Un Lun Dun

32. Memento

As they took Zanna home, Deeba sent out mental thanks to everyone who had helped her in UnLondon: Obaday, Jones, Skool, the Slaterunners, Mortar and Lectern, and especially Brokkenbroll the Unbrellissimo.

Good luck, she thought. She knew that the UnLondoners still had a fight ahead of them. The Smog would not take kindly to their counterattack. But with Brokkenbroll and Unstible’s plan, the UnLondoners might win.

It was their fight now. They had no Shwazzy, but they’d made their own plans, and she wished them luck.

Deeba’s delight was overshadowed by bewilderment at her mother’s strange lack of concern. But then she remembered what Mortar had said— the phlegm effect.

She went to the computer to look up the word phlegm. She found that yes, it did mean “snot,” just as she had thought, but it also had an older meaning: “equanimity.” And when she had looked that up, she learnt that it meant “calmness of temper.”

So that was what Mortar had meant.

The phlegm effect was why when her mother and father stumbled sleepily in to breakfast, they cheerfully greeted Deeba as if she hadn’t been missing for three days.

“Dad,” she said. “You remember what time I got home yesterday?”

“Yesterday?” He looked thoughtful. “About six, wasn’t it? No. I’m not sure.” He shrugged.

“What was we talking about at supper, Mum?”

“At supper, darling? It was about…your schoolwork?” Her mother turned it into a question and forgot about it.

It wasn’t as if time had stood still, and it wasn’t as if they’d forgotten her, or as if she’d been replaced by a phantom. Instead, all the time she was in UnLondon, they’d simply not worried. They’d all spent the time thinking that they’d seen her a few moments ago, or that she’d just popped into her room, or that they’d have a word with her in a second. They stayed calm—phlegmatic— because they didn’t, and couldn’t, realize that she’d really gone.

Deeba was pleased that her parents and brother and her friends and teachers hadn’t been panicking. She would have hated for them to worry. She had to admit, though, it made her a bit uncomfortable to realize that no one had been thinking about her and Zanna.

She was also uneasy when she thought of the moment of hesitation her family had shown on her return, the first time they saw her. Deeba tried not to think about it, even when her teachers and school friends did the same thing.

Zanna took a day off school, was laid up taking painkillers for her head and cough syrup for her lungs. In the playground, Deeba watched the sun and smiled into its fat, full little face. It was deeply strange not to see the empty hoop of the UnSun.

The sunlight was more vivid; she felt soaked in light.

“You’re in a good mood,” said Miss Edwards, looking at her oddly. “Haven’t seen you this happy since…” she said, and then her voice petered out, because of course she could not quite remember when she had last seen Deeba, because of the phlegm effect.

Zanna’s dad had gotten over the guilt of the accident, and that put Zanna in a good mood. Keisha and Kath were still a bit wary around Deeba, but something in the air between them had changed. They smiled at her cautiously during the lunch queue, and mentioned that Becks would be back in class soon. If that one sight of the Smog scared you, Deeba thought, you wouldn’t believe what I’ve been doing the last few days.

She almost couldn’t believe it herself. In the light of that bright little sun, all her memories of grossbottles and Slaterunners and bridges to and from anywhere and flying buses and her little carton Curdle seemed like daydreams.

When what had happened seemed impossible, she made sure no one was looking, and brought out the glove, and read it. If Zanna remembers, she thought, I’ll give it to her. Till then it’s mine.

Mostly it was single words or even just a few letters, but here and there were snippets of sentences. She soon knew them all by heart.

She read them again and again in the same order, reciting them quietly like a poem.

Zanna was soon back at school, and then Becks, and the slow patching-up of relations between the friends continued. Within a couple of weeks, things between them were all good again.

It’s back like it was, Deeba told herself.

She said it to herself even though she knew that was not true.

Becks was still in her cast. Zanna suffered from headaches, and she wheezed a bit when she breathed too hard. She was physically slower than she had been, too. Only Deeba knew why.

Deeba could never talk to any of her friends about what had happened. If her conversation ever veered even close to anything even a little bit strange, Kath or Keisha or Becks would start to panic and get aggressive.

Once, when Deeba was alone with Zanna, she said gently: “Do you know what the word Shwazzy means?” In her pocket, Deeba felt the glove. By rights it’s yours, she thought.

Zanna frowned with concentration. She opened her mouth and nothing came out, and a look of great alarm, even fear, crossed her face, and she began to cough violently. She doesn’t want to remember, Deeba realized, patting her friend’s back. It’s too scary.

Of course it was frustrating, sometimes incredibly frustrating, not to be able to tell her best friends about the extraordinary, unbelievable things that had happened. To the two of them. But when she was with Zanna on the back of a bus and they were laughing or joking around, even though Deeba could hardly believe that all those events were gone from Zanna’s head, she told herself it was worth it, and she tried not to think about the more unusual bus she and Zanna had recently taken.

Sometimes at night, Deeba would sit on her bed and look out onto the moonlit estate, and imagine UnLondon under the loonlight. She hoped everyone there was well and happy, and that the battle against the Smog was going according to plan.

It would be hard, but under the guidance of the Unbrellissimo, and Unstible, and with the secret Armets’ techniques, maybe UnLondon could win. Deeba read and reread the mysterious words on the paper glove that she believed was hers, by now, and wished the UnLondoners luck.

When she was there, she had wanted desperately to come home. Now, even though she was truly happy to be back, she was wistful that she could never say anything about the most amazing place she had ever been.

Deeba was certain that she would never see UnLondon again.