Even without fetching it from its hiding place and opening it, Ellie knew what was in the pretty art-deco tin, which had once contained some sablés au beurre Tess had brought back from a school trip to Brittany. Originally it had been a safe place to store her birth certificate, and the results of the DNA test, requested four months after she was born. Slowly she’d added to its contents. There were a couple of black-and-white photos of her dad and a heavily pregnant Ari, with black hair in a truly monumental beehive, snuggled up on a bed. A Melody Maker interview with her father conducted in someone’s back garden in Primrose Hill with Ari throwing in a few comments from the sidelines that had made it onto the yellowing pages. A flyer from a gig at the Black Horse in 1986, when his old band, The Incognitos, had headlined and Ari’s group, the Saturday Girls, were third on the bill and legend (and Tabitha) had it that that was the night they’d first connected. A few pictures of him torn out of magazines, not that Ellie slavishly searched for her father’s likeness but if she came across a photo or an article she usually added it to her box.
The most recent cutting was from the Evening Standard’s party pages a few months before. Her father and his wife had been photographed at the opening night of a play. He was dressed in a sharp black suit and though he was fifty-five and starting to look a little weatherbeaten around the edges, it was easy to see why he was featured whenever a women’s magazine did a feature on silver foxes. Ellie always scrutinised his face for clues to see if there was any family resemblance, but Sadie and Ari were both united in their belief that Ellie got her looks from the Cohens.
The last item in the box, buried under all the scraps of paper purloined from newspapers and magazines, was a CD of her father’s first and stratospherically successful solo album, Songs for a Girl. He’d dedicated it to his wife; the wife he’d left for Ari and the woman he’d gone back to when the affair was over. It was the record that had made him famous. Ellie had never listened to it, couldn’t bear to, but the songs were woven into the fabric of British life and she was pretty sure that she knew all the words to at least half of them.
It wasn’t much of a Dad box, but then he’d never been much of a dad. Ari had tried to ensure that Ellie never really felt his absence. Between them, Chester, Tom and her grandpa had turned up for sports days and carol concerts, been the happy recipients of ineptly made Father’s Day cards and, much later, had been the ones to lecture Ellie on the perils of underage drinking and teenage boys who were only after one thing, and would come and pick her up in the wee small hours from the other side of London when she didn’t have enough money for a taxi.
Ellie had always had so many people in her life that the lack of a father shouldn’t have bothered her, but she’d still wondered what her life might have been like if he’d been in it. It had been a recurring but secret theme when she was younger. Every birthday, at Chanukah and Christmas-time, whenever she had a part in a school concert, Ellie would hope that this time her father would turn up, even though Ari said that he was really busy or that things were complicated and that Ellie would understand when she was older. Ellie had especially wanted her father to suddenly appear during the year when Ari had been getting up at five each morning to clean offices and had also worked until midnight as a barmaid to save for the deposit to join a shared ownership scheme and buy a flat, and Ellie had had to go and live with Sadie and Morry.
There had been so many times when money was tight and there’d been bailiffs at the door. They’d always turn up on a Friday afternoon, preferably the Friday afternoon of a bank holiday weekend when Ari could do nothing but hide behind the sofa with Ellie, both of them quiet as the quietest of mice. Then Ellie would wonder why her father wasn’t coming to their rescue because he had lots of money and he could make all the bad stuff go away.
That was back then, and now Ellie didn’t really wonder about her father any more. It was clear that he didn’t wonder about her. But sometimes, like this evening, her curiosity about this man she barely knew even though she had his DNA coursing through her veins (or whatever it was that DNA did) got the better of her. So Ellie kneeled down on the floor and stuck her arm under her bed, fingers ready to close around the edge of her Dad box, because it was always there beneath the right-hand side. Always. Unless she’d knocked into it when she was vacuuming, because she knew for a fact that their cleaner didn’t bother with the bits that couldn’t be seen. Ellie lay flat on the floor, and peered into the shadowy recesses.
