Page 67 of The Good Part
‘You wouldn’t look for the portal,’ he says, his small brow set in a frown.
‘What were you planning to do – wander around London looking for this random depot?’ He nods. I’m learning that children are oblivious to both sarcasm and any perceived shame in picking their noses in public. Taking his hand, I start walking towards the main concourse. ‘Come on, there’s a train home in ten minutes.’
‘Can’t we just have a quick look, now I’m here?’ he pleads, tugging on my sleeve. Looking down at his face, into eyes that look so much like mine, I feel myself relent. He believed in this plan enough to run away from school, to take my bank card and get on a train all by himself.
‘It wasn’t fair for me to get your hopes up by posting on that forum. I shouldn’t have let you believe there’s a magical fix for any of this.’ I pause, pinching my forehead. ‘You do realise how insane this whole plan is?’
‘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.
