Blue Like Friday (7 page)

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Authors: Siobhan Parkinson

BOOK: Blue Like Friday
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“I mean, it isn't even April Fool's Day,” the guard was saying. “If it had been the first of April, of course we'd have been expecting this sort of thing. The hospital sometimes gets dragged into tasteless pranks like that.”
I had a wild idea that I would say it was a kind of dress rehearsal for April Fool's Day, but it was June, for heaven's sake. It wouldn't have been very convincing. So I said nothing, just took another sip of my Coke. It tastes different out of a teacup, for some reason.
“Well … ,” said Hal, and he cleared his throat.
We both looked at him. He seemed to have shrunk since earlier that morning. His jumper looked too big for him.
“My dad … ,” he said. “Not Him, my own dad …”
Uh-oh, weirdsville, I thought. What has your
dad
got to do with anything? But I didn't say it out loud. I remembered how he'd gone a bit moochy when the security man at the hospital had mentioned him losing his da, and then how pale he'd got when we'd been talking to the bicycle guard. I hoped he wasn't going to do anything embarrassing.
I fixed my eyes on the passport application form on the table. It was upside down, but I could read it if I concentrated.
“Yes?” said the guard. She had gone very still, very listening.
There was a long silence.
I deciphered the whole passport form while I was waiting for Hal to say something else. You'd be amazed at the personal information they want just to give you a passport. People have no privacy, have they?
Two of the guards, the ones who had been playing cards, stood up and put on their caps and said good-bye to everyone and went out. Still, Hal hadn't said any more.
The door closed behind the two guards, and the silence settled in again.
At last Hal spoke. “He died on a Friday,” he said.
His voice was really tiny, as if it belonged to a minute little creature. A beetle, maybe, or a caterpillar, something not only small but also usually not at eye level with you and rather far away.
“I'm sorry to hear that, Hal,” the guard said quietly.
Behind me, I could hear the squeak and creak of the swivel chair the guard at the computer was sitting on. He'd stopped tapping at the keyboard. It was as if the whole room was holding its breath.
Our guard sat with her hands together on her knees, the fingers intertwined, and she waited to see if Hal was going to say any more.
“When I was small,” Hal said, “we flew a kite once, the two of us. That's the only thing I remember about him.
That and about it being a Friday when he died.”
Friday. Something clunked in my brain. It wasn't like a piece of a jigsaw clicking into place, the way people say. It was more like someone dropping a very heavy suitcase on a wooden floor in the room above you,
thunk,
and it's so heavy, it kills its own vibrations.
“I see,” said the guard. “That's very sad for you, Hal.”
“Yes,” said Hal.
There was another silence, and then Hal added, “I found him.”
“Oh, Hal,” I breathed.
I had never heard this before. This was the Something Awful that had happened. It was awfuller than I'd thought.
The guard gave me a look. Don't say a word, her look said.
“I don't remember that part,” Hal was saying. “I was only five. My mother told me, that's how I know.”
The swivel chair squeaked again. I wished I was somewhere else, somewhere noisy and cheerful, like a café or a schoolyard at playtime.
“Except,” Hal said, and he sounded as if this had only just occurred to him for the first time, “except his shoes. I remember his shoes. Very shiny. Like polished chestnuts.” His voice got quieter. “I'd forgotten that.” The last sentence was as if he was talking to himself.
I shuffled on my chair. Shoes, kites, death. I didn't really want to be listening to this stuff.
The guard waited for a bit longer, but Hal didn't say any more. I could hear a clock ticking. I looked over my shoulder and saw a big one on the wall overhead. Every time the second hand moved, the clock gave a tick.
After a while the guard said, “I went to China on my holidays last year.”
Oh no! I thought. Another weirdo. What is it about me that I keep meeting weirdos? I must have a kind face. That's probably it. I must look like the sort of person it's OK for weirdos to dump on with their weirdnesses.
Anyway, I must have coughed or giggled or something, because the guard looked at me, but she didn't seem to see me. It was as if she was thinking about something else, something that wasn't there.
She fished in her pocket and took out a scrunchy and started to make a ponytail of her hair. It was thick and shiny; it made a lovely ponytail. I wish I had straight hair.
“My dad came too, can you believe it?” the guard said, swinging her ponytail. “I hadn't been on holidays with my dad since I was your age, and that's a long time ago. But he was so lonely after my mam died, I thought it'd be nice for him to get away, and you can't get much farther away than China, can you?”
“Right,” I said. Loony, I thought.
“I have great photos. Only they're at home. Of us flying kites, I mean. Sorry, I should have explained that first. That's what reminded me, Hal, when you mentioned …”
“Oh?” I said. “Oh, I see.” Well, it did make a tiny bit of
sense, I suppose, once she explained she'd been flying kites with her dad.
“It's a thing called the Festival of Pure Brightness,” she said. “He loved the kites.”
“Nice,” I said, in a false, bright voice. I couldn't think of anything else to say. Sometimes “nice” is the best you can do. This was the weirdest conversation I'd had in a very long time.
“Yeah, nice,” said Hal. And they gave each other shy little goofy smiles. “The Festival of Pure Brightness. Sounds … er, bright.”
Yeah, right, Hal, I thought. Sounds bright. Sounds pure. Sounds Chinese. Sounds as if we should be getting along home now.
