Twenty Questions for Gloria

by Martyn Bedford

  If I’d thought about it, I would have realized his story didn’t add up. For the sake of a couple of months—and given that his fees must already have been paid—why didn’t he stay on at the boarding school down south, then join his family up here at the end of term? But before I had a chance to process what Uman had said, he threw me with a change of subject.

  “I like your earrings.” He reached out and held my left earlobe gently, examining the small, simple disc in the design of a primrose against a white background. His touch startled me but I didn’t pull away. “Delicate,” he said. “Unusual.”

  “I made them myself.”

  “Did you?” He looked and sounded impressed.

  A bell signaled the end of break. Uman dropped his hand back to his side.

  Pulling a planner from his holdall, he flipped it open to the timetable. “Math,” he said. “In P-07, wherever that is.”

  “Same here.”

  “Good. We can sit together.”

  “No we can’t. I sit with Tierney in Math.”

  “In which case, let’s cut class.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What’s to stop us walking right out of here and doing something more entertaining?”

  “Like what?”

  “There must be an infinite number of alternatives—we are making a comparison with math, after all. But, frankly, I don’t mind. I’d just prefer to spend this hour with you.”

  I stared at him. He seemed perfectly serious. “I’m not cutting class,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s crazy. Because you’re crazy.”

  “You may have a point there, Gloria.”

  I liked hearing him say my name, which is odd, because I’ve never been keen on “Gloria” and have always insisted on being called by a shortened version of it.

  “No, you’re right,” Uman said. “We’ll go to Math.”

  Perversely, I felt a twinge of disappointment. The idea of sneaking out of school might have been crazy but it was also thrilling. The yard had almost emptied by then. As he made to head back inside I put a hand on his arm to stop him. “Uman, can I ask you—why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why me? And don’t give me that interesting-and-complicated crap.”

  “Okay, the truth: when I saw you this morning in the tutor room I realized right away how unhappy you are. How much your life…” He searched for the word. “…disappoints you.”

  —

  I Googled him. At lunchtime, I found a quiet spot by the tennis courts that’s still in WiFi range, switched on my iPad, and trawled the Internet for Uman Padeem. He wasn’t in any of the usual places—Twitter, Facebook, and the like—and as far as I could tell, he’d posted nothing on the photo-sharing sites. A more general search produced 225 results in 0.19 seconds, none related to “Uman Padeem” but only to one or other of his names, or to names that were similar:

  Did you mean: uzma nadeem, umer nadeem, ayman nadeem, amman padam?

  It’s possible to have lived for fifteen years without leaving a virtual trace. Possible but not easy. Most people I know at school are out there somewhere on the web. Uman, it seemed, had never done anything sporty or musical; taken part in a charity fund-raiser; acted in a play; won a painting or poetry competition; had his picture taken at a fete, fair, carnival parade, or nativity; or done anything else that caused his name to appear on a school website or in a local newspaper.

  Eventually, I gave up. Opened the dictionary app instead and looked up “pedagogical.”

  —

  How could he tell? Why was a total stranger able to see it when no one else, not even Tierney or my other friends or Mum and Dad, had noticed anything wrong?

  I read people. That’s what he’d said.

  My first response was to deny it. “I’m not unhappy. Why would you even say that?”

  “Because it’s true. You want more out of life than it’s giving you. You want change.”

  “Don’t tell me what I want. You don’t even know me.”

  So it continued as we headed to class. If Uman hadn’t depended on me to show him the way to Math, I’d have abandoned him right there in the corridor.

  One time my brother’s girlfriend did a tarot reading for me and I got pissed off with her when she started telling me about myself. A lot of her “analysis” was rubbish, but it was the things she got right that annoyed me the most—as if she’d intruded into a private area of my head. It was creepy. With Uman, it felt uncanny more than creepy. Like that guy on TV who performs tricks on members of the audience—hypnosis, mind reading, that sort of thing; it sends a shiver down your spine, but you can’t help smiling, shaking your head with wonder at how the hell he does it.

