The Kneebone Boy (6 page)

They walked up the three flights of stairs and Lucia rapped on Angela’s door. Instantly, they heard Dr. Jekyll explode with frenzied barking.

“It’s okay, Dr. Jekyll! It’s only us!” Max yelled back at him. That only made the barking more furious.

“He hates you the most, you know,” Otto said.

They waited for the sound of Angela’s footsteps, but the only thing they heard was Dr. Jekyll’s toenails clicking against the floor as he paced in front of the door. They knocked again, sending the dog into a new fit of rage. But still no Angela.

“Well, this rots,” said Lucia.

“Maybe she’s waiting for us at St. Pancras,” Max suggested. “Maybe we’ve crisscrossed.”

“We’re not going back there,” Otto declared. He’d been a good sport about traipsing through London thus far, but he’d had enough of adventure for the day. “We’ll just stay put and wait.”

He dropped his bag down and sat on it. Lucia and Max, seeing that he would not be budged, relented and did the same. There they waited, in the dingy little hallway, listening to Dr. Jekyll’s pacing and nodding a sheepish hello to a red-faced man who passed them on his way upstairs. They nodded hello again when he went back down the stairs a while later, then again when he came back up with a bag of groceries.

“Who are you wanting, then?” he demanded in the tone of someone who had had enough monkey business.

“Well, seeing as how we’ve been sitting in front of Angela Winger’s door for the past half hour, I’d say it’s a safe bet we’re wanting Angela Winger,” Lucia said without even looking at him. She was sometimes rude to people who asked dumb things.

“Angela’s on holiday,” the man spat back. “Piss off!” He jabbed his thumb at the stairs.

“What do you mean she’s on holiday?” Lucia said, looking up at the man.

“Oh, the little snit is interested now, is she?” The man smirked and cocked his head in a taunting way.

“Excuse me, sir”—Max tried to be as polite as possible to make up for Lucia—“but where
is
Angela?”

“Not that it’s any of your business,” he said, “but she happens to be in Berlin. As in Germany.”

“But our dad talked to her today and she said she’d meet us at the station,” Lucia said.

“And
did
she meet you at the station?” the man asked in a mocking tone.

“No,” Lucia admitted. “But . . . but she can’t be in Berlin!”

“Can be and is, Sunshine. Can be and is.” The man was enjoying himself so much now that he put his bag of groceries on the floor and seemed prepared to stay and watch the panic unfold.

It did.

“What do we do now?”

“How could Dad have sent us if Angela’s away?”

But Max had the wherewithal to ask the man, “What about Dr. Jekyll then? She wouldn’t just leave him behind.”

“Ever heard of a dog walker? She was here this afternoon. Dr. Jekyll would have took her fingers off for her if I hadn’t gone in first and gave him what for. And did that sullen little minger even say thanks for my trouble?” He frowned remembering this snub afresh. “Now, clear out! The building don’t allow loitering in the hallways.”

There was nothing to do but to gather up their bags once more and trudge back down the stairs and out onto the street.

“What are we supposed to do now?” Otto said. They were silent for a bit, considering.

“I might try climbing up,” Max suggested, eyeing the gate in front of the building and the tiers of balconies above. “I could try Angela’s window and see if I can get in that way.”

“Yes, and then we’ll all spend a lovely night in jail. Brilliant, Max,” Lucia said.

In truth, she was slightly jealous of the idea, because
though it involved risk and danger, of which she very much approved, it also involved heights, which as you already know she is not fond of.

“What we need to do is to ring Dad,” Otto said. This was so plainly obvious that no one could argue against it. They found a phone booth on the next block and Max dialed up their home number. He held the phone to his ear for a distressingly long time before he hung up.

“He must have already left,” he said.

They had no other phone number for him. When he went away on his trips, he always called
them
and gave Mrs. Carnival a number in case of emergencies.

