For a wet Monday night, the traffic across London was heavy. We had to change buses twice, pulling up outside the station with only minutes to spare. I still couldn’t quite believe this was happening, that I wasn’t dreaming.
‘Which train is it?’ Mum was getting in a tizz. ‘Which platform?’ There didn’t seem to be any guards to ask.
The station had the look of a place closing for the night. The tea stall was packing up, the flower seller sweeping the floor. At the ticket hatch the blinds were down. The only passengers seemed to be the ones making their way to the exit.
Then, the terrible truth.
On the far wall the huge station clock showed a couple of minutes past seven. We were too late. We stood, not speaking. I was dazed with disappointment. To have missed the train just by minutes was all too much.
Overhead, up in the rafters, a pigeon flapped awake. A hiss of steam came from a far corner of the station, and then the sharp, shrill unexpected blow of a whistle.
Mum and I locked eyes. ‘Is that—?’
‘Go!’ Mum thrust the suitcase at me. ‘You might just make it!’
The last I saw of her she was blowing me a kiss.
I ran full pelt across the station towards the noise. Behind a pillar, down a slipway and there was the sign: ‘The Continental Express’, though the platform was roped off in the way expensive paintings sometimes were in galleries. I slowed to a walk, excitement quickly turning to nerves.
What if Tulip had changed her mind? What if I couldn’t find her amongst the passengers? What if I looked too poor to be allowed on board?
The train itself was lavender and cream-coloured, shining like water and fashionably curved. If Mrs Mendoza was catching a train it was definitely going to be this one. On the platform, whistle still in his mouth, was a guard in a uniform the same colours as the train. Despite giving my hair a quick smooth and rubbing my shoes on the backs of my socks, I felt myself growing shabbier by the second.
The whistle went again. The train was making ready to leave. There were shouts, doors banging, steam swirling out from under the wheels. It was a job to see anything as I hovered at the barrier.
The guard came over but didn’t unfasten the rope.
‘You can’t come through without a ticket,’ he said, looking me up and down.
‘I’m meeting some friends,’ I protested. ‘They’re already on board. They’ve got my ticket.’
‘Have they, indeed?’ He might as well have told me to ‘pull the other one’. It was clear he didn’t believe a word.
Behind him another guard called out, ‘Are we ready, Smith? All set?’
And then the clunk of a window sliding open as someone’s head poked out. ‘What’s the hold-up?’
I knew that voice.
‘Tulip!’ I cried, waving wildly, then to the guard, ‘There, look! That’s my friend!’ I’d never been so glad to see anyone.
Another dark curly head appeared beside hers. ‘Bravo, Lil! You made it!’ Oz yelled.
Even then I don’t think the guard completely believed his eyes. But he unclipped the rope and seconds later I was running down the platform and boarding the train.
‘Better late than never.’ Tulip grinned, squeezing me into a hug.
On the platform, the guard’s whistle blew again. This time, with all the doors shut, the train began to move. There was no going back. We were on our way to Egypt.
*
For the first few miles, we watched spellbound from the windows as the lights of London slipped away. I turned to Tulip. ‘Your mother really hasn’t guessed what we’ve done?’
‘Not even a whiff of suspicion,’ Tulip said proudly. ‘She’s holding court in the cocktail lounge as we speak. Already half the passengers are in love with her.’
This I could well imagine.
‘You have got the jar, haven’t you? And the translations?’ I asked.
‘It’s all safely wrapped up in our room,’ Tulip assured me.
‘I’ll tell Mama you’re here,’ Oz said and disappeared.
‘Wait till you see where we’re sleeping, Lil,’ Tulip said, taking my hand. ‘It’s like a dolls’ house bedroom – it’s tiny.’
I felt a funny mix of nerves and excitement as she led me through carriage after train carriage. I’d thought the Mendozas’ house grand, but this was swishness on another scale entirely. We went through a carriage done out with pale leather seats where people were smoking cigars, playing backgammon and cards. The dining car was quieter, full of rows of empty tables covered in white cloths as stiffly folded as envelopes. I couldn’t help gawping at the curved wooden walls, the patterned ceiling, the thick salmon-pink carpets.
Narrow corridors linked the carriages together. With so many passengers milling about, we had to say countless ‘excuse me’s to squeeze past.
Finally we reached Carriage A. Oz’s bedroom was next door, Tulip explained, and beyond that was the last compartment in the carriage, which was spacious, with its own bathroom, and had been nabbed by her mother. Ignoring the little ladder for reaching the top bunk, Tulip sprang up on to her bed. She sat there, looking down at me, swinging her legs. ‘I’ve taken this bed. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Course not.’ I didn’t mind a bit. The beds looked narrow but comfy with crisp turned-down sheets, and bars you could pull up to stop yourself falling out in the night. There wasn’t room for much else – you could stand and stretch your arms out and touch both walls.
Reaching under her pillow, Tulip handed me something wrapped up in a sweater. ‘You’d better have this back now you’re here.’
It was the jar, in its box.
‘I wasn’t looking forward to sleeping with it later,’ she admitted.
