Page 54 of The Good Part
It only takes a few minutes for me to create a profile and a post on the site’s ‘looking for’ page.
USER: WishingFor26
LOOKING FOR: Vintage Wishing Machine
DESCRIPTION: Coin operated, 10p to flatten and inscribe a 1p coin with ‘Your wish is granted’. Yellow neon lights, plays a tune that sounds like ‘Camptown Races’.
SIGHTINGS: Newsagent’s on Baskin Road, South London, sixteen years ago.
Once I’ve created the post and uploaded Felix’s sketch, I show it to him. ‘It’s a long shot. We shouldn’t get our hopes up,’ I tell him firmly. I’m telling myself, too.
‘Someone will see it,’ he says confidently. ‘Someone will know where it is.’
At a muffled wail from behind us, we both turn to see Amy with a pair of leggings over her head. Pulling them off, I give Amy a goofy smile. She giggles and reaches for my face, grasping my cheeks like they’re Play-Doh.
‘What do you think the princess of the laundry room wants for tea?’ I ask, getting to my feet and taking Amy with me.
‘We both like fish fingers,’ Felix says, following me out of the laundry room.
‘Okay, fish fingers it is. I can probably manage that.’ Then, because Amy’s huge eyes are staring at me expectantly, I cover my face with the leggings. ‘Oh no, the octopus has got me!’ I cry and Amy squeals with delight as I mime being attacked by the leggings. ‘Quick, Captain Felix, the princess of the laundry room is in trouble, she needs a boat!’
Amy claps her hands, transfixed. Felix shoots me a confused scowl.
‘Captain, we don’t have long. The princess can’t swim!’
There’s a plastic laundry basket behind him, and grudgingly he pushes it towards me with his foot.
‘You’ll need to do it, Captain, the octopus has got me in its clutches,’ I yell dramatically, putting Amy down and miming a fight with my legging-clad hand.
Felix walks slowly across to us, picks up Amy and plonks her in the laundry basket, rolling his eyes at me as he brushes his fringe away from his eyes. But I sense a glimmer of interest, so I step up my performance and go all in, channelling all my drama experience, which consists of playing Sheep Number Five in my primary school nativity play.
‘She’s safe for now, but to get her home, we need to defeat the evil octopus king’ – I wave the leggings in the air – ‘ascend the waterfall’ – I point to the stairs – ‘then take on the Bathtub of Many Questions, before reaching the safety of Castle Cot.’ I pause for dramatic effect. ‘Are you with me, Captain?’
Felix looks around, embarrassed, perhaps checking to see if anyone is watching us. His eyes flicker with indecision. Amy claps in anticipation, completely invested in whatever this is. ‘Please, Captain Rutherford, I can’t do this without you.’
Time stands still, then the urge to play wins. Looking around the room, I grab a pillow from the sofa and throw it to Felix. ‘Your octopus shield, man.’ He bangs the pillow to his chest, launches himself at my legging-clad hand, and a fight to the death ensues. Amy stands up in her boat, applauding our performance. Now that Felix is involved, the game notches up a level in complexity. He tells me that before getting up the waterfall of seven fishes, we must take out the octopus’s lair in the playroom. He grabs a dressing-gown cord from the laundry pile and ties it onto Amy’s boat so we can pull her along as we leap across the furniture. Felix commits to the game with a ferocity I couldn’t have predicted. When we’re both safe on the living-room rug, with Princess Amy moored up in her boat, Felix points to the toy basket at the other side of the room.
‘That’s the secret lair,’ he whispers. ‘Neckie’s in there. He’s the leader. To get up the waterfall we’ve got to get him and his goons out of there, distract them so we can get to the button.’
‘What does the button do?’ I ask, genuinely keen to know.
‘Anti-gravity button. It reverses the flow of the water.’
‘Genius! How do we take out the toys?’
‘The goons,’ he corrects me. ‘I’ll paddle around the back, you distract them at the entrance to the cave. I’ll climb in the secret entrance and detonate the’ – he looks around, throws a cushion across the floor, then leaps to it so he can reach for a wooden jack-in-the-box from the lower toy shelf – ‘the bomb.’
‘Be careful of that. You know how sensitive those are,’ I say, in hushed reverence.
‘This isn’t my first rodeo, Lieutenant,’ he tells me with a cheeky grin, and in that grin, I see a flash of his father, and of this boy at sixteen, at twenty, as a man, and feel a pang of something in my chest, as though my heart has shed some outer shell and now lies open to the elements.
Felix paddles off on the sofa cushion with the bomb tucked carefully beneath his arm.
On my phone, I find ‘Bad Romance’ by Lady Gaga. It starts playing through the speakers in the ceiling and I turn up the volume. For Zoya’s sixteenth birthday, we worked out a dance routine for this song and recorded a music video in her parents’ living room. It’s the only dance routine I know. Felix watches in confusion as I start singing and throwing wild shapes on the rug, Amy squeals in delight and starts rocking her laundry basket boat back and forth. Felix gives a nod of approval and now he’s near the toy basket he starts tossing soft toys around the room.
‘It’s working! They’re leaving the cave undefended! Don’t stop.’
I dance like my life depends on it, like my relationship with my son depends on it, like my whole horrible day of failure might be undone by one successful dance routine. Maybe I’m not going to win this little boy’s respect by pretending to be the mother he knows, but maybe I’ll win it by dancing like a maniac long enough to give him a shot at the anti-gravity button.
