Blue Like Friday

by Siobhán Parkinson

  “Still, all those police … That’s very odd, Hal, wouldn’t you say? We really had better find out what the situation is, don’t you think?”

  “How?” asked Hal.

  “We’ll have to go to the Garda station and find out.”

  “What!”

  “You heard me, Hal. We have to go and see if we can find out if he’s been arrested.”

  “But … we can’t just go swanning into the Garda station and ask if they have Him,” said Hal. “Because if they have, they will want to know what we know about it, and then … And anyway, I don’t want to see that guard again, the one that thinks he knows me.”

  “We have no choice, Hal.”

  “We have a choice,” said Hal. “We can just forget about Him and go and fly the kite.”

  That was all just talk, I knew. I could see that he was starting to get worried. There were two little pink spots high up on his cheeks, as if someone had kissed him, twice. Not even Hal could have wanted his little plan to have been quite this effective. All he’d meant to do was create a row between his mother and Alec. He hadn’t actually planned on getting anyone arrested. He was just bluffing when he suggested flying the kite.

  “Hal! If you were an idiot, which would you be, a bit of a fool or a complete moron?”

  He got the message, I think. Though it’s hard to tell with Hal sometimes. He slumped back on the bench and took a vicious bite out of his muffin.

  “I suppose we could be on a school project,” I went on, “and just meet him by chance, while we’re looking around the station.”

  “I don’t think you could wander into a cell by chance,” said Hal. “I believe they lock the doors.”

  “Funny, that,” I said, and gave a nervous little giggle.

  Hal smiled. It was the first smile he’d given all morning. It made me feel better. Not much better, but a bit better.

  “Come on, Hal,” I said then, wringing the bakery bags into a knot for putting in the litter bin. “Let’s go. We have to see a policeman about a dog.”

  “What dog?”

  “Oh, Hal. No dog. It’s only a turn of phrase. We just have to go and see a policeman.”

  “It might be a woman,” Hal argued.

  Well, that was true, but really, sometimes I could shake Hal. He comes up with the most pointless remarks sometimes. True, but pointless.

  “It might,” I said with a sigh.

  And as a matter of fact, it was.

  Chapter 11

  When we got to the station, I went in. Hal stayed outside, “to keep an eye out,” he said.

  It wasn’t very nice in the Garda station. Everything was gray and the walls were very bare and there were crumpled papers on the floor, which was covered in worn tiles. The place seemed to be empty, but there was a little bell on the counter, so I gave it a ring. It made a mighty buzzing sound, enough to wake the dead, you’d think, but it didn’t seem to have any effect.

  I waited for ages, and I was just wondering if I should ring again, or would that annoy them, when this young guard came out and asked what she could do me for (ho-ho).

  She had a nice smile, so I didn’t bother making anything up or saying I was on a project or anything, I just asked her straight out about Hal’s stepfather. She gave me a funny look, as if she thought I didn’t seem to be the kind of person who knows people who get arrested (which is true), but she went off and came back with a sheaf of papers.

  “I have no record of anyone of that name,” she said, wrinkling her nose in puzzlement.

  That was a relief.

  “You mean, he hasn’t been brought here?” I said.

  “No, I mean he hasn’t been arrested this morning at all. He’s not on our list. That kind of information is instantly available, you know.”

  “Really?” I said faintly.

  “Oh yes. We have the latest technology.”

  “Oh!” I said. “Well, thank you, guard.”

  That was good news. It didn’t explain what had happened, but at least we hadn’t got a person arrested for nothing. I bounced out to where Hal was sitting on a wall outside the station.

  “He’s not here,” I said.

  “Does that mean he hasn’t got here yet?”

  “No, it means he hasn’t been arrested.”

  “Oh well,” said Hal. He stood down from the wall and dusted his hands smartly together. “Well, now we know.”

  “Thanks for asking, Olivia,” I said. “You are a fine friend, and I owe you a big favor.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Hal said.

