Second Fiddle

by Siobhán Parkinson

  “No,” said Gillian, wistfully. “Nothing as interesting as that.”

  “My father’s dead,” I said.

  I hadn’t told many people. It was hard to say, but this seemed a good moment to drop it in. I don’t like telling people, but you have to mention it sooner or later, before someone says something really embarrassing.

  “Oh—my—God!” said Gillian. Her hand flew to her mouth. “I’m … I didn’t mean.… Oh!”

  “It’s all right,” I said, not meaning, of course, that it was all right that he was dead, but that it was all right for Gillian to have gone on about her own father. I was glad all the same that I was lying back, staring at the top of the tunnel. It meant I didn’t have to look Gillian in the eyes.

  “Do you…?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course I do.”

  “How did you know what I was going to say?”

  I shrugged. What else was there to ask, except whether I missed him?

  “I think we should get out,” I said. “I’m starting to hyperventilate in here.”

  “OK,” said Gillian, “only you have to go first. Last in, first out. Seeing as it’s a cul-de-sac.”

  She pronounced the last three words in a French accent.

  “Cul-de-sac is not the French for ‘cul-de-sac,’” I said.

  “Of course it is,” said Gillian. She has this very adamant way of going on sometimes, just because she’s older.

  “No, it’s not, it’s ‘blind alley.’”

  “It can’t be,” said Gillian. “‘Blind alley’ is English.”

  “I mean, the French for ‘blind alley’ is what the French call a ‘cul-de-sac,’” I said. “They never say ‘cul-de-sac.’ My father told me.”

  That was true, but I said it to finish the argument. I knew Gillian wouldn’t contradict a dead parent. Not even she would be that insensitive. I suppose I shouldn’t use my dead dad like that, to score points, but you have to have some compensation.

  I crawled backward out of the tunnel. There were bits of greenery in my hair and it felt as if there were ants running down under my collar. I scratched my scalp as I stood up.

  Gillian came out bottom first. She was wearing more suitable clothes for the woods today: jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. She didn’t look quite so peculiar in them. She scratched her scalp too as she stood up.

  “Feels as if you’re being eaten alive by very tiny creatures, doesn’t it?” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Gillian, plonking herself on the smooth rock that I used as a table.

  “Where’s the violin?”

  “At home.”

  “Why didn’t you bring it?”

  “I couldn’t. It might have gotten damaged.”

  “Pity,” I said. “Would you like some lunch?” I asked with sudden generosity. I am actually a very generous person, in spite of the small episode with the Kit Kat earlier, which may have given you the wrong impression.

  Gillian looked at me curiously and nodded.

  “It’s squashed,” I warned, fishing my usual tuna sandwich out of my pocket, “because of crawling into the tunnel, but it’ll taste the same.”

  Gillian nodded again and held her hand out, palm upward, for her half of the damp sandwich.

  “If we ran away from home together, they’d put us on the news, like those girls who got murdered,” I said as we munched. “There’d be reconstructions with young actresses and people ringing up with false sightings. And all the time we could be in a B and B in Bundoran, watching it on the telly and eating icepops.”

  “That’s horrible!” said Gillian.

  “Yes, but we have to face these things, my mother says. She always expects me to be murdered; it’s her big fear. She has the guards’ phone number written down by the phone for when it happens.”

  “Why does she let you out on your own, then?”

  “She can’t keep me locked up, can she?” I said. “I’m not allowed to talk to strangers, though.”

  “You talked to me,” Gillian said.

  “I don’t think girls my own age count,” I said.

  “You talked to Tim,” Gillian said. She didn’t mention that she is older than me, which she is, but only by a year or two, I would say, though maybe I mentioned that already.

  “Is he a murderer?” I asked.

  Then old porridge-faced Gillian really surprised me. She made a joke. I didn’t think she knew how.

