See If I Care (9 page)

Helen had some terrible disease. She was probably going to die.

There was no other way to explain what was going on. She was definitely sick – Luke had heard her throwing up in the bathroom loads of times in the last few weeks. And then last night, when he was lying in bed trying to sleep, he heard Mam coming home from work, and then Helen opening her bedroom door and going downstairs.

And for what seemed like a long time, he could hear their voices going back and forth in the kitchen. Helen sounded like she was crying, and Mam – Luke couldn’t decide what Mam sounded like. He must have fallen asleep then, because he didn’t remember
them coming upstairs, but there was no sign of Helen at breakfast.

‘Is Helen sick?’ Luke asked his mother.

She nodded, looking paler than usual. ‘She won’t be going to school today.’

And when Luke came home that afternoon, Granny told him that Mam and Helen were gone to the doctor’s, which meant that Helen had to be seriously ill. Mam didn’t believe in going to the doctor unless you were really bad – she always said most things could be cured with a visit to the chemist, which cost nothing. The only time she’d taken Luke to the doctor’s was when he got really bad sunburn years ago, and started throwing up all over the place.

Now he closed the Harry Potter book he’d bought with Granny’s Christmas book token and looked out the window again. Almost time for tea, and still no sign of them. He remembered when Helen had stayed out all night, about three months ago now. He remembered wondering if she was dead, if her picture would be in the paper.

What if she died now? What if Mam came back alone from the doctor’s and told them that Helen had been rushed into hospital, and she had only a few weeks, or even a few days, left to live? Would Anne be
allowed in to say goodbye to her, when she was only seven?

Luke was glad he’d got Helen the HMV token for Christmas, even though she still hardly ever spoke to him. No wonder she was always so sad and cross looking, if she had some kind of terrible disease. That would make anyone sad and cross.

Helen and Mam came home at twenty-five to seven, just as Granny was putting two plates of food into the oven to keep warm. Helen looked as if she’d been crying again, and went straight upstairs.

Mam took off her coat and sat at the table. ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said to Luke and Anne. Luke glanced at Granny, who was taking Mam’s plate out of the oven. She didn’t look curious – she must know already.

‘Helen is …’ Mam paused, ran a hand through her hair. Anne and Luke waited. Luke felt suddenly afraid.

‘Helen is … going to have a baby.’ Mam looked from Anne to Luke. ‘In June, she’s having a baby in June.’ She lifted her shoulders, let them drop again. ‘That’s it.’

Anne said, ‘But where is she getting it from?’

A tiny smile passed over Mam’s face. ‘From heaven, where I got you.’ Mam looked at Luke. ‘What do you think?’

Luke hadn’t a clue what to think. Helen was pregnant, not dying. She was going to have a baby. Her tummy was going to swell up like a watermelon, and she was going to have a baby, and be its mother.

And – the thought struck him like a shock – he was going to be its uncle. Uncle Luke. And Mam was going to be a granny, and Granny was going to be a great-granny.

Luke considered. It didn’t seem so bad really. Another thought occurred to him. ‘Will it live here, with us?’ He tried to imagine a baby in the house, filling the place with nappies and bottles and crying in the middle of the night. A buggy in the hall. Teddies on the stairs.

Mam was frowning. ‘None of that has been decided yet,’ she told them. ‘We’ll have to sort out a lot of things.’

‘You’ll be its auntie,’ Luke told Anne, and the uncertain expression left her face and she burst into a smile.

‘Will I be able to feed it?’ she asked Mam, and Mam shrugged.

‘We’ll see, lovie,’ she said. ‘It’s a long way off.’

When he went upstairs later to do his homework, Luke paused outside Helen’s door and listened. Nothing. He put up a hand and tapped lightly.

‘Who is it?’

‘Luke.’ He waited for her to tell him to get lost, but after a second, Helen appeared at the door.

‘Yeah?’ She didn’t look cross, just a bit tired.

‘Mam told us,’ Luke said. And then he wasn’t sure what to say next.

Helen looked at him. ‘So,’ she said, ‘what do you think?’

Luke risked a tiny smile. ‘I think I’m going to be an uncle,’ he said. He waited for the door to slam in his face.

Helen looked at him blankly for a few seconds, and then she gave a shaky smile back at him. ‘Uncle Luke,’ she said. ‘Go and do your homework.’ He’d almost forgotten what she looked like when she smiled.

In his room, Luke reread his penfriend’s letter. And then he read the last bit twice more. It was a bit weird, the way both their fathers had something wrong with them. Her dad sounded very like Luke’s, sitting around all day doing nothing much. So all her stories about going to Disneyland Paris and bowling and everything must have been made up, just like Luke had made up things. The thought didn’t make him cross with her – more like a bit sorry for her. It was no fun having a dad that didn’t want to do
anything with you any more.

And now she was asking Luke’s advice – like she thought he really might be able to help. What on earth should he say to her? He had enough problems with his own father, let alone anyone else’s.

He put her letter aside while he did his homework, but all the time he was writing out his sums, or going over the dates of the Second World War battles, or practising the new tin whistle tune Mrs Hutchinson had given them to learn, Luke’s mind kept tiptoeing back to Elma’s letter, and the questions she’d asked him.

