s called.’
‘Theory number five?’
‘Yeah. And the time-warp one.’
‘Number seven?’ My pencil hovered over the list.
‘But supposing we eliminate all the others and—’
‘Oh, grow up, Ted.’
I wished Kat could spontaneously combust there and then. But she didn’t. Her eyebrows came close together and her lips were right down and then a tear came rolling out of her left eye and down her 144
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nose. I thought of something I hadn’t thought of before. Very slowly I drew a wavy line through theories five and seven even though a strange feeling went up my oesophagus.
