I added the P.S. later, after Gillian had gone home, though it’s not true about her being shy, or not that I’m aware of. (Have you noticed that nearly everyone in the world claims to be shy, “really”? You could try it out: ask a random group of people if they are shy “really” or “deep down inside,” and you’ll see what I mean. It’s the same with having a sense of humor. Ask a random group of people if they have a sense of humor, and every single one of them will say that they have a great sense of humor. It’s astonishing that there aren’t more shy comedians in the world, to my mind.)
I took out the larger face bit before I sent the e-mail. That was only a joke between me and myself. But I left in about needing new clothes, because I thought it was true. She couldn’t do something as serious as an audition in those frippy things she normally wears. The day I called at her house, she was wearing a coloredy top with a drawstring around the neck, like a laundry bag. You can’t do an audition in a laundry bag.
My mother wanted to know what was going on. What were we doing, spending hours on the computer when we could be out in the sunshine?
“Oh, we go in adult chat rooms and pretend to be over eighteen,” I said airily. “We thought we might find boyfriends that way. American ones.”
“Mags!”
“Of course we don’t,” I said. “You’re such a wet, Mum. Do you think we have no sense?”
“No,” said my mother. “That is to say, yes.”
“You are absolutely convinced I am going to be kidnapped and murdered and chopped up into little pieces and made into soup, aren’t you?”
“Mags, don’t talk like that.”
“But you’re wrong. I don’t talk to strangers. I don’t take stupid risks. I say no to drugs, though I have to admit I tried beer once at a wedding, but fortunately I didn’t like it. I don’t go into chat rooms. I’m all right, Mum, I’m all right!”
“What wedding?” said my mother. “Who gave you beer?”
“Mum, it was only a sip, but that’s not the point. The point is, I’m OK.”
“I suppose you are,” said my mother with a small sigh.
Sometimes I wonder if she wants me to be not-OK, so she can rescue me.
“Well then,” I said.
She ran her fingers absentmindedly through my hair. It was a nice feeling.
“I’m more likely to be run over by a drunk when I’m crossing at a pedestrian light,” I said reassuringly, “than to be lured to my death by some weirdo with an ice-cream cone in a raincoat, I mean, in a raincoat with an ice-cream cone.”
“Oh, Mags! Stoppit!” But she was grinning in spite of herself.
“Only teasing,” I said.
“Emm,” said my mother then, twisting a strand of my hair around her finger without realizing she was doing it. “Mags?”
“What? Leggo my hair!”
“Sorry. I … er, I have invited someone to lunch on Wednesday.”
“Well then,” I said. I wasn’t terribly interested in this piece of information.
“I’d like you to be there.”
“Why?” I asked suspiciously. “Why can’t I just have my sandwich as usual and take it to the woods? I don’t want to sit around with boring grown-ups. I’m busy next week. I’m on a manhunt.”
“A manhunt? You’re only twelve.”
“It’s not that sort of manhunt. I’m just helping someone to find someone they’ve … mislaid.”
“Is that what all the e-mailing is about?”
“One little e-mail is all. And I didn’t go online till after six, like you said, when it’s cheaper.”
“Hmm. Well, I’ll make my famous minestrone. How does that tempt you?”
“Yum,” I said. “When?”
“On Wednesday, I told you. For lunch.”
“Oh! Well, all right then. I’ll be there.”
I may have my reservations about my mum, but I know good minestrone when I get it. I believe in being fair about things and I cannot say fairer than this: if you haven’t tasted my mother’s famous minestrone, you really haven’t tasted minestrone at all. (Except possibly in Sicily.)
* * *
Gillian’s father did not reply to my e-mail. I was furious. Surely to goodness any father worth the name would reply to a mail like that from his own daughter. Practically from his own daughter.
I tried to imagine what my dad would have done if someone had e-mailed him like that, but I couldn’t decide how he would have reacted. I just had no idea how he would behave. That made me feel a bit panicky, as if the earth were shifting under my feet and I didn’t know which way to jump to safety.
Sometimes, his face won’t come into my head and I can’t imagine him anymore. That makes me feel panicky too, and guilty as well. It’s as if I am losing him all over again, only this time, it’s my fault. When I feel like that, I go and look at the photos in the album we keep in the sideboard. I stare at the photographs for a while, looking at his face smiling over the top of a book or peeping out from behind a gate—the back gate of our old house, the one that led into the lane where the woodbine grew—and finally something in my memory slides and clicks into place, and the smiling photo face starts to move and talk and gradually my own remembered image of my dad’s face comes swimming back into my mind and takes over from the photograph, and it’s almost like remembering him properly. Only not really.
Sometimes, when the panicky feelings started, I would screw up my eyes and try to squeeze a few tears out. I had an idea that a good cry would flush the feelings away. That’s what people say. But my eyes just got hot and dry and the tears wouldn’t come. I’d have to think about all the sad things about him being dead before I could manage even a sniffle.
I’d think about how I was an orphan now, or half an orphan. That was no good, because it only made me laugh, imagining myself cut in half, hopping about on one leg. Laughter is good, but there are times when it is not appropriate.
