Summer Night Dreams

by Alison May

  She swallows and flicks her eyes towards my dad. I knew it. She’s hiding something. ‘I don’t have much family.’

  ‘None at all?’

  She shakes her head, and laughs uneasily. ‘Just call me poor little orphan Tania.’

  My dad wraps an arm around her shoulder. ‘It doesn’t matter. We’re your family now, aren’t we Emily?’

  I nod, but I’m worried. No family at all. No friends. Whatever it is she’s hiding, it must be something big, and somehow I’ve got to find out what it is. Dad’s not used to dating. When I was little I once asked whether I’d get a new mummy, like Jodie Henderson at school got a new daddy. He laughed. He said I was the only girl in his life. He’s so trusting, and in four months, he’s going to marry a virtual stranger. It’s up to me to look after him now.

  Emily

  Dom has driven us to a business park on the outside of town. It’s Saturday so the place is all but deserted, with the exception of two other learner drivers pootling about the deserted roads and car parks. We swap seats, and I feel him watching me as I fiddle with the seat back and mirrors.

  ‘So I want you to pull out, drive along this street and then turn left.’ He points towards a turning about a hundred metres in front of us. ‘And then pull in somewhere round the corner.’

  ‘Okay.’ It feels a bit weird driving Dom’s car. It’s bigger than the standard driving instructor super-tiny, super-economical models, but I think I do all right. I pull in and stop around the corner.

  Dom grins. ‘Pretty good. Right. Shall we do some manoeuvres then?’

  I pull into an empty car park and, after a couple of misfires that I put down to it being a much bigger car than I’m used to, I successfully bay park in three different spaces of Dom’s choosing. I also manage to turn the car in the road using forward and reverse gears and make short work of reversing around a corner.

  ‘You’re pretty good.’

  ‘Thank you. I told you. I just need more practice.’

  Dom shrugs. ‘Do you though? I mean I know we’ve only done manoeuvres but you seem fine. Are you sure you wouldn’t be better off putting in for your test?’

  I shake my head. ‘I’m not ready to do it on my own yet. It’s different with an instructor. They’ve got the dual control thing, so it’s not all on me.’

  ‘But I don’t have dual control, and you’ve been fine today.’

  He’s right. I have. That’s Dom though. There’s something very safe about being with him.

  ‘Do you want to drive home?’

  I shake my head.

  That’s another good thing about Dom. He doesn’t push me. We swap seats again and I settle into the passenger side for the drive home, blocking my ears to Dom’s chuntering about what on earth I’ve done to his seat position and mirrors. I think I hear the term ‘long-armed midget’ under his breath.

  I like Dom driving us places. I like watching his hands on the wheel, while I sit back and let him take us where we’re going, all calm and in control. I snap myself out of the lull. There was another point to today, besides the driving lesson. Another chance for Dom to feel needed and a step towards finding out what secrets Tania’s hiding. ‘How do you research someone?’

  ‘What?’ He sounds confused by the question.

  ‘How do you find out about somebody? Like about their past?’

  He glances at me before flicking his eyes back to the road. ‘Someone historical?’

  ‘No. Someone still alive.’

  ‘Erm, well I presume you’ve tried Googling them?’

  ‘I didn’t find much.’

  ‘Okay. Have you tried local papers?’

  ‘I don’t think she’s from around here.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Tania.’

  His eyes flick towards me again, but he’s stuck concentrating on driving. Maybe I should have lied.

  ‘Why don’t you just ask her whatever you want to know?’

  Sometimes, for a very clever man, Dom can be really stupid. ‘Because she’s hiding something.’

  ‘What?’

  I sigh. ‘I don’t know, do I? She’s hiding it.’

  ‘Well, the history centre at the main library hold local papers for all over the place, so if you know where she’s from, you could try that.’

  Penzance. She said something about Penzance, but that’s still all I’ve really got to go on.

