Risking It All Read online

  I got a reputation and in turn that got my original persecutors off my back. Lest you think they admired my fine disregard for authority, my dash and derring-do, let me correct that. My school-fellows scented danger to themselves, that they’d be damned by any kind of association. So they left me alone to rampage among the school rules at will. They were sharper than I was. I was too dumb to realise I was doing harm to no one but myself. The school won the last battle, as it was inevitable they would. I was not, wrote the headmistress to Dad, taking advantage of what the school had to offer. They all felt that was such a pity. I was bright but unruly. I seldom if ever handed in homework on time. When it did arrive, it gave the impression of having been scribbled out on the bus that morning on the way to school. (She was right.) It hardly seemed fair to let me continue to be a subversive element when I wasn’t even benefiting from the education on offer. I was out. Poor Dad. Poor Grandma. I’d like to add, poor me. But seeing as I’d brought it all on myself, I’ve never been able to indulge in self-pity. Just as well.

  So it was with real curiosity that I asked Duke, ‘How?’

  He wiped the smug look from his weasel features and gave me a funny sideways glance, as if judging how I’d take what he was going to say. ‘Everyone’s got secrets. Even school bullies. In fact, especially school bullies. So you find out what the secret is and you let them know you know it. Then they leave you alone.’

  I could see how he’d ended up a private detective. His investigations had started early, sneaking around finding out the sordid little sins and embarrassments that schoolkids hide behind bluster and aggression. He could finger this one for shoplifting. That one’s mother was on the game and had been up before the magistrates again. Another one lived in unbelievable squalor with drunken parents. The RSPCA had been round to rescue the dog, but the child had been left to social services and they’d done sod all. Clarence had put himself in the position of being able to start a whispering campaign, and even the most violent playground thug is powerless against that. I understood it. But I didn’t like it.

  ‘Something tells me you fancy you know a secret about me,’ I told him. ‘And I’d like to hear what it is. For a start, I’d like to know who hired you. I’m entitled to be told, I think.’

  ‘Eva did,’ he said simply. ‘Eva Varady, your mother.’

  I stopped dead and whirled to face him. He looked alarmed, as well he might. I guess my expression told him this wasn’t welcome news. We were about the same height and I think I’m pretty fit. It’s not only men who can dish out the aggro. He backed off a little and then hopped back some more when I yelled in his face:

  ‘That’s a lie! She didn’t. She couldn’t have. It’s not true. She’s gone. She’s dead!’

  He put his head on one side in that bird-like way of his and dealt me another of his strange looks. ‘Who told you she was dead?’

  I was silenced. No one had told me. I suppose, as a child, I’d decided in my own mind that she must be. She had never come back for me. Death was the only acceptable explanation. Later, I’d assumed that I must be as dead for her as she was for me, even if we were both living. The idea of my mother as a flesh-and-blood creature intervening in my life had become too incredible even to be imagined. I still couldn’t imagine it. This had to be some kind of trick. Who was pulling it and why or what he or she hoped to gain, I couldn’t even guess. But that was it, it must be. I seized the explanation, demanding, ‘Who put you up to this? What’s your game? If you think I can’t deal with a slimy little runt like you, you’re badly mistaken. I don’t like people trying to put one over on me and I always do something about it.’

  But even as the words left my mouth, I knew in a small cold corner of my heart that it was going to turn out to be just as he’d said. She’d sent him. Any other explanation was grasping at straws. She’d walked out and now, on this cold, overcast February morning by the canal, she’d walked back in again in the person of this sad little bloke. How could she do this to me? And why?

  Clarence Duke was looking hard done by. ‘You asked me,’ he snivelled. ‘So I told you. That’s what you wanted to know. It’s always the bloody same. People say they want the truth and when they hear it they go off the deep end and start yelling. No one put me up to it, except Eva herself. It’s my job. I do things for people. Things they can’t do themselves. She wanted to find you so I found you for her. It’s a job to me, right? You needn’t make it sound so personal. What’s it to me whether you’re happy about it or not?’

  Fair enough, I had no right to take it out on him. He was a hired snoop, a messenger boy, just as he said. He did jobs for people who couldn’t do them themselves, just as I’d been flattering myself I did in my investigating career. I didn’t like the idea of looking on Clarence as a colleague, and I dare say he wouldn’t have fancied me as one. But I owed him basic respect as one professional to another (almost). Besides, he had no reason to lie to me. I ought to be glad he hadn’t, because that certainly wouldn’t have helped. But I didn’t want to know any more. No more questions, and above all, no more painful answers.

  We were still standing on the towpath. ‘This is as far as we go,’ I said eventually. I was trembling. I couldn’t help it. I had to force myself to speak calmly, but inside the pressure had built up as if I was going to explode.

  ‘Give me one more minute, Fran—’ He held up his hands placatingly.

  ‘No!’ I shouted at him. ‘You’ve done your job, just like you said. Now clear out of it and leave me alone!’

  Bonnie, hearing me raise my voice, had already come running back, ears pricked enquiringly, looking around with anxious brown eyes to see where the trouble was. She decided it was Clarence, barked at him and made a dive for his running shoes.