I’d think about how Mum had no one to talk to about things, no one to plan things with, no one to share the responsibility of a child with. Of course, I am a very easy child to bring up, but all the same, it is a big responsibility to be a parent all by yourself. That just makes me sigh with frustration and check guiltily that my mobile is charged up. It’s difficult to feel sad about my mother’s parenting problems. I mean, I understand it’s hard for her, but it doesn’t push the sadness buttons, you know?
I’d think about how we’d had to sell our old beloved creaky house in the city and come and live in this stupid house where everything is too new and shiny and there is too much light everywhere and no nooks and crannies. But even that didn’t make me cry. The new house is annoying, not sad; leaving the old house was sad, but not as sad as losing Dad, so there’s no point in whining about it.
I would think about the terrible noise there’d been when he’d collapsed onto the horn of the car, and how my mother and I had come running out of the house, thinking someone was trying to steal it, and how we’d found him slumped there, not breathing, and the horn blaring and blaring like some angry creature. That makes me edgy and nervous, though, not sad exactly.
I’d think about how much I missed him. I’d think about how he used to tease my mother when she got anxious about things, stood up for me when my mother was being strict. I’d think about how he used to let me beat him at chess and how he used to read to me when I was younger and about how, when I got older, I used to read to him when he was too tired to read for himself after a long day’s work and how we used to laugh about things that happened in books. That makes me sad, sad, in a longing, aching sort of way.
But the very saddest thing I didn’t want to think about.
Gillian
I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to hear that my father hadn’t replied to the e-mail. Really, Mags is too ridiculous. What does she think? That she can make people nice by sending them cute little notes, inviting them to join the human race? It doesn’t work like that. She doesn’t understand that
yet. She hasn’t had the experience, I suppose, of having her dad go missing on purpose. I know it’s terrible if someone dies, because you know you will never, ever see them again, but if someone just walks away from you, chooses to walk away, that’s much worse, because it spoils everything. Not just everything now and in the future, but the past as well. All those games he played with you when you were a kid, all the stories you read together, all the walks you had, the bags of toffees he brought home on a Saturday—they’re all tainted now, as if someone has spat on your memories, because the person you shared them with turns out not to have loved you after all. OK, maybe he loved you at the time, but he didn’t love you enough to stick it out. That’s what makes it so bad.
I suppose I should try to see it from Mags’s point of view. She would probably give anything to see her dad again, just once, and that probably makes her think that for me, seeing my dad even once a month is like being given the most wonderful birthday present. But he’s still missing, my dad, that’s what she doesn’t understand. Being missing doesn’t have to do with whether you’ve seen a person recently. Being missing has to do with whether you know where to find them if you need them. It’s easy to turn up once a month, all smiles and with the welcome of the world for yourself. That’s not the same as being available, which is what parents are supposed to be.
And now, I am supposed to write to the school and say whether I am coming to the audition, by Wednesday of next week.
“Better tell them you’re coming anyway,” was Mags’s insightful advice.
“I couldn’t do that,” I said. “It mightn’t be true.” I don’t like to tell lies. It makes me uncomfortable.
“Well then,” she said, “tell them you ‘would be happy to accept’. That’s true, you would be happy to accept, even if you can’t.”
I suppose I’ll have to do something like that, to keep my options open. I wish I didn’t have to deal with all this. I wish I could just concentrate on the music. That’s what’s important to me, not all this stuff with letters and e-mails and is this a lie and is that the truth and what will it cost and where the blazes is Dad when you need him? The music is the thing. It’s hard to explain to someone on the outside, but going into the music is like going to another place, where everything is different. Not always better, but different, because the rules are different.
When I’m nervous or agitated, I pick up my violin for comfort, just like the way I used to hug my teddy when I was a little girl.
“Did you have a teddy when you were little?” I asked Mags.
She frowned at me.
“Listen,” I said, and I started to play “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.”
She frowned harder. “That’s so familiar,” she said. “What is it?”
“If you go down to the woods today…,” I sang softly, “dee-doodly, dee-doo, dee-doo.”
Mags grinned and started to pick up the tune. “Dee-doo, dee-doo, dee-diddly-dee-die,” we sang together, “dee-diddly-dee-die, dee-diddly-dee-die.…”
“Today is the day the teddy bears have their pic … nic!” Mags sang. “I haven’t heard that since I was about five!”
Then I held the bow straight up in the air and used my fingers to pick at the strings. Ooh-ooh-ooh, eeh-ooh, eeh-ooh, went the violin.
“Pizzicato,” I said over the sound, in answer to Mags’s puzzled look. “It’s allowed.” Honestly, she knows nothing.
She laughed. “Sounds like something you get in an Italian restaurant. Pizzicato with mushrooms.”
“Comfort food,” I said.
Mags
It came to me in the middle of the night. That probably means I am some sort of genius; the sort of person who is struck by inspiration at the midnight hour. I try not to let the idea go to my head, but it is interesting to think about it all the same. People probably think Gillian is the genius around here, just because she can play the fiddle. They don’t know about my inspirations, or they might think differently. It’s just that some talents are more hidden than others. Some people are not such show-offs that they have to go wafting about the forest with a musical instrument.