  “Yes!” she hissed, and made her eyes bulge. “I can’t keep it a secret any longer. He’s a child-murderer. Eeek! All that tree-surgeon stuff, it’s just a front, just an excuse to carry chainsaws and hatchets around, but really.…”

  Just for a split second there, she got me. Something icy had raced up my spine before I realized she was joking. That was the moment that I thought maybe I might get to like her after all. Possibly we might even get to be friends.

  “Shu-ut up,” I said with a grin. “You’re not really running away, are you?”

  “I was,” said Gillian. “I thought I was. Sort of.”

  “You couldn’t go without your violin.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t going forever. Just to find my dad and then I’d go home and get the violin. I’d need it for the audition.”

  “Is there some connection between your father and the audition?”

  “Money,” she said.

  “I see. Is he rich?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, it depends what you mean by rich, doesn’t it? Not really, I wouldn’t say so.”

  “Only, that’s sort of vital information,” I pointed out sensibly. I am a sensible person, in case you hadn’t noticed. “There’s no point in going looking for him if he isn’t, is there? Since it’s money you need.”

  “He doesn’t need to be rich,” Gillian said. “Just solvent.”

  “I thought that was something you sniffed,” I said.

  “It’s another kind of solvent. It means not bankrupt.”

  Gillian was clearly pleased with herself. She’d got me back for the cul-de-sac episode. Of course, her vocabulary is not generally as extensive as mine. That was just a lucky break.

  “What about your mum? Has she not got any money?”

  “No. She’s always moaning about it. But even if she had … well, you know what she’s like.”

  “Well then,” I said. “Come back to my house,” I added on a sudden impulse.

  “Why?” Gillian asked.

  “We need a strategy,” I said. “And a table. You always need a table for strategic planning. To put our elbows on while we think, and to spread things out on.”

  “OK,” Gillian said. “Lead the way.”

  That sounds like she thought it was a good idea, doesn’t it? That’s what I thought, anyway. Seems a reasonable assumption to me. But then, I’m a reasonable sort of person.

  Gillian

  I would like to make it quite clear that I don’t usually tell people my life story, because the last thing you want is some well-meaning stranger clumping around your family, especially when things are a bit delicate, as they are in my family. So I really don’t know how I got into all this playing detectives stuff. When Mags said we should try to find Dad, I sort of went along with it. To be fair, it was sort of my idea to start with. I did want to find him, because I needed to touch him for some cash, but I hadn’t really thought it all through. It was only a half-formed notion that just happened to be on the top of my mind when old Mags came ambling along, and so I blurted it out, and next thing we were planning a manhunt, for all intents and purposes. As I say, I didn’t really mean it to happen.

  Mags

  That’s quite enough from her for the moment. Of course she meant it to happen. She just got cold feet later and now she’s trying to justify it, that’s all. You don’t need to take any notice of her. I’m the one telling this story. Well then.

  It was interesting doing the strategic planning, what Gillian so snootily calls “playing detectives.” It was quite like being a detective, actually,
only not a real one like on boring TV programs about the police where it’s all Identi-Kit pictures and forensic evidence, but the kind they have in books: amateurs with inventive ways of viewing the world.

  I got out the atlas and a lot of paper and pencils and a railway timetable and as many phone books as I could find and piled them all up professionally on the dining table.

  “This’ll do for the moment,” I said. “Later, when we actually do the looking, we’ll need the other sort of stuff: string, you know, and matches.”

  “Will we?” Gillian asked.

  “Of course,” I said. Clearly, Gillian hadn’t read anything worth reading—always a bad sign. “Now, what’s his name?”

  “Brendan.”

  “I will need his surname, you eejit.”

  “Regan.”

  “OK, Brendan Regan,” I said, and wrote the name down neatly on the top line of one of the sheets of paper. “That’s funny, it sort of rhymes, doesn’t it?”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Brendan Regan. What’s he like? Is he tall and handsome and manly?” Like Tim, I was thinking. Also, since his name was practically a poem, I thought he’d have to be something special.

  “Well … tall, yes, tall.”

  I wrote tall under the name Brendan Regan on my sheet of paper.

