Our Father Who Are Out There...Somewhere

by AJ Taft

  CAFFEINE NIGHTS PUBLISHING

  Our Father, Who Art Out There...Somewhere

  AJ Taft

  Fiction aimed at the heart

  and the head...

  Published by Caffeine Nights Publishing 2011

  Copyright © Alison Taft 2011

  Alison Taft has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998 to be identified as the author of this work

  CONDITIONS OF SALE

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, scanning, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher

  This book has been sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental

  Published in Great Britain by Caffeine Nights Publishing

  www.caffeine-nights.com

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-907565-07-6

  Cover design by

  Kirsti Robinson

  &

  Mark (Wills) Williams

  Everything else by

  Default, Luck and Accident

  For Esme

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to everyone at YAC and Ink especially Phil, Liz, Chris, Lucy and Danuta Reah.

  Big thanks to Katie and Justine for reading the early drafts and Steve, for his fine attention to detail and inability to hide his wincing.

  Thanks to Rose for her great idea, Ron Strong for the web-site, Kirsti Robinson for the art work and Darren at Caffeine Nights for making it all happen.

  And Sandra, thank you so much for helping me along the way.

  Special thanks to my mum for not being anything like Lily’s mum and for never giving up.

  And to Uncle Keith, see I told you, in my book and in my heart forever.

  It is wise to disclose

  what cannot be concealed

  Johann Friedrich von Stiller (1759-1805)

  Our Father, Who Art Out There... Somewhere

  Born and raised in Burnley, Alison Taft dreamed of becoming a writer ever since reading Harriet the Spy by torchlight under the bedcovers, aged eight.

  After completing a degree, Alison lived in Crete and spent time in the Middle and Far East. In the mid-nineties she was a keen supporter of the free party network. She has worked in a variety of jobs but after being sacked once too often for gross insubordination, Alison decided to heed the words of one employer who described her as ‘unmanageable’, and became a full time writer.

  Alison now lives in Leeds with her partner and two children. She spends her evenings at the computer, sipping mint tea and plotting her revenge.

  Our Father, Who Art Out There... Somewhere is Alison’s first novel.

  Prologue

  It’s not a pretty sight, even to the uncynical eye. Ten minutes to go until last orders, Happy Tuesday of Fresher’s week (like happy hour but without the constraint of time). The crowd at the bar is at least five deep; everyone jostling to get another one in before the lights come up, and the grim reality of the surroundings can no longer be ignored. The air is so heavy with cigarette smoke, it’s difficult for Lily to locate her friend as she emerges from the scrum, head bent, arms at right angles, with two plastic pints of luminous vodka and orange. Her DMs stick to the floor each step she takes. Luckily, Jo’s bleached white flat-top helps her stand out from the crowd.

  “God, some bloke just threw up behind me, is it in my hair?” Lily has to shout to be heard above the strains of ‘Walking on Sunshine’ by Katrina and the Waves. She turns round and Jo inspects her dirty blonde dreadlocks, which hang down her back like rope.

  “Can’t see anything.” Jo spins her back round and takes a drink from her, “Cheers.”

  Jo stubs out her cigarette in a convenient, but overflowing ashtray on the table next to them, and raises her plastic pint to her mouth. As she does so, a hand gropes her well rounded bottom, which jolts her, causing her to miss her mouth and to tip a hefty slug down the front of her Ramones T-shirt.

  “Do you mind?” She turns on the bloke standing behind her. He’s six foot tall, and so drunk he’s swaying. He leers at her as he tries to focus.

  “Hey gorgeous. Want to come back to mine? We’re having a party. You can bring your mate.”

  “I’d rather stick pins in my eyes,” Jo snarls at him. “So leave us alone.” She turns back to Lily.

  He isn’t easily deterred, “Oh wow, lezzers.” Jo shakes her head in disgust. “Can I come back to yours then, please? I could just watch,” he adds hopefully. Jo’s arm jerks and then she watches him slowly come to terms with the fact that he is now wearing the remains of her vodka and orange. “You frigging cow,” he splutters.

  “Yeah, what you going to do about it?” asks Jo. As she speaks a large hand clamps onto her shoulder from behind. Jo turns to face the security beefcake, whose rippling, black muscles bulge out of a tight green T-shirt.

  “Come on, time to go,” he says, with the air of someone who has done this once too often.

  “He’s just been feeling me up,” says Jo, pulling herself up to her full five feet one and a half inches. “I believe this Students’ Union has an equal opportunities policy. He’s a sexist. If he’d been racist you wouldn’t be throwing out the victim.”

  The bouncer steers her towards the exit as she continues her tirade. Lily follows a couple of steps behind, throwing back the rest of her drink in urgent bursts. The bouncer opens the door. “Don’t be walking home, girls.”

  “It’s women. Do we look prepubescent?” Jo cups her breasts in both hands, her cheeks flushed with rage.

  He refuses to be drawn into an argument. “Have you got enough money for a taxi?”

