Boom!

6 Captain Chicken

Charlie’s bandages came off a couple of days later. To celebrate the occasion his mum decided that I should be allowed back into the house. He’d suffered enough, apparently. And learned his lesson. Clearly she knew absolutely nothing about her son.

On the other hand, it did give us the opportunity to show the secret message to Charlie’s dad. Obviously we didn’t want him leafing through the Spudvetch! notebook and finding out that Charlie had been following teachers around Sainsbury’s. So we made a second copy on a clean sheet of paper and handed it to him over supper.

“What do you make of this?” asked Charlie.

Charlie’s dad was, in our opinion, the brainiest person we knew. So if anyone could help us translate the mystery language, it was him.

Dr Brooks cleaned his lips with the corner of his napkin, ferreted in his pocket for his reading glasses, eased them behind his ears and squinted hard. “A code. Gosh, how delightfully old-fashioned.” He smiled quietly to himself. “I thought kids these days just went around shoplifting and playing computer games. Where did this come from?”

“Confidential,” said Charlie.

“My, my,” replied his dad, winking at us. “What fun.”

“So…?” pestered Charlie.

Dr Brooks shook his head. “It’s all Greek to me, I’m afraid.”

“Greek?” I said excitedly.

Charlie’s dad looked over the rim of his glasses. “It’s a phrase, Jim. All Greek to me. Double Dutch. Nonsense. Gibberish.”

“Ah,” I said, blushing slightly.

“Mind you…” he continued, popping the last new potato into his mouth and chewing contentedly. “Coruisk. Now that rings a bell. I mean, it may just be a coincidence, but I think I’ve heard that word somewhere before. Coruisk, Coruisk, Coruisk…Do I get some sort of prize for working this out? Bottle of whisky? Book token?”

“I think we could manage something along those lines,” replied Charlie.

But the conversation was interrupted by Dr Brooks’s bleeper. He took the little black thingamajig from his belt and examined it. “That’s the hospital, I’m afraid. No rest for the wicked.”

“See you later,” said Charlie.

“And I shall have a jolly good think about that word.” He smiled, standing and taking his jacket from the back of the chair. “But right now I must go and have a poke around with a dead body.”

On my way out of the Brooks’s house, Charlie’s mum stopped me and told me to wait for a minute. I thought I was about to get a lecture about keeping her ill-behaved son on the straight and narrow, but she returned after a minute or so carrying a large, metal, fish-shaped object.

“I very nearly forgot,” she said. “This is for your father. He rang earlier to ask whether he could borrow my salmon mousse mould. Now, Jim, I am sure your father is a very trustworthy chap, but will you try and make sure he actually cooks with this? I don’t want it welded into a scaled-down Wellington fighter-bomber.”

“I will.”

I got home to find Dad with his sleeves rolled up, wearing a stripy apron and cutting a large aubergine into thin circular slices.

“Stir those onions, will you, Jimbo?” He pointed to a pan on the stove.

I dropped my bag, took off my tie and dutifully whisked the onions round a bit.

“What happened to the planes, Dad?” I asked.

“Planes, Jimbo?” He started dipping the aubergine slices in little bowls of egg and flour. “I can do planes. I can do helicopters. I can do radio control. I can do aileron wiring and stall cut-outs. I need a challenge. You’ve got to progress. Turn the gas on under the frying pan. Thanks. You’ve got to learn new things. Keep yourself sharp.”

“Stops you sitting on the sofa in your pyjamas watching breakfast television while everybody else goes off to work.”

“Indeed,” said Dad.

Mum thought the Aubergine Parmesan was delicious. I had to agree. Even Becky liked it. “It’s all right,” she said glumly, which is high praise from a teenage death metal fan.

Dad grinned stupidly all through supper as if he’d just won an Oscar. And Mum grinned back at him like she’d just met him for the first time and fallen madly in love. At one point they were holding hands at the table. All of which made me a bit queasy, though I guess I couldn’t complain.

The only sour moment was when Becky went to the cupboard to fetch a bottle of ketchup. Dad told her ketchup was an insult to good food. For a moment I thought there might be actual fisticuffs, but she looked around the table, realized it was three against one and decided to accept defeat.

