The Secret of Excalibur

Holly winced, hands over her mouth. ‘Oh, no, no! I don’t know. Is it still gross? Not if it’s gross. Is it?’

‘Tell you what,’ Chase said, taking off his leather jacket, ‘why don’t you judge for yourself ?’ He rolled up his sleeve and held out his left forearm. Holly recoiled, then moved back for a closer look. A crooked, X-shaped scar ran almost from wrist to elbow, smaller lines of wounded skin branching out from it.

‘Does it hurt?’ she asked, one hand hovering above his arm, afraid to touch it.

‘It bloody did at the time!’ Chase assured her. ‘Smashed both the bones, had a great jagged spike three inches long sticking out right through the skin there.’ He pointed, Holly making a high-pitched Eeeeeeew! ‘They had to bolt it all back together with titanium. So I’m sort of bionic now. Freaks ’em out when I go through the scanners at airports.’

‘Edward, that’s terrible!’ cried Nan, looking appalled. ‘You poor thing! Does it still hurt? How long did it take to mend?’

‘It was in a cast for nearly two months,’ Nina told her.

‘Yeah,’ Chase added. ‘When it finally came off, I had one arm bigger than the other.’

‘Just like when you were fifteen and had all those magazines under your bed,’ said Elizabeth, with the air of someone who’d just scored an unbeatable point.

Chase held back a rude reply and turned instead to his grandmother. ‘It still hurts a bit sometimes, but it’s more or less fixed now. Had to be careful when I was training back up, though. Didn’t want to overdo things and have a bolt pop out through my arm.’

Holly remained fascinated by the scar. ‘So now you’re okay again . . . could you beat just about anyone in a fight?’

Chase nodded. ‘Why, got someone you want me to sort out?’

‘No, no!’ She paused, thinking. ‘Although there’s this absolute cow at school . . .’

‘Nah, I don’t hit girls,’ Chase told her. ‘Unless they’re a really, really bad person. But if you ever have any bloke trouble, just let me know and I’ll have words.’

‘Eddie,’ snapped Elizabeth, an angry warning.

‘So who could you beat?’ Holly asked, ignoring her. ‘Could you beat . . . Jason Bourne?’

Chase laughed mockingly. ‘Doddle. He’s CIA, he’s a spook. They’re all wimps.’

‘What about Jack Bauer?’

‘Hmm. Tougher, but . . . yeah. No problem.’

‘James Bond?’

‘Which one?’

‘Any of them.’

He pretended to consider it. ‘All of ’em except . . . Roger Moore,’ he said at last. ‘He’s the one I wouldn’t want to mess with. That eyebrow, I just can’t match it.’

Holly giggled. ‘You used to be in the SAS, right? Could you beat the SBS?’

‘Course I could. The SAS is the best fighting force in the world. No contest. Why?’

‘Because there’s a girl in my class whose big brother is in the SBS, and she says that he says that the SAS are just a bunch of gayers.’

‘Holly, don’t say things like that,’ Elizabeth chided, although she was clearly amused by Chase’s affronted expression.

‘I’m just saying what she said he said!’

‘Some SBS guy said that, did he?’ Chase growled, irked not so much by the insult as its source.

‘What’s the SBS?’ Nina asked.

‘Special Boat Service,’ Elizabeth told her. ‘They’re supposedly much tougher than the SAS.’

Chase scowled. ‘Oh, fu—’ His gaze flicked between his niece and his grandmother. ‘. . . sod the SBS.’

‘Fusod?’ Nina teased.

‘It’s . . . a military term.’

‘Oh, it is, huh?’

‘Well,’ said Elizabeth, pointing up the hill, ‘the SBS are based just up the road in Poole, so maybe you could go and challenge them to an arm-wrestling contest or something as pointlessly macho.’

‘Maybe I could,’ Chase replied scathingly. ‘ ’Cause that’s all serving your country’s about, being macho. I’m sure there’s all kinds of other worthwhile stuff I could have done instead in the last eighteen years. Any suggestions, Lizzie? I mean, with all your accomplishments . . .’

Recognising that the siblings were about to reach a critical mass and explode, Nina desperately tried to change the subject. ‘So, Holly, you, uh . . . like sending text messages, huh?’

To her astonishment, Holly didn’t consider the question to be as hopelessly lame an attempt at distraction as Chase and Elizabeth obviously did. ‘Oh, yeah! I mean, I prefer instant messaging, because who doesn’t? But Mum won’t let me on the computer much any more because I’ve got exams coming up, so I have to use texts, but my phone’s so old and rubbish.’ She held the offending item out as proof. To Nina, it looked a perfectly capable piece of technology, but she imagined someone half her age would have a very different idea of a good phone. ‘I mean, it doesn’t even have video! All my friends have better phones than me. It’s embarrassing.’

‘It’s just a phone, Holly,’ said Elizabeth, exasperated. ‘It makes calls, it does texts, that’s all you need. Anything else is just an expensive gimmick.’

‘But gimmicks are part of the fun, right?’ Chase said, winking at Holly. He pointed at a mobile phone shop up the street. ‘Tell you what, seeing as I didn’t bring you a present, how about I get you a new phone? Something flashy, with all the bells and whistles. Including video.’

Holly’s eyes widened. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah, course! Wouldn’t be much of an uncle if I couldn’t do something cool for my niece, would I?’ He led her towards the shop, looking back at Nina. ‘I’ll give you a call when we’re done, come and find you. Shouldn’t be too long, we’ll just get whatever’s the most expensive!’

Nan watched them go with an admiring smile. ‘He always was such a nice lad. It’s lovely to see him again. Don’t you think, Elizabeth?’

Elizabeth’s only answer was silence, but Nina didn’t need to hear any words to know that she could have quite happily killed Chase at that moment - and probably his fiancee as well. ‘So, ah,’ she said weakly, unable to endure her future sister-in-law’s thunderous glare any longer, ‘what’s the view like from that balloon?’

The view from five hundred feet up was actually quite impressive, Nina decided. The park below was a long finger of grass and trees with a small river running down its length, angling away to the glinting sea a quarter of a mile to the south. It was encircled by weaving, narrow roads - apparently the broad avenues and straight lines of Manhattan were anathema to English town planners. She could even see her hotel, a recently built octagon of pinkish stone overlooking the pier to the west of the park’s far end. The only blot on the landscape was a hulking glass-fronted block dominating the pier approach, a disused Imax cinema which, according to Nan’s ongoing and increasingly vitriolic tirade against it, had once been voted the ugliest building in England. Nina nodded and made ‘Uh-huh’ sounds at appropriate moments, though she had to concede that Chase’s grandmother did have a point.

But even that rant was preferable to the alternative. The view had done nothing to defuse the argument between Chase and his sister. And in the confines of the balloon’s gondola, there was no way to escape it.

‘I am so mad at you right now,’ Elizabeth hissed to Chase. Holly and Nan were at the opposite side of the gondola, just out of earshot, but Nina was an unwilling eavesdropper.

‘For fuck’s sake, Lizzie,’ Chase replied irritably. ‘I bought my niece a present. So fucking what?’

‘Because you didn’t ask me, and if you had bothered to ask me, I would have told you not to, because the last thing Holly needs right now is yet another distraction when she needs to concentrate on her schoolwork.’

‘Nan said she was doing fine. So did you. Sounds like she’s doing okay.’

‘I don’t want her to do “okay”! She can do so much better than “okay”, Eddie! But she’s a teenager, there are a million other things she’d rather be doing. It’s hard enough to get her to pay attention