‘You can’t worry about work now,’ Sam says with a frown. ‘Your health needs to take priority.’
‘So, I didn’t happen to mention some amazing “big idea” to you?’
Sam shakes his head. ‘Afraid not. If you’d written something down, it could be in your office.’
‘I have an office?’
‘Second door on the right.’ He points down the corridor towards the back door.
‘Okay, thanks. I might take a look later,’ I say, smiling up at him, resting one hand on my hip, then switching it up to put one hand behind my back. How does a normal person stand? I feel like I’ve forgotten.
‘I’ll make the kids dinner then, shall I?’ Sam asks, reaching out to brush a strand of hair away from my face.
‘I already made food,’ I tell him. ‘Risotto balls; they just need warming up.’
‘Risotto balls? Wow. That’s a first.’ Sam looks impressed and I shrug, as though it was nothing. Then he looks me in the eye and says, ‘Hello, stranger.’ It takes me a moment to realise he means it as a joke about the fact I don’t usually cook, but the way he says it makes me feel as though he’s talking to me – the real me.
‘Hi,’ I say, holding his gaze. Then my stomach flutters – a spark, some kinetic burst of energy. I sense he feels it too, because his body stills and he doesn’t look away. Whatever this feeling is, it’s both unnerving and oddly familiar. I don’t know what to do with it, or how to respond, so I turn to walk away. ‘Um, I just need to talk to Felix, if you’re okay to watch Amy,’ I say, heading for the stairs, suddenly self-conscious about how I’m walking. Am I strutting? Is this my normal walk?
‘Sure,’ says Sam, exhaling heavily, before picking Amy up off the floor.
As I walk up the stairs, I need to hold the banisters to steady myself, because my whole body now feels charged with an undefinable tension. Why am I being so awkward and weird? Then it dawns on me. This is how I get when I have a crush on someone.
Chapter 17
Felix is sitting on his bed, reading an encyclopaedia. I know I’ve upset him, and I need to fix it.
‘I’m taking your advice – I’m not letting Tom Hoskyns or anyone else steal a day from me,’ I say, and he gives me a grudging smile. ‘There’s food downstairs if you’re hungry.’
‘Will you look at my Portal Quest now?’ he asks.
‘Sure,’ I say, humouring him. I sit down on his bed and he eagerly hands me his tablet. The first screen asks, ‘What does your portal look like?’ It then takes me through a series of questions about the machine’s size, colour, lights and functionality. Once I’ve answered the final question, a graphic appears – a rudimentary digital sketch of the wishing machine. It looks like it’s been drawn by a child, which of course, it has.
‘Is that what it looks like?’ Felix asks, bouncing his bottom up and down on the bed.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ I say, trying to be diplomatic.
‘Now we just need to put it online. Someone will see it, someone will know where we can find one.’ He pauses. ‘I made a list of possible websites, forums that arcade game collectors use.’ He opens another tab on his tablet. ‘You have to be over eighteen to post on them though.’
‘Thanks for doing all this, Felix, but could I look through the list tonight, when I have time to research it properly?’ I don’t want to rain on his parade, but I doubt even the most avid collector would be able to identify the machine from this sketch. ‘Do you want me to help you with your school project?’ I nod towards the cardboard heart sitting on his desk.
‘I want it to work. How would you make it work?’
‘I’m not sure you’re going to be able to make a beating heart out of loo roll, but we can probably make it look a little more heart-like.’ My eyes cast around the room, falling upon a red squishy ball by the door. ‘Look, this could be the centre, then we could cut and glue the loo rolls to make the tubes narrower, then they’d be more in proportion.’
Pulling up a bean bag, I sit down beside his desk.
‘There needs to be a pulmonary artery, the aorta, the superior vena cava and the inferior vena cava,’ Felix says, pulling out his child-sized desk chair.
‘I’m impressed you know all those words.’
‘They were in the encyclopaedia you gave me for Christmas.’
Searching through a jumble of craft material in his desk drawer, I pull out some glue and blunt-tipped scissors. Felix watches as I get to work, cutting the tubes in half and rolling them smaller, then shaping the ends so they’ll sit flush against the ball.
‘Do you get a lot of homework like this?’ I ask him. He shrugs again but now he is watching intently and doesn’t object when I take scissors to his red ball.
‘There’s an end-of-year project fair,’ he tells me. ‘The best projects go on display for the whole school to see. There are judges and everything. Last year, me and Mummy made this epic volcano, but when I took it in to show my class, I couldn’t get the lava to bubble up the way we made it do at home.’ He pulls the sleeves of his jumper down over his hands.
‘Well, we can only try our best,’ I say, then realise I’ve just used a phrase my dad often said to me. Do these phrases sit dormant in our minds, just waiting to be deployed when we become parents ourselves?
Felix follows my instructions and helps glue all the component parts back together. When we’re done, I wipe my sticky hands on my jeans and stand back to admire our handiwork. It’s a jumble of ball and cardboard, but I think I could identify it as a heart if I had to guess. ‘There. What do you think?’
Felix stares at it, and I can’t read his expression at all. When he finally looks up at me, I imagine he’s going to fling his arms around me, thank me for not having lost my amazing crafting abilities, and tell me it’s exactly what he wanted it to look like. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t say anything. He just stands up, picks up my heart, and throws it into the wastepaper bin on his way out of the room.
My cooking skills go equally unappreciated. Felix deigns to try a risotto ball, then proclaims it ‘tastes weird’， and is ‘too spicy’ and asks, ‘Why can’t we have fish fingers?’ Amy won’t even try the risotto balls. She squishes one in her tiny palm, then flings it across the room, where it lands with a ‘splat’ on the floor by the fridge door.
‘Those took me ages,’ I say despondently. I once made fishcakes for my flatmates, they were dry and full of bones, but everyone at least had the decency to pretend to like them.
‘Delicious,’ says Sam, taking a risotto ball from the plate and popping it into his mouth.
‘Do they usually like my cooking?’ I ask him quietly.
‘Sorry to break it to you, but no. Amy will usually try things, but Felix is pretty committed to beige freezer food right now. His journey into food exploration has stalled on the foothills of Mount Birds Eye.’
A squabble breaks out between Felix and his sister because Amy wants the green mug that Felix is holding. The tussle sends the contents of the mug spilling all over the table.