For me, romance stayed in the pages of my notebooks and diaries. I hadn’t ventured into love—or lust—in the flesh, uncertain of my looks and charms and unwilling to test the waters. There had been some smudged innocent kisses behind the youth club, informed by the stories in Jackie, but I preferred to write about the longing and imagined lovers. There was safety in my stories. And less saliva.
And I’d had Harry’s terrifying lecture on losing your virginity. I’d asked her what it was like when she told me she’d done it with Malcolm Baker’s friend after the Christmas disco.
“Did it hurt?” I said.
“Agony. Bloody agony, but it gets better,” Harry had said, puffing on a No. 6 on the top of the double-decker. I knew she’d probably only done it once but let it go. She liked being my older, more sophisticated friend.
“Agony? Really? God, maybe I’ll wait a bit longer. Do you want one?” I’d offered her a Cheese and Onion crisp and we’d moved seamlessly on to our favorite crisp flavors.
Then Harry had rung the bell and skipped down the stairs to get off the bus. She looked up and waved as the bus lumbered off.
? ? ?
Harry had long thought my failure to get a boyfriend was down to having no dad.
“Where are the men in your life, Emma? No wonder you are shy around boys,” she’d said when we’d last broached the subject, months before.
It had been her idea to bring up the subject at home, so I had. I tried to keep calm and pointed out that half my DNA was my mystery father’s. Jude had reacted with horror.
“But you’ve got me,” she’d cried. “And he wouldn’t be interested.”
She’d pointed out that he probably had another family by now and I would be making problems for him if I turned up. “He’d have to explain you to his new wife.”
That night, the night of the row, Harry said: “Sod them, Emma. You need a proper parent. Let’s go and find your dad.”
And I agreed.
We waited until the next time Jude was out and went up to her room to look through her things for letters and photos of old boyfriends. I was so worried she’d catch us, I stood by the door while Harry did the digging around. I was nagging Harry to put everything away when she found a scribbled note at the back of 1968’s diary. It said “Charlie,” and there was an address in Brighton.
“We should go there,” Harry said. “It’s around the right time and it’s not too far,” she added, practical as ever.
It was all moving too fast for me, but I’d agreed to start down the path and it felt too late to turn back now.
TWENTY-SIX
Emma
MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2012
I’m supposed to be polishing the book I’m editing, but I keep drifting away from the sentence I’m reading. My boss has e-mailed to say the subject is about to be exposed in a Sunday paper as a cokehead and I need to get a wiggle on so the publishers can sell the serial rights to the press.
I’ve e-mailed back to say I’ll get it to her by the end of tomorrow, but I can’t concentrate. It’s as if my eyes keep sliding off the screen. I get up, make myself a cup of tea, and sit down again, determined to get on with it. But my tea goes cold beside me and my screen locks while I sit wondering if everything would have turned out differently if Harry and I had found my father back in 1984. If the story had ended in Brighton.
But of course it didn’t.
I almost laugh when I remember how it began—like some silly schoolgirl adventure—but there is nothing to laugh at, really.
Harry had it all planned back then. We forged a note for school, saying I had a dentist appointment in the afternoon, and she pretended to be ill.
“Since we’re in different classes, they shouldn’t put two and two together,” she said. “I’ll say period pains because Mrs. Carr hates talking about that stuff.” Poor Mrs. Carr, she was about a hundred years old, and being Harry’s form teacher must have been a terrible cross for her to bear.
Harry had chosen a Thursday because it was gym so we could leave at lunchtime. And there we were, at the railway station, about to make it all real.
I can see us, standing there. Two kids. I’m the one not talking, concentrating on the plan and trying not to think about what I’ll say. So many questions running through my head. Making me feel faint.
Harry said this was just the first step and not to build my hopes up. I said I wasn’t, but it was hard not to.
The thing was, my dad had existed in my head for so long, it was hard not to think of him as a real person. I used to wonder if I looked like him, examining my features in the mirror and wondering which bits of me were his.
Some people say I look like Jude, but I’ve never thought so. Her friends said we had the same eyes. Well, we both have blue eyes.
I didn’t know how I felt about finding my dad. Excited but really, really scared. I didn’t tell Harry. She used to pull this face when she thought people were being immature.
I was so frightened he wouldn’t want to know me, like Jude said, but I let myself imagine him hugging me, like in those stories about people being reunited. Like in Heidi. When I thought about it I felt tingly and wanted to cry, so I wrote about it in my diary. It made me feel better when it was written down. Safe on the page.
Harry never did “safe.” She loved a bit of excitement, a bit of trouble. And it was okay, normally, because I just watched and was the shoulder to cry on when it all went wrong. Like when she started seeing that horrible biker in the precinct. Her parents went mad and her dad went to see the biker at his house and said he would go to the police if he went near his fourteen-year-old daughter again. Harry cried for two days.
But that day in January 1984, that Thursday when we bunked off school, was all about me. Harry said it was my “big day,” but I think I’d have preferred gym.
On the train to Brighton, I remember we got out our school packed lunches, hers white sliced bread with ham and coleslaw, mine a house brick of homemade wholemeal with hummus, and we fell silent. We were really doing this and it made us a bit giddy.
“What if he’s fat and bald and drinks out of cans?” Harry said.
“What if he’s a millionaire? Or a biker?” I said.
Harry gave me a look.
“What if he has ten children and lives in a council house?” she said.
Harry could be quite conservative, despite her reputation as a rebel—I think it was her mum’s influence. Jude said Mrs. Harrison was “all fur coat and no knickers.” I wasn’t sure what it meant at the time, but it made me laugh.
Anyway, I didn’t say, “What if he doesn’t want to see me?” but I was thinking it and I threw away my sandwich in the bin in the ladies’.
When the train pulled into the station, I didn’t want to get up. My legs were all jelly and Harry pulled me out of my seat and linked her arm through mine.
“Come on. Let’s go and see who lives there. We won’t say you’re looking for your long-lost dad until you’re ready. And if we don’t like the look of him, we’ll go and get some candy floss on the pier. Okay?”
I nodded.
The address was a big house in a posh street, set back from the seafront. But it wasn’t like the other houses. The windows were boarded up and the front garden was all overgrown and full of empty bottles.
“No one lives here, Harry. Let’s go,” I said, so glad the ordeal was over before it had begun. But she was having none of it.
“Don’t be wet. We’ve come all this way. We should at least knock.” So she did, with me shivering at the gate, ready to run away at the first sign of trouble.
“There’s no answer,” she shouted back to me. And was about to turn away when the door opened and a tall man stood there, rubbing his eyes like he’d just woken up.
“Yeah? What do you want?” he said.
“Do you know Jude Massingham?” Harry said, straight out.
He looked at her and laughed. “Jude Massingham. Christ, that’s a blast from the past. Must be more than ten years ago. God, maybe twenty? She was my mate Charlie’s woman. Who are you, then?”
The man was quite thin and wearing tight black trousers and a thick brown belt with a fancy buckle resting below his belly button. You could see through his shirt—it was that really thin material even though it was freezing—and he had a medallion thing on a leather thong round his neck.