Molly gripped the back of Micky’s seat. Miss Hunroe’s driving, along with her rose-scented perfume, was making Molly feel sick. She hoped she wouldn’t be. That would really spoil the day, she thought, if she was sick all over the leather seats of Miss Hunroe’s car.
“Interesting way of driving,” Micky commented dryly, looking up from his crossword puzzle book as, yet again, Miss Hunroe flipped her coin and started to flash at the van in front.
“It keeps me amused,” Miss Hunroe replied. “I like to see the law of odds in action. There’s a fifty-fifty chance that I should or shouldn’t pass, yet somehow this coin always lands on what I’ve guessed it will land on. So I always pass! It’s as if the coin wants to get back to London as quickly as possible!”
And so on they drove, as if in some sort of a race, upsetting the other traffic on the road, causing other drivers to raise fists and blast their horns. Molly stared at the straight road ahead, as she knew that an eye on the horizon would help her carsick feeling. She watched a cat-shaped cloud turn into the shape of a dragon and kept watching the clouds until her stomach felt better. Every so often Micky began a conversation with Miss Hunroe. These went something like, “Butanoic acid. Miss Hunroe, isn’t that the name of the colorless liquid that causes that nasty rancid smell in butter?” or “That word cache. Miss Hunroe, do you spell it like that? Does it mean ‘a secret place where a store of things is kept hidden’?” Then, when Micky had moved on to his special book of riddles, he started to test Miss Hunroe.
“The beginning of Eternity,
The end of time and space,
The beginning of every end,
And the end of every place. What am I?
“Shall I tell you, Miss Hunroe? The answer’s E. The letter E. Clever, eh?”
“Sorry, dear, I can’t talk. I’m driving,” was usually Miss Hunroe’s answer to whatever question or riddle Micky threw at her, and so he went on with his puzzles alone, or he looked out of the window or craned his neck to talk to Molly or consulted his compass to see in what direction they were heading.
AH2 drove behind, in his sleek black car, keeping his distance. His locator box was switched on, so that however crazily the emerald green sports car drove, he could always tell where the alien girl, Molly Moon, was. He sucked on cool mints and listened to space-age ambient music that twanged and tocked, reminding him, he thought, of the size of the universe. He wondered how far away Molly Moon’s planet was. And he thrilled to think that soon he would meet a real, living extraterrestrial.
Finally the countryside gave way to concrete and brick, and soon he was driving on an overpass, past a glass-and-steel office building onto the main drag into London.
“Ah, the smoke!” Miss Hunroe gasped. “Culture and art! Heaven! Nearly in! Kensington and Chelsea soon! And the weather doesn’t seem to be bad at all!”
Both sides of the road now became punctuated with black taxis with their famous old-fashioned curvy design. Big red double-decker buses chugged past. Some were open-ended at the back so that people could jump on and off at traffic lights. And quicker than Molly had expected, they came to their destination. As the car drove alongside the tall iron railings of a giant Victorian building with four gothic towers spread out on its top, Miss Huroe announced, “So here we are! The natural history museum! This is where lessons start.” She swerved the car into a DIPLOMATS ONLY parking space.
“What’s a diplomat?” Molly asked.
“It’s a special person,” said Micky, “who works for the government of a country. Their job is to go and live in another country, where they sort out stuff for the people of their own country in that other country, if you see what I mean.” Then he looked at Miss Hunroe as though through a magnifying glass. “You’re not a diplomat, are you, Miss Hunroe?”
“Oh, no!” Miss Hunroe answered, adjusting her wavy blond hair and turning the car’s driving mirror to put on her red lipstick.
“Um…then won’t you get a ticket?” Molly asked.
“Definitely not. I’ve made arrangements,” declared their new tutor mischievously, tapping a pass of some sort that was slotted into a plastic holder in the windshield.
They all got out. Molly’s legs felt very stiff when she stood up straight. She shook them out.
The previous day, Molly had been sitting in one of the attic rooms of Briersville Park, on a wide window ledge with her legs pulled up to her chin. Rocky, the boy who she’d grown up with in the Briersville orphanage, Hardwick House, had been leaning against the wall while Micky sat in a red armchair, with Petula, their black pet pug, at his feet. He’d been scouring the papers for interesting news and reading out bits from a book of riddles to Molly and Rocky. A fire crackled in the hearth. They were all in dry clothes, having gotten back inside from spending all afternoon with Amrit, their pet elephant, who loved to play in the pool.
Molly remembered how ill Rocky had looked. How he had flopped down in the furry chair and pulled a cushion on top of him. His brown skin appeared grayer. He looked like he was catching the flu, the same flu that Ojas, their Indian friend, had caught. It was then that the phone had rung. Molly had picked it up. It was Lucy Logan.
“Hello, Molly, it’s me.”
“Oh, hi, Lucy.” Molly couldn’t quite bring herself to call Lucy Logan “Mum” even though she was her mum. She was of course Micky’s mum, too, and Rocky and Ojas’s adopted mum, but all of them called her Lucy. She had been away with Ojas and Primo for a night in Yorkshire.
“How are things?”
“Fine. Well, sort of. Rocky’s ill. Is Ojas better?”
“Not really, and now your dad…erm…Primo’s feeling bad, too. We’ll be back tonight but, annoyingly, after dinner. The weather is shocking. It’s as if there’s been a freak storm. We’re in a terrible traffic jam. Apparently a huge truck full of milk skidded and turned over. It’s completely blocked the motorway.”
“Well, you know what they say,” Molly replied. “Don’t cry over spilled milk!”
Lucy laughed down the phone.
“Well, we won’t, but it is a bit boring. We could practically walk back quicker. But listen, don’t forget, the new tutor is coming for supper tonight. Be polite. Show her around. And we got the elephant chair….”
In the background, Molly could hear Ojas’s voice. “The howdah,” he corrected Lucy.
“Yes, the howdah. We think it will fit Amrit perfectly.”
When Molly put down the phone, Micky glanced up from the papers. “Says here there’s a flu epidemic happening.” He wrinkled his nose crossly. “Wish I’d remembered to pack some medicine before I left the twenty-sixth century.”
“Wish you had,” Rocky moaned. “I bet there was brilliant medicine there.”
“Sure was,” Micky agreed. “They have a cure for practically everything in five hundred years. Suppose we could always nip forward and get some pills. Fancy a quick trip, Molly?”
This may seem a strange way for someone to talk, as if they came from the future, but in Micky’s case, it wasn’t. For Micky did in fact come from the future.
“I’d love to take you, but Primo and Lucy say I’m not allowed,” Molly replied. “I told you, they’ve confiscated my time-travel crystals and my time-stopping crystals. Can you believe it?”
This also may seem like an odd thing to say. But in Molly’s case it was entirely apt.