Our Father Who Are Out There...Somewhere (8 page)

Jo returns to find Lily asleep on the settee mattress, surrounded by a mound of broken glass and china. She closes the front room door quietly and starts emptying the shopping bags into the kitchen cupboard. A few minutes later Lily appears in the doorway, rubbing her eyes. Jo glances sideways at her. “Well, at least there’s plenty of space for the food.” 

Lily’s smile is brief, just the faintest glimpse of an upturned mouth, but it was a smile. “There’s another box in the loft,” she says. “I couldn’t, I didn’t open it before. It’s full of letters. I looked but I couldn’t. I’m going to get it.”

“Do you want me to come up?”

Lily shakes her head. “No, I’ll bring it down.”

Jo puts a frozen pizza in the oven and sweeps up the broken crockery, while Lily fetches the box. Once they’ve eaten, using torn up pieces of the cardboard packaging as plates, Lily opens the small wooden box, which despite the layers of dust is highly polished and inlaid with an intricate design. She shudders at the mound of letters inside. Jo picks up the top envelope and glances at Lily. Lily nods. Jo pulls out a small sheet of paper and clears her throat.

“‘My dear darling wife...’” She reads. “By the way, this is dated April ’66:

‘Being away from you does not get any easier, even though we can now count ourselves an old married couple. I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere and it’s beautiful and utterly pointless without you.’”

“Such romance.” Jo holds her hand to her heart for a brief moment. “Shame he’s a complete knob.” 

She turns the piece of paper over and reads from the other side:

“‘I am counting the moments until we are reunited (forty-seven hours and thirty-five minutes). I have plans to take you straight to bed and keep you there the entire weekend.

All my love for ever, David.’”

Lily puts her hands over her ears. “Too much information.”

Jo pulls a face. “I wonder what he does, your dad? I mean he clearly earns a fortune.”

Lily reaches for a letter. “I don’t know. But if he was that rich when he was married to my mum, it’s no wonder she was pissed off.”

“And why hasn’t he paid any to you? I mean when your mum got divorced she should have got half, shouldn’t she?”

“I don’t even know if they got divorced.”

Jo opens another envelope. “What about this?

‘You are the woman of my dreams.

Thank you so much for last night.

I will remember it forever.’”

Lily isn’t listening. Her eyes scan the letter in her hand. “God, this one’s from my mum:

‘I love you so much I can hardly breathe.

I yearn to be with you.’”

Lily drops the letter like it’s contagious. “Yeah well, that’s what killed her. I don’t know if I can read any more of these.” She spots an envelope addressed to her mother in a different, loopy handwriting. Lily squats on her haunches, elbows over her knees, rocking slightly as she opens it. “This one’s from my Gran:

‘Dear Pamela. I’m sorry about today. I thought I’d try writing instead, in the hope that maybe you’ll try to understand, what I’m saying isn’t a criticism of you. I’m trying to help. I can’t bear to think of you in this state when I’m gone. I’m not blaming you. I will never forgive that man for what he’s done. After all I did for him; he’s broken my heart too. And I haven’t the time to recover. But you do. You have to carry on, Pamela, if only for Lily’s sake. You’re still young. Please don’t let life pass you by. It doesn’t last forever. I don’t want to fight. Please don’t let it end like this. Mum.’”

Lily sits back with a thump on the floor. The silence broken only by the faint hiss of the gas fire. “God, he really screwed my family didn’t he?” She looks at the postmark on the envelope. “1972, that’s the year she died.”

Jo lets the letter she’s holding fall onto the mattress. “It’s so sad. No one recovered.”

Lily’s eyes are bright. “It’s like he stole everyone from me. He didn’t just leave me, he took everyone with him. He left me nothing. Where are all his relatives? Not one of them kept in touch with me. Where are my grandparents? Why didn’t they send me the odd birthday card? Cousins, aunts, uncles; I had no one.” Lily draws breath and allows her anger to rise like fire. “I have no one. Who am I going to spend Christmas with? I’ll end up with bloody Bert next door.”

“You can come to ours,” says Jo.

