Chapter 2 The Daytime Night
This is where the story really starts.
My name is Carl Thorpe and I am thirteen years old. I live in Eccles, in Greater Manchester with my mum and dad. Oh, and with my idiot sister Amber who is sixteen although she has a mental age of about five. I also have an older sister called May who is pretty cool, but she is away at university in Durham. She is twenty years old.
I like maps, black cherry yoghurt and old telly. I have never really seen the point of music which Amber seems to think is weird, but then she has pictures of JLS and The Wanted on her wall which I think is weirder still.
I was on the winning team for the Year 7 local schools road safety quiz. I say team, I answered most of the questions although Manisha Bhatnagar got one right about the colour of cat's eyes on a motorway slip road (they're green, which I knew, but she answered it correctly and therefore deserves the credit).
I have an on/off girlfriend called Debbie Anson but at the moment it is 'off' so I don't really want to talk about it.
My Twitter name is @MightyThorpe and although I have a Facebook page I don't use it that often so it's probably not worth trying to 'friend' me.
That's all the recent stuff, anyway. No doubt more bits about me will come out in due course.
I do not believe in destiny or fate. I think we are all responsible for our own actions and this world is what we make of it. So it was a bit of a shock to find out one day that fate had chosen me to become its champion.
Once a month, after my dad's payday, he takes my mum out for a meal (I suspect it's an implicit criticism of her cooking but I have no concrete proof of this) and they go out for drink or a film or a concert or some combination of each. This started about three years ago when both decided that it was important for them to make time 'for each other'. As a result, one Saturday every four weeks is a write-off and there is no point me or my sister making any plans. When it first started, Amber was effectively baby-sitting me but even though now I am older and wiser I am still not allowed to go out by myself of a night-time. Since that means Amber can't go out either (which is ridiculous. I can understand them not wanting to let me go out by myself but to not stay in by myself either? It's not like I have a record of burning houses down or a crushing inability to use a phone) the net result is that the resentment and frustration we generally feel toward one another is brought into sharp focus every time the moon is full.
I mention the moon because that's what I thought it was at first. I quite often leave my bedroom curtains open at night. I'm not in the habit of parading around in the altogether and there's nothing worth stealing in there so I don't feel any great desire for privacy. I'm the same with doors – I'll often leave them open. I don't like cutting myself off, which has often puzzled me because I'm not one for company. Someone who likes to be alone but not enclosed, a sort of an anti-hermit. Better still when there isn't a cloud in the sky and the my room backs onto the whole of outer space. That's when the moonlight's at its best, sometimes it's almost bright enough to read by. So it makes sense that when daylight suddenly, inexplicably, started streaming into my bedroom I thought the moon was responsible. It took a second for my brain to discard that as wholly inadequate and to wrap itself around the undeniable – if impossible – evidence that this was 100% genuine daylight.
My mum still chuckles when she hears the 'Big Ben' chime that she chose for our doorbell every time it goes off. It makes me cringe, and not just because I think it sounds a bit naff. It affects me physically, like the specific pain you get from chewing a foil chewing gum wrapper with your filling. Considering I was already weirded out from the light outside hearing that hideous sound from the door on a night when I wouldn't have expected any visitors was made me faint. I don't mind admitting that. It was only a second, everything went dizzy and I had to sit on my bed, but it was real, I'm not overreacting and if you're reading this Mum perhaps you'll believe me now when I say it makes me sick and take it out.
Amber called up from the living room.
'Carl! Go and see who's at the door.'
'You're downstairs – you go!' That's logical, isn't it? She's the nearest. But from the conviction in her voice I could tell that she honestly believed that the next three syllables she uttered were enough to excuse her from any and all tasks that night.
'X Factor.'
No word of explanation, no statement of intent or attempt to reason. This was her 'Get Out of Jail Free' card. It was more of an effort arguing with her rather than just doing it myself so I hurried downstairs to the door in the hope of getting there before whoever it was rang again.
I yanked the door open, determined to beat the caller to it. There he stood, the man I was telling you about in the first chapter. He was dressed in the clothes of an Italian nobleman from the time of the Renaissance as I later found out. That's what made me think of the Jack of Clubs. It wasn't as if he was in fancy dress - the material, the way his clothes looked , the way he was completely comfortable in them. This was what he would normally wear. He was stood there, framed in the doorway, lit by the what I could now see was definitely the light of the sun. At nine o'clock on a Saturday night.
I was still woozy from my faint and my head was spinning with a dozen questions but no real idea of who was the best person to pose them to. So I ignored all the complicated ones and plumped for a simple one that popped onto my tongue without bidding.
'Can I help you at all?' I didn't have anything to back this up with, I was just being polite. I thought that was the sort of thing you said when you opened the door to a stranger. I didn't know at this point that the our visitor was just as dizzy as I was and he seized upon my words as if it was something he'd been longing to hear for his whole life.
'Yes!' he cried in English. I mean, at this point I didn't know that he was Italian, but in retrospect it's odd that he spoke in perfect English. 'Yes, you can help me. Are you Carl Thorpe, second-born of Nicola Thorpe?'
The questions in my head continued to multiply, fritzing my senses enough that I wasn't sharp enough to do anything other than answer completely truthfully.
'Yes. Yes, I am.'
He fell to his knees. 'Thank goodness it's you! I've succeeded! I have found you! I have found the most important person in the world!'
Again, I was too dazed to do anything except answer him truthfully: 'Yes you have.'
It was at that point that I fainted properly.
And no, there's nothing wrong with that.
More soonliest.
Utterly gutted to realise @MightyThorpe doesn't actually exist on Twitter.
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