Mum serves cucumbers again for supper. Marcus says he’s not hungry and goes off to shoot more aliens on his smartphone and eat some of his secret supply of Jaffa cakes. I sit at the table, watching the rest of my family and wondering what it’s like to be an orphan. Very like this, I imagine. I seem to have lost my family and inherited someone else’s. I quickly run through the options of people I could go to for help. Mum? No. Dad? No. The doctor? I’m too scared of him ever since he told me off for sticking a pencil rubber up my nose. Marcus? Worse than useless. Miss Primrose? Absolutely not.
So all I’ve got is Ursula and Henry, and Ursula doesn’t believe me and I’m not at all sure how much use Henry’ll be, especially as we don’t actually know what’s wrong with them, except for an extreme love of fancy dress. I certainly wouldn’t know how to cure them.
Mum’s got thick make-up all round her eyes, and her hair’s now short and black. It doesn’t look like it’s dyed, it looks more like the string mop that’s been mouldering outside the back door for months dipped in poster paint, and she’s still got the beard.
‘Dad,’ I say, stroking the back of the Egyptian throne from the museum. ‘Are you supposed to be using the things from the museum – aren’t they really too precious for us to have in the house?’ I ask it as casually as I can.
‘S’all right,’ he says, tightening the towel around his waist. He’s wearing a vest, and shoes and socks, so just at the moment he looks like an ordinary bloke who sat in something by accident and had to change his trousers, but I don’t think that’s why he’s wearing the towel. ‘No one minds.’
‘But what are you doing?’ I ask. ‘What’s all this for?’
Mum looks at me, and for a second her eyes go normal, then she goes back to being the extra-smiley thing she seems to have become. Marcus is right, no one’s been told off for a week, even Finn, who’s been stuffing his face with chocolate all the time. I should have noticed.
‘Home-made ice cream? Sam?’ she says, whisking a box out of the freezer. ‘Or home-made sweets?’
She puts a saucer of brown blobs on the table. I can see they’ve got nuts sticking out of them and they might be made of dates. ‘They’re sweets?’
‘Original Egyptian recipe, authentic ingredients,’ says Mum.
Dad picks one up and pops it in his mouth. ‘Delicious, love. Cinnamon?’
‘Yes – and cardamom.’ She holds the plate towards me, Finn grabs two and I take one. ‘The ice cream’s made with real chocolate, from the museum cafe.’
They all watch me while I eat the sweets, as if I might explode. But they’re actually quite pleasant. So I have another, and another, and then try mixing them with some of the ice cream that Mum plonks in bowls, and then quite quickly have some more ice cream. Gradually I stop feeling so worried. The ice cream’s really nice, the sweets are fine, Mum seems happy, Dad seems happy, Finn seems happy.
So, with the help of some more ice cream, I’m happy too.
I’m running. Racing through the jungle, through big heavy wet trees and things that hiss in the undergrowth. My legs are ridiculously heavy, so that my top half seems to be miles ahead of my bottom half.
In the distance I can hear drums, heavy slow drums.
Tendrils lash my face; hands reach out of the mud and grab at my wellingtons.
I run faster, skimming over the ground, and suddenly my legs take huge strides, racing ahead so that the plants on either side become a green blur. Faster, faster, so fast I can’t even see the ground, and I burst through the trees to the edge of a lake.
I stop, not needing to breathe, not even remotely out of breath.
Stretching out before me is a causeway. Although in the back of my mind I know it’s a bad idea, I step onto it and walk between little vegetable plots, growing corn on the cob, to a city. The walk seems a long way, so I stretch my arms out and fly some of it before gently landing in a crowd. They gasp and rush towards me, grabbing at me, lifting me over their heads and towards a tall stepped pyramid. They drop me at the foot, and a man with several stuffed parrots on his head and a feather-covered wetsuit comes towards me, his bony hands closing around my wrist.
He might be the school caretaker. I pull back, but I slip, and looking down I see the steps of the pyramid are slick with blood. I try again, but the crowd pushes me up the steps, and the parrot man pulls until I reach the top.
The crowd cheers and points at the parrot man.
He’s got a knife, a huge silver tinfoil knife, and he raises it high above my chest…
Brrrinnnggggg.
My bedroom walls reflect the morning light. No blood, no pyramid, no parrot man.
Phew.