  “ Haven't you heard?” says Jo. “All men are rapists. That includes taxi drivers.”

  He shrugs his shoulders and shows them the palms of his hands, as if to say he’s done all he can.

  Lily sways as she steps outside, "I think I'm going to be sick," she mumbles. The bouncer shakes his head. She's such a pretty thing, but always so wasted. Skin and bones too. He closes the door behind them.

  "Come on," says Jo, "the air will do you good." She grabs Lily's arm, tucks it into hers and starts marching her up the road. It's uphill all the way to their shared student flat, ‘the rat run’. As they walk, students spill out from The Fenton, The Packhorse, The Eldon; some in worse states than Lily.

  Halfway home, they take the short cut through Hyde Park, a breath of fresh air between the grey/white high rise buildings of Leeds University and the red brick student slums of Headingley. They hear the familiar sound of other groups of students wandering home; singing, shouting, stealing traffic cones, as they make their way through the darkness. At the playground on the edge of the park, close enough to the road to be illuminated by the street lamps, Lily sits down on a swing. She pushes herself high into the air, while Jo opens her bag and pulls out a bottle of vodka. They stop off here on their way home most nights. Jo finds her pack of cigarettes, puts two in her mouth, lights both and then passes one to Lily.

  Lily slows down to reach the cigarette and sits on the swing, gently swaying. After
a couple of drags she turns to Jo. “Do you really believe that?” They haven't spoken all the way home. “That all men are rapists?”

  Jo considers the question, “I think they all have the potential, it's there in them. If they knew they could get away with it I reckon any man would. Don't you?”

  “Dunno, never really thought about it.” Lily takes another deep drag on her cigarette, “I'm always too drunk to say no.”

  “Seriously? You've never had sex sober?” Jo asks. Lily stops swinging. It's hard to remember. “How about your first time?”

  “No, I was definitely pissed then.” Lily takes a swig from the bottle that Jo is offering. “Thank God.”

  “How old were you?”

  Lily wipes her mouth with the back of her sleeve, “Thirteen, actually twelve.”

  “Christ.”

  “I know. It's not good, I know.” She flicks her cigarette as far as she can and watches the sparks blaze a small trail, as the stub hits the ground. “Give us another fag.”

  Jo passes her another Marlboro and Lily takes a lighter out of her pocket. She cups her hand around the lighter, bending her head towards it. It shoots a jet of flame that rises a couple of feet, taking with it Lily's eyebrows and most of her fringe. Lily screams.

  “Shit, are you ok?” Jo grabs her and looks at her face. She pats out the smouldering ends of her hair. “Jesus, good job you don't wear hairspray. You could have been a goner.”

  Lily adjusts the gas flow on her lighter and tries to relight it, but this time it doesn't work at all. “Aargh!” she bellows, as she hurls the lighter into the darkness. She stands up, “I want to go home.”

  Chapter 1

  The magpie sits on the head of the statue of Robert Peel and cackles. A shudder runs all the way down Lily’s spine. She doesn’t know whether it’s the same lone magpie that greeted her as she opened the front door that morning; spreading its large black wings and scaring the bejesus out of her, or whether it’s the same one that was sitting on the lamp post as they rounded the corner to the edge of the park. She recites the rhyme silently to herself, “One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy.” If she has seen three separate single magpies in the space of ten minutes, can she add them together and count three for a girl? Or is it three helpings of sorrow? Or sorrow multiplied to the power of three? Lily shakes her head, salutes it, and for the third time, mutters, “Morning Mr Magpie, where’s your wife?”

  Jo screws up her face, “Will you quit with that. It’s just a bird.” She looks up at the magpie. “An ugly, noisy bird.”

  The magpie cackles again and flies off.

  Lily can’t shake the queasy feeling. It’s still there in their ‘Development of the Welfare State’ lecture, and she knows it’s more than a hangover. Her charred eyebrows itch. She rests her chin on her forearms and stares at the piece of paper in front of her. “P?” she whispers.

  Jo shakes her head and draws an arm onto the stick figure hanging from a noose at the bottom of the page.

  Lily tries again. “K?”

  Jo wrinkles her nose and fills two of the blank spaces with the letter K.

  Lily shuffles further forward on the bench. “I?” she says, her voice gaining confidence.

  Tutting, Jo adds six I’s to the nine word sentence.

  Lily raises her chin, forgetting, in her excitement, to keep her voice down, “I’m so bored I think I might kill myself?”

  Jo fills in the missing letters as they both start to laugh. Mr Wardle raises his hairy eyebrows from the podium at the front of the class. “Quiet there at the back, please.”

