Zizou Corder Read online

  “Oh, hang on,” said Julius. “This’ll be good!”

  “What?” said Charlie, and as he said it he felt a strong, firm increase in the rumble of the Circe’s engines, and a sudden forceful surge in her power. They were speeding up.

  It was a bit like the moment before an airplane takes off—though of course Julius and Charlie had never been in an airplane. It was a moment of pure power, and it thrilled the boys.

  “What’s happening?” yelled Charlie. “We’re going to drown that boat!”

  “Quite the opposite!” cried Julius, grinning and hanging over the side. “Look! Look!”

  The people in the boat had stopped waving. As the Circe drew nearer, Charlie could see that they were very busy: They were up on deck, facing the shore, and they had poles and boat hooks. A couple of people were on shore too, also holding poles out, as if they were expecting something. And so they were.

  As the Circe came careening past, she steered dramatically in toward the bank. Charlie thought she was going to collide with the boat. “What are they doing?” he yelled, but then, rather later than Charlie found comfortable, the Circe swerved suddenly back out into the middle of the river. The great wave of her wake spread in a huge V behind her, whooshing toward the bank, and the little boat that hung so precariously upon it.

  “Alley-oop!” came a shout from the Lucidi family, who were hanging off the rails like Julius and Charlie, watching the action.

  Charlie was terrified for the little boat, but as the wash came upon it, a cry went up aboard and ashore, and there was suddenly a great pushing and shoving with the poles and boat hooks, as those ashore tried to push the boat into the river, and those aboard tried to push off from the riverbank. And with the arrival of all that extra water underneath them, it worked—the Circe’s wake snatched the little ship from the muddy bank where she had been stranded, and pulled her back into the main flow of the river—right side up, shaky, its occupants cheering.

  “Wow!” cried Charlie.

  “Ai ai ai ai ai!” cheered the Lucidi family.

  “Caramba!” yelled Julius.

  The circus ship gradually slowed down again. Capsizing the little boat she had just rescued was not part of the plan.

  “Do you often do that?” asked Charlie.

  “Hardly ever,” said Julius. “I’ve only seen it done once before, by another ship, and it didn’t work. The little boat got shoved even farther up the bank, and on its side too. This was fantastic. Fantastic.”

  Charlie and Julius careened around the deck, pretending to be small boats stuck on mudflats and big boats rescuing them, until Julius suddenly found that he was stuck in a mudflat: a big pile of Learned Pig poo. Charlie got the giggles. Julius, however, was annoyed—he felt Hans should pay more attention to where his pig pooped. So he went and jumped on him, which annoyed Hans—he felt Julius shouldn’t jump on him and wallop him when he hadn’t even known that his pig had pooped.

  Charlie left them to it, and went quietly back on deck to think about the lions.

  That night when Maccomo had gone to dinner, Charlie said to the young lion: “What I don’t understand is why you aren’t affected by the medicine. It was in your water too, but you’re not dopey and tired. You haven’t given up.”

  “He’s been sharing my water,” said Elsina quietly. “I get fewer drops because Maccomo is hoping I will have cubs one day, and the drops are bad for a young lioness’s health. So I get one drop just to calm me down a little. Of course one drop had hardly any effect on him because he’s much bigger than me.” She gestured to the young lion, who smiled and looked rather pleased with himself.

  Charlie nodded. He was glad that these creatures he had fallen in with were intelligent. It was reassuring.

  Later, just as Charlie was preparing to sneak off the ship and find a cat, Maccomo said: “Don’t imagine that you are going ashore. Tonight you sleep here and guard the lions. Do not leave them alone. French people are not honest.”

  Charlie was torn between anger at not being able to leave and the urge to say: “That’s stupid. You can’t say people aren’t honest just because of where they come from—some are and some aren’t, like everybody.” Instead he just sat there, fuming, in the lionchamber. He made himself angrier still by calling his dad’s phone over and over, even though it had been unobtainable for days now. He was furious that he had to do as Maccomo said, to avoid making him suspicious. He had to be sensible and keep out of trouble. If it hadn’t been for that, he would have been over the side in a second, no matter what the old bigot said. He was getting desperate for news.

