by Katy Regan
He went to give us a massive extra dollop of mash as usual, but as he was putting it on Teagan’s plate, she stopped him. “No, thanks, Dean, we don’t want extra mash today.” His spoon was hovering; you could tell he was surprised. “Or Zac,” she said. “He doesn’t want any either.”
“Why’d you do that?” I said, when we were sitting down.
“I’m just not into mash that much anymore.”
“But I am,” I said. “What about me?”
“Shh,” she said, “let’s not talk about mash anymore. Let’s talk about something good.”
That was when I told her what Mum had said when she was drunk about loving my dad.
Teagan was staring at me and frowning at the same time.
“But I thought you said he was an idiot,” she said, and I felt bad then for all the times I’d said that. I used to think my dad would look like a messed-up person, like Sam Bale’s dad, with some teeth missing and scars from fighting, but now I knew he wouldn’t. I knew he’d look like a proper dad.
“I thought he was. But now I think, how can he be? If she really loved him and he loved her?”
“But hang on,” said Teagan. “Why, if he loved her, did he even do a runner then?”
“That’s what I want to find out!” I said, thinking it was awesome that we thought the same thing. “I want to give him a chance to explain and tell the truth and maybe then he’ll be my dad and maybe even get together with my mum again. But I can only find out if I find him, can’t I? I need to speak to him face-to-face.”
That was when I asked Teagan if she’d help me and she said yes. That was when she officially became my deputy on the Find Dad mission.
*
• • •
GRANDAD SAYS THAT most days are rhubarb and custard days, like rhubarb and custard sweets, but that it’s about sucking on the sweet custard bits so hard that you don’t taste the sour rhubarb. That Thursday was a good example of a rhubarb and custard day, because there was the happy bit about Miss Kendall’s baby and then there was the journey home on the bus …
I’ve got a technique now. I sit on the top deck, but in one of the seats right at the front. If I’m lucky, when Aidan Turner or any of his lot get on, they don’t even notice I’m there. This works extra well if I remember to take a hoodie because they can’t recognize me from the back of my head, and the fact that it could be me doesn’t even come into their brains.
Today, however, there was already someone on the front seat and too many people downstairs, otherwise I’d have stood by the driver where they don’t harass me as much. In the end, the only seat was two rows in front of Aidan Turner. At first they were just whispering, but as the journey went on, it got louder.
“Hey, Jabba the Hutch, I’m talking to you. When’s your baby due? Did you have sex with Miss Kendall? I hope you didn’t go on top of her ’cause you would have squashed her.”
My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it, but I just looked out of the window. It didn’t even make sense because a man can’t have a baby.
Sometimes in one day you can get a rhubarb and custard bit several times over—that’s the good thing about it: just because you’ve had a rhubarb bit doesn’t mean you can’t get a nice sweet custard bit after, even if you’ve already had one.
When I got off the bus, I decided to walk the long way home, past Your Fitness—just in case Jason was there.
I stopped outside and ate my Hula Hoops. The sun had come out—it felt like eons since it had—and it was warm and lovely on my face, like when I lie in the bath with a hot flannel over my head; everyone should try it, it’s really relaxing.
I can fit five Hula Hoops on my little finger and one on the next finger, but no more. When I was nine, I could fit a Hula Hoop up to my middle finger so I know I’ve grown. You have to bite down just the right amount so that it cracks the Hula Hoop but not your finger and each time I was doing this, I was secretly making a wish that Jason would just magically come out and see me and then … it came true! It was sick! It was the custard bit happening, like magic because Jason came walking straight out of the Your Fitness center.
He seemed proper pleased and surprised to see me. “Zac, my man, what are you doing here?”
“I was just walking past.”
“It’s good to see you,” said Jason and he put his hand on my shoulder; it felt nice. Jason’s got dead big muscles and he’s six feet, three inches tall. The tallest man in England is Neil Fingleton, who is seven feet, seven inches, so he’s not that far off. I come up to Jason’s chest, but I bet if I stood next to Neil Fingleton, I’d only come up to his knees. “So are you looking into joining our boxing club?” Jason teaches boxing as well as aikido and karate. He can do twenty pull-ups on our kitchen door frame.
