by Siobhan Dowd
‘Done,’ I said.
Kat picked up the list as if she was interested again. She brushed off the tear. ‘That leaves four theories,’ she said. ‘Two, three, four and six.’
‘And nine,’ I said, remembering.
‘Nine?’
‘The ninth theory is the one I was going to tell you about last night,’ I reminded her. ‘When the phone rang. You never wrote it down.’
She took the pen from me. ‘You never told me what it was. Out with it, Ted. It had better be good.’
‘It is.’ I started dictating. ‘The ninth theory is that Salim never got on the Eye in the first place.’
Kat got halfway through writing the words, then stopped and said it was daft and I said it wasn’t and she said hadn’t we seen him get on and I said we had seen what we thought was Salim but it was just a shadow and could have been anyone.
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‘He turned and waved,’ Kat said.
‘Lots of people might have done that,’ I said. ‘Not just Salim.’
‘But what happened to Salim, then, between when we said goodbye and when he got to the top of the ramp?’
I had not considered this. ‘He might have stopped to do up his trainers and decided not to get on after all and come back down the ramp after we moved away. And then he might have looked for us but we’d vanished into the crowds. And then he might have got lost or run away or got kidnapped.’
Kat closed her eyes. ‘OK, Ted. I’m reliving the moment.’
I shut my eyes too. But all I could see was the wrong-way-round Z and a line of boys, all Salim look-alikes, smiling and waving and saying goodbye and walking to the edge of a precipice.
‘Ted,’ Kat said. I opened my eyes. ‘I have to admit it’s a clever theory.’
A good tingling feeling went from my oesophagus up to my scalp. I smiled.
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‘But it’s wrong, Ted.’
I stopped smiling. ‘Wrong.’
‘I don’t expect you to understand. The boy who waved from the top of the ramp. The way he stood and looked back. The way he turned and walked on. It was Salim. I just know.’
‘You just know?’
‘It’s a body-language thing.’
The good feeling I had turned bad. ‘Body language’ is a form of communication, like speaking English or French or Chinese, but it has no words, only gestures. Humans and chimpanzees and meerkats and stingrays can read body language by instinct without having to learn it. But according to the doctors who diagnosed me, people with my kind of syndrome can’t. We have to learn it like a foreign language and this takes time.
‘You mean, you saw something about the boy who waved that I didn’t?’
‘Yes, Ted.’ Kat’s voice was soft. She put a hand on my shoulder, which made the hairs on my neck stick up. ‘Trust me. It was Salim we saw. It just was.’
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I took the pencil back from Kat and crossed off what she’d written for theory nine. I crossed it out three times over. I’d thought it the best theory of all until then. Now it was dead, almost at birth. Dead as a dodo, you could say.
148
NINETEEN
The Boy on the Train
M um came in and Kat sat on the desk, on top of the photos and the theory list.
‘Hi, guys,’ Mum said.
‘Hi, Mum,’ said Kat. She swung her legs backwards and forwards and stared into space.
‘This isn’t much of a half term for you, is it?’
‘Don’t worry, Mum. We’re fine.’
Mum smiled. Then she said the police were visiting us again and we should go downstairs, in case they wanted to ask us anything. Then she went out and Kat got off the desk. She hid the theory list and the photographs in the little drawer under my desk. Then she picked up the souvenir picture and said that she’d hand it over to the police, just in case it was of some use. Then she went out of my room. I reopened the drawer. I found my favourite photo –
the one Salim had taken of Kat and me on the footbridge. It looked as if a corner of the London Eye was emerging from my shoulder. Then I put it in my 149
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book of weather systems, between cyclones and anticyclones, where it would be safe. Then I followed Kat downstairs.
Soon the police car drew up and Mum and Aunt Gloria took the same places on the sofa and Dad showed in Detective Inspector Pearce, who was on her own. She sat on the same chair as yesterday. Nobody said anything for a minute. Then Kat went up to her and offered her the souvenir photograph.
‘I’m sorry we didn’t give it to you sooner,’ Kat said.
‘I meant to yesterday, but we forgot, didn’t we, Ted?’
‘Hrumm,’ I said.
Detective Inspector Pearce took the photo and shook her head and smiled. ‘We already have that one, Kat,’ she said. ‘Along with sixty-four others. But thanks anyway.’
Aunt Gloria grabbed the photograph and peered at it. ‘What is this?’
‘It’s a picture of the people in the pod, Aunt Gloria,’ I explained. ‘The pod that—’
‘Not a trace of Salim in any of them, I’m afraid,’
Detective Inspector Pearce said. ‘Nor in the CCTV
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footage. I’ve been checking much of it myself. In that particular pod, a rather large gentleman –’ she leaned over and pointed to the big white-haired man in the raincoat – ‘stood in the same spot for nearly the whole ride and blocked much of the camera’s view.’
Aunt Gloria tossed the picture down on the floor near my feet. I picked it up. ‘You know what I think?’
she said. ‘I think he never went up that damn Wheel in the first place!’
