by Unknown
Sometimes, when he thinks we’re not looking, he gets out a box of matches and strikes them, one after the other, letting them burn right down until the flames lick his fingertips. He stares at the flame, mesmerized, then drops them into the water. Whenever I catch him, I take the matches away and give him a lecture, but Mouse just shrugs and the next day, or the day after, he’ll have another box of matches and the whole spooky game starts again. He looks fearless. Anyone who hadn’t heard him cry in the night would think that he was.
I’m happy here, but there’s just one problem. We’re six days into the Tree People Festival, and there’s still no sign of Dad. When I ask Storm what’s happening, she gets all evasive and grumpy.
‘How do I know when he’ll turn up?’ she says. ‘He said he’d be here, so he’ll be here. Or maybe he’ll catch us at the next place, who knows?’
‘What’s the next place?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know, Dizz. There’s a gathering down in Somerset, there’s Womad in Reading… or we could head over to Yorkshire for the Green World Festival. Can’t you just stop worrying about your dad?’
‘But how will he know where to find us?’
‘I’ll let him know, Dizzy, OK? Come on, you need to stop hassling him and relax.’
‘You did remember to post my cards? The one from the launderette and the one I bought from the Greenpeace stall?’
‘Yes. I’m sure. Look, Dizz, take some advice. Don’t pester your dad. Ever think he might be enjoying some time on his own?’
I frown, because that’s one thought I really haven’t hit on before. Could she be right? Could Dad be making the most of his time out from being a single parent?
‘I just miss him,’ I trail off sadly. ‘I just wondered when he’d be here.’
‘I don’t know, Dizzy, what am I, a fortune-teller or what?’ she huffs.
‘Well… yes.’ I nod at the faded sign on the door of the patchwork van, which says ‘Tarot readings, £5’.
Storm rolls her eyes. ‘I guess you still believe in Santa Claus, too. Grow up.’
She turns her back and walks away, and my eyes prick with the injustice of it all.
Later, up at the waterfall, Finn sits with his back against the horse chestnut tree, playing my guitar, soaking up the sun. He is showing me new songs, busking songs.
‘When you play in the streets, you need to grab people’s attention pretty quick,’ he says. ‘You don’t want them to walk past. Sad songs are good, old songs.’
He plays ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Yellow’. His voice is soft and strong, his brown fingers long and graceful as they pick out the chords. It sounds professional.
‘Worth iop?’ he asks.
‘Nah. I’m saving up for a Cliff Richard CD,’ I tell him.
Finn pulls a mock-hurt face and hands over the guitar. I’ve been practising loads this holiday, and I launch into the chords for Robbie Williams’ ‘Angels’. I make no mistakes, but Finn is a slave-driver.
‘Sing,’ he says. ‘Go on.’
I start off with a thin, reedy wail, then settle into it a little. I can do it as long as I focus on the guitar and refuse to look at Finn. He’s bound to be laughing. I remember how Jade and I got thrown out of the primary school choir, aged eight, for talking too much. Or was it because I had a rotten voice and they didn’t know how to tell me? I’ve never been sure.
‘Not bad,’ Finn says, and when I peer out from behind my veil of hair, he looks serious. He’s definitely not laughing, anyway. ‘Try again.’
So I sing it again, and Finn gets his tin whistle and tries out a few sounds. He works up a soft, flutey trill to go with the chorus.
‘A winner,’ he says. ‘Didn’t know you could sing. We’ll clean up!’
‘Clean up where?’
‘In town, when we go busking. You can get a bus in if you’re up early enough – the bus stop is down the lane, by the crossroads. There’s one in every morning, another one back late in the afternoon. Fancy a day out?’
I look at my toes. A day in town would be great, but what if it’s the day that Dad turns up? I’ve waited so long already I can’t risk missing him.
‘Problem?’ Finn asks, gently.
‘No. No problem,’ I lie. ‘It’s just – I don’t know if I fancy busking. I’d be too scared to sing in front of people. And who’ll mind Mouse and Leggit while we’re away?’
‘We’ll take them with us,’ Finn says. ‘Mouse’ll love it. We can busk a bit – you don’t have to sing if you don’t want to – then we’ll grab some lunch and hit the beach. I thought you’d like it.’
