ISSN 1758-6488
|
Same Old Fiction |
print view |
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘all right. He’s just making it up.’
She sighed. ‘Not making it up. Your father isn’t a liar, Lola. He thinks it’s all perfectly reasonable. That’s why he’s taking so much time over it. It needs to be just right. But it isn’t–’ she cut herself off. ‘Let me put it this way. It would hurt him, very badly, not to be accepted onto this mission – not to get to talk to the scientists about his big idea, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘sure. He’d be gutted. That’s why I’ve been –’
‘No,’ Barbara said firmly. ‘That’s encouragement. If you care about him, you won’t be helping him to make it better – you’ll be distracting him from it. Getting him to think about other, more ordinary things. Saving him from the disappointment.’
A man came out of the toilets then – the man who we first asked to help us. He was drying his hands on the front of his jeans and looked surprised we were still there.
‘My husband?’ Barbara asked. The man frowned, shrugged, walked away without really making a proper answer or even looking at her.
‘Come on,’ she said, and tugged at the sleeve of my coat, ‘we can’t stop looking. He could be anywhere. We’ll talk more about this later.’
We found Donald in WHSmiths. Barbara saw him through the window and pulled me inside. He was crouching over a pool of spilled newspapers, the rack at an angle behind him. Donald murmured calmly as people stepped over the mess. He was struggling to put the pages in the right order and every page looked the same: pictures of the half-frozen river, the leafless, whitened trees, the bundled kids sliding down hills on metal tea-trays, reams and reams of closely printed columns about global warming.
I saw his neat fingers shuffling over the pages and heard the whisper of the paper. His head was bent forward and the bald-patch on his scalp was shiny and humiliating. Barbara pushed past me and knelt beside him to fold the papers, working slowly, saying nothing, bumping her shoulder against his.
I hesitated on the mat in front of the automatic doors, feeling them slide close and bounce open behind me, the electronic sensor under my feet not sure what to do with a weight that hesitated so long. Are you staying or going? The draft at the back of my neck was icy.
I know what I was thinking about. Chloe again – of course. I’d stopped imagining her and Emma at the New Year’s party now – the booze, the streamers, the late night trip out in Carl’s car. Now I was thinking about when I’d see her next – how I was going to approach her. I’d spent the morning sulking and brooding over it and had almost decided to pretend I’d forgotten completely about it – been whisked away to a last minute party of my own. It would have been transparent and ridiculous. Chloe would have smirked and then let me tell my story as if she was doing me a favour. Emma would have openly laughed and passed me the packet of photographs – her and Emma in party dresses, hair up, doing Auld Lang Sine. Even worse if they walked past WHSmith now and saw me kneeling on the carpet with my whole family, fumbling with newspapers while the shop assistants stared.
The doors bumped closed, and then open again behind my back. Barbara looked up.
‘Go home,’ she said quietly, ‘go and peel the potatoes and we’ll be with you shortly.’
I went.
