Second Fiddle (9 page)

“Could be,” I said, careful not to sound too convinced. You don't want to be encouraging a person with this sort of wild imagination. “Yeah, I s'pose. Or it could just be that he doesn't care. Mentioning money mightn't have been the best thing. If we'd just said he should ring me.…”

“But listen,” Mags said. She interrupts. She's always doing it. “The other thing I thought of in the night is this: why don't we text him? I'm sure he has a mobile.”

“I told you, I don't have his phone number.” I was beginning to get a bit weary of this whole hunt-the-dad game, and she wasn't even very good at it, as far as I could see. “If we had that, we could just have rung him in the first place.” That was a no-brainer, I would have thought.

“No, I know that, but what about your mum? Has
she
got a mobile? Because if
he
has a mobile, and
she
has a mobile.…”

“Oh, bling-bling!” I said. “They can ring each other up and have nice little chats. What use is that?”

“Because, stupid,” said Mags with her usual tact and charm, “it means she probably has his number programmed into
her
mobile.”

I don't take kindly to being called stupid, but I let it go, because actually, she was beginning to make a bit of sense after all. It might be worth a try, I thought.

“Mmm,” I said. I didn't want to sound too excited, in case she got carried away again. “Yeah, she has a mobile. She lends it to me if I have to go somewhere, because I haven't got one.”

“There you go. Perfect. You can invent a trip somewhere, borrow her mobile, and Bob's your uncle.”

Mags was so pleased with herself, she did a little twirl and took a bow. “Who's a clever girl, then?” she asked triumphantly.

I thought it best to humor her, so I grinned halfheartedly.

“It was a brain hemorrhage, if you must know, not a virus,” she said suddenly, sitting down with a bump. “That my dad died of. He just collapsed one day, sitting at the wheel of his car outside the house, and fell over onto the horn. It made a terrible racket, and that was that. Out on a blast.”

Well, what a thing to land on me out of nowhere! I didn't know where to look. I don't know what I said. I suppose I said something like, “Oh dear, I mean, I'm sorry.” Something sympathetic, I suppose. I hope. I wouldn't like to think I said anything offhand, though I was in such a state of surprise, I probably wasn't exactly as warm and sensitive as I would have been if I'd had time to think about it.

“Well then,” she said, which she always does when she doesn't know what to say, and she shrugged.

Mags

Of course it was an absolutely brill idea. She just can't bear to admit it.

Our first go at texting Gillian's dad, when we eventually got ahold of her mother's mobile, went like this:

pls ring Gill. she nds help.

“Sounds as if I'm suicidal,” said Gillian. “Or an alcoholic.”

“OK,” I said brightly, and changed the text so that it read:

pls ring gill. she nds money.

“It doesn't sound very enticing, does it?” said Gillian.

“Enticing? You want enticing?” I said. “OK, you've got enticing.” And I jabbed at the phone with my thumbs and came up with this:

pls ring gill urgently

“That'll scare him,” said Gillian.

I should have sensed that her heart wasn't in it.

“Good,” I said. “Serve him right for not answering our e-mail. Will I send it?”

Gillian looked carefully around, as if she were afraid someone might see us doing something terrible, and said, “OK, send it.”

I jabbed again at the phone and then I said, “Right, done. That should shift him.”

We sat for a few moments staring at the phone, expecting it to burst into a frenzied peeping at any moment.

“We said to ring
you,
” I said at last. “So he probably won't text back on your mother's phone. He'll call you at home, when he gets a chance.”

“Yeah,” said Gillian. “Sure.”

But he didn't call her at home that day. Or the next.

“Well, text him again,” I said impatiently when Gillian reported this sorry news. “Same message, only this time, type
URGENTLY
in capital letters.”

“It won't work,” said Gillian glumly. “I know he won't ring. He doesn't care. I won't get the money, and I won't be able to go and I'll miss the audition, and I'll blow my one chance, and I'll never get to be a professional violinist, and I'll end up working in a supermarket and it'll be all his fault.”

