“Are you Alicia’s father?”
“I might be. Or it might be your Dad. What does it matter now?”
It mattered to me. Not that I had an ounce of loyalty to my dad anymore. How could I blame Mum for turning to his nicer, younger brother? Richard was a huge step up from Dad. I suppose I felt a bit jealous. Jealous that Alicia might have a better father. And still, a tiny part of me was angry. Angry that Mum and Richard had done this to Dad. Even though Dad was awful. Even though he deserved it.
“Jody? Are you there?”
Richard clicked his fingers to get my attention. “We’d better get going, if you’re going to find yourselves a place to stay for the night.”
“Right,” I said, pulling myself together. “Right you are.”
He drove us to the train station. Not the nearest one, in case Dad was following us, but a bigger one, several miles away.
“Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know.”
I stared at the board. How I wished we had mates in different parts of the country. Someone who could help us disappear.
“Let’s catch the first train out of here. We’ll go wherever it takes us.”
Richard nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”
He went to the kiosk and bought us a couple of tickets.
“The train’s leaving in five minutes from platform two,” he said. “You’d better get moving.”
“OK, thanks,” I said. “And thank you so much for your help. We really owe you.”
His face became solemn. “Now listen to me,” he said. “At some point, you’re going to want to go back to your dad.”
“No, we’re not,” I assured him. It seemed like a really strange thing to say, after all we had been through.
“I think you will,” Richard insisted. “But you need to resist, no matter what tricks he plays.”
“I don’t care if I never see that man again. In fact, I’m banking on it.”
“Here’s the train!” squealed Alicia.
Several more dignified people turned round to look as she jumped up and down. She had a right to be excited. This was the beginning of a whole new adventure.
We waved to Richard until the train pulled out of the station. I put my hand in my pocket and clutched the wad of cash he had given me. In my haste to get away, I’d forgotten my own money, still hidden under the mattress at Cold Bath Lane. But Richard’s stash was much bigger than mine had been. I wondered if it was left over from the days when he had been in business with Dad.
Alicia and I found some empty seats with a table. We sat down opposite each other, so we could each look out of the window.
“Where are we going?” Alicia asked, as the destinations were announced over the loudspeaker.
“The train goes to a place called Limemouth. We might as well go all the way,” I said. “It’ll be a big hub, so we ought to be able to find a cheap hotel for the night. We can move on somewhere else in the morning.”
“Do you think Dad will find us?”
“I hope not. Even Richard won’t know our exact location. He told me not to tell him, that way Dad can’t get it out of him.”
“He won’t hurt Richard, will he?”
“I hope not,” I said, squeezing the wad of money in my pocket. Richard had saved us and I couldn’t bear to think of anything happening to him.
“Can we play ‘I Spy’?” Alicia asked, tapping her fingers on the table.
“Shush! I can’t hear what they’re saying.”
We both listened as the guard rattled off the names of a dozen small stations.
“Did you hear that? The train’s going to pass through Queensbeach.”
Alicia twitched. “Queensbeach?”
“Yes.” I watched the houses rush past. “That’s where Julio is staying.”
“Ooh,” she said, finally getting it. “And Isabel? Will she be there?”
“Yes, Isabel too.”
Her pretty face twisted into a scowl. “Then I think we should pay them a visit.”
33
We stepped out of the station and followed our noses down narrow alleyways, through deserted streets, until we hit a flat expanse of sand. Queensbeach wasn’t the holiday paradise I had pictured. The beach itself was covered in odd relics that had been washed up by the tide, and bits of rubbish people had dropped as they passed through. There were rocks of various sizes dotted around it, and the sand looked as though the whole place needed a good wash. It didn’t smell the best either, a combination of sodden seaweed and gone off fish.
All was strangely quiet, but then people who lived in a seaside town probably didn’t realise their good luck.
“If I lived here, I’d be on the beach every day,” I told Alicia.
“Me too,” she agreed, picking up a pebble and tossing it into the sea.
The beach looked forlorn and unloved. Maybe we identified with it, because nobody loved us either.
“We’d better find somewhere to stay for the night,” I said. “We’ll find them in the morning.”
“I want to find them now.”
“I know, me too. But we don’t know where they are staying, and I don’t fancy sleeping on the beach, do you?”
Alicia shrugged. “I don’t care.”
I took her hand and led her through the car park, and down the street. I wanted to find somewhere as cheap as possible. I didn’t want to burn through Richard’s money too quickly.
Eventually, I found a B&B with the light on, and walked up to the front step.
“Do you have any vacancies?” I asked, when an old man came to the door.
He laughed as if I had said something funny.
“We always have vacancies, don’t we, Babs?” he called to his wife.
She grunted in response.
Our room was small and neat. There were two single beds, a side table and a wardrobe. The communal washroom was fit for purpose, and there didn’t seem to be any other guests staying there. We had no clothes to unpack and very few other belongings. I wished I had thought to grab my copy of The Gingerbread Man from under my pillow. Without it, I felt like I’d lost my connection to Mum.
