“Larry’s got to go to dinner in a Paris apartment with Irish embassy people,” I said, “and it’s full of overstuffed cushions, gold silk”—actually, I just made that bit up, but I bet it’s very luxurious—“and it has shutters, but they don’t open them, so it’s dark and mysterious and it smells of cat and potpourri. Doesn’t that sound adventurous?”
I wished I could go to Paris. I imagined myself about three years older, in very pointy high heels and a little black dress, in high rooms lined with bookshelves, talking about something serious, philosophy, maybe, or films. I don’t know what, but serious stuff, anyway. And people listening to me. That’d be the best part, instead of everyone telling me to act my age one minute and to do as I’m told the next.
Hal shook his head.
“Well?” I asked. “What happened when you got home yesterday?”
“Er, well, we had our lunch,” said Hal. “Waffles and beans.”
“Sounds disgusting,” I said.
“Well, normally it’s broccoli and rice cakes, the stuff women eat. And I put a border around the kite. Look, I made it out of wallpaper that I found in a skip on our road.”
“Very nice, Hal,” I said.
“I thought about what you said about a blue kite disappearing into the sky, and I thought a red border would make it more visible.”
“Well,” I said. “It’s nice to know you listen to me some of the time. So, it’s red like Wednesday then?”
“No!” he said. “Wednesday is a completely different shade of red!”
“Right,” I said. Weirdo, I thought.
He’d attached these two amazing tails to the kite as well. One was made out of an old Christmas decoration, all glittery streamers, and the other one had these paper bows in different colors—purple and yellow and green and red and pink and turquoise and gold. It was gorgeous, and really long, and every bow was a little bit smaller than the one before it, so the whole tail kind of trailed away, right down to the tiniest little mauve bow, not much bigger than a shirt button. He’s quite artistic, Hal, when he puts his mind to it.
“It’s wicked, Hal,” I said, “but what happened?”
I was dying to know how Hal’s folks had reacted to all that business with the hospital, and whether the row between his mother and Alec had continued after she got back from the golf tournament. It was an interesting situation.
“I told you.”
“I mean Alec, what did he say? Did he mention the hospital business?”
“To me?”
“Well, yes, to you, to your mother, whatever. Did it come up in conversation over the waffles?”
“He doesn’t eat waffles. He—”
“Hal!”
“What?”
“Look, let’s take this in easy stages. When you got home yesterday, who was there?”
“My mother was still out playing golf.”
“Right. And Alec?”
“He was having a beer in the back garden.”
So, he was home before Hal. He hadn’t got locked into some sort of nightmare in the hospital, going around and around pathetically looking for Clem Clingham and a pot of paint. He must have known about the back gate all along. He’d got one over on us there, even though he probably didn’t even know it.
“So, you stuck your head out the back door and said … oh no, you don’t talk to him, so maybe you waved to him or something?”
“Wave to Him? No. I just took my bike around the side of the house. I keep it in the back, and he was sitting there on a deck chair, still wearing his painting overalls.”
“And?”
“So I said, ‘Were you working this morning, then? Only, I thought you were going to the golf thing with my mum.’”
“Hal! You spoke to him!”
“Well, I thought, it’s a bit funny to be wearing his overalls when he’s not working, and if I don’t mention it, it’ll look as if I am avoiding it or something, and that might seem a bit suspicious.”
“Well, yes, but I thought you said you never spoke to him! Not since he moved in.”
“Well,” Hal said, “I never had anything to say to him before, not really. Nothing important. But it seemed important to say something yesterday, after … everything. So I did.”
“OK, so he said?” It was hard work getting this story out of Hal.
“‘Rrrmph,’ something like that.”
I wasn’t getting very far with this line of interrogation.
“So, when did your mum get home?”
“She didn’t.”
“How d’you mean, she didn’t come home? She must have been home by bedtime.”
“No.”
“She stayed out all night?”
“Yeah, looks like it.”
