"The London Eye Mystery" by Siobhan Dowd, Chapters 1

You are sealed into one of the thirty-two capsules with the strangers who were next to you in the queue, and when they close the doors, the sound of the city is cut off.

abacus

From the top of the ride, Kat says London looks like toy-town and the cars on the roads below look like abacus beads going left and right and stopping and starting.

souvenir

We saw the people bunch up as the capsule came back down, facing northeast towards the automatic camera for the souvenir photograph.

vanish

Somewhere, somehow, in the thirty minutes of riding the Eye, in his sealed capsule, he had vanished off the face of the earth.

forecast

I was on Shreddie number three, and the radio weather forecast was saying it was set fair but with a risk of showers in the southeast.

revenge

And you’re so angry that society is treating you like this that you take drugs and shoplift and form gangs in revenge.

edible

I saw her holding it to her nose and sniffing it, as if it was edible.

devastate

Or Hurricane Katrina, a category-five storm which devastated New Orleans in 2005.

coincidence

(I am sure it is no coincidence that one of the most catastrophic storms of all time has the same name as my sister.)

hoard

I tried to find it so I could quote it word for word but Mum said it had probably been thrown out because our house is too small to hoard things.

curator

Salim and I are about to move to New York City, where I have been offered a job as an art curator.

elaborate

Aunt Gloria, she says, writes with much more elaborate words.

hectic

Life has been horribly hectic and the years have flown by like so many swallows in the sky.

fascinating

So it’s the Big Apple for us, a big exciting adventure in our fascinating voyage through life.

abolish

It was like the time I’d asked why footballers were still being kept as slaves when slavery had been abolished, after a newsreader announced that a Manchester United star had been bought by another club for twelve million pounds.

entitled

Mum said Kat would just have to lump it and it served her right for having skived off school, because a girl who skives isn’t entitled to make a fuss about sleeping on the couch for a night or two.

meditate

I’ll just take a deep breath every time she says something annoying and in my mind’s eye I’ll meditate on the shape of a teapot.

tsunami

I tried meditating on a teapot in my mind’s eye but all I saw was hot water spilling from the spout and coming straight at me like a scalding hot tsunami wave.

hilarity

Everyone laughed their heads off, which is not what literally happened but I like the idea of laughing heads becoming detached from bodies through extreme hilarity, so it is a good way to describe things.

nicotine

Trouble is, Ted, I’m totally hooked on nicotine and can take or leave bread.

writhe

Salim doubled over with groans and writhed like he had been poisoned.

global

Which meant I could talk about anticyclones and minor depressions but not major storm systems or global warming.

skewed

I’d also once heard a doctor say to Mum that my developmental path was skewed.

sieve

Mum says I have a brain like a sieve.

impressed

The tower was silver and tall and I could see Salim was impressed with London because he looked at the tall buildings with his eyes wide open and his mouth open.

silhouette

He reached the spot where the pod doors opened and closed and his silhouette gave us a last wave.

consignment

In my mind’s eye, Aunt Gloria turned into a motorist with driving goggles and a huge consignment of bananas in the back seat.

defy

He defied the law of gravity, Mum.

metaphor

Mum frowned as if I’d said something stupid; then her face cleared (which is what you say when someone’s been looking unhappy and then they suddenly cheer up, and I like this phrase because it is another weather metaphor.

decapitate

It is a puzzling fact that chickens can run around in a frenzy for some seconds after being decapitated, but I do not think they do this for a whole hour.

mobile

So Aunt Gloria did a), that is, she pressed and repressed the redial button on her mobile phone.

fetch

Kat fetched a china plate and arranged some chocolate fingers on it.

remorse

People think he murdered the nanny who was looking after his children and then threw himself off a cliff in remorse.

diagnose

Then my syndrome was diagnosed by the doctors.

inherit

I was about to explain how the next of kin inherits the property of people who have died and how perhaps this also applies to the property of people who have disappeared, when the doorbell rang.

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"The London Eye Mystery" by Siobhan Dowd, Chapters 1–10

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"The London Eye Mystery" by Siobhan Dowd, Chapters 1–10

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