Second Fiddle (13 page)

But the car didn't pass. It stopped and the window rolled down. Maybe it would be someone I knew who could give me a lift! What bliss!

“Hey!” said a voice I half thought I recognized.

I peered at the driver, squinching my eyes to focus on him. He was wearing a red baseball cap, but he took it off when he noticed me peering, so that I could see who he was. It was the bus driver from earlier. The baseball cap must mean he was off duty.

“Want a lift to Ballybeg?” he asked. “It's on my way home.”

I hesitated.

“No,” I said at last. “My mother doesn't allow me to accept lifts from strangers.”

“But you came with me earlier, on the bus,” he said with a grin.

“That was different.”

“I don't see how. A bus is bigger than a car is the only difference.”

I thought about the logic of this. I agreed with him that really there was no practical difference, but I could imagine that my mother would be bound to perceive a
moral
difference. “No,” I said again more firmly. “I like running.”

“In this heat? You're soft in the head, you are, young one.”

“Well then,” I said.

“I'm a friend of your granddad's,” he went on.

“Are you?” This sounded promising. Maybe it would be OK. Maybe I could take this lift.

But the bus driver had gotten tired of the conversation. “I'll give you one last chance,” he said, and leaned across to open the passenger door. “In you hop now, or forget it.”

I stepped forward and pulled the door toward me. My nostrils filled with that warm-car smell—hot plastic seats and a black, enginey whiff. I slammed the passenger door shut.

“No,” I said, coming around to the driver's side again. “My mother would kill me.”

The bus driver laughed, jammed his baseball cap back down on his head, and revved up his engine. The tires skittered for a moment on the rough surface of the road and then the car shot off up toward the rise in the road and the horizon, its exhaust merrily blasting hotly out behind. I could hear the roar of the engine getting softer and softer as the exhaust fumes dissipated into the air, and at last there was only a whining sound and I was alone again on the road, with my half-empty and now rather sticky bottle in my hand. What kind of an idiot was I to pass up a lift? I regretted it already. (By the way, I was wrong to regret it. You should never accept a lift from someone you don't know you can trust. I knew that, really.)

I took another gulp and sighed and then I set off jogging again.

As I ran, I began to fantasize about Mr. Red Baseball Cap. I decided he was a runaway from the local facility for the criminally inclined. He'd probably stolen that bus. It was terribly old and he hadn't been able to give me a ticket. It was probably a retired bus that he'd found out the back of the depot and used for his getaway. I should have known a real bus would never have come on time. I should have been suspicious when it arrived bang on three thirty.

He was probably a child-stealer too, as well as a bus-thief, I thought, which was why he'd stopped for me at the bus stop, even though I hadn't waved him down. I was beginning to enjoy this. I gave my pet criminal a name. “Loony” Len Lafferty. Then he'd probably abandoned the bus in Ballymore and stolen a car. I couldn't work out why he was now driving back in the direction he'd come from in the first place, unless he was trying to cover up his tracks. That was probably it. Giving the police the slip. They'd never expect him to double back.

I thought maybe I should change tack and turn this into a mystery story instead of the story of me and Gillian, but I got a headache trying to work out all the reasons “Loony” Len did what he did. I had a good time imagining him trying to kidnap the two boys with the football and the snotty nose in Ballymore. That made me giggle, which is not a good idea if you are trying to jog at some speed on a hot day, so I changed then to thinking about my feet. They hurt more than ever now and my sandals were starting to chafe my insteps. I would have blisters tomorrow.

*   *   *

“Where were you until this hour?” my mother asked predictably as I fell in the back door, my hair clinging to my head with perspiration.

The soft flesh at the tops of my arms, where they meet my body, was smarting from my dress being tight at the armholes. My feet felt like two large hamburgers attached to the ends of my legs. It had taken me longer than I thought to get home. The heat had defeated me.

“It's nearly half past
six,
” my mother was saying. “I've been demented with worry. Your phone has been dead. Mags! Answer me!”