After dinner I escaped to the balcony in case Mum and Dad did actual kissing and I vomited. Becky joined me soon after and said, “What’s got into him?”

“Into who?” I asked.

“Into Dad, stupid,” she said, lighting a cigarette and dropping the match down on Mrs Rudman’s balcony. “All this cordon bleu business.”

“I bought him a cookery book,” I said.

She gave me a funny look. “So it’s your fault.”

“I think it is,” I said proudly.

“God,” she sighed, “it’s like he’s turning into a woman.”

I patted Becky on the back. “Women going out to work. Men cooking. You’ve just got to face it, sister. This is the modern world.”

It felt very strange being taught by Mrs Pearce on Monday. I kept wondering if she knew we’d been inside her house, whether she’d found something out of place, whether we were under suspicion. But her behaviour was no different from usual. So I soon relaxed and started to feel rather smug. We’d got away with it. She might have a secret. But we had a bigger one. It was one of the very few times in my life that I knew something a teacher didn’t. Mr Kidd seemed less scary too. We were on to them.

He might have scared the living daylights out of us. But if he knew how close we were getting it would probably scare the living daylights out of him.

We thought we were absolutely brilliant.

And it wasn’t until the following Saturday morning that we realized how wrong we were.

I got up early and helped Charlie with his paper round. When it was done we cycled over to the shopping centre for a late breakfast at Captain Chicken. I bought myself a strawberry milkshake and an apple pie. Charlie opted for turkey nuggets and a black coffee, which he thought was more sophisticated.

“Any developments?” I asked.

He took out the orange Spudvetch! notebook and opened it at the page where he’d copied out the mystery message.

“I’ve googled everything,” he said. “Fardal is a surname. Rifco make bathroom cabinets. Bassoo is the name of a creek in Montana. And Pralio sell sports equipment.” He took a sip of his black coffee. “On the other hand, you can stick any combination of letters into Google and find something. But here’s the interesting thing. Remember Dad saying Coruisk rang a bell?”

“Uh-huh.” I blew bubbles into my milkshake.

“Well—” said Charlie. Then he fell silent.

“What?” I asked.

He was looking over my shoulder. I turned round. A man in a very expensive light-grey suit was walking towards us from the counter carrying a paper cup, a napkin and a burger box. The place was pretty much empty at this time in the morning but he came and sat down on the spare seat at the end of our table.

He was fifty or sixty years old and ridiculously tall. His face was tanned and wrinkly, like he’d spent most of his life outdoors. And despite the suit there was something worryingly military about his cropped grey hair.

He adjusted his suit, opened the burger box, unfolded his napkin, took a sip of hot chocolate, and began eating his chicken burger, carefully keeping his pressed white cuffs away from the onion relish.

“Excuse me,” said Charlie. “We’d like some privacy. If you don’t mind.”

He said nothing. He looked at Charlie. He looked at me. He finished his mouthful. He wiped his mouth with his napkin. “You think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?”

It was a posh voice, the sort of voice that introduces classical music on Radio Three. He didn’t sound like someone who usually ate his breakfast in Captain Chicken.

I said nothing. Charlie slid the Spudvetch! notebook back into his pocket. “Sometimes we’re clever,” he said. “Sometimes we’re stupid. It kind of depends.”

The man smiled and took another bite of burger. Charlie and I began shuffling our bums towards the aisle.

“I don’t know exactly how much you know,” the man continued, washing the burger down with another sip of hot chocolate. “You know a little. That much is quite clear.”

He was clearly not your average weirdo.

“The Watchers brought you to my attention a few days ago. We have had you under surveillance since then. They are of the opinion that you are not dangerous. I’m not so sure.”

The Watchers? Surveillance? Dangerous? I felt the building tilt slightly to one side. Or was it me? I held the sides of my seat for support.

“The Watchers get nervous.” He brushed the bun-crumbs off his silk tie. “The Watchers do not enjoy people poking into their affairs. And if you carry on as you have been doing, then they may decide that action has to be taken.”

