by Siobhan Dowd
THE LONDON EYE MYSTERY
northwest, in the heart of the city, a cumulus cloud was in formation. I stared as vapour collected and imagined how the particles of water were swirling around a central funnel, making it into a threatening shaft. It might or might not bring rain. It was moving this way over the skyline. Its heavy bulbous shape billowed out as rising air currents added to its mass.
I thought of Kat, out there, somewhere in the city, under the growing cumulus cloud, on the trail of the strange man who sold us the ticket. And I knew what I had to do.
I got to the phone in Mum and Dad’s bedroom with nobody noticing. I dialled Frontline Security again.
‘Frontline Security?’ came the same female voice after the music and the recorded announcement.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Hrumm,’ I said.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Didn’t catch that.’
‘Er,’ I said.
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‘You’re just a kid, aren’t you?’
‘I am twelve years old,’ I said.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m just a temp.’
There was a silence. I thought hard.
‘Have you got the right number?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘So who’re you looking for?’
‘A man,’ I said.
‘A man?’
‘A man with a stubbly chin.’
She laughed loudly. ‘Sounds like Christy. He’s the only one here who never shaves properly. You’re the second person who’s been after him today. I’ll tell you what I told her. He’s not here.’
‘Not here.’
‘ I’m the only one here today.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’m manning the phone. So to speak.’ She laughed some more down the phone. I didn’t understand the joke but I did what Mr Shepherd told me to and laughed as well.
‘First it’s a young girl who’s looking for the friend 202
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of her older brother – she’s got a picture of him, but she doesn’t know what he’s called, and she’s desperate, because he’s left his asthma inhaler in her house. Now it’s a kid looking for a man with a stubbly chin. Well, honey, I’ll tell you what I told the girl. It’s no skin off my teeth.’
I pictured the pink flesh around her molars.
‘Christy’s with the other guys and girls. They’re all on the same job this week. Down Earl’s Court at the Motorcycle and Scooter Show.’
‘Earl’s Court?’
‘The big exhibition hall. If you find Christy there, don’t say I told you, will you?’
‘No,’ I said. But she’d already hung up. You can live a whole life, twelve years and 188 days (or 4,571 days, not forgetting the three extra days for the leap years), and not tell a single lie. Then on day 4,572 you tell two. The first lie I told was about the lost compass that wasn’t really lost. The second lie was the note I wrote and left by the phone. It said,
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Dear Mum,
We have gone swimming to get some exercise. Ted. Next I took fifteen one-pound coins from the treasure chest that I’ve had since I was five. I went to the end of the landing and listened. Mum and Rashid were downstairs in the kitchen again. They were talking quietly. The house was calm. I crept down the stairs. I headed for the front door. I opened it, stepped out into the sunshine and paused. Was this the right thing to do? What if Mum found the note and didn’t believe it? What if I didn’t find Kat in Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre? What if I didn’t find Earl’s Court at all? What if I didn’t even make it to our local underground station? But Kat-astrophe, Kat-aclysm, Kat-alogue of Disasters, my mean, mad sister, wasn’t going to leave me behind, not when so much was at stake. I inched the door shut. I headed out through our postagestamp front garden. I closed the gate behind me and walked out onto the pavement and down the road. 204
TWENTY-SIX
The Coriolis Effect
A s I walked, I thought about how tracking things down is very hard. Tracking the weather is one of the most difficult things of all. You can spot a hurricane as it crosses the ocean, but not know the exact path it will take or when and where it will hit land. There are too many variables that alter its course. Such as the Coriolis effect.
The Coriolis effect is very interesting. You can’t see the Coriolis effect, you can’t touch it, but it exists. It deflects things. It’s a powerful force in the world. This is how it works.
As you know, the earth rotates. If you’re standing on the equator, you rotate with it, 40,000 kilometres in twenty-four hours. You’re going at 1,670 kilometres an hour, but you feel like you’re standing still. The speed that you don’t realize you are doing is your tangential velocity. But if you stand on the North Pole, you don’t go any distance at all. You go round on the spot. Your tangential velocity is zero. 205
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The Coriolis effect happens because of the difference between these two tangential velocities. If you throw something from the equator towards the North Pole, it won’t go straight, but crooked. The difference in tangential velocities deflects or distorts it. Your missile lands a little to the right. But if you were standing on the equator, and launched a missile to the south, it would land to the left, not the right. Right in the northern hemisphere, left in the southern hemisphere. It is like the different directions of the water swirling down the plughole. As I walked away from our house, I thought about the Coriolis effect. I thought about Salim’s disappearance. Perhaps tracking Salim was like tracking the weather – only without knowing about the Coriolis effect. We didn’t know what had deflected him off his course. But something had. I thought about distortion, deflection, whirlwinds and weather. I thought about north, south, male, female, full, empty, anti-clockwise, clockwise. I stopped on a corner. I realized I had gone the wrong way and wasn’t sure where I was.