Lily remembers Jo’s spluttering indignation when she had come back to Leeds after spending three days with her family last Christmas. It had taken her almost a week to stop regaling tales of how her brother had nicked her Billy Bragg album, and how her father had insisted on them going to church on Christmas Eve, despite the fact he wasn’t religious, because his young wife wanted them to sing carols. Jo had had some great argument with… was it an aunt or a cousin, about politics or racism or something. She had come back to Leeds a ball of anger and frustration.

Jo stands up. “At least we’re friends. I know it’s not exactly family.”

Lily pours them another drink. She stands up to hand Jo the mug. They dwarf the dingy room, with its nicotine striped wallpaper.

“Do you know what I want? I want him to get some idea of consequence. That he can’t do what he did and it not to have any consequence.” Lily’s words are slurred. “When I was eight years old, I came home from school to find my mum lying on the kitchen floor with her head in the oven. Afterwards, this doctor pressed a bottle of tablets into my hand and said, ‘make sure your mummy takes two every morning when she gets up and two before she goes to bed.’ And I was too embarrassed to tell him my mum never went to bed. She lived on the sofa; so I didn’t know when to give her the pills.”

“You can’t let him get away with it, Lil. He can’t be allowed to say he has no wish for contact. No way. Let’s go back again,” says Jo. “Take another look. Hey, we might have got the wrong David Winterbottom for all we know.”

Lily shakes her head. Unusually for her, inside her is a sense of deep certainty. She knows they were at the right house.

“Well then, Lil,” says Jo, when it becomes clear Lily isn’t going to speak. “Let’s pay him another visit. It’s not like we’ve got anything better to do.”

Jo parks the Mini a few hundred yards away from Newlands and looks at the clock on the dashboard, three twenty. “Hope we’re not too late.”

Twenty minutes pass before the schoolgirl appears around the corner, hands in pockets, sucking on a lollipop. “God, what a stiff,” mutters Lily, as the girl stops outside the side gate, gets her purse from her bag and her key from her purse and lets herself in.

Less than half an hour later a dark green Volvo estate pulls up outside the front gates. The driver taps in a code and the wrought iron sweeps aside. Jo watches through the rear view mirror, while Lily cranes her neck to watch through the passenger’s wing mirror, but they see no more than a flash of the side of a face. “I think it was a man,” says Jo.

Lily bangs her arm against the door. “This is no good.”

“What we need is equipment,” says Jo. They wait in silence as the light gradually fades from the day. “And a proper plan.”

Three days later they are back, sitting in the red and white Mini, in the small, cobbled side street across the road from Newlands. The side street is only a few hundred yards long. It ends in a pair of large wooden gates. The back entrance to the large detached house is on their right. Each house is shielded from the road by a combination of tall fence and high hedge. Not the privet kind; more the well established beech or laurel. They are both wearing black combat trousers and black sweatshirts. Lily’s dreads are tied back in a ponytail and pulled through a baseball cap, which she wears with the peak pulled down over her eyes. Jo is wearing sunglasses and a black beanie hat. She pulls out a pen and their specially purchased notebook from her bag, and begins to write.

“Do you think anyone can see us here?” asks Lily.

Jo underlines her heading with two thick black lines, before twisting and turning in her seat. “Don’t think so. I can’t see any windows from here.”

 Lily pours them a cup of black coffee from the new thermos flask, and unwraps the toast they didn’t have time to eat before they set off that morning.

Moments later, Jo nudges Lily’s elbow. The coffee that Lily has just poured spills over the top of the mug and onto Lily’s inner thighs. Lily leaps up in pain, trying to hold the material of her trousers away from her flesh. Jo, her mouth full of toast, nods towards the house. The gates are opening. With one hand, Lily raises the binoculars to her eyes. A sleek, black sports car pulls out, pausing momentarily to check for traffic. Lily watches it roar off down Primrose Glen. She doesn’t remove the binoculars until the car is out of sight.

“It was a woman, I’m pretty sure.”

“And?” asks Jo. “Hair colour? Age? Was she white? Black? Purple? Come on, Lil, you must have seen something.”

“White, I guess,” says Lily, rubbing at the warm wet patch on her trousers.

DAY ONE (Monday)

07:30 Newlands. All quiet.

07:40 Adult Female (AF) leaves. White.

Black nifty sports car (expensive).

07:55 Postman drops letters into box on outside of gate.