He leans forwards and tucks a corkscrew strand of hair behind my ear. His blue-grey eyes look into mine, seeing past the excuses. ‘I thought you could maybe find a phone box and ring your dad,’ he whispers.
I fling an arm round his neck and hug him tight. It’s different from hugging a girl. Finn smells of long grass and waterfalls and warm skin. His matted hair feels surprisingly soft and heavy under my fingertips.
‘It’s OK,’ he whispers into my neck. ‘I promise, Dizz, it’ll be OK.’
I’m up at seven, crouching outside Tess and Finn’s tent, tugging on a length of damp string that snakes through the grass and disappears inside the tent through a tiny gap in the door-zip. I tug again. There’s something heavy on the other end, and then there’s a grunt and the string goes loose and I know Finn’s awake. The string is his alarm clock, tied round his big toe.
By the time he crawls into the patchwork van, Mouse and I are slurping Weetabix and soya milk.
‘Hi,’ he says, his eyes sleepy, his dreads sticking out at right angles.
I remember how weird it was, yesterday, to touch those matted snakes of hair. Then I blush, and try to forget.
‘Hi,’ I say briskly. ‘Breakfast’s ready.’
Finn scoops up his bowl and flops on to the bunk where Leggit is lying, upside down, long legs pointed towards the van roof. She catches a whiff of the cereal and scrabbles back to an upright position. Her head rests on Finn’s shoulder, brown eyes fixed on the bowl, a sliver of white fang showing. Finn reaches up to the cupboard and pours some dog biscuits on the floor for Leggit to hoover up.
It takes half an hour to walk down to the bus stop, fifteen minutes more before the tiny, ramshackle coach appears. Mouse sticks his tongue out at a staring passenger. I clutch Storm’s fringey purple scarf, looped around Leggit’s collar instead of a lead. She barks in excitement as the door swoops open.
‘Bringing that dog on? You’ll have to pay half fare for it,’ the driver says gruffly.
‘No problem,’ says Finn, stepping forwards with the cash. The driver stares at Finn’s bare feet for a long moment before ringing up the fares.
We bundle Leggit on to the bus and shove her into a seat. She writhes around and finally settles down in the aisle. Every time someone gets on or off, they have to step over her. The bus clatters around the countryside for ages, picking up a man in a business suit from the end of a farm-track, two backpackers wilting under the weight of their rucksacks and a trio of old ladies with matching nylon cardies and shopping trollies.
By the time we shudder to a halt at the bus station in town, it’s just past nine. Ayr is buzzing. Shops are opening up, cafés are dragging tables out on to the pavement. It’s going to be hot, and it’s going to be busy. A perfect busking day, Finn says.
Finn, Mouse and Leggit take a trawl down the main street, looking for a good place to settle. I go looking for a phone box.
‘Want us to stay?’ Finn asks, but I wave him away.
I stand in the phone box, stacking up my 20ps neatly. I cough, pick up the receiver, check outside to make sure there’s no queue. I push a coin into the slot. It feels weird ringing home from a musty phone box in a strange town. I wish I’d asked Finn to wait.
My fingers tremble as they push the buttons, and the ring tone sounds extra loud in my ear.
The receiver clicks and clears and a woman’s vo
ice says, ‘Hi! Lucy here.’
Lucy. Dad’s girlfriend.
I hold the receiver away from my face. What’s she doing there? Where’s Dad? Lucy never stays overnight at the flat. So what’s she doing there so early, what’s she doing answering our phone like she’s done it a million times before?
‘Hello? Is there anyone there?’ she says. ‘Who is this?’
I put a hand over my mouth, squeeze my eyes shut and let my face fall against the cool metal of the telephone. I try to remember to breathe.
‘Hello?’ Lucy says again. ‘Dizzy, Dizzy, is that you? Please speak to me! Don’t hang up! I’ll just get your dad, he’s in the shower…’
I hear her calling ‘Pete, Pete!’ in the background. The receiver slips through my fingers, dangling on its long silver cord. I remember what Storm said yesterday. Maybe your dad is enjoying the break, Dizzy. Ever think of that?
I press down the button to cut off the call, and replace the receiver with a shaky hand.
