‘But when did you know for sure?’
‘One of my aunts from our village moved to England to get married here a few years later,’ Nan explained. ‘She had a baby and suffered from depression afterwards. I can still remember my dad warning me and Hardeep not to let anyone know.’ She smiled, but it was a sad smile. ‘That’s when I guessed the truth. And that was one of the reasons why I decided to become a doctor.’
‘To help people like Milly’s mum?’
‘That sounds impossibly saintly, but yes, that’s why.’
Nan looked so unhappy, I went to sit beside her, wedging myself onto the sofa next to the suitcase. All these things had happened over forty years ago, and yet it seemed they still had the power to upset Nan.
‘Poor Milly,’ Nan said softly, reaching for my hand. ‘What she must have gone through … And I didn’t even give her a chance to explain about the earrings. What kind of a friend was I? You know, Dani,’ she went on, ‘I only knew Milly for a little while, but she was one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. And one of my best friends too.’
I let my hand lie in Nan’s. I didn’t know what to say.
‘And did you wear the earrings when you married Nannaji?’ I asked eventually.
Nan shook her head. ‘I couldn’t, not after what had happened. I told my mum I’d lost them. She went mad.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘In my jewellery box, waiting for you to get married!’ Nan said with a wink.
She was back to her old self again, I was glad to see, and the atmosphere lightened.
‘I’d better go, Nan.’ I tucked the things she’d given me carefully into my school bag. ‘Thanks for telling me about Milly.’
Nan got to her feet. ‘I’ll take you home.’
‘You will not! You’re tired. Mum will kill me.’
‘Oh, don’t be daft,’ Nan said robustly. ‘I’m not dead yet. Now, where are my car keys?’
It took us half an hour to find them as Great-uncle Hardeep, who’d been keeping an eye on Nan’s house while she was away, had hidden them away behind the bread bin. Then Nan drove me home. We didn’t say much on the way. I was thinking about what Nan had said. Everything Milly had done made sense now. I wondered what had happened to her when they moved to Birmingham. Had her mum ever got better?
It was commuter time and the traffic was really bad, so I got Nan to drop me off at the top of our street. I wandered home, my mind going over and over the events of the diary. I decided to read it again, now that I knew the truth. But not in Punjabi – in my English translation this time!
As I got to the front door, it opened without me even having time to get my key out. Mum stood there with a finger to her lips.
‘What’s going on?’ I said.
‘Ssh!’ Mum pointed upstairs. ‘I just wanted to warn you not to make a noise. I think Lalita’s asleep. It’s gone very quiet up there.’
‘Is she OK?’
‘She’s a lot better,’ Mum said in a low voice, closing the door quietly behind me. ‘But she hasn’t been sleeping very well since the accident and she gets tired easily. So don’t wake her up, Dani,’ she added as I headed for the stairs.
‘I won’t,’ I said absently, my mind still on Milly and Nan’s diary. It would be interesting to read the diary again, now that I knew what I knew.
Lalita’s bedroom door was shut. I opened mine as quietly as I could.
I needn’t have bothered.
Lalita wasn’t asleep at all. She was sitting on my bed, her head bent over my translation of Nan’s diary.
My own diary lay open on the bed next to her.
Chapter Nine
May 2006
MY EYES ALMOST fell right out of my head. I was (and this is the second time I’m going to use this brilliant word in my diary) stupefied.
Lalita glanced up, saw me and blushed a deep, burning red. She jumped to her feet and then let out a little scream as her ankle gave way. She wobbled and collapsed back onto my duvet.
Carefully I shut the door behind me. I didn’t want Mum to hear this. It was between me and Lalita.
‘How dare you!’ I said, shaking with anger from head to toe. I felt all hot and embarrassed too, as I remembered some of the things I’d written about Lalita in my diary. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘Y-your m-mum said I could borrow one of your DVDs,’ Lalita stammered. I’d never seen her look so uncomfortable or so much at a loss. Well, serve her right!
