by Mary Hooper
Chapter Four
‘Is there any news about my dad yet?’ Ella asked. It was lunchtime the following Monday and we were in the staffroom on the telephone. Ella’s head was tilted to one side and the receiver was angled so that I could listen in, too. ‘Have you found out anything?’
‘I’m really sorry,’ the woman at the helpline said. Her name was Maureen and she was, she’d told Ella, her case manager. ‘We’ve only just started making our enquiries and it’ll be some time before we hear back.’ There was a pause. ‘I see when you filled in the form, you said you were going to try and find out some further information about other members of the family, and what sort of job your dad might be doing.’
‘I haven’t found out anything,’ Ella muttered. ‘Sorry.’
She’d tried – I knew she had. She’d asked her mum if her dad had had any brothers and sisters and in the middle of it the pillock had come in. He’d wanted to know what Ella was asking about ‘that loser’ for, and said that if he (real dad) had wanted her he would have come back for her, but judging by the state of her it was no surprise he hadn’t.
Poor old Ella had got really upset and – this amazed me, though it shouldn’t have really because I knew what her mum was like – she had sided with the pillock and it had all ended up in a flaming row.
‘When he lived with my mum, he used to be a car mechanic,’ Ella said now. ‘But I don’t know if he’s still doing it.’
‘Any information helps,’ said the woman. ‘Perhaps he’s working at a garage or car showroom or something.’
‘So how long d’you think it will take?’ Ella asked.
‘It’s difficult to say. And you mustn’t build your hopes on it, Ella,’ the voice went on kindly. ‘Even if we can get a letter to him, he might not reply. He might have decided to make a new life for himself. Lots of people do, you know. They cut themselves off and then find it too difficult to start having contact again.’
Ella turned to look at me, big tears welling up in her eyes.
‘But you can ring me any time you like,’ the voice said, ‘even if you just want to chat about things.’
Ella made a gulping noise in her throat and I knew she couldn’t speak because she was too choked. The woman must have known that, too. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said. ‘If you like, I’ll put him on our Missing page for a week.’
‘What’s that?’ Ella asked.
‘It’s on Teletext. We’ve got our own Missing page and we put about twenty names on at a time. It’s very low-key publicity – no photo or anything – just his name and a few brief details about him.’
‘Oh, yes please,’ Ella said.
‘Look out for it next week, then.’
The woman told her the page number and said that they’d be in touch immediately if they heard anything.
The tears had gone and Ella was beaming when she put the phone down. ‘D’you hear that? He’s going on telly. His name’s going on telly!’
‘Your mum will go spare!’
‘Let her! On Monday for a week! He’ll see it – I know he’ll see it, and then he’ll get in touch with me.’
I looked at my watch, we adjusted the silly white hats and we went out to serve the doodles. Working in the tea shop had got much more interesting for me since the pashmina and the flowers had arrived. It had given things a bit of an edge thinking there was a chance that someone came in there who fancied me. I’d taken to wearing make-up every day – I hadn’t always bothered before then – and, after my mum’s comment about my hair, nearly always had it up so that I looked older.
I practised being charming, too. Charming to every man who came in, because who knew who it might be? Even if it wasn’t someone young and gorgeous, I liked the idea of getting surprises and quite fancied getting more. If the person hadn’t declared himself by September when we had to go back to school, I wondered if the presents would start arriving there. That would increase my cred. I wouldn’t even have to bother to think up a new, more interesting persona for myself, I’d be known as that girl who had a mystery admirer and presents arriving all the time.
*
Late that morning, an envelope arrived in the second post. It contained one of those small handmade cards: silver wire twisted into a little mouse shape on a background of a painted rainbow, very pretty. Inside, each one wrapped in a screw of tissue paper, was a pair of earrings, long, silver, with a tiny stone at the end of each one which Mrs Potter said was a moonstone. There was a note, too. In the same handwriting that had been on the first note, written with an ink pen in nice italic script. It said:
Would you like to meet? I want you to know I have only the best of intentions towards you, so would you like to bring your Mom or your best friend or someone? I suggest next Sunday, you say a time and place. You can leave a message on 07204-609654.
