by Ellen Potter
Otto snapped a picture. The tattooed man’s head swiveled sharply at the sound of the click. Lady tattoo or not, the sight of that face staring directly at them made their eyes go wide. His nose had the oddest shape. It looked like a frog that had been smashed flat in the road. Maybe he’d tattooed his face to take people’s attention off the smashed frog in the center of it.
“That’ll be a fiver,” the man said, hopping off the car and heading toward them while holding out his palm.
“Five pounds? What on earth for?” Lucia said. Her brothers were simply staring with their mouths open.
“Well, I ain’t a bloody penguin in a zoo,” he replied as though he were genuinely offended. “Tourists pay five pounds for my picture.”
“Ridiculous,” Lucia said firmly, and she grabbed Otto and Max by the shirtsleeves and stalked off, not paying any attention as the man yelled after them, “Oi, oi!”
Lucia’s impressive eyebrows squinched together. “That’s nerve to make people pay for his photo.”
Secretly, though, she was not so much offended by the five pounds as by the fact that he had called them tourists.
“Anyway,” she said, “it’s about time we had some dinner. I’m starving.”
Otto suggested trying back at Angela’s again, just in case her neighbour was wrong and Angela had returned, but Lucia refused. She said it would be a shame to leave the streets of Camden just yet, now that they could do whatever they damn well pleased. Max agreed and Otto did too in the end. All in all they were in that gorgeous state of mind in which they felt free and unafraid and sharply aware of how large and exciting the world was.
In other words, it hadn’t gotten dark outside yet.
Chapter 4
In which Lucia reveals a secret and the Princess Uzima narrowly escapes from a lion
Casper always gave them some spending money when he went away, and now they considered what sort of dinner they should buy with it. There were so many choices here! In Little Tunks there was only a tiny fish-and-chip shop, a pizza parlour, and the Pig & Pony Pub, where they served a dried-out disk of brown substance that the menu called a burger.
The Hardscrabbles peered through the windows at a good many food shops and were tempted by some. But they couldn’t all agree on a place until they passed the open door of a curry shop and smelled the earthy tangle of spices, so strong that the odor oozed down the back of their throats and made them feel all spitty. In a good way. They went in and ordered at the counter, each choosing something different so that they could try a bit of everything. They sat at a table by the window, so as not to miss a thing on the street. After several minutes, the shop owner brought them their food, along with small silver pots of gem-colored sauces.
“Careful,” he warned, pointing to a pot of red sauce. “This one is veerry, veerry spicy.”
So of course the red sauce was the first pot that the Hardscrabbles dipped their spoons in. After a few minutes, their noses were dripping and they were making some strange chockety sounds in their throats until the shop owner brought over some yoghurt to cool them down. After they were done, Otto wanted to leave for Angela’s but Lucia insisted that they sit and digest. This should have struck her brothers as strange, since she’d never cared about their digestion in the past, but they didn’t notice. They all sat and digested until the shop owner started to give them filthy looks.
With their bellies full and their heads feeling strangely light, they walked back to Fishtail Lane and climbed the steps to Angela’s flat. Their rap on the door provoked the usual fit of barking from Dr. Jekyll, but this time they also heard the approach of footsteps on the other side of the door.
“There, you see!” Max said, smiling. “She is here after all.”
But when the door opened, it wasn’t Angela at all. It was a stocky teenage girl with a wide, flat face and a badly chapped lower lip. Dr. Jekyll ran between her legs and flew out into the hall, barking wildly.
“He bites,” she shouted in order to be heard above the barking.
“It’s okay, boy,” Max said to Dr. Jekyll. “It’s just us.” He put his hand out and the dog lunged forward and snapped, grazing Max’s fingers.
“I told you,” the girl said flatly.
“Are you the dog walker?” Lucia asked.
“S’right.” The girl eyed Lucia suspiciously. “Who are you?”
“We’re the Hardscrabbles. We’re supposed to be staying with Angela for a few days.”
“How you going to do that when she’s in Germany?”
“Then it’s true!” Otto exclaimed.
