The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd
‘He’s our cousin,’ I said. ‘Which means we share fifty per cent of our gene pool.’
‘Yeah, but d’you like him?’
‘Hrumm. I—’
‘Don’t you feel anything? Ever?’
‘I like him, Kat. He’s my friend.’
She nodded. ‘He’s cute.’
‘Cute,’ I said. Kat calls lots of things cute, including cats, football players, movie stars and skirts and 53
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babies. Which means that cute doesn’t mean much because if everything’s cute, what isn’t? Me, I suppose. I don’t suppose Kat would ever call me cute.
‘Salim’s a mosher,’ I said.
‘A mosher?’
‘It’s northern for “casual, cool dude”,’ I said. ‘And he gets lonely. He told me.’
‘Really?’ Kat sounded impressed. ‘Perhaps it’s having to move to New York. I’d be lonely if I had to leave all my friends.’
We kept watching the London Eye go round. It was like a huge clock only going anti-clockwise. Salim’s pod moved from three o’clock to two o’clock just as an aeroplane flew low overhead.
‘Kat?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘What does it mean when something is up your street?’
‘Huh?’
‘Salim said The Tempest would be right up my street. He acted in it at school last term.’
Kat laughed. ‘We’ve been reading it at school too. 54
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Mr Moynihan keeps making me read Miranda’s part and she’s such a bloody dishrag.’
I considered this. ‘So it’s not up your street?’
‘No way.’ The pod was nearing one o’clock. ‘What d’you think of Auntie Glo?’ Kat asked.
I remembered what Dad said about her leaving a trail of devastation in her wake. Then I remembered how she’d said I was like Andy Warhol, a cultural icon. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Me neither. I heard Dad say to Mum that Auntie Glo drives him bananas. And I found two empty bottles of wine on top of the fridge.’
In my mind’s eye, Aunt Gloria turned into a motorist with driving goggles and a huge consignment of bananas in the back seat. ‘You mean, she drives him bananas the same way I drive you nuts?’ I said.
‘Bananas. Nuts. Round the bend. Off your trolley. Whatever.’
She laughed and I joined in because it showed I knew what she meant even if I wasn’t sure what was funny about Aunt Gloria making Dad feel insane. 55
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Then Salim’s pod got to its highest point, twelve o’clock, and we both said, ‘NOW!’ at the same time and laughed again, and this time I meant the laugh. We’d been tracking the same pod, the exact one Salim was in. My watch said 11.47. He was right on schedule and at the top the sun made the glass shine. The pod sank slowly to nine o’clock. I remembered from the time we’d gone up before how, near the end of the ride, a souvenir photograph is taken automatically. The London Eye managers have fixed a camera into position, so that a good shot of everyone is possible against a backdrop of Big Ben. It happens somewhere between eight and seven o’clock. I saw the dark figures inside Salim’s pod gather to one side, facing out northeast to where the camera was. I even made out a flash.
Then we walked back to where we’d arranged to meet Salim and waited for his pod to land. At 12.02 precisely it came back to earth. The pod doors opened. A group of six grown-up Japanese tourists came out first. Then came a fat man and woman with their two small boys who were also fat, which 56
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probably meant they all ate too much convenience food and needed to improve their diet. The girl in the fluffy jacket followed, arm in arm with her boyfriend. A big burly man in a raincoat, with white hair and a briefcase, came out next. He looked like he should have been getting off a commuter train, not the Eye. And then came a tall, thin blonde lady holding hands with a grey-haired man who was much shorter than her. Finally two African women in flowing, colourful robes came out, laughing like they’d just been at the fun fair. Four children of various ages were with them and they looked very happy.
But of Salim there was no sign.
I knew straight away that something was wrong.
‘Hrumm,’ I said.
Kat screwed up her face. ‘I could have sworn he was in that one, with the Japanese . . .’ The passengers wandered off in different directions. ‘He must be on the next one.’
We waited but he wasn’t. Nor the one after, or the one after that.
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A bad feeling slithered up my oesophagus.
‘Stay here,’ Kat said, gripping my hand. ‘Don’t move.’
She dropped my hand and ran off. I didn’t like being left on my own in those crowds. I kept blinking and looking around, thinking Salim would re-materialize. Then I started to think I’d lost Kat too. Then I realized I didn’t know how to find Mum and Aunt Gloria, which meant I was lost as well. My hand flapped and I forgot about trying to stop it. Then Kat came back. ‘No sign of Salim?’
‘No, Kat.’
‘I bought this,’ she said. ‘A souvenir photo. I looked at all of them, the ones before and the ones after, but I couldn’t find any with Salim in. This is the one with the Japanese and the African ladies.’
She showed me the photograph and I looked at the faces of strangers, smiling and waving at the camera. Various bits of people were chopped off, as the pod had been quite full. You could see half a face here, an arm waving there. But nothing that looked remotely like Salim.
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‘Salim isn’t there,’ I said.
Then I said, ‘Salim has disappeared.’
