Our Father Who Are Out There...Somewhere

by AJ Taft

  “She’s a solicitor. Why do you want know?”

  “Has she worked here long?”

  “It’s her firm. She set it up. Why do you want to know?”

  “Oh, just curious. Thank you.” Jo pushes the revolving doors so quickly she nearly does a three hundred and sixty degree spin, but she manages to jump out in time. She shouts over to Lily when she’s halfway across the courtyard. “She’s called Ruth Hurst. She’s a lawyer. Lawyer, lawyer, pants on fire.”

  That afternoon Lily has another driving lesson. Primrose Glen and the streets around are deserted in the early afternoons; perfect for the learner driver, without the hazards of parked or moving cars and pedestrians. The only traffic consists of other learner drivers, sometimes queuing to perform three-point turns in a particularly wide avenue. Lily takes three attempts to pull the car away from the side of the kerb, hopping kangaroo style down the road at three miles an hour, until finally stalling. The girls both roar with laughter.

  “I think you need another spliff, Lil. You’re not relaxed enough.”

  DAY NINE (Tuesday)

  07:30 AF leaves Newlands.

  08:25 AM leaves. LA and JB follow.

  ‘Adult Male’ leaves the house every morning at exactly the same time. On Tuesday morning, emboldened by their success the previous day, Jo and Lily follow him at a safe distance, Lily wearing her baseball cap, sunglasses and having added a scarf wound around the lower half of her face. The journey doesn’t last long. Five minutes later he pulls into the car park of St Andrews, the third school on their list; the one they didn’t visit on day three. They watch as ‘AM’ pulls his briefcase from the car and heads through the double doors into the school.

  “He’s a teacher?” For some reason this news doesn’t please Lily. Whether it’s jealousy that he spends all his days working with children, or whether it’s a certain snobbery that he’s not a rock star or a peace protestor, is not something Lily wants to think about. Instead she scowls at a schoolboy who passes in front of the windscreen. He looks alarmed and scurries through the school gates. “A teacher.”

  “Obviously Afghan is the chief breadwinner,” says Jo. “Tres modern.”

  They are back outside Newlands in time to see ‘Teenage Female’ return to the house, this time carrying a black leather case.

  “Clarinet,” says Jo with authority.

  “Fuck me. Is there anything the girl doesn’t do?” says Lily.

  Ten minutes after ‘Adult Male’ arrives home, Lily watches her father and his daughter wheel out their bicycles. As they pass through the gates, ‘Adult Male’ pulls alongside ‘TIFF’ and checks the chinstrap on her helmet. Lily sinks lower in her seat and mutters under her breath, “I’d love to show him how it feels to not have any family.”

  Jo crumbles some warm resin onto the line of tobacco in front of her. “I’ve got an idea,” she says.

  Chapter 13

  DAY TEN (Wednesday)

  07:35 AF leaves.

  08:25 AM leaves. Newspapers delivered.

  Spite and Malice tally: Jo 5, Lily 2

  Driving lesson: Number of points in a three-point turn: 11

  Highest gear reached: 3rd

  Lily tugs at her black woollen hat but it’s no use; it springs back up so that it is merely perched on the top of her head, barely skirting her forehead. Her dreads are piled up on the top of her head, and the hat has used all its capacity trying to contain them. She nestles her nose into her scarf instead. The November day is so cold her breath is crystallising.

  “Right, I’m guessing she’s going to take this road here, and then walk down Princess Street here,” says Jo, bending the pages of the A-Z so that Lily can see the route. “So, if you wait on North Avenue, I’ll wait here,” she points to a spot on the map, across the road from the grammar school, “and we’ll see what happens.”

  Lily thrusts her hands deep into her pockets. “I don’t know about this.”

  “We’re only watching, we’re not breaking any laws. You’d better get going,” says Jo. “Good luck. And remember, if you think she’s spotted you, just turn round the next corner, or cross the road.”

  Lily walks to her designated waiting post on North Avenue, which meets Primrose Glen at a T-junction. She yawns; they’d stayed up late last night. Jo had insisted on them wandering the streets around the house in Accrington, taking it in turns to follow each other. She had managed to follow Lily for a good five minutes, without Lily realising she was there.

