by Katy Regan
‘Yeah.’ I sigh. ‘Your dad was.’
‘I want to find him, Mum,’ Zac says, looking up at me, and when I see his eyes, I can tell how much. ‘I want to find him and find out the truth – why he did a runner, why, when he loved you and you loved him …’
I tip my head back and close my eyes. ‘Zac, darling, we’ve talked about this.’
‘I know but you must have been in love at one point to have had me, and if you loved him once, then he couldn’t have been that bad.’
‘Zac, he was never bad.’
‘But Nan says he was. And I need to know he wasn’t, because otherwise that means I am because I’m his son, and I’ve got his genes. It’s not just eye colour and hair colour you get from your parents, you know.’
I turn my body around then to face him. ‘Zac,’ I say. ‘Please, you must understand. Firstly, your dad was not all bad; nobody is. But also, even if he was – and he wasn’t; isn’t – even if he was a hundred per cent bad, it does not mean that you have inherited any of that. You are the kindest, most considerate, most beautiful person I know – and I’m not just saying that because you’re mine.’
He searches my face as if for clues as to what to say next. ‘I need to know why he did a runner. Why he didn’t want us.’ There’s a moment’s silence. ‘But you never went looking for him either, did you?’ he says eventually. ‘You never gave him a chance to explain. Maybe there was a reason he left. But he never got to say why.’
‘No,’ I say, feeling my insides tense. He doesn’t understand – how could he? But even though he knows nothing about the circumstances of his father’s disappearance from our lives, there’s a truth to his words. I didn’t give Liam the chance to explain. And I didn’t go looking for him. ‘No, I didn’t. But I didn’t need to, Zac, because actions speak louder than words and, like I’ve always told you, he left before I even had you.’ I’ve said this so many times, it almost feels true. ‘He never wanted to know. He just … he went. Really, it was a lucky escape.’
Zac sighs and looks out at the grey sea, the grey sky, but I know there’s more to come. I’m not expecting what Zac says next, though.
‘Me and Teagan are looking for him,’ he says. ‘I want to find him, Mum. I have to find him. Will you help me?’
My heart is beating so fast it’s making me breathless. I’ve dreaded this day, this moment, his whole life. I’ve only ever wanted to make him happy, or at the very least to not make him sad, but I realize he is sad; he’s yearning and unfulfilled inside.
‘Darling, I’ve got a secret,’ I say. I have to try something. ‘Since we got the letter – you know, about your weight – and you’ve been getting bullied at school and having a bit of a rough time of it all in general, I decided that all I wanted in the world was for you to be happier, to make you happy. So that’s why I asked Jason to help, that’s why I’ve been mean and put all the nice food in a secret cupboard. I wanted you to get fitter and happier. It’s not about being thinner; I just wanted you to feel better about yourself, and – you have to trust me on this one – looking for your dad isn’t going to make you happier. And what if it actually makes you sadder? What if we found him and then for some reason he still didn’t want to know? I couldn’t bear that, Zac. It would make me so sad to see you sad.’
Zac fiddles with his jumper and doesn’t say anything for what feels like ages, then he looks at me. ‘What will make me sad is not trying. I just want to know, Mum, I just want to know what he’s like.’
And I realize then that whether I like it or not, we’ve come too far. He’s come too far. Zac’s going to look for his dad – if not now, then when he’s fifteen, sixteen. And it will be the biggest, most important, scariest thing he’ll probably ever do in his life. Don’t I – as his mother – need to be by his side?
I put my arms around him. ‘OK,’ I say, cuddling him close. ‘OK, my little big man. If you’re absolutely sure you want to do this, then I will help you.’
Chapter Twenty
Zac
Fact: Harp seals only feed and look after their babies for twelve days. Then they leave them to fend for themselves.
And then things really kicked off.