  ‘And some of the indexes of births and marriages are online now. I can send you the links Or you can look those up at the history centre too, at least for the Midlands and South West. You might have to pay though.’

  ‘That’s fine.’ It’ll be worth whatever it costs, if I can find out the truth and get Tania out of my dad’s life forever.

  Dominic

  Dominic dropped his girlfriend in town, as requested, and waited for her to disappear into the crowd before he pulled away. Should he have tried to discourage her from interfering? So far as he could see, Tania’s past was none of Emily’s business. He could imagine his mother’s horror at the idea of interfering in someone else’s relationship. It’s not my place ... that’s what she’d say. His ringing mobile interrupted his thoughts. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Dominic, it’s your mum.’

  ‘I can see that. Hold on.’ He pulled the car in at the side of the road and switched his phone off speaker. ‘Is everything okay?’

  He heard his mother sigh on the other end of the phone. ‘Well I don’t like to grumble.’

  Dominic closed his eyes and zoned out slightly as his mother launched into an extended anecdote about the mother of somebody who was in Dominic’s class at primary school, and had now apparently been caught shoplifting from the discount supermarket. Dominic couldn’t escape the impression that it was the cheapness of the produce stolen, rather than the actual shoplifting that his mother disapproved of. Tittle-tattle about strangers was much more his mother’s style than actual messy involvement in her loved ones’ day to day lives.

  His mind wandered. He didn’t remember the kid whose mother she was talking about, but he remembered the school vividly. The pictures in his mind of primary school were fiercely techni-coloured. The reds of bloodied knees. The fluorescent yellow of school dinner custard. The green of dinner ladies’ overalls. The blue of the big mats they hauled out across the hall at the start of PE. Secondary school was different. More austere. More ordered. The memories were calmer. They didn’t scream with life.

  He knew why he was thinking about school. It was both a missed opportunity for the future and a turning point in his past. Thousands of pounds, that they could ill afford, his parents had spent to send him to a fee-paying secondary school. Thousands of pounds worth of expectations now sat on his shoulders. Thousands of pounds that had led all the way to his full professorship. Thousands of pounds his mother would think were being thrown back in her face if he walked away now.

  Dominic forced his attention back to his mother’s voice on the end of the line.

  ‘Well I’ll let you get on,’ she muttered. ‘I know how busy you are.’

  ‘It’s not that bad.’

  She tutted away his disclaimer. ‘No. No. You’ve got to keep working hard. You always do. You’re your father’s son. No doubt about that.’

  No, thought Dominic, no doubt at all.

  Emily

  The house is quiet when I come in. At first I think there’s nobody home, but Tania’s sitting in the conservatory, still in her yoga gear with an old V-necked pullover of my dad’s over the top. There’s a pile of bridal magazines on the table, but she’s not looking at them. She’s sitting there, staring out at the garden. Friends close, enemies closer, I remind myself.

  ‘Hi! What are you up to?’

  She looks up when I speak; I think that’s the first time she’s noticed that she’s not alone. ‘Oh. Emily, when did you get in?’

  ‘Couple of minutes ago. Where’s Dad?’

  She turns her head away from me and stares out towards the garden. ‘
He had to go into work.’

  I sit down on one of the obligatory wicker conservatory chairs and pick a magazine up from the table. ‘He’s busy man.’ I put my best sympathetic face on. ‘It must make planning the wedding tricky.’

  She looks at the magazines in front of her. ‘It’s a lot to think about.’

  ‘Well why don’t I help you?’ I pull a notepad from under the magazine mountain and find a pen in my handbag. ‘What is there still to do?’

  ‘Why are you helping?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She narrows her eyes. ‘You don’t like me.’

  I don’t even miss a beat. ‘Of course I like you. I haven’t really had chance to get to know you. This will give me chance.’

  She gives me a tiny smile. ‘I thought you hated me.’