‘Did she also say that you could read my diary?’ I enquired cuttingly. I grabbed Nan’s diary roughly from Lalita’s grasp and picked up my own from the bed. ‘You’ve been snooping and prying into my things, and I hope you’re pleased with yourself! You had no right to touch my stuff!’
‘I know,’ Lalita muttered, hanging her head. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘How would you like it if I sneaked into your room and messed with your personal things?’
‘I shouldn’t have done it, Dani.’ For the first time Lalita raised her head and stared straight at me. ‘But you know what? I’m glad I did.’
‘What!’ At this point I could willingly have killed her!
‘Reading your diary made me see what a pain in the backside I’ve been,’ Lalita said quickly. I think the manic gleam in my eyes was scaring her a bit. ‘It was just that I had a lot on my mind, finding Mum and then having to keep it a secret from Gran and Dad. And then I had to get used to you and your mum moving in. I didn’t know how to handle it, and it all got a bit too much.’ She looked at me quite pleadingly. ‘I’m sorry.’
I was silent, struck dumb by her words. I didn’t know what to do. If I carried on throwing a temper tantrum (and believe me, I felt I was perfectly entitled to do that – I mean, she read my diary!), then maybe things between Lalita and me would never improve. But if I forgave her, would we ever get along anyway? I just didn’t know.
I sighed, feeling my anger drain away just a little.
‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ I said accusingly.
‘I know,’ Lalita agreed.
‘If you read anything horrible about yourself, don’t blame me,’ I snapped.
‘Well, maybe occasionally,’ Lalita said with a tiny smile. ‘It wasn’t all me, you know.’
I shrugged. ‘I do know. But I didn’t want my mum to marry your dad, and I never wanted to move in with you.’
‘Snap,’ Lalita replied.
There was another long silence.
‘Well, here we are again,’ Lalita said dryly, ‘just going round in circles. Or should we try to get along a bit better from now on?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said slowly, trying to work out how I felt. ‘I suppose it would make things a lot easier. I mean, we don’t have to be friends.’
‘No,’ Lalita agreed. ‘Not like your nan and Milly, anyway.’
I frowned.
‘Sorry, I know I shouldn’t have read that either, but your nan’s diary is really interesting,’ Lalita muttered awkwardly. ‘Did you translate it?’
I nodded reluctantly.
‘You did a great job,’ Lalita said eagerly. ‘I can’t write or read Punjabi. I was just up to the part where your nan started school.’
I hesitated for a moment and then I handed Lalita the exercise book I’d been writing the translation in. I know, I know, I must be mad …
‘Here, you can finish it while I unpack my bag and sort out your homework.’
‘Really?’ Lalita stared at me with wide eyes. ‘Thanks, Dani!’
I moved quietly around the room, laying out our books on my desk, while Lalita plunged back into the diary. I thought about what had just happened and wished that I could be sure I’d handled the situation properly. I mean, I could have yelled and screamed some more and got Lalita into huge trouble with Ravi and Mum, but I was beginning to wonder if there was any point to that. It wasn’t like we didn’t all suffer because Lalita and I didn’t get on.
I didn’t
hear a word from Lalita for about ten minutes, until she gave a gasp and looked up.
‘Milly’s gone?’
‘’Fraid so,’ I replied.
‘So when are you going to translate the rest of the diary?’ she demanded eagerly.
I shrugged. ‘It doesn’t really matter when I do it because Milly’s gone for good. The diary finishes just after Nan turns fourteen, and Milly isn’t in it any more.’
Lalita stared at me in horror. ‘But that can’t just be the end of it! I want to know what happens!’
Her reaction completely mirrored what my own had been, and it made me smile.
‘Doesn’t your nan know anything?’ Lalita asked.
‘I asked her today,’ I admitted. ‘She thinks she’s worked some things out, but she doesn’t know for sure.’
Lalita frowned. ‘Is it something to do with Milly’s mum?’
Shocked, I dropped the heavy maths book I was holding and it narrowly missed my toes.
‘What?’ I couldn’t believe she’d said that! I’d barely noticed Milly’s mum when I’d read the diary.
