Fake I.D.
Hazel Edwards
First published in Lothian ‘Takeaways’ series in 2002, reprinted
First Canadian edition 2005 Vanwell Publishing Ltd, Ontario
Tamil translation 2009
Markwatersproductions T.V. Script
Original ISBN 0734404425
eBook edition ISBN 978-0-9871575-7-7
Copyright © 2002 Hazel Edwards
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http://www.hazeledwards.com/shop/item/fake-id
Some kids use fake I.D. Turns out; Zoe’s Gran used fake I.D. for years. On the day of her Gran’s funeral, Zoe opens the ‘Not to be opened until after my death’ package. For Zoe, this becomes an awesome family history mystery. Gran was not just Madga; she had other names and lives. With the help of her hockey playing, techie mate Luke; Zoe sets out to discover her Gran’s past via the Dead Persons’ Society, online and elsewhere. Like red hair and a big nose, can ‘bad’ genes be inherited?
with thanks to the research ‘genis’ from State Trustees
Contents
Chapter 1 A.k.a. (also known as…)
Chapter 2 Dead end
Chapter 3 Dead Persons’ Society
Chapter 4 www.finalthoughts.com
Chapter 5 Trustee
Chapter 6 Answer-phone
Chapter 7 DNA
Chapter 8 The Shady Lady
Chapter 9 Scam
Chapter 10 Last Bytes
Chapter 11 Luke Warns
Chapter 12 Unanswered Questions
Chapter 1 A.k.a. (also known as…)
‘NOT TO BE OPENED UNTIL AFTER MY DEATH.’
It was printed in black on the package.
So I opened it.
Gran was dead. So in one way, it was OK to open her envelope. On the day of your gran’s funeral, you expect to say goodbye to her, help pack up the house and her belongings and even arrange for her dog to be looked after. But you don’t expect to find out that she was someone else.
Fake ID, that’s what my gran had. For years and years. Now I don’t know who she really was. But I’m going to find out. I have to.
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‘Here’s the box of bits,’ Mrs Donna, the neighbour, had said. ‘The Trustee will be here later to check everything. I guess it’s OK, since you’re the nearest relative here in Australia. That makes you important today.’
Well, maybe I was, and maybe I wasn’t. Most days I’m just ordinary. Even my name is ordinary. At my last school, there were four Zoes. But this Gran business is extra-ordinary. And so was my gran, I’ve just discovered.
Scary stuff, funerals. I’ve only been to a funeral once before. That was Jay, a boy from our Year 8 class. We cried and cried at the service because death was so close. Was there any plan or does death just zap you? At fifteen, you’re just starting to do important things. Not that dying isn’t important, I guess, but you don’t want to end up in a box with your footy jumper and a stuffed toy-cat mascot draped over it, like Jay.
Gran was different. She always was different.
Gran had lived alone since Pa died a year ago. Not many oldies took belly-dancing classes or went online, but my gran did. And now it seemed that she had not been just Magda.
You shouldn’t open private things, especially those with a sign like that! But how else was I going to find out? Gran wasn’t who she seemed to be all my life. It’s possible that even her name, Magda, was fake, too. So what was real and what wasn’t?
The ‘NOT TO BE OPENED UNTIL AFTER MY DEATH’ envelope was in the deed-box with other papers inside. The box smelled musty, and yet OK-ish — I notice smells.
No key. So I’d used an unfolded paper clip to pick the lock. It opened fairly easily, once I jiggled the flat clip. Felt a bit mixed up about that. ‘Sorry, Gran, but I’ve got to find out. Anyway, it did say, “until after my death”, and it’s your funeral today.’
But of course, no one could hear me. She was supposed to be in that death chapel at the cemetery place down the road. Bits of her life were still here, and in me. If she was my real gran, that is.
The feeling inside my chest was like cheating in exams. Well, I haven’t cheated in a test, but it’s the way I would feel, I guess — a sort of fizzy cloud going all through me as I pulled out the old papers. In Year 4, I used to keep a secret diary, but this was different.