“Hal!”
“It tastes sort of like curry paste,” Hal said, peering at the kite.
“What does? Your mother not being there?”
“No!” he said, as if I should know that a thing like that wouldn’t have a taste. How would I know what tastes and what doesn’t in Hal’s weird world?
“The border around the kite,” he said. “That shade of red. Green curry paste. Funny, that, the way the reds and the greens get mixed up. Never thought of that before.”
The kite, the kite, the wretched kite! He couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything else. That and his weird mixed-up senses of color and taste.
“Hal!” I said again, pretty thunderously, I have to admit.
Hal’s shoulders seemed to collapse in toward his chest, and he had that caved-in look he gets when he’s upset. His face was like a snowflake that gets stuck on the outside of the window and you’re looking at it from the inside, and you know it’s going to slither down any minute and then disappear.
“Sorry,” I said, meaning about shouting at him, but he didn’t seem to hear. “Er … did she ring or anything?” I asked. “Was she staying with a friend?”
“No.”
“Well, did Alec explain where she was?”
“No.”
“Does nobody ever talk in your family?” I could hear myself getting all psychological, like my mum.
“He isn’t in my family.”
“Oh, Hal!”
“Can we go to the strand and fly the kite?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I can’t, I’m not allowed. I’m grounded.”
“Why?” It sounded like the wind, the way he said it, the wind trapped between tall buildings. He must’ve really needed to go kite flying.
“Because of yesterday,” I said, “being out all day. My parents are furious with me. You’re lu—” I stopped myself just in time. This boy’s mother had … disappeared, it seemed. He was behaving oddly, but could you blame him? Poor Hal, I found myself thinking. Just like my mum is always saying.
Hal’s face looked whiter than ever, if that’s possible. He’s in danger of turning into an angel, I thought, and flying away altogether.
“When are you ungrounded?” he asked.
“I’m afraid to ask,” I said.
We didn’t say anything for a while. I admired the kite. Hal just sat there. It looked as if he were working on draining every last drop of blood out of his head and down into his feet. I suppose if you don’t know where your mother’s gone, it’s probably normal to look like that, but I didn’t like it. Hal didn’t look himself at all.
“Olivia,” he said at last, in that tiny, insecty voice he had yesterday at the Garda station. “What if my mother doesn’t come home?”
I had been thinking exactly that, but I didn’t let on to Hal.
“Of course she’ll come home, Hal,” I said. “Mothers don’t just disappear. It’s in their job description: they have to stick it out.”
“I shouldn’t have done that thing with the mortuary, should I? It’s all my fault. It was Him that was supposed to leave, not her. I wish …”
“Don’t be daft, Hal,” I said. “There’s no connection between you playing a silly trick on Alec and your m
other not coming home last night. It’s because of whatever is going on between them. Nothing to do with you, you’ll see. It’s just some silly row they’re having.”
I don’t know much about how grown-ups think, only what I can work out from EastEnders. (I am not supposed to watch EastEnders, but, hey, I have to live in the real world, whatever my parents think of it.) Still, I’d say that it’d take more than someone not going to a golf tournament to make a couple split up, wouldn’t it? And anyway, even if she wanted to leave old Alec, Hal’s mum wasn’t just going to abandon Hal, now, would she? No, there had to be another explanation.
“She was banging doors and screeching and everything yesterday morning before she left for the golf thing. She was furious with him. It woke me up, all the shouting.”
I have to say, that sounded a bit serious all right. People don’t screech in my family, unless they get a fright in the dark or something, but I said, “Look, Hal, this is probably what happened. She probably had a few drinks after the golf tournament, maybe she won or something and she got carried away, and then she thought she’d better not drive till this morning because she’d be over the limit, wouldn’t she? She’s probably seen those ads on the telly where you only have to pick up a drink and the next thing, there’s mangled bodies all over the road.”