There was a plastic crate with her winter hats, gloves and scarves in it. Three long cardboard boxes where her winter boots nestled on boot trees. The concertina file containing all her important papers and another plastic crate housing all her Malory Towers, St Clare’s and boarding school books, which Ari had tried to ban with little success. There was even her Mason Pearson flat hairbrush, which Ellie had been looking for everywhere, but no Dad box.
Keep calm, keep calm, she muttered. Maybe the cleaner had moved it. Or she’d moved it herself when she’d reorganised her room a couple of months ago. Ten minutes later she’d rifled through her wardrobe, checked under the chest of drawers, done a second sweep of the wardrobe and searched through suitcases and travel bags. Each time she came up empty.
Ellie stood in the middle of her room and looked around. Maybe the Dad box was hiding in plain sight, but if it was then she couldn’t see it.
There was a muffled thud on the stairs, then the sound of a key in the lock and she was scurrying out into the hall to greet Tess with an anguished, ‘Have you seen a French biscuit tin? It’s usually under my bed but I can’t find it anywhere!’
Tess couldn’t even remember the French biscuit tin that she’d once given to Ellie. After taking precious minutes to be brought up to speed, Tess dutifully searched all the places that Ellie had searched, opened every drawer and created havoc where once there had been neatly folded clothes arranged by season, texture and colour. Then, mainly to humour Ellie, Tess even hunted through her own room.
‘Sorry, Ellie, but it’s not here,’ she said at last, as she finished shoving her own underwear back in its drawers. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to it.’
‘Oh, I do,’ Ellie growled. She marched into Lola’s room without knocking, and anyway it was seven o’clock and Lola had been mouldering in bed all day and Ellie had no sympathy for her. ‘This is all your fault!’ she snapped at a barely conscious Lola. ‘I told you not to let him into the flat. That was all you had to do. Just stand in the hall and pass him his stupid, bloody stuff and now he’s taken my Dad box. That’s the only explanation. Unless you have it. Do you have it?’
Ellie’s eyes swept over the mess that was Lola’s living space. There were heaps of clothes and dirty crockery everywhere and, quite frankly, Lord Lucan and Shergar could have been stashed in Lola’s room and no one would be any the wiser. As it was, Lola was struggling out of her fugue state and trying to sit up on the mattress that she slept on ever since she’d lent her bed base to a friend for a conceptual art piece.
‘What the fuck?’ she mumbled. ‘Why are you shouting?’
‘I’m shouting because Richey must have taken my Dad box when he was in my room, even though you made a big thing about how he wasn’t even allowed into the flat. How could you do this to me?’
‘What the hell is a Dad box? You don’t have a dad!’ Lola could go from catatonic to roaring in thirty seconds. ‘And don’t come into my room when I have a hangover and start screaming at me. What’s got into you, Ells?’
Panic and fear and the feeling that the end of the world was coming were what had got into her, but Ellie thought the words might choke her. In fact, she did make a choking sound when she tried to speak, so she settled for storming out of Lola’s room and slamming the door behind her. It was the first time in her life that Ellie had ever felt the need to slam a door.
It was the warning she needed to put herself on a timeout in the bathroom so she could calm down and stop doing out-of-character things like shouting an
d slamming doors. She stayed there for ten minutes, though that was mostly spent pulling everything out of the pot cupboard where they kept tampons, razors and a huge range of Korres toiletries, from whenever they did a TK Maxx run. The Dad box was not there or hidden behind any towels and it was obviously too big to fit in the cabinet over the basin, but Ellie still checked to be sure.
Ellie emerged from the bathroom, a lot less panic-stricken, because now she was resigned to the awful truth that the Dad box was gone. She also needed to apologise to Lola, who was in a foetal position on the living-room sofa.
‘Dude, it’s already forgiven,’ Lola said. ‘Sorry I shouted at you, but I can’t believe you’ve been holding out on me all this time. So, tell me, who’s your daddy?’