When we’d got home from the docks on Easter Saturday – after Mum had agreed she’d help us find my dad – me, Mum and Teagan had a special meeting. It was like a normal Find Dad mission club meeting, except we didn’t need to have it at the roundabout; we could all just talk about it in our kitchen, because it wasn’t a secret anymore. Mum said she had some conditions, if she was going to help us – we had to do certain things or she wouldn’t do it. She said she wanted to see our file of facts so far about my dad and know why we’d gone down the docks without telling her in the first place, and why we thought that was ever a good idea. (When adults say that, they’re not interested in the answer, they just want to talk about why they think it was a bad idea. They just want to tell you off, basically.) We told her about me going to see Mr Singh at Costcutter, anyway, and how he’d told us about my Grandad Jones being a famous fisherman too and how this had given me the idea to go down to the docks – because loads of people would have heard of him and his son (my dad).
This is what we told Mum:
When I met Teagan after the Easter tea (that I ruined), we went down to the fish market at the docks. Grandad once told me that the fish market was the most important place at the docks, possibly in Grimsby, so we thought it was a good place to start.
There was a lady when you went in and her job was to answer the phone. You could tell she was good at her job, because there were loads of phones going off all at the same time, and she wasn’t even getting stressed. We told her we were doing some research for a project on fishing for school and she told us we could go and talk to a man called Shanky who was the manager of the market. When we got to his office, though, Shanky wasn’t there. It was just his assistant, Barrel. Shanky and Barrel aren’t their real names; they’re just nicknames. Barrel is really called Mark Cross, but everyone calls him Barrel because he drinks too much beer and so his belly is like a barrel. He’s not bothered. Having a nickname is a sign of affection. He gave us both a Jaffa Cake, then we asked if he knew Liam and Vaughan Jones and he started to tell us he did, that he’d even been on a trip with my dad once, that he was a ‘good bloke’ but that he hadn’t seen him for ages.
Teagan was writing everything down in our file. It was proper exciting (especially the bit where they said my dad was a good bloke!). But then Shanky came in – he was really called Paul Cruickshank. We knew that, because it said it on his name badge. Cruickshank is the surname my nan used to have before she was married to Grandad, but I wasn’t suspicious. I didn’t even know Shanky was related to my nan, but it turns out he’s her brother; he’s my great-uncle! He went mad at Barrel for telling us anything. Then he called my mum.
‘Right.’ Mum was covering her eyes with her fingers (she was still stressed about it even though we were fine but it was what might have happened that was the worst thing). ‘So you decided that because you might find people who knew …’ (she didn’t want to say ‘Grandad Jones’, you could tell) ‘Vaughan Jones, then that was a good enough reason to go down the docks on your own without telling me?’
I looked at Teagan. It’s embarrassing when someone else’s mum is telling them off and it can make you laugh, so she was staring at the wall to be on the safe side. ‘Um, yeah, basically,’ I said.
‘Do you know how dangerous and irresponsible that was?’ Mum said, looking at me, then at Teagan. I felt bad for making her worried. She’s got loads of things to worry about already, like not having enough money and missing Uncle Jamie. ‘Anything could have happened. You could have slipped and fallen into the water, got caught up in some machinery, been electrocuted – you could have died.’
‘I know and I’m sorry but I told you,’ I said, ‘I was really mad and upset after what happened at Nan and Grandad’s.’
‘Which is exactly why you should ne
ver have done something as rash as go to the docks, Zac. You should never do things like that while you’re all het up and emotional – that’s when accidents happen.’
It felt proper scary when Mum said that. My neck even tingled. I started picturing all the ways we could have died, like getting mangled in a fish-cleaning machine, tangled up in a massive net or falling into the water and getting sucked under a boat, joining all the sailors in their watery graves. It made me stop breathing for a second. I had to take a deep breath to start me breathing again. We didn’t know then what would happen to Teagan a few days later.
There are loads of different kinds of love, you can’t even believe how many.