  He didn’t feel like being sensible. He felt like doing something, running somewhere, punching someone, throwing something out the window.

  He looked at his phone.

  He looked up Cocky Slimy Git.

  Before he could stop himself, he’d pressed the button.

  Voice mail.

  “Hi, Rafi,” he said in an insolent way. “I hope my trip to the zoo amused you. And what a shame it is you haven’t called again. I’d be so interested to learn how you sleep at night—” And then he hung up quickly, because in his mind the sentence was continuing “you greasy bully slimeball . . .” and his purpose was not to make Rafi angry again. It was to put him off the scent.

  There. Done it.

  Charlie smiled dangerously.

  It worked—for about five minutes. The zoo, eh? thought Rafi, gliding along in the silver car. Which zoo, he wondered, and why?

  Then he thought: And why would he be telling me—calling me especially to tell me—that he’s been on a trip to the zoo? . . . Because he hasn’t!

  Here, for the moment, Rafi took a wrong turn. He wants me to think it was just a trip. He’s at a zoo now! He’s staying in a zoo!

  So he called his research villain, and as a result wasted another couple of days and quite a lot of money having him locate and visit all the zoos in the country reachable by water.

  CHAPTER 12

  After Rouen they had to slow down even more: The river was narrower and the water shallower, with islands and sandbars to negotiate. From time to time the Circe had to cross from one side of the river to the other to find the deep channel. Crossing was quite a palaver because all the other boats around had to know what the big ship was going to do, so the skipper would hang a large blue board out to starboard, with a flashing white light at its center, to warn them. When boats were planning to overtake one another they had to communicate that too. Charlie hung over the deck railings next to the figurehead trying to figure out if there was a pattern in all the hooting and tooting, but just when he thought he was getting it, Maccomo would call him in to do some job, or a sailor would tell him to get out of the way.

  Charlie had never been to France before and, between fretting, planning, stealing conversations with the lions, and all the extra jobs involved as Paris and the Show grew closer, he had time to admire it. A pale path followed much of the bank of the river, for horses to tow barges, with every now and then an emergency recharging point for electro-barges that hadn’t charged up properly overnight at the electric berths. The towpath was lined by tall straight trees, set as regular as soldiers, and beyond them lay wide, flat green fields, and occasionally a golden-gray farmhouse, with black-and-white cows, and apple trees. In the distance, Charlie could see the silvery towers of faraway towns, and the occasional gleaming line of a main road. The river itself was quite isolated and quiet and beautiful. From time to time he could sit and enjoy the calm movement of the ship after the bumpy sea passage and the speed of the race to Rouen, and feel the warmth of the sun on his cheek. All the while, he watched out for any cat who might be able to give him any information.

  The day they left Rouen, the locks started: Amfreville was the first, and it took two hours to maneuver Circe into the great chamber on the river, close the gates behind her, wait for the box to fill up with water beneath her, bringing her up to the level of the section of river they were moving on to. Char
lie had seen locks on canals before, small ones taking in the whole canal and operated by hand. This was something else: For a start, it only occupied a small amount of the river, which was busy erupting in rapids and little waterfalls all around. It was as if a section of canal had been built in the middle of the river, and when the Circe came out the other end of it she was higher up, beyond the rapids and waterfalls, and sailing along smoothly again, leaving all peril behind.

  “You’d never get a big boat up here without all this,” he observed.

  “Ah,” said Julius. “But the Seine was never as bad as the Ourcq.”

  “The what?” asked Charlie, intrigued. He liked to hear Julius explain things. He was amazed that such a young boy knew so much. Sometimes Julius gave him a look that seemed to say “I hope I’m not boring you.” Julius knew that not everybody was interested. It made him shy sometimes. But not with Charlie.

  “On the Ourcq—” began Julius.

