Ways to Live Forever (11 page)

I slept late again next morning. When I woke up, Dad was there.

“Dad!” I said.

“What?” he said. He put on a serious face. “Aren’t I allowed to spend some time with my son?”

“Of course you are!” I said. I hugged him. He looked surprised, but pleased. He hugged me back. “What do you want to do?” he said.

We had a great morning. I didn’t want any proper breakfast so we had tinned peaches and ice cream and grapes, in bed. Mum had gone to see Granny, and Ella was at school. Dad had taken a whole day off work just to see me. We played Top Trumps and Risk in Mum and Dad’s bed and I won.

Mrs Willis didn’t come, but we did school. Dad told me the story of Loki, who stole Sif’s hair in the night and then had to go and ask the dwarfs to make her some more. I’d forgotten how good Dad is at telling stories. He does voices and everything.

After Dad told his story, I read him the bit from my book about going up the down-escalators. He liked it so much that I read him the bit with the Ouija board as well. And some of the lists.

“Where did you find all this stuff?” he said.

“From the Internet,” I said. “And books too. Mrs Willis brings books sometimes.”

He was pretty impressed, so I showed him my “Things To Do”.

“I’ve done nearly all of them,” I told him. He looked so surprised that I laughed. I told him all about it. He didn’t get upset. He just sat and listened.

“So there’s just airships and spaceships left?” he said.

“And being a scientist,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “Isn’t that what this is?” he said, tapping my folder.

I hadn’t thought of my book like that. Did all those arguments with Felix count as being a scientist? I wanted to ask Dad, but then Annie came round. She looked at the games and paper and books and breakfast things all over the bed, with Columbus curled up in the middle of them, and laughed.

“You look like you’re having a party!” she said.

She gave Dad some stronger tablets for me to take. It was a shame really because they made me so sleepy that I couldn’t stay awake. Dad didn’t mind. He let me stay in the big bed. I lay and watched him as he cleared away all the mess.

As he was about to go, I said, “Dad.”

He turned. “What?”

I looked at him, standing there in the door, with his book of Norse myths under his arm and his glasses all askew. “Nothing,” I said.

He looked at me. Then he came over to the bed and hugged me so tight I thought I was going to explode.

“Sleep well,” he said.

I did. I slept all afternoon. Except once I woke up and thought I heard Dad talking on the phone.

“Yes, I knew that. But aren’t there any other options?”

I thought he was talking to Dr Bill again. Then he said, “I wouldn’t want to interrupt filming.”

Filming?

“Yes, a short flight . . . No . . . No, really? Washing powder? . . . Well, it’s worth a try . . . Yes . . . Yes, thank you.”

He put the phone down. I lay there, wondering sleepily what was going on. Had I been dreaming? But I was so tired, it didn’t seem very important. I closed my eyes and fell asleep again.

Airship: A power-driven aircraft that is lighter than air.

Concise Oxford Dictionary
: Ninth Edition

Next morning, when Mum was getting Ella ready for school, the phone rang. Mum answered.

“Hello? . . .Yes . . .
Who
? . . . He said
what
?”

I rolled over in bed and craned round so I could peer through the open bedroom door.

“Daniel! I’ve got a man from a film company here. Says he talked to you yesterday!”

“Oh, yes. . .” Dad came through, still clutching a piece of toast. He took the phone from Mum, who gave him a funny look. “Hello? . . . Yes? . . . Yes.
Really?
That’s wonderful! . . . Hang on . . . four p.m., Legburthwaite . . . Yes . . . Yes. Thank you very much . . . Goodbye, now.”

He put the phone down. Mum and Ella were staring. So was I.

“What,” said Mum, “was that about?”

“Are you going to be in a film?” said Ella.

Dad laughed. “Of course I’m not going to be in a film,” he said. He rubbed his hands together, like the conjuror about to pull the rabbit out of a hat. “That was a man called Stanley Rhode. He’s doing some work for a company that’s filming an advert up on Helvellyn.”

“An
advert
?” said Mum.

Dad laughed again. “For washing powder,” he said. “Can you believe it? I think they’re going to spray the washing powder out from behind it and make some joke about clothes as clean as clouds.”

“
Daniel!
” said Mum. “What
are
you talking about? Spray washing powder out of
what
?”

“Oh.” Dad looked startled. “Didn’t I say? From an airship, of course.”

“From an
airship
?” I nearly fell out of bed. “Dad!”

Mum and Dad turned. “Oh, there you are,” said Dad. “Yes, I rang the British Airship Association yesterday, but they said you’d have to go to Germany or Italy to get passenger flights. So I explained the situation and they gave me this fellow’s number. He’s the pilot, and he says he can take us up today, after they—”

“
Today?
”

I couldn’t believe it. Was it some sort of joke? Dad was beaming round at everyone. Ella was hopping up and down, tugging on Dad’s arm.

“What’s happening?” she said. “Dad? Are we still going to school? Are we going to be on the telly?”

I scrambled out of bed and into the hall. “It’s even better than that,” I told her. “Just you wait and see.”

Some things are perfect, from start to finish.

That’s what going up in an airship was like.

We had to drive all day, nearly. It was very cold. There was a creamy white sky, with no clouds, and only the faint, silver disc of a sun. Most of the snow had gone and what was left clung in pale, frozen icebergs on the motorway verge. Me and Ella were buried under duvets and blankets in the back of the car.

The airship was in a big field under Helvellyn, all bustling with people and trucks and equipment. It was moored to a mobile boom truck, which is a sort of van with a boom on top of it, which can be attached to the front of the airship. There were about twenty people looking after it. We had to wait for ages while they did things like check the instruments and refuel the engines. Then Stanley and the co-pilot, Raoul, showed us the inside.

Most of an airship is the envelope, which is like a long, bean-shaped hot air balloon. All the bits that aren’t the envelope are in a cabin at the bottom called a gondola. There are engines at the back, a cabin with seats for passengers to sit, and a flight compartment, which is where the pilots sit. The flight compartment has two seats, lots of dials and meters and a wheel, which you use to steer. Stanley and Raoul let me and Ella sit in the pilot seats and they spent ages telling us what everything did. Then they made us go back to the passenger bit. We were the only passengers.

The third best thing about an airship is taking off. First you get the excitement as the engines begin to whirr. The noise gets louder and louder until suddenly the airship shoots almost straight up, so you’re pushed right back into your seat. It’s brilliant.

When the airship had levelled off, we were allowed to take off our seatbelts and move around. Stanley and Raoul let us go in the flight compartment while they were flying. Stanley let me hold the wheel and turn it right and left. So I have flown an airship! That was the second best thing.

Stanley told us all about how you become an airship pilot. He said he started out flying aeroplanes, but then he tried airships and he liked them better. You can look out of the windows at the ground in an airship and you can see all the birds flying past, rather than just zooming by them like planes do.

“Sometimes,” he said, “flocks of ducks overtake us, look back and laugh!”

The absolute best thing about the airship was what you saw out of the windows, though. You were allowed to open them and lean right out, so you got the wind blowing all in your face and in your hair. You could see everything really clearly, like a picture, all the tiny hills and mountains and lakes, drifting slowly past below you.

It felt very funny, looking out, because you were sort of separate from everything – you couldn’t talk to anyone down there or swim in the lakes or climb the hills – but at the same time you were still kind of part of it. It was as though you were looking at a picture, except you weren’t outside the frame. You were still there. You were just looking at it all from a different angle, from very far away.