The Golden Fury

Chapter 25

Chapter 25

“Not for a while, I suppose,” I said. “Maybe I’ll make an appointment.”

“Good idea, Em. You’ve been so much better lately, but perhaps your pills need tweaking.”

That’s the way we talk about my anxiety. Like it’s a headache or something. Nothing to be ashamed of.

I’m not going to call the doctor’s practice. I’m not being difficult, but Dr. Gorgeous likes to talk about my feelings when I go to see him for a repeat prescription and I’m not up to that at the moment. Last time I had a Bad Day, he said he’d like me to see someone—“a specialist,” he said

—but I told him I didn’t need to. I’m happy seeing him because I only have to sit chatting for the allotted eight minutes and he gives me a prescription.

A specialist would want to know about my relationships. About how I feel about Jude and my absent father.

I’d have to tell him I’d gone looking for my dad as a teenager—but I can’t say that. Because I can’t tell the whole story. One thing would lead to another and it would mean unpicking the web.

I try it out, just in case. I can hear myself saying: “It began with Will.

Well, it began before that, but the arrival of Will started the unraveling.”

But that is as far as I get before I am in the danger zone.

The day I decided to begin the search for my father, I’d had a row with JudeOur life had been turned upside down by Will. Jude had become completely obsessed. He’d taken over her life. And, so, my life.

We couldn’t do anything or go anywhere without asking Will what he thought or if he wanted to come, too.

There was a lot more singing in the bath, I remember, the smell of her Aqua Manda bath oil making the air thick outside the door. But I’d learned to ignore her calls to come in—peace offerings I was happy to reject. He was all she talked about, and I wondered how many of her clients were still in prison because of her ridiculous fixation.

I told Harry and she said Jude was acting like a groupie. I didn’t like it. Didn’t like her calling my mum that. It was all right if I said mean things, but not anyone else.

I didn’t tell Harry that I’d heard Jude telling our new flatmate—

Barbara from her office—how she’d first slept with Will at a May Ball.

Barbara said it sounded romantic, but I thought it sounded cheap. My mum was too old to be talking like that.

Jude was changing. She’d been so serious and focused on “the important things in life,” and I’d assumed I was included in that category.

She certainly had big plans for me—cabinet minister, surgeon, Nobel Prize winner were all bandied about in a jokey way, but I knew she expected a lot.

We had what Jude liked to call an adult relationship. That meant we talked about politics and new books and films she’d seen, and she told me about her legal cases and the terrible situations people were forced into by authoritarian states. We didn’t talk about pop stars or boys or sports. That was my other world. In my bedroom or the phone box. The kitchen was where I interacted with my mother.

• • •

ut suddenly she wasn’t interested in me anymore. She was busy shaving her legs and searching for matching underwear in her chest of drawers, Bscrabbling through layers of faithful old pants and tired bras.

One night, she presented herself in the kitchen for inspection in a new dress while I was doing my homework.

“What do you think, Emma?” Jude had asked me.

“Aren’t you a bit old to be going out without a b*a, Mum?” I’d said, using the f*******n M word. I hated her at that moment. She looked so beautiful and happy and it had nothing to do with me.

“The woman up the road—the one Will likes—never wears one and she looks awful,” I added.

“You little b***h,” Jude had snapped at me. She’d never used that word to me before. Never had to, I suppose. I was changing, too.

• • •

After Jude left, slamming the door behind her, I headed for the telephone box at the end of the road. It was almost eight o’clock and the box lurked in the dark pool between two streetlights. It was lit only by an ancient lightbulb that cast a nicotine yellow pall over the interior and stank of pee and joints. The concrete floorseemed permanently wet and stained in the corners as if the last user had just zipped up his jeans and left. But I loved that phone box. It was my private space. There was a phone at home, on the wall in the hallway, but every conversation felt like a public event, with Jude listening and even joining in if she felt like it.

I lined up my coins on the metal shelf, picked up the receiver, and began dialing.

I asked Harry’s father if I could talk to her. I was always polite, using my most suitable-for-adults voice. He hated me disturbing her when she was doing her homework, but I would pretend it was about some schoolwork.

He used to say he didn’t know what we could have to talk about after being at school together all day. But he always gave in.

I’d hear the sound of Harry’s feet thundering downstairs and then her voice, high and cross. “Dad, stop listening to my calls. This is private.”

I told her about Jude calling me a b***h, and Harry was thrilled. She loved a bit of other people’s trouble.

“I’m sick of Jude and Will,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, but I knew she had misgivings. The trouble was she was secretly—or sometimes not so secretly—in love with Will. She said he was sexy.

“Harry! He’s so old,” I said, outraged when she’d first told me. I didn’t tell her that the word “sexy” made my stomach go all watery. I was trying to hate Will for barging into our lives, but I still liked it when he winked or smiled at me. I couldn’t help it.

The pips crashed into my thoughts, signaling that another three minutes had passed, and I pushed the remaining ten-pence piece into the slot so we could discuss Harry’s social life. I just tagged along.

I remember she’d nicked a five-pound note from her dad’s trousers to buy a new top. Her theft was all in aid of impressing Malcolm Baker, her latest crush. He had apparently smiled at Harry on the bus and her heart was clearly set on slow dancing with him at the youth club disco.

For me, romance stayed in the pages of my notebooks and diaries. I hadn’t ventured into love—or l**t—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. b****y 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.

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.