He let the word ‘action’ hang in the air.

“Who are you?” asked Charlie.

I kicked him under the table. I wanted this conversation to end. And I wanted it to end now.

But Charlie took no notice. “What right have you got to come in here and tell us what we can and can’t do?”

I kicked Charlie for a second time.

And that’s when I saw it again, for a fraction of a second. A fluorescent blue flicker inside the man’s eyes. He smiled. “Who I am is not important. Nor am I going to tell you. Only one thing is important and it is that you stop your little games.”

As he spoke these words he pulled back one of his cuffs and pressed the tip of his forefinger to the surface of the table. I pushed myself further back into my seat. The end of his finger began to glow with an eerie neon-blue light. And the plastic tabletop under his finger started to blister and melt.

“It’s very simple,” he explained, beginning to move his hand along the table. “You have a choice. You can behave. Or you can face the consequences.”

The air began to fill with black smoke and the stink of burning plastic. He was slicing the table in two, the heat from his glowing finger eating through the surface like a soldering iron.

When he’d finished, we could see his polished black shoes through the gash down the centre of the table.

“Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“Yes,” said Charlie. “We understand.”

And then the man did what we’d seen both Pearce and Kidd do. He put his right hand over his left wrist. It had always looked as if they were calming themselves down. Now I saw what they were really doing. Around his left wrist was a brass band, just like the ones we’d found in Mrs Pearce’s attic. He pressed it briefly with the fingers of his right hand, then let it go.

“Good.” He stood up. “In that case I shall bid you good day. Charles…James…”

And with that he was gone.

We sat there, stunned, for several seconds. Then Charlie looked down and said, “This smells really, really bad,” and a spotty bloke in a Captain Chicken hat started walking towards us, saying, “What the hell have you done to my table?”

We ran.

Five minutes later we were sitting on a bench in the little park in front of the flats.

“Gordon Bennett!” said Charlie.

“Gordon Reginald Harvey Simpson Bennett Junior!” I replied.

We were silent for a few moments. Then Charlie said, “You saw that thing he did with the wristband?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Kidd did the same thing. So did Pearce.”

“I know.” He fished in his pocket, and suddenly there it was in Charlie’s hand — a wristband.

“You nicked one?” I asked incredulously. “From the box in the loft? Charlie, that is seriously not a good idea.”

“Bit late now,” said Charlie. “She had a whole pile. I was kind of hoping she didn’t count them very often.”

“Charlie, you idiot.” Horrible pictures filled my head. The most horrible one involved me being cut in half by a hot neon-blue finger. “Get rid of it. Get rid of it now. If they find out…”

“OK,” said Charlie. “Point taken. But first…a little experiment.”

He pressed the bangle. Nothing. He squeezed it. Nothing.

“That guy was not joking,” I insisted. “Please, Charlie. Chuck it.”

Then he put it on his left wrist, placed his right hand over it and pressed it.

“Snakes on a plane!” hissed Charlie, pulling his hand away as if he’d just touched an electric cooker ring. “Try it,” he said, taking it off and handing it to me.

“No way,” I said, holding up my hands. “Absolutely not.”

“Just put it on,” he insisted, taking my arm. “This is important.”

I struggled briefly, then gave up. Wincing, I tensed my muscles as Charlie slipped the thing over my wrist.

“Now touch it.”

“Is it painful?”

“No, it’s not painful, you big girl’s blouse.”

I touched it with the fingers of my right hand and a high-pitched scream roared through my head as if a plane were landing somewhere between my ears. This was followed by a few clicks. Then I heard a voice saying, “Gretnoid?”

I spun round to see who was talking to me. But there was no one there. We were alone in the park, apart from Bernie, the homeless guy, asleep under the hedge in the corner.

“Adner gretnoid?” said the voice. “Gretnoid? Parliog mandy? Venter ablong stot. Gretnoid?”

It was conning from inside my own head. It was like having earphones screwed directly into your brain. I took my hand away and tore off the band.

“Heavy, eh?” Charlie nodded.

I decided it was time to go home and lie down.