  Uman insisted he wasn’t telling me what I was—he was simply seeing it.

  I didn’t know what to make of it. Or of him.

  —

  I didn’t sit with him in Math. I said no when he asked if I’d meet up with him after school to show him the sights of Litchbury.

  Yet there I was, at lunchtime, Googling him.

  —

  DI Ryan asks me straight out, “Were you unhappy with your life, Gloria?”

  “Actually, yes. I had been for quite a while.”

  “All teenagers think they’re unhappy, Lor,” Mum says. “That their lives are just so tedious.”

  “Mrs. Ellis, please. Let Gloria speak for herself.”

  I give DI Ryan an example.

  A regular here-we-go-again Saturday, the weekend before Uman turned up at Litchbury High. I was heading into town to meet up with the usual crowd in Caffe Nero for the usual hot chocolate with marshmallows, then back to Tierney’s place for a DVD, popcorn, and nachos. As usual. Sometimes we’d go to Molly’s, or Bekah’s, or Emma’s, or mine—but, always, the rom-com (or horror, or musical) and crunchy-munchies. If it was one of our birthdays we’d go right through to the evening at Pizza Express. It wasn’t anyone’s birthday that week. Even my outfit would’ve been predictable: purple Docs, odd socks, jeans, and something baggy under the brownish fake leather fake pilot’s jacket. Burgundy beanie, worn on the slant, and homemade earrings—at the dangly end of the spectrum, what with it being a non–school day.

  So far, so normal.

  Or not.

  Because, even as I walked into town, listening to familiar tunes on shuffle, passing the too-familiar sights of a route I’d taken so often it no longer looked real—the play area by the stream, the fire station, the pebble-dashed semis, the stone terrace behind the train station—I was aware of feeling flat. Not about anything specific, just in general.

  “I’d been like it for weeks. Months, really.”

  DI Ryan waits for me to continue.

  I backtrack to New Year’s Day. I’m not sure that was when it started but that was the first time I recall being properly aware of it. January 1, a day of resolutions and renewal. I raised the blind at my bedroom window and gazed out over the same higgledy-piggledy rooftops and trim little gardens and shiny cars and leafless treetops of the only place I’ve ever lived…and I conjured up a tsunami. (No idea where from—the nearest coast is more than sixty miles away.) I saw it all as clearly as if it was happening right there: the whole town smashed to matchsticks and swept away by a huge surge of water. I couldn’t have explained why. This is a “nice” town. Safe, quiet, pretty. Tourists come here. People who don’t live here wish they could. I had no reason to dislike it.

  Until I looked out on New Year’s Day, I hadn’t realized I did.

  Tier reckoned I was just tired from the party. It was more than a morning-after downer, though. You don’t hallucinate catastrophic tidal waves from your bedroom window because you’ve had several hours less sleep than usual and too much Smirnoff Ice. Or go on feeling like that through January and February, March and April. Not that it happened every day, or so full-on. It wasn’t as if tsunamis played on a continual loop in my head. But there was a nagging sense of
restlessness. Of dissatisfaction. With myself as much as anything. I’m sure a psychiatrist could’ve given me any number of good reasons why I shouldn’t feel that way. But your mood doesn’t listen to reason, does it?

  Mine didn’t, as I hiked into town to meet my friends on a regular Saturday in the middle of May, two days before I even knew Uman Padeem existed.

  “Uman said he entered my life because I was ready for him to enter it.”

  DI Ryan fixes my mum a look, as if daring her to interrupt.

  I shrug. These things are unknowable. You can decide to believe them or not.

  Whatever, I was running late. As usual. So by the time I got to Caffe Nero, my friends were already inside. I hesitated, peering through the window like the customers were mannequins wearing clothes I might want to buy. Even though I stood to one side, the automatic doors kept opening and closing, as if in sympathy with my indecision about entering.

  I spotted the others at our usual table near the back. Tierney and Bekah were facing in my direction; Emma and Molly had their backs to me. One empty chair: mine.