  ‘Call the dog off!’ he whined, jumping around to keep out of the way of Bonnie’s teeth. ‘I don’t like dogs. They always bite me.’

  ‘They’ve got sense. Scram before I bite you,’ I told him.

  I turned my back on him, whistled up Bonnie, and started off walking as fast as I could. I could hear him pattering behind me. He was a persistent little sleazeball.

  Without turning, I told him, ‘If you don’t clear off, I’ll shove you in the canal and tread on your fingers if you try to climb out. Even if you can swim, there’s enough toxins in there to give you the runs for a month.’

  ‘She said you’d be upset,’ he said.

  ‘Upset?’ I whirled round again and he jumped back quickly out of my reach. The news hadn’t just upset me. I was devastated by it. Everything I’d built up over fourteen years, every little brick in a wall protecting me from the fact that my mother had abandoned me, walked out and left me and never sent so much as a birthday card afterwards, all came tumbling down. I had no point of reference any more. I wasn’t the Fran Varady I’d thought I was, without any family since Dad and Grandma Varady died. I was a new, strange Fran who had a mother. She was alive, she was near at hand, she spoke to me through this skinny little bloke with his tatty business cards. Why? Did she want something from me? Because I had nothing I could give her. Nor had she anything I wanted.

  ‘I am more than upset, Clarence,’ I managed to say evenly, but he could surely hear the anger in my voice, and, probably, the pain. ‘I’m hopping mad. Don’t push your luck. Go back and tell her you found me. You’ve done your job.’

  ‘She wants to see you, Fran.’ His tone was cajoling.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to see her. You tell her that. She’s had fourteen years to come and see me. She could’ve come to see me when I had bronchitis at eight, or chickenpox at twelve, or was in the school play, or after Dad and Grandma died and the landlord threw me out in the street at sixteen . . .’

  I knew I was losing my cool. I managed to get it back. ‘Tell her,’ I said, ‘that the times she could’ve come to see me have been and gone and now she’s missed that particular bus.’

  ‘She’s dying, Fran,’ he said, looking at me with watery little grey eyes. />
  ‘That,’ I told him, ‘is despicable. If you’re going to lie, think of something else.’

  ‘It’s the truth, I swear. She’s in a hospice. She’s got leukaemia.’

  ‘On the level?’ I heard myself ask.

  ‘On the level,’ he said. ‘So, what do I tell her? Will you go?’

  ‘Will you go?’ asked Ganesh.

  I’d told him all about Clarence and the thunderbolt he’d delivered. Not straight away. I’d gone home after leaving Duke down by the canal, and sat for ages on a crate in my garage home, just thinking, or trying to. My thoughts spun round crazily. Eventually I became aware someone was speaking to me. My eyes focused and I saw Gan, balanced on his heels in front of me, his face, framed by long black hair, filled with concern.

  ‘What’s up?’ he was asking. ‘Come on, Fran, what’s wrong?’ He reached out and put a hand on my arm.

  So I told him. I pretty well tell Ganesh everything and he’s usually got good advice which I don’t always take. But I was in need of advice now like never before.

  ‘You need to think it over,’ he said. ‘Sleep on it. Come up to the flat and eat with us tonight. You should have some company.’

  They shut up the shop at eight, and when I got up to the flat at just before nine, Hari was frying onions in the kitchen and watching a video of some Bollywood epic on the little TV in there at the same time.

  ‘How are you feeling now?’ Ganesh asked.

  ‘Still churned up. I don’t want to see her, Gan. I know it sounds mean, when she’s so ill, but what can I say to her?’

  ‘Perhaps she’s got things she wants to say to you?’ he suggested.

  ‘I don’t want to hear them. What can she do? Apologise? You can’t abandon a child and then, years later, say you’re sorry.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Ganesh. ‘What else can she say? Everyone regrets things they’ve done. If you can’t put them right, all you can do is tell the person you’ve hurt you wish you hadn’t done it. Why did she do it, do you know?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Since I grew up I’ve tried considering her and Dad as a marriage and I can see it wasn’t perfect. He was a nice, loving, happy man, even if not what you’d call a good provider. He always had lots of ideas, they just never seemed to work out. But he loved her and so did—’ The next word stuck in my throat.

  Ganesh finished the sentence by saying, ‘And so did you.’

  ‘Yes. Little kids love their mums. But she didn’t love us, either of us, did she? She particularly didn’t give a hoot about me or she’d have taken me along with her.’

  ‘Depended where she was going,’ said Ganesh.

  ‘Or with whom!’ I snapped back, sick of hearing him fight her corner.

  ‘Was there another bloke involved?’

  I told him I didn’t know and then nodded towards the kitchen. ‘Don’t tell Hari. He’ll worry.’

  Ganesh grinned briefly. ‘How did you guess?’

  I sank down in the corner of the battered old sofa, arms folded tightly across my chest, knees pressed together, not quite resorting to the foetal position, but coming pretty close. I was frightened, floundering about, knowing what I had to do, wishing with all my heart I could get out of going to see her, but aware that I was being pushed inexorably towards it. Ganesh sat at the other end, leaning forward with his arms resting on his thighs, hands loosely clasped, watching me with concern in his eyes. For all his able playing of devil’s advocate, he didn’t know what to do either.