“Maybe that man in Angela’s building was wrong,” Max said. “Or maybe he was just having us on, and Angela will be back later.”

There was hope in that thought and they didn’t have much else at the moment. Otto was for planting themselves outside Angela’s building and waiting for her to return. But Lucia argued that since they were in the middle of London and free to do what they liked, they might as well try to have an adventure. Max agreed and so that was that.

It wasn’t long, though, before Otto began to think it was a good idea as well. The whole of Camden was crawling with oddities, and there was nothing that Otto liked better than an oddity. People with pink hair, blue hair, black lipstick (on men!), ears that were stretched wide with huge disk earrings, and every available patch of skin pierced or tattooed. The children stared at them in much the same way that people in Little Tunks stared at the
Hardscrabbles—with a mixture of curiosity and uneasiness.

“Do you think they’re dangerous?” Otto asked, which ironically is something people often asked about him.

“Very, I’m sure,” Lucia said. It was a waste of everyone’s time to have an adventure without the element of danger.

“Rubbish,” Max said. “Anyone can put on clumpy black boots and pierce themselves silly. A truly dangerous person would be someone you’d never even look at twice.”

They wandered through the outdoor markets, a jungle of circus-coloured clothing and shoes and wild wigs and everything else you could imagine. They saw boots that had plastic heels with tiny plastic goldfish swimming in them, necklaces made out of old typewriter keys, and shirts made out of mice bones. The children were so fascinated that they forgot to mind about lugging their bags around. They even nearly forgot their messy predicament. They ambled through the streets, gazing into shop windows, their healthy pink Little Tunks lungs eagerly pulling in the stink of coach fumes and Indian curry and occasionally some really impressive body odor.

Then suddenly, without realizing it, they found a secret opening into the Perilous-World-at-Large. There are lots of these openings scattered about at certain longitudes and latitudes. There is one, for instance, right outside El Djem, Tunisia, and another to the left of a raspberry bush on Mr. DiMorelli’s dairy farm in Stone Mills, New York. Most people pass through one or two at some point in their lives without realizing it. But if they were paying attention
they’d notice that far more perilous things begin to happen to them almost immediately. The Hardscrabbles certainly had no idea that anything unusual had occurred when they entered the portal on Camden High Street although Lucia swears that she felt dizzy, but Max says that was due to the coach fumes.

Otto stopped short quite suddenly.

He was staring at a man perched on a parked car. The man’s head was shaved and he wore no shirt. Every inch of exposed skin was tattooed, even his scalp and face, which had fierce-looking swirls covering it. His lips were blue. It took a moment to see that the blue was not lipstick, but a tattoo that stained his lips and covered his chin. It looked as though he’d eaten blue ice cream and it had dribbled down his chin in curling rivulets.

“And I suppose
he’s
not dangerous either?” Lucia said to Max.

Max didn’t answer. He was looking at the man thoughtfully. Actually he was looking at the man with a stupid expression on his face, but he always looked stupid when he was doing his best thinking. The man was obviously used to being looked at and he ignored them.

“There’s one for your collection.” Lucia nudged her elbow into Otto’s side.

That’s all she said. It was completely innocent, but of course they all blamed her later for what happened.

Otto whipped his camera off his shoulder and began to fumble with the case, and then with the lens cap.

“I wonder,” Max said, the stupid expression now gone
from his face, “if that man knows he’s wearing a woman’s tattoo on his face?”

“What do you mean?” Lucia asked.

“Well, the Maori people in New Zealand tattoo their faces just like that, only the men have one sort of tattoo and the women have another. That bloke has a lady’s tattoo on his face.”

Otto snapped a picture. The tattooed man’s head swiveled sharply at the sound of the click. Lady tattoo or not, the sight of that face staring directly at them made their eyes go wide. His nose had the oddest shape. It looked like a frog that had been smashed flat in the road. Maybe he’d tattooed his face to take people’s attention off the smashed frog in the center of it.

