Clean Break Read online

  ‘Yes he is, yes he is, yes he is!’ I said inside my head.

  I made Dancer whisper it to Vita and Maxie and me every night when we went to bed. We all believed her. Maybe Mum did too, in spite of what she said. She paid the Fairyland rent herself right up until Easter.

  We’d all started hoping that Dad would come back then, even if it was just for a visit. He always made such a special day of Easter. I remembered one Easter, when Vita was very little and Maxie was just a baby, Dad hired a huge rabbit costume from a fancy-dress store and pretended to be the Easter Bunny, crouching down and hopping, flicking his floppy ears from side to side.

  Another year he hid hundreds of tiny wrapped chocolate eggs in every room of the house and all over the garden, and we spent all Easter morning running round like crazy, seeing who could find the most (me!).

  Last year Dad gave us all different eggs. Maxie got a big chocolate egg wrapped in yellow cellophane with a toy mother hen and three fluffy chicks tucked into the ribbon fastening. Vita got a pink Angelina Ballerina egg with a tiny storybook attached. I got a Casper Dream fairy egg with a set of Casper Dream flower fairy postcards. He gave Mum a special agate egg, with whirls of green and grey and pink, very smooth and cool to touch.

  ‘It’s called a peace egg,’ Dad told her. ‘You hold it in your hand and it calms you down when you’re feeling stressed.’

  Mum held her agate egg a lot through January and February and March. Sometimes she rolled it over her forehead as if she was trying to soothe all the worries inside her head. She held onto it most of this new Easter Day.

  Mum tried her hardest to make it a special day. She made us our favourite boiled eggs for breakfast and she even drew smiley faces on each one.

  We had chocolate eggs too, big luxury eggs with bright satin ribbons. When we bit into them, teeth clunking against the hard chocolate, we found little wrapped truffles inside. Mum said we could eat as much chocolate as we wanted just this once – but we were all keyed up waiting for Dad to come with his Easter surprises.

  We waited all morning. Gran cooked a chicken for lunch. We waited all afternoon. Gran suggested we all went for a walk in the park but we stared at her as if she was mad. We didn’t want to risk missing Dad.

  ‘He’s not going to come,’ Gran said to Mum. ‘You know he’s not. You haven’t seen sight or sound of him since that dreadful day when he ran off with the kids.’

  ‘He didn’t run off with us, Gran. It was just a day out,’ I said heavily.

  ‘A day and half the night, with the police out searching,’ Gran sniffed.

  ‘I have heard from him,’ Mum said. ‘You know he sent another cheque last week. And he put Happy Easter to all of us. So I thought . . .’ Mum’s hand tightened on her peace egg.

  ‘You thought he’d come running back with his silly fancy presents, getting the kids all over-excited and driving you mental,’ Gran said.

  ‘Shut up!’ Mum shouted. She suddenly flexed her arm and hurled her peace egg to the other side of the room. It landed with such a clunk we all jumped. The peace egg stayed smoothly intact, but it dented Gran’s video recorder and chipped a big lump out of Gran’s skirting board.

  ‘Oh God, I’m sorry!’ Mum said, starting to sob.

  We thought Gran would be furious. Her eyes filled with tears too. She went to Mum and put her arms round her.

  ‘You poor silly girl,’ Gran said. ‘I can’t bear to see you sitting all tense and desperate, longing for him. You’re making yourself ill. Look how thin you’ve got.’

  I looked at Mum properly. I hadn’t noticed. She really had got thin. Her eyes were too big in her bony face, her wrists looked as if they would snap, and her jeans were really baggy on her now, so that she had to keep them up with a tight belt.

  It wasn’t fair. I missed Dad every bit as much as Mum and yet I hadn’t got thin, I’d got fatter and fatter and fatter.

  It didn’t stop me creeping away and eating my entire Easter egg all in one go. I licked and nibbled and gnawed until every last crumb was gone. My mouth was a mush of chocolate, pink tongue covered, my teeth milky brown. I imagined my chocolate throat and chocolate stomach. Yet I still felt empty. I was like an enormous hollow chocolate girl. If anyone held me too hard I’d shatter into a thousand chocolate shards.

  I felt so lonely during the Easter holidays. Whenever we went out to the shops or the park or the swimming baths there were fathers everywhere. They were making the teddies talk to the little kids in the Bear Factory; they were helping their kids feed the ducks and pushing swings and kicking footballs; they were jumping up and down playing Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses in the water.

  There were dads in every television programme, making a fuss of their kids. One time we even spotted our dad in an old film. It was just a glimpse, in a crowd, but the plait was easy to spot.

  ‘It’s Dad, it’s Dad!’ I said.

  ‘Dad!’ Vita screamed, as if he could hear her.

  Maxie didn’t say anything. He turned his back to the television. He’d stopped talking about Dad the last few weeks. He just looked blank when Vita and I said his name.

  ‘Maybe he’s forgotten him,’ said Vita, when we were getting ready for bed. Gran was in the bathroom with Maxie, washing his hair. He’d poured concentrated Ribena over his head because he said he wanted to dye his hair purple.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Vita, he can’t possibly have forgotten Dad already.’

  ‘Well, he’s such a baby. And totally weird,’ said Vita.

  ‘I know, but it’s only three months since we saw Dad.’

  ‘Three months two weeks and four days,’ said Vita.

  I stared at her. Vita could barely add two and two.

  ‘How do you know so exactly?’

  ‘Because I’ve been marking it off on my calendar,’ said Vita.

  ‘What calendar?’

  ‘I made it at school just before Christmas. We had to stick it on an old card and do glitter and I got bored and did a red-glitter bikini on Jesus’ mummy and my teacher got cross with me and said I’d spoiled my calendar and couldn’t send it to anyone. So I put it in my desk and now I mark off the days,’ said Vita.

  ‘You could have given the calendar to Mum or Dad. Dad would have found it ever so funny,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I could give it to him when he comes back. I could do red-glitter hearts all round the edge of the dates,’ said Vita.

  I thought of her own little red heart thumping with love for Dad underneath the fluffy kitten jumper Gran had knitted for her. I didn’t always like Vita but I loved her a lot. I wanted to give her a big hug but I knew she’d wriggle and fuss and say I was squashing her. I put Dancer on instead and she gently hugged Vita’s little stalk neck and blew breathy kisses into her ear.

  ‘Make Dancer kiss me,’ Maxie said, running into our room stark naked. His newly washed hair stuck up in black spikes.

  ‘Dancer doesn’t want to kiss silly little bare baby boys,’ said Vita primly. ‘Put something on, Maxie. We don’t want to see your woggly bits. I’m so so glad I’m a girl, aren’t you, Em? Dad always said I was his favourite little girl.’

  ‘He said I was his favourite grown-up girl,’ I said.

  I wondered if he said that to Sarah now.

  Maxie didn’t join in. He gathered up all his bears, a great tatty furry bundle. ‘We’re all bears,’ he shouted. ‘I’m bare and they’re bear! We’re all bears.’ He shrieked with laughter and yelled it over and over again, in case we hadn’t got it the first time. We did our best to ignore him, so he started nudging us with his teddies. He got wilder, bludgeoning us with bear limbs. One paw went right in my eye and hurt a lot. I frequently didn’t like Maxie and recently it was very hard to remember that I loved him.

  He’d always been silly but now he acted positively demented, running around all over the place, yelling his head off, throwing baby tantrums in the supermarket and the street. Mum worried he might have some serious problem and thought she should take him to the do