  After we’d eaten, Hari disappeared to do some balancing of the books in his untidy little office. Gan and I washed the dishes, then slumped in front of the TV, watching – or pretending to watch – a late-night political discussion.

  Gan said nothing because he knew I wasn’t in the mood for more talk. There was only one subject, and we’d said all we could on that. To try and talk about anything else would’ve been ridiculous. Eventually he dozed off, with his arms folded, his legs stretched out and his head propped on a faded red velvet cushion. He gets up all week at an unearthly hour to take in the newspapers.

  I was left with my thoughts. It was easy for Gan to take the moderate view. I also considered it a tad hypocritical. I wondered whether anyone in his family would’ve forgiven an erring wife. But then he wasn’t talking about his lot, was he? He was talking about me. Close as I am to Gan in so many ways, there’s always this divide between us, something we can’t bridge. I feel it more than Gan. We get along so well but we have often surprised ourselves with our different viewpoints.

  Equally, it was easy for someone like Clarence to deliver his message as he was paid to do. I didn’t know how he’d found me. I hadn’t asked, not wanting to know anything more. But despite the seediness of his appearance, he must be a good detective. He’d done his part and was waiting now for my response to take back to his client, my mother. I had a last try at persuading myself he had been lying, after all, about her being in a hospice. But I knew he hadn’t been. The worst news was always true. To refuse to go and see her seemed cruel. But what did she want? To make amends before she died? Despite all Ganesh had said and, all right, despite all I told you, how do you make amends for the bewilderment and despair of a seven-year-old child?

  I struggled to find mitigating circumstances, some excuse for her behaviour towards me. She had known I’d be well looked after by Dad and Grandma. It wasn’t as if she’d dumped me on social services. But I remembered how crushed Dad had been by her defection. I could see him in my mind’s eye, sitting at the table with his head in his hands. He got over it outwardly, as one does, as I did. But the hurt never left our hearts. We never spoke of it to one another, but we knew. It was as though we shared a secret.

  Sometimes Grandma would refer to her, generally when defending me after I’d done something wrong. ‘What can you expect of a motherless child? What kind of woman walks out on her own flesh and blood? Ah, poor little one . . .’ All this as she sat on her chair, patting me on the head and weaving from side to side as if she was about to keen over the dead. She’d then seize my head, nearly pulling it off, and kiss me soundly.

  After this, I’d be force-fed with goulash and sticky cakes by way of compensation. Grandma worked on the theory that calories solved any problem.

  I hadn’t got much in life, as Ganesh was fond of pointing out, but I had considered myself adjusted to my circumstances. I knew who and where I was, what life was likely to offer me and what it wasn’t. I had found a kind of equilibrium inside myself, despite everything. I was being asked to risk that. To risk everything. For what? To go and see a woman who had so effectively screwed up three lives?

  Hari reappeared and sat down to read his newspaper. Ganesh stirred and woke up.

  ‘Terrible things are happening,’ said Hari from behind his newspaper.

  ‘Yes, they are,’ I said.

  ‘What are the police doing, that’s what I ask!’

  ‘Generally,’ I said churlishly, ‘they’re making life difficult for people whose lives are already difficult.’

  ‘Here is a poor woman,’ said the invisible Hari, ‘has lost her only daughter.’

  Gan and I both looked at the newspaper and Hari’s fingers gripping it to either side.

  ‘What woman?’ asked Ganesh truculently.

  ‘A nice respectable lady, a doctor’s widow.’

  Gan and I heaved a joint sigh of relief. On reflection, it was hardly likely to have been my mother, advertising in the paper for news of me. But she might’ve done. She’d hired Clarence Duke. She didn’t have much time. She could’ve put in an ad. Anyone knowing the whereabouts . . .

  ‘See, here is a photograph of her daughter.’ Hari rattled the paper at us as if that would enable us to see the picture, which we couldn’t. He carried on. ‘Such a good girl, a nurse. Now she’s missing. She went off shift one evening and she didn’t get home. No sign of her. Her flatmate reported her missing the next day, but did the police do anything? No, they did not, not for three
days. Now her mother, at her wits’ end, is making a big fuss. Quite right, too.’

  Hari emerged from behind the paper to stare morosely at the talking head on the TV screen. ‘And the politicians, too? What are they doing? Nothing. What a terrible thing to lose your child like that. What would that poor woman not give to get her back again?’

  It seemed as if God or someone was sending me a message, making up my vacillating mind for me.

  I whispered to Gan, ‘If I go, will you come with me?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Gan.

  Like I said, he’s a true friend.

  ‘You ought to make it soon,’ he said hesitantly.

  ‘Yes, I realise that.’

  ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday,’ he went on in a low voice. Hari’s a trifle hard of hearing. ‘It’ll have to be in the afternoon.’ In the morning the shop was open for the Sunday-paper trade until twelve. ‘So, what are you going to do, phone this bloke Duke? You can use ours.’ He nodded towards the phone.