The Kid Who Came From Space. Ross Welford
I looked at Mam, and as our eyes met, I had never seen a person look so fearful. The colour had drained from her face: she was a ghostly grey.
Two minutes later, the bar was emptying as people ran to the car park and got in their cars.
‘You take the forestry trail, Jack!’
‘I’ll go up the north road – come with me, Jen.’
‘Did she have a phone with her?’
‘Has anyone called the police?’
‘Meet back here in half an hour, yeah?’
‘Have you got my number? Call me if you find her!’
… and so on. It seemed as though the whole village leapt into action, with cars going in different directions.
Dad seemed to be coordinating things, or at least trying to, but it was all pretty hectic. I was sort of caught in the middle of it without having anything to do. Gran was pulling on her running shoes and a head torch: she said she would run her regular forest path that a car couldn’t go up. And through the chaos I looked across the bar to see Iggy sitting on the piano stool, his eyebrows practically knitted together with worry, his hands twisting his cap in front of him. His mum, Cora, stood next to him, looking forlorn in a red-and-white Santa hat.
‘Mel,’ said Dad to Mam, ‘why don’t you stay at home?’
‘No!’ protested Mam. ‘I’m coming to look for my daughter!’
Dad looked at me next. ‘You OK to stay, Ethan? In case she comes back here?’ He glanced over at Cora Fox-Templeton and they exchanged a look that somehow left Cora in charge as the ‘responsible adult’.
She nodded and the bell on her hat jingled.
‘Keep your phones on. Don’t leave the pub,’ said Dad, pulling on a coat over his soldier outfit. ‘We’ll let you know when we have found her.’
When. I liked that.
And so it was that Iggy, his mum, his chicken and I went into the pub lounge to wait for Tammy while the search got under way.
There was an uncomfortable silence. It’s not as if I knew either of them all that well.
Eventually, Iggy said, ‘They found my father.’
I looked at him quizzically.
‘He went missing when I was little. He was found two weeks later, living rough in London. So, you know …’
‘Is … is he OK?’ I said.
His mum was looking out of the window, not seeming to listen.
Iggy nodded. ‘Yes. He’s got another family now. But he’s coming to see me after Christmas, isn’t he, Cora?’
Cora turned to him. ‘He said he’d try, Iggy. It’s a long way, and you know what he’s like.’
Iggy looked downcast, and I was embarrassed, so I took out my phone and tried to call Tammy for the umpteenth time.
‘Hi, this is Tammy. I’m not here so please leave me a message!’
The worst thoughts were going through my head. She’s been kidnapped. She’s been killed …
But I still could not think of who would do that, or how.
So I told them both the story again. I left out no details this time. I told them about going down the path, and hearing a humming noise and seeing a column of mist …
They listened, and nodded thoughtfully. Then my phone went and I saw that it was Mam calling. I tried to tell myself not to hope for good news. But just as I had imagined Tammy would come out of the woods fastening her jeans, I could not help wishing it would be Mam saying, ‘We’ve found her’.
Instead it was: ‘No news. We’re coming back. The police are coming and will want to speak to you, Ethan.’
I was looking at Iggy – when he heard the word ‘police’, he kind of flinched. I knew already it was bad. But that was when I was certain.
Iggy Fox-Templeton. He’s about to be a big part of this story. I ended up getting much closer to him than I ever thought I would – or even should.
He is ‘the kid who set fire to the school’. Except I was there and he didn’t. It’s just that ‘the kid who set fire to a litter bin’ doesn’t sound as good.
According to Mam and Dad, he is ‘a bad influence’, because of that thing with him stealing crisps from the pub storage shed. Dad told his mum, who didn’t seem very concerned. Dad didn’t do anything more about it because we were new to the village and he says a new pub landlord can’t go around making enemies. ‘And he calls his mum Cora, for heaven’s sake,’ said Dad with a sneer. ‘Mad old hippy would be closer’ – and Mam tutted at him and told him not to be so mean.
I’ve only been at the school since September, but Iggy has either truanted or been suspended from school so many times already that he’s pretty much never there.
And most recently he set fire to the bin in the east playground.
It wasn’t serious. No one was hurt, although I suppose they could have been, and he’d have got away with it if Nadia Kowalski hadn’t split on him. He had already made an enemy of her, though, so she was out for revenge.
It all started in a physics lesson with Mr Springham. He was going on about the refraction of light. Or reflection. Or both – I can’t remember. All I do remember is that Iggy had moved himself to the front and was watching, fascinated, as Mr Springham used a glass flask of water to bend a beam of light into a single point. He even wrote something in his notebook, which I had never seen him do before.
The next day he was sitting behind me on the school taxi-bus.
Tammy was in the seat in front of me, next to Nadia Kowalski. There’s about six other regulars on the bus and I don’t actually know them much: they’re in different years and they were either chatting to one another or playing music or on their phones.
‘Greetings, Tait,’ Iggy said, leaning over my seat. This was in October, a few months after we had moved to Kielder and I kind of knew him a bit. Apart from Tammy, he’s the only other kid near my age in the village. He’s older than me and Tam by a year or so, but is still in Year Seven because he’s missed so much school.
‘Wanna see my Death Ray?’ he whispered, casting a sidelong glance at Tammy and Nadia.
Without waiting for me to answer (I was going to say ‘yes’ anyway – I mean, who wouldn’t want to see a Death Ray, whatever it might turn out to be?), he shuffled past me to sit next to the window.
‘Promise you won’t say anything?’ he said.
I shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ I said without thinking.
Then he took off his glasses and said, ‘Wait till we stop.’
It was really warm that day: more like August than October. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky. A few minutes later, the taxi-bus stopped at the end of a farm lane, and we knew we’d be waiting because the girl who lives there is nearly always a minute or two late. The driver turned off the engine and everything was still. Iggy fumbled in his bag and brought out a small, round glass flask exactly like the one Mr Springham had used in his ‘bending light’ demo.
‘Hey, is that …?’ I began.
‘Shh. I’ve just borrowed it. Watch.’
He held the flask against the bus window,