‘Well, she does seem a bit odd,’ Lalita went on, flipping through the exercise book. ‘And she seems to be permanently ill. Was she depressed or something?’
I could hardly believe that selfish, self-centred Lalita had spotted these things when I hadn’t. Maybe she wasn’t so insensitive after all.
‘Nan thinks so,’ I replied. ‘She thinks that Milly was covering up for her mum.’
‘That makes sense.’ Lalita looked at me with interest. ‘So how does your nan feel about it now?’
‘She still feels bad when she talks about it, I can tell. Her eyes kind of glaze over and then she’s back in the past and I think it seems to her as if it happened yesterday, instead of forty years ago.’
‘Well, why don’t we look for Milly then?’
I stared at Lalita in amazement. ‘Look for Milly?’
‘Yes.’ Lalita shrugged as if this was no big deal. ‘You know, find her. Track her down.’
‘But—’ I stopped. This was a very big deal! And why hadn’t I thought of it myself?
Lalita was looking at me expectantly, and I tried to gather my racing thoughts.
‘Where would we start?’ I stared helplessly back at her. ‘I mean, we don’t even know Milly’s full name. And she’d probably have got married since then.’ I knew that Sikh women weren’t meant to change their surnames to their husbands’ when they got married, but since moving to England a lot of women had followed the custom here. Nan had changed her surname when she got married. So the chances were that Milly had too.
Lalita grinned at me. ‘Look, Dani, there are loads of different ways to trace people these days, even if their names are different. I found my mum, didn’t I? It took a while, but I got there in the end!’
‘True,’ I admitted grudgingly. Even so, it sounded like an impossible task to try to find Milly, but I could guess how thrilled Nan would be. For her sake alone, I was ready to give it a go. ‘But where do we start?’
‘Like I did with my mum.’ Lalita put her legs up on my bed and made herself comfy. A fleeting thought crossed my mind that I would rather do this on my own, but I pushed it away. Lalita seemed really enthusiastic, and anyway, she had experience of searching for someone and finding them. I didn’t. ‘You start with the place where the person was last seen and heard of.’
‘OK.’ I thought about it. ‘I suppose we could get the address of the house where they all lived from Nan. And we could ask her Milly’s full name …’ I frowned. ‘But that’d give the game away. I’d really like it to be a surprise.’
‘We don’t need to ask your gran anything,’ Lalita replied with a touch of impatience. ‘We can probably find out some of the information another way.’
I looked blank. ‘Where?’
Lalita sighed. ‘At Coppergate, of course!’
‘So we really want to find Milly, Mr Arora, and we were hoping that you could help us.’ Lalita smiled sweetly up at our form teacher. ‘I mean, the school must have records of all its old pupils.’
I stood next to Lalita in our classroom, feeling slightly dazed at the speed of it all. Nan had come round to see us over the weekend, but we hadn’t said a word to her about our quest for Milly. Now, on Monday morning, we were trying to sweet-talk Mr Arora into helping us, after we’d explained about Nan and Milly.
‘We’re looking for anything from the old school which might help us to track Milly down,’ Lalita went on. ‘Miss Bell, Milly’s form teacher, knew that she’d moved to a school in Birmingham, so do you think there might be a note somewhere about which school it was?’
Mr Arora was frowning, which didn’t make me feel very hopeful.
‘Well, when the old school was cleared out, all the paperwork was put into boxes, and it’s being stored in one of the new classrooms for the moment,’ he explained. ‘Mrs Bright is hoping that some of the teachers will have time to sort through it, as she’s hoping to mount an exhibition showing Coppergate School through the years.’ He smiled slightly. ‘However, no one’s got round to it yet.’
‘Just think, sir!’ Lalita pointed out. ‘If we find Milly, we could have some stuff in the exhibition about tracking down old Coppergate pupils! And maybe Dani’s nan could come into school and tell us what Coppergate was like in the old days. It would be brilliant!’
I had to hand it to Lalita. She was really going for it.