08:25 Green Volvo leaves. Adult Male (AM).

No description available at this time.

Lily puts the binoculars down. “I can’t tell. It’s a man. It could be your dad for all I know.”

Jo creates a new column, Adult Male. “Did you get its registration?”

Lily doesn’t answer. Ten minutes later the schoolgirl steps out of the side gate. They watch as she almost skips down the street.

Lily nods towards a tree spreading its branches above them. “We need a better view. We need to be higher up. Drive under that tree there.”

Jo moves the car a few feet forwards and Lily winds down the passenger window. Lily bends her body out of the window and climbs onto the roof. From here she can reach the lowest branch. She pulls herself up and stands in the tree. Its last few leaves are clinging on, but for the moment its canopy is enough to obscure her from view. Lily wedges herself between two branches and trains the binoculars on the house across the road. She can see the dark leather of the settees through the front room window. Satisfied, she drops back into the car. “It’s perfect.”

It’s another two hours before the window cleaner shows up, just before lunchtime, and keys the number into the security pad. Lily stays in the car, training the binoculars on him, but she can’t make out which numbers he pressed. The last one may have been an eight.

An elderly woman walks past the entrance to the side street at 11:00 hours. She glances up the side street and frowns at them. Lily holds up the Skipton A-Z in front of her face. The old woman pauses for a moment, as if deciding whether to approach them or not. Jo smiles at her and the woman nods and walks on. “Shit,” says Jo. “We don’t look like we fit in. Let’s go somewhere else for a bit.”

They park up a couple of streets away, opposite a petrol station. Jo drums her fingers on the steering wheel. After a couple of minutes she asks, “Did you ever want to learn to drive, Lil?”

“No.”

“Want to give it a go now?”

“What?”

“It’d be a cool disguise. All we’d need is L plates.” Jo climbs out of the car and hurries across to the shop inside the petrol station. A few moments later, she sashays back across the forecourt, holding a red letter L above her head.

Lily winds down the passenger window as Jo starts to peel the backing of the red and white squares. “Are you crazy?” asks Lily, as Jo sticks the first one onto the bonnet.

“It’ll give us something to do. And stop people getting suspicious. Think about it. We’ve seen at least three learners since we’ve been here.” Jo sticks another one on the right hand side of the bonnet before walking around to the rear of the car. She sticks another two above the back bumper before getting back into the driving seat.

That afternoon, Lily has her first driving lesson. She manages to get up to second gear and turns a corner. Her cheeks are flushed pink by the time they are back in the side street, to witness ‘Teenage Female’ returning home. Jo logs the time in the notebook; 15:35 hours. It’s not much later before the dark green four-by-four swings into the drive. The house lights up against the encroaching gloom. Through her binoculars Lily watches ‘Teenage Female’ close the front room curtains. Jealousy as strong as acid burns in her stomach.

DAY TWO (Tuesday)

07:20 Knackered. All quiet. Coffee.

07:25 LA in tree.

07:39 AF leaves Newlands.

From her vantage point in the tree, Lily watches the older woman, ‘Adult Female’, stride around to the rear of the sleek, black car and toss her briefcase in the boot. She slams the boot lid shut with one hand, before ducking into the driver’s seat and adjusting the rear-view mirror. Fumes start to billow from the exhaust as the iron gates sweep open. Once the car has disappeared from view, Lily drops back down onto the roof of the Mini, and jumps in the car again. “She’s not even good looking,” says Lily to Jo. “And she’s fat. Well, overweight.”

Jo picks up the pen and writes ‘AF-fat’. She turns to face Lily. “Are we talking specialist dress shops?”

“Well, no, but she’s short.”

“How short?”

Lily reaches for the tobacco tin, disgruntled that her father had left her for an unattractive woman. “Dunno, smaller than me.”

“About my height then?” Jo asks, her pen poised and her eyebrow raised.

“Yeah, but she’s fatter, well…” Lily senses a change of conversation is called for. “She’s got dark hair in a kind of bob.”

“How long?” asks Jo.

“Shoulder length.”

“What’s she wearing?”

“Trouser suit, a dark one. Black or dark blue maybe. She looks old too. Maybe we haven’t got the right house after all.” Lily scratches her cheek.