Chapter 2.
‘Poppy, didn’t you hear me? I said Mum’s gone,’ Eddie blurted out.
‘Don’t you ever knock,’ I snarled.
Eddie gulped and banged on the door with his hand.
‘Well, it’s a bit pointless now you are actually in here,’ I pointed out. ‘What do you want anyway?’
‘Mum’s gone,’ Eddie repeated.
‘Gone where?’ I grunted as I heaved a boot out of my wardrobe. The pile of old books tottered and almost fell. I saw the toe of the other boot sticking out beside a tennis racquet and gave it a tug.
‘I don’t know where she went. She’s vanished,’ wailed Eddie.
‘So?’ I pulled at the boot, then yelled in dismay as the entire contents of the wardrobe cascaded over me onto the floor. I picked up an armful of books and furiously tossed them into the corner of the wardrobe. ‘Don’t just stand there. Help me shove this stuff back,’ I snapped at Eddie, who was standing there with his mouth open like a dimwitted goldfish.
‘But Mum has gone,’ he bleated.
I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. After all, Mum is a grown-up and if she wants to go shopping or something then she doesn’t need to ask our permission first. But Eddie was standing there gulping great mouthfuls of air and he finally burst into tears. That got my attention. Eddie hardly ever cries. Even when he is being bullied really badly he just goes quiet and sort of pulled into himself.
‘She’s gone, Poppy. She’s really gone,’ he sobbed.
I patted his back awkwardly and made ‘never mind’ noises, with an inner resolve to find that Tyler kid the next day and give him a good thump. Eddie must have been really upset if it made him cry.
Once Eddie reached the sniffing stage I fished out a clean tissue from my drawer and handed it to him.
‘Come here,’ I said, patting the bed beside me. Eddie obediently flopped down beside me. Okay, tell me what the problem is,’ I said in my best big sister voice.
‘It was awful, Poppy,’ Eddie hiccuped. ‘I was kicking the ball and it went towards Mum. She was sitting there on the swing and I yelled out to her to duck. I didn’t mean to kick it at her. It just sort of slipped. Anyway, she ducked to one side and then the next moment she sat up and fell though a crack in the air and vanished.’
I was completely taken aback. This wasn’t what I had expected to hear at all. I felt his forehead but it wasn’t hot so he didn’t have a fever. And Eddie doesn’t usually make up stories, he’s far too practical for that. I’ve always been the one with the imagination.
‘She’ll be back in time for dinner’ I said cheerfully, thinking that if Eddie was having some sort of massive mental breakdown, then the least I could do was to humour him.
‘Do you think so?’ Eddie asked eagerly, turning his big brown eyes up to mine.
‘Yes, of course,’ I said soothingly. ‘Now why don’t you go and watch TV or read a book or something. Mum will call you when it’s dinner time.’
Eddie nodded and obediently went to the living room where I heard the theme music of Space Monster start up. It’s a perfectly dreadful programme that all the little kids watch, but naturally I have outgrown it. I quickly stuffed everything back in my wardrobe in a big untidy heap and pushed the door shut before unenthusiastically turning to my social studies homework. We are each doing a project on a different country and I’d been given Fiji. It was quite interesting actually, and there was tons of information in all the books and pamphlets I’d collected, but I couldn’t get into it. Eddie had really rattled me. I even went down to the garden and looked around but Mum wasn’t there. ‘She probably went to the supermarket for something and wouldn’t take Eddie with her,’ I reasoned. ‘She’ll be back soon.’
I didn’t realise how wrong I could be. Dad came home from work and grunted at us before settling down in the living room with the newspaper. He told Eddie to turn the TV down a bit then after a while he asked, ‘Where’s your mother?’
‘She’s gone,’ Eddie mumbled, without taking his eyes from the screen.
‘What do you mean, gone? Gone where? The car is still there. Did she walk somewhere?’
‘Dunno,’ Eddie shrugged.
Dad looked a bit peeved and muttered about ‘that not being like Jean,’ meaning Mum.