  All I had to do was go through the doors, buy a drink, and zigzag between the tables to join them, like I’d done a hundred thousand times. There would be loads of smiles and hey-ing and hi-ing and Yo, Glo-Jay-ing. They were my friends. They liked me. I liked them.

  The two girls facing the front of the café hadn’t noticed me yet. Tierney raised a mini marshmallow to her mouth on a long-handled spoon and slipped it between her lips. She knows how attractive she is, but acts like she has no idea. Alongside her, Bekah was messaging. Bekah is always messaging. Molly was in full swing on some anecdote or other, judging by the hand flapping, the hair flicking, the head bobbing. Like a bee performing its waggle dance to tell the rest of the hive where to find the food. It would be about Josh. It would be hilarious. Or tragic.

  I pictured myself sitting in that vacant chair. Listening. Laughing. Or sympathizing.

  At some point, one of them—almost certainly Tierney—would notice the latest earrings and I’d be confettied with compliments, as if making my own jewelry from charity-shop bric-a-brac and bits of tat was just the coolest thing.

  A hologram of my face stared back at me from the window, pale skin pixilated by the bustle beyond the glass. At their table, my friends enacted a scene so familiar it was suddenly the oddest sight—like they’d been reduced to the size of the dolls I used to play with and arranged for a make-believe tea party. Another tsunami moment. Only, instead of a torrent of water sweeping them away, I imagined going in there, gathering up my friends in my arms, and taking them home to be stowed in the trunk under my bed.

  I’m aware of the expression on DI Ryan’s face as I say this. Mum’s, too.

  “I wanted to just turn around and walk away,” I tell them. “They’re my friends, we meet there all the time, but suddenly—that morning—I couldn’t face it. Couldn’t face them.”

  “Did you?” DI Ryan asks. “Walk away, I mean.”

  “No. Tierney spotted me just then. She waved and I waved back and went inside—I had to, once she’d seen me. But also, it was like she’d snapped me out of a trance.” I sit back in my chair. Rub my face—hard, like I’m trying to scour the skin off. When I lower my hands again flecks of light fizz before my eyes. “The whole time I was with them that afternoon,” I say, “I acted like everything was totally fine. Same old them, same old me. Same-old, same-old.”

  “Then, two days later, Uman appeared,” DI Ryan says.

  “Yep.”

  “And he was different.”

  “Yeah, he was. I’d never met anyone like him.”

  —

  DI Ryan has called a break. Biscuits appear. Coffee, apple juice. Maybe I’ll get used to it but, on my second day back, it still surprises me how easy it is to eat and drink whenever I like.

  She stepped outside to take a call just now. Like it was important.

  As she returns to the interview suite, I ask, “Have you found him?”

  “No,” she says. “No, Gloria, we haven’t.”

  QUESTION 4: So, do you like him?

  When we resume, she asks about Uman’s attitude, that first day at Litchbury High. Toward the teachers, me, everyone. The way he said whatever he liked, regardless of who he was speaking to, and without thought for the consequences or people’s opinions of him.

  “He didn’t care,” I say. “He really didn’t.”

  “You liked that—his recklessness?”

  Did I? I suppose I must have. It was exciting, in a way, witnessing his disregard for the rules of conventional behavior. A vicarious thrill, to use an Uman word. “It was like watching someone doing a bungee jump,” I tell her.

  As if the question follows on naturally, DI Ryan asks if I found Uman a bit scary.

  “The bungee-jump thing was an analogy.”

  “I know, I meant more generally.”

  I see where she’s going with this. When I was missing, the police must have questioned my school friends about the period leading up to my disappearance. And about Uman, of course. The things he did. The things we did. The things he “made” me do. She has all the dots in place and just needs me to join them up for her. But I’m not playing that game. I’ve tried to tell her—have told her—that she’s got Uman all wrong. Got us all wrong. He didn’t do anything bad. But DI Ryan, my parents—they go on twisting it.

  Then they expect me to help them.

  “No,” I say. “I never found him scary.”

