Felix and I get a bus towards Battersea. Travelling past Westminster Bridge, looking out across the Thames, I see the familiar shapes of Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, and the London Eye. There are new buildings too, changing the skyline I once knew. Twisty columns of steel and stone denote a Parthenon-style building on the south bank. A distinctive conical skyscraper dominates the horizon to the east, and huge curved flood barriers encase both riverbanks. London, old and new, ever evolving, but also somehow intrinsically the same.
Felix pulls a small notebook out of his backpack and hands it to me.
‘What’s this?’
‘It’s a logbook. When you go on an expedition, you need to log everything.’
‘Right.’
‘If you’re on an expedition and an incident occurs, like someone falls over and cuts their knee or if there’s a shark attack, you need to make a log of it.’
‘Okay, I’ll keep a lookout for sharks.’
‘There aren’t going to be any sharks in London, Mummy.’
‘How did you get out of school this afternoon, Felix?’
He looks sheepish for a moment, picking at a thread on the bus seat in front of him.
‘There’s a gap in the fence in the playground. You can squeeze out if you really want to.’
‘And you walked all the way to the station, on your own? That’s incredibly dangerous. Promise me you’ll never do that again.’
‘I took my whistle,’ he says, showing me a small red whistle around his neck.
‘What’s the whistle going to do?’
‘ “If anyone tries to steal you, blow your whistle,” – that’s what you told me, when we went to that music festival.’ He pauses to inspect his whistle for a moment. ‘Do you think you would die if you swallowed a whistle?’
‘I don’t think you’d die. No.’
‘What about two whistles?’
‘I don’t know, Felix.’
‘How many whistles do you think you could swallow and not die?’
‘If it got stuck in your windpipe you might die, but . . . why do we need to know the answer to this? Just don’t swallow any whistles.’
As we get off the bus at Battersea Arches, a teenage boy on a hovering scooter flies along the pavement and nearly crashes into us. Grabbing hold of Felix, I swing him out of the way just in time, then turn to yell, ‘Watch it, you fucking idiot!’ at the teenager, who doesn’t even turn to give us a backwards glance. Felix looks up at me, his eyes shining with admiration.
‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,’ I tell him, biting my lip. ‘That’s a horrible word.’
‘That was an incident,’ says Felix.
‘Was it?’
‘Definitely.’ Felix takes out the logbook. ‘Can you write it because my writing’s too big? Write the time and then write “Man on scooter nearly crashes into us. Mummy tells him he’s a fucking idiot.” ’
‘I don’t think we need to write the specifics of who said what.’
Having located the old rail arches, we wander around looking for a flower stall or a brown door. The place looks uninhabited: boarded-up shops, graffitied walls and abandoned shopping trolleys. I’m starting to think Crouch Pouch, or whatever his name was, might have been having us on.
‘You look lost,’ says a huge man with an impressive array of body tattoos, working on an upturned motorbike outside a repair shop.
‘We’re looking for Arcade Dave,’ Felix says, giving the man a slow wink. The man gives Felix a cold, hard stare, and I’m worried we might be about to put that whistle swallowing conundrum to the test. But then the man nods over to his left. ‘Up there, past the flower stall.’
Following his directions, we find a small stall selling a few wilting tulips, and just as Crouch Pouch promised, a brown door with a dusty sign that says, ‘Dave’s Depot’.
‘This is it!’ Felix says, pushing open the creaking door. On the other side is a metal grate leading to a rusty spiral staircase, heading down into the bowels of London. Felix runs ahead, fearless, and each of his steps echoes with a metallic clack throughout the windowless, brick cavern.
‘It’s a bit dark,’ I say, nervously following Felix down the winding staircase. ‘Maybe we should wait.’ Suddenly, this all seems like a bad idea. What if that website was really a people trafficking site, and we’ve been lured here under false pretences? What if I get Felix kidnapped? Or me kidnapped, for that matter? Just as I’m about to suggest we turn back, Felix shouts, ‘It’s here!’ from further below me on the staircase. Hurrying down the final few spirals, I come out on solid ground to see a second set of huge brick rail arches, built beneath the ones at ground level. The cavernous, curved space in front of us is jam-packed with old arcade games and dusty fairground curiosities. It’s an awesome sight, like discovering Tutankhamun’s tomb (if Tutankhamun had been around in the eighties and obsessed with video games). I pause for a moment to absorb the sheer unexpected spectacle of the place.
‘It’s going to be here,’ says Felix, running towards the jumbled aisles of ancient technology.
‘Hello?’ I call out, worried we might be in trouble for wandering down here uninvited, then remembering the guy from the forum’s warning that Arcade Dave ‘could be a bit of a funny fella’. What does that mean, that he’s a com-edian or that he’s a psychopath?
A man in filthy overalls with a messy, auburn moustache, stands up from behind an old PacMan machine, eyeing us suspiciously.
‘Arcade Dave?’ I ask, furnishing him with the best please-don’t-be-a-psychopath smile I can muster.
‘Who’s asking?’ he says.
‘I’m Lucy and this is Felix. Crouch Pouch sent us.’
‘It wasn’t Crouch Pouch, Mummy, it was Crock Pouch,’ says Felix, his eyes darting nervously to Arcade Dave.
I imagine this name is going to act as a Masonic handshake in this underground lair, but Arcade Dave simply says, ‘Don’t know ’im,’ and gets back to work on his machine.
Felix, undeterred, strides over to him.
‘We’re looking for a wishing machine, it’s like a million years old.’
‘It’s not a million years old,’ I clarify, ‘it’s probably from the seventies or eighties, maybe the fifties. Definitely twentieth century.’
‘What does it look like?’ Dave asks, wiping his nose with an oily rag.
He listens attentively as I tell him everything I can remember, then beckons us to follow him. Felix bounces along behind, unable to contain his excitement. He turns around and mouths to me, ‘He has it!’
Dave leads us to a machine covered in a sheet, and I brace myself as he reaches to unveil it. What if this really is it? But when he pulls off the dust sheet, he reveals a square glass case with a scary-looking genie holding a giant crystal ball. Felix looks at me expectantly, though he knows I never mentioned a genie. I shake my head. ‘No, that’s not it.’
‘Ain’t seen anything else like you’re saying,’ Arcade Dave tells us, shaking his head. ‘Collectors, are you?’