  Her canvas bag is heavy on her shoulder, so Lily swaps it to the other side. In it is a book to read, a letter to post, a brightly coloured scarf, a red bobble hat which last fitted Lily about eight years ago, and some money if she needs to duck into a shop. Ten minutes after Lily has found a garden wall to sit on, ‘TIFF’ appears round the corner from Primrose Glen, Walkman on. She’s wearing a duffle coat, which is so big it makes her legs look like a couple of matchsticks sticking out of the bottom. Lily remembers the days of walking to school, so cold her fingers would sting with pain, a winter coat being one of those luxuries that her mother’s sickness benefit just didn’t stretch to. Lily slips her book into her bag and counts to ten, before setting off after the schoolgirl.

  Five minutes later, instead of crossing the road to turn into Princess Avenue, as Jo had anticipated, ‘TIFF’ takes a sharp left. By the time Lily reaches the spot where ‘TIFF’ disappeared, ‘TIFF’s royal blue socks are disappearing down a narrow ginnel. Lily waits a moment, looking anxiously up and down the street. Should she carry on the way Jo had told her to go? She hesitates for a moment, trying to imagine what Jo would say, and then follows after ‘TIFF’.

  The ginnel leads to an eight foot high red brick wall, with a dirt track next to it. Lily wonders which way to turn and then decides the path to the left looks more well trodden. She follows the outskirts of the wall for a few yards, until she sees an open gate. Lily peers through the gap in the wall and sees the lawned playing fields at the rear of the school, and tennis courts. She forms one hand into a fist and blows warm air into it, before turning back the way she came, to find Jo.

  Jo is pacing up and down, pulling heavily on a cigarette as Lily turns the corner into the road where she’d arranged to meet Jo. Further up the street, cars are queued, dropping off identical children in royal blue socks. “What the fuck happened?” she says, as soon as Lily approaches.

  “There’s a short cut, down a ginnel. Leads right up to the school.”

  “A ginnel?” says Jo, stamping on her cigarette butt with a deep red Doc Marten boot. “That could be interesting, show me.”

  Lily pulls her coat around her, as they cross the road and retrace Lily’s steps. The ginnel isn’t wide enough for them to walk shoulder to shoulder, so Lily goes ahead, both of them looking up, above the privet walls. “No one would see us here,” Jo says.

  “Come off it Jo, stop fucking around. We can’t kidnap a schoolgirl.” Lily turns and storms off down the ginnel, back to the road. Jo takes one last look around before following after her.

  DAY ELEVEN (Thursday)

  Driving lesson: Number of points in three-point turn: 7

  Spite and malice: Jo: 8 Lily: 3

  Spliffs: 6

  “He’d know it was me anyway,” says Lily as Jo deals the cards. “A daughter he’s never met tries to get in touch, and then a month later his other daughter is kidnapped. It hardly needs Miss Marple to work it out.”

  Jo starts dealing the cards with more urgency, slapping each one down on the tray and counting them out loud as she does, like she can’t reply in case she loses track. When she’s dealt forty cards into two equal piles, she deals a further five each. Then she places the remaining pile of cards in the centre of the tray and looks up at Lily. “Does he know where you live?”

  Lily picks up her five cards. “Doubt it. I once said to my mum that I wanted to go and live with my dad. We were having this huge fight, she spat at me. Said not to get any stupid ideas. And I remember her saying
, ‘he has no idea where you are.’ And I thought it was odd, because I’d always thought up ’til then, that he’d left us, so why didn’t she say, ‘I have no idea where he is?’ We were always ex-directory too. And she changed our name. I don’t even know where she got Appleyard from.”

  “Well then, does it matter if he does think it’s you? He won’t know for certain, and it still means he has no idea where his daughter is."

  Lily considers this for a moment while toying with a dreadlock. “Guess not.”

  DAY TWELVE (Friday)

  Suggestions for the I in TIFF: Imbecile, Ignorant,

  Incredibly Boring, Indescribably posh

  Spliffs: 6

  “You know Lily, if we are going to do anything it’s going to have to be next Wednesday. It’s already December, Wednesday will be…” Jo turns a couple of pages, “the 12th. If we don’t do it next week, it’s going to be too close to Christmas. She might not even be at school the Wednesday after. And families like theirs usually go away for Christmas.”