Ellie shot Tess a grateful look for not blabbing her darkest secrets. Ari’s affair and subsequent heavy-with-child-ness had happened before her father went from obscure purveyor of substandard mope rock to mega-famous, stadium-playing purveyor of anthemic mope rock, and also the internet hadn’t been invented then. Life had, apparently, been simpler when it was much, much harder for the whole world to get all up in your grille. Besides Ari wasn’t the type to sell her story, ‘because it’s no one else’s bloody business and I am not going to be a sad cliché of the wronged woman’.
Ellie had kept quiet too. Her father had never acknowledged her so there was no reason to acknowledge him. And even though she and Tess were besties and had known each other since they were eleven, Ellie had still waited until the summer after they’d done their A levels to confess all. Lola had only been in her life for four years and for two of those years they’d glared at each other at parties, so she hadn’t yet earned access to Ellie’s secrets.
‘I can’t tell you that,’ Ellie replied. ‘It’s nothing personal, but you’re rubbish at keeping secrets. It would be on Twitter in the space of an hour.’
‘It wouldn’t!’ Lola made a hurt face, then Ellie saw her scroll back and reconsider. ‘Well, I can keep a secret until I get drunk, then all bets are off.’
‘Anyway, he’s only my father in the biological sense of … Why are you looking at me like that?’
Lola was staring at her as if she was seeing Ellie for the very first time. ‘Is it Paul McCartney? You do look a bit like him around the eyes.’
‘No, she doesn’t!’ Tess gasped indignantly. ‘She’s much prettier than Stella McCartney.’
‘I guess.’ Lola gave Ellie another appraising glance. ‘I can’t see Ari doing the nasty with Macca anyway. Is it Bono?’
‘No! And it’s not David Bowie or Shaun Ryder or any other bonkers suggestions you’re going to come up with,’ Ellie said quickly, because if they started this game, sooner or later Lola would hit paydirt. ‘Listen, is there any way that my box might be in your room?’
‘I don’t think so but let’s have a look,’ Lola said, and she even moved off the sofa and didn’t get mad when Ellie and Tess ransacked her room. Although they found the DVD remote control that had been missing for months, there was no Dad box.
The three of them trailed back to the living room. While Tess and Lola sank down on the sofa, Ellie stood there, hands hanging limply down by her sides.
Tess gave her a stricken look. ‘What are you going to do, Ells?’
Ellie knew that she should take charge of the situation: find a solution or, at the very least, a silver lining, but all she wanted to do was climb into bed, pull the covers over her head and stay there indefinitely. ‘Well, I need to call Richey,’ she said heavily. ‘See if he took it. Why he took it. What I need to do to get it back.’
‘Why don’t I ring him?’ Lola offered. ‘That way he won’t see your number if he’s screening his calls.’
Ellie waited for a tension-filled minute as Lola made the call but she’d known even before Lola shook her head that it would do no good. ‘It just says, “The number has not been recognised”,’ Lola reported. ‘If I were you, I’d call Chester. Get him to go round and have a word.’
Ellie was already reaching for her phone. All it took was two garbled sentences, and Chester was cutting her off. ‘Where do you think he’ll be? Dublin Castle? Spread Eagle? I’ll also try The Mixer and The Monarch. Give me his address too.’
‘He might not have the box any more. Or maybe he never took it and I’ve just misplaced it,’ Ellie ventured.
‘You don’t misplace stuff, Ellie. Not you.’ He paused. ‘Let’s not tell Ari about this. Wouldn’t want to worry her. I’ll sort this out and I’ll give you a ring once I’ve tracked down the little shit.’
‘Don’t get into anything with him. Just get the box back,’ Ellie pleaded.
‘Sweetheart, leave it to me. I won’t do anything that will get blood on my Trojan Records T-shirt,’ Chester said calmly, which didn’t exactly allay Ellie’s fears.
It wasn’t the funnest Sunday evening ever. The three of them had originally planned to have a Come Dine With Me marathon, as they had over twenty episodes taking up valuable space on the TiVo, but Ellie found that her eyes kept straying to her mobile phone. Every now and again Tess or Lola would say something like, ‘Are you sure you checked in the airing cupboard?’ or ‘Did you pull out everything from under your bed?’ Then all three of them would get up, rush to the place in question and every time Ellie would get her hopes up and dare to believe that this nightmare was over, only to have them cruelly dashed, and return to her vigil on the sofa.
