Holly Page 10

  Dad started walking up and down the sitting room, taking deep breaths to try and stop himself from crying. I watched him and thought I’d never seen such an awful sight in my life. Mum crying was one thing, him crying was quite another.

  ‘Say something. Say something!’ I begged. ‘You do still want to be my dad, don’t you?’

  There was about another two minutes when he just paced up and down, and then he said, ‘I knew. I suspected.’

  Neither Mum nor I said anything and he said again, ‘I knew.’

  ‘Knew what?’ Mum said, astonished. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘D’you think I’m stupid? I knew we were going through a dodgy patch. I guessed you were seeing someone else. And then when you got pregnant I knew there was a fair chance that the baby wasn’t mine.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because I’ve never been one hundred per cent sure that I could have children.’ He blew his nose and seemed to pull himself together. He was on to facts now and he was better at facts than emotions. ‘I had mumps as a teenager, and that sometimes reduces your fertility. I never told you about that before we got married, though, because I knew how much you wanted a baby. So you see, I can be capable of deception, too.’

  Mum didn’t say anything. I guess she was trying to take it all in.

  ‘Once – when we lived in the other house – you got a letter. An airmail letter. You tried to pretend it was from an old aunt or something but I knew from the way you took it and hid it away that it was from someone important, about something secret. I looked everywhere for that letter, but I never found it.’

  He glanced at me. ‘And then as Holly grew …’ His voice went husky again. ‘… grew into a lovely young lady, I knew she wasn’t mine. She was tall and fair and beautiful and I was none of those things.’

  ‘Dad!’ I implored him.

  ‘But I went along with the game, just like you did. I couldn’t do anything else.’ He paused and blew his nose again ‘So what do you want to do now?’

  Mum shook her head. ‘I don’t want to do anything,’ she said. ‘Nothing! I want things to stay exactly as they are. I just wanted you to know the truth.’ She glanced at me. ‘Holly wanted you to know the truth. I think … I believe you’re her father. Not biologically, maybe, but in terms of care and love and trust and everything else. We’ve brought her up together, we’ve been a family, and no one can change that now. It’s just whether you can forgive me or not.’

  Dad looked at me. ‘Do you want to change anything, Holly? Do you … do you want to go and live with this man?’

  I started blubbing again so that I could hardly speak. ‘Of course I don’t!’

  There was a long silence. ‘Well, then,’ Dad said, and he wiped his eyes on his sleeve. ‘Come here, then, love.’

  As he said it, Mum said it as well, but it was Dad I went to.

  He put his arms round me and I leaned hard on his shoulder and pressed my face into his jumper. I couldn’t speak. I wanted to ask him if he still loved me now that he knew I wasn’t his and stuff like that, but I couldn’t begin to put those sorts of things into words.

  Out in the hall, the phone began to ring. We all ignored it, but it rang and rang and in the end went on to the answerphone.

  ‘Holly!’ I heard Ella screech. ‘Guess what?’

  In the sitting room we were frozen like shop-window dummies, just listening.

  ‘Holly! Are you there? Guess what?’ Ella said again. Then she said, ‘My dad got in touch! He rang the helpline. It was him working at that person’s garage! Isn’t it brilliant? I can’t believe it!’ She paused for breath and then she said, ‘Ring me when you get in and I’ll tell you all about it. He lives in Essex and he wants to meet me! I can’t believe it!’ Another pause and she added, slightly hesitantly, ‘I hope everything’s all right. Goodbye.’

  After a moment Dad sighed. ‘That’s good,’ he said, nodding his head towards the phone.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I suddenly felt unbearably tired. As if I’d fall down if I didn’t sit down. I couldn’t face sitting with Mum, though. Not yet.

  I gave Dad a bit of a smile, just to let him know I was all right, and went out of the room and upstairs to my bedroom. I felt I wanted to cry for a long time and then sleep for a year.

  Chapter Sixteen

  On Wednesday morning I stood in the flight departures hall, looking around me. For once the shops and the snazzy-looking coffee bars didn’t attract me, because I was searching for something else. Someone else.

  All was quiet at home. Sort of the lull after the storm. Mum and Dad both looked drawn and ill at ease and neither of them was eating or – judging from the cups of tea being made in the night – sleeping much, either. They were speaking to each other, though, and soon, maybe, the number of years they’d been together would kind of drag them through and back to normality. I hoped I’d be able to get back to normality, too. Things had changed and shifted and I didn’t feel the same about certain things but I thought that I could, just about, learn to adjust. My life had moved into a different gear, I just had to try to move with it.

  ‘We are now boarding for flight V101 to San Francisco,’ the tannoy announced. ‘Will passengers please go to Gate 54.’