Or maybe she had a few drinks all right, I thought, only she didn’t decide to stay over but instead got into her car and drove it into a ditch. Oh—my—God! She could be lying there with the crows picking out her eyes. But I didn’t say that out loud.
“She probably stayed over at the golf club or with a friend or something,” I said. “She’ll be home by teatime. You’ll see.”
I kind of hoped that might be true.
“But why didn’t she ring?”
“She probably did. I’m sure she would have phoned Alec.”
“He never said.”
“He just didn’t mention it to you. Since you’re not exactly on chatting terms. It’s all very well you two not talking to each other,” I went on, “but how are you going to know what’s going on if you don’t ask?”
“Yeah,” said Hal. He definitely cheered up a bit at that thought. “You’re right. She must’ve rung Him, mustn’t she? He thought I knew, I suppose, so he didn’t mention it. Yeah, that must be it. I will ask Him.”
“Good on you,” I said. “That’s the spirit.”
“I’d better get on home, then,” he said, “and see what the story is.”
“OK,” I said.
“See you tomorrow, Olivia.”
“Yeah, tomorrow,” I said. “No, tomorrow’s the bank holiday. See you on Tuesday, you mean. At school.”
“Yeah, well, Tuesday,” he said.
“Bye, Hal,” I called as I closed the front door behind him.
It would all have blown over by Tuesday, I thought comfortably. It was easier to think comfortable thoughts when Hal wasn’t sitting there, slumped in a chair and looking lugubrious. His mother would ring by tomorrow for sure, or she’d come home with a long story about a tire puncture or a missed train or something. It’d be all right. Mothers don’t just walk out on their kids. I never heard of such a thing.
Chapter 14
I was wrong. Hal didn’t come to school on Tuesday. I couldn’t imagine what was going on in his family. I didn’t even want to think about it.
Gilda and Rosemarie had had a tiff over the weekend, and they both spent Tuesday trying to get me on their side. The two of them take a lot of energy. I spent the day trying to be nice to each of them exactly the same amount, so they couldn’t use me as some sort of an excuse in this row they were having. Something about a bottle of nail varnish. I don’t really see the point of nail varnish. I did try it once, but it made my fingernails feel all tingly. I didn’t like it. But they ended up both blaming me anyway, even though their stupid row had nothing to do with me. It’s funny how people do that—blame someone else for their own rows. I’ve got used to those two, though, and I didn’t let it bother me.
I’m not allowed to phone Hal’s mobile from our house phone because it’s too expensive, so when I got home after school that day, I phoned his house, but I kept getting the answering machine. I didn’t leave a message, because I didn’t know who might listen to it.
Nothing happened at school on Wednesday, except that neither Gilda nor Rosemarie would talk to me—by trying to be equally nice to them, I’d somehow managed to offend them both—and Hal didn’t come in again.
On Wednesday evening, Larry came home, looking very sheepish. His passport had turned up in the bottom of his rucksack, where he’d hidden it—in case it got lost.
“I spy with my little eye something beginning with p,” I scoffed.
He didn’t think it was funny.
What my parents didn’t think was very funny was that he’d got a tattoo while he was away. That was a fairly Gothic sort of move for an old dyed-in-the-wool Romanesque like Larry, I thought. Showing a bit of spirit at last. It was quite a nice one, a sort of birdy creature, a peacock maybe, or a phoenix, winding around his wrist, very dramatic, but it was in a stupid place because it crept right down onto his hand. It would be on show all the time; you couldn’t hide it even with a really long-sleeved shirt.
My mother threw a conniption. She wailed, “Where did I go wrong?”
“You didn’t go wrong, Mum,” I explained to her. “It was Larry’s own idea. Don’t go blaming yourself. You did your best with him. You can’t take responsibility for how he has turned out.”