  “And does he tell you wonderful stories? About the war?”

  “The war?”

  “Oh, sorry, no, that’s grandfathers. Well then, about hippies.”

  “Hippies?”

  Gillian didn’t seem to know about anything that happened before about ten years ago.

  “About rock ’n’ roll,” I explained, “and how he went to Woodstock and sat-in in the library at college and played Leonard Cohen songs on his guitar and went to Marrakesh in the summers and campaigned to free Nelson Mandela?”

  “Leonard who?”

  “Gillian, what sort of a life did your father have? Didn’t he do any of that cool stuff?”

  “He was … he is a Web site designer,” Gillian said. “He has, you know, clients? And he goes to meetings with a briefcase, and he writes down what they want and then he sends them stuff by e-mail.”

  “Oh. That makes him younger, I suppose.”

  “Than what? Younger than what?”

  “Well, younger than other people’s fathers. Mine, for example.”

  “I don’t know how old he is.” Really, she’s hopeless, Gillian. “I never asked. It didn’t seem important.”

  “It’s not, except for the description,” I explained. “When we ask the guards to help us find him, you’ll need to be able to say ‘midthirties’ or ‘late forties’ or whatever, so they’ll know what they’re looking for.”

  I wrote youngish for a dad under tall.

  “The guards!” squeaked Gillian. “We don’t need to go to the police, do we?”

  “Well, it depends whether we find him or not by ourselves. When did you last see him?”

  “On Thursday.”

  “On Thursday!” I was taken aback, but I wrote it down dutifully all the same.

  “What’s wrong with that?” asked Gillian huffishly.

  “I thought he was missing. I thought we had to look for him.”

  “He is missing,” insisted Gillian. “I don’t know where he lives. I haven’t got his phone number. He’s not in the phone book, by the way. I did think of that. So, I don’t know how to find him. I call that missing.”

  “But he’s not really missing,” I said. “Not if you saw him on Thursday. I mean, he hasn’t disappeared off the face of the earth or been taken hostage by terrorists or anything like that, has he?” I looked at the pile of phone books and railway timetables. Maybe I’d overdone it. “Unless he was abducted by aliens on Friday, maybe?” I added, though I didn’t hold out much hope.

  “There’s no need to sound so disappointed,” said Gillian sulkily. “I think he’s living in Ballymore now. He said something about moving to be nearer to us, but I think it’s because the rents are cheaper than in Dublin—that’s where he was before.”

  “When did you have this conversation?”

  Gillian thought for a moment. “About six weeks ago. Maybe two months.”

  “That explains why he’s not in the phone book,” I said. “He hasn’t been there long enough. Why don’t you just ask your mother how to contact him? If you saw him on Thursday, she must be in touch with him. She probably has his phone number.”

  “My mother…,” said Gillian. She turned her hands out, palms up and gave an exaggerated shrug. At the time, I thought she just meant, You know how hopeless my mother is, but now I think she meant, Back off, don’t ask too many questions.

  “OK,” I said. “You don’t want to involve her, right? We could just look in her address book, though, if we could find it. She has an address book, I presume?”

  Gillian shrugged, so I wrote down Zelda’s address book under the words youngish for a dad and then put a large black question mark after it.

  Brendan Regan

  tall

  youngish for a dad

  last seen on Thurs

  Zelda’s address book?

  “Do you see your dad every Thursday?” I asked.

  “No,” said Gillian grumpily. “If I did, he wouldn’t be missing, would he?”

  She sounded as if she was beginning to get tired of this inquiry already. I was only getting into it.

  “So, how often do you see him?”

  “Every second Thursday,” said Gillian. “Not!” she added, when she saw the thunderous look on my face. “Not every second Thursday meaning, you know, this week and then skip a week and then next Thursday.”

  “I don’t see what else every second Thursday could possibly mean,” I said.

  “I mean, the second Thursday of every month. It’s sort of a standing date. We go out for a meal, usually to a steakhouse. I don’t like steak. I only eat the chips. I’m thinking about becoming a vegetarian.”

