Framed

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  Mr Evans started the engine and bumped the Mini down the steps and out on to the grass. It was a bit dusty but that was all.

  By this time Lester and Ms Stannard were getting out of their boat. Lester had managed to row all over the lake without getting a drop of water on his shirt, or even on his shoes.

  Ms Stannard said, ‘What’s this then, Dylan?’

  I told her what had happened and I showed her the Mini.

  ‘Now that,’ said Lester, ‘is a work of art.’

  ‘No,’ said Ms Stannard, ‘that is a work of engineering.’

  ‘Let’s not go down that road again.’

  ‘No, let’s not.’

  ‘Though I would point out that it is a very striking colour.’

  ‘I wonder why they put it in the pavilion.’ Then she said, ‘Tell him your idea, Quentin.’

  ‘Well, it was your idea,’ said Lester.

  ‘He’s not interested in whose it is, he’s interested in what it is . . .’

  ‘I’m simply saying that . . .’

  I could see that this was going to go on for a while. I was too excited about the car to wait, so I said, ‘Got to go. Tell me later.’

  Big drove us up through town in the Mini. Someone had taken one of the panels from the Elvis mural and propped it up outside Curl Up N Dye. It was the one of Elvis having his hair cut before he joined the army.

  As soon as we hit the forecourt, Mam came running out – and that wasn’t good, because she looked so excited I knew she must have thought that it was Dad’s car and so Dad must be inside. She was disappointed that it was just me and Terrible.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘In the pavilion in the park. Someone must’ve hidden it. But I found it! Well, we found it.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  Then Marie came running out as well and she looked all excited too.

  ‘Where is he?’ she said.

  ‘It’s not him, pet,’ said Mam. ‘It’s just the car. Dylan found it.’

  Marie glared at me and went straight back inside. Mam went after her, but it was pointless. We heard the door slam and she was locked in her room again.

  The only person who was pleased to see us was Minnie. ‘This is very unusual,’ she said. ‘Normally, if a car is used in a bank robbery or a drive-by shooting, they burn it out.’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t used in a bank robbery.’

  ‘Why would anyone steal a car and then put it in the pavilion? This is truly fascinating.’

  ‘The point is, I’ve found it. This makes up for losing it in the first place, doesn’t it?’

  Mam said, ‘It’s very good, Dylan. Very good.’

  ‘So you’ll tell Dad, won’t you? Phone him and tell him that we’ve got the car back? And that I found it?’

  ‘Yes, of course I will.’

  ‘And about the oil change, as well.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Isn’t this the best thing ever?’

  ‘It’s very good.’

  And later on, something else brilliant happened. Ms Stannard and Lester came in and she said, ‘Tell them, Quentin.’

  He coughed like he was about to make a speech. ‘Well, I am – as you know – impressed and touched by the way the village has responded to the paintings . . .’

  I said, ‘What village?’

  ‘This village.’

  ‘This is a town! Do you think this is a village?’

  ‘Let’s not get involved in geography. The point is, I am impressed and I would like to pay tribute.’

  At last! Hidden Beauty! Finally he was admitting that Manod was legend.

  ‘What kind of tribute?’ said Minnie.

  An immense kind, that’s what. Lester’s idea (it was Ms Stannard’s idea really) was that on Sunday, before the picture set out on its journey to London, it would stop here, on the forecourt of our garage, and Lester and his men would bring the picture into the shop and people – invited people – people invited by us – would be allowed to look at the painting. ‘A private viewing’, he called it. ‘It’s a kind of thank-you present. To Manod. And especially to you, Dylan. Verbal invitations only, of course. There must be no mention of it in the press.’

  I said, ‘You don’t need to worry about that, Mr Lester. The press doesn’t come out for another three weeks.’

  ‘Please call me Quentin.’

  I said I would, but I couldn’t.

  How legend is that? We wanted the Oasis to be more than a garage and now it was a copier centre, coffee shop, and the National Gallery!!! Beat that, Little Chef!