“Turned out!” she snarled, as if I had accused him of being the leader of a chainsaw massacre, when all I was doing was being nice to her, trying to get her to feel better about Larry’s little failings, even though I was secretly thinking that, according to her own theories, Larry had probably got the tattoo because of something that had happened to him when he was younger that made him want to be nasty. Though I must say, getting a tattoo is a fairly mild sort of nasty, in my own opinion, but I suppose from Mum’s point of view it is a Big Deal.
I tried to think of something helpful to say. “A body piercing would be worse,” I said eventually. “Even one in a place you couldn’t see.”
My mother squealed when I said that. “Take her away!” she screeched at my dad, as if I were some sort of a mangy cat or a plague rat or something. And there I’d been, congratulating my family on not screeching. It just goes to show, doesn’t it?
“But I only said—” I said.
“That’s quite enough, young lady,” my dad said.
All in all, I was not having a good week. Life is not very fair, sometimes, is it? And that’s just my life, which by and large is not too bad. It’s not even Hal’s, which pretty well stinks, really, when you compare.
“And there’s not a hasp in the house,” Larry muttered in my ear, in a silly, squeaky voice, as I turned on my heel to leave the room, with my chin up and a defiant expression on my face.
That did it for the chin up and the defiant expression. I exploded into giggles.
My mother totally overreacted: she threw three cushions at me, flink, flonk, flunk. She must have thought that I was giggling at her.
“Get out!” she roared.
It wasn’t my fault, it was Larry being smart, and there I was getting the blame—again. My family doesn’t understand me.
One of the cushions hit me on the ear. If it had been a book or a teacup or something, it could have knocked me out. Lucky it was a sofa she was sitting on and not a bookcase or a coffee table, or I’d have to report her to the social workers.
Chapter 15
On Thursday, Hal finally turned up at school.
He wasn’t wearing his school sweatshirt. We haven’t really got a uniform in our school, but we do have a school sweatshirt we are supposed to wear. It’s wine colored, pretty icky, but teachers have absolutely no taste in kids’ clothes. You’d think they’d teach them stuff like that at college, wouldn’t you? Like, “Look, it’s simple, read my li
ps: kids don’t like wine-colored things. Blue, turquoise, red, yellow, orange, silver, purple, even black would do, at a push—just not wine, OK? Or not navy or gray or brown or that shade of green that is trying to be brown.” But no, and that is why you have a country full of children who hate their school uniform. I am sure it is bad for us to be made to wear stuff we hate all the time. We will probably turn into fashion slaves when we grow up, and spend all our money on Gucci shoes, trying to make up to ourselves for our childhood misery.
Hal had on a blue sweatshirt, with the elbows out, and he was even thinner and smaller and paler than usual. His hair looked as if he hadn’t combed it for days. He had a cold sore at the side of his mouth.
“Hal, what’s wrong?” I asked him as we were walking home. That was the first chance I got to talk to him all day.
“What do you mean?” he mumbled.
“Hal, you’re not yourself. How come your mum let you wear that sweatshirt to school? You’re lucky Mrs. Moriarty didn’t see you, or you’d have been in trouble.”
Mrs. Moriarty is our school principal, and she is medium scary, about five or six on a scale of one to ten. Her scariness is not because she is exactly horrible, apart from being utterly obsessed with the school sweatshirt, but mainly because she is very tall—and tall is scary when you are a small person. She makes it worse by wearing high heels, really noisy ones. Kate, now, our teacher, is not scary at all, about minus two, and she doesn’t give a fig about the school sweatshirt. I don’t know why it is a fig that people don’t give about things, never a plainer fruit, like an apple or a banana.
“I couldn’t find the right one,” Hal said, meaning about the sweatshirt.
“Have you been sick?” I asked.
He shook his head.
I had to ask the awful question. “Hal, is your mum still away?”
He nodded.
“So, it’s just you and Shiny Face at home? Since Saturday ?”
He said nothing. This was not good, I thought. This was not good at all. I tried to imagine my mother not being there, and I managed to feel quite sad at the thought, even though she had thrown not one but three cushions at me yesterday.
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