I climbed into bed, exhausted. I fell asleep instantly, as the effects of the Angel Dust wore off. When I awoke, Alicia was mucking about with a stack of clothing catalogues.
“Look,” she said.
She had cut out the bodies and added different heads, eyes and hair. Piles and piles of different ones. She sorted through them, finding just the right hair, just the right eyes, nose and smile, until she had a doll that looked uncannily like Isabel. It annoyed me that she still idolised her.
“Isabel betrayed us,” I reminded her.
“I know she did,” Alicia said. “And she’s going to pay.”
“So, where have you ladies sprung from?” asked Bill, the B&B owner, when we went downstairs.
“London,” I answered truthfully.
“Well you look like you could do with some sea air,” he said.
Sea air, country air. People were always trying to cure my pale skin.
“You must be on your school holidays,” he said, to Alicia.
“We’re on our way out,” I said, pointedly.
“Why don’t you have a sit down first? Babs’ll make us all a nice cuppa, won’t you darling?”
Alicia looked at me, and I shrugged. We settled side by side on the large flowery sofa. Begrudgingly, his wife plodded into the kitchen.
“Worked on the trains, I did,” Bill said enthusiastically, when I didn’t ask him about his life.
“Forty years I was doing it for, never took a day off, right up until I retired. Then we followed our dream and took this place by the sea. It’s hard work running a B&B, not as easy as people think. There’s all the beds to make and the breakfasts to cook. Phone calls to answer, things to mend. We’re always on our feet, aren’t we, Babs? Hey, could you fetch us some biscuits, love? The rich teas, not the digestives. They give me the trots.”
“We’re nipping out,” I told Babs. “Not sure when we’ll be back.”
She grunted her reply, and we legged it out the door.
“Man, some people like to talk, don’t they?” Alicia giggled, as we ran down the road. I was feeling a lot more human now, much more like my old self.
“I feel like we should celebrate,” I said. “We finally got our freedom. We should throw a party or something.”
“Except no one would come.”
She was right, we didn’t have a single mate between us.
“Let’s find Isabel and Julio,” I said with renewed vigour. I felt an intense need to do something, anything to mark the fact that we were finally free.
“But how?”
We both thought for a moment.
“We could look them up in the phone book?”
I shook my head. “No, they are renting a holiday home. They won’t be in the book.”
“We passed some cottages right on the beach,” Alicia said. “Maybe it was one of them?”
“Let’s take a look.”
We walked back to the beach. It was dark now, and most of the houses had their lights on. We went up to each one in turn and peered through the windows.
A shiny new bike had been left propped up against one of the houses. There wasn’t even a lock to secure it. It fascinated me that it had been left like that and no one had taken it.
“There are bound to be more holiday homes,” I said, after we’d walked along the row. “Who knows how many there are in a town like this.”
“So how are we going to find them?”
I thought for a moment.
“When the sun comes out tomorrow, they’ll be down on the beach for sure. We’ll find them then. We just need to make sure they don’t see us.”
But the next day it rained. All day long, it poured down. The beach was completely deserted. We scoured the local eateries, but there was no sign of Isabel or Julio. And the day after that was no better.
“This is hopeless,” said Alicia, miserably.
Holed up in our room at the B&B, Alicia cut out more paper dolls while I watched TV and brooded. I’d drunk a couple of litres of cider, but it didn’t have the desired effect. I missed my Angel Dust. The world seemed dull and grey without it.
On the third day, the sun finally came out.
“About time,” Bill said brightly, at breakfast. “You girls are as pale as you were when you arrived. I expect you’ll be heading down the beach now?”
“Too right,” I said with a smile.
“I do love a nice swim,” said Babs wistfully, as she started to clear away the plates.
“You wouldn’t want to swim in that muck,” Bill laughed. “Seriously, I’ve no idea what’s in that water, but I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to be that colour.”
He wasn’t the best advert for Queensbeach, so it was just as well we weren’t regular tourists. I nicked some towels from the bathroom, and off we went.
The beach was buzzing with people. Every inch of sand was covered with towels, bodies stretched this way and that, some plump, some slim. Most were lobster red from the unexpected sun. People got overexcited when the weather was like this. They forgot their hats and their sun cream. All that mattered was getting down the beach and enjoying the unexpectedly warm day, before it all turned to crap again.
“I can’t believe how many people are here,” gasped Alicia. “How on earth are we going to find them?”
“We still have to be careful,” I warned. “We don’t want them spotting us before we find them.”
“Maybe we should get some disguises,” Alicia said, pointing towards a souvenir shop.
I humoured her and we went inside. It was full of sunglasses and big straw hats. There were straw donkeys, too. God only knew who’d want one of them.
“We ought to hide our hair,” I said.
“What about a wig?”
There was a row of comedy ones in green, blue, red and purple.
“Those are more likely to draw attention to us,” I said.