“What’s he doing with his hands?” The girl scowled suspiciously at Otto.
“Just talking. But look,” Lucia said, “there must be some mistake. Our dad called Angela today and arranged it all.”
The girl opened her mouth, then shut it again. She grew very red in the face.
“Well, how was I supposed to understand what he was saying with all the barking and whatnot,” she muttered crossly.
“You spoke to our dad?” Max asked.
“I might have.” The girl frowned and picked at a loose bit of skin on her lower lip. “I don’t know. Someone called. And they said something about a favor and then about St. Pancras, but here was Dr. Jekyll going berserk like he does, and I just said ‘Yeh, sure,’ like that. Just to get him off the phone. How was I supposed to know—”
This girl was obviously such a twit that the Hardscrabbles blotted her out, the way you might stick your thumb over the face of a person in a photo whom you can’t stand.
“Look,” Lucia said to her brothers, “we might stay anyway. We’d have the place all to ourselves. Imagine living in London, completely on our own?”
“I don’t like it,” Otto said.
“It’s better than Mrs. Carnival’s,” Max said.
“What? Do you think I’m some sort of duffer?” the dog walker cried, forcing them to remember that she existed. “How do I know you aren’t just a pack of thieves?”
“You just said you spoke to our dad,” Lucia said.
“I said maybe I did. You lot got a shifty look. Especially him.” She pointed to Otto. “No, you can’t stay here. I won’t be blamed for her stuff going missing.” She reached down, grabbed Dr. Jekyll by his collar, and yanked him back in the flat. “You’ll just have to go straight back to where you came from.” Then she shut the door in their faces.
They stood there in silence for a moment.
“Mrs. Carnival’s cyst has probably filled back up since the last time I drained it,” Max said dolefully.
“So much for not having to finish out the school year,” Otto griped. “Mrs. Carnival will make us go.”
“So much for London,” said Max.
“Not quite,” Lucia said. “We’ll be in London for twelve more hours yet.”
Now we come to the part where Lucia divulges a secret. She’s known it since the train ride and she told it to the readers in the first draft of this book, but when she read it over she decided it was better to keep it to herself until this moment. The element of surprise and all that.
“The last train for Little Tunks has left at seven thirty,” she said. “There won’t be another one till seven forty-five tomorrow morning.” She said this very stiffly, because it had that significant sort of feel to it. Also, she was slightly nervous about how her brothers would react.
She is happy to say they were fairly good sports. Except that Otto said, “Where in the world do you expect us to sleep?” and Max said, “That was really stupid.” But she suspects Max was simply upset because for once she knew something that he didn’t (if you remember, she had used the train timetable as a bookmark, and she happened to notice the time of the last train and the first train to Little Tunks).
“Look,” Lucia said in a very reasonable tone, “when do the really interesting things happen? Not when you’ve brushed your teeth and put on your pyjamas and are cozy in bed. They happen when you are cold and uncomfortable and hun
gry and don’t have a roof over your head for the night.”
“Who told you that?” Otto said, scowling.
“It’s just common sense, isn’t it?” Lucia replied.
“The Princess Uzima said it,” Max put in. “After her mother-in-law kicked her out of the palace with nothing but the clothes on her back.”
There was a pastel sketch of the Princess Uzima in their hallway. It showed an elegant, slender woman with skin the color of polished cherrywood and the most disdainful nostrils that Lucia had ever seen. She had married the tribal prince of Anawadi but her mother-in-law thought she was too stuck-up. She had the princess arrested for treason and tossed out into the wilderness, leaving her with nothing but a vial of poison so that she could kill herself before the lions did it for her. But Princess Uzima was not afraid of lions. She struggled across the plains of Africa, sleeping under trees, sipping bitter water from the okanobu plant, and once even escaping from a lion by throwing back her head and baring her elegant throat, then daring him to bite it. When he hesitated, she cursed him in the Anawadi tongue and threw stones at him until he ran off. In Casper’s sketch, you could see a tiny silver vial hanging from a chain around the princess’s neck. It still held the poison that she had refused to swallow.