I thought love was just one feeling but it’s not. The way you love your dog is totally different from the way you love your nan and grandad, and the way you love your boyfriend or girlfriend is different from the way you love your child. Mum explained it to me on Easter Sunday – the day after she said she’d help us find my dad down at the docks, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
We were on our way to an exercise session with Jason at the time (Mum had ended up organizing a session even though it was Easter Sunday; thank God Jason didn’t mention how weird I’d been when he’d asked me about my plans for the weekend!) and I was on my favourite subject, saying how she loved my dad once, so she would definitely love him again – it was just she hadn’t seen him in ages. She’d probably not stopped loving him, I said, she was just mad at him and also he wasn’t here for her to practise the love feelings on. Mum said she was proud of my optimism but she needed to manage my expectations. ‘Also, it doesn’t work like that, Zac,’ she said. ‘It just isn’t that simple.’
‘But you wouldn’t stop loving me just because you didn’t see me for ten years,’ I said, which was when she explained about the different loves.
‘The love you have for your children is completely different. It’s unconditional.’ We were holding hands and swinging our arms dead high as we walked; we’ve done it since I was little – it’s really relaxing.
‘What’s unconditional mean?’
‘It means you love them without conditions. You love them whatever they do and whoever they are.’
‘Would you love me even if I’d been born with no arms or legs?’ I said, thinking about the boy in the documentary I’d watched with Teagan.
‘Of course,’ Mum said. ‘Life would be very hard, much harder than it is now, but you’d still be my son, and I’d still love you.’
‘Would you love me if I was born with no brain?’
She laughed then. She looked pretty, because the sunset had made everything glow pink, including her face. ‘Zac, you wouldn’t be able to survive with no brain, you wally,’ she said, and she was right. How would you know how to breathe and pump blood round if you had no brain? Plus, I wouldn’t be anyone to love if I didn’t have a brain. Your brain is where all of your personality is: the rest of you is just bones and skin. It doesn’t even count.
We walked along to Your Fitness. Jason had opened it especially for us, even though it was Easter Sunday.
‘Would you still love me if I killed someone?’ I said and Mum had to think about it for ages, and then she said, ‘Yes, I think so. I would hate what you’d done but I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself from loving you. It would just be a feeling inside me that happened, even if I didn’t want it to – like being scared or jealous.’ I knew what she meant because I still feel scared loads and I wish I could stop it. She told me then, too, how she loved me the second I was born. She said it was like she knew me, even though it was the first time she’d ever seen me. She said I looked really wise and clever when I came out, like I’d been on earth before and could teach her stuff – it sounded mad. But mainly she just wanted to cuddle and look after me. She said meeting me was the happiest moment of her life.
Mum-love is a fact like that – it just happens, whatever you do, you can’t do anything about it, like rain. It’s not the same for dads, though (or earwigs – earwig mums only look after the strong babies, they just leave the others to die, it’s well harsh). Dads only love you when they’re sure that you’re theirs – I read it in my Factblaster book. The reason they know you’re theirs is that you look like them. It’s why babies are always the spits of their dads – it’s true as well, me and Teagan tested it in town. Nature made it happen so that more dads wouldn’t run off. It’s probably why my dad did, because he never met me so the magic nature bond didn’t work. If he met me, he’d see I looked like him, then he’d change his mind. What I wrote in my letter still stands.
I was in bed when it happened. I even heard the ambulance siren. I looked outside my window and saw it in the middle of the estate with its blue whirly lights. I thought it was for someone old that I’d never heard of and I was so tired, because I’d stayed up late making my nan and grandad a cheese and onion pie (to say sorry), that I went straight back to sleep.
Then this morning, I went round to call for Teagan because my mum was taking us to Skegness on the coach. We were going to go on the beach, in the arcades, get fish and chips and not even come home till it was dark. It was going to be the most epic day ever, but then Tia, Teagan’s sister, answered the door.
‘Teagan’s in hospital,’ she said. ‘My mum’s there too. She had a bad asthma attack last night. She couldn’t breathe and we called 999.’ That was when I realized about the ambulance in the night.
