by Siobhan Dowd
‘I hate waiting,’ Aunt Gloria was saying.
‘I know you do.’ It was Rashid. ‘Patience and you
– they don’t go.’
‘We should call in the press, Rashid. Like Inspector Pearce says.’
‘Not yet, Gloria. I don’t want our private affairs all over the place.’
‘There you go again. Always caring about what other people think. What does it matter? What matters is Salim.’
‘OK, Gloria. We’ll call the press tomorrow. If Salim isn’t found by then.’
There was a pause. I heard a groan and the sofa creaking.
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‘I’d do anything just to know Salim was alive, somewhere, anywhere, unharmed,’ she said.
‘He is, trust me. I feel it in my bones.’
‘I hope your bones are right,’ said Aunt Gloria.
‘Oh, Rashid. If he comes back safe, let’s be in touch more. It hasn’t been good for him, our never talking.’
‘Why are you taking him to New York, then? I nearly put an injunction on you.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘I did. You never told me what you were planning. I only learned about it from Salim.’
‘But I need the money, Rashid.’
‘I pay you every month, don’t I? As we agreed.’
‘It’s not enough. I need a good salary too.’
‘Why? To pay for all your clothes?’
The voices were getting louder again. I edged backwards towards the stairs.
‘You can rise as far up in your profession as you want,’ Aunt Gloria said. ‘Why can’t I?’
‘You’re impossible, Gloria. You only ever think of yourself.’
‘That’s a lie. I’m the one who looks after Salim, 164
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day in, day out. He’s lived with me all his life. He’s mine. He goes where I go.’
‘Salim,’ Rashid said, ‘is Salim. He doesn’t belong to either of us.’
There was a pause. I stood still. The sofa creaked again.
‘You’re right,’ Aunt Gloria said. ‘If anything happens to Salim, you say you’d never forgive me. But I’d never forgive myself.’ Her voice wobbled, as if she was going to cry. I crept up the first stair.
‘Don’t blame yourself, Gloria,’ Rashid said. Then I heard him groan. ‘Salim asked me something the last time he visited me.’
‘What?’
‘He asked if he could come to live with me.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘He did.’
‘Never. Impossible.’
‘I don’t know if he meant it. But he did ask.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said . . . that I was too busy every day at the surgery – that he was better off with his mother. 165
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That he should go to New York, it was a fine city. I said no. I didn’t even sit down and talk to him about it. He asked just as I was rushing out to a patient. I turned a deaf ear to him, Gloria.’
‘Oh, Rashid! Don’t you start. I can’t stand to see grown men cry.’
Rustles, chokes, sighs. Then I guessed what came next. My hair stood on end. They were kissing. From the sound of it, it was the long-tongue-like-eels kind that Kat told me about a couple of years back. She says that they do it in the movies, when their cheeks move about. That they do it in the school corridors when the teachers aren’t looking. That Mum and Dad do it when we’re not looking.
My mum threatens us with weird punishments sometimes. If I forget to change my school shirt three days running, she’ll yank it off me, screech at the state of the collar and threaten to hang me on the washing line by my toenails if I forget to change it next time. She’s joking, you realize. But if you were to ask me, what would I prefer – being hung from a washing line by my toenails, or having 166
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to be kissed by somebody like Aunt Gloria – I know which I would choose. The washing line, every time. I fled upstairs as fast as I could. I’d had enough eavesdropping for one night.
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TWENTY-ONE
Mix and Match
I got back into bed, careful not to wake Kat. I munched on my crisps, letting them soften in my mouth before I bit into them so as to make less noise. Quietly I got out the list of theories and the photos. I thought. I bunched up the washing-line photos and put them on the desk. Then I went through the others. I finished one packet of crisps and opened a second.
Halfway through the packet I stopped munching and stared. I looked at another shot and stared at that too.
‘Kat!’ I hissed. I shook her shoulder hard. She raised herself from the pillow, holding her head between her hands. ‘Ugh. What a dream. What is it?’ She blinked up at me from the lilo.
‘The strange man, Kat,’ I said. ‘The man who sold us the ticket.’
She shook her head. ‘Yyyeerggg,’ she yawned. 168
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(That is what it sounded like.) ‘What about him?’
‘I’ve found him!’ I squeaked.
Kat’s eyes went round and she looked confused. So I showed her the photo that I had taken, the one that had gone wrong, with the headless bodies. I pointed to a torso of a man, with a jacket flapping over a T-shirt.
‘That’s him!’ I said.
‘How do you know? He just looks like someone in a crowd. And anyway, what’s he got to do with it?’
‘Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.’
Kat put her head to one side like I do sometimes, because it helps you to think. My theory is that it allows blood to pour into the side of the brain you need for whatever bit of thinking it is you have to do. The right-hand side is for logical deduction and analytical thinking and the left-hand side is for creative thought, and I think it is this side that inspiration comes from.
‘It was odd the way he came up to us,’ Kat said. ‘You could say, suspicious. Or maybe just 169
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coincidence.’ She picked up the picture and looked at it again. ‘Don’t say you remember him just from that. You never notice what people wear.’