It’s just gone nine, and Lucy is at the flat while Dad’s in the shower. I can’t kid myself. She stayed over. She never did that while I was there, but now that I’m not… Maybe she’ll move in. Maybe they don’t miss me at all.
That’s why Dad hasn’t come – because he’s busy playing house with his girlfriend, taking a break from me. He’s having fun. He’ll come and get me, sometime, sure. Definitely before the new term starts. But right now, he’s in no hurry to trade his freedom for parenthood. He’s happy. Without me.
There’s a sharp rapping on the phone-box door.
‘You all right?’ a woman calls, her pink face too close to the glass.
I push out of the booth, past the woman. My throat prickles with hurt. I feel stupid, idiotic, crazy for worrying about my dad, for stressing out over whether he had the right address for the festival, whether Storm put a first-class stamp on my postcards. For missing him.
I want him to miss me back, to rescue me from the patchwork van and the lazy, aimless, muddy world of festivals and travellers and soya milk and stale bread with little patches of green mould.
Too bad. It’s not going to happen.
I find a big department store and drift in, hunting down the loos. I fill a sink with cold water and splash my face, drying it on my T-shirt. A woman with a mop and bucket, cleaning the cubicles, tries not to stare. I rake a comb through my tangled hair and hold my head high.
Outside, I follow the sound of twanging guitar strings and find Mouse, Finn and Leggit installed in an alcove outside Marks & Spencer, tuning up. They’ve spread a stripy rug across the pavement and Leggit is stretched out like a small, spiky-haired antelope. Mouse sits dreamily, licking a huge ice-cream cornet adorned with chocolate flakes and two colours of sticky sauce.
‘OK?’ Finn grins.
‘Don’t ask.’
Finn, who knows when to push it and when not to, doesn’t.
We warm up slowly, with Finn on the tin whistle, churning out folky tunes and Irish ballads and ancient hippy songs from the land that time forgot. Mouse sets Finn’s black sunhat at the front of the stripy rug to collect the cash. A shopper hurls in 10p, then a toddler drops in some coppers. Finn relaxes, gets into the music. The hat fills slowly.
I nip down the street to WHSmith and buy cans of Coke, water for Leggit and a Beano for Mouse. Strolling back, I notice the way Mouse is sitting, sad-eyed, shoulders hunched, pale and small and skinny. Every mum that passes him looks back, looks worried, digs into her purse.
‘Have you done this before?’ I ask him.
‘Course,’ he says. ‘Loads of times, with Mum. Only without the music.’
‘Oh.’
Begging.
Sometimes, Mouse makes me feel about a hundred years old.
I hand him the Beano, break open the Cokes, pour water into an empty ice-cream tub from the gutter for Leggit. We settle in for the morning.
The streets fill up with tourists, Mouse flicks through his comic listlessly and Finn runs through his list of surefire winners, strumming the guitar or letting me play while he sings. Cash drips steadily into the hat.
People smile as they walk past, a few kids stop and watch, a middle-aged woman gives us a two-pound coin and tells us ‘Stand by Me’ is her all-time favourite song. A stern-faced bloke gives us a large tin of Chappie, ‘For the poor old dog’.
‘She’s meant to be thin,’ Mouse protests. ‘She’s a lurcher.’
I get brave and try ‘Angels’ with Finn on tin whistle, and for a whole three minutes I manage to blot out the phone call and Lucy’s bright, simpering voice and the fact that Dad’s not coming, not any time soon. Like I care.
Then Mouse spots a couple of policemen over the road, and we grab our stuff and melt into the crowd of shoppers. We’ve made almost twelve quid! Mouse waits while Finn and I dive into a bakery. We buy sandwiches, crisps, pop, chocolate, custard doughnuts.
‘All set, then,’ says Finn, outside. ‘Let’s find the beach!’
Mouse whoops and his whole face lights up. He wraps Leggit’s scarf-lead round his wrist and skips off along the pavement. I spot his Beano in the gutter, dip down to retrieve it. ‘Mouse,’ I call after him. ‘You forgot this!’
‘Don’t bother,’ Finn says, snatching the comic away and dropping it into a wastepaper bin. ‘He won’t miss it.’
‘He might,’ I argue, but Finn fixes me with a sad, grey-eyed glance.
‘He won’t,’ he says firmly. ‘Didn’t you notice? The kid can’t read.’