‘That’s an interesting theory, Aunt Gloria,’ I said,
‘and one that I considered too, but—’
‘Ted,’ Mum said. She put a finger to her lip. That is body language even I have learned to read. It means ‘Be quiet’.
There was another silence.
Then the inspector said she had a possible lead. A boy matching Salim’s description had been seen at four o’clock yesterday afternoon by a guard at Euston Station, dodging the ticket barrier and getting on a train just a moment before the doors were locked.
‘A train? What train?’ Aunt Gloria said. 151
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‘An inter-city between London and Manchester.’
‘Manchester? But that’s where we’d just come from. Why would Salim go back there?’
‘The boy – if it was Salim – was on his own. Unfortunately that’s where we lose sight of him. The guard on the train has no memory of him. He could have got off at any of the stops in between. But the Manchester police are checking to see if Salim is perhaps in Manchester—’
‘With his dad!’ Aunt Gloria said.
‘He is not with his father, I’m afraid. It was the first place we looked.’ The inspector produced Salim’s address book. ‘We’ve spoken to everybody you told us he was close to. His cousins Ramesh and Yasmin. Your neighbours, the Tysons. His school friend, Marcus Flood. And his old friend from primary school, Paul Burridge.’
‘And?’
‘None of them say they’ve heard from him since you left the day before yesterday.’
‘Hrumm,’ I said. ‘That’s—’
‘Hush, Ted,’ said Mum.
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‘If Salim did go to Manchester,’ Detective Inspector Pearce said to Aunt Gloria, ‘where do you think he’d be most likely to go?’
Aunt Gloria stared into the space in front of her and then sighed. ‘I don’t think,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘I think the boy on the train is like the boy last night, the boy in the morgue. The boy you thought was Salim and wasn’t.’
Detective Inspector Pearce reached over and touched
Aunt Gloria’s hand. ‘I’m sincerely sorry about that, Gloria. We didn’t have a proper photo ID then. We do now.’ From a brown envelope she’d been holding she took out a photo of Salim and showed it to us. ‘Your ex-husband gave us this. Would you say it’s a good likeness?’
Salim was in a school blazer, with a sweatshirt underneath, and a faint line of a moustache over his lips. He was not looking either happy or sad in the photograph because his lips were straight, neither up nor down.
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two copies so that Salim could give one to his father. To Rashid. I do it every year. I don’t know why. I don’t even know if Rashid has them framed. I don’t—’
The doorbell rang. Dad went out into the hall to see who it was and I heard voices and then in walked a tall Indian man in jeans and a green shirt.
‘Speak of the devil,’ Aunt Gloria hissed. I only heard her say this because I was standing next to her. I didn’t see anything particularly satanic about the strange man. I thought he must be another plainclothes police officer. My hand flapped.
‘What’s this?’ the man said. ‘Have you found my son?’ He looked at Aunt Gloria.
She looked at him. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m looking for my son. What else? Trust you to lose him!’
Maybe Satan had entered the room after all because everybody started talking very loudly. I put my hands over my ears but I could still hear them. I counted the people in the room. Seven. I tried to guess the ages of those I didn’t know. Then I added 154
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up the ages, actual or approximate, of all present. When I arrived at the figure of 233, and worked out the average age was 33.3 recurring, everyone was still shouting their heads off. The difference between laughing your head off and shouting your head off is that with one you are happy and with the other you are angry. I like it much better when people are laughing their heads off.
Detective Inspector Pearce got up from her chair.
‘I’d better go,’ she said, but I’m not sure that anyone listened except for me and Dad, who had not joined in the shouting either. Dad showed her out to the hallway and I followed. You could still hear the raised voices in the living room.
‘Goodbye, Mr Spark,’ Detective Inspector Pearce said. ‘I’m sorry again about last night.’
I felt Dad’s arm on my shoulder tighten. ‘Will you find out who that poor boy was?’
‘We’re working on it,’ Inspector Pearce said. ‘And as for Salim, when everyone’s calmed down, can you ask them if they would agree to us calling in the press?’
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‘The press?’
‘Yes. If Salim’s picture gets into the news stories, somebody who’s seen him might come forward.’
Dad nodded. ‘I’ll ask them.’
‘Inspector Pearce,’ I said. My hand flapped. ‘Salim got a call on his mobile yesterday. At approximately ten fifty a.m. He said it was from “a friend calling from Manchester to say goodbye”.’
‘Did he? How interesting.’ She smiled at me, which meant she and I could be friends. ‘If only some of my officers had half your brains, Ted.’
Then she nodded and walked down the tiny garden path to where the police car was parked. Dad and I went back to the living room. Rashid was saying that the police had burst into his busy evening surgery last night and that all his patients must have thought he was another Dr Death, which was the name newspaper editors gave to a very evil doctor who killed dozens of his patients instead of making them better for no reason other than that he liked doing this. Aunt Gloria was clinging to a cushion as if she was about to throw it at him and 156
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saying that all he ever cared about was what other people thought about him. Mum was standing up and holding Kat by the elbow and ushering us back into the hallway.
