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The beginning of the summer was just like any summer before: incredibly boring. I guess it was nice to let my brain wake itself up instead of having to get out of bed at a specific time to get to school on time, but I still would rather be in school than waste so much time lazing around the house. My mother had put me in a few camps, and they alleviated the monotony to some degree, but the other children were so devastatingly stupid it was all I could do not to storm out of the building.
The weeks I wasn't in camp were even worse, since my only company was Connor. From age three, he'd been absolutely obsessed with trains, and he expected everyone else to share his passion. I didn't dare leave my room for any stretch of time out of fear he'd drag me into making yet another railroad. There were only so many possible configurations with a thirty piece set. Even worse was the constant noise, "Choo choo! All aboard!" The trains didn't even have room for people inside, they were solid wood. And there was no reason to take a train to travel ten feet across the room. Besides, where would a person the size of a grain of rice have to go in the first place?
I only got suckered into playing with him five times that summer, which was five too many for me. Most of them were my mother forcing me to appease him so he'd stop bothering her while she tried to do housework. I tried to make it fun for myself by staging massive crashes or inventing a mystery for Connor to solve a la Murder on the Orient Express. He didn't appreciate that. Maybe because I always casted him as the victim.
When I wasn't evading Connor, I was practicing my maths or reading a book. I was determined to enter seventh class as the smartest and best prepared kid in the entire school. Not that I was prone to forget anything once it was stored in my mental database, but I studied just to make sure everything stayed in the right place. Another reason was simply that it was something to do. I read all of Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and Edgar Allan Poe within the first three weeks of summer. I enjoyed the Tell-Tale Heart more than any of the others.
Often, I thought of Sebastian and how much fun he'd be having in the US. I feared he'd be enjoying himself so much that he'd forget to miss me as much as I was missing him. On the bright side, Martin made no successful attempts at contact. I hoped his parents had sent him to sleep-away camp or something that would keep him equally as occupied. I counted down the days until we left for London, and it seemed like an eternity before the exes on the calendar finally reached our departure date.
My family travelling anywhere was a recipe for disaster. Earlier, I explained how my mother took forever to get herself out of the house for an evening, and it took her exponentially longer to get the whole family ready for a week-long holiday. Each member of the family packed their own suitcase, but she took it upon herself to double check everything we planned to pack before we packed it, and triple check Connor's. There were also the endless additional bags and cases full of 'necessities' like snacks, games, and the like. Our flight was scheduled to leave at eight o'clock in the morning, meaning the wakeup call came at four o'clock sharp. The night before, Connor threw an hour-long tantrum that night because he had to go to bed early even though 'it's not even a school night!' I chuckled upon seeing him that morning, trudging around like a zombie. I hoped he regretted throwing such a fit, since his screaming kept me up too.
It was five thirty in the morning, half an hour before our ideal arrival time at the airport. My mother was a cyclone, frantically throwing things into the boot while jabbering instructions at anyone she passed. I glanced at my father and we both chuckled at her absurd antics. My father had a much more organised approach to leaving for a big trip: he set everything aside far in advance so he wouldn't have to rush to put it all together at the last minute.
Connor sat in the corner of the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal, tears silently streaming down his face as he'd just been shouted at by Mum for forgetting to pack knickers. I wandered around the house dodging my mother since I'd already packed everything the previous weekend. I hadn't seen her run so fast since Connor had attempted to eat his rattle and nearly choked when he was a baby.
After a hectic half an hour, my mother announced that everything was in order. We filed into the car and waited for her to mentally check her list three more times before pulling out into the street. We made it about three minutes before she shrieked that she'd forgotten her passport. We returned to the house, waited for her to fetch it, and set out again. This time, we made it five minutes before the gasped that she'd forgotten the book she planned to read on the flight. Yet again, my father reluctantly turned around and drove back to the house. She dashed into the house, grabbed the book, and returned looking even more flustered than I thought possible. We made it ten minutes before she exclaimed that she'd forgotten nappies. My father almost turned around before he realised we hadn't brought nappies on a trip in three years.