  “Sorry, what is the Ourcq?” interrupted Charlie.

  Julius gave him a pitying look. “It’s one of the other rivers that goes to Paris,” he said. “And in the old days, the old, old days”—by which Charlie knew he meant not just before the gasoline ran out, but before the gasoline was discovered in the first place—“they brought wood and stone down it, from the countryside into Paris for building. It was a really quick wild river, and the boats just came hurtling down on the current, which was very, very fast, and then when they got to a weir they would just shoot over the top and plunge down into the waters below. So loads of people drowned, and half the boats were broken and wrecked, and even if they weren’t, when they got to Paris they were destroyed anyway, because there was no way back up.”

  Charlie gave a little shiver. Half of him found it quite exciting. The other half thought it sounded extremely scary.

  Each time they passed an electro-barge, tooting as they went (one long, one short definitely meant “I am going to overtake,” but one long and two short seemed to mean it too—he couldn’t get the hang of it), Charlie scoured the decks for a cat. No luck. Why were there so few? He saw one asleep under the trees, and one in the basket of a bicycle being ridden along the pale path under the trees, but none he could talk to. Then, approaching the lock at Notre Dame de la Garenne, they came upon a barge going their own way, towed by horse in the old-fashioned way. In the flurry of communications and negotiations involved in locking in and out, Charlie spotted the barge’s cat, a fat cheerful-looking tabby, coiled like a rope on the barge roof.

  “Excuse me, Monsieur Cat!” he called.

  “Mademoiselle Chatte, if you please,” replied the tabby, sticking her leg out and stretching it a bit, lazily.

  “Sorry, mademoiselle,” cried Charlie. “Look, could you come and talk to me a moment?”

  The cat, opening her sleepy eyes, realized she was being addressed by a human, and was so surprised that she rolled right off the roof and started to hiss.

  “Yes, I know, I’m very unusual, sorry,” said Charlie. “But please. Just for a moment, then we can drop you on the bank and you can regain your own boat later when it comes up. Please, come now, please.”

  The tabby gave him a very baleful stare, but her curiosity overcame her (cats are very curious, as you may know), and she was not too proud to leap from the roof to one of the circusship’s fenders, which she caught with her claws before easing herself elegantly over the side, with a grace that suggested it had been no effort whatsoever, and whoever thought it had been was simply rude.

  “And your point is?” she said.

  Charlie, with great courtesy and some charming compliments (because he had read somewhere that French people are gallant) explained that he desperately needed to hear if there was any talk or gossip on the canal about a pair of English humans, one black, one white, one male, one female, who had been stolen away and taken to Paris, in a submarine.

  “You look like a lady who would know everything that was worth knowing, mademoiselle,” he said suavely.

  “I look like a monsieur,” she replied. “You said so yourself.”

  “I was momentarily blinded,” he replied, which was a phrase he had heard his father use once when he mistook a cardinal in his fine scarlet robes for a beautiful lady in a red dress. “Confused by your glamour.” He seriously hoped that it was all right to say this sort of thing to a French canal cat. It had gone down fine with the cardinal, but you never can tell how those people you don’t know are going to take things.

  The cat laughed. (A cat’s laugh is quite something—especially a French one.)

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I do know everything. Are you the boy?”

  Charlie looked around. “I’m a boy,” he agreed cautiously.

  “But are you the boy?” the tabby asked again.

  “In what sense?” asked Charlie. He really didn’t know if he was the boy, from the cat’s point of view, and he didn’t want to claim to be some boy that he wasn’t.

  “The boy who has lost his parents and is following in search of them.”

  Ah. That boy.

  “Yes,” said Charlie, “I think I must be. I mean, I have lost my parents and I am following in search of them.”

  The cat looked at him with sympathy.

  “They are way ahead. They’ll be there tomorrow morning easily, I heard.”

  “Tomorrow morning!” Charlie wanted to swear, but he remembered his father telling him that one reason you shouldn’t swear is because then when you really needed a strong word to express a strong feeling, you would have none strong enough left. But tomorrow morning! If they were that far ahead, how could he ever find them in Paris? He was days behind them! Would the cats there know to keep track of them? How would he get any more news?

