The Boy Who Hit Play Page 4

  ‘You’ve had that for twelve years?’ I thought we were a team.

  He rubs his forehead. ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘And you never said.’

  Lloyd spits out his lemony mineral water.

  Dad puts his hands over his eyes.

  None of us says anything for a minute.

  Dad leaves the space for me to fill.

  He could explain but he won’t. He’ll wait for me to ask.

  To know what I want to know.

  He’ll wait till I’m ready.

  ‘Why did you never tell me before?’

  ‘I wanted to. But it was never the time,’ he says. ‘I thought when it was time you’d ask. And you did.’ He rubs his eyes. ‘I thought it’d be something we’d find out about when you wanted to. Now you want to.’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to.’

  ‘You never said.’ Dad tilts his head.

  ‘You let me go to the Aftenposten.’ I feel like some eight-year-old that you let make dinner and then have a ready meal in the freezer just in case, ’cos you know you’re never really gonna eat what they make.

  ‘I didn’t know …’ Dad looks at Lloyd.

  Lloyd looks down and mops the table.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I didn’t know what it meant. Not for sure.’ He rubs his eyes with the backs of his hands. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  I look at the ice cream. The colour’s come off all the Smarties.

  Sorry.

  It’s such a stupid word.

  Sorry I forgot to switch off the TV.

  Sorry I didn’t take out the rubbish.

  Sorry I forgot my homework.

  Works.

  But for this. For stuff like this there needs to be something so much BIGGER.

  A Key

  I tuck my hands in my armpits. I can feel the sweat.

  Dad rubs his chin. ‘I think …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think I didn’t wanna be replaced.’ His face crashes. He looks at the table. ‘Which is stupid. I know.’ He waves his hand and looks at me. ‘You know in China there’s a legend that when you’re born you have invisible red strings attached to all the people who are going to be important to you in your life,’ he says. ‘They’re all there before you even begin.’

  I think about the invisible threads. I think about the dot-to-dot shapes in the stars. I think about clicking and clicking and clicking through YouTube. The link to a link to a link to a link. Click, click, click connections.

  How you get from Top 10 Scary Kids Who Remember Their Past Lives to Bad Lip-Reading Star Wars.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘It says Skriva, 8320 Norway. It’s an address. Their address. I think.’ He breathes out. ‘It’s in the north.’

  I think about the propeller plane. ‘Does it say their names?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing about them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who else knows?’

  Dad looks at Lloyd. ‘Just me,’ Lloyd says.

  ‘Honest?’

  They nod.

  ‘Good. I’d feel really stupid if I was the last person to know things about my own life.’

  Dad pushes the paper over. ‘Take it,’ he says, ‘it’s yours.’

  OK, so the Aftenposten wasn’t the key.

  This paper is.

  How do you open a door with a paper key?

  You stick it in your pocket.

  And go.

  ‘OK,’ I say, ‘let’s get the bus before we miss the plane.’ I put the ice cream on the table to curdle on its own. ‘But no more secrets. I hate secrets.’

  Dad nods. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘It was wrong.’

  ‘It was.’

  We get up.

  The numbers click round on the departure board.

  The minutes click past to our plane.

  Life can change in a click.

  We have the address.

  We have tickets.

  We have a concrete plan in the concrete city.

  It’s possible.

  It’s actually suddenly possible.

  And my heart starts to lift and hope floods back into me like hot water up a tea towel.

  Stuck

  Lloyd sits next to me on the bus and points to my pocket. ‘Don’t let anyone take that away – swear on your life!’ He crosses his chest.

  ‘It isn’t a lottery ticket.’ I smile. Actually in a way I guess it is. It’s kind of like a life lottery ticket. I take a photo of it, just in case. Lloyd takes one too and tells me a story about the great Blondin who crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope flipping pancakes and who said that the secret to tightrope walking is the first three steps.

  ‘The first step is confidence,’ Lloyd says. I think about getting on the plane to get here.

  ‘The second is faith.’ I think about the Aftenposten.

  ‘The third leads you to your destiny.’

  I think about the propeller plane and grip the compass.

  The bus brakes hiss and we run into the airport terminal.

  ‘How long have we got?’

  ‘Twenty minutes.’ Dad gets out the tickets in a little envelope.

  I hold mine. It’s long and thin with a checked pattern underneath and

  Elvis Crampton Lucas

  on top. I like seeing my name printed out. It feels weird but nice. Like looking at myself from the outside.

  flight no: WD451

  dept: 16.45

  We walk up to the check-in desk.

  The person behind it stands in a green uniform with a checked neck scarf and smiles.

  ‘Hei hei,’ she says. ‘Tickets and passports please.’

  I pass her my ticket.

  Dad unzips the front of his case to get the passports out. He puts his hand in. When it comes out there aren’t any passports in it.

  He rubs his head.

  He checks his pocket.

  His other pocket.

  His jacket.

  He undoes his case and starts to look through everything. Jumpers and socks fall out.

  ‘Dad.’ People are staring.

  ‘It won’t be in there,’ I say. ‘We haven’t even opened that yet.’