  Lily bites the skin on the inside of her cheek to try and stop herself from snorting with laughter. She daren’t look at Jo. As Mr Wardle clears his throat and rustles his notes, the door opens and a woman in a grey suit enters the room. She doesn’t glance up at the ten or twelve rows of students, but goes straight across to Mr Wardle. The room falls silent, so that Lily, even from her position on the very back row, can hear the sounds of the woman’s urgent whispering. Adrenaline starts to seep into Lily’s stomach, heightening the waves of nausea she’s been fighting all morning. As she watches Mr Wardle nod, Lily glances out of the window just in time to see another lone magpie sailing across the sky, its tail feathers like an arrow behind it.

  Mr Wardle glances up, his eyes searching the rows of students. He clears his throat again, “Lily Appleyard?”

  Lily jerks her head up and he spots her. As soon as he makes eye contact he averts his gaze. “Could you go to Student Services please?”

  She stumbles her way along the row, tripping over another student’s satchel as she does so, before making her way down the steps at the side of the theatre. Her dreadlocks bounce off her shoulders as her heart hammers against her skinny ribs.

  The woman in the grey suit waits for her, holding the door ajar. She doesn’t say anything to Lily. Lily follows her out of the room, down a flight of stairs, and then down the corridor at a brisk pace, until she stops at a door with a sign that says, 'Stuart Strange, Head of Support Services'. The woman nods at her to open it. Lily knocks, the heavy wooden door making her knuckles sting. She pushes it open and steps inside.

  A man in his early fifties, with a greying beard and black rimmed spectacles, presumably Mr Strange, stands to greet her. A large black topped desk lies between them.

  “Ah, Lily,” he says, rubbing his hands together. “Thank you for coming.” He takes a deep breath, puts his finger tips on the edge of the desk, as if to support himself. “I’m terribly sorry to have to tell you, Lily that your uncle has telephoned the polytechnic this morning with the news that your mother has passed away. She died last night, peacefully in her sleep. She didn't suffer.” He takes another breath, looks her straight in the eye, counts to five and says, “I am very sorry.”

  Her hangover helps in some strange way, cushions her from too much reality. She stands looking at the bookcase behind him. The colours are all wrong. Three large books with bright red spines, are stacked next to each other on the right hand side, without any thought to counterbalance. It makes it look like the bookcase could fall over at any point.

  “Would you like to sit down?” He points to the two leather armchairs and small coffee table in the corner of the room.

  Lily takes a moment to register she’s being asked a question. “No, no thank you.” Even a purple cover or a dark blue tome in the bottom left corner would have sufficed. Working with the Problem Drinker, she reads down the spine of one badly sited yellow textbook, that’s half the size of the book next to it. She adjusts her weight onto her left leg and tries to pull her mind back to the man in front of the bookcase.

  They stand in silence across his desk, facing each other. Mr Strange is the first to crack. He looks across to the door as if he’s heard someone knock at it. Lily tries to search for any useful clues in her head for what to say in a situation like this. She tries to think of a film she's watched, or a book she's read where this same thing has happened because she is at least aware that questions should be asked. But the only question in her mind is why he has ordered the bookcase the way he has? Her breathing starts to quicken. Mr Strange looks at her with concern.

  “I don’t have an uncle,” she says at last.

  This news takes him back a bit, “Oh,” he says. He picks up a piece of paper from his in tray and peers at it. “He said he was your uncle.”

  Lily sees the phrase, ‘died peacefully’, with the peacefully underlined. More than how she lived, she thinks.

  “Ah, yes Uncle, Bert?"

  “He’s not my uncle.”

  Stuart Strange looks at her questioningly, waiting for her to expand. He’s also trying to work out what’s wrong with her face. Lily tries to engage in conversation, “He’s just the perv who lives next door to my mum. He’s always trying to get me to call him uncle, and look at his puppies,” she adds as a joke.

  Mr Strange looks alarmed. “Is there someone else I can call, someone wh
o could collect you?”

  Lily shakes her head quickly. The last thing she wants is to have this man feel any more concern for her. “No, there's no one else. It’s alright. He’s harmless.”

  Mr Strange looks at the wall behind Lily. “He said he’d arrive at 2 o’clock to pick you up. He said to meet at your flat.”

  Lily becomes aware of a clock ticking. She turns to look. It’s half past eleven. She watches the hand of the clock tick off the seconds; jerking so violently each time one passes, it appears the clock might fall from the wall and Lily starts to worry for its safety. She watches twenty-eight seconds jolt past without incident and calms herself.

  “Should I go back to my lecture?” she asks. She wants to get out of this too warm room. She’s not up to this kind of scrutiny; not without eyebrows.

  “Have you a friend who could wait with you?”

  Lily’s face lights up with relief, “Jo.” Jo will know what to do.

  “I’ll go and get her for you.” Mr Strange starts towards to door.

  “No it’s ok. I’ll go,” says Lily, throwing herself at the door handle. She runs down the corridor before Mr Strange has time to argue. She opens the door of the lecture theatre and sees Jo stand immediately. Leaving her books on the bench, Jo runs down the steps to Lily. No one inside the theatre says a word. Jo takes Lily’s hand and together they hurry from the building.

  It’s only when they get outside that Jo asks, “What's up?”