‘No. Not from that picture on its own, Kat. But look at this one too.’ I showed her the photo taken just before, by Salim. Salim had snapped one of the Eye, but lopped the top part off, because he was too close. In the foreground was part of the queue and various bystanders. When you looked really hard at the individual people in it, you could see the head and shoulders of a man, facing towards the camera. It was only the size of a pea, but enough of the face was recognizable.
‘That’s him,’ I said.
Kat looked hard. ‘You’re right, Ted. It is him.’
She took the other photo. ‘That’s his head and shoulders. And this is his chest and trousers. They match.’
I got a magnifying glass out of my desk drawer. We looked at the pictures together. It was a game of mix and match, head and tail. Fitting together things that belonged. A jigsaw.
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‘There’s something written on his T-shirt,’ Kat said, peering through the glass. ‘Can’t make it out. An O and a T for sure. The rest’s blurred.’ She looked at me. ‘You know, Ted, this might be a breakthrough.’ She clapped me on the shoulder so hard I coughed. ‘Tomorrow I’m going back to the photo shop with the negatives. I’m going to ask them to blow up the two shots. But Ted – don’t say anything to anyone about this.’
‘What about Mum and—?’
‘She’d only ignore us if we tried to explain. No. I’m following up this lead on my own.’
‘Not on your own, Kat.’
She clapped me on the shoulder again. ‘With you, Ted. Of course. We’ll figure out what it says on the T-shirt. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll track him down.’
I was so excited I forgot to hrumm.
‘Ted – can’t stand to say it, but you’re a genius.’
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TWENTY-TWO
Word Game
W e slept for what was left of that night. When I woke up, freshening winds had moved in from the west. Light rain pattered on the window. The lilo on the floor was empty. I imagined where the clue of the strange man with the ticket might lead and how it might fit in with the theories left on the list. Depending on how you look at it. I remembered my thoughts from the night before, about how things can go clockwise and anti-clockwise at the same time. There was a tangle in my head. Kat came in, wriggling into her fur-collared jacket. It was tight for her. First one arm then another went up into the air as she squeezed into the sleeves. ‘I’m off, Ted,’ she whispered. ‘To get the photos blown up before anyone notices. Back in an hour.’
She put a finger to her lips, picked up the photo packet containing the negatives and went out. I looked across at my desk. The photos of the 172
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clothes on the washing line were scattered over it and I could see jumbled images of Dad’s tartan shirt, pinned up by the shoulders and cuffs, and Mum’s black long-sleeved T-shirt upside down and Kat’s school sweatshirt and Dad’s boxer shorts and three of Mum’s bras and my pyjamas. I put the photos into a tidy pile and lay back on my pillow. The cool air from a front across London fanned my forehead. I imagined the weather satellite picture – a jumble of patchy cloud, looking like the jumble in my brain. That’s what I need, I thought. A bird’s-eye view, from a satellite. A geo-stationary satellite, 36,000 kilometres above the earth, can beam down images in seconds. It measures the heat of the clouds and the surface temperature of the sea. It tells meteorologists what’s happening and can help them to understand the approaching weather systems and make predictions.
Then I remembered: even a geo-stationary satellite can be two things at once, still or moving. It stays in the same place in relation to the earth’s surface, but only because it orbits at the same speed 173
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as the earth’s spin. Clockwise or anti-clockwise, male or female, half empty or half full, stationary or moving, depending on how you look at it. I groaned and dug my head with its swirling brain waves under the pillow. Mum and Aunt Gloria’s voices called up and down the stairs. There was no sound of Dad’s voice. My clock said 9.02, which meant he had gone to work. Then Rashid’s voice came up from the kitchen. I smelled toast. An hour went by. I got dressed. I put on the shirt I’d worn the day before and the day before that, but I didn’t think Mum would notice. At 10.05 I crept out onto the landing just as Kat’s shape appeared through the frosted glass of the front door. It opened slowly. Kat was sneaking in with her key. She saw me at the top of the stairs and put her finger to her mouth again. But Mum must have heard her. She appeared from the kitchen before Kat could get up the stairs.
‘Where’ve you been, Kat? I didn’t say you could wander out when you felt like it.’
‘Hi, Kat,’ I said. ‘Did you get it?’
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Kat stared at Mum then at me.
‘My compass,’ I said. I went downstairs and tapped Mum on the elbow. ‘I think it dropped out of my pocket yesterday. Kat said she’d have a look in the front garden for me.’
‘Oh,’ Mum said. She ruffled my head. ‘I didn’t know you’d lost it. Sorry, Kat. I thought you’d gone off somewhere. Did you get it?’
‘No,’ Kat said. ‘I hunted around the bushes. Nothing.’
‘It was only a cheap one,’ I said. ‘But good at tracking the wind direction.’
‘Maybe,’ Mum said, ‘when all this is over’ – she paused and shook her head – ‘ if all this is ever over, we’ll get you a new one. And something for Kat too. If you both stay quiet and calm while all this—’
She stopped, shrugged, shook her head and returned to the kitchen. Kat looked at me. I looked at her.