“Um, no, not really.”
“Come on!” he said, pushing me away, but I knew he was just teasing. “Footie?”
“Nah.”
“Come on, you’re a good little goalie.”
“I’m not.”
“You are!”
“That was ages ago.”
“Once a good goalie, always a good goalie,” Jason said, and then he hugged me but just with one arm. I felt a bit embarrassed but only because I haven’t seen him for ages.
“And how’s life?”
“Good.” I felt guilty about not telling him about my Find Dad mission—I don’t know why.
“And how’s your mum?”
“She’s all right, she’s fine.”
“Been out in Cleethorpes recently, has she? Strutting her stuff on the dance floor again?” He helped himself to three of my Hula Hoops, but I didn’t mind. “She’s a great dancer, your mum,” he said and I felt sad because I knew he was probably thinking of the good times when he was her boyfriend, like his mum’s fiftieth birthday party down the Casablanca Club when we all danced all night. I didn’t know anyone there, I’d only just met Jason’s family that night, but they were so nice and friendly and I danced nonstop and at the end I was so hot I poured a glass of freezing-cold water over my head. Nobody could believe it. It was the best night of my life.
In case Jason was thinking of the good times, I said, “No, she’s not been anywhere,” but then, before I could stop it, “except on a date … She didn’t like him, though!” I said it quickly, even though it was too late. I’ve got this problem: I can’t lie or even leave stuff out that’s true. It’s like there’s this Devil voice going, You have to say it, talking in my ear.
“Didn’t she?” said Jason.
“Nah. She hit him.”
“She hit him?” His eyes popped out of his head then, and he laughed and so did I, I don’t know why.
“Yeah, over the head with her handbag; in the snow in the middle of our estate. I saw her! It was absolutely hilarious.”
“Who was this guy?”
“Dunno. Dom someone?” My heart was beating. I wished I could stop talking.
“Dom Parish?” said Jason.
“I … I’m not sure.”
“Why did she hit him? Had he done something to her?” Jason’s smile completely went then and he looked dead worried.
“No!” I didn’t want him to worry about my mum, because he loves her. “She just wanted to kiss him and he didn’t want to kiss her … and …” I wanted to go, badly. “I wasn’t really looking.”
I used to think Mum and Jason might get back together. I once went in the Christian Center and prayed for it to happen. It has Ask Jesus and He Will Answer painted on the side of the building so I did, but it didn’t come true; not that I blame Jesus because I bet he gets asked loads of stuff and there’s only so many hours in the day. And anyway, now I knew they definitely wouldn’t be being boyfriend and girlfriend again, not because of Dom but because of my dad being the only man my mum’s ever loved.
There was a pause then. It went on quite long. I was beginning to think Mum was right about not seeing Jason so much anymore—it felt a bit weird.
“Wel
l, listen, tell your mum I said hello, won’t you?” Jason said eventually, putting his hand on my shoulder again. “Tell her it’d be nice to come round for a coffee again soon, or me and you could hang out?”
“Deffo.”
“Have a kick around up in the field?” he said, and I smiled to be polite, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to—it’d been ages and I was probably crap again by now.
“All right, well, take it easy and make sure you give your mum my love, won’t you?”
“All right then,” I said. “See ya.” But I’d already started to walk away. I didn’t want to say, She sends her love back, because I knew she didn’t, not now. I knew she only had romantic feelings for my dad.
*
• • •
EVER SINCE WE had the letter going home saying I’m above the normal weight for my age, Mum’s started trying to get me to eat more healthy stuff. We still have Chinese on a Friday, but she’s been trying to encourage me to eat fruit for breakfast (it’s all right if you put it on a pancake) and she put all the crisps and biscuits in the secret cupboard, so I have to ask if I want anything.
