ONE

      “This is exactly what happened to Liz and Lionel when Kismet went missing in her GAP year…”

      Finn’s grandma stood in front of the Departures gate, and fussed.

      “Grandma! He’s in the building. He’ll be here any minute,” said Finn.

      They were waiting for Uncle Al to turn up. He was supposed to be providing cover for Grandma while she took a well-earned break – flying to Oslo for a ‘knitting cruise’ around Scandinavia with another hundred or so grey-haired needlecraft enthusiasts.

      Al had promised to show up at Grandma’s the night before.

      Then Al had promised to meet them at the airport, first thing.

      Then Al had promised – just now, by phone – to meet them at the Departures gate.

      But Al… well, Al was Al, and nothing was certain, and Grandma’s way of coping with the distress her son caused her, from babe in arms to now, thirty-two years later, was to fill the world with a breathless stream of anxious chatter.

      “…Kismet their eldest with the tattoos they had to fly out to Kinshasa cost them five thousand pounds silly thing had lost her phone it was the not knowing if she was dead or alive you can’t imagine what that does to a parent – where is he? – I looked after their cat same bladder problems as Tiger…”

      “Last call for passenger Violet Allenby, Oslo flight 103, proceed immediately to gate 15,” announced the voice over the loudspeaker.

      “…John very helpfully ran me into Woking young vet from New Zealand lovely girl wet food and herbal treatment…”

      “Grandma! Please!”

      “I can always catch the next one…”

      “Noooo, Grandma!” Finn gyrated in frustration.

      “Infinity!” she snapped. “I am not moving an inch.”

      (Infinity. All Finn knew about his father – all he needed to know – was in his name. Who would name a child after a mathematical concept? “Exactly the sort of man you’d imagine,” Finn’s mother would say wistfully, claiming it had been all she could do to prevent him being named E=mc².)

      “Al is here! I’ll be fine!”

      “He is not! One thing you can rely on is that you can never rely on Al. He says he’s ‘in the building’, but that could mean anything. It could mean an imaginary building; it could mean a building on another continent, on another planet…”

      “Grandma, get on the plane!”

      “I have a duty of care. You are a child…”

      “I’m almost a teenager.”

      “…and if you really think, if he thinks, I’m going to abandon you to your fate in an airport full of germs, runaway trolleys and international terrorists…”

      And then, thank goodness, from around the corner, looking like he’d just rolled out of bed, walked Al.

      Six foot two and thin as a whip, part muscle, part bone, part wire, suede jacket and ancient cords worn to the point of oblivion, dark hair, darker eyes, designer glasses held together by tape, arm raised in surprised greeting as if he’d just wandered in and spotted them by chance.

      “Alan! Where on earth have you been?”

      “Ah…? I was in the middle of something.” He thought this would do. “Why are you still here?”

       Yap!

      On a lead by Al’s side bounced a delighted, knee-high mongrel (a kind of spaniel/hyperactive kangaroo cross, Finn always thought).

      “What are you doing with Yo-yo? You can’t bring dogs in here!”

      “I saw him tied him up outside. He was crying.”

      Officials across the concourse were already beginning to take notice.

      “Marvellous! Now we’ll all be arrested…” said Grandma.

      “We’ve got to get her out of here,” said Finn to Al.

      With that, Al scooped Grandma up like she was a toddler, gave her a kiss on the cheek and put her down again, pointing in the right direction.

      “For goodness’ sake, I’m sixty-three!”

      Finn wheeled her bag after her and together he and Al herded her through the Departures gate like a reluctant farm animal.

      “Have you spoken to Mrs Jennings? She’s agreed to check Finn in and out of school.”

      “Mrs Jennings and I speak all the time,” confirmed Al.

      “Go, Grandma!”

      “You’re lying!” she protested. “All the meals are in the freezer marked—”

      “All the meals are in the freezer, all the knives and forks are in the drawers, there are doors and windows that allow access to the dwelling place…” interrupted Al.

      “The keys!”

      “…the keys to which are in Finn’s pocket, which is a cloth appendage sewn into his trousers about so high. Go on, Mother! I can reheat lasagne and hold a high moral line for a week!”

      “That I doubt very much!”

      She was being urged through now by a red-faced airline official.

      “Love you, Grandma, have a great time!”

      “You too, darling, but do be careful. Al? Alan?”

      “I promise, he’ll be fine, go!”

      As Grandma finally disappeared through passport control, Finn fell to his knees in relief, Yo-yo licking his face.

      Al looked at Finn, puzzled, and said, “Did she say school?”

      Fifteen minutes later, Grandma was in the air, and Finn and Al were gunning it out of Heathrow and on to the M25 in Al’s 1969 silver grey De Tomaso Mangusta, the most extraordinary car ever hand-built in Italy, loud and low, a monster V8 coupe with perfect styling capable of 221bhp. Yo-yo howled and loved it. Finn adored it. Grandma thought the car ridiculous and a prime example of Al’s financial irresponsibility.

      “I’ve grown tired of pretty dresses and I can’t think of anything better to waste it on,” Al would tell her, something Finn knew was only partly true because more than once he’d found cheques from Al in Grandma’s handbag, and they seemed huge. For no matter how unconventionally Al behaved, people still seemed to want a piece of him – corporations in need of a technical fix, pharmaceutical companies looking to reconstitute molecules, governments stuck with insoluble nuclear waste. They all came to Al.

      He ran a small lab in the heart of London and was a ‘sort of scientist’: an atomic chemist with a wandering mind who found it difficult to fit into any one category – in science or life.

      He was the only person, or so he claimed, to have been fired from the staff of the Universities of Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the same term (for challenging the Standard Model of particle physics via the Tau Neutrino Paradox and for striking a right-wing economist with a steamed halibut during a buffet, respectively).

      Al