Kat groaned. ‘Mum and Auntie Glo are going to be livid.’
59
EIGHT
What Goes Up Doesn’t Necessarily Come Down
W e walked over to where Mum and Aunt
Gloria were having coffee.
‘Let’s lie,’ hissed Kat. ‘About taking that ticket from a stranger.’ She grabbed me by the wrist so hard it hurt.
‘Lie,’ I repeated. ‘Hrumm. Lie.’
‘We could say that Salim got lost in the crowds, that he—’ She let my wrist go. ‘Oh, forget it,’ she said. ‘I know telling a lie with you is useless. And stop doing that duck-that’s-forgotten-how-to-quack look!’
We reached the table where Aunt Gloria and Mum sat talking up another storm. We stood by them in silence. A pounding started up in my ears, as if my blood pressure had shot up above normal, which is what Mum says happens to her when Kat drives her distracted.
‘There you are,’ Aunt Gloria said. ‘Have you got the tickets?’
Kat waited for me to say something.
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I waited for Kat to say something.
‘Where’s Salim?’ asked Mum. ‘Not still in the queue?’
‘Hrumm,’ I said. ‘No.’
Mum looked as if Salim might be behind us.
‘Where then?’
‘We don’t know!’ Kat blurted. ‘This man – he came up and offered us a ticket. For free. He’d bought it and then decided he couldn’t face the ride.’
‘He had claustrophobia,’ I said.
‘That’s right. And the queue was terrible. So we took the ticket. And gave it to Salim. And Salim went up on his own. And he didn’t come down.’
Aunt Gloria shaded her eyes and looked up. ‘So he’s up there somewhere,’ she said, smiling. Kat had a hand to her mouth and her fingers were wriggling like worms. I’d never seen her act like this before. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He went up ages ago. Ted and I tracked his pod. But when it came down – he wasn’t on it.’
Mum’s face scrunched up, which meant she was 61
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a) puzzled or b) cross or c) both. ‘What on earth do you mean, he wasn’t on it?’
‘He went up, Mum,’ I
Mum looked more cross than puzzled by now. But Aunt Gloria’s face remained smooth like paper without a crease. ‘Bet I know what happened,’ she said, smiling.
‘What?’ we all said.
‘He probably went round one more time.’
The simplicity of this solution struck Kat and me at once.
‘That’s it. He just stayed on,’ said Kat. I looked at my watch. ‘In which case he’ll land at twelve thirty-two.’
We went back to the Eye, this time with Mum. Aunt Gloria said she would stay where she was, because Salim would know where to find her if we missed him.
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We watched several pods open and close, but no Salim. 12.32 came and went. No Salim. Mum asked the staff if they could help. A woman from customer services came to talk to us. She said she’d like to help but couldn’t. She said that the London Eye management policy states that children are not supposed to ride without an adult accompanying them.
Mum’s eyebrows met in the middle. ‘Kat,’ she said,
‘I relied on you. You should never have accepted that ticket. You should never have let Salim go up on his own.’
Something terrible happened then. Kat started crying. She hadn’t done that in ages. She pressed her knuckles up against her cheekbones. ‘It’s always my fault. Never Ted’s. I’m always to blame. Ted never does anything wrong.’
‘You’re older, Kat. But obviously not much wiser.’
Mum bit her lip and they both stared at each other.
‘Why don’t we call his mobile?’ I said.
Mum frowned as if I’d said something stupid; then 63
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her face cleared (which is what you say when someone’s been looking unhappy and then they suddenly cheer up, and I like this phrase because it is another weather metaphor. A face can clear just like the sky can when a dark cumulonimbus cloud has passed over and the sun comes out again). ‘Of course! Ted,’
Mum said, smiling, ‘you’re a genius. We should have thought of that right away.’
We hurried back to where Aunt Gloria was waiting at the table. There was no sign of Salim. When she saw us come back without him, she gave a big sigh. ‘Where has that boy got to?’ she said. Mum picked up Aunt Gloria’s handbag. ‘Call him. Get your mobile out. Give him a call.’
‘OK,’ Aunt Gloria said. ‘He’s probably only a few yards away.’
She pressed some buttons and put the phone to her ear with a smile and a nod of her head. Then her expression did the opposite of ‘clear’. It clouded over.
‘ The mobile phone you are calling has been switched off,’ she repeated. ‘ Please try later.’
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She dropped the phone down on the table. Her lips trembled.
‘Why’s his phone off?’ she whispered. ‘Why?’
Kat said later that we spent the next hour darting around the South Bank like headless chickens. It is a puzzling fact that chickens can run around in a frenzy for some seconds after being decapitated, but I do not think they do this for a whole hour. We looked everywhere but there was no sign of Salim. We went back to the staff, who called in the police. A constable took our names and addresses. He asked if we thought Salim knew his way back to our house. Probably, we said. Then he told us to do three things:
a) keep trying his phone
b) go home and wait, and
c) try not to worry.