I wasn’t entirely sure I was, either.
*
We found Mrs Mendoza in the dining car. She looked resplendent in a bright red frock and matching elbow-length gloves.
‘Mama gathers new friends like flies,’ Tulip whispered as we approached.
Mrs Mendoza, bright-eyed and smiling, was definitely a light-up-the-room type of person. I saw it, the other passengers saw it, and so – begrudgingly – did Tulip. I think secretly she adored her mum.
Once I’d said hello to Mrs Mendoza and, remembering my manners, said the ‘thank-you-for-having-me’ stuff, Oz, Tulip and me found ourselves a table near the window. Outside it was pitch dark, the rain streaking diagonally down the glass as we sped along. I still couldn’t quite believe I was here, and wondered if back at home Dad had come back from the pub yet, if Mum had told him where I was. And like a wallop in the gut, it hit me all over again: I had a brother. He’d be a grown-up by now. He might’ve fought in the war. There was a chance he wasn’t even alive, which was a crushingly awful thought.
‘What’s wrong with your hand, Lil?’ Oz asked, getting my attention.
‘What? Oh!’ I flexed my fingers gingerly. The marks had gone from white to red, and felt tight like sunburn. ‘It flipping hurt when she did it,’ I confessed. ‘But it’s nothing a cold flannel won’t put right.’
Tulip twigged what’d happened. ‘You went to school today, and that old dragon hit you?’
‘She hit me three times.’
Oz’s eyes were on stalks. ‘You got caned?’
‘What on earth did you do wrong?’ Tulip asked.
Quickly, I hid my hand under the table.
‘Not much,’ I said. ‘Anyway, we’re on an adventure. From this point on, all school talk is strictly banned.’
Tulip grinned. ‘Sounds like my kind of rule.’
Oz got to his feet. ‘We should have a game of something. I’ll find a chess set.’
As we waited for him to return, Tulip said she was hungry. Having missed supper completely, she ordered grilled cheese sandwiches, hot chocolate and a selection of fancy cakes.
‘The Washington Post are paying, remember?’ Tulip reminded me. ‘They deserve it, overlooking Mama like that. Go on, order anything you want.’
I’d never ordered from a menu before. There was so much to choose from. I honestly wanted all of it, but settled on bacon and eggs, buttered muffins, and ice cream with fruit that came in a really tall glass.
‘What’s it like having a brother?’ I asked as we waited for our food.
Tulip wrinkled her nose. ‘They’re loud, they’re big, they’re smelly. Everyone thinks they’re more important than girls.’
‘Not in your family,’ I pointed out. ‘Your mum treats you the same.’
‘Maybe, but she still thinks I’m the giddy one, and Oz has got all the brains. It was the same with Alex.’ She looked suddenly sad.
‘We don’t have to talk about brothers if you don’t want to,’ I said gently.
‘Half-brother,’ she corrected me. ‘Mama’s been married twice.’
I gasped. ‘Crikey, like a movie star!’
‘Her first husband was white, hence Alex not being dark like us. Our dad is black. He’s a jazz pianist. Plays concerts all around the world.’
It sounded so very glamorous and intriguing.
‘Everyone loved Alex.’ Tulip sighed, fiddling with her napkin. ‘The Golden Boy, we used to call him – and not just because of his hair. He was brilliant at everything.’
I remembered all the silver cups on the shelves in the Mendozas’ library.
‘He was going to university, to Oxford, to study Ancient History. When he came home from school in the holidays, he used to teach Oz. He said it helped him remember all he’d learned, going over it again like that.’
‘But Oz must’ve been so young. How did he understand it?’
Tulip shrugged. ‘He only picked up bits of it. The rest he’s done since Alex disappeared – in his memory, I suppose. He’s probably going to be as clever as Alex one day. It’s the big wide world Oz doesn’t understand so well. That’s why he doesn’t go to school any more.’
It was hard enough having a brother I’d never met, never mind how it must feel to have one and then lose him again. Mum and Dad in the churchyard yesterday flashed into my mind. It felt right, here with Tulip, to mention it.
‘Apparently my mum had a baby before me.’
Tulip’s eyebrows shot up. ‘So now who’s got the mysterious family, hey?’
‘I didn’t know him,’ I said quickly. ‘He was adopted years ago, before I was born. I’ve only just found out.’
‘Gosh! That must’ve been a shock. Are you going to try and find him?’
‘I don’t think so.’ It hadn’t occurred to me to. ‘Anyway, he’ll be a grown-up by now, or I suppose he might be dead.’
We both fell glumly quiet.
Then Tulip slapped the table. ‘Right, enough of this doom, gloom and misery. Where’s our food and Oz with that chess set?’
Oz and the waiter arrived together. And soon our table was so crowded with food and plates and sparkling cutlery that it was a good job he hadn’t found a chess set after all, as there was no space in which to play.
Tulip was relieved. ‘Let’s play something fun, instead. For matchsticks.’
She whipped out a pack of cards and spent the rest of the evening thrashing us both to smithereens.