“Yes, and the point is things did get really interesting for her then,” Lucia said.
Otto looked unconvinced but Max said, “In any case, it’s twelve hours less of Mrs. Carnival and her neck cyst. Well done on that count, Lucia.”
Chapter 5
In which London grows dark
There is nothing like a darkening sky to knock the wind out of a really interesting experience. And the London sky was growing very dark very quickly. For the first time that day, the Hardscrabbles were beginning to understand the seriousness of their situation. They were all alone with not much money and nowhere to go. In the daylight, the streets of Camden were colorful and exotic. Yes, some of the people had looked a bit scary, but none of the Hardscrabbles had truly felt like they were in any danger. Not really and truly.
Now, as they made their way back down Fishtail Lane and toward the market area, they gazed around apprehensively. The market stalls were closed and the streets were more empty. Or rather, they were more full of the wrong sort of people. The dimming light sopped up the bright pinks of wigs and the chartreuse greens of stockings and now everyone looked grey and grim. People moved more slowly too and seemed to notice each other more. The Hardscrabbles felt eyes on them; curious, interested eyes.
They wandered aimlessly until Max stopped and dropped his bag on the ground. “We can’t just walk around all night,” he said. “And anyway, my arms are ready to fall off from carrying this bag.”
“We might try and find a police officer,” Otto suggested.
“Don’t be silly. The police don’t bother themselves about little things like this,” Lucia said. “We’ll just have to find some place to tuck ourselves away for the night. An alley, maybe.”
Otto made a face. “Bad things happen in alleys.”
“That’s just in books,” Lucia said. “By the way, what’s that smell?”
They all smelled the smell then. It had been there the whole time they were talking, of course, but they hadn’t noticed it. It was a green fishy smell. Not a “green fish” smell. I mean green in the sense that it smelled alive. Also it smelled of fish.
Max walked up to the low fence that lined the street and leaned over.
“It’s the canal,” he said.
Indeed, right below them was a long canal and drifting slowly through the water was a narrow boat, the lights from its windows skimming the quiet banks.
“Let’s find a place down there,” Lucia said brightly. “You never read about murders by the edge of a canal.”
Of course bodies are always being found floating in canals in mystery books, but as you know, Lucia rarely read mystery books so she couldn’t have known that.
They walked down a set of stairs and passed across a bridge on which several rough-looking people were draped against the railing. The Hardscrabbles pretended not to notice them. They fervently hoped that the people on the bridge would do the same.
“Well hello, kiddies.” The girl was maybe seventeen. A cigarette dangled from her lips and she was dead thin. So thin, in fact, it was amazing she could hold herself upright, since there was a mass of thick blond dreadlocks spilling out of her skull. She looked a bit like a willow tree.
“Running away from home, are we?” she asked.
“Not at all,” Max replied. “It’s just that we’ve missed the last train home and we’re looking for a place to sleep for the night.”
“Don’t talk to her!” Lucia hissed. “Honestly, Max, you are just the type who winds up dead in an alley.”
“Come on with me then,” the girl said, flicking her cigarette into the water. “I know a canal boat that’s empty, up the way a bit. Good for squatting.”
“That would be great—” Max started to say, but Lucia cut him off.
“We’re perfectly fine as is,” she said brusquely. Then she remembered that willows were her favorite tree and they so often toppled pathetically during bad winds, so she added, “But thank you. Good night.”
“What about the pretty blond boy?” the girl said, nodding toward Otto. “He’s quite dishy. Want to come home with me, love?”
That made Lucia want to slap her, willow tree or not. Otto’s one visible eye went wide and his head dipped so low that it nearly disappeared inside his scarf.
They walked away quickly and didn’t say a word to one another for a while. I think it was because they were embarrassed.
Spare boxes and places to sleep for the night, same thing—there aren’t as many of them as you’d think. They searched and searched for an out-of-the-way nook, and when they finally found one, it was so narrow that they would have had to sleep standing up, shoulder to shoulder, and they did have enough sense to know that they’d want to kill each other after ten minutes like that.