  Charlie was a brave boy and quite a tough one, tougher than he thought he was, but when he heard this bad news he sat down on a coil of rope and tears sprang to his eyes. In this moment of disappointment, thoughts that so far he had managed to keep away from himself began to sneak into his mind. Thoughts like “How are they feeling?” And “Are they worrying about me?” And “How could anyone ever have overpowered my great strong dad in the first place?” And “When will I see them again?” And even—“Will I see them again?”

  The deck was quiet because most people had gone in to eat, but even so he was not, not, not going to cry anywhere anyone might see him. He jumped up to rush into the ropelocker, but as he did so Mademoiselle Cat, in a sudden burst of pity, said: “Don’t worry—everybody is looking for them. Everybody will help you. Everyone knows the story.”

  Charlie looked up, blinking. “What story?” he asked.

  Mademoiselle Cat twitched her whiskers and said, “The story of your parents. Who they are.”

  “What is their story?” said Charlie. He had a sudden very strong feeling that this story might fill in the gaps for him—why they had been taken, by whom, maybe even where to. “Tell me,” he said urgently. “Tell me!”

  “If you don’t know,” said Mademoiselle Cat, “then maybe you are not the boy . . .” She looked doubtful rather than suspicious, but even so Charlie was now filled with a burning need to hear this story immediately. How could he find and rescue them if he didn’t know everything there was to know?

  “Tell me,” he said furiously. “I have to know. They’re my parents. What’s the story?”

  “I can’t say,” she said, quietly. “Just because . . . in case . . . but if you are you, don’t be afraid.” Before Charlie could stop her, she leaped swiftly from the deck of the circusship into the water.

  “Come back!” shouted Charlie, not caring now who saw him yelling in Cat from the deck. “Come back! Cats don’t swim! Come back!”

  But she didn’t. Charlie stared furiously after her, then furiously kicked a pile of coiled ropes, knocking them over and earning himself an earful from the sailor who had just coiled them up. Charlie didn’t even hear him. He was livid.

  If you’re you, don’t be afraid.
/>
  Well, of course he was he, and of course he was afraid: He’d just been told his parents would be in Paris long before him and he’d probably lose them, and there was some great mystery going on, about his mum and dad, which he, apparently, was the only person not to know, and now some blooming cat was suggesting that he wasn’t even himself.

  “Rats!” he shouted—which gave the cross sailor a shock, and sent him scurrying off, saying: “Where? Where? I’ll get my gun; I must tell the cook . . .”

  Charlie leaned over the side, scratching his head—it seemed ages ago that his mum had cut his hair, and his beautiful crocodiles were growing out already—and staring out over France. Gradually his anger slipped away, leaving only one question in his mind: Should he try to leave the circusboat and get to Paris quicker by some other means?

  It didn’t take long to realize that this idea was not a keeper. For a start, what other means? Unless he was intending to ride a tall silvery tree into Paris, he’d be walking, because the floating circus was the fastest craft on the canal, and there was nobody using the path at all—let alone anybody in a nice quick gas-powered car. And then—he had promised the lions, and he didn’t break promises, and even if he were the kind of person who did, he didn’t think breaking promises to lions could ever be a good idea. No, he’d just have to bite his lip and continue gliding up this wide and windy river.

  Charlie knew that worrying about something you can’t change is pointless, but he couldn’t stop himself. He was miserable about his parents. He didn’t think he could bear this delay.

  All the next few days, as he fetched and carried, swept and yanked, tipped out drugged water and filled it up with clean, he pondered the two questions: Lion Escape and Parental Mystery. Lion Escape was easier to think about, because it had some answers, and it didn’t make him want to cry. So he chatted innocently to everyone about the Show, and who would be where, and what happened when; and he wandered the ship, looking for ways on and off, for gangplanks and hatches that would give easy access to the shore.