The Case of the Exploding Loo (5 page)

“I told him to come round tonight,” Holly says, showing me the email.

“To our house?” I squeak. “Are you completely mad? He’s probably planning to murder us in our beds.”

“Then don’t go to bed. Come on, Know-All, this is important.”

“Have you read this note, Holly? Only after dark? No front doors? What is he? Some kind of vampire? Doesn’t this strike you as weird?”

“No weirder than exploding toilets and disappearing parents. Do you want to find Dad or not?”

“Of course I do.”

That doesn’t stop me screaming when I hear a bang later that night.

I jump straight out of bed – I don’t want to take any chances – and check my phone.

22:47

I’m not tired, probably because I’ve been napping every afternoon this week. Something about the combination of stress and Curry in a Hurry hot chocolate always knocks me out.

Wide awake now, I tiptoe across the landing to check on Holly. Her bedroom light is off but I can make out her silhouette against the window as she lifts the latch.

“Noooooo,” I yell.

But the dark figure pushes against the window and clambers over the sill. He moves towards me in the dark, lifting his right arm, brandishing a weapon. Without thinking, I rush at him and drive
him backwards, knocking him off balance so he stumbles into Holly’s open wardrobe. I shove his chest with a strength I didn’t know I had and slam the wardrobe doors. Fingers trembling,
I turn the key in the lock and trap him inside. My hands won’t stop shaking.

Holly flicks on the bedroom lights and stares at me, her mouth wide open.

The wardrobe doors rattle.

“He’s here,” I say. “The Porter guy is here.”

“Yeah. I got that.”

“He’s in your wardrobe.”

“Yeah, got that too.”

“I’m not sure what happened,” I confess. “I kept thinking about him murdering us in our beds, so when he raised his arm . . .”

“You barged him into my wardrobe!” Holly’s mouth twitches. “Impressive!”

“What now?” I ask as the wardrobe doors clatter.

“We’ll have to let him out at some point. Might be an idea to do it now, before he kills my clothes.”

Closing my eyes and taking a calming breath, I move closer to the wardrobe. “Er, hello?”

“Hello,” the wardrobe replies.

“I’m going to unlock the doors and on three I want you to throw out your weapon.”

“Weapon?”

“The weapon you were waving around as you climbed in the window. You ready? One . . . Two . . . Three . . .”

I open the right-hand wardrobe door, getting ready to slam it on his arm if necessary. “Throw!”

Crash!

Holly and I gaze at the ‘weapon’.

Holly giggles. “Beware the deadly water bottle!”

I unlatch the left-hand door, feeling flustered. “Okay. You can come out, slowly!”

The door creaks open. A face peers out from between Holly’s skinny jeans and glittery vest tops; a round, symmetrical face attached to a long neck, with skin the same creamy off-white
colour as our Armitage Shanks toilet.

“Hello.” Porter unfolds himself from the wardrobe and holds out his hand. “I’m Porter Lewis. Portaloo spotter.”

“Huh?”

“Like a train spotter. But with fewer trains and more portable toilets.” Porter’s ears turn red as we stare at him. He thrusts his hand in his back pocket.

“You watch . . . toilets?” I take a step back and wonder whether we should chuck him straight back out of the window. What sort of hobby is toilet-watching for a teenage boy?

“Only portaloos. And only empty ones. They are design classics. The simple lines of the exterior and the deceptively spacious interior . . .”

“That is one freaky hobby,” Holly narrows her eyes at Porter. “Although it does make you the best example, ever, for Know-All’s weird collection of people whose names
match what they do.”

Holly’s right. Porter Lewis the portaloo spotter beats Mr Payne the dentist
and
Lee King the plumber. Last week Holly tried to convince me she’d met Robin Banks the master
criminal, along with his assistant, Nick de Lotte, and his brother-in-law, Robin Holmes. As if I’d believe that! Okay, maybe I did. But only for a few minutes. Until Holly fell about
laughing.

What Holly doesn’t understand is that Nominative Determinism is a “thing”, with a Wikipedia page and everything. It’s a proper theory that suggests your name can affect
your job, your hobbies, even your character.

I think about names a lot. I believe there’s a reason Dad’s name sounds like “brain” and mine sounds like “Know-All”, just as I believe Mr and Mrs Lewis
decided their son’s fate when they christened him Porter.

“A portaloo spotter?” I repeat. “Does that mean you know about portaloo explosions?”

Porter nods.

“There have been two unexplained toilet blasts this year: an eruption in a portaloo at an Austrian Folk Festival and the explosion at Lindon Christmas market, where I happened to be
filming.”

Porter’s voice squeaks but I guess he’s feeling awkward talking to us about the day Dad disappeared. I may have to revisit my squeaking = lying theory.

“The Austrian investigators say toilet chemicals reacted badly with a dropped cigarette at the Folk Festival.” Porter frowns. “Why do people always blame the portaloo?
Don’t they realise portaloos are—”

“Can we stick to the point?” Holly asks. “Christmas market?”

“Right. Sorry. Got carried away. The portaloos at the Christmas market were Splendaloos. Those guys have been supplying portable toilets since 1984 and have approximately four thousand
nine hundred toilets for hire. That’s about the same number of toilets the Americans used when they first swore in Barack Obama as President. Americans have no respect for portaloos, you
know. Tens of thousands of portaloos in the US are set on fire, spray-painted or tipped over every month. Tens of thousands! That’s almost five per cent of all the toilets in use over there.
It’s shocking . . .”