"Sorry, old habits die hard," my mother said. "I've forgotten nappies before, I guess in all the rush I forgot our youngest son is already seven years old."
"Just calm down, take a deep breath, and we'll actually make it to the airport," my father instructed. The drive to the airport was only a half hour, but Connor still managed to ask 'are we there yet?' twenty times. Running nearly an hour late, we dashed through the airport as if we were pursued. Connor nearly got lost when his hand slipped from my mother's grasp and he fell behind in the madness. Frankly, I was embarrassed to be a part of a family such as this. If I was in charge, we'd be calmly proceeding through security and would end up with half an hour to spare.
Unfortunately, I was a part of this family, a family with a mother who practically screamed at the luggage people to hurry the hell up, attempted to manually speed up the conveyor belt, and carried her son piggyback through the airport because he couldn't run fast enough. By some miracle, we made it onto the plane in time. My mother was dead asleep within five minutes of taking her seat, and Connor followed soon after. I'd packed a book in my carry-on, so I pulled it out and settled in to read as we took off for London.
~0~
The arrival was much calmer than the departure, since we didn't have any sort of deadline. Evidently, my mother didn't do well with deadlines. We checked into our hotel at noon, which was earlier than we'd expected to arrive. My father wanted to go somewhere exciting that afternoon, but my mother claimed she was too mentally and physically exhausted to do anything for the next eight hours, and Connor concurred, only in fewer words.
"I'll go somewhere with you, Dad," I said. It wouldn't do to waste so much time after all the struggle to get here.
"Where would you like to go?" he inquired.
"I don't know, I thought you and Mum knew all the places you wanted to take us."
"We do know where we want to go all together, but we didn't plan any excursions with just the two of us. You must know something about London, is there something in particular you'd like to visit?"
"Well, is the Tower of London on your agenda?"
"Yes, it is. We'll see that sometime this week, we didn't plan exactly day by day.
"How about the British Museum?"
"Perfect. We didn't think Connor would enjoy that, so we weren't planning to go together, but that sounds like the perfect afternoon activity for the two of us."
We said goodbye to my mother and Connor, both of whom looked ready for a twenty-four hour nap, and hailed a cab to the Museum. I'd been in taxis before, but never an authentic, London cab. I requested my father teach me to hail a cab sometime while we were here, and he promised he would.
We arrived at the museum, which, fortunately, wasn't overly crowded. I wasn't a big fan of manoeuvring around massive mobs of people and craning my neck to attempt to look at an exhibit over the heads of overenthusiastic tourists. The galleries were quite open, so we had free reign to look at whatever we pleased at our own pace. My father had been there on a few occasions in his youth, so he had a pretty definitive route on which he wished to take me.
We saw a bunch of old artefacts from Greece and Rome—most of which were boring chipped vases or sculptures of marginally famous people—Chinese pottery, and some stuff from the Mayans and Aztecs of Mexico. The most interesting object in the entire museum was the Rosetta Stone, whose plaque said it was the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. As I gazed at the intricate carvings, I imagined what it would have been like to be one of the people responsible for cracking the code of hieroglyphics. The elation they would have undoubtedly felt upon succeeding would have been unimaginable. It was difficult to fathom the countless hours they must have put into this project.
We stayed and explored the museum for about three hours before my father insisted we go back to check on my mother and Connor. I didn't want to admit it, but I was growing bored of looking at old stuff. He let me attempt to hail the taxi on the way home, and I actually succeeded on the third attempt. My short stature made it incredibly difficult to be noticed on the busy sidewalk, but some exaggerated jumping up and down did the trick.
A few minutes later, we arrived back at the room to find my mother and Connor still fast asleep. We decided to let them rest and just do some quiet activity until dinnertime, so I immediately buried myself in a book I'd brought. Knowing my mother and brother, I expected to have lots of down time when they were too exhausted to do anything else.
Just a note that Connor's love of trains is a reference to the original Doyle stories, where Moriarty's brother is said to be a station master. But his brother was also named James too, so I changed that to prevent confusion. Who in their right mind would name both of their sons James?