  Her voice is quivering. It must be hard, coming into someone else’s home like this. I shake my head. It’s not that I hate her. It’s that I have to protect my dad. It’s not personal. ‘Of course I don’t. So what have you already done?’

  She pulls her knees up in front of her, so she’s sat in a tightly coiled ball on the sofa. ‘Well I’ve got a venue, and I’ve ordered the invites.’

  ‘Excellent. What else do we need?’

  She slides her feet onto the floor and leans forward. ‘There was a checklist-thingy.’ She rummages through the magazines for a minute before pulling one to the top, and flicking to the centre pages. As promised, there is indeed a checklist-thingy: Everything You Need To Organise For The Perfect Wedding! It’s an eight page pull-out. Eight pages of things you, apparently, need to organise for the perfect wedding, most of which, it seems, should have been done months ago. I can see why she might be a teeny bit overwhelmed. ‘Wow.’ I skim through the magazine. ‘Apparently you’re supposed to have four separate outfits.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘One for getting ready in. One for the day. One for the evening, and one for going away.’

  Tania shakes her head. ‘I’m going to have one dress. I’ll wear it all day.’

  ‘Even to get ready?’

  She laughs. ‘I can do my make-up in my pyjamas I think.’

  I read on a bit. ‘No. You can’t. You can’t do your make-up at all. Somebody has to do it for you. In fact if we’ve got two and a half months to go, you should be having your first make-up trial in about three weeks.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’ve been doing my own make-up for forty-eight years.’

  Forty-eight. Yeah, right. And the rest. ‘Well you can’t for the wedding.’ I smile as sweetly as I can. ‘And we’ll need to sort out dresses. Have you thought about bridesmaids?’ I try to make my voice casual, like I’m not bothered about the answer, but she must have at least one old friend who she wants with her at the wedding, maybe even a sister.

  ‘Actually yes.’

  Bingo.

  ‘I talked to Theo about it. I’m not going to have hoards of bridesmaids, but I would like one.’

  Excellent. Just one. That must be her best friend.

  ‘Emily, I was hoping you’d be my bridesmaid.’

  What? My mouth goes dry. I’ve never been a bridesmaid before. When I was about seven I had a princess dressing-up dress, and I used to march up and down the garden grabbing handfuls of whatever plants I could reach, pretending to be a flower girl. I used to imagine that I had lots and lots of aunties and cousins and big sisters and that I was going to be a bridesmaid for all of them.

  ‘Emily?’

  Of course I should have been expecting this. She’s marrying my dad. She has to ask me, doesn’t she, to keep him happy. It doesn’t mean we’re friends.

  It’s good though. Well, not as good as her revealing that she has a sister who she’s kept hidden in a mental institution for the last forty years, since she was hideously scarred in a teenage fight after which Tania stole her identity and went on the run. But it’ll do. It gives me a perfect opportunity to snoop around Tania a bit more. ‘I’d be delighted.’

  She leans toward me. I let her hug me. If it wasn’t Tania, it would almost be nice.

  When she sits down, I pick up another of the bridal magazines. She’s turned some corners down in this one. I turn to the first marked page. It’s a picture of a dress. The model is young with loose blonde curls falling around her shoulders. The dress is one of those wafty, floaty numbers that women of a certain age think are ‘forgiving’ but actually you have to have the figure of a twelve-year old boy to carry off. I turn the corner back up. ‘You’ll be wanting something a bit more structured, won’t you?’

  She doesn’t answer.

  I let my eye run over her figure. It’s actually pretty incredible for her age. All the yoga must be having some effect, but still, she’s not twenty-five. I’m struck by the terrifying thought that she might look better than me, before I remember that there isn’t going to be a wedding. My dad’s going to come to his senses, and the whole situation will blow over. I flick a bit further through the magazine.

  ‘What’s going on here?’

  I didn’t hear Dad come in. Tania jumps out of her seat and practically launches herself at him. ‘Emily’s agreed to be my bridesmaid.’