A seriously old photo had been folded into four. The creases were well worn and the brownish writing on the back was loopy. Carefully I unfolded it, scared the quartered photo might fall to bits and I’d lose this clue.
She looked about twenty, with bright eyes, laughing up at the camera. The uniformed man standing alongside, with his arm draped across her shoulders, looked much older. I didn’t know which country’s uniform it was, but it looked official, like he was a soldier or something. Dark-grey eyes. Curly, dark hair. An interesting lived-in sort of face as if he knew a lot or had done unusual things.
‘Are you coming, Zoe?’
‘In a minute,’ I called to Mrs Donna who was tidying up downstairs. There was a bundle of postcards in an elastic band and a roughly written label, ‘FOR TUNA’. Who was Tuna? A fish? Was it a nickname? A few foreign letters with a ribbon around them. Love letters? If they were love letters, looking through them was too much like perving, even if I could read the language. Maybe I’d wait until after the funeral and e-mail Mum to ask what she thought.
No. I had to solve it myself. Mum wasn’t here and that’s why I was boarding with Luke’s family and their narky cat. Puss had had a charm by-pass, but not the rest of Luke’s family. They were OK.
Gran could have burnt the photo if she’d wanted to hide it. So she meant us to find it. Probably that man meant something special to her. He didn’t look like a younger Pa. Wrong hair colour. Turning the photo over, I found stained brown writing with two names scribbled.
M or D and a T? With the loops it was hard to tell. Short names. Letters running together. Scribbled clues to her past, but who would be able to identify them? Probably no one was still alive who knew Gran before she took on the fake ID and why she did it.
Behind the couple looked like a war or revolution with smoke, a flag and burning buildings. A grey world. Even the flag was smoke covered and the colours didn’t show much. It was hard to tell even which country they were in.
I fumbled in the deed box. Underneath was an ID card, with a young Gran photo and a blurry date stamp. I put it up to my nose and it smelled old. Then I tried to read it. Date of birth with hard to read numbers. Family name. A squiggly signature. But the name was wrong. Kiss. OK, many women change their names when they marry. That’s normal. But Pa’s name was Kovacs, and Gran’s maiden name was Konya, not Kiss. Why was it the wrong name?
There was a newspaper clipping with a sportsman’s photo, all yellowy around the edges, dated 1956. I couldn’t read Hungarian. Not until I was doing my Year 9 assignment had I found out how many languages Gran understood, and Hungarian was just one of them. Her mind must have had lots of compartments like a filing system.
‘Come on. You’ll be late for the funeral.’ Mrs Donna’s voice was getting closer.
There was a ‘this is all too much’ tone in her voice, so I pushed the secret stuff into my backpack.
Kids use fake ID for cheap travel or to get into night-clubs when they’re under age, and I’d done it once, but why had my gran used fake ID for all the years she’d been in Australia? In police files, a.k.a. meant also known as…how many a.k.a.’s did Gran have?
So I left my gran’s house, with all sorts of questions unanswered. Then, as I got into the tiny car Mrs Donna was driving to the funeral, I realised… In that ‘DO NOT OPEN UNTIL AFTER MY DEATH’ package,
there was no will.
‘Did Gran leave a will?’ I asked. ‘Did she say what she wanted to happen?’
Mrs Donna shrugged, and passed me the tissues. ‘The Trustees have e-mailed Kat about that sort of thing. I’ve never witnessed a will for your grandmother, but others might have, because you need two witnesses. After that fuss about your pa’s will, and whether things should go to your grandmother or not, I don’t know what happened.’
What fuss? Last year, I didn’t notice boring wills, but since this history assignment, I know people write important stuff in their wills as well as who should get what. If Gran’s will explained where she came from and why names and dates had been changed, that would be very helpful. She’d started to tell me, and then been interrupted.
‘Put these tissues in your pocket. You might need them soon.’
‘Thanks, Mrs Donna.’ I took the tissues.
‘Call me Nell.’
Where do people put wills? Now was not the time to look. First was the funeral and all the death stuff. I pushed some Kleenex in my pocket, just in case.