We waited and waited but Mum still didn’t come back.
‘Maybe there’s been an accident,’ I suggested at last. I was starving and even if Mum came back soon, tea would be really late.
Dad looked alarmed and turned the TV over to the news. They have a segment of local news each night when they talk about road accidents and anything else that has happened. But this must have been a boringly normal day for everyone and the best they could do was an interview with some old guy who wanted a tree cut down because the leaves kept blocking the gutters on his house. Dad muttered a bit more and finally said, ‘It looks as if your mother must have been held up somewhere. We’d better get tea for ourselves.’
Now Dad can’t cook, and Mum never lets Eddie and me into the kitchen in case we muck up her recipes. We have been known to helpfully add something unexpected or else use up the expensive ingredients she was keeping to try out for something special. So Eddie and I put on our most hopeless faces, although Eddie is much better at that than me. Dad felt sorry for us and sighed. ‘It had better be takeaways, I suppose. Your mother will complain that it isn’t good for you but I guess the occasional meal won’t hurt us.’
So we all piled into his car and went to the fish and chip shop. When we came home again, licking the salt from our greasy fingers, the house was cold and empty. Mum still wasn’t back. We ended up going to bed really late while Dad rang round Mum’s friends and even Grandma, to see if she was there. That made me realise he was desperate as he doesn’t get on with Grandma at all, and never talks to her willingly if he can avoid it. He always says that his parents did the decent thing and died so they wouldn’t be a problem for their children but that Mum’s mother was an interfering old so-and-so. However no one seemed to know where Mum was and I finally fell asleep hearing the phone crash down as Dad tried yet another unsuccessful number.
The next morning was awful. Dad had tried the hospitals and even the police who had said she hadn’t been gone long enough to be a missing person and asked if Dad and Mum had been arguing lately. Dad gave us some money to buy lunch at school and dropped us off there on his way to work.
‘Where do you think Mum is?’ I asked him. I was starting to have a hollow feeling inside and things didn’t feel right.
‘I don’t know, Poppy. Hopefully she will come home today and tell us where she’s been.’
He sounded harassed and Eddie had hardly said anything. He turned his gloomy face to me when I asked him if he had everything he needed.
‘Have you got your pencil case and a clean hankie?’
Eddie nodded and slumped down in the seat looking miserable.
When Eddie and I trudged home after school, we knew Mum hadn’t come home. The house seemed cold and unfriendly. I tried asking Eddie where Mum was but all he said was, ‘I already told you’ then went all stubborn and quiet.
Dad was really frantic when he came home from work. He rang the police again and this time he kept shouting at them.
‘Of course I don’t know where she is. That’s why I’m ringing you. No, she would not have gone off with someone else!’
He slammed the phone down and went white. I’ve never seen a grown-up look so upset before. I could see he was making a huge effort to be calm and reasonable as he asked us where we thought Mum was. He wanted to know if she had talked about going away or if there had been any men hanging about the place lately.
‘Mr Collins came to fix the dishwasher,’ I said helpfully.
Dad grunted and went to the phone. I listened shamelessly to his end of the conversation. You could tell Dad was really embarrassed and he was trying to tactfully find out if Mum had run off with Mr Collins the repairman. I didn’t t
hink that was likely because Mum doesn’t even like him much, even though she is always polite to him. I knew that because she was always too polite, if you know what I mean?
Dad hung up at last and ran his hands through his hair. The police arrived then and we realised that it was real. Not a joke or a misunderstanding but real. Mum had gone.
There were two policemen; one old balding guy, Sergeant Stubbs and a young, quite pretty woman with dark hair tied up in a bun under her hat. Her name was Constable Alice. I think that was her first name as her badge said A. Bingham but Sergeant Stubbs told Eddie and me to go into the kitchen with Constable Alice while he talked to Dad. Eddie wanted to hang round looking at the police car and I could see he was dying to get inside it and try the siren so I kept a firm grip on his arm. Constable Alice was okay. She was quite brisk and efficient and made us a cup of hot chocolate, even though we could have done that for ourselves if we’d wanted to. We were at least capable of some things in the kitchen.