My mum doesn’t sleep well. She says she still hasn’t gotten used to sleeping by herself, and I often hear her creeping around making tea in the kitchen in the dead of night. Then I lie there feeling bad about her not sleeping. Or not so much about my mum not sleeping, but about what a useless daughter I am. I can’t bring myself to get up and go and say something comforting to her, the way a really good daughter would do. Or even just sit with her and say nothing. I really wish my mum and I got on better. We don’t fight, it isn’t that, but there is always this stiffness between us. I can’t remember when it started.
I wondered what Gillian would do. I couldn’t imagine anyone sitting with Zelda in the night, but Gillian might sit with my mum, if she were her mum. At this point my thoughts became confused and I drifted into sleep. I didn’t hear my mother’s door shutting softly as she went back to bed.
Later, though, I woke again and shot up in bed, slapping myself across the mouth to stop myself shouting out. This was the moment of inspiration, the one I just told you about if you were paying attention.
That’s why! was what I had to stop myself shouting. It had come to me in a dream, I thought, or else just as I woke up. I knew, suddenly, what my dad would do if he got an e-mail from a friend of his daughter’s that he had never heard of. I had no idea why I hadn’t been able to imagine it during the daytime, since it was so obvious.
“Who the blazes is that?” he’d have muttered irritably. “Macla, what sort of a name is that?”
Macla is my e-mail username. In case you can’t work it out for yourself, I will explain that it is made up from the first few letters of my real name and surname. It’s cool, isn’t it? Like a Celtic goddess, or a saint who was dead holy and built a lot of monasteries and led an army to defeat the heathen. Of course, my father knew what my e-mail name was, but Gillian’s dad obviously wouldn’t know that. It was Gillian’s dad who would scrunch over his computer screen and mutter about the unknown Macla.
I snuggled down again under the duvet with a smile, pleased as punch with myself that I’d worked it out. I hadn’t forgotten my dad after all.
As I drifted toward sleep, I remembered what Gillian had said about having a teddy. I did have a teddy: Teddy Murphy he was called, after a cat we used to have, only the cat was called Murphy, not Teddy Murphy, obviously. I hadn’t seen the old fellow since the move. I’m too big for a teddy, of course, but still, I’d like to know where he is. I’d like to be able to put him on a shelf in my bedroom, just for decoration, and look at him sometimes. I wouldn’t like to think of him being squashed in the bottom of a leftover tea chest or with his coat all dusty in the garden shed.
Gillian
She really has no sense, Mags. I suppose I have to make allowances for her age. But she comes out with things all jumbled up, and it can be very confusing. I didn’t mean to go stomping all over her feelings in my size 12s, but how was I to know what she was on about? (She doesn’t really wear size 12 shoes, by the way, but this is just the kind of very obvious figure of speech Gillian uses. To be quite fair, since we’re on the subject, her feet are not her worst point. I’d say they’re about a size 5, if you want to know. Signed: Mags)
“My dad got a virus,” she said excitedly to me a couple of days after we’d sent the e-mail, when we met in this place she calls her den. It’s just a clearing by the stream in the woods, with a sort of hidey-hole beside it. Very childish.
I was just opening up my lunch: peanut-butter sandwiches, because I was experimenting with vegetarianism.
“About a year and a half ago,” she was burbling on.
“What sort of virus?” I asked. I know you shouldn’t ask questions about other people’s illnesses, but for goodness’ sake, she was volunteering this information; she obviously needed to tell me. The least I could do was show a bit of interest.
“Oh, I don’t know.” S
he shook her hair in that impatient way she has. “That’s not the point.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to intrude. You don’t have to tell me about it, if it’s private.” I think that was fair enough. I wasn’t going to poke my nose into her family’s business, even if she insisted on taking a magnifying glass to mine.
“It’s not private,” she said. “It was one of the ones you get by e-mail.”
“E-mail!” My God, I thought, she is all over the place, this child. “You can’t die of an e-mail virus!”
OK, OK, I made a mistake, but I ask you, what would you think if someone’s dad has died, and suddenly she starts going on about him getting a virus?
“I know that,” she said, looking all mystified. “What are you talking about? Oh! You think I meant … Oh, Gillian! He didn’t catch that kind of virus. I mean he got a virus on his computer.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
Well, so I got red in the face. So I’m a sensitive soul. Artists are like that.
“I remembered it in the night,” Mags went on, galloping off somewhere else now. I told you, she’s all over the place. “The thing is, see, it took him ages to get rid of it, the virus, and ever after, he was very picky about e-mails from strangers. He never opened anything unless he knew the person, and even then, only if there was no attachment. He was always warbling on about it. And your dad works with computers, right, so he’s probably very careful too, which explains why he hasn’t answered my e-mail. He probably put it straight in the bin. That explains it!”
“Could be,” I said, careful not to sound too convinced. You don’t want to be encouraging a person with this sort of wild imagination. “Yeah, I s’pose. Or it could just be that he doesn’t care. Mentioning money mightn’t have been the best thing. If we’d just said he should ring me.…”
Second Fiddle Page 6