The Good Part(69)

‘Yes,’ he says sombrely.

‘And if we look for the depot, and we don’t find anything, will you drop it – the websites, the hunt for a portal, everything?’

‘Yes.’ He nods his head rapidly up and down, his eyes dancing with delight.

‘Fine. I’ll call your dad.’

Sam answers before the phone even rings. ‘I’ve got him.’

‘Thank God. I’ll call the school,’ Sam says. ‘What was he doing?’

‘He believes there’s a portal that brought me here from the past. He thinks if we find it, he can send me back.’ Sam is silent on the line. ‘It’s my fault, I told him about this wishing machine, the last thing I remember.’ Turning my back to Felix and lowering my voice, I say, ‘He knows he’s in trouble for running away, but this whole situation has been hard on him too. I think it might be good if I just spent some time with him, one on one.’

I’m expecting Sam to object, but he says, ‘Fine. If you think it will help. He’s still in trouble, though. Tell him no screen time for a week, no, two weeks. School will want words with him, too.’

I turn back to Felix, the phone still to my ear. ‘Your dad says no screen time for two weeks.’

‘And tell him I love him and I’m glad he’s okay,’ Sam says, a raw, ragged edge in his voice now.

‘Love you too, Dad,’ Felix calls towards the phone.

‘Okay, we’ll see you later then. We might be a while.’

‘I love you,’ Sam says. Before I can work out how to respond, he’s gone.



Felix and I get a bus towards Battersea. Travelling past Westminster Bridge, looking out across the Thames, I see the familiar shapes of Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, and the London Eye. There are new buildings too, changing the skyline I once knew. Twisty columns of steel and stone denote a Parthenon-style building on the south bank. A distinctive conical skyscraper dominates the horizon to the east, and huge curved flood barriers encase both riverbanks. London, old and new, ever evolving, but also somehow intrinsically the same.

Felix pulls a small notebook out of his backpack and hands it to me.

‘What’s this?’

‘It’s a logbook. When you go on an expedition, you need to log everything.’

‘Right.’

‘If you’re on an expedition and an incident occurs, like someone falls over and cuts their knee or if there’s a shark attack, you need to make a log of it.’

‘Okay, I’ll keep a lookout for sharks.’

‘There aren’t going to be any sharks in London, Mummy.’

‘How did you get out of school this afternoon, Felix?’

He looks sheepish for a moment, picking at a thread on the bus seat in front of him.

‘There’s a gap in the fence in the playground. You can squeeze out if you really want to.’

‘And you walked all the way to the station, on your own? That’s incredibly dangerous. Promise me you’ll never do that again.’

‘I took my whistle,’ he says, showing me a small red whistle around his neck.

‘What’s the whistle going to do?’

‘ “If anyone tries to steal you, blow your whistle,” – that’s what you told me, when we went to that music festival.’ He pauses to inspect his whistle for a moment. ‘Do you think you would die if you swallowed a whistle?’

‘I don’t think you’d die. No.’

‘What about two whistles?’

‘I don’t know, Felix.’

‘How many whistles do you think you could swallow and not die?’

‘If it got stuck in your windpipe you might die, but . . . why do we need to know the answer to this? Just don’t swallow any whistles.’

As we get off the bus at Battersea Arches, a teenage boy on a hovering scooter flies along the pavement and nearly crashes into us. Grabbing hold of Felix, I swing him out of the way just in time, then turn to yell, ‘Watch it, you fucking idiot!’ at the teenager, who doesn’t even turn to give us a backwards glance. Felix looks up at me, his eyes shining with admiration.

‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,’ I tell him, biting my lip. ‘That’s a horrible word.’

‘That was an incident,’ says Felix.

‘Was it?’

‘Definitely.’ Felix takes out the logbook. ‘Can you write it because my writing’s too big? Write the time and then write “Man on scooter nearly crashes into us. Mummy tells him he’s a fucking idiot.” ’

‘I don’t think we need to write the specifics of who said what.’

Having located the old rail arches, we wander around looking for a flower stall or a brown door. The place looks uninhabited: boarded-up shops, graffitied walls and abandoned shopping trolleys. I’m starting to think Crouch Pouch, or whatever his name was, might have been having us on.

‘You look lost,’ says a huge man with an impressive array of body tattoos, working on an upturned motorbike outside a repair shop.

‘We’re looking for Arcade Dave,’ Felix says, giving the man a slow wink. The man gives Felix a cold, hard stare, and I’m worried we might be about to put that whistle swallowing conundrum to the test. But then the man nods over to his left. ‘Up there, past the flower stall.’