  ‘We just had them,’ Dad says. I scoop his jumpers and socks back in the case. And stare back at the staring people.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ The person behind the check-in desk looks worried. We are frantic. ‘I can’t board you without passports.’

  Dad puts both hands on his head. ‘What time do you shut?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes.’

  ‘S***.’

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘What!’

  A man pushes his case forwards into the back of my leg.

  ‘Ow.’

  Lloyd pushes it back. ‘It isn’t polite to push.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to stand aside.’ The check-in assistant looks behind us at the queue of people. She means all of us. ‘You can try lost property.’

  ‘Right.’ Dad zips up his suitcase.

  ‘To lost property!’ Lloyd raises his arms and runs.

  I clutch my ticket.

  ‘What’s gonna happen if we can’t go?’ I whisper.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  We get to lost property and wait behind someone who’s really angry about an umbrella.

  They leave.

  The man checks. Our passports aren’t there.

  ‘Isn’t there someone you can ring?’ Dad’s head sweats.

  He rings the security manager and shakes his head. ‘Perhaps later, sir,’ he says.

  Dad bangs the desk. ‘We haven’t got time for later.’

  The tannoy says, ‘Would all passengers for flight WD451 please proceed to gate seventeen as this flight is now ready for boarding.’

  I look at the ticket. That flight is us. I think hard. ‘We must have left them somewhere else.’

  ‘Where?’

  I stare at the shiny black floor tiles.
The world goes misty. I plug into my brain. And look back over everything. Following us through everywhere we’ve been.

  The hot-dog stand.

  The bus.

  The street.

  The newspaper office.

  The newspaper office?

  It’s the only place we left the bags.

  I look at Dad. ‘We didn’t lose them.’

  ‘We did, Elvis.’

  ‘We didn’t.’ I think about the turned-round cases. ‘Someone took them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The green man. The tweed man.’ I look at Lloyd. ‘Your brother.’

  ‘Floyd?’ Lloyd looks at the floor. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘When?’ Dad pulls his hair.

  ‘When we were at the newspaper office. It’s the only time we left the bags.’

  ‘I’ll buy us new ones,’ Lloyd says.

  ‘You can’t buy us new ones,’ Dad says.

  ‘Did you get travel insurance?’ Lloyd points a finger in the air. ‘They replace passports with travel insurance.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘Please stand aside, sir,’ the lost-property man says. A man with a budgie in a cage stares at us. We move aside and sit down on metal seats with armrests that don’t move. The bars dig into my legs.

  ‘We could go to the police?’ I say. ‘Passports are serious. People care about people losing their identity.’ I swallow. ‘Identities are important.’

  ‘Yes, it might have been people traffickers that took them,’ Lloyd says.

  ‘It wasn’t people traffickers.’ Dad slumps.

  BING BONG. ‘This is an announcement for all passengers on flight WD451. Please make your way to gate seventeen as this flight is about to depart.’

  I think about our three empty seats. My heart is on that plane. My body is here.

  Lloyd hangs his head. ‘I’m sorry you have to go through this. My family is a disappointment.’

  I wonder if we’re being watched.

  Is Floyd here?

  Laughing at us?

  ‘It took three weeks’ wages to buy those tickets.’ Dad puts his head in his hands. ‘It’s hopeless,’ he says. ‘Without passports, we can’t even go home. We’re completely stuck.’

  Think

  My brain starts fizzing like Mentos in Coke.

  Frothy, frothy.

  There must be a way out. There’s always a way out.

  I look at my watch.

  I look at the ticket.

  The clock ticks round.

  I think fast but I’m too slow.

  4.46

  It’s too late.

  The plane’s gone.

  I imagine it taking off.

  Sometimes when I have to make choices or things go wrong it’s like there’s another me that did the other thing. The one that practised the spellings and got ten out of ten. The one that said the right thing. The one that caught the plane. The other me flies off and looks out the window at the city zooming away. The other me feels sorry for the real actual-life me sitting on the hard metal seats.

  I switch my brain on. There must be a way out. There’s always a way out.

  My fingers tap the armrest.

  My feet tap the floor.

  My brain cells tap into my brain.

  Think.

  I listen to the sound of:

  silence thoughtful.

  If Floyd took the passports, he’s got them. Unless he’s sold them? Or binned them?

  Why would he steal them? If we find him we might get them back?

  This is unlikely as it means:

  A – Finding him. There’re millions of people here and all we know is that he’s wearing a green tweed jacket and have no proof he took them.

  B – Even if we found him he could just deny it.

  I keep tapping.

  The passports aren’t the problem.

  The problem is the plane.

  There’re other ways to travel. We could’ve come here on a boat.

  If you go on a train or a boat you don’t need a passport.

  Not inland anyway.

  Passports are for borders.

  If you stay in the border you can go where you want.

  ‘We can catch a train or a bus or a boat instead,’ I say. ‘Other things go north. If we go on those we don’t need a passport.’

  Dad looks at his watch. ‘Now?’