  “Myself,” I said.

  “You’re nuts,” said Hal.

  I sighed. “I must be,” I said. “OK, then, what now? And do NOT mention that kite, Hal King, or I will … Oh! Hal!” I shrieked.

  It was using Hal’s full name that made me realize what an idiot I’d been.

  “What?” he asked. “What, what? What’s wrong?”

  “No, nothing’s wrong,” I said, “or maybe it is. Oh no!”

  “Olivia, could you please talk sense?” Hal pleaded.

  “I’ve just realized,” I said. “I used the wrong name in the Garda station. I asked for Alec King, not Alec Denham. I keep forgetting he doesn’t have the same name as you—remember, I couldn’t think what to call your mother on the phone? Gee, that was dead embarrassing, did you notice?”

  “So …”

  “So,” I said, “we are none the wiser. He might have been arrested after all. Oh, Hal. Sorry.”

  I felt such a dumb-cluck, and I really didn’t fancy the idea of going back in there and explaining myself, no matter how nice the policewoman had been.

  “Will you come in with me this time?” I asked Hal. “Please?”

  He nodded.

  So the two of us stumbled into the reception area and rang the bell again, and after the usual delay, out came my friend.

  “I … er, I made a mistake the last time,” I said, grinning dementedly at her in the hope of making her think I was a sweet child that she should be nice to.

  “Oh?” she said, and she took a pencil from behind her head. She had her hair held up with it, I think, because it all came tumbling around her shoulders when she took the pencil out. She tapped her front tooth with the blunt end. “What kind of a mistake?”

  She had a nice face. With her hair down, she looked quite young. Well, I mean, she still looked like an adult, but as if she hadn’t been one all that long. She probably didn’t think I was a sweet child, but she looked as if she might be sound.

  “A name mistake,” I said.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said, and she tapped her tooth again. Then she turned the business end of the pencil toward me, as if I was a chart she wanted to point something out on. “You came in here to ask about an arrest, and you didn’t even know the name of the arrested person? Alleged arrested person.”

  She poked the pencil toward me in an unnecessarily menacing way.

  “That’s … well, I did know. I just …”

  “You know, we can’t be handing out information about arrests to just anyone. It’d have to be a person with a genuine reason.”

  The pencil poked the air in front of my nose again.

  “Oh, I have a genuine reason,” I said.

  “I mean, a reason we would consider genuine,” she said sternly.

  “Yes,” I said. “I understand.” I licked my lips nervously. They tasted of chocolate muffin. I hoped my tongue wasn’t all brown. I tucked it quickly back into my mouth.

  “So, who is this person you are looking for information about?” she asked officiously, licking the point of the pencil and holding it over a sheet of paper. “Is it a member of your family?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s a member of his family.” I pointed at Hal. I was glad I’d got him to come in this time. “But he’s too shy to ask himself.”

  “Ah, I see,” she said. “Well, that’s understandable. Now, what’s this gentleman’s name? If you have quite deci
ded, that is.”

  “Denham,” I said.

  “Denham,” she said, and wrote it down.

  Well, at least she hadn’t suddenly shrieked in recognition. That looked good.

  “First name?”

  How many Denhams did she think might have been arrested in Balnamara in the last hour and a half? But I didn’t say that. I just said, “Alexander.”

  “And are you a Denham too?” she said, turning to Hal.

  “Nuh-o,” he stammered. “I’m a King.”

  “You don’t look like a king,” she said, and laughed.

  Hal has heard this joke before. He didn’t smile.

  “Not even a prince,” she went on.

  Still there was no reaction from Hal.

  “What’s your first name?” she asked, more gently.

  “Hal.”

  “And you’re sure you’re not a King?”

  “I am, it’s a Denham I’m not.”

  “Oh, right, yes, I see. And what is Hal short for? Hallelujah?”

  I started to giggle.

  “Haldane,” muttered Hal.

