When we pulled into the car park by the flats I looked up at the tatty, peeling, weather-stained block and I must admit I got a bit tearful. Then I remembered the complications waiting upstairs and my heart sank.
I turned to Becky. “What are we going to say?”
“We?” said Becky. “I think that’s your job, mate. But if you want my advice, I’d go easy on the aliens-with-hairy-tails-and-space-travel aspect of the whole thing.”
“Gird your loins,” said Charlie. “Let’s get this over with.”
Becky unlocked the door of the flat and we stepped inside. Mum was on the phone. She dropped it and froze for several seconds. Then she screamed. It was actually quite frightening. She threw her arms around me and Becky and squeezed and cried and shouted, “You’re alive! You’re alive!”
Then Dad came into the hallway and did the same thing, without the screaming. Then everyone noticed that Charlie was standing to one side looking a bit left out so we grabbed hold of him and had a group hug, by which time all of us were crying, even Charlie, and I’d never seen him cry before, ever.
Things calmed down after a few minutes and we stopped hugging each other. Mum’s face went a bit dark and she said, “Where in God’s name have you been?”
And this was the point when I realized we should have worked out a story. “Well…”
There was a horrible silence.
“You disappear for a week,” said Mum, her joy ebbing rapidly away. “You don’t tell us where you’re going. We call and you don’t ring us back. We’ve been through hell wondering what happened to you.”
Then Charlie had a brainwave. And I have to say that it was both simple and rather brilliant. “We were kidnapped.”
“Kidnapped?” said Dad.
“Kidnapped?” said Mum.
“By Mr Kidd,” said Charlie. “And Mrs Pearce. From school.”
“They took us to Scotland,” I said. “To Loch Coruisk. On the Isle of Skye.”
“What…!?” said Mum. “What…!? What…!?” She sounded a bit like a chicken.
“So,” said Dad, shaking his head, “who wrecked the flat?”
“What?” asked Charlie.
I looked over Dad’s shoulder and saw two halves of the snapped coffee table stacked in the corner of the living room and it all came back to me. “Oh, that,” I said.
“We came back home,” said Dad. “The fridge was on its side. The sofa was upside down. And we found one of the kitchen chairs in the car park.”
“Obviously we didn’t want to be kidnapped,” said Becky, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world. “So we put up a fight.”
“But… but… but…” said Mum, sounding like a slightly different kind of chicken. “But why did they kidnap you?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” said Charlie breezily. “You’ll have to ask Mrs Pearce and Mr Kidd. Perhaps they can explain everything.”
“I’m going to ring the police,” said Dad.
“Excellent idea,” said Charlie. “But I really do think I ought to go home first.”
Becky and I showered rapidly and grabbed some clean clothes and Dad drove us all over to Charlie’s house.
We knocked on the door and it was pretty much a repeat of what happened at our house. The hugging, the crying. Except that Mrs Brooks screamed a lot louder than Mum.
Dr Brooks rang the police, and two sergeants arrived ten minutes later. Reassuringly, neither of them were wearing brass wristbands.
We told them the kidnapping story. Like Becky suggested, we missed out the aliens-with-hairy-tails-and-space-travel aspect. And the stealing-a-motorbike-and-a-car-and-driving-without-a-licence aspect. And the saving-the-Earth-from-destruction aspect.
The police asked us whether we wanted counselling. We said we’d prefer a hot supper. They told us they’d be in touch and headed out to their car.
Charlie, Becky and I then wandered into the kitchen to discover that Dad and Mrs Brooks had formed a team. Mrs Brooks was rustling up a Stilton sauce to pour over steamed vegetables, while Dad was putting together some individual broccoli tartlets. Mrs Brooks was really rather impressed.
Indeed, while we were eating supper she said that if he was looking for work, she often needed help with some of her bigger catering jobs. Dad said he was very flattered but he’d have to go away and think about it.
Over a dessert of pears in chocolate custard Mum asked Becky whether she was going to ring Craterface. Except she called him Terry because she was in a good mood because we weren’t dead. And Becky said she’d be happy if she never saw the lying skunk again. Which was probably just as well since we’d left the Moto Guzzi in Scotland.
Then there was a loud pop! and Dr Brooks appeared carrying champagne and a tray of seven glasses. He filled them, we raised them, Dad said, “Welcome home,” and Charlie sank his glass in one go and let out one of the loudest burps I have ever heard in my life.
18
A bunker under the brecon beacons
School on Monday morning was particularly excellent. For obvious reasons. When your headmistress stands up in assembly and says you were kidnapped by two of your teachers, but you escaped and they’re now on the run from the police, a party atmosphere continues pretty much unabated for the rest of the week.
We were officially cooler than any other pupils in living memory, and I reckoned it was probably a good month before any teacher would feel confident enough to give either of us a detention.
Dad decided to take the job with Charlie’s mum. He stuck it for three whole weeks. That was about his limit. She was terrifying, so Dad said. During one particularly stressful wedding reception she did her breadboard-throwing thing. He was inches away from a visit to Accident and Emergency.
Luckily, he was offered a more lucrative and less dangerous job in the Grand Café in town, so he was able to stop working for Mrs Brooks without incurring her everlasting wrath. Even more luckily, the job in the Grand Café was part-time so he was able to come home and cook us beef Wellington and stuffed butternut squash.
The police never came back. I told Charlie something fishy was going on but he told me to chill out and be grateful we weren’t taken into custody and injected with truth serum.
So I tried to chill out. And I was doing it really well till we were playing five-a-side football during the lunch break one day a couple of weeks later and I looked across the road and saw a black car with smoked-glass windows parked in front of the laundrette. I didn’t tell Charlie. He’d just say I was paranoid.
The following day I saw it when I was standing on the balcony after supper. It pulled into the car park, idled for a few minutes, then drove away again.
I told Charlie this time. He said I was seeing things. Then we had a class outing to the Science Museum and the black car with the smoked windows was sitting at the side of the street when we got back into the coach. I went a bit crazy at this point. It took Mrs Hennessy a good ten minutes to calm me down and even Charlie said I might have a point.
A few evenings later we met up in the little playground opposite the flats. We sat side by side on the swings. It was getting dark. The orange streetlamps were coming on one by one and the windows in the tower block were lighting up in a chequerboard of different colours.
We were talking about our big secret.
Charlie said, “Don’t you wish you could tell someone? I mean, we could be rich, we could be famous, we could be interviewed by the world’s most respected scientists. We could go down in history.” He paused. “Except of course we wouldn’t. Because no one would believe us. We’d probably end up in a psychiatric hospital.”