“Where did the Princess Uzima sleep?” Otto asked.
They all thought a minute, trying to remember what Casper had told them.
“She slept in a car for a while, I remember,” Lucia said.
“That was later. The first few nights she slept under a baobab tree,” Max said.
And there, just ahead of them, was a tremendous tree by the edge of the canal where there had been very few trees along the way and small ones at that. No one even bothered to say “That’s weird” because it so clearly was. It also smacked of the supernatural, which none of them believed in, so they decided to pretend it was exactly what they had expected would happen. Lucia even hesitated about sleeping there, because it was a willow tree and therefore reminded her of the horrible dreadlocked thing on the bridge. But in the end she realized that she’d loved willows long before she hated the girl on the bridge so it was probably okay.
They pushed through the fountain of delicate branches, the leaves lisping as they parted, and they found a nice circle of clean bare earth inside. It was so well sheltered that even the smell of the canal was fainter and all the sounds from outside were muffled. They dropped their bags, and then themselves, to the ground. For some time, they sat in silence, listening to the smothered voices of passersby and the very faint nighttime hum of the city. They were small-town people, after all, and at the end of a day full of crowds and noise they were grateful to be alone again. A streetlight on the canal path not far from the tree shed a milky yellow light that leaked between the leaves and gave them enough illumination to see by. With some squinting Lucia might have read a book or Otto might have tattooed himself. It was the perfect little hut.
“Hey, you know what?” Max said. “We could stay right here instead of going back to Little Tunks. We’d have to be careful with money, of course, but this tree is nearly as good as a tent and we’ve always wanted to go camping.”
It was a really excellent idea and they all agreed, even Otto.<
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“Good, that’s settled,” Lucia said. “Now I think we should all brush our teeth because our breaths stink like an open sewer, what with the curry and all.”
There was a small argument then. I won’t write it out because it was too stupid, but it was about something Lucia had said earlier regarding teeth brushing and which Max had taken very literally, which was typical of him.
In the end they dug through their bags and pulled out their toothbrushes. The toothpaste was in Max’s bag. It was a very dry brushing. They parted the willow branches and spit outside the tree so things didn’t get repulsive inside.
Max put his toothbrush and paste back in his bag then began to rummage through his clothes. He frowned and searched around the bag some more.
“Spoon’s not here.” He looked up at them with an alarmed expression on his face.
“It must be, look again,” Lucia said.
Max did and Otto scooted over next to him to look as well. After a few moments, Otto looked up at Lucia and shook his head.
“Well, Dad must have forgotten, that’s all,” she said. “He was in a hurry.”
“He’s never forgotten before,” said Max. He looked genuinely stricken.
Spoon is a spoon. He’s made of sheeny silver-colored material and is stuffed with batting and has a sly, smiling face embroidered on. Max has slept with him since he was an infant. You might think it’s immature for a ten-year-old to still sleep with a stuffed toy but Spoon has what you might call Special Family Meaning. Spoon was part of a set that was given to Otto when he was a baby (though no one remembers who gave it to him). The set was based on the nursery rhyme “Hey Diddle Diddle the Cat and the Fiddle.” When it was new it had seven stuffed pieces—Cat, Fiddle, Cow, Moon, Dog, Dish, and Spoon. Otto lost Fiddle and played with Cat so much that it became too thin-skinned to hold its stuffing, and was thrown out. Moon was set on fire in an experiment, but Otto would rather we not go into that. When the set was handed down to Lucia, she managed to stuff Cow down the toilet within the first week but she held on to Dish and Dog for many years until she left them out in the garden overnight and Dish and Dog were carried off by something. So by the time the set came into Max’s possession there was only Spoon left and, curiously, the box that held the set, which says on the back that the nursery rhyme was based on something that happened in the court of Queen Elizabeth I in which her serving girl (Dish) fell in love with the royal food taster (Spoon) and they eloped. But they were caught and were locked in the Tower of London. I think it’s very twisted of people to sneak these things into kids’ mouths through nursery rhymes, incidentally. But that’s another issue altogether.