She didn't ask any more questions about the business at the hospital, which was dead-on of her, because Hal really hadn't explained.
“I dunno, I dunno,” she said after a while, standing up and bustling about a bit. “What are we going to do with ye at all?” She crushed the two Coke cans and gathered up the sticky cups.
“What about Mr. Denham?” I asked. “Can you get them to let him go, now you have the whole story, like?”
“Oh, no,” said the guard, standing at the door with her hands full of the cups and cans.
Blinkin' marvelous, I thought. Now what? I took a quick peek at Hal, and he looked close to tears.
“Because he wasn't arrested at all,” the guard went on.
“I checked the first time you were in, and nobody was arrested at the hospital this morning.”
“But there was a squad car!” I said.
“There was. We'd got a message from the hospital that they needed something urgently for a patient. It was coming on the train from Dublin. Some sort of plasma, I think. We sent the squad car to the railway station to get it, and then we zoomed it up to the hospital as fast as we could.”
“Plasma!” I yelped. “It was just … oh!”
Hal gave a huge grin. “So, he hasn't been arrested?”
“No, I told you, no one was arrested. Why on earth did you think he might have been arrested?”
“I dunno,” Hal and I said in unison.
We looked a bit foolish. At least Hal did, and I am sure I looked no different. Foolish, but hugely relieved. Now that we knew Alec Denham hadn't been arrested, it seemed ridiculous that we'd ever thought he might be.
The guard shook her head. “Ye watch too much telly,” she said.
Maybe she's right. We'd put two and two together and got about a hundred and five. Whew!
“But what happened to him?” I asked, when we'd stopped huffing and blowing with relief. “I mean, is he still lost in that hospital or what?”
“I wouldn't think so. He probably drove on home.”
“But we never saw him coming out,” I said. “We waited for ages, didn't we, Hal?”
“I suppose he must have driven on through then,” the guard said.
“How do you mean, ‘on through'?”
“On through and out the back gate,” she explained.
The back gate!
Hal and I stared at each other. His mouth hung open. So did mine. Why hadn't we thought of that? It was so simple.
“That road … ,” I said, but then I clamped my mouth shut, to stop my chin hanging like the bucket of a road-digger.
Hal nodded. “With the trees,” he mumbled.
“We never wondered where it
went
,” I said with a groan. “We just looked to see if the van was parked on it.”
“We are thick,” said Hal.
“As a brick,” I said.
“As two bricks,” said Hal.
“As a whole houseful of bricks,” I said.
“Ah, not really,” said the guard. “It's hardly ever used, because it comes out onto a very bad boreen, all potholes. People don't even know it's there, half the time. But if you follow that little gravelly road, you end up at the back gate.”
I don't know why the security man didn't say anything about the back gate, but he hadn't been all that helpful anyway. Maybe it just didn't occur to him any more than it did to us.
“So you mean,” I said to the guard, “while we've been
sitting here telling you the whole story, he's at home watching the races?”
“I suppose so,” said the guard cheerily. “If that's how he normally spends his Saturdays.”
How could we have been so
stupid
!
“And we've been through all this for nothing?”
“Well, I wouldn't say that,” said the guard. “I'd say you had some explaining to do.”
“Sorry, guard,” I said, and I gave Hal a little kick on the ankle. Not really a kick, more a nudge with the side of my foot.
“Yeah, sorry, guard,” he said.
She smiled and then she pushed open the door with her hip and disappeared for a moment.
When she came back, she said, “Now, will I send you home in a squad car or what?”
“No!” I squawked.
Bad enough to be thick, stupid, idiotic nincompoops of fools, but we didn't have to look like criminals on top of all that. Can you imagine if we arrived home in a squad car! My mother would murder me. She was going to murder me anyway, but if I came home under Garda escort, she'd really
mean
it.
“Yes!” said Hal at the same time.
Boys are like that. They'd jump at the chance of being zoomed around in a squad car, no matter how it embarrassed their families.
The guard laughed. “Which is it to be?”
“Please, Olivia,” said Hal. “Oh, come
on
! A squad car!”
“But we have bikes,” I said. I was never so glad that I had a bike.
“Did you leave them outside?” asked the guard, looking out of the window. “Only there's no sign of them out there. Surely to goodness they wouldn't steal two bikes from outside the Garda station!”
“No,” I said. “We left them at the square. Beside the poet statue.”
“That'd be Kavanagh,” she said.
“Oh, is that who it is?”
“Yes,” she said. “He's my favorite. We did his poems at school. He's famous.”
“I suppose you have to be famous to get a statue,” I said.
“And dead,” said Hal.
“I suppose so,” said the guard. “It's a way of honoring a dead person, isn't it. I mean, you can't give them a present, can you?”
“Hmm,” said Hal.
I couldn't believe we were having this discussion about dead people and statues when we were going to be driven home in a squad car and be grounded for
life
probably.
“Anyway, look, what about this for a compromise? I'll give you a lift in the squad car as far as the square to pick up your bikes. It's only a few hundred yards, but children
who spend their Saturdays wasting Garda time deserve no better. That's an offense, you know.”
I knew she wasn't really threatening us. Just sort of reminding us, I suppose, that you can't go around creating havoc for the guards, even if Something Awful did happen to you.
I found out about Kavanagh afterward, by the way, because I like poems, even if I'm not that interested in statues. He has a great one about canals and far-flung towns. This'd be a far-flung town, I suppose. Maybe that's why we have a statue of him.

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