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I’m a dyslexic geographer. I forget my left from my right. My hand was shaking itself out, until I looked up and saw the cumulus cloud I’d noticed earlier. It had grown into a cumulonimbus. It hung down from a glowering sky behind London’s tower blocks. Rain or hail, possibly thunder, approached. I headed back in the direction I’d come from, back past our house, and towards the cloud. Somehow it felt correct. Sure enough, soon I was out on the main road and from there I could see the underground station.
Being a dyslexic geographer, I can’t read maps. I never know if I should read them upright or upside down. But there’s one map I can read, which is the one of the London Underground. Because it’s a topological map, you are in a universe where the spaces between points don’t matter and all that counts is the sequence of stops and where the lines cross. You could stretch the tube map into all sorts of hoops and loops and it would be the same map, as long as the junctions were the same.
I stood at the tube map for a very long time. 207
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Then I found Earl’s Court. It was on the green line and on the blue line.
This meant I had to get the black line to Embankment and change onto the green line or take the black line to Leicester Square and change onto the blue line. I decided the Embankment route was shorter.
I bought a travel card and went down to the platform.
I put my hand in my jacket pocket to stop it from shaking itself out.
The sign said a train to High Barnet via Charing Cross was due. I heard a rumble in the tunnel and then the train came into the station like a silver streak of lava pouring down a volcano. The doors opened. I went in and took a seat.
The carriage was half full, or half empty, depending on how you looked at it. Some graffiti was scratched onto the glass window opposite: NO WAY. It was razor-etched, with slashing parallel white lines for each stroke of every letter. This was a bad thing somebody had done ju
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the sake of it, like why Dr Death killed his patients. A bad feeling started in my oesophagus.
Usually when I get the tube I am with Kat and Mum and sometimes Dad. I like to tell them in advance what the next stop is, which shows how well I can read the map, and I also say how many more stops we have to go. But they were not with me. So I counted the stations and said their names in my head. That way, I wouldn’t forget to get off when I had to.
Between Waterloo and Embankment the trains go under the Thames. It is a long stop. I saw a man staring hard at an advertisement for car insurance. He was sitting under the graffiti sign and his eyebrows were close together. There were lines on his forehead and his lips were pressed together, which meant he was angry. He also had a plaster on his cheek.
I remembered how Sherlock Holmes once amazed Watson by working out Watson’s train of thought. (A train of thought is a good way to describe someone’s series of connected thoughts, because they are 209
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attached to each other like carriages are by couplers.) Holmes did this by watching Watson’s face and the things he was staring at and making deductions.
So I worked out that the man opposite me was having a train of thought about a car crash he had had, which was why he had an injury, and that the advertisement for car insurance made him angry because he had not been insured.
I was so pleased with this piece of deductive thinking that I nearly forgot to get out when the train stopped.
A woman’s voice announced, ‘ This station is Embankment. Please take care when leaving the train as there is a gap between the train and the station platform.’
I jumped up with my hand flapping and only just made it through the doors before they closed. Then I nearly fell down the gap but didn’t.
I followed the signs for the green line, westbound. I got a train that said EALING BROADWAY on the front. I had seven stops to go. It was a brighter journey, closer to the surface. I could see flashes of 210
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daylight. I could smell damp. I didn’t try to work out what any of my fellow passengers were thinking but kept concentrating on the order of stops, and at Earl’s Court I got out.
The weather had changed. Hail was bouncing off the corrugated station roof. Hail is a shower of irregular lumps of ice and always comes from cumulonimbus clouds, so I knew I was right under the cloud I’d seen forming earlier. Judging by the sound, these stones might be ten to fifteen millimetres wide. I went through the ticket barrier. I stood in the ticket hall, blinking at the signs for different exits.
A station guard came over. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘You, boy. Are you lost?’
I considered whether or not I should speak to him. Everyone knows you are not supposed to speak to strangers. We’d spoken to the strange man at the London Eye and perhaps that was why we were in such trouble. But this man was in a London Underground uniform and this meant it was his job to help lost passengers.
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‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Where are you going?’ he said.
‘Earl’s Court,’ I said.
‘This is Earl’s Court,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’re after the exhibition centre?’
‘The exhibition centre,’ I agreed.
‘Go up those stairs. Keep straight on through to the tube exit and it’s opposite. Huge. You can’t miss it,’ he said. He didn’t once say go left, go right; he just pointed in the right direction.
Perhaps he was a dyslexic geographer too.
‘Remember to duck the hail,’ he called after me. Perhaps he was a meteorologist too.
I made my way up the station stairs, veering slightly to the right as I did so. This was because I was imagining that I was a missile, being hurled from the equator into the northern hemisphere. So the amount that I veered was equal to the deflection caused by the Coriolis force. And this made me feel good.
