Meanwhile – it’s that word again:
Meanwhile, Billie Jean and Mister Mack were searching in all the gardens – up trees, under bushes, on top of bird tables – for the BFB.
Meanwhile, Robbie was cycling after the white van, and the white van had nearly reached the airport.
Meanwhile, the BFB’s mother, Miriam Bigge-Mack, was also cycling to the airport. So was Robbie’s brother, Jimmy.
Meanwhile, a hand went into the handbag. The owner of the bag was sitting upstairs on the 39A bus. She put her hand into her bag to take out her phone. But, instead, she took out . . .
‘Emily!’
‘Goop!’ said the BFB.
REMINDER: The BFB is still called Emily.
‘What are you doing in my bag?’ asked Kayla Mack.
‘Goop,’ said the BFB.
‘You weren’t in there earlier,’ said Kayla.
‘Goop,’ the BFB agreed.
‘How’s life?’
‘Goop.’
‘Cool,’ said Kayla. ‘Here, sit up on my lap and you can look out the window.’
Kayla was eighteen but she remembered when she was a baby. The two things she’d liked most as a child were looking out of bus windows and jumping out of windows – but never jumping out of bus windows.
So Kayla cuddled the BFB as they both looked out the window at all the houses and people and white vans. Kayla was the BFB’s dad’s sister. So that made her the BFB’s aunt. She liked being an aunt and the BFB was her favourite niece. She was also her only niece.
‘Where’s your dad?’ she asked.
‘Goop.’
‘Where’s your mam?’
‘Goop.’
‘Where’s Granny Billie Jean?’
‘Goop.’
‘And Granddad?’
‘Goop,’ said the BFB.
Kayla was searching for her phone in her bag.
The last time she’d seen the BFB, she’d been in the kitchen with Kayla’s mother, Billie Jean. So she was going to phone Billie Jean, to tell her that the BFB had crawled into her bag. Kayla knew that her mother would be searching for the missing baby. She’d be worried and wondering where she was. Kayla would phone her now and tell her.
But she couldn’t find the phone.
It wasn’t in her bag.
Kayla liked her phone but she didn’t like it that much. She didn’t carry it everywhere. When she wanted to know what the weather was like, she didn’t google ‘Dublin weather’. She looked out the window and saw the rain. She often forgot her phone – sometimes on purpose. You could be really sarcastic when you didn’t have a phone.
‘Oh my God! Do you not, like, have a phone?’
‘Oh my God, yeah. But it’s, like, invisible.’