Constable Alice smiled at us with her big white teeth. I noticed she had a tiny chip off the corner of one of them and wondered if she had done it on one of her hairclips. Grandma is always telling me not to open my hairclips with my teeth in case I chip them. It hadn’t stopped me but I didn’t like to ask if that was what Constable Alice had done.
‘When was the last time you saw your Mum?’ she asked.
‘Yesterday when we came home from school,’ I said. ‘She was getting in the washing and she called out to me to eat some fruit and not to touch the cake as she was going to try a new type of icing on it.’
I looked a bit guilty here, as Eddie and I had carved great chunks off the cake half an hour before this and it looked definitely the worse for wear.
‘Did you see your father at all?’
‘No, he didn’t come home from work until dinnertime.’
‘Where did your mother put the washing?’ Constable Alice asked.
‘I guess she put it into the hot cupboard in the hall,’ I said. ‘I didn’t actually see her because I was in my bedroom.’
‘She went into the garden then,’ Eddie said helpfully.
Constable Alice suddenly looked a lot more interested. ‘What part of the garden,’ she wanted to know.
‘She sat on the swinging seat,’ Eddie told her. ‘It’s in the herb garden and Dad made it for her as a birthday present last year.’
‘Yes, yes, go on,’ instructed Constable Alice.
Eddie shrugged. ‘That’s it. I didn’t see her after that. She vanished.’
Constable Alice gave him an odd look and scribbled something in a little notebook she took from her pocket. She made us show her the swinging seat and the herb garden and told Eddie to stand where he had been when he saw Mum. Constable Alice looked at the spade, which was still lying next to the swinging seat, and then at the garden. I thought for one awful moment that she suspected that Dad had done away with Mum and buried the body in the garden, but there was no sign of any fresh digging, which was probably just as well. Then she took us back inside and looked in the hot cupboard at the pile of washing, which I thought was a bit nosy. After that she led us into the living room and made us tell Sergeant Stubbs what we had said. Sergeant Stubbs was being very cheerful at us. He ruffled Eddie’s hair, which he hates, and made him repeat exactly the last thing Mum had said. That was ‘mind the camellia bush, Eddie. I’d like at least some flowers this winter.’
Constable Alice wrote this in her notebook and then Sergeant Stubbs asked Eddie again what happened next. Eddie was getting a bit sick of being questioned by now and turned sulky.
‘She vanished in a crack in the air. She went invisible,’ he said defiantly.
Dad shook his head in despair and Sergeant Stubbs and Constable Alice looked at each other over Eddie’s head. Then they patted him gently on the shoulder and told him to go outside with me and play. I thought that was totally unfair. They obviously didn’t believe us and we were being got rid of while they talked about the important stuff. We couldn’t even hang around and eavesdrop because Constable Alice came with us and made sure we went right to the end of the backyard. It is really hard to play when someone tells you to and we chucked the soccer ball back and forth a few times in a dreary sort of way. We both kept missing catches as we were more interested in what the police were saying to Dad and kept looking away at the vital moment. We finally couldn’t bear it any longer and began walking back to the house. At the same time we saw Constable Alice and Sergeant Stubbs coming out the front door and down the steps.
As soon as their car drove off we rushed inside. Dad looked awful, as if someone had hit him. A bit like Eddie really, when Tyler has had a go at him.
‘Um, er, we think your mother has decided to have a little holiday for a while and forgot to tell us she was going,’ he explained.
That was such an obvious lie it was pathetic. Dad looked really uncomfortable as he said it but we could see that he wasn’t going to tell us anything else. Mum never forgets anything and she wouldn’t have gone off without telling us first. In fact, she probably wouldn’t have gone anywhere without taking us with her. Eddie and I looked at each other but we didn’t say anything to Dad. There wasn’t much point. We knew that something must be terribly wrong, especially if Dad was lying to us, and we thought that things couldn’t get much worse than this.
We were wrong.