  I said to Mam afterwards, ‘Tell Dad about this and the car, and he’ll be back before you put the phone down.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Mam. Mams are always a bit cautious.

  That night while she was putting the baby to bed, I remembered about Barry and Tone – the men from the insurance company – who’d asked me to ring them if ever I found a clue about the missing car. I still had the pen they’d given me with the phone number on it, so I called them. They were really interested that we’d found the car. They said they’d come over as soon as possible. I thought Mam would be really pleased with me for that.

  It turned out to be my biggest mistake yet.

  22 June

  Cars today: too many to keep track of

  Weather – too busy to notice

  Note: A DIFFERENT ANGLE

  This is the day that the Snowdonia Oasis Auto Marvel and Coffee Shop and Copier Centre finally became Manod’s premier Indoor Attraction.

  On Sunday, I made sure that Mam got lots of milk and coffee for the Gaggia and even polystyrene cups, just in case. I got Tom’s mam to make a massive load of Crispy Choc Constables. Then we sat in the shop, waiting. And waited. And waited.

  ‘Is there maybe a big football match on?’ asked Mam.

  But there wasn’t.

  No one came all afternoon. Mam decided to cut Max’s hair because his fringe kept flopping into his eyes. He wouldn’t stop wriggling, so I had to hold him on my knee. When she’d fininished, Mam said, ‘There. That’s better. Oh!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve cut too much off. He doesn’t look like a baby any more. He looks like a little boy.’

  ‘No. He looks like a baby with short hair.’

  She picked him up and took him off to her room.

  Minnie had been flicking through the Revised and Expanded. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘look at this.’

  It was a piece of paper, folded in four, with lots of typing on it and ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ stamped across the top.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Suffering sherbet!’ said Minnie.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a list of all the paintings he’s got up there. And it tells you how much they’re insured for. Hang on.’ She searched through the book and held it open at one of the pictures – a woman looking up to heaven with her hand on her hip – and said, ‘How much do you think that’s worth, then?’

  I said, ‘A thousand?’

  Tom said, ‘Is it for sale?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ten thousand?’

  ‘Twelve million,’ said Minnie. ‘Which is more than this whole town is worth.’

  ‘So if anyone did rob one of the paintings, they’d be a very rich robber,’ said Tom.

  ‘Tom,’ said Minnie, ‘you’re tempted!’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  I said, ‘If it says “Confidential” on it, we should give it back.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Minnie. ‘Except . . .’

  ‘Except what?’

  ‘Well it’s like Fate, isn’t it? All we’ve got to do is look down this list and we’ll know which is the most valuable painting in the gallery. He’s almost asking us to do a robbery really, leaving it in his book like that.’

  ‘He is not asking us to do a robbery.’

  ‘He left the paper in our copy of the book. He’s trying to tell us something.’r />
  I said, ‘Minnie, that painting is worth twenty-five million, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Can I just ask you something – who do you know with twenty-five million pounds?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Then who is going to give you twenty-five million for that painting?’

  ‘That,’ said Minnie, ‘is a very good point. Tom, stop talking about robbing paintings.’

  ‘I’m not talking about robbing paintings,’ said Tom.

  Then Minnie invented this great game called Masterpiece. In the back of the Revised and Expanded there was a set of postcards of the most famous pictures. She wrote down the insurance value of each painting on the back of the postcard and then dealt them out like cards. And we played this game where we had to see whether Tom, say, would swap my picture of a knight for his one of a woman in a big hat. Then, when we’d decided, we’d look at how much they were worth.

  If it hadn’t been for the game, we’d’ve gone mad waiting. Nothing happened till it was starting to get dark. Then suddenly headlights lit up the inside of the shop. Then more headlights, and more and more. And we went outside and cars were parked all the way down the road. And people were walking up the street towards the garage. It seemed like there were hundreds of them, all walking, talking, laughing, all coming to our garage. You couldn’t make out their faces, but I was pretty sure Dad would be one of them.