  I knew he might be on this flight, and I stopped in my tracks. I knew you couldn’t go to the flight gates or even into the departure lounge unless you were a passenger, and if this was his flight he was probably through there now and just about to board. I’d been about to go to the Virgin counter and ask if they had a passenger named Ben Simmons, but now I mentally shrugged and turned in the direction of the departure lounge.

  Why had I come? I didn’t exactly know. It had been more a question of waking in the morning and thinking to myself that I might as well, and ringing Mrs Potter at the shop, and then ringing Heathrow to find out times of possible flights. I’d missed two of them by the time I got there, but there were two more that morning, so I’d decided to leave it to fate. If I got there and saw him, OK. If I didn’t, then that was fairly OK too.

  When I got to the wide channel which led to the departure lounge, an Asian family were just going through with a whole lot of bags, babies and grannies in bright saris. I stood at the head of the slope and tried to look past them, but beyond where the staff checked the boarding cards there were screens which prevented you from seeing further in.

  If he was booked on the Virgin flight, he was somewhere in there and I’d missed him. But there was a BA flight in an hour’s time and he might be on that. I stood there, undecided, not knowing whether to go and check with the other airline or wait there or what.

  And then, as I was hesitating, I saw him: a tall, fair man in a navy-blue suit, an overnight bag over his shoulder, going through the customs desk.

  ‘Hey!’ I started down the slope but he didn’t turn. He showed the man his passport and went through into no man’s land.

  ‘Hey!’ I said again. ‘Hello!’

  Just as he reached the screens he turned and saw me. He looked bewildered at first, then amazed, then delighted. I thought what a strange feeling it was: having the power to make someone be all those things.

  Three businessmen came behind him, pressing him through to the x-ray machines, so I couldn’t go to him and he couldn’t come to me and that was just as well, because I wouldn’t have wanted any big hugging and kissing scene.

  We saw each other, and we waved, and that was enough.

  He’s my father. I know that one day I’ll see him again.

  Epilogue

  Nearly a year’s gone by since the day I went to the airport. I’m in sixth form now and I’ve just done my first year exams. They weren’t a complete disaster, so I hope I’ll be going to university next year.

  Mum and Dad are sort of back on an even keel. The thing that helped, strangely enough, was that Dad had had mumps. He said he should have told Mum about that before they got married, knowing how much she wanted children. He told her that because he’d been capabl
e of deceit, he felt more able to forgive her.

  I guess I’ve forgiven her too. The thing she did was against Dad, so if he can forgive her it wouldn’t be right for me not to. Anyway, it doesn’t take much to forgive your mum, I’ve discovered, because you want her there so much. The thought of being alienated from her, of not having her in my life, is too terrible to think about, whatever she’s done. I love her just as much, although I may not feel the same about her. I realise now that that’s not altogether a bad thing, though, and that as you go through life your relationships change and adjust and sometimes find a new level.

  I love Dad just as much, too – more, probably. And he really will always be my dad, no matter what Ben or anyone else says. That part hasn’t changed.

  Last year, after it happened, we were all a bit awkward with each other. A bit stiff and starchy and ultra-polite around the house. But now things are almost back to normal. Like, I can have a row with Mum without being tempted to call her names and Dad can say things like, ‘Look, I’m your father and if I want you in at a certain time …’ without being self-conscious about it or making me squirm inside.

  And today I’m at the airport again and I’m flying to San Francisco so I’m dead excited. Ben and Jennie are meeting me there to take me to their home in Monterey. Just for two weeks, of course, because my home, and my mum and dad are here …

  Also by Mary Hooper

  CONTEMPORARY FICTION

  Megan

  Megan 2

  Megan 3

  Amy

  Chelsea and Astra: Two Sides of the Story

  Zara

  HISTORICAL FICTION

  At the Sign of the Sugared Plum

  Petals in the Ashes

  The Fever and the Flame

  (a special omnibus edition of the two books above)

  The Remarkable Life and Times of Eliza Rose

  At the House of the Magician

  By Royal Command

  The Betrayal

  National Missing Persons Helpline is a charity (Reg No 1020419) that tries to contact missing people and offers advice and support for their families as they wait for news. They run a Helpline especially for young people who have run away, enabling them to send a message to their family or carer and to receive advice and help:

  Message Home Helpline 0800 700 740

  To order direct from Bloomsbury Publishing visit www.bloomsbury.com/maryhooper or call 020 7440 2475

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  Turn over for a taster of

  AMY

  by Mary Hooper…

  Section 1

  Recording begins at 9.03am with PC Janet Miller in attendance

  It all started after I fell out with Louise and Bethany, really. It was falling out with them that made me try to find friends somewhere else, and the Internet seemed a good place to look.