She closed the living-room door behind her.
‘God Almighty. Let’s leave them to it,’ she said.
‘Let’s go get a pizza, for pity’s sake.’
So we did. Pity must have been pleased because we had four enormous pizzas at the pizza restaurant nearby. I had a Coca-Cola and Kat had Sprite and Mum had a beer and Dad had a bottle of sparkling water. Dad and I ate all of ours, and Mum and Kat swapped their last slice and left only bits of the crust, which meant that everybody had been extremely hungry. And over the meal we did not talk about Salim. I talked about thunderstorms and why they happen and Kat showed Dad how she had removed the silver nail polish from her hands and he said he was glad Cat-Woman had gone back to the moon. When we got back, Rashid and Aunt Gloria were sitting on the sofa together arm in arm. This puzzled me until I remembered what Mum says about Kat 157
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and me having a love–hate relationship and I worked out that the same was true of Rashid and Aunt Gloria. Mum said to Rashid he was welcome to sleep on the couch if he wanted to and he said was she sure and she said she was and he said she was most kind and he would. And then Kat and I were told to go upstairs to bed, so we did.
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TWENTY
Eavesdropping
K at curled up on the lilo and went to sleep. The house went quiet.
Kat made a funny lapping noise, like a dog drinking water. I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking of Salim, seeing his face with his lips turned up, fading in and out of the spokes of the London Eye. Then I remembered him saying I looked a cool dude and telling me that he got lonely. The boy on the slab. The boy on the train. Salim or not Salim.
I switched on the desk light. Kat didn’t wake. She just moaned and turned over.
I got my weather-system book off my desk and looked at the photo of Kat and me on the bridge, as taken by Salim. I don’t know much about photos, but I could see it was a good photo, not like the kind I take, because the lines around our faces were sharp, and we were exactly in the middle of the shot. A small strip of the Eye’s wheel came up from my 159
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shoulder, with seven of the thirty-two pods shining in the sunlight.
I put the photo back in its hiding place, between the chapters on cyclones and anticyclones. I thought. Cyclones go anti-clockwise. Anticyclones go clockwise. That’s if you’re in the northern hemisphere. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, it’s the other way round. It’s like water whirling down a plughole: in the northern hemisphere it whooshes anti-clockwise, in the south, clockwise. And I realized that the same is true of the London Eye. I’d always thought of it as going anti-clockwise. If you look at it from the south bank of the river, that’s how it goes. But (a big but) if you look at it from the north bank, it goes clockwise.
Whirlwinds and wheels: clockwise or anticlockwise, depending on how you look at it. Nematodes, such as earthworms: male or female, depending on how you look at it. Then there’s Dad’s favourite saying. A glass: half empty or half full, depending on how you look at it.
I scratched my head. Depending on how you look at 160
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it –the same object can be or do opposite things at once. I remembered a picture Kat had once shown me of a waterfall. Only, the way it was painted, it looked as if the water was flowing upwards. Perhaps this was a clue to Salim’s disappearance. Perhaps Kat and I were looking at things the wrong way up, or the wrong way round.
I got excited then, because I am good at looking at things differently. When I was little, I once drew an egg as three rings: the shell, the white and the yolk. It looked like the planet Saturn and the teacher at school said it was a very unusual way to draw an egg. She said I had drawn it in cross-section as if I had x-ray eyes and could see straight through it. I tried to look at Salim riding in his pod with x-ray eyes but I could only see figures in the pod, dark shadows, turning to have their souvenir photo taken. So next I picked up the souvenir shot. After Aunt Gloria had tossed it on the floor
earlier, and the police had said they didn’t want it, I’d taken it back up to my desk. I studied the African women, the big white-haired man, the fat couple and their children, 161
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the Japanese tourists. All I could see of the girl in the pink jacket who’d stood near us in the queue was her arm, waving at the camera above the other people. I could not see her boyfriend, nor the tall blonde woman with the grey-haired man who was shorter than her. It had been a crowded pod. Not everyone had fitted into the picture. Salim might have been at the back somewhere, behind the shoulders and cluttered bodies. I tried to look in between the torsos with x-ray eyes. But it was grey, murky shadow, tiny dots, nothing more. I pushed it away.
I got up and crept downstairs to the kitchen. I knew where Mum kept the salt and vinegar crisps hidden and I needed some. I took two packets out and crept back into the hallway. I paused. The living-room door was ajar and I could hear Aunt Gloria’s voice. I decided to listen in case there was a clue. Maybe Aunt Gloria knew something that she didn’t realize she knew but if I heard it I would be able to see the significance. Mum has told me it is wrong to eavesdrop on people. (Eavesdropping is a strange word. Eaves are the parts of roofs that 162
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project over the walls. The only thing that drops from them is rainwater and rainwater cannot hear.) Kat eavesdrops all the time. She lurks in the hallway when Mum and Dad are talking about serious matters such as school reports, and if I tell her it is wrong to do this, she hisses at me to get lost.
But tonight I decided to eavesdrop myself.