‘Go, Ted,’ Kat whispered. She punched me in the arm so hard I nearly fell down the stairs. ‘Never thought I’d see the day. You lied.’
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We went upstairs to my room and Kat took out a large card envelope that had been stuffed up her front. ‘The man in the shop . . .’ she said. ‘He knows me now. He blew up the pictures for me in less than an hour. Here they are.’
She ripped the seal and took out two large prints. One was of the strange man who’d sold us the ticket. His face was blurred but recognizable, with his stubbly chin, dark eyebrows and high forehead. He squinted into the light.
The other was of three torsos, but the middle one was his. You could recognize a shabby leather jacket, a hairy neck, a black T-shirt or sweatshirt, and his fingers with a roll-up cigarette in them. The jacket was open and flapping. We could see some of what was written on the shirt in white lettering:
O N T L I
E C U R The beginnings and ends of each of the two words were cut off by the jacket.
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‘A word game,’ Kat murmured. She sat at my desk and grabbed a piece of paper. ‘We have to find out what words have those letters in the middle.’ She copied out the letters and looked at them. ‘To the right of the I – do you see, Ted? There’s a downward stroke, and then a bit of a diagonal – perhaps an N? I considered the alphabet in capital letters. ‘Could be an M.’
‘Maybe – but somehow I think it’s an N.’ She tapped her pencil. I heard her muttering: ‘BONT –
CONT – DONT – EONT . . .’ and so on until she came to ‘ZONT’. Then she threw down the pencil.
‘Hopeless,’ she said.
‘What about the second word?’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s recurring?’ I thought of ‘recurring’ because my favourite number is 3.3 recurring. I like the way the point-3s go off into infinity, like a chain of Gods.
‘ Recurring –hey, that would fit.’ She wrote down the word and muttered it under her breath. She looked at the word in silence. ‘You know, Ted, I’ve been having one,’ she said.
‘What?’
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‘A recurring nightmare. Every night since Salim
. . . went.’
‘What happens in it?’
She shut her eyes. ‘First I’m in a morgue. And there’s this boy lying on a slab and I’m too frightened to look at his face, Ted. Then suddenly I’m in a pod on the Eye. It’s turning fast – faster than it really does. It speeds up. I’m looking out. I can’t see anything. It’s foggy, a white mist everywhere. Then the Eye stops. At the very top. It stops. And the glass . . .’
‘What?’
‘The glass dissolves, Ted. And I’m falling – falling through the white spokes. Like through a cat’s cradle. And the fog . . . I can’t see where I’m going to land . . .’ Her hand went to her throat.
‘A dream, Kat,’ I said.
She shook herself. ‘Yeah. I know.’ She looked at the letters and sighed. ‘If it was RECURRING the R-I-N-G would go too far to the right. The G would be under the armpit.’ She rapped the pencil on her knuckle. ‘Why do people have words on clothes, Ted?’
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‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It looks funny, people walking around like signposts, or billboard adverts.’
‘It’s not my idea of style. Especially those joke T-shirts, like FRAGILE GOODS: HANDLE WITH CARE.’ She grinned. ‘I saw that the other day on a lady with the most enormous . . .’ She cupped her arms in front of her chest.
‘Hrumm,’ I said.
‘Telling me. But I don’t think this is a joke T-shirt. It’s only two words.’
‘You get ones with names of universities,’ I remembered.
‘So you do – but probably not,’ she said. ‘There’d be a crest or something. A design or motto to go with the college name.’
‘If it is a college, would it help knowing it?’
<
br /> ‘How d’you mean?’
‘You can buy those sweatshirts anywhere. You might be anybody. There’s this boy in my class. He has a sweatshirt that says OXFORD
UNIVERSITY. But he’s too young to go to
Oxford, isn’t he?’
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Kat’s head went into her hands. She groaned.
‘This is a waste of time.’
‘On the other hand,’ I continued, ‘there’s this other boy whose mum picks him up from school and she wears a T-shirt with GARDENS FOR THE DISABLED on it. The letters circle around a big daisy. And it’s the organization where she works.’
Kat’s head came up. ‘True,’ she said. ‘ONTLI ECUR,’ she muttered. ‘Is it where he works – or a club or a society? Something he’s part of? Something that just might lead us to him?’ She looked at the fuzzy torso, the faded white letters. She leaped up like a jack-in-the-box.
‘ Security! ’ she yelled.
‘Sorry?’
‘The second word, dumbo! It’s security.’
My head went off to one side.
‘He works in security.’
‘Security,’ I agreed. I was impressed and dis appointed at the same time that I hadn’t seen the word before Kat. ‘What about the first word?’
Kat sat down again, frowning in concentration. 180
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‘ONTLI . . . ONTLI . . .’ she muttered like a mantra.
‘Kat,’ I said, ‘there’s something I don’t understand. About photos.’
‘Shush,’ she said, and continued the mantra.
‘Why aren’t the letters the wrong way round, Kat?’
‘Hey?’
‘You know. When you take a photo. Why don’t letters appear back to front, like in a mirror image.’