“Sounds as if that's what you
want
to happen,” I said. “You're giving up awfully easily. Anyway, a supermarket could be quite good. You'd probably get free sweets.”

I was only trying to look on the bright side, but Gillian glared at me. It seemed to me she was sort of pleased that her dad was being so difficult to track down. I thought maybe she needed an excuse not to do the audition after all. Perhaps she was scared.

“Well, I'll send the text again, but I can't see it having any more effect than the first one,” she said stubbornly.

“But there must be tons of other things you could do,” I said, “even if we don't find your dad. You could tell your mother. I know you don't want to, but she is your mother after all, she'd be bound to help if she knew how much you want to do this. Or you could get Tim in on it. Or you could borrow the money somewhere.”

“A hundred euro? Who do you know who would lend a thirteen-year-old a hundred euro?”

“Well, you could borrow twenty from one person,” I said, “and twenty from another, build it up that way. I could lend you twenty-seven euro thirty; I have twenty-five in my post office book and I have two thirty in my pocket.” Have I pointed out before that I am a generous soul? Well, in case you haven't noticed, that was quite a big offer, not so much the money in the post office—you don't notice if you give that away—but offering her the two thirty in my pocket was quite a big deal, I thought. But she didn't seem to notice. “Tim could probably lend you twenty or thirty,” I went on. “My mum might lend you twenty if we asked her nicely. That's more than half of a hundred already. My grandpa … well, he's pretty poor, but he might rise to ten. Be creative! Haven't you got a godmother or someone? Do you not get money for your birthday sometimes? Have you got a post office book of your own? Can you sell something? There are a thousand things you could do, I'm sure there are.”

I wanted to shake Gillian. Where's her imagination? Hello?

“I couldn't pay people back, though,” she pointed out obstinately. Did she really want to go to this audition or not?

“Gillian, you keep putting obstacles in the way. Think positive! If you start doing other things to raise the money, you'll find he'll probably ring. Things always work that way.”

“No, they don't,” Gillian muttered. “I hate my life.”

Sometimes I think maybe she's a bit spoiled.

Gillian

I was starting to regret having told Mags I wanted to find Dad. I mean, it
would
have been very handy if I knew where he was. I could just go and talk to him and ask him for the money, and he could say yes or no. Probably no, but at least then I'd know where I stood. But I was starting to feel a bit uneasy about all this tracking down. I figured, if he doesn't want me to know where he lives, that means he doesn't want me to come bothering him. And really, I can't allow myself to be distracted by all this stuff. I need to be putting my energy into my music. I do not need to be having woodland adventures and playing at manhunts, however amusing Mags finds it. It seems to me that Mags is more interested in the idea of finding my dad than in the idea of making it possible for me to go to my audition.

Still, I did as she suggested and sent the second text message.

Result: nothing.

Precisely as predicted.

Mags

That is so unfair! Don't listen to her! It wasn't for my amusement, all this. What do I care about Gillian's father? As far as I am concerned, he is a cipher. (By the way, this is one of those words you might think you understand, but you probably don't, even if you can use it properly. Isn't that amazing? To think that you can totally misunderstand a word and still be able to use it correctly!) His role, in my view, was simply to supply the cash Gillian needed to go to England to do her audition. Period.

Anyway, I had other things on my mind for a while. Things closer to home.

I found a dress I'd forgotten I owned, a sleeveless cotton summery thing with tiny flowers on it. It was creased from being folded up, but I shook it out and hung it in the bathroom while I had a shower, and it looked better after that. I sniffed it carefully. It smelled a bit musty, but not actually stinky. I sprayed it with hair stuff I found in the bathroom cabinet to freshen it up. Then it smelled sweet but still musty and the fabric had gone stiff in places. Still, it wasn't too noticeable. I dried myself off and put on the dress and looked at myself in the mirror. It was a little tight, but not very uncomfortable. It'd be OK.

