It’s time to get home – Dad will be back soon, and I don’t want to disappoint him like I did yesterday. We trudge back on foot, tired and thirsty in the heat. But I’m also feeling a buzz of adrenaline. I’m getting used to it, ever since the masked biker skidded past me. Neither of us say much – we’re too wrapped up in our thoughts. All kinds of sirens are wailing in the streets around us – police, fire and ambulance. We pass two men yelling at each other in the middle of the road. The lack of water is making everyone crazy. Liam walks with me until he reaches his bus stop.
‘Before I go – about the symbol you showed me yesterday, the tattoo?’
‘Yes? Have you found something?’ I perk up.
‘No, the opposite – I looked at, like, the whole internet. Nothing. It looks like a key, but there are millions of pictures of keys out there. Are you sure you remembered it right?’
I shoot him a withering look – my memory is photographic.
‘All right, hold your fire,’ he says, pretending to hide from my dagger-eyes. ‘Whatever it is, it’s a mystery to me.’
‘But that can’t be right – I feel sure I’ve seen that symbol before. Can you check one more time?’
He grimaces. ‘Urgh … all right.’
A bus pulls up.
‘See you soon,’ he says and waves, as he joins the queue to board.
I wave back, then walk the rest of the way to Hyde Park. Police cars and ambulances speed in opposite directions, but there are hardly any cars on the road – people aren’t going out, aren’t going to work. Offices have no water for making drinks, flushing toilets or washing hands. Without water, London is starting to grind to a halt.
It’s almost five by the time I get in, and I’m tired. It’s time, as Poirot would say, to sit back and use my ‘little grey cells’ to figure it out. Not wanting to waste time, I go straight upstairs, sit on my bed and close my eyes. Just a minute later, I hear the front door open, and the sound of Dad lugging something into the hallway.
The front door closes, and I wait, listening to the sounds from the kitchen – a lot of banging about. Usually, Dad will call up the stairs, but he seems to be busy with whatever he’s doing. Feeling curious, I go to see what the commotion is. Peering round the doorframe, I see the worktop and kitchen table cluttered up.
‘Hey, Dad?’
‘Hmmf,’ he says, gripping a length of rubber tubing in his mouth.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask. I’m not used to doing the questioning. On the worktop next to the sink, seven demijohn bottles are lined up. Dad usually uses them for making fruit wines from rosehips and wild plums he gathers in the park, but now they’re full of the evil red slime. Each one is fitted with a valve to let air out but not in, and these are attached to rubber pipes that lead out of the window. Dad takes the tubing from his mouth.
‘It’s what you would call an experiment.’
‘Are you still trying to kill the algae?’ I frown, listening to the slow bloop-bloop sound of air bubbles passing through the valves.
‘Nope, I’ve tried everything – even the weedkillers and chemicals I swore I’d never use.’ He coughs drily and I’m worried about how long he’s been spending breathing in weedkillers and toxic slime.
‘But, if you can’t kill them, what’s all this for?’
He turns to look at me for the first time, eyes pink and watering. ‘This stuff must be growing underground, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Well, how? It doesn’t use sunlight to grow – so where does it get its energy from?’
‘So you’re … feeding it?’
‘Exactly!’
He has a feverish look in his eyes – I’ve never seen him like this. Since Dad is usually so calm and quiet, I’ve always thought that I get my, ahem, obsessive nature from Mum. Seeing him here, taping up bits of pipe and painting each of the bottles black to keep the light out, I’m not so sure.
‘This one, I’m going to feed with plant matter – vegetable peelings and the like. This one, with meat – I’ve put a cut-up pork chop in there …’
Dad is talking to himself as much as to me. I nod along reassuringly, as though he’s telling me he is the reincarnation of Julius Caesar, or that the royal family are giant lizards, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Finally, I make my excuses and go back up to my room. Everything is crazy, and Dad is acting crazy, and I need to be alone for a bit or I think I’ll go crazy too.
I sit in my room for a long time, waiting until Dad thinks I’m asleep. All the while, I’m thinking about my next move, Changing Channel over and over again, going back to the places I’ve been in the last forty-eight hours.
I’m in the hospital room, looking down at the professor’s red-stained shoes …
I’m outside the RGS, with a rag clamped over my mouth …
I’m in the park, watching in slo-mo as the motorbike roars towards me …
Two things keep bothering me – the professor’s link to the crisis, and my conversation with Brianna in the toilets. Since the professor is unwilling to be questioned, I might as well go and see Brianna.
Brianna Pike – heir to the Pike rubber glove fortune – lives in a townhouse on Cadogan Place. Brianna never speaks about her father’s rubber glove business of course – that would be too embarrassing for a pupil at St Regis. The house is known among the older students at St Regis as the ‘Party Palace’, though obviously I’ve never been invited. Her big brother – a former St Regis pupil – is famous for his lavish lifestyle.
When I’m sure Dad will believe I’m asleep, I get dressed again. I get into my cut-off denim shorts and put on a red stripey vest top and my favourite blue creeper shoes. I pin my hair up and add a short ginger wig for disguise. If the mysterious biker is still around, I’d rather not look like myself. I slip my notebook and pen into my pocket. Then I open the skylight, get up on my chair and climb on to the roof. I move to where the tree reaches its branch and start climbing down. At the bottom, I dust myself off and check for onlookers, before running out through the back gate and into the park.
I run as much of the way as I can, checking around me at every corner. I try not to allow my imagination to roam into the realms of fear – bogeymen are for children, I tell myself. The light is fading when I reach Brianna’s house, but at this time of the year it never gets totally dark – even in the middle of the night the sun barely dips under the horizon. The sky is full of pink-and-gold clouds, and you could have been forgiven for thinking that all is well – that this is a peaceful midsummer’s night.
In the pit of my belly there is a churning unease – a feeling that, at any moment, a figure might drag me into the shadows. On the other side of the square is the Cadogan Hotel, where Oscar Wilde was arrested and dragged off to prison. For all the grandeur of the buildings, this seems a gloomy, haunted part of the city.
I decide to watch the house for a few minutes before risking ringing the doorbell. I lean against the railings a little further down the street. The plants here are suffering from the water shortage. I take my notebook and pen from my pocket. A light comes on and off again in Brianna’s house, but that’s about it. If Brianna is up to anything shady, she’s being discreet. A motorbike drives down the street and stops a few houses past Brianna’s.