  ‘We can find somewhere to stay and get the tickets tonight. It’ll be better than flying.’ He looks hurt. ‘Not that flying’s not good, it’s just we’ll see things. We’ll get to see everything on the ground, not like someone’s just dropped us out of the sky.’ This is the first holiday of my life. I actually want to see it. ‘You’ve got money haven’t you, Lloyd?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lloyd says and gets a load out.

  Dad puts his hand over to cover it up. ‘Put it away.’

  ‘Right.’ I get my phone out. ‘Let’s book an Airbnb. We’re staying in Oslo.’

  Hedgehog Lover

  We make Lloyd a profile on Airbnb with a photo of him in front of a bendy metal sculpture on the airport Wi-Fi.

  Lloyd Partington

  I am an independent man with independent thoughts.

  I like people, nature and apples.

  Show me your world. I am always interested.

  Then we have to make one for Dad because Lloyd doesn’t believe in credit cards and Airbnb doesn’t do cash.

  He pulls me into his selfie. ‘You make me look more human,’ he says. He looks smiley and nice. ‘People get put off by the moustache.’

  ‘Like who?’

  He shrugs.

  We write his profile.

  George Lucas (not that George Lucas)

  Dad of Elvis (not that Elvis)

  I look at him. ‘You really want to put that?’

  ‘Yeah. I wouldn’t be me without you!’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘True blue.’

  This makes me tear up a bit so I look back at the screen. ‘Right.’

  He types …

  Lover of music and hedgehogs.

  ‘You don’t want people to think you’re a hedgehog-lover.’

  He shrugs. ‘It’ll do.’

  ‘It sounds wrong. There’s other things you like.’

  ‘There isn’t time.’

  I hope no one I know sees it. Ever.

  We look for places to stay and I find a cheap one (on Dad’s card) with a room with a photo of a bike and a woman with a purple headscarf who says:

  People think my city is ugly. I will show you it isn’t!

  Mulki Hosseini

  ‘She looks nice.’

  Dad looks over my shoulder. ‘Yeah,’ he says and clicks on ‘instant book’ and gets a map.

  Lloyd stands up. ‘Back to the Flybussen!’ he says.

  And we groan and salute him as this is how things are done.

  Shadows

  The flat has a dark staircase that leads up to a red glass door. The bike from the picture is on the wall inside. I press the bell. A shadow behind the door spreads out to meet us. The chain unfastens, the lock unlocks.

  For a minute I hold my breath. The door opens.

  ‘Hei hei!’ Mulki says. She is smiley and nice.

  What did I expect?

  Floyd’s shadow hangs in my mind.

  We go in and have to take our shoes off by the door. ‘It’s a Norway thing,’ she says and pulls a face. ‘We all do it.’ Her socks are bright blue. The floorboards are all polished wood.

  It is good for sock skidding.

  I slide down the hall and into a bright, planty lounge and into the bedroom with all our stuff. She gives us a key and shows us an information folder. ‘My home is your home!’ she says and leaves.

  We skid into the kitchen. There are racks and racks of glass jars and spices. Dad cooks egg-fried rice for dinner. I sit on a footstool and look at the takeaway menus in the information folder and play guess the price. Fritystekt kyllingil
et med sursot saus (deep-fried chicken with sweet-and-sour sauce) costs seventeen pounds each. We eat our rice.

  Mulki comes in while we are washing up. ‘How are you liking Oslo?’ she says.

  ‘We’ve only been on the Flybussen really,’ I say.

  ‘Three times.’ Lloyd dries and stacks the plates.

  I think about her ad: People think my city is ugly. I will show you it isn’t!

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I think it is ugly actually.’ I shrug.

  ‘OK,’ she says. She doesn’t look mad. ‘You are not alone!’ She looks at Dad in the Marigolds. ‘You are finished?’

  He snaps the gloves off and nods. Lloyd stacks the last plate.

  ‘Good. I will show you just how beautiful Oslo can be.’

  ‘I believe in giving everything a second chance.’ Lloyd dries the wet patches on his shirt with a tea towel.

  Dad rubs his eyes. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘OK.’

  ‘Great,’ Mulki says.

  I think of seeing something that isn’t concrete.

  I think if Floyd’s got our passports what else does he want?

  The best way to avoid him is movement.

  That’s what they do in films.

  Right?

  The Tiger City

  We follow Mulki out into the streets full of people and sound. I tune my ears in. Feet, tyres, brakes, talking and rumble that rises up out of the belly of a city like a cloud.

  We follow the streets and roads to wooden walkways and a river. ‘This is the Akerselva,’ she says and we walk down it past waterfalls and over bridges, and I think about the city breathing and the river keeping it alive and pumping out clean air. We buy a slice of spice cake each with icing as thick as our thumbs and eat them next to a church with bells that chime like music boxes and woodchoppers and palaces and death.

  Birds hop in and out looking for crumbs and I feed some of my cake to a sparrow and Dad says, ‘That cost five quid.’

  And Lloyd says, ‘Love is more than money.’

  And the sparrow looks pleased and hops off.

  ‘Oslo has two hundred and twelve sculptures and many parks,’ Mulki says. ‘The beauty is there, you just have to look for it.’

  ‘Like life,’ Lloyd says.

  ‘Exactly.’