‘So maybe Dani and I could help to sort out the paperwork,’ she finished.
Mr Arora rolled his eyes, but at least he was smiling. ‘You’re a very persuasive girl, Lalita,’ he said. ‘However, it’s not as simple as it sounds. I can’t allow you and Dani access to the paperwork. Some of it may be confidential.’
‘OK,’ I sighed, wondering what we would do now.
‘Oh, but, sir, if you came with us, you could look at the confidential stuff and Dani and I could look at the rest.’ Lalita just wasn’t giving up! ‘It can’t all be secret. We only want Milly’s full name, and the address and school she moved to, if it’s there. We could do it this lunch time.’
She looked pleadingly at Mr Arora, who shook his head.
‘I’m very busy, Lalita—’
‘Please, sir! It’s really important to Dani’s gran.’
Mr Arora sighed. I sensed victory!
‘OK, meet me here after you’ve had your lunch and I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Thanks, sir,’ Lalita said gleefully. ‘You’re the best.’
I was feeling even more dazed as we went off to our first lesson.
‘You should work for the United Nations,’ I said to Lalita. ‘You could persuade anyone to do anything!’
Lalita grinned at me. ‘I want to find out what happened to Milly,’ she replied. ‘And I just know that, somehow, we’re going to find her!’
‘Don’t get too disheartened,’ Mr Arora said as he unlocked one of the unused classrooms at the far end of the school. ‘But there are quite a lot of boxes.’
‘Quite a lot’ didn’t even come close. The classroom was a big one and it was completely and utterly full of large cardboard boxes, some piled two or three high. Someone had had the sense to leave a narrow pathway between them, but apart from that, the room was crammed full.
I groaned, and even Lalita’s upbeat expression dropped a little.
‘I’m afraid almost every single piece of paperwork in the old school was dumped in these boxes and brought over without being sorted,’ Mr Arora explained apologetically. ‘But it isn’t as bad as it looks. Some of the boxes are labelled with dates.’ He pointed at a stack of boxes near the window. ‘I’ve had a quick look already, and those are OK for you two to search through. I’m still trying to find the school records from nineteen sixty-four.’
Lalita and I went over to the window and opened the first box. A cloud of dust floated out, making Lalita sneeze.
‘These look like old worksheets,’ I remarked, taking one out
. ‘Look, O-level questions on Shakespeare.’
‘O-level?’ Lalita looked blank.
‘Before GCSEs,’ Mr Arora called across the room.
We went through the box carefully to check there was nothing more useful under the worksheets. There wasn’t, just more worksheets. I began to feel a bit disheartened as we opened the next box.
This was full of pieces of pupils’ work, which had obviously been used in displays. It was interesting in a way, but I couldn’t believe anyone still wanted all this old junk. It had just been packed up along with everything else because nobody could be bothered to sort it.
The third box was labelled CLASS PHOTOS. At last I felt a surge of interest. Maybe my nan would be in some of them.
‘These have got dates on,’ Lalita remarked, pulling out a packet labelled 1977.
‘Let’s see if nineteen sixty-four is there,’ I said eagerly.
It was, about halfway down the box. Lalita opened the packet and we spread out the black and white photos on the windowsill.
‘There!’ I recognized Nan from other pictures she’d shown me and pounced on one of the photos. ‘Look, there she is!’
Nan was looking solemnly into the camera, two long plaits dangling either side of her face. Next to her was a thin girl with a cheeky face and very dark eyes. She too had plaits, but hers had been turned under to make hoops and were tied up with ribbons.
‘Lalita!’ I said excitedly, my eyes glued to the picture. ‘Do you think that could be Milly?’ I pointed at the girl with the upturned plaits. ‘Remember in the diary Nan said they’d had their class photo taken that day her dad caught her with Milly? I bet that’s her!’
Lalita didn’t answer me. I glanced impatiently at her. She was staring at the photo herself, a stunned look on her face.
‘I don’t know if it’s Milly,’ she said in a stumbling voice. ‘But I do know that it’s my gran …’
Dani’s Diary Page 15