  Lily stalls the car half way through what had, up to that point, been a perfect reverse around the corner. She tries to start the car again, forgetting to put the gears into neutral, so that the car jumps a foot backwards and the contents of the spliff Jo had been rolling, land down the side of the handbrake. Jo sighs as Lily sinks her head against the backs of her hands on the steering wheel.

  Last Christmas had been awful, watching her mother eat four boxes of mince pies for breakfast. Bert had come round in the evening and they had all got quietly pissed, watching some soft porn he had pretended was an actual film. Her mother had been too comatose to notice. Lily peels a piece of skin from the side of her thumbnail, watches the skin underneath flush up pink.

  “What would we do? Grab her?” Lily tries to imagine herself with a large potato sack, one of those brown hessian ones.

  “We could tell her we work with her mum; her mum’s been taken ill. We’ve come to take her to the hospital.”

  “What if she doesn’t come?”

  Jo shrugs. “Then we’d grab her.”

  DAY THIRTEEN (Saturday)

  TIFF – Teenage Incompetent Fresh-faced Female,

  Teenage Inept Frigid Female,

  Teenage Immaturely Farting Female

  Spliffs: 5 (Need to score soon)

  Lily brings Jo a cup of tea and opens the front room curtains. Jo tries to raise her head from the pillow, but the vodka they drank last night has formed a leaden pool at the back of her brain. “Fancy a day off?” says Jo.

  Lily shakes her head; she’s already dressed. “I want to see if they go horse riding again. You don’t have to come.”

  The curtains are still drawn when they arrive at Newlands. “What are we going to do if we don’t do it? We can’t spend the rest of our lives watching them play happy families. We might as well be watching Coronation Street with all the rest of the great unwashed,” says Jo, as she pushes back the driver’s seat of the Mini.

  Lily trains her binoculars on the top right bedroom window and doesn’t say anything.

  DAY FOURTEEN (Sunday)

  No rest for the wicked

  09:50 AM, AF and TIFF all leave Together (1st time) in Volvo.

  Follow them to church. (C. of E.)

  The vicar shakes ‘AM’s hand and smiles. ‘AM’ puts his arm around his wife and daughter’s back and leads them down the path in the weak December sunshine.

  Lily and Jo watch from their hiding place amongst the headstones.

  “It’s not like I want to hurt her. It’s not kidnapping, more like…” Lily searches for the right word, “borrowing.”

  Jo finishes chewing her mouthful of cold pizza. A smile appears slowly across her face. Then she puts her head back and laughs. “We’re doing it! We’re actually fucking doing it.”

  On their way home, they stop off at Passage to India. “Lily. You not been in for ages. How you doing, girl?” Mr Khan comes out from behind the counter. “You not eating enough. No man likes a skinny girl. I fix you a feast.” He points to one of the tables, indicating that they should sit.

  Lily shakes her head. “We want take away, please. We’ve got stuff to do.”

  “Is this your friend from university?”

  “Poly, yeah.”

  “This what men like,” he says, laying a casual arm around Jo’s shoulders. “Meat on bones.”

  Jo looks like she’s about to say something, but she doesn’t. Lily tries to smile apologetically.

  If Mr Khan notices he’s upsetting Jo’s feminist sensibilities, he doesn’t mention it. “Your mum was proud, Lily. University, very, very clever. What you study?”

  “Politics.”

  “Prime Minister.” Mr Khan nods like it’s all decided. “I vote for you.”

  He won’t hear of them paying. “On the house. Don’t forget where you came from, Lily girl.”

  Back at the house, Jo takes the lids off the silver trays while Lily rolls a spliff. “Wow, there’s enough here for the week. Nice that he gave it to us, you.”

  “He kept my mum in Kormas,” says Lily. “He just lost his best customer.” Lily lights up the spliff, inhales and leans back against the pillows on the mattress, her eyes closed. “I’m surprised he’s still in business.”

  “Once we’ve eaten, we need to think about accommodation for our overnight guest.” Lily opens one eye. “She’ll have to sleep somewhere,” Jo says.