He said he would report Salim’s disappearance to the rest of the squad on duty in the area. If he hadn’t reappeared in a few hours, an officer would visit us. 65
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Kat tried to explain about how Salim had vanished sometime after getting on the wheel and before getting off. He looked at her as if she was imagining it.
‘Children don’t evaporate into thin air,’ he said.
‘Not in my experience.’
So then we did b) and went home to wait. We were hoping to see Salim in our front garden but he wasn’t there. So Aunt Gloria did a), that is, she pressed and repressed the redial button on her mobile phone. Mum got her inside and made tea. Kat fetched a china plate and arranged some chocolate fingers on it. This was Mum and Kat’s way of trying to do c). But nobody ate any. We all tried not to worry but nobody succeeded.
Then Mum called Dad and told him what had happened. He said he was round the corner at the Barracks and nearly finished for the day. He’d come home to see if there was anything he could do to help. Mum hung up. Immediately the phone rang. Aunt Gloria grabbed it.
‘Salim!’ she said loudly.
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She listened for a few seconds and her face turned into a mini ice age (that’s my own expression and I hope you can guess what it means). She slammed the phone down.
‘Some man,’ she said, ‘selling conservatory windows.’ She made it sound as if selling conservatory windows was a crime against humanity. She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece.
‘Three hours,’ she said. ‘He’s been gone three hours. This hasn’t happened before.’
Then she started pacing up and down the room, punching one fist into the palm of another. It was very interesting to watch. I wondered what kind of weather she could be compared to and decided on a thunderstorm, very localized, with forked lightning.
‘Salim,’ she said, as if he were in the room, ‘I’ll have your guts for garters.’
I had never heard this before and wondered what garters were. Kat told me later that they are what women used to wear around their thighs to keep their stockings up and they are elasticated. I do not think guts would be a tidy way of doing this. 67
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Then Aunt Gloria said, ‘Oh, my boy, what have they done to you?’
I wondered whom she meant by ‘they’.
Then, ‘You’d better be back by Wednesday or we’ll miss our flight to New York.’
Then, ‘That stupid policeman. Saying not to worry. I’ll bet he doesn’t have children.’
Then, ‘Supposing some terrible gang has abducted him? Oh, mercy, mercy, no!’
Then she noticed me watching her.
‘What are you staring at?’ She pointed a pinklacquered fingernail at me and jabbed the air. ‘If you hadn’t suggested going to the London Eye, this would never have happened. You and your bloody bicycle wheel in the sky!’ She flopped onto the sofa and made a wailing sound. ‘Oh, Ted. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.’
‘Glo!’ Mum said, rushing to sit beside her. ‘Calm down, love.’ She flapped her hand at me as if I was an annoying fly. I figured out that this meant she didn’t want me anywhere nearby.
I went to see Kat, who was in the kitchen sitting 68
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at the table. She had her headphones on and her head down on her arms so she couldn’t see me or hear me.
So I went up to my room.
69
NINE
Dodos, Brigantines and Lords
I jumped onto my bed, down next to the lilo where Salim had slept the night before, and banged my fist against the wall, then jumped up on the bed again and down again, wall again, and I went,
‘ Hrumm, hrumm,’ bed again, floor again . . . This was the routine I’d had when I was small, before Mum and Dad bought me the trampoline. Then the trampoline came and I jumped on that instead. Then the trampoline broke, but I didn’t go back to the old routine because Mum said it would damage the walls and furniture now that I was bigger.
So I hadn’t done the routine in years. I’d forgotten how good it felt.
When I was tired of jumping, I got out some volumes of my encyclopaedia and curled up on my bed against the wall and looked at some interesting entries.
There was a knock on the door. Kat came in.
‘Ted,’ she said. She closed the door behind her and 70
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leaned against it. ‘You’ve still got your jacket on. Why do you always forget to take it off?’
I shrugged and drew it closer around me.
‘Ted, I need you now,’ Kat said. She did something odd, which was she sat on the bed next to me.
‘You’re all I’ve got. Mum isn’t talking to me. Auntie Glo thinks I’m Satan in disguise. Dad’s home from work now, but he just shakes his head every time I open my mouth.’
I looked up. ‘The dodo disappeared, Kat,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘The dodo. It dropped off the evolutionary path.’
‘Right. The dodo. So?’
‘It disappeared. Darwin would say it wasn’t adaptable enough to survive, so it didn’t.’
‘I don’t think Salim’s dropped off the evolutionary path, Ted.’
‘No, I know. But I’ve been thinking about disappearances,’ I said. ‘And looking some of them up in my encyclopaedia.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘There was this lord called Lord Lucan. People 71
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think he murdered the nanny who was looking after his children and then threw himself off a cliff in remorse. Perhaps he did. But his body never showed up, Kat. Perhaps he made it look that way, but really went off somewhere in disguise, under another name. One theory is that he went off to India and became a long-haired hippy.’
‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with—’
‘Then again, perhaps he was murdered himself. Perhaps he’s buried under someone’s patio.’