‘Oh, wow!’ Ella said as we stared at it. ‘Can I come?’
‘Course you can,’ I said.
‘That looks like a mobile number,’ Ella said. ‘And look how he’s spelled Mum – with an ‘o’. Like the Americans do.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. I nibbled at my bottom lip. I was thrilled at the thought of meeting him, of course, but also a bit deflated and a bit worried. All the time he was a mystery admirer it was just that – a mystery. He could be anyone and I was free to make him an Eastern prince, a road protester or a Hollywood talent spotter, as the mood took me. Once I’d met him, though, all that would be over. I was scared he’d just turn out to be a quite boringly ordinary bloke.
At six fifteen that afternoon as I came down the road from work, Mum drove up in the car with a load of shopping. We carried everything indoors and, as she unpacked the stuff in the kitchen, I danced around wearing my new earrings and reading the card out to her.
‘Look, aren’t they lovely? I can go, can’t I? What d’you think he’ll be like?’
She frowned, picked up the card and examined the writing. Then she examined the earrings and shook her head. ‘Expensive again,’ she muttered. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Well, we can find out now!’ I said. ‘I can go, can’t I? Ella says she’ll come with me. She’s desperate.’
‘I’m not letting you go with her!’ Mum said. ‘If you go at all, I’m going with you.’
I groaned. ‘Do you have to? I’ll be perfectly all right.’
‘Don’t look at me like that! As if I’d let you two go on your own – you’d get kidnapped or something.’
‘Mum! We’re not ten years old!’
‘I want to go with you and sort this out,’ she said. ‘I’m not having someone I don’t know send you expensive presents. What’s his game?’
I sighed. I’d guessed this was coming, of course. Guessed she wasn’t going to let me go with Ella.
She banged tins into the top cupboard. ‘I’ll come with you and we’ll take the presents back and say thank you but you can’t possibly take any more expensive things from a stranger.’
I gave a great groan. ‘Oh, no!’ No more presents! And to have to give back those that I’d got! I began to wish I hadn’t told her.
She turned from the cupboard. She had that uncanny ability that mums sometimes have of knowing what I was thinking almost before I did. ‘Look, Holly, I know you needn’t have told me about this, but I’m extremely pleased that you did. You must allow me to know the right thing to do, though. You don’t know with these men – you’re a lovely young girl and some men are dangerous.’
I tutted, swinging my head from side to side so that I could feel the cold stone of the earrings gently touching each cheek.
‘You’ve heard of stalkers, haven’t you? What about that woman who was killed last year by a stalker who’d been pursuing her for ten years?’
‘This isn’t like that,’ I muttered. I didn’t want to think that my secret admirer, my strikingly attractive band member, the person who’d sent such lovely things to me, was anyone horrible like a stalker.
‘You can scoff, but if
he’s on the level, why doesn’t he just turn up at the door in the normal way? Why all this secrecy business?’
‘Dunno.’ I shrugged.
‘I’ll ring him and give him a time and place,’ she said decisively. She scrunched up the shopping bags and shoved them into a drawer. ‘And I bet he doesn’t turn up once he knows I’m coming.’
‘Mum!’ I protested again. ‘Let me ring him. The card was for me. It said for me to ring.’
A bit of a battle ensued, with me saying that if she didn’t let me ring I was never going to tell her if he contacted me again, and her saying that while I lived in this house under her roof I had to be guided by her, etc. It didn’t go on for long, though – our rows never did. It ended with us deciding between us that I was allowed to ring him with a message arranged beforehand, while she listened in.
We then had to decide where we were going to meet. Mum said it ought to be somewhere out in the open and crowded. ‘It’s got to be somewhere we can just politely say our piece and then depart.’