Finn asks directions to the beach, and we cut down a series of side streets until we see the seawall and a vast, rolling slash of deep-blue ocean. Mouse is silent, his eyes huge, nostrils flared. He looks like he could explode with excitement.
‘Look,’ he whispers to Leggit. ‘That’s the beach! That’s the sea!’
‘Have you never seen the sea before?’ Finn asks.
‘Of course. Loads,’ Mouse says, scornfully. ‘Don’t think Leggit has, though.’
Finn and I exchange grins.
We trip down the steps to the beach, stumble through the soft, silvery sand. Leggit squirms, slithering free of the fringey scarf. She sprints off down the beach, zigzagging wildly through the football games, sunbathers, kids with buckets and spades. Down at the water’s edge, she finds a huge piece of seaweed and shakes it about violently, then charges up to Mouse and drops it at his feet.
‘Seaweed,’ he says, amazed.
Finn, barefoot and wearing skate shorts, is already paddling through the shallows, chucking driftwood sticks for Leggit to chase.
Mouse and I pull off our trainers and socks, roll up our jeans. The soft sand is hot, it squidges through your toes, tickles your feet. Mouse runs down to the water’s edge, shuts his eyes and lets the tide wash over his feet. I’ve never seen him look so happy.
We turn to the right, trailing along the edge of the sea until we find a quiet bit of beach, away from the picnics, the swimmers, the deckchairs. We spread the stripy rug, tip the picnic out of its bag, bask in the sun.
‘Is this why they’re called sandwiches?’ Finn asks, after Mouse skids to a halt beside him, spraying his egg mayonnaise.
‘Sorry,’ says Mouse, then laughs when he sees that Finn isn’t cross. When he smiles, he’s almost cute.
We eat till we’re stuffed. Leggit has a roast chicken triple-layer with salad, plus one of the custard doughnuts. Then she skitters back to the water’s edge, where Mouse is building a sandcastle studded with mismatched shells and circled with stumps of driftwood.
‘He’s happy,’ I say.
‘Yeah.’
Mouse draws zigzags in the wet sand with a stick, digs a moat round the castle with his bare hands, drapes seaweed from his ears and roars at us like a sea monster. He runs in circles with Leggit, wades fully clothed into the sea up to his waist and staggers out, dripping. His wet, brown limbs are crusted with gold, his damp hair dusty with sand.
Mouse looks like any other kid on the beach – maybe a b
it skinnier, a bit scruffier, a bit more nervous. But he’s having fun, and I know and Finn knows that it’s an awful long time since Mouse had fun.
‘So, what did your dad say?’ Finn asks at last.
I drop down into the sand, close my eyes. In the distance, a baby is crying, and the sound of an ice-cream van drifts down from the street.
‘Change of plan,’ I say lightly to the pale-blue sky. ‘He’s not coming, now. Not till the end of the summer.’
‘What happened?’
‘Oh, y’know. He’s taking some time out to be with his girlfriend, Lucy. She’s really nice. He says that I might as well make the most of my time with Storm. Enjoy the summer, that kind of thing.’
Well, that’s what he’d have said if I’d given him the chance. If I tell Finn I hung up without even talking to Dad, he’ll march me down to the phone box and make me ring back, just to be sure I haven’t jumped to the wrong conclusions. I can’t do that. I’ve spent eight years knowing my mum abandoned me when I was four. I won’t get through another day if I think Dad’s ditched me, too. He’s entitled to spend some time out with Lucy. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love me any more.
‘You OK with that?’ Finn watches me from under the brim of his black cotton hat.
‘Sure, why not? Lucy’s cool. And I’m having fun. Getting to know Storm. It’s good for me and Dad to have some time apart.’
‘Is it?’
If Finn doesn’t stop looking at me, I’m going to cry.
‘Yes,’ I say defiantly. ‘Yes, it is.’
I roll over on to my front and stare down at the sand. Crying is a bad plan. It’d only make the sand wet.
‘Custard doughnut?’ Finn suggests, offering me the box. ‘Seriously wicked. Go on – Leggit recommends them.’
I laugh, lifting out the last custard doughnut. It’s soft and sweet and soggy, and slightly gritty with sand. It tastes great.