“The point, Porter!”

“Sorry. But do you realise how much a new portaloo costs? Around five hundred pounds! Five hundred pounds! These toilets deserve our respect. It’s all in the name. Guess what they
call portaloos in the United States? Portapotties! I mean. Seriously? How can you give something the appreciation it deserves when you refer to it as a portapotty? If they only
knew—”

“Enough!” Holly yells. “Tell us about the Christmas market explosion.”

Porter reaches into his pocket and pulls out a computer memory stick. “Why don’t I show you instead?”

“Show us?” I stare at him, dry-mouthed. “You filmed the actual explosion? Give me that!”

I lunge at Porter and grab his arms. The memory stick flies through the air and lands in Holly’s sock drawer. What am I supposed to do now? I don’t want to hurt Porter, but I’m
holding on to him and I’ll look stupid if I just let go.

“I didn’t film it deliberately.” Porter uses his longer reach to grip my head and force me backwards, breaking my hold and trapping me at a distance.

“Ow!” he yells as I bend one of his fingers back.

“Sorry. It’s a move I learnt from an anti-bullying video on YouTube,” I explain.

“That’s cheating. You’re the one bullying me.” Porter sucks his injured finger. “All I was doing was filming the new Splendamini 3000, a mini-portaloo. It’s
an industry revolution. I didn’t realise— Oof!”

Holly wallops both of us in the ribs. We stagger apart.

“Enough!” she barks. “Porter, find that memory stick among my socks. Know-All, find us a place to watch it.”

I obey, but when she turns around I stick out my tongue. I turn and catch Porter doing the same.

I stomp across the landing, kicking no-longer-seasonal Christmas decorations out of the way as I lead Holly, Porter and Porter’s memory stick through the minefield of
tatty tinsel and rejected Christmas tree baubles to my room. My desktop is the only place we can watch Porter’s film now Fake Insurance Man has taken Dad’s hard drive and laptop.

I love my computer. I love all computers. My perfect world would contain no people – just me and a million computers. Dad would probably agree about the computers but he’d keep the
clever
people in his world. He used to say that if he ruled the country he’d banish everyone with an IQ below one hundred and twenty. Holly called him an intelligence fascist, but
Dad said he’d give them a chance to increase their IQ first, which is fair. Isn’t it?

Anyway, that’s how I got the idea for the brain ray.

Dad and I spent a lot of our free time together imagining intelligence-increasing devices. Our first idea was for a brain cap with electrodes that plunge into the key “intelligence”
areas of the brain, which studies suggest are:

We rejected the brain cap pretty quickly. Dad said it was because intelligence lies in the connections between areas of the brain, not in the areas themselves. But I suspect it
was because he knew we’d never convince anyone to let us drill into their skull.

My second idea was based on the fact that brains rely on electrical signals to communicate. I wondered if we could use electromagnetic energy to affect brain cells by creating an electromagnetic
field.

Dad liked the idea and we spent all our free time working on it.

The weird thing is I haven’t thought about it much since he vanished. With Dad gone, being clever no longer seems so important. Besides, we could never figure out how to get round the
dangerous side effects of electromagnetic radiation.

“Hello?” Holly waves a hand in front of my face.

“Sorry. Daydreaming.” I pull open my bedroom door.

Porter’s eyes widen to almost perfect circles as he spots my multi-screen computer. I’m glad people have eyelids. It is not nice to see so much eyeball. Why does nobody except Dad
understand that I need six monitors to see data the way it appears in my head?

“It was a birthday present,” I tell Porter’s eyeballs.

“I got a doll’s tea set that year,” Holly grumbles.

I don’t like the way Holly and Porter are looking at me.

“I didn’t tell Dad what to buy, did I? And watch out for Uranus,” I snap as Porter bumps his head on my Meccano planet. “It took months for me and Meccano Morris to
create an accurate-scale Meccano model of the solar system for our science project. The last thing I need is you causing space to collapse in on itself.”

I push Porter out of the way as the media player flickers into action. The film opens on the mini-portaloos. Porter has added a voiceover describing them. In detail.

I’m starting to wonder if anyone has ever literally died of boredom, when a man wanders into shot at the edge of the screen.

“Dad!” My hands scrabble in my bag for the scorched leather lace-ups. I lift them so they’re half covering my eyes.

“Don’t hide behind those stupid shoes.” Holly yanks at my arm. “We need to know what happened. What has Dad got in that bag?”

I lower the shoes, but Dad has already entered the toilet and all I see are closed doors.

A few minutes later, there’s movement at the far edge of the screen.

“Freeze!” I say. “Is that Dad’s portaloo? Why are you moving the camera in the wrong direction?”

“Sorry,” says Porter, backing away and head-butting Venus. “People get a bit funny if they think you’re filming them on the toilet.”

Fortunately, at that moment, the camera wobbles, giving a clearer view of Dad emerging from the portaloo.

“Where’s the bag, Holly? You said Dad was carrying a bag. I don’t see one.”

“Seriously? You’re obsessing over Dad’s bag?” Holly flicks Saturn at me. “Haven’t you noticed something slightly more important?”

I reattach Saturn’s rings. “Like what?”

“Like the fact that Dad, who is supposed to have spontaneously combusted in a portaloo, has just come out of the portaloo! Dur!” Holly grabs Dad’s shoe and hits me with it.
“You’re supposed to be the observant one. Look! Dad came out of the portaloo.”