  Mam said, ‘I thought he said invited guests only.’

  Minnie said, ‘We didn’t want to miss anyone out.’

  ‘But there’s people here we’ve never seen before.’

  ‘I think everyone thought they should invite someone else. Great, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  The reason that no one had turned up until now was that they were waiting to see the truck come down the mountain road. If you looked up, you could see the headlights jerking backwards and forwards as the combi negotiated the tight turns.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I looked behind me and there was Mohan, his face lit up by the halogen security lights.

  I said, ‘Mohan! Fantastic!’

  He said, ‘Fancy a kick-around?’

  He dropped the ball and I dribbled it over to the grass, shouting, ‘The butane rack is goal!’

  We’d barely kicked it once when suddenly the Ellis brothers were running round, shouting, ‘Over here! Over here!’ And then someone else joined in, and someone else, and we were playing this massive game of football. People were standing on the invisible touchline with cakes and coffee, shouting things like, ‘Go on, Jimmy!’ Names I didn’t even know.

  The ball landed at Tom’s feet and he took it forward. I drifted over to the left and shouted to him, but he just kept going forward till it looked like he’d go past the goal. Then he kicked the ball and it swung round and slid in from an incredible angle. Everyone cheered. I’d never seen him look so happy.

  ‘Amazing geometry, Tom,’ said Mohan.

  Tom said, ‘It’s a Ninja thing,’ and grinned again.

  Doctor Ramanan came over and ruffled Mohan’s hair. He said, ‘Busy like this every night, is it then, Dylan?’

  I said, ‘Not yet, but it will be one day.’

  ‘I think everyone I’ve ever met in Manod is here.’

  ‘Except my dad. But I think he’s coming. You haven’t seen him, have you?’

  He hadn’t.

  And then the gates opened and the van came in. Everyone watched while the men got in the back and passed out a box the size of a dining table. They carried it into the shop.

  Then Lester stood on the back of the van, ‘I was only expecting a few dozen people. It seems the Hughes family are more popular than I’d imagined,’ he said. ‘Deservedly so. Perhaps the wisest thing would be if you formed a queue to see the picture and Mrs Hughes and her children will entertain you with their excellent coffee and cakes.’

  So that’s what everyone did and, for the record, we took nearly £600 that night. We ran out of polystyrene cups and Tom had to wash a load of them so they could be reused.

  Whenever the shop was full, Lester gave a little talk about the painting, which was two big blokes with beards and cloaks standing in a room with loads of stuff all about the place, like it was a junk shop maybe. It was called The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein. It’s insured for £15 million.

  ‘Note the detail of the collar,’ Lester was saying. ‘Because court officials wore so much fur, of course, a court painter had to be particularly adept at painting fur. The fur here – it almost looks fluffy.’

  It did look fluffy – but £15 million! Come on! And it had a kind of big white smudge across the bottom by the men’s feet.

  ‘Ah. Now that,’ said Lester, ‘is very interesting . . .’

  Terrible whispered to me, ‘Pity your dad couldn’t come tonight.’

  I said, ‘He might come yet.’

  She looked surprised. Then she said, ‘He didn’t mention it earlier. We saw him. In Harlech.’

  Lester was saying, ‘If I can invite the children to come right over to one side of the picture – to a very tight angle. Almost parallel. That’s it. . .’

  Terrible moved over. I pulled her sleeve. ‘What d’you mean, in Harlech?’

  She shushed me. Lester was saying, ‘Now, if you crouch down and look at the painting from over here, what can you see? The smudge has become . . .’

  ‘A skull!’ shouted Terrible, right into my ear.

  ‘Very good.’

  Then she whispered to me, ‘He drives the monster truck at Diggermania. You must know.’

  Lester was saying that the skull was hidden because it was drawn in a special way called foreshortening. ‘Most pictures – because of the nature of perspective – compel us to stand right in front of them, like television sets. But this one invites us to move aside and look at things from a different angle. And when we do, what do we see?’