“Sorry,” I said, and slumped into a kitchen chair. “Forgot to charge it up.”

“Your face is bright red. Your hair is damp. You stink! Has someone been chasing you?”

“Naw,” I said. “Been running to get home on time is all. My feet are killing me.”

“Good,” said my mother grimly, and handed me a glass of water. “My God, Mags, you will be the death of me. I have been out of my mind. Out—of—my—MIND!”

I looked up at her. Sweat trickled over my eyebrows, making my vision bleary, but I could see that she was pale.

“Sorry,” I mumbled again, and took a gulp from the glass. Water had never tasted so good.

My mum collapsed onto the chair opposite where I was sitting and lowered her head into her hands. It wasn't fair. I had tried so hard to do the right thing and I'd ended up upsetting my mother anyway. If I'd taken the wretched lift from the stupid bus driver, I'd have been home before my mother had even noticed I was gone, but I'd obeyed the asinine rules, and now look where it had landed me! (
Asinine
is my word of the week at the moment. It has nothing to do with numbers, though it sounds like it. It has to do with donkeys.)

Life is so unfair. We all have to learn this painful lesson. You are lucky to be able to learn it by reading this book, instead of having your mother practically sobbing at your feet. I can tell you that it is not a nice feeling to know you have really upset your mother just by trying to do the right thing, especially a mother like mine, who does her best, even if it doesn't always seem that way, to me at least.

“Mum?” I ventured. I stood up and put a hand on her shoulder. It was heaving horribly. I thought for a moment she actually was crying, but she was just breathing hard, in a distressed sort of way. “I'm sorry. I tried.…”

My mother sat up straight and swung around angrily to me. Or so I thought. But then she grabbed me, and her arms tightened around me in a fierce hug that almost knocked the breath out of me. I remember thinking, well, this is better than screaming, I suppose. Her face was pressed into my shoulder, and I could feel her breath, hot and moist as she spoke, her words muffled against my collarbone: “I could
kill
you, you stupid, careless, unthinking
brat!
Only that I love you to bits.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, pushing her away a bit, so we could both breathe. “Whatever. It's too hot for hugging.” I get embarrassed by this sort of thing. If I were a proper daughter, I would fall on my mother's shoulder at moments like this, but, as I say, I am not very good at daughterhood. “Well then.”

I touched a finger to her cheek, though, to make it not so bad that I had pushed her away just now. “I'm sorry,” I said again.

“Oh, these things happen,” my mother replied. She was calmer now. “I don't expect to know where you are every single minute, Mags, but if you are out of contact for a whole afternoon.… Anyway,” she went on, changing into a different gear all of a sudden, “go and have a shower before dinner, and put on something clean. I can't eat with you in this state. You're snorting like a rhinoceros and sweating like a pig, your face is tomato red, and your hair is like something a bird pulled out of a hedge.”

“I love you too,” I said sarcastically. “You should be a poet, you know. You're great on the old similes.”

My mother laughed. “Thanks,” she said. “I'll keep that in mind in case the job falls through.”

She had just found work three mornings a week, helping out in an office in Ballymore. She'd managed a department in an advertising company before my dad died, but she hadn't worked for some time afterward. She couldn't face it, she said. This little job was a start back into normality for her. That's how she put it. Getting back to normal. I hated that expression—as if life could ever really be normal for us again—but I knew she didn't mean it in a bad way.

When I reappeared in the kitchen, I was all polished up and wearing deliciously clean socks, with my hair still dripping a little around my shoulders. I sat at the kitchen table and fingered my fork expectantly. I mean, it's all very well having touching little scenes with your mother, but food is still the center of family life, in my view.

“Young Gillian was looking for you,” my mother announced, dishing up the spaghetti. “She rang earlier.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“About three. That's when I started to worry. I thought you were with her. I told her to try your mobile, but she said you weren't answering. That bothered me, and I tried ringing you myself. When you weren't here by five, I got really worried. I was going to ring the guards if you hadn't got home by seven.”