  Lily’s old bedroom looks like it’s been burgled. One of the doors is hanging off the single wardrobe in the corner of the room, and clothes spill from a set of drawers. The desk has been extensively grafittied, and the curtains are missing about half of their hooks. “Did you never put up posters?” Jo asks.

  Lily shrugs and pushes a plate under the bed with her foot. It stinks in here.

  “Can you lock the windows?”

  “No.”

  Jo claps her hands together. “Right, we’d better get cracking.”

  “What, now?”

  “Strike while the iron is hot,” says Jo.

  Chapter 14

  DAY FIFTEEN (Monday) D-DAY– 2

  Dress Rehearsal starring Jo Battersby as

  Teenage Inconsiderate Fainting Female and

  Lily Appleyard as evil kidnapper.

  Jo checks her watch, twenty to nine. She trains the binoculars on the side gate and holds her breath. A minute or so later it opens, and ‘TIFF’ emerges. Jo presses a button on the stopwatch they bought yesterday afternoon. When ‘TIFF’ is out of eyesight Jo starts the engine.

  Lily is waiting at the bottom of the ginnel, outside the school wall. The ginnel meets the school wall at a T-junction and Lily turned right and found a place to crouch out of sight. ‘TIFF’ will turn left to enter the school gates. Sure enough, at seven minutes before nine, Lily sees ‘TIFF’ turn the corner and watches her shiny, dark hair disappear down the left side of the wall and through the gates at the bottom.

  Five minutes later Jo appears. “Ready?”

  Lily nods, and Jo turns around and walks back the way she came. Two minutes later she reappears, skipping along like she’s nine years old. Lily has moved position so that it appears she’s entering the bottom of the ginnel from the direction of the school gates. She breaks into a kind of run. “Hello,” she calls to Jo. “Is your name Winterbottom?”

  “Yes, yes it is. Why?”

  Lily bends over, pretending to catch her breath from the exertion of running. “Your mum’s been taken ill, she sent me to fetch you…” She looks up at Jo. “You know, I think we need to know her name. Don’t you? I mean her mum wouldn’t ask us to call her daughter without telling us her name, even if she is bent over double with a heart attack.”

  “Winterbottom isn’t her name either, is it?” Jo pulls the notebook out of her pocket and starts flicking through the pages. “She’s called Hurst at work. What if ‘TIFF’s got her name?”

  Lily paces up and down the ginnel, shaking her head. “And why didn’t we just ring
the school?”

  “We tried and it was engaged. Then the ambulance arrived, so we decided to jump in the car.”

  “We still need to know her name.”

  “Ok, then we need to go shopping.”

  In the Skipton branch of Scope they find a charcoal grey trouser suit and a white blouse for £3.75. Jo holds the suit against Lily. “I think it says wannabe lawyer, don’t you?”

  Across the road at Oxfam, Jo pulls a pair of slim black shoes with a small heel from a wire basket and shows them to Lily. “Man, can’t I just wear my docs? They’re not going to look at my feet.”

  “It’s about feeling the part,” says Jo, taking them over to the counter.

  In the toilets in McDonald’s, Lily puts on the trouser suit and ties her dreads back as neatly as possible. Jo parks up in a car park in Skipton town centre, and watches Lily sway in the second hand heels, into the law offices of Totten, Hurst and Ingham. Lily turns around to glance at Jo before she pushes through the revolving doors. Jo nods at her and holds her thumb up.

  The receptionist isn’t much older than Lily. She looks up as Lily’s heels clip clop across the smooth wooden floor and tries to hide a smile at the sight of Lily swaying. “May I help you?”

  Lily holds on to the chest high reception desk for support and tries to remember her first line. “I was just wondering whether you do any work placement schemes here.”

  “I don’t think so, I mean I’ve never seen any. Do you want to leave your phone number and I’ll ask?”

  She hands Lily a pen and piece of paper. Lily’s hands shake as she begins to write. She clears her throat. “What kind of work do you do here?”

  Her speech sounds too rehearsed, even to her own ears. She starts to adlib. “Do you do much criminal stuff? I’ve always wanted to defend.”