  I mean, everyone wants friends, don’t they? People might tell you that they’re quite happy knocking around on their own, but I don’t believe them. When people are described as being ‘a bit of a loner’, it sounds as if they’re deep and mysterious, but actually all it means is that they haven’t got anyone to go round with, and how sad is that?

  I never have been a bit of a loner. I always had friends – kidded myself that I was quite popular – but then something happened to upset the balance, and all of a sudden I was on my own. Norma No Mates.

  There were four of us girls to start with: Josie and Lou – short for Louise – and Bethany and me. We’d been best friends since primary school and gone through all sorts of different crazes. First of all it was collecting things: stickers, fluffy toy cats and glitter eyeshadows, then we were screaming about boy bands and fancying Soap stars. Josie was Lou’s best friend and Bethany was mine and we were the perfect foursome. One summer we even had identical bright blue tee-shirts with our names written in sequins on the front, and we wore them whenever we went out together. Other girls, girls who didn’t have a little gang to go around in, used to look at us really enviously.

  Then, about a year after we’d all started at Ash Manor School, Josie’s family moved away. Her dad had got a new job and they were going to live in Scotland. We were all upset, of course, and promised we’d write to her for ever, but pretty soon that trailed off. I do email her sometimes, now and again, but she hasn’t got the Internet at home, so I hardly ever hear back from her.

  For a few months after she left things were OK, and the three of us went around together just like before. The thing was, though – you know that saying about two being company and three a crowd? Well, it’s really true. When you go out places, things are in pairs: seats on the bus, and at the fair and on the train. Boys are usually in pairs as well. When you go and see a film or go for a burger somewhere crowded there’s always ‘Room for two more’, but there never seems to be room for three more.

  So what I’m getting at is that Bethany and Louise were the two more, and I was the third one, the one left over.

  And even that didn’t matter so much at first, because when we went anywhere and it became clear that someone was going to be left out, I would always stand down quickly, get myself off the case so that they wouldn’t have to suggest it. I was always saying, ‘No, it’s OK, you two go ahead!’ or, ‘I’ll get the next bus. Yeah, sure I’m sure!’

  After a few months of this, though, they more or less expected me to stand down all the time. They had become a best-friend twosome and I just wasn’t in it.

  Once I realised this I felt pretty desperate. I used to lie awake at night wondering what I could do to keep in with them. Pathetic, really. I used to think of things I could say the next day, ‘Your hair looks brilliant today, Bethany’, or, ‘Wish I could draw like you, Lou.’ In the end, those smarmy things sounded fake even to my ears, and I’d find them drying up in my mouth before they got said.

  To make it worse, Lou and Bethany even look alike. They’re quite tall and I’m a good five inches shorter, and they have the same dark, shiny, bobbed hair, whereas mine is long and straggly and a mousy colour. There are other things, too: like they laughed together at jokes that I sometimes didn’t get, and like the same dance music, and go after the same sort of boys, and stuff like that.

  And then I found out that they’d been seeing each other behind my back. This sounds a bit wet, I know. Like I’m saying they were unfaithful to me. It’s just that when it was Bethany’s birthday I found out that her mum and dad had taken her to a posh restaurant for a meal and that Lou had gone along too, but I hadn’t been asked. And then Lou – whose mum has a caravan at the coast – had invited Bethany to go down with them for the weekend.

  Without me. Amy had got the elbow.

  I just didn’t know what to do. Should I just leave them to it, or hang on in the hope that they might fall out?

  I thought and thought about it. I’m an only child, see, so my friends are really important. I mean, I know brothers and sisters are hateful to each other sometimes, but at least they’re always there for company in the evenings and at weekends and things. If you haven’t got any brothers or sisters or any friends, it can be pretty lonely. What I really wanted was for them to have a row and end up hating each other, so I could step in and be Bethany’s best friend once more. Or maybe, if I caught some disease or other, they’d feel terribly guilty and be sorry for me and want to be friends again.

  In the end, though, I realised that there was nothing I could do to break them up, and from being smarmy I went the other way and took to muttering things whenever they were nearby. ‘Careful, you two, don’t leave each other alone for a moment,’ I’d say, or, ‘Whoops, you moved apart from each other for a few seconds there!’ OK, it was childish but I just felt so bitter. Bethany was my friend, not Lou’s. It wasn’t fair!

  AMY available now

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  First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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  This electronic edition published in January 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Text copyright © Mary Hooper 2000

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  eISBN: 978-1-4088-3676-7

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