When his homework was finished, Luke went back downstairs and knocked softly on his father’s door. After a few seconds he opened it and walked in and sat in his usual chair in the half-dark, breathing in the scent of his sleeping father.

What should he say to Elma? He had to say something, couldn’t just ignore her questions when he wrote back. He sat by his father’s bed, thinking hard.

After about fifteen minutes he got up, touched his father’s warm cheek, and left the room. Then he poked his head around the sitting room door and told Granny he was going to bed.

‘Right, lovie, see you in the morning.’ She turned back to the TV.

Luke stood with his hand on the door. After a minute he said, ‘Granny?’

‘Yes, love?’ His grandmother looked at him enquiringly.

‘What do you think about this baby?’ Luke asked.

Granny thought for a few seconds. Then she said, ‘Well, it’s not the way any of us would have wanted it, but we’ll have to make the best of it now, won’t we?’

Luke nodded. ‘You’ll be its great-granny.’

Granny smiled. ‘So I will,’ she said. ‘Now there’s a thought.’

In his room, Luke opened the box of notelets that Granny had given him for his birthday. They all had paintings of the sea on them. He picked a stormy one, with huge white-capped waves dashing against grey and black rocks.

He stuck his stamp on upside down, addressed the envelope and began his letter to Elma.

The next few weeks were very, very bad. Mum and Dad spent most of the time fighting, and Elma and the boys spent most of their time in their bedroom pretending not to notice the screams and shouts and banging doors from downstairs.

Mrs Clifford called twice, and each time everyone pretended to be happy, just so she’d go away.

Twice Elma went to Tara’s house after school. It was really fun to be in a house where people seemed to be happy, but when she was leaving the second time, Tara’s mum stopped her in the hallway.

‘It was lovely to see you, Elma,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’d like Tara to visit your house next time?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Elma said, ‘My house is kind of boring.’

Tara’s mum just shook her head, and said nothing, but after that Tara kept on saying she’d love to visit Elma’s house, and Elma couldn’t think of any more lies or excuses, so now she mostly avoided Tara, and walked around the playground on her own.

One morning, Mrs Lawrence came into the classroom holding a big bundle of penfriend letters. She handed them out, saying, ‘Don’t open these until this afternoon; you are in year five now so I know I can trust you. Now, take out your maths books.’

But Mrs Lawrence was wrong to trust Elma, even though she was in year five. Elma just
had
to know what Luke Mitchell had written in his letter. Of course she didn’t care about his stupid granny and her cakes, or about his imaginary dead horse or how many months old he was or any of that stuff. All she wanted to know was his answer to her question about her dad.

Maybe Luke Mitchell had come up with a super-fantastic idea to get Dad out of the house; if he hadn’t, she just didn’t know what she was going to do.

And so, while everyone else was puzzling over stupid maths problems, like how many buckets you’d need to carry a hundred and seven and a half litres of water, Elma spent some time puzzling over her problem family.

She tucked Luke’s letter into her cardigan pocket, and asked to go to the toilet. Mrs Lawrence nodded, and Elma practically ran out of the room. She locked herself into a cubicle and ripped open the envelope. She didn’t bother to admire the notelet with its picture of a stormy sea. She opened it, and skimmed through all the boring stuff. Then she got to the important bit. She read it, and then she read it once more. She couldn’t help feeling disappointed.

Dad write geography books? Fat chance. Dad never even wrote as much as a letter. He couldn’t write a geography book to save his life.

And a quiz? What good was a quiz? And what were the chances of there being a geography quiz conveniently running that her dad could just enter and win. As far as she knew, her dad had never entered a quiz in his life. So, even if there was a quiz, surely he’d just say no. Like he said no to everything else she suggested.

Elma crumpled up the notelet and crammed it into her pocket. She’d been right all along – Luke Mitchell was nothing but a stupid, boastful liar.

That afternoon was free activity time. It was her turn to use the computer, and she was allowed to pick someone to work with her. She went up to Tara.

‘Do you want to do computer with me?’

Tara gave her a funny look. ‘What do you want me for? I’ve noticed how you’ve been avoiding me, you know.’

Elma looked guilty. She was asking Tara because she had no one else to ask. So she smiled her best smile and said, ‘Sorry, Tara. I’ve just been a bit worried about something, that’s all.’

And Tara smiled back, and they both went to log on to the computer.

Tara wanted to go on to a site where you could design your own sports shoes, but Elma hesitated.

‘Do you mind if I try something quick first?’

Tara shrugged, so taking that as permission, Elma opened a search engine, and quickly typed in two words:
Geography Quiz
. She made a face when the search result showed there were 240,000 pages about geography quizzes. Then she tried
Geography Quiz
and
UK
. This brought it down to 30,000 – still not much good.

Tara was starting to look impatient so Elma tried one more time:
Geography Quiz
and
UK
and
radio
. Then she closed her eyes and crossed her fingers and hit enter one more time. This time, there were only a few hundred hits, and the first one almost jumped off the screen and smacked her in the face. She quickly clicked on it and was directed into the BBC
website. There, in the middle of a big red flashing circle, were the magic words:
The Great BBC Geography Quiz. Only
six
more days to enter.

Elma quickly clicked on the words, and was directed to the competition page. Luckily, there was a phone number. She wrote it on the back of her hand, and then read the rest of the instructions:
Just telephone us before April 10th, and answer eight or more of the ten