  “Look,” I said in exasperation, “can you stick to the point? We’ll discuss your dietary preferences some other time. Why didn’t you ask him about the money on Thursday, when you saw him?”

  “I tried,” Gillian said. “He didn’t get it. I mean, I told him about the audition, but not about needing the money. I thought he’d see that. I didn’t think I needed to spell it out. But he never offered, and then I got—well, I got too embarrassed to ask.”

  “You really are a complete eejit, you know that?”

  Gillian suddenly thought of something. “I’ve got his e-mail address, if that’s any use,” she said. “Only I haven’t got a computer.”

  “I have a computer,” I said. “It was my dad’s. He sort of … left it to me, I suppose you could say.”

  “You mean, I could use your computer to contact him?”

  I nodded.

  “Great,” Gillian said. “Thanks. What’ll I say?”

  “How about, ‘Dear Dad, I forgot to mention the other day that I need…’ How much do you need? A hundred euro; let’s say a hundred to be on the safe side. ‘Dear Dad, Could you see your way to letting me have a hundred euro for my airfare to England so I can go to that audition I mentioned? Mum seems to be a bit short this week.…’”

  “‘Because you are such a mean pig,’” Gillian chimed in, “‘and you always leave us short and then you come and pick me up in that stupid black car of yours and take me to that horrible restaurant where I don’t even like the food, and you never want to know anything about me except what it says on my report and if I got any detentions this term, and you sigh when I mention my violin and you keep asking these questions about Zelda and whether she’s seeing anyone, and anyway, everyone knows you love Tim more so you probably won’t let me have the money and you can stuff it, I don’t want it if that’s your attitude.’”

  Gillian banged her pink little fist down on my mother’s dining table and made me jump.

  “Hmm,” I said, chewing on my pencil. “I don’t th
ink you should say that bit. You do want the money. What about Tim?”

  “Oh, Tim hasn’t got any. By the time he pays Mum for his keep and.…”

  “No, no, I mean, does he see your dad on every second Thursday too?”

  “No,” said Gillian. “He won’t have anything to do with him. He hates him for leaving us. For being so mean. For only seeing me once a month. For being Dad. But mostly for objecting to Tim being a forester. He wants him to be an engineer. He says being a forester is a job for a peasant.”

  “Oh, my!”

  “Yeah. You see what we’re up against. Not that Tim is a proper forester anyway, he’s only doing it for the summer to see if he likes it. I don’t think I can bring myself to e-mail him, the miserable swine.”

  “If you want the money, you’ll have to.”

  “Don’t want to,” said Gillian, chewing her fingernails. You’d think a person who bothers with nail polish wouldn’t do that.

  I sighed.

  “I know what,” I said after a while.

  “What?”

  “I’ll do it. It’s my computer after all. I’ll e-mail him. ‘Dear Mr. Regan, You don’t know me, but I am a friend of your daughter’s. She desperately needs a hundred euro. If you phone her, she will explain. Her life depends on it.’ No, that’s too scary. ‘Her future depends on it. Please get in touch. A well-wisher.’”

  Gillian laughed. Her too-small face broadened and looked as if it were going to crack right across. She looked like an amused frog. She definitely didn’t look like someone who’d changed her mind about looking for her father.

  “I always wanted to sign something ‘A well-wisher,’” I said happily. “It’s so menacing.”

  In the end, this was the e-mail we sent:

  Dear Mr. Regan,

  I am a friend of Gillian’s. Gillian urgently needs a cash advance for an honorable purpose. If you phone her, she will explain. I think you should get in touch. You should be very proud of your talented daughter.

  Yours faithfully,

  Margaret Rose Clarke (A well-wisher)

  P.S.: Gillian is a vegetarian and would like you to stop making her eat steak, as it is against her principles. She is too shy to tell you this herself. I am not shy, however, which is lucky for her. She also needs some proper clothes and a larger face.