  I giggled some more at that. She frowned at me, but it looked like a frown she’d just put on, like a mask.

  “I can’t help it,” said Hal. “It was my mother’s idea.”

  The guard gave a little tinkly laugh. But then she frowned again and said crisply, “People in the same family usually have the same surname. Is this man some in-law of yours or what? Or a cousin maybe, on the mother’s side?”

  “Nuh-o,” stuttered Hal.

  “Good. For a moment there, I was under the impression you were related to this person. The one you say was arrested.”

  We hadn’t said that. We’d only asked if he had been. But I thought we shouldn’t argue. She wasn’t such a walkover as I had hoped she was going to be. Being children, and moderately cute, wasn’t working the way it does with some adults.

  “Well?” I said, after a moment. “What is … I mean, can you tell us … ? I mean, what’s the … situation?”

  She opened up the top of the counter and jerked her head. “You’d better come into the day room and have a cup of tea,” she said. “I’m just going off duty, so we can have a chat without being disturbed. One of the others will be minding the shop.”

  Maybe she was going to be OK.

  I looked at Hal. He was very pale, and the two little pink spots on his cheeks looked even pinker.

  He shrugged at me. I shrugged at him. Then we both trooped in behind the counter and went into this room they have behind the scenes. I wondered why it was called the day room. Then I wondered if they had a night room, too. Maybe not. Maybe it’s like the Low Strand, even though there isn’t any High Strand.

  There were a few other guards sitting around. Two of them were playing cards, and one in a corner was doing something on a computer. I recognized the guard on the computer as the bicycle guard we’d met earlier. He gave me a big grin and a wave.

  Uh-oh, I thought. Now he’s going to want to know why we’re here, and could we not find our way home, and is this man still missing, and … but he didn’t say anything. He went back to what he had been doing.

  Our guard pointed to a sofa that had seen better days. It looked as if the dog slept on it, actually, but beggars can’t be choosers. (That’s another of my mother’s annoying little sayings; it’s funny how these things rub off on you, even if they annoy you.) So we sat down, side by side, on the manky sofa. There was a horrible little brown table in front of it. I stared at an application form for a passport that was lying on it, and our guard went out of the room for a moment and came back with two cans of Coke and two teacups.

  “The kettle is stone cold,” she said. “I thought you might prefer this anyway.”

  She thought right. She was pretty deadly, really.

  “Now,” she went on as we poured our Coke into the cups, “I want to hear the whole story from the beginning.”

  “Will you tell, Hal?” I asked. “Seeing as it’s your story.”

  But I could see he really didn’t feel like telling the story. His face was white, and I thought I could hear his teeth chattering, though that might have been just the Coke, which was very cold.

  “All right,” I said, when Hal shook his head. “I’ll explain.”

  So I did. The guard began by writing down everything I said, but the further I got into the story, the more slowly she wrote, and eventually she put down her pencil and notepad and just listened. She shook her head a few times, and once or twice she groped in a tissue box for a paper hanky and did the most tremendous amount of coughing and spluttering into it.

  “So, we got my brother to leave the message on the answering machine,” I said, “and he must have got it, Mr. Denham, I mean, because he set off this morning and he drove to the hospital and he went in. We followed him, just for the laugh, like, well, actually, we didn’t follow, we went ahead and waited for him, but anyway, we saw him going in the hospital gate. And the next thing was a squad car arrived. And he didn’t come out, and we couldn’t work out what was going on.”

  She shook her head about fifteen times, and then she said, “So, because of you two and yer—prank,” said our guard, “the guards have arrested, as far as you know, an innocent man who only wanted to paint a building in the hospital? This boy’s stepfather, is it?”

  Hal opened his mouth, but I didn’t want him explaining how Alec wasn’t really his stepfather, so I said quickly, “Yes, that’s about it, I suppose.”

  “Well,” the guard said briskly, “you are the boldest children I ever met. Ye deserve to go to jail, the pair of ye.”