Chapter 2 Dead end
Rows of red, pink and yellow rose bushes led to the chapel. So many chapels. Embarrassing to end up at the wrong one, even as a visitor. No ID signs on the coffin, or even on the hearse. You could be at the wrong funeral, and too late you’d realise, like when I went to the wrong hall for the hockey team selection last year. Being new again in a different school is a hassle and you miss out on being chosen for teams because kids don’t know you or if you can play well enough. Kat, my mum, moved a lot, even before this last Antarctic trip of hers. But she chose to do that. Whenever Mum decided to move, I had to go as well and I had to get used to all the new ways of doing things. I had to start at the bottom again in the ‘vegie’ class or the Thirds. I didn’t have a choice.
‘There’s a notice board, Zoe,’ said Mrs Donna, who kept saying I should call her Nell. I think she felt worse than I did about my mum not being here. But ‘winterers’ in Antarctica couldn’t get out for several months, not even for a death in the family. No ships. No planes. Just e-mail and maybe digital photos, plus a few calls via satellite phone.
A typed sheet with surnames for the funerals flapped in the breeze. Sort of temporary looking. Whose job was it to update the list? Did they wait until the person was cremated, or just until all the mourners vanished into the right chapel?
“Chapel Glory.’ What weird names.
Inside the cemetery were colour-coded signs painted on the road. FOLLOW THE GREEN ARROW TO CHAPEL GLORY. Some even had colour co-ordinated flowers in the beds alongside.
FOLLOW THE RED ARROW TO CHAPEL PEACE. None of them said Chapel Death, but that’s what they were. Did the cops ever book anyone for speeding in a cemetery?
‘Look out!’ I’m not a good passenger when Mrs Donna is driving her tiny car. Her seriously thick glasses worry me. And what she can’t see through them worries me even more. That blue arrow to the crematoria with ONE WAY ONLY. And didn’t the sign-painter think about who might be reading DEAD END?
Somehow, this funeral fuss doesn’t seem to have anything to do with me, but it does. Indirectly. Gran’s dead and I’m alive. That’s why I’d freaked out in the shower this morning when I started thinking about just me being left. But then nothing turns out as expected
Funerals equal BLACK. Black ties. Black clothes. Luckily, wearing black is ordinary for me. Apart from my school uniform, and my hockey gear, everything I wear is black. If they ever had a no-black clothes day, I’d be naked and that could be embarrassing.
‘This may be a little different from what you expected,’ said Nell Donna comfortingly. She was right. It turned out to be a Black and White Funeral. Nothing to do with footy colours or which team you barracked for. Parked in front of the chapel was a large white hearse.
‘Who are they?’
‘White Ladies. It’s a special funeral company run by women.’
Gran preferred women’s businesses. Even her dentist was female. So, a White Lady funeral with white-suited attendants and even a female hearse-driver in a white jacket sounded like a Gran decision.
Well, someone had to do the job, but…it’s not what I’d like to try for Work Experience next term. I wondered what they had to do behind the scenes. Did they have to touch the bodies? Would cars pass you on the freeway when you had a coffin in the back of the hearse? Was it illegal or just bad manners to pass a hearse?
‘That’s what she wanted,’ Nell went on. ‘It’s been a little difficult not having adult members of your family here to arrange things.’
‘What’s in those?’ I pointed to the vase-things along the built-in shelves, like postal boxes. I didn’t want to think about adults missing from my family just now.
‘Ashes. People’s remains. They’re called urns,’ explained Nell.
‘Yuk.’ It was like being posted on to the next life. If you believed there was an after-life. Did they mean a life-after-life, or what? No one was willing to talk much about death. They always dropped their voices in case of being overheard, by God or something. I wonder if you could be e-mailed, as a sort of attachment. Attention God.cos, for cosmos, perhaps? No viruses attached. Only, in this case, there might be. I’d tell that to Luke later. He might laugh, even if others didn’t. Luke got my jokes, mostly. Could a global virus crash the universe? That was a seriously far out idea.
A White Lady offered a white pen.
‘Sign the guest book,’ Nell whispered to me.
‘What for?’ I read the earlier names. There weren’t many.