Chester eventually rang back just before eleven. He’d been to every pub, club and drinking den in NW1 and NW5 but Richey was nowhere to be found. None of his friends or drinking buddies or the three stoners he shared a flat with had seen him since last Friday morning.
‘Do you think I should call his lawyers tomorrow morning? My dad’s, I mean,’ Ellie asked Chester as she sat on her bed and surveyed the wreckage of what had once been her beautifully tidy, almost minimalist bedroom. ‘Just to give them a heads up. Maybe Richey just took the box to piss me off and he’ll turn up in the next day or so to give it back? Or he might have just dumped it in a bin. Or—’
‘Couldn’t do any harm to give the lawyers a call,’ Chester said quickly, as if he couldn’t bear to listen to Ellie’s torturous explanations of what had happened to the box, when the only logical explanation was that it was currently the subject of a bidding war between several tabloid newspapers.
‘But it’s not like my father’s had an album out for ages, is it? He’s not exactly newsworthy right now, and I know his daughters are always in the papers but that’s not the same,’ Ellie insisted. She’d never had to contact the lawyers before – had no reason to – and it felt a lot like opening up a can of worms best left tightly shut and buried underground.
She and Chester agreed that there was no point in doing anything but sleeping on it and reconvening in the morning but Ellie abandoned any hope of sleep in favour of imagining Ari’s fury and hurt if the story hit the papers. And God! What horrible things would Richey say about her? That she was really uptight and it was impossible to believe she was a rock star’s daughter. He’d probably tell them that they’d been seeing each other for weeks before they’d actually slept together. So when she thought about it, as rationally as she could when it was four in the morning, Ellie decided she wasn’t really tabloid fodder.
For a start, she had a regular job, rather than being a model, actress or singer. She’d never dated anyone remotely famous. She’d never let a boyfriend take dirty pictures of her. She’d certainly never made a sex tape, and apart from smoking a few joints, she’d never taken drugs. The tabloids would laugh in Richey’s face. Although Ellie didn’t think she was that boring, not when you got to know her, she was boring on paper. Who knew that being boring could be a good thing?
It was enough to lull Ellie to sleep for a few fitful hours. When she woke up, she was still sure that she was a non-story, and once she got to work she’d phone Chester and tell him that. She was desperate to get her Dad box back but at least she didn’t have
to ring some faceless legal drone. Ellie didn’t want the only contact she had with her father in twenty-six years to be an email forwarded by his lawyer about her thieving scumbag of an ex-boyfriend.
With a renewed sense of purpose, Ellie even bought flaky pastries from the fancy French patisserie in Marylebone on her way to work so everyone at the gallery could start the week on a sweet note. Though if she kept stuffing her face and drinking ruinous amounts of alcohol, another detox beckoned, she thought, juggling pastries, coffee and purse as her phone began to ring.
‘Hello?’ she said, after she’d balanced coffee and carbs on a handy bollard.
‘Ellie Cohen?’ said a voice that she didn’t recognise, and every molecule in her body stiffened in alarm. ‘Sam Curtis here. I work on the celebrity desk at the Sunday Chronicle. Have you got time for a quick chat?’
‘No!’ Ellie yelped. ‘You’ve got the wrong number.’ It was the best she could come up with when all the blood in her body had rushed to her head and was making it hard to see or speak or think clearly.
‘We’d love to run a story about you and your dad,’ the Sam person continued as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘Great human interest piece. Can’t wait to hear your side of it. We’ll take some nice photos. How does that sound?’
It sounded … Ellie wasn’t even sure. She was clawing at her throat because it felt like she couldn’t breathe. She forced herself to take several juddering breaths, to focus on her Styrofoam cup of coffee until she was lucid again and able to make decisions. Not that there was anything to consider.
‘No,’ she said very forcefully. ‘Absolutely not.’
‘Look, love, this story is going to run with or without your cooperation. It really would be better for you if it was with your cooperation.’