  —

  As Tierney and I headed out of school that afternoon, I spotted Uman up ahead in the stream of students along Coronation Road. He was taller than just about everyone around him, and with his long dark hair, he was unmistakable. I remember thinking he must live on the same side of town as us or he’d have left by the main exit. Tier’s hay fever had eased, but she was complaining of feeling woozy from the antihistamine, and it made me smile because it reminded me of Uman calling her my Danish friend.

  “Where d’you think he lives?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  I gestured up ahead. “That new guy. Uman.”

  “Somewhere posh, if you reckon his old man’s a big-shot lawyer. Don’t let that put you off, though—some parents are happy for their sons to date a girl from the lower orders.”

  She’d been teasing me all day, ever since Uman sat with me at tutor time.

  We were crossing the bottom of Heatley Road, past the usual huddle of after-school smokers in the bus shelter. The flow of students had thinned a little. I could see Uman fifty meters or so in front, a logo-less black holdall dangling from one of his long arms like a puppy he’d picked up by the scruff of the neck. That graceful but awkward stride—a catwalk model with the slightest of limps, his hair fanned out behind him in the breeze.

  “Let’s follow him,” I said.

  “We are following him.”

  “No, I mean actually follow him. Find out where he lives.”

  Tier laughed. “What are we, private detectives or something?”

  “Come on. Aren’t you curious?”

  “No.”

  “You are, I can tell.”

  “No, you are.”

  “Fine, I’ll follow him on my own.”

  “Like hell you will.”

  We stayed close enough to keep him in sight but not so near that, if he happened to glance over his shoulder, he’d realize we were tailing him. We reckoned Uman was heading for the Ridings, where some seriously expensive houses sprawl in huge gardens as Litchbury gives way to countryside. But he surprised us by crossing the main road and taking the path that runs alongside a primary-school field.

  This was our route home.

  My first thought was that Uman was going to my house—that I was following him—but in fact, he was trying to find me. It made no sense, because he could have had no idea where I lived. But, then, not much made sense where Uman Padeem was concerned.

  “This is bizarre,” I told Tier. “We’
ve walked home this way a million times and suddenly I feel like I’m trespassing.”

  As we joined the path, we glimpsed Uman at the far end. I was sure he would turn right, parallel to the railway line, and—although it was a roundabout route—head that way toward the Ridings. But, no. He turned left onto the footbridge that would take him over the tracks to the path on the other side. The one that led to the corner where my street meets Tierney’s.

  “How does he even know this route?” Tier asked.

  It was a good point. The path was well used by people in the neighborhood, but those from other parts of Litchbury—or who were new to town—wouldn’t be aware of it.

  Uman didn’t live near us, that was for sure. If a new family—especially one that wasn’t white—had moved in, we’d have heard about it. Besides, a corporate lawyer who sent his son to boarding school could afford to buy several houses like ours and still have change for a yacht.

  “Where’s he going?” I asked.

  The only way to find out was to keep following him.

  But when Tier and I had crossed the footbridge over the railway line, the path on the other side was deserted. Unless he’d run, there was no way he could have reached the end so soon; and, with tall fences and hedges on either side, climbing into someone’s back garden wasn’t an easy escape route. We quickened our pace. We’d still be able to spot him from the end of the path—my street was a dead end and Tierney’s was long and straight, so no matter how fast he ran, he couldn’t have disappeared on us altogether.

  At the end of the path, though, there was no sign of Uman whatsoever.

  “It’s not possible,” Tier said. “People don’t just vanish.”

  “You may have a point there,” a voice said, behind us.

  We turned to see Uman approaching along the path we’d just walked down, looking very pleased with himself.

  —

  “How d’you explain that?” Tierney asked.

  I couldn’t. We were at her place—officially working on a science project, but actually listening to music, browsing the Internet, taking selfies, and Photoshopping them to make us look like freaks. I nearly always went to her house after school. I preferred it there to being at home. I don’t mention this to DI Ryan. Not with Mum sitting right here.