  Another angle. You just look at things from another angle. And what do you see then?

  I tried to look at it from a different angle – Dad driving off suddenly, Mam doing nothing but look out of the window for days, Marie locked in her room . . . I don’t want to talk about it.

  Lester and his men packed up the picture and took it back out to the van. Everyone stood around, watching it go. They were still drinking coffee and eating cakes and talking. Some of them were even laughing. I wanted to shout at them. And I realized that that’s how I must’ve looked to Mam all this time. Like one of these people who were happy when things were actually sad. Someone looking from the wrong angle.

  23 June

  Cars today:

  JAGUAR XJ 4.2 V8 SOVEREIGN – Barry and Tone from the Insurance

  Weather – don’t care

  Note: THE CASE OF THE MINI IN THE PAVILION

  So this is finally it. This is the day that the Snowdonia Oasis Auto Marvel officially ceased trading as a garage.

  At first I didn’t believe what Terrible said about Dad. I couldn’t ask Minnie about it, because she’s younger than me and she shouldn’t have to know sad things. I wanted to ask Mam, but she was always busy with Max, so I went and knocked on Marie’s door.

  She didn’t answer, so I knocked again. Still no answer. Knocked again. This time she came out. ‘What,’ she said, ‘do you want?’

  ‘Do you know where Dad is?’

  ‘Dylan. This door is locked. It’s been locked for weeks. Can you figure out why?’

  ‘I think I know where he is.’

  ‘It’s locked because I don’t care. I don’t care about him. You. The garage. Mam. Anything. Go away.’ She slammed the door.

  I knocked again. She started screaming.

  Mam came running up the stairs with Max on her arm. ‘Dylan, what are you doing?’

  ‘Trying to talk to Marie.’

  ‘Well, she doesn’t want to talk to you. Let’s go.’

  Marie must have heard, because she stopped screaming. The bedroom door opened a crack and
her arms shot out like two white tentacles and plucked Max away from Mam. Then the door shut again. Mam didn’t even blink. Like this happened all the time.

  ‘Dylan,’ said Mam, ‘Marie is a teenager. Lots of teenage girls get grumpy and we just have to live with that. It’s a phase. All girls go through it.’

  ‘All girls lock themselves away for weeks on end? Really?’

  ‘Leave it, Dylan.’

  There was that flash of light from under the door again. Then the door opened and the two arms passed Max back to Mam. She cuddled him. She was going to walk away.

  I said, ‘Mam, can we go to Diggermania?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Diggermania. You know, it’s . . .’

  ‘I know where it is.’

  ‘It’s got . . .’

  ‘And I know what it is.’

  ‘Well, can we go then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? It looks immense and . . .’

  ‘Just no.’ She was snapping now and there was a big fat tear lying on her bottom eyelid.

  ‘If I’m really good, can we go?’

  ‘That’s enough, Dylan. All right? That’s enough.’

  And it was enough. Enough to tell me that she knew. Enough to tell me it was true.

  When I saw Barry and Tone’s Jaguar turning on to the forecourt I felt a bit more cheerful. At least they’d be happy that I’d found the car. And even though it’s weird that Dad’s only in Harlech, it’s also good because it means that, once I’ve sorted this car business out, we can go and tell him.

  I ran out on to the forecourt. Tone handed me the car keys and asked me to fill her up. I know I was only opening the petrol cap, but there’s something about holding the keys to a classic-marque car that makes you feel good. I said, ‘The Mini’s in the workshop now, by the way. It was just sitting there in the pavilion.’

  ‘We heard.’

  ‘How lucky was that, though, that I found it just like that?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Barry.

  ‘How lucky was it?’

  They went into the shop to pay and started asking Mam all kinds of random questions.

  ‘We noticed from the paperwork,’ said Barry, ‘that you had difficulties meeting the financial requirements of your petrol supplier.’