‘So the family will know who to send thank you cards to afterwards.’
‘I don’t know their addresses. So why do people get thanked for going to a funeral?’
Ignoring that, Mrs Donna introduced me. ‘This is Zoe, the granddaughter. Katalin’s daughter.’ Didn’t mean much to those who’d never met my mother, but the olds still nodded politely.
‘Looks just like her gran.’ (I didn’t, except for the nose.)
‘Can you dance like Magda?’ (Belly-dance? No way!) ‘Or sing?’ (Not in Hungarian!)
Just Mum and me were Family now. Dad left when I was very young, and nobody talked about him much. Only when Luke and his dad joked around did I miss having one. But how can you miss what you’ve never had?
A tap on my shoulder. I turned. ‘Hey, Luke.’ I’d never been so pleased to see him. He looked out-of-place in a borrowed navy jacket, which sagged, over his jeans. ‘ Good to see you.’
‘Hi, Zoe. Sorry about your gran,’ he mumbled. ‘This place is like the Cyber Dark Game Palace. Saw the urns. Unreal.’
Funerals were new gigs for me too. The organ music was creepy, like SFX out of a horror movie. My gran liked belly dancing and those Middle Eastern drums or even gypsy fiddle music, so this music was wrong for her. Also the beige carpet and curtains in the chapel were not Gran-like. Gran wasn’t ‘religious’, in a churchy way, but she respected ‘other worlds’ and red was her favourite colour.
‘Sit in the front, Zoe,’ pointed the dumpy White Lady, shaped like an eight. ‘Near the…’
She meant Gran’s coffin, which was poised on a sort of supermarket trolley with a wreath of roses on top. Gran did like flowers, especially roses. I like the smell of rose petals. That’s another weird thing about funerals. People bring flowers for the dead person who can’t smell or touch them. Bit of a waste, but I guess the florists do OK. If they couldn’t sell flowers for funerals, St Valentine’s Day and weddings, they’d probably go broke.
‘I’ll sit up the back,’ Luke said hurriedly, and left. I felt very alone.
‘Are you OK, Zoe?’ Mrs Donna bobbed her head respectfully towards the coffin and then sat with me in the front seat.
‘Fine,’ I lied. I was sitting in my grandmother’s funeral. Of course I wasn’t all right. Later, I would worry about Gran’s past. Now, I was worrying about the present.
The White Ladies were different heights. What if the coffin carri
ers dropped it? Would the lid split? You’re not supposed to think about things like that. I wondered how they would manage to lift a coffin, and carry it on their different shoulder heights. Of course. They’d use the trolley with wheels. No heaving on the shoulders. Maybe that’s why they get everything in position before the mourners arrive. Just in case they drop anything important. Like my old team nearly did when they carried me off the field after the Grand Final. Back to now! Maybe the coffin just slips out of sight and they don’t carry it?
I knew why I was thinking about this stuff. So I wouldn’t freak out. Creepy places, these funerals. I didn’t want to think about what would happen behind the velvet curtains. Cremation. Going up in smoke. That’s what they did for Viking heroes, burnt them in their ships. I did that in an assignment in primary school, long before the Year 9 family history assignment started creating problems in our family.
‘Please be seated, friends and relatives of er…Magda Kovacs.’
Out front with the mike, the funeral celebrant was like a DJ, but he didn’t know my grandmother before, so everything he said could have fitted any woman of seventy. His voice was rich and tawny-sounding, but maybe you needed a voice like that to be a professional talker. Maybe he recycled a basic speech for all funerals? But after a few minutes he did invite people to comment on my gran.
‘Perhaps one of MagDA’s friends or family would like to say something?’ He stressed the Da at the end of her name. His voice echoed around the chapel because people were being so quiet that you couldn’t even sniff without them all looking at you. I rammed the Kleenex under my nose to stop any noise, and just about choked trying to be quiet.
Say what? Even if Mum had been here, she hated speaking in public.
No one said anything. I turned around. The oldies looked a bit embarrassed by the space in the service. They dabbed at their eyes and noses with hankies. I wondered if anyone called Tuna would stand and I could return the postcards.
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