It takes Marcus and his friends the rest of the day to round up the really mad people – that includes Mr Dent, the rest of the Romans and the fondue dancers – and, with some considerable difficulty, lock them in the library. All evening, books fly out through the windows and the rugby songs get louder and less comprehensible.
By midnight, all we can hear is snoring.
‘Can we ring someone now?’ asks Henry, shreds of feathers still sticking to him.
‘Who?’ asks Ursula.
‘Like the army?’ says Henry.
In the end, we settle for ChildHelp, who in turn ring Social Services, who ring NHS Direct, who ring the Department of Education, who ring the Government, who send a bunch of men in white suits with no sense of humour from an airbase in Lincolnshire.
They arrive in helicopters, on ropes, smashing into the Trojan Horse until it just looks like a flattened shed.
They talk to us all night, asking hundreds of questions – and take blood samples from the warring tribes in the library. Then they decide to take blood samples from us, too.
Henry goes forward to offer his arm first; I follow, and Marcus after me.
‘No way!’ says Ursula. But Henry uses goat techniques on her until she thinks it was her idea.
They sit us in a white plastic tent on the town square, watching reruns of Dr Who.
Eventually the men cordon off the cafe and the museum, and take out all the pieces of the brand-new air conditioning units in huge plastic bags. They take away all the unidentified little boxes for ‘examination and testing’. Then they suggest that we children take the rest of the week off school and hand out hundreds of packets of cornflakes and UHT milk.
‘Perhaps it’s time to go home,’ says Ursula, snapping shut the camera case as the men in white suits disappear back inside the museum and the sun rises over the chocolate-covered steps of the museum cafe.
Mum and Dad and the policeman are sitting on plastic chairs in the garden, staring at the pyramid.
‘How on earth?’ says Dad.
‘Goodness,’ says Mum, rubbing her head. ‘I could kill for a coffee.’
‘No you couldn’t,’ says Marcus, sprinkling the end of a bag of coffee on the last remaining rose bush. ‘Not until we’ve bought new supplies from Mrs Mytych.’
‘Perhaps you should take these back,’ I say, pointing at the chair and flail that Dad took from the museum.
‘Oh no!’ he says. ‘That’s dreadful; how did they get there?’
So, on the way, in the car, I explain.
We pass a digger extracting Queen Victoria from the cricket pitch, and a family driving sheep along the street.
‘But how?’ says Dad.
‘The cafe – there was something wrong with the ventilation system. It joined the museum, so people were eating and drinking little bits of history.’
‘Sam, I’m so sorry, it must have been terrifying,’ says Dad, driving round the mud huts built on the roundabout.
I think about it. ‘It was, a little, but it was also quite funny. Can’t you remember anything?’
Dad sits quietly at the traffic lights, thinking.
‘I remember having fun, dressing up, making things. It was like being a little kid – just having fun.’
‘Hmm,’ I say, having an idea.
In August, we had our first town pageant. We argued about the theme. Henry said we should just make it Egyptian, Ursula said that the Renaissance would be best, but in the end we decided that the people of the town should vote on it.
I had fun in the museum with Dad, making a list of all the different cultures and places that people might choose from, and he introduced me to some we hadn’t even run into. Ever heard of the Minoans? They lived on Crete and had a bull called the Minotaur. Or the Assyrians? Or even the bog people who buried their dead in bogs. This time, when he took me round it was really interesting, although there were things about the Aztecs that I still felt should remain a mystery.
Henry, Ursula and I put the list together and stuck it through everyone’s front door in the entire town. As we went round, we found that not all the houses had gone back to the boring normal way they were before. There were still strange structures strapped onto the front of some houses, and not all the washing hanging out on the lines was twenty-first century.
In the end, the town voted to be Roman on their first pageant. It took no time for Henry’s dad and Mr Crump to turn the common into a Roman city, with a temple and a forum and market stalls. Mum made more weird sweets from an original Roman recipe, and she and Finn sold them in aid of the Amateur Dramatic Society, while Ursula’s mum made strange pigments out of earth and plants and did terrible brown portraits of everyone. Miss Primrose turned up looking like a Disney Princess, all pink and fluffy and back to normal.
‘Ursula, Sam,’ she smiled. ‘What a lovely idea; what fun to dress up, I love dressing up.’
‘We know,’ muttered Ursula.
‘And Henry,’ said Miss Primrose. ‘You look…’
Red? Huge? Extraordinary? Like someone wearing a sheet?
‘Majestic,’ said Miss Primrose. ‘Like a god.’ She smiled, and a million baskets of kittens jumped into the air.
Henry flushed deep brick and dived into the changing tent. ‘What do you think Mr Dent will come as?’ he asked, pulling his toga tight around his chest.
‘A gladiator,’ said Marcus, sharpening his spear. ‘But I’ll be ready for him.’
‘Well, I hope everyone will be well behaved for the FLAP prize presentation,’ said Ursula, who had refused to dress up. ‘David Pringle from Hollywood’s coming to present it.’
‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ I said.
But I was completely wrong, because David Pringle thought that Ursula’s film, made in the end from all the filming she’d done during the historical meltdown, and known as Egyptian Bread, was brilliant – a ‘post urban comic dystopian apocalyptic fantasy,’ he called it, ‘informed by historical accuracy and fantastical imagery.’ That was fine by us because he gave her a thousand pounds in prize money, which much to my surprise Ursula split three ways – keeping the spare pound for herself, of course.
Reeling from the prizegiving, we moved on to the actual pageant – which was a triumph. Everyone except for Ursula dressed up, and had loads of fun without hurting each other, and even Mrs Mytych came out and joined in as a centurion. Tourists came to stare, and the Mayor declared the Gladiatorial Games open, allowing Mr Dent and Marcus to lay into each other with polystyrene spears and cardboard swords.
They both really enjoyed it.