“That’ll be a fiver,” the man said, hopping off the car and heading toward them while holding out his palm.

“Five pounds? What on earth for?” Lucia said. Her brothers were simply staring with their mouths open.

“Well, I ain’t a bloody penguin in a zoo,” he replied as though he were genuinely offended. “Tourists pay five pounds for my picture.”

“Ridiculous,” Lucia said firmly, and she grabbed Otto and Max by the shirtsleeves and stalked off, not paying any attention as the man yelled after them, “Oi, oi!”

Lucia’s impressive eyebrows squinched together. “That’s nerve to make people pay for his photo.”

Secretly, though, she was not so much offended by the five pounds as by the fact that he had called them tourists.

“Anyway,” she said, “it’s about time we had some dinner. I’m starving.”

Otto suggested trying back at Angela’s again, just in case her neighbour was wrong and Angela had returned, but Lucia refused. She said it would be a shame to leave the streets of Camden just yet, now that they could do whatever they damn well pleased. Max agreed and Otto did too in the end. All in all they were in that gorgeous state of mind in which they felt free and unafraid and sharply aware of how large and exciting the world was.

In other words, it hadn’t gotten dark outside yet.

In which Lucia reveals a secret and the Princess Uzima narrowly escapes from a lion

Casper always gave them some spending money when he went away, and now they considered what sort of dinner they should buy with it. There were so many choices here! In Little Tunks there was only a tiny fish-and-chip shop, a pizza parlour, and the Pig & Pony Pub, where they served a dried-out disk of brown substance that the menu called a burger.

The Hardscrabbles peered through the windows at a good many food shops and were tempted by some. But they couldn’t all agree on a place until they passed the open door of a curry shop and smelled the earthy tangle of spices, so strong that the odor oozed down the back of their throats and made them feel all spitty. In a good way. They went in and ordered at the counter, each choosing something different so that they could try a bit of
everything. They sat at a table by the window, so as not to miss a thing on the street. After several minutes, the shop owner brought them their food, along with small silver pots of gem-colored sauces.

“Careful,” he warned, pointing to a pot of red sauce. “This one is veerry, veerry spicy.”

So of course the red sauce was the first pot that the Hardscrabbles dipped their spoons in. After a few minutes, their noses were dripping and they were making some strange
chockety
sounds in their throats until the shop owner brought over some yoghurt to cool them down. After they were done, Otto wanted to leave for Angela’s but Lucia insisted that they sit and digest. This should have struck her brothers as strange, since she’d never cared about their digestion in the past, but they didn’t notice. They all sat and digested until the shop owner started to give them filthy looks.

With their bellies full and their heads feeling strangely light, they walked back to Fishtail Lane and climbed the steps to Angela’s flat. Their rap on the door provoked the usual fit of barking from Dr. Jekyll, but this time they also heard the approach of footsteps on the other side of the door.

“There, you see!” Max said, smiling. “She
is
here after all.”

But when the door opened, it wasn’t Angela at all. It was a stocky teenage girl with a wide, flat face and a badly chapped lower lip. Dr. Jekyll ran between her legs and flew out into the hall, barking wildly.

“He bites,” she shouted in order to be heard above the barking.

“It’s okay, boy,” Max said to Dr. Jekyll. “It’s just us.” He put his hand out and the dog lunged forward and snapped, grazing Max’s fingers.

“I told you,” the girl said flatly.

“Are you the dog walker?” Lucia asked.

“S’right.” The girl eyed Lucia suspiciously. “Who are you?”

“We’re the Hardscrabbles. We’re supposed to be staying with Angela for a few days.”

“How you going to do that when she’s in Germany?”

“Then it’s true!” Otto exclaimed.

“What’s he doing with his hands?” The girl scowled suspiciously at Otto.

“Just talking. But look,” Lucia said, “there must be some mistake. Our dad called Angela today and arranged it all.”