‘Suppose we don’t want to depart?’ I said. I couldn’t help wondering whether he’d bring another present with him – something too big to post. ‘We ought to hear him out. Suppose he’s young and really nice? Suppose you like him, approve of him?’
‘Suppose I don’t,’ she sniffed.
We decided to make the meeting place outside the gates of the old royal palace, near where we lived, at three o’clock the following Sunday. Although we could walk there, Mum said we should drive in case we wanted a quick getaway. After that, jittery with excitement, I rang the number he’d given. I was really quite nervous that he’d pick up the phone – that would have thrown me completely because I’d only rehearsed saying the place and time parrot-fashion. I wasn’t ready to talk to him.
We went out into the hall to the telephone, with Mum squashed against me as close as she could possibly get.
He spoke quite quietly, and it was impossible to tell how old he was. He had a nice, deep voice and a faint accent which might have been Australian. He just said the number and ‘Hi, I’m out. Please do leave me a message, though.’
I said, ‘This is Holly. My mum and I would like to meet you on Sunday afternoon. Outside the old palace gates at three o’clock. Goodbye.’
‘I couldn’t hear his voice!’ Mum said as I replaced the receiver. ‘I wanted to hear how he sounded.’
‘He hardly said anything.’
‘Did he sound respectable?’
‘’Spose so. He didn’t sound rough. He might be Australian.’
Australian didn’t go with my daydreaming, somehow. Australian conjured up a picture of someone wearing one of those silly hats, or a surfing beach bum with bleached yellow hair. It would be OK if he was from one of the Aussie soaps, of course, but I didn’t want a lager-swilling loser.
When I went back to my bedroom to have another little bit of a daydream, I picked up the card again and remembered Ella had mentioned that he’d written ‘mom’ in the note. So maybe he was American and not Australian. That would be better.
Well, whatever he was, in five days’ time I was going to find out.
Chapter Five
‘You’re going to meet him!’ Alex said, sounding all gruff down the telephone line. ‘What the hell are you doing that for? How would you like it if some girl was sending me stuff and I went off and met her?’
‘It’s not like a date,’ I said. ‘It’s to give him his things back. Anyway, Mum’s coming with me.’
It was Sunday morning. I hadn’t told Alex about the meeting before, because I’d known he wouldn’t like it. I’d had to tell him in the end, though, because he’d rung to ask me to go to the cinema that afternoon.
‘It won’t take long. I’ll probably be back at half past three,’ I said. ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I get in and we can go to the second show.’
As I spoke, I thought to myself that I’d be back at three thirty … unless I met Mr Secret Admirer and fell madly in love with him, and then who knew when I’d be back?
I wasn’t madly in love with Alex, that was a cert. I really liked him, but he was just a boy I went out with sometimes. I thought perhaps the madly-in-love bit might happen later, but Ella, who was a bit of an expert on these things, told me that it always happened at the beginning, and if it wasn’t there then, then it never would be. Everything else was there, though: Alex was good-looking, funny, nice to me and didn’t spend all night chatting to his mates when we were out together, so it was a bit of a disappointment that I wasn’t soppy about him, but there you go. Anyway, I knew the soppiness didn’t ever last: Mum had told me that it gradually gave way to what she called ‘a nice companionship’. Who wanted to start off with a nice companionship, though? That was for when you were old. Sooner or later I wanted to sample the can’t-eat-can’t-sleep bit.
‘And you’re going to tell him to get lost, are you?’ Alex said.
‘Yeah. Sort of,’ I said. ‘At least, Mum is.’
‘And you’ll give him back his stuff?’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said, beginning to lose patience. ‘Look, he’s just going to be some weird old bloke, isn’t he?’ As I said it, I crossed my fingers and hoped madly that he wasn’t. ‘So when we get in, I’ll ring you, right?’
‘OK,’ he said.
I’d only just put the phone down when it rang again and it was Ella.
‘Guess what? He’s on!’ she said in a stage whisper.