  I could see that the edges of her mouth kept wanting to turn up in a smile, but still, I wasn’t sure if we could trust her not to make life difficult for us.

  “It was his idea,” I said.

  That was mean of me, I suppose, and I am not proud of it, but it was his idea. I hadn’t liked it from the start, as you may remember, and it didn’t seem fair if I had to go to jail for something I hadn’t wanted to get involved in in the first place. (Though I suppose a lot of criminals say that.)

  “But luckily for you,” she said, ignoring me, “you are too young for jail.”

  Well, we kind of knew that, but all the same, when you are more or less in police custody, it’s nice to hear it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

  “Thank you, guard,” I said humbly.

  “But tell me one thing,” she said. “Tell me why.”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you do it? Why did you want to play such a trick on this poor man?”

  “Well … ,” I said, and I looked at Hal.

  I certainly wasn’t going to tell her it was part of a major plot on Hal’s part to make his mother split up with his stepfather, and that I had gone along with it out of a misguided commitment to saving the earth from global warming.

  “I mean, it isn’t even April Fool’s Day,” the guard was saying. “If it had been the first of April, of course we’d have been expecting this sort of thing. The hospital sometimes gets dragged into tasteless pranks like that.”

  I had a wild idea that I would say it was a kind of dress rehearsal for April Fool’s Day, but it was June, for heaven’s sake. It wouldn’t have been very convincing. So I said nothing, just took another sip of my Coke. It tastes different out of a teacup, for some reason.

  “Well … ,” said Hal, and he cleared his throat.

  We both looked at him. He seemed to have shrunk since earlier that morning. His jumper looked too big for him.

  “My dad … ,” he said. “Not Him, my own dad …”

  Uh-oh, weirdsville, I thought. What has your dad got to do with anything? But I didn’t say it out loud. I remembered how he’d gone a bit moochy when the security man at the hospital had mentioned him losing his da, and then how pale he’d got when we’d been talking to the bicycle guard. I hoped he wasn’t going to do anything embarrassing.

  I fixed my eyes on
the passport application form on the table. It was upside down, but I could read it if I concentrated.

  “Yes?” said the guard. She had gone very still, very listening.

  There was a long silence.

  I deciphered the whole passport form while I was waiting for Hal to say something else. You’d be amazed at the personal information they want just to give you a passport. People have no privacy, have they?

  Two of the guards, the ones who had been playing cards, stood up and put on their caps and said good-bye to everyone and went out. Still, Hal hadn’t said any more.

  The door closed behind the two guards, and the silence settled in again.

  At last Hal spoke. “He died on a Friday,” he said.

  His voice was really tiny, as if it belonged to a minute little creature. A beetle, maybe, or a caterpillar, something not only small but also usually not at eye level with you and rather far away.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Hal,” the guard said quietly.

  Behind me, I could hear the squeak and creak of the swivel chair the guard at the computer was sitting on. He’d stopped tapping at the keyboard. It was as if the whole room was holding its breath.

  Our guard sat with her hands together on her knees, the fingers intertwined, and she waited to see if Hal was going to say any more.

  “When I was small,” Hal said, “we flew a kite once, the two of us. That’s the only thing I remember about him. That and about it being a Friday when he died.”

  Friday. Something clunked in my brain. It wasn’t like a piece of a jigsaw clicking into place, the way people say. It was more like someone dropping a very heavy suitcase on a wooden floor in the room above you, thunk, and it’s so heavy, it kills its own vibrations.

  “I see,” said the guard. “That’s very sad for you, Hal.”

  “Yes,” said Hal.

  There was another silence, and then Hal added, “I found him.”

  “Oh, Hal,” I breathed.

  I had never heard this before. This was the Something Awful that had happened. It was awfuller than I’d thought.

  The guard gave me a look. Don’t say a word, her look said.

  “I don’t remember that part,” Hal was saying. “I was only five. My mother told me, that’s how I know.”