I said nothing. I'd hoped this conversation was over. Maybe if I said nothing, it might stop now.

But Mum had other ideas. “Well?” she said. “I think I deserve an explanation, young lady.”

“Young lady” was usually a sign that my mother meant business.

I sighed. “I'm thinking of one,” I said.

“Oh, Mags, can't you just tell me what happened? Where were you all afternoon, who've you been with, what are you up to?”

I sighed again and jammed my fork through my spaghetti. “I'm not ‘up to' anything. I could have been home ages ago, if I'd accepted a lift from the bus driver. But I thought you wouldn't like that,” I said virtuously, “so I didn't take it. I walked instead, all the way.”

“Getting a lift from a bus driver is called taking the bus,” my mother said. “I have nothing against you taking the bus if you need to get somewhere, especially if the somewhere is home. I am not
completely
paranoid.”

I couldn't begin to explain. It was all too complicated and I felt terribly tired all of a sudden.

“But where were you that you needed a bus to get home?” my mother persisted.

“I'm telling you, I didn't take the bus, I walked, ran mostly.”

My mother sighed. “Well, next time, take the bus, you dope. Not accepting lifts from strangers doesn't extend to not taking the bus. You must know that, for goodness' sake.”

I grinned to myself. “Yes, mother,” I muttered. “Lovely spag, by the way. Great sauce. I just went to see Gillian's parent,” I added, deliberately slurring the t at the end of the word
parent
so that it sounded plural. No one ever uses the word
parent
in the singular, so I reckoned she would expect to hear an s at the end of it anyway.

“Oh,” said Mum, cheering up. “But how come Gillian was looking for you then? She wasn't with you?”

“We just missed each other, that's all. It's a long story. You don't need to hear it all. There's nothing to it, I promise. I'll try to do better about keeping the phone charged up.”

My mother gave up, thank heavens, and ladled some more sauce onto my spaghetti.

Gillian

Mags phoned me the next day. I knew she would. I was steeling myself for the interrogation.

“What
happened?
” she demanded crossly. “Where
were
you yesterday?”

I suppose I can't blame her for being cross. I had stood her up, after all, even if I didn't want to.

“I had a music lesson,” I said.

A bit lame, I know, but what could I say? I couldn't go telling her that my mother had
forbidden
me to speak to my father. It sounded so stupid. It is stupid. And anyway, everything had changed now. Everything. There was simply no need anymore to go bothering Dad. We could abandon the whole Project Manhunt. So there was no point in going to Ballymore. I'd tried to ring her, to explain.

“A music lesson? A
music
lesson!” Mags was squeaking and squalling away on the phone. “
Gillian,
we had an
arrangement.
”

Sorry about all the italics, but Mags talks in italics when she gets excited.

“I know,” I said. “I'd forgotten about the lesson, I got the days mixed up, but obviously, I had to go. I tried to ring you.”

“Obviously,” Mags muttered, “oh,
obviously.
You
had
to go. Of
course.
It doesn't matter about a little old arrangement with
me. That
can be abandoned at a moment's notice, as long as Miranda doesn't miss out on her precious music lesson!”

Who the heck is Miranda? I wondered. Was it supposed to be me? But I didn't stop to ask. It probably had something to do with one of Mags's mad ideas that I didn't need to hear about. It's hard enough to follow her through an argument, without stopping to ask for explanations for all her fantasy-life nonsense as well.

“But I
have
to go to my music lessons,” I said. I was getting a bit desperate, starting to talk in italics myself, but it is true—if you have a lesson, you have to go, you can't just run off to town with your friend. Though I didn't actually have a lesson, but you see what I mean, I hope. I'm speaking in general terms here. “You don't understand, do you? Nobody understands how important my music lessons are.”

Now I was starting to whine. This conversation wasn't working out terribly well.