Instead, I settled on some sunglasses and nice subtle hats. I chose a pink cap for Alicia and a straw hat for me. I also picked up some sun cream and a couple of pairs of flip-flops. It all came to more than I had expected, but I decided it was worth it. It was vital we blended in.
We lay on our towels for a while, but every so often, we got up and wandered around. We walked up and down, checking each row of sunbathers for Isabel and Julio, but we didn’t find them. Eventually, we returned to our towels. My eyelids fluttered in the warmth of the sun and I snoozed for a while, until Alicia woke me.
“Look!”
“What?” I rubbed the sleep from my eyes.
“Look!”
Someone was splashing about in the water, waving their arms in the air.
“That girl just fell off the banana boat. I think she’s in trouble.”
Out of nowhere, a lifeguard came racing up the beach, clutching a life ring.
“He’s fast,” Alicia said, impressed.
“He is, ain’t he?” I said, admiring his rippling muscles. The lifeguard reached the ocean and his legs powered through the water. I held my breath, waiting to see what would happen. There was quite a commotion on the shore. A big cheer went up as he reached her.
“I wouldn’t cheer just yet,” I murmured. The girl panicked, punching him as if he were trying to drown her. My whole body tensed up as I watched it play out.
“He’s gone under!” Alicia gasped. “Ain’t no bugger going to help him?”
There was a great deal of splashing as the two of them grappled in the water. The people nearest to them tried to swim out, but they weren’t close enough to help. I stood up and took a few steps down the beach, but it was hopeless. There wasn’t anything I could do.
Finally, they surfaced, and the crowd cheered again.
“He’s got her,” Alicia said. “Look, he’s swimming back.”
She was right. The lifeguard looked exhausted as he hauled the girl up onto the beach, and a group formed around her. The lifeguard collapsed back on to the sand and heaved a huge sigh of relief.
“I never knew Julio was a lifeguard,” Alicia said.
“Nor did I,” I admitted. I was now wondering what else he hadn’t told me about himself. Had I ever really known him, or had he been stringing me along, all summer?
34
We followed Julio back to his holiday home, careful to stay well back, as Dad had always taught us. It turned out he was staying at Rose Cottage, one of the little houses we’d peered into on our first night in Queensbeach. We watched him disappear inside, then we went to the windows to take a look.
“I can see Isabel!” Alicia squealed in excitement. “Look!”
I ran round to where she was standing. Isabel and Julio were sitting at the table with a man who had to be their dad. He was grey and balding, but you could tell that under his greyness, his hair had once had the same vibrant tone as Isabel’s.
“Come on, let’s go,” I said, worried Alicia would give us both away.
“But why? We only just found them!”
I turned to face her. “We’re going to come back later. When it’s dark.”
“Oh,” she said, nodding earnestly. “I see.”
We stopped at a charity shop on the way back. We needed black jeans, gloves and hoodies. Clothes that would blend with the night.
The streets had emptied out by the time we went out again. There were a few people milling about, but no way near the number of people there had been earlier. I saw a couple of buses pass by and wondered if all the tourists had moved on for the night. I hoped so. The last thing we needed was an audience.
We strode down the high street, past a club and a couple of restaur
ants. There was a car parked on the corner that caught my eye.
“What is it?” Alicia asked.
“Wait,” I said. I watched as a couple of teenagers walked up to the car. They spoke to the driver for a moment, then moved on, smiling secretively to each other.
I pretended to look for something in my bag.
“You looking for something?” called out the driver. “You want to get high?”
“You got any Angel Dust?”
“I got whatever you want, my love,”
I took the package he held out to me. It might have been Angel Dust. It might have been anything. I was willing to take my chance. I slipped him the money and we moved off down the street. I waited until we got round the corner to check it out properly. It looked OK, white and glistening.
“You ready to go?” Alicia asked, bored.
“In a tick. I need the bog.”
I led her into a nearby McDonalds and gave her a couple of quid to buy herself something to eat.
“What about you? Aren’t you hungry?”
“Not really.”
There was only the disabled toilet available. I went inside and shut the door. When I emerged, several minutes later, I was happy.
Alicia ate her burger as we walked down to the beach. She was talking about something but all I could think about was that I was about to see Julio again. I burned with desire for him. I couldn’t believe he didn’t feel the same way about me anymore.
“Which one was it?” I asked, when we reached the beach. I looked at all the holiday cottages. I could have sworn it was the third from the right, but now I wasn’t so sure.
“It’s that one,” said Alicia, pointing to the one in the middle. “Look, Rose Cottage.”
“OK,” I said. “Now we need to take it easy. We don’t want them to know we’re here.”
“Then you really need to keep your voice down,” Alicia said, sounding cross. “You’re practically shouting.”
“Am I?”
“You’re still doing it!” she said in exasperation. “Come on, there’s the gate.”
The little wooden gate creaked noisily as she pushed it open. I followed her round the house to the back. I was having a little trouble walking straight because the bushes kept swaying in the breeze. The trees whispered to one another, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to freak Alicia out.
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