  Dad smiles. ‘Wonderful, and wonderful to see you two getting on.’

  I smile back. ‘Of course we’re getting on. I’m going to help Tania plan the wedding.’ I keep smiling. ‘You’re so busy with work. We can hardly expect you to drop everything to pick buttonholes can we?’ I stand up and link my arm through Tania’s at his side. ‘You can leave everything to us.’

  Alex

  The click of Helen’s key in the lock was Alex’s signal to jump up and hit Play on the CD player in the corner of the living room. It was practically an antique, but given his landlady’s freakishly frugal lifestyle he decided to count himself lucky he wasn’t having to fire up the gramophone. The distinctive strains of ‘Eye of the Tiger’ blared out.

  ‘What the ...?’ Helen stood in the doorway and surveyed the scene in front of her. In addition to the music there were a few decorative changes to the room, most of which had involved Alex printing out motivational slogans from the internet and blu-tacking them to the walls. There was also the flip chart in pride of place in front of the fireplace.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  Alex considered answering and decided against. She’d find out next time she had to teach in the small seminar room off the main departmental corridor. ‘Come in. Come in.’ He ran forward and grabbed her hand, dragging her into the room.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘This is “Operation Get Helen That Job” headquarters!’

  She peered more closely around the room. ‘Why does it say “You’re all woman!” above the TV?’

  ‘It’s inspirational.’

  ‘How?’

  Alex shrugged. ‘It was on a website of inspirational sayings.’

  ‘But you’re not all woman.’

  He sighed. ‘It’s not aimed at me.’

  ‘What does “Be your own cheerleader” mean?’

  ‘It means that you’re allowed to big yourself up a bit.’

  Helen looked bemused.

  ‘That’s not really the point. Look. Sit down.’

  Helen did as she was instructed and took a seat on the couch.

  ‘As I was trying to explain, this is now the official headquarters for Operation Get Helen That Job.’ He turned over the first page of the flip chart to reveal a cartoon of Helen in full academic dress surrounded by the trappings of her new found wealth. There were dollar signs, and a bright red convertible. Across the bottom was another inspirational slogan: ‘Visualise your success.’

  ‘Did you draw that?’

  Alex nodded.

  Helen laughed. ‘You have too much free time. And I don’t really want a flash car.’

  ‘I know.’ Alex looked at the drawing. To be fair he might have done a better job of visualising Helen’s dreams if she had dreams that extended beyond buying a new cardi
gan. He handed Helen a pile of A4 papers. ‘Here we have job description, person specification and a copy of the job ad. The sections highlighted in yellow are where we have weaknesses to tackle.’

  He gave Helen a second to catch up on her reading. ‘You’ve highlighted outgoing.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘I’m outgoing.’

  ‘When’s the last time you went out?’ Helen opened her mouth. ‘Work doesn’t count.’

  ‘That isn’t what it means. It means your personality, for networking and stuff.’

  Alex nodded. ‘I know, and you are not a sociable animal. We need to work on that.’ He carried on talking before she could issue any further objections. ‘The situation is as follows ...’ He turned a page on the flip chart to reveal a sheet he’d written up in advance and talked her through the numbered points. ‘One – you need to earn more money. Two – you’re not prepared to move to a different area to do this, because of your ridiculous infatuation with Professor Collins. Three – that basically means you have to get this job, because if you don’t it’ll probably be another ten years before another one comes along. Do you concur?’

  Helen nodded mutely.

  ‘Good. Then we move onto the action plan.’ Alex turned to another prepared flip chart sheet. ‘In addition to the obvious stuff, like filling in the application form, there are four prongs to our approach. One – interview practice. Two – Dominic Collins. Three – the Community Dig weekend, and finally, four – what on earth are you going to wear?’

  ‘What about Dominic?’

  Alex sighed. So predictable. ‘You need to ask for his help.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘To put in a good word. You’re friends, aren’t you? You need to make the old boy’s network work for you.’