I blow-dried my hair. I never do that normally, I just brush it swiftly and let it dry naturally, hanging about my shoulders. The blow-drying made it go all wispy. I hoped I didn't look a complete dork. I pulled it back and put a hairslide at the back of my head, in that old-fashioned style my mother likes, the way Victorian girls used to wear their hair. I wished I could get those cool tiny braids in it. A girl at my last school got those done in a hotel in Lanzarote and she didn't have to so much as touch it for more than six weeks. That's my idea of a really useful hairstyle. I didn't think my mother would take me to Lanzarote specially, though. An alternative would be to have it cut really short, but my mother doesn't like that idea. She's romantic about long hair.

The way I'd pulled my hair back made my face seem extra wide. I pulled at the front a bit, to loosen it from the slide, and get some of it to loop artistically down by my forehead. It didn't look too bad. I brushed my teeth and put on a bit of lip stuff, the kind you use to keep away chapped lips in the winter. It tasted of strawberries.

“You'll do,” I told the mirror grimly, and launched myself off up the corridor toward the kitchen.

My mother was stirring a large pot and sniffing the juicy steam that came off it when I put in an appearance. She's not the world's greatest cook, but she is great at soup and stew.

“Delicious!” I pronounced, sniffing the rich, tomatoey air.

“My goodness!” said Mum. “You scrub up well. Must buy you a new summer dress, though. You look like you are going to burst forth at any moment from that one. Can you breathe?”

“Are you calling me fat?” I asked suspiciously.

“I'm calling you a growing girl, is all,” said my mother.

“I
knew
I should have worn jeans,” I said sulkily. “I feel a twit in this. I'll change. I have a clean blouse somewhere.”

“No, don't. You're lovely. My lovely daughter!”

I grimaced. I wasn't used to compliments and I didn't know what to do when they came.

“So who's coming to lunch, anyway?” I asked, peeking through the door to the dining room. There was a check tablecloth and a tiny vase of delicate flowers in the middle of the table and cutlery for three. “That Miss What's-her-face from the library? Or Grandpa?”

I didn't really think it was likely to be Grandpa. He doesn't like my mother's cooking. “Too wet,” he'd said once, when I asked him what was wrong with it. He liked a nice dry piece of meat that you could see, three potatoes, and a boiled vegetable, preferably green. “That you could see” meant no gravy or sauces smothering the meat, and nothing chopped up and mixed with other stuff. Still, he made an exception for her minestrone. Her minestrone was exceptional.

“His name is Don,” my mother said, far too casually.

“A
man!
” I gasped.

If my mother had invited a discombobulated llama or a number 59 bus to lunch I couldn't have been more surprised.

“Indeed,” said my mother drily. “Most people of that name tend to be male, and this one is certainly old enough to be beyond calling a boy.”

“You're being smart,” I said accusingly. “You're never smart. What's wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong, Margaret Rose. I am merely inviting someone to lunch.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“No!”

“Do you wish he was your boyfriend?”

“Mags! I hope you won't talk like that when Don is here. If you're going to embarrass me.…”

“I don't see how you could have met someone to fall in love with already,” I said. “We've only been here a month.”

“I am
not
in love with him. And I didn't meet him since we moved here. I've known him all my life. He's an old friend, of mine and your dad's. He's in the area, passing through, so I invited him. Now will you stop going on about him like that? You're making me nervous.”

“Sweet peas on the table,” I said. “Hmm.”

“It's July. We often have sweet peas on the table in July.”

“Was he your boyfriend before Daddy was?”

“Mags, I'm warning you.…”

“OK, OK,” I said with a sigh.

*   *   *

Don turned out to be quite nice. Boring but nice, the way grown-ups often are. He asked me what class I was in at school. I explained that it was the summer holidays and I wasn't at school. My mother kicked me under the table.

“I have just finished at primary school,” I went on sweetly, “so I'm starting secondary in September, in the next village. It's just a few miles away.”