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TWENTY-SEVEN
Biker Hell
T hrough bouncing hail, which was on average about twelve millimetres in diameter, across a busy road, loomed a big building with a banner plastered over it: MOTORCYCLE AND SCOOTER
SHOW. The hailstones died away, the last globules tapping my head and shoulders as I crossed over. Inside the main entrance, people were crushed up together. There was a ‘person-counter’ by the ticket desk registering the daily numbers. Today’s figure was 19,997 and rising.
I’d never seen such a crowd. It was mostly men in black leathers, with silver studs and black glossy orbs
– helmets – on their head or under their arm. I felt as if I had been beamed from earth onto an intergalactic space station. Were they men or clones? They laughed, argued and shouted. I wasn’t sure about them. They looked like the rough boys in our school who go round in gangs and if you come up against them in the corridor you had better turn and 213
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run away. These men seemed worse than those boys. But they didn’t spit at me or elbow me in the ribs or call me a neek. They ignored me. So I queued for a ticket.
Then I saw a team of security people, standing by the barriers, checking hand luggage, sweeping people with hand-held explosives-detectors, like they do at airports and at the London Eye. Some people were made to empty their bags and pockets. What made me stare was what was written on the T-shirts. Kat and I had got it right.
FRONTLINE
SECURITY It was the same T-shirt as the one worn by the strange man, only this time I could see the missing letters. I scoured the faces of the guards at the entrance, but the strange man wasn’t among them. I bought a ticket and presented it. One of the guards waved a bomb-detector around my body and motioned me forward.
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As I went through a metal turnstile, the ‘personcounter’ clicked to a new daily number: 20,054. I stopped. T is letter 20 in the alphabet, E is letter number 5, and D is letter number 4. It was as if the
‘person-counter’ had registered me by name: 20, 5, 4. TED. Perhaps it was my lucky day. Perhaps I would find Kat. And perhaps we’d find the strange man. And perhaps this would lead us to Salim. Perhaps—
Perhaps nothing. As I went through into the big hall, I stared. Engines revved, tyres screeched, film tracks blared, lights flashed, music thumped. Everywhere was the smell of petrol and polish. The names of bikes were displayed on every stand. Hondas, Yamahas, Suzukis. One stand said: WELCOME TO
BIKER PARADISE. It was more like Biker Hell. The colours were chrome, black, electric-blue. The noises were purring engines and throbbing drumbeats.
A giant screen showed motorcycle racers coming straight at you.
Waving girls in black leather bikinis sat on bikes that hung from the air and went nowhere. 215
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I didn’t know where to look. People kept thrusting leaflets at me and sticking stickers on my sweatshirt. One woman gave me a raffle ticket. It said: FREE TO
ENTER. WIN A SET OF LADY’S LEATHERETTES. Whatever they were, I didn’t want them. I wanted Kat.
I walked among the loud stands. A man
approached me with studded gloves and tattoos up his neck. He started talking to me as if he’d known me all my life. He used a lot of words I didn’t know. GSX. Disc brakes. Harley’s V-Rod. VFR. Kawasaki. He paused.
‘Maybe you’re the Tornado type?’ he said. He put a hand on my arm and pointed to a model overhead with a silver picture on it of a swirling twister, just about to touch down.
‘Hrumm,’ I said, my hand flapping.
‘You’re right. It’s the best,’ he said. ‘The crème de la crème of motorbikes, the one and only, the . . .’
I ran.
Then an announcement came over the loud
speaker. ‘ Come to the take-off ramp in Hall Two for the 216
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freestyle jumper display. Hurry –
the show starts in two minutes. ’
There was a general movement in one direction. I found myself being carried along into another big hall. In the centre was a huge ramp. It looked like you would have needed mountaineering equipment to climb it. It stopped in mid-air like a road to nowhere. A terrific drone of an internal combustion engine started up. It turned over with a wreurrrrrring noise, becoming ever higher pitched. Then I saw it: a flash of chrome, a white helmet, a missile-like soar. A bike about to jump. It parted company with the top of the ramp. It continued its flight up. It almost grazed the roof. Then down it came, down and down. I had to shut my eyes because whoever was on it was sure to be smashed up and dead and I didn’t want to see it.
The crowd clapped and cheered. I opened my eyes. The bike had landed metres away. There was a bad feeling in my oesophagus. My hands were over my ears. The driver was a madman. He pulled up, got off his bike and took off his helmet.
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Long blonde locks fell out. It was a woman, not a man. Male or female, depending on how you look at it. The audience gasped. Then there was more clapping, cheers, people thumping their feet. The woman laughed, shook out her hair and waved a leathered hand in the air. She remounted her bike and zoomed back to the start.