BANG!

The pomegranate becomes a red starburst and juice flows down the wall, crawling over the lumps in the plaster before pooling on the flagstones at my feet.

“Ha!” says Mr Chen at my side. “Ha!” And he dances a little jig.

“That,” I say, picking up a small disc from the floor and licking the juice from my fingers, “was magic, total magic! Best one ever.”

Bong!

Bong!

Bong!

Bong!

The clock on the church at the end of the row begins to strike midnight, the bell tolls, shaking through the walls of the old house.

Getting his breath back, and suddenly serious, Mr Chen leans forward and inspects the engine that fired the disc into the heart of the pomegranate. “Not magic, Athan boy, not magic. Not hocus-pocus or some god-fearing fairy dust. It was man that did it. We did it.” He taps his sleek white hair. “With our clever heads.”

“Yours more than mine,” I say, taking a cloth and mopping the juice from the stones. “You’re a genius, Mr Chen.”

Moving silently alongside me Mr Chen closes his soft hand gently around mine. “No, Athan boy, I’m not, and I couldn’t do it without you. Without your ideas. Your skill. You’re as good as I am, in your way.” He squeezes my arm. “Look how far we’ve come this past half a year.” He swings around, touching on the mechanisms we’ve built. The small ones and the large ones, the apple picker and the rat trap, the parasol and the carrot slicer, the lamps, the pumps and finally the engine itself. “Look at it all and have more faith in yourself.”

He coughs delicately into his handkerchief. “Now, before I send you home, I want to try something else. We can’t do this tomorrow. Tomorrow is Sunday, and you know how your mother and the God-fearers feel about Sunday. But tonight is still Saturday. Go and get the electric box down. It’s heavy and I can’t do it on my own.”

“Really?” I say, blinking away tiredness and feeling suddenly awake. “Are we going to try out the bird?”

“Not yet.” Mr Chen smiles, his eyes disappearing into the creases of his face. “We’ll try her another day. Early one morning, when the days begin to lengthen.”

“Oh.” I wipe the juice from my fingers on to my breeches and duck into the little passage that opens from the kitchen into the store. I’m trying to hide my disappointment. I know it’s the middle of the night but I had hoped.

I find a gap in the heavy velvet curtain and push through it to the heady smells on the other side.

Sulphur and ginger.

Oranges and vinegar.

Cinnamon and tar.

I love it in here. In another house it would be an ordinary larder, but nothing about Mr Chen is ordinary. Yes, there are nutmegs and cloves, pears and hams, but between the familiar packages there are strange brightly coloured bottles and boxes. Some marked with a skull and crossbones, others labelled with careful recipes.

While I’m pulling out a stool to stand on, he potters in behind me, humming and shuffling bottles around the shelves. Cobwebs catch in my hair as I climb but I reach out to the electric box sitting on the top shelf. It lurks blackly between a clear jar of vitriol and a box of raisins. It’s heavier than it looks and I have to slide it down my chin and chest to keep it steady and even then I can feel the liquid slopping inside.

A large spider walks from the box on to my arm and then off my elbow to the next shelf down. I daren’t brush it off; the box is too heavy.

“Here,” I say, passing the box to Mr Chen, watching his old fingers stretch downwards with the weight.

“Excellent, excellent,” he says, staggering from the store into the kitchen and thumping the box down on the table and lifting up the lid.

A sharp smell sneaks out and catches my throat, but the old man doesn’t seem to notice as he adds a clear liquid from a stoppered bottle. “We’re nearly ready to launch the bird, Athan, but where she is, we need a gale, and that gale must be from the north.” He stares into space. “Or perhaps we can come up with another way to make her move fast enough. That can be your task, Athan.” He beams at me. “Invent a launching machine for our bird.”

“Wheels? A horse?” I suggest, taking the bottle from him. “Or we could lug her up to Lansdown, point her downhill, get her off the ground like a kite. If we could run fast enough, you know, trailing her behind.”

Mr Chen laughs. “Perhaps.” He clears his throat. “Ideas worth consideration, my boy, but they depend on who or what is watching.” He fixes his gaze on mine. “We must take care of our bird. You have to understand that our flying machine could change the lives of thousands of people. Not all for the good.” He fiddles with the plates of metal inside the electric box.

“How do you mean? Surely flying would always be a good thing?”

“How,” he says, rearranging the insides of the electric box with a long pair of tweezers, “would you feel if your enemy came from the skies?”

“Like a seagull when it pinches your dinner?”

“Yes,” he laughs. “Like a seagull dropping its bombs, but with bombs made of tar and brimstone – setting fire to the rooftops. How would that be?”

“But we can keep our bird for good people, so that it could do good.”

“Exactly. And that’s why we must be careful who knows about it.”

I listen to the strange tune Mr Chen hums and I try to retain what he’s doing. Ever since he arrived like a kingfisher on a wet day last winter, with his boxes and bottles, colour and noise and laughter, I’ve been learning from him. No one’s ever managed to teach me anything before, but Mr Chen’s different. It’s as if he knows everything – the why of everything, the truth. He annoyed Grandma straight away by knowing more than she did, explaining things, demonstrating things, laughing at her superstitions.

She was furious. Crossed her arms and said he was a devil.

But the devil chose me. I climbed down from the rooftops right in front of him and he looked in my eyes and said, “You’ll do. You’re just what I need.”

From then on, he’s given me work and paid me well.

“Excellent,” mutters Mr Chen, and claps his hands lightly together. “Now, Athan boy – let us try again.”

“Can we try not to break anything of Ma’s this time?”

He shakes his head, remembering Ma’s fury last Tuesday when we destroyed the henhouse. I thought she was going to hit him, and she’s twice his size. “She has a fine tongue on her,” he laughs. “But nothing will go wrong this time, and if it does, we’ll give her some bananas,” he says. “Now, Athan, get me the big engine.”

I rummage in a cupboard and drag out a cluster of brass tubes set into a structure of wheels. It’s heavy, but not as heavy as it looks, as it’s mostly hollow. I set it on the table and unscrew the glass jar that acts as a tank, filling it only a little from a tarred barrel of clear liquid before screwing it back on top.

“Bananas,” says Mr Chen, bending a piece of wire, “are very special, just as science is special.” He slots the wire carefully into the tubes. “Today, science is also loud. Here, stick these in your ears.”

He hands me two scraps of wadding and we crouch behind the table.

And then he touches the wires together.

BANG

BANG

BANG

BANG

BANG

BANG

BANG

BANG

BANG

The engine keeps beating, banging and thudding and shaking with a mechanical pulse that makes my eyeballs hurt. Faster and faster and more and more evenly, it beats and purrs and then the explosions become so close, so small and regular that it turns into a hum.

“The fan!” He reaches for an elegant-shaped wooden blade and attempts to jam the stalk of it into a hole in the engine.

But the fan catches, rips itself from his hand and flies across the room, passing us and whirring out of the open window. It bounces once on the cobbles and disappears. I listen for the impact, pulling the wadding from my ears.

Crash!

Glass.

Our window.

Mr Chen peers short-sightedly through the sash at our shop opposite. Three panes on the large window on the front have shattered. Two dresses on mannequins stand open to the weather behind a glittering heap of glass.

“My precious bananas it is then,” he says, handing me a basket of yellow fruit. “And perhaps your kind uncle will be good enough to mend the breakages and send me the bill.”

“Goodnight, Mr Chen,” I answer. “Thank you for these.”

“Thank you for all your help.” He swings a pouch up from his belt and slips his hand inside. “Here.” He drops four gold coins into my hand.

“But you don’t owe...