Not As We Know It Read Online Free Page B

Magical events. Did Leonard have magic in his fingertips?
    I told Ned about his appointment. He swore then, still whispering. He asked me to help him escape.
    “You’ve got to go, Ned,” I said. “It might be different this time.”
    I heard Ned grunt in the dark, then whisper again, maybe to me, maybe to Leonard, “And they might give me the moon on a stick.”

We went to London once. Mum says everyone should visit the capital even if it does take hours and hours crammed in Dad’s van. When we were there, she wanted us to go to all the museums and see dinosaur bones and paintings of old ladies. Dad just wanted to take photos of all the buildings made of Portland stone, cathedrals and banks and galleries. Even a palace. Ned said that the island must be almost hollow seeing as how so much of it is in London.
    Portland is like the holey cheese Mum gets when it’s on special offer. The one with the red wax. It’s full of holes. On Portland, if your dad’s not a fisherman, he’s a quarryman. Apart from Tibs’s dad, who runs the post office. And Lucy and Peewee’s. He’s a policeman.
The
policeman. Officer Taylor.
    Before a rockfall in the quarries, or a cave-in, rabbits escape the burrows. You can’t say “rabbit” on Portland. It’s bad luck. Granddad says it’s silly superstition and Dad calls it the “R-word,” like it’s a swear word. Ned loves to say it.
    Granddad does have his own superstitions. He tells us myths and legends and stories of why the world is the way it is. Sometimes I think he belongs to another age, one before cars and Walkmans and
Star Trek.
And I guess, like all old people, he does.
    —
    Ned had left with Mum and Dad, growling,
“Let’s get the hell out of here,”
before stomping through the door. Granddad came by a little later.
    When I’d fixed his tea and we were sitting at the kitchen table he said, “You got me thinking, Jamie. About mermaids.”
    He asked me if I remembered when we studied stars. Granddad’s stories often started like this. I didn’t wonder what stars had to do with mermaids. I knew we’d get there.
    In the summer, when we learned about stars, Granddad took us out at night to look at them—we didn’t need to go beyond our back garden. He taught us how Earth and the other planets moved, and we found Venus in the sky and the North Star and a host of constellations.
    I told Granddad I remembered.
    “You know all the constellations we
can
see,” Granddad said.
    I did know. I also knew what Granddad told me next, that there are lots of constellations we can’t see. They only appear in the southern half of the sky. People who see them can’t see our constellations. Orion never fires his bow across their sky.
    Granddad took a sip of tea, then continued, “There’s one called
Piscis Austrinus
—the Southern Fish. It peeks into our northern sky in autumn and winter. You can see just one star, Fomalhaut: a very important star if you want to find your way.
Fum al-hut
means the mouth of the fish. It’s Arabic.”
    Granddad told me to get him paper and a pencil. “Get your atlas too,” he called.
    Back at the table, he made seven big dots. He joined them up with bold, straight lines to make the outline of a fish.
“Piscis Austrinus,”
he said. “A very old constellation. The Greeks knew it. And the Egyptians. Goes all the way back to Babylonia.” He reached for the atlas and flicked through the pages. “Here,” Granddad said, and placed the thick book down in front of us. “Right, that’s Iraq here”—he traced the outline of a country with his finger—“and Syria there.” He traced another country. “This is where the Babylonian empire was. They had lots of gods, the Babylonians. One chief one was Atargatis. You got that?”
    I nodded at Granddad and mouthed, “At-ar-ga-tis.”
    “Atargatis was the mistress of her people. She was responsible for their protection, making sure they were well and healthy and prosperous.
    “But one day she