‘Who is?’
‘My dad. On Teletext. I’ve been looking every day and it came on this morning. I nearly dropped dead when I saw his name there.’
‘What’s it say?’
‘Go and look,’ she said. ‘Ooh, it really made me feel funny – seeing it written up in black and white.’
‘Has your mum seen it?’
‘No. No reason why she should. She never looks at Teletext. I don’t suppose she knows what it is.’ She sighed. ‘I wonder if he’ll see it. Or if someone else will see it and tell him about it.’
There was a long pause and then, just to bring the conversation round to me, I said, ‘I’m getting ready to go in a minute.’
‘Already! I thought you weren’t meeting him until three o’clock?’
‘Well, I want to look my best, don’t I?’ I said. ‘He might have a present for me. I might be dripping in gold when I come back.’
‘Huh!’ she said. ‘Ring me, won’t you?’
‘Course I will.’
‘And go and look at my dad’s name.’
I went into the sitting room and tapped out the number. National Missing Persons Helpline, it said at the top of the page, and then the pages turned over and there were lots of people missing: old, young, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, all with their details and descriptions. Underneath it said things like, ‘We’re desperately worried’, ‘Left home after a family row’ or ‘Just ring home and let us know you’re all right.’
Ella’s dad was about the tenth one on, and I presssed HOLD when it got to him. It said:
Does anyone know the whereabouts of David Sullivan?
Little is known of his present appearance, but David is forty-six years old, used to live in the South-East, and may possibly be working as a car mechanic.
A member of his family would very much like to be in touch with him again and asks him to make contact through us.
Dad came in when I was looking at it.
‘Look – it’s Ella’s dad!’ I said. ‘She’s advertising for him.’
He read it carefully. ‘But why doesn’t it mention Ella as being the one who’s looking for him?’
‘In case he’s got another family and hasn’t told his wife he’s been married before,’ I said. ‘They told Ella they always put that.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he said. ‘Family break-ups. I don’t know … ’ Then he said, ‘I think you’d better take my mobile phone this afternoon.’
I turned off the TV. ‘What for?’
‘
So if there’s any difficulty you can ring me. I’ll be sitting here waiting and if necessary I can jump in the car and come to your rescue.’
‘Like Batman?’
Dad nodded and grinned. ‘Something like that. You just don’t know who’s going to turn up, do you? These young lads get – well – obsessive sometimes.’ He put his arm round my shoulders and gave me a hug. ‘I know I’m being an old stooge but I’d just feel better knowing you had the phone with you.’
‘OK!’ I said. Whatever. I was dying to meet this guy, whoever he was and whatever he was like. The nearer it got to three o’clock, the more excited I got.
*
At a quarter to three, Dad waved us off from the window, making a dialling-up motion with his hands. We nodded to him and waved back.
‘You look nice,’ Mum said as we drove down the road.
I shrugged. ‘I thought I ought to make an effort.’
She glanced at me quickly again. ‘You’ve got the earrings on. Take them off!’
I sighed. ‘I thought I was just giving the scarf back.’
‘ And the earrings.’
‘OK,’ I said sulkily. I took them off and held them in my hand, which felt sticky with sweat. It was a blistering day and I kept coming over in great swoops of hotness. Who was he? What did he want? What if he was gorgeous?
‘We’ll go past the gates and into the proper car park,’ Mum said, pausing at the traffic lights.
‘It’s two pounds an hour!’
‘Never mind. We’ll push the boat out.’
‘How will we know him?’
‘He’ll know us, won’t he? He’ll know you, any rate. We’ll just have to wait for him to approach us.’
I wiped my free hand on my skirt, looking out of the window at the crowds coming up the main road from the station. A hot summer Sunday always brought out the masses, some carrying picnic baskets and cool boxes, some pushing babies in pushchairs, some – the doodles – with maps, leather rucksacks and books on Henry VIII under their arms. The tea shop would be heaving.