When I got home, I burst out crying. Mum said I couldn’t have known that the ambulance was for Teagan, but I should have, because I’m her best friend, and best friends are meant to know facts that other people don’t.
Mum and me still went to Skeggy. Mum thought we should go anyway, and that the change of scenery would do us both good, but even though it was nice, I missed Teagan loads.
We went to the beach, but it wasn’t as much fun without her. Together, we would have made a boss sandcastle, with the deepest moats you’ve ever seen. (The secret is, you have to use your hands, not a bucket and spade, to make the strongest sand. Scientists have proven it – we looked it up on YouTube – it’s not even a joke.)
Teagan has never even been to Skeggy – this would have been her first time – and I was mad at the council, because if they’d come to sort out the green fur on her bedroom curtains, she probably wouldn’t have even had the asthma attack and she would have been here. It’s why I decided to take a picture of me on my own and send it to them as a protest, so they knew the consequences of their behaviour. Mum says people listen to kids more than adults but I’m not sure that’s true.
I walked along the beach with my shoes off. The sand was cold – it felt dead nice. I could see Mum waving across the road, with the fish and chips in her hand that she’d gone to get to cheer me up. I waved back, then carried on looking for my special shell for Teagan. We were going to visit her in hospital later on, and I want to take it to her. It needed to be a really nice one that would make her feel better about not being able to come to the beach today, a kind of good luck shell, that when she held it would help her get better. Finding a really special shell, though, was much harder than it looked. Loads of them were broken or a boring grey colour that wouldn’t suit Teagan. Most of them weren’t special enough.
I walked for ages along the beach, looking at the ground all the time, waiting for my shell to call out to me, Here I am! Choose me! I picked up a silver one. I thought it might be it. I liked how it was shiny and looked like it might be precious, like money or jewels. It was proper silky inside and I nearly put it in my pocket, I nearly chose it. But then I saw another and I did a big gasp to myself, because I knew this was definitely the one. It was shiny white and pearly but it was the shape that I liked the best: twisty and long with a point at the end, and grooves carved into it. I liked how it reminded me of loads of different things: a Flump sweet, a helter-skelter slide, or the tall pointy bit on a castle like they have in the Disneyland pictures … But it was when I realized what
it really looked like that I knew it was my shell for Teagan. It looked like a rocket!
‘What this investigation needs,’ I could hear her saying, ‘is a rocket up its bum!’ When I put my ear to it, you could even hear it roaring. People always say it’s the sound of the sea, but I think it’s more like a rocket taking off.
Chapter Twenty-One
Mick
Not yet eleven and already the ‘your dad did a runner’ story isn’t holding like it was. It’s like sinking sand beneath his feet, and it won’t be long before it gives way altogether because with every question Zac asks about Liam – like he did on Easter Saturday, while I sat, frozen to the spot, wondering if that was going to be the moment the lid finally came off – with every piece of information he gathers, he is one step closer to knowing the truth.
The truth is so close. I can see it in the distance, gathering force, like I used to be able to see a storm approaching, at that point between the sea and the sky. You know you’re in for it then, but there’s nowhere to go and you just have to sit it out. But this is different. I’m not just at the mercy of the storm, I’m an orchestrator of it. I’m like God but all I can create is destruction. I look at my grandson – my beautiful grandson, the most precious person in my life – and I wonder what this will do to him, what pain and havoc it will wreak on his life. I’m caught between a rock and a hard place: I don’t tell him the truth, and I can’t live with myself; I tell him the truth, and he’s devastated.
And this is the person who gave me a second chance at life; if it wasn’t for Zac, I’d probably have drunk myself to death by now. But he was there and he needed me, needed me to airlift him from the wreckage – the wreckage that I played a big part in – and keep him safe and loved. If he was to be denied his father, then I owed him that. So that is one – the only – good thing to come out of this: I got sober, because I owed it to Zac. I got sober and I made damn sure I was the best grandad I could possibly be.