Mum doesn’t know this, but I know where the secret cupboard is, so when she’s at work I can just help myself. I try and resist but it’s really hard. If they wanted children not to eat so much, they shouldn’t make stuff that’s bad for you so nice. That’s what I would do if I was the prime minister: I’d tell the people who make the chocolate biscuits and the crisps not to make them so nice so people like me wouldn’t want to eat them all the time.
I know I’m big for my age and I hate getting teased about it, but I’m only ten and it’s puppy fat. Nan says I’ve got my whole life to go on a diet. Mind you, my nan’s been on a diet her whole life and it hasn’t made any difference. I just think I’m like my uncle Jamie. It’s what chefs are like; they just love their food. The main problem is when I come home from school on my own. It’s a really long time from dinner break to home time, so by the time I get back, I’m starvin’ marvin. Tonight, for example, I tried for ages to resist the Call of the Stomach (that’s what me and Mum call it when we’re hungry), and to wait till tea, but I was starving by half past four, so I got a packet of Nik Naks and a caramel wafer from the secret cupboard—then I waited till the six o’clock fridge. We get most of our food from the six o’clock fridge at the Tesco at the bottom of the road. It’s where they sell off food from that day, but for really cheap. You can get steak for £1, then just put it in the freezer. It’s great for junior chefs like me, because you can’t choose what’s there; you just have to see then make something good from it. Today there were only some Aunt Bessie’s Yorkshire puddings and some carrots, but together they only cost me 70p! So I got them, then I went home and I made my tea (Yorkshire pudding, gravy, carrots, and mash). But today I had cheesy mash. (It’s lovely, you should definitely try it.)
I go to bed about nine p.m. when my mum’s at work and I take my Factblaster book with me. It’s totally boss. It’s got a picture of someone’s brain on the front with everything coming out of it: dinosaurs and robots and planets; machines, a volcano, and a Greek temple—with its roof blown off so you can see the inside. It’s meant to show how when you read it, you’ll know about all this stuff too. My favorite bit is the flags of all the different countries at the back. I like learning them off by heart and then testing myself.
One of my other favorite bits of the book is the index, because you can just go down it with your finger and there are so many subjects to choose from. I looked up about sex, but it wasn’t under a section called “sex”—it was like it was trying to fool you—it was under a section called “life cycle.” There was a picture of a sperm going into an egg. It told you about how the egg is fertilized, and then how the baby grows. Touch is the first of the five senses to form in the womb, it said. So I’ve touched the inside of my mum’s womb! I thought. The blood and skin and everything—it felt mad. I turned back to the index then. The book’s really heavy so you have to be careful that it doesn’t slide off your knee, and I got my bedside lamp so the light was shining right on the index. Then I looked under “D.” It does say Every fact you’ve ever wanted to know on the front, after all, and so I thought it was worth a try; it was even exciting. There was “dams,” there was even “death,” but, worst luck, there was nothing about dads. That was when I decided to add what Mum had said about loving my dad to the end of the letter I’d written before all this started, because you wouldn’t ignore a letter with that on it, would you? And what if my dad didn’t even know that she had ever loved him? What if that was why he left in the first place?
I’ve got a secret: when I wrote the letter this New Year’s Eve, even though I said everyone was mad with Liam except me, I was mad too—a little bit. The year 2015 had been rubbish. I felt scared and sad all the time. Since my birthday when I was ten in May, Mum seemed to have got sadder too. She was crying a lot and saying she was fat and disgusting, even though I told her I thought she looked fine and, anyway, it’s the person inside that counts. But then, on Halloween last year, she got caught in Morrisons with a Halloween cake and a packet of KitKat Chunkys in her bag. She said it was a mistake and that she’d done the scanning machine wrong, but she had to go into a room with a policeman while another lady policeman stayed with me outside and Mum cried so much she couldn’t breathe. We weren’t allowed to shop in Morrisons after that, and I started to worry a lot about what would happen to us: like, what if she got caught with something in her bag in Tesco or Costcutter? Where would we get our food then? I got so worried that one day, I didn’t even go to school. I just wandered around town and bought whatever I wanted to eat with my money I’d got for my birthday, until Jacob Wilmore’s mum saw me and told my mum. That was when they got me Brenda to talk to. So while it was true that I wanted to give Dad a chance and for him to come to my party, I mainly just wanted him to come and help us, help me. And that was what I was thinking when I wrote the letter. Now, though, things had changed. I still wanted him to come and help us, but I also wanted him to see my mum again and realize he loves her as much as she loves him, and then we can all be happy.
*
• • •
I OPENED MY bedside table drawer where I had the letter and got my pen out. Then I wrote the extra bit at the end about my mum loving my dad. Now I just had to get his address or, better still, find him and give it to him in person, because there was no way he’d be able to ignore that bit.
7
Mick
“Are you the father of James Hutchinson?” I’ll never forget those words. It was just after midnight on June 12, 2005, and I’d opened the door to find two policemen in neon jackets standing on my doorstep, a swirl of blue lights behind them.
“Yes,” I said. I’d been passed out on the settee and I was disorientated. I thought I might still be dreaming.
They glanced to the side of me, through the house.
“Are you in alone or is your wife in too?” That was the point at which I knew something was seriously wrong and my heart began to bang in my mouth.
“No, she’s at work—she works at a care home. She’s on a night shift.”
“Can we come in and sit down?” they said.
I felt my bowels disintegrate; utter fear swept through me like an icy wind.
“What the hell’s he done now?” I said it with a smile on my face, but I already knew something terrible had happened.
“I think it’s best if we come in and sit down.”
They ducked their heads; they seemed to take up our whole lounge with their neon jackets and their walkie-talkies that bleeped and spluttered. They both looked barely out of their teens and almost as scared as me, and I’ve often wondered, in the years that followed, if this was the first time they’d done this: knock on some poor bastard’s door in the small hours and open up a great hole in his life.
They came in and sat down, but I didn’t. There was a barely touched cup of coffee and a half-eaten sandwich on th
e arm of the sofa. I took it and moved it into the kitchen, perhaps to delay whatever bad news I knew they were here to tell me. They explained there’d been an incident down by the wharf on Victoria Street. Jamie and Liam Jones, who they believed to be the partner of my daughter, which I confirmed, had been involved in a serious fight down there with another individual. They couldn’t tell me his name because it was part of their ongoing investigation, but I had a good idea it was Chris Hynd, a local I’d known for a long time and just a well-known wind-up merchant. The fight had resulted in Jamie being knocked to the ground, cracking his head on the corner of the pavement, and being knocked unconscious.
My stomach capsized. A picture flashed up of him being thrown backward in slow motion, cheeks reverberating with the force, spit flying, bone splintering.
“But he’s okay?”
“It’s serious, I’m afraid.”
“How bad?”
“He’s been taken to A&E. The doctors are doing everything they can.”
They asked me if I wanted them to drive me to the care home where Lynda was working and come with me to tell her, or if I’d prefer they radioed for another officer to go, and we meet at the hospital. I said let’s go straight to the hospital. They must have thought how strange it was that I didn’t want to immediately be with my wife, the mother of my son, at a time like this, but even then I knew I didn’t want to look her square in the eye, that I couldn’t. Sometimes I feel like I’ve not been able to look Lynda in the eye since. I can’t bear to see her pain and to know, to know …
We walked toward the police car. The flashing light was blinding me and my legs were shaking so much one of the officers had to help me in. I wasn’t crying, not at this point; the crying was to come later when the scale of it all hit me. Right then, I was numb with shock.
I was holding my head in my hands in the backseat and rambling. How long was he down on the floor? Was he knocked unconscious immediately? Who else was involved in the fight? I wanted to hear names. I wanted to punish myself. Meanwhile Saturday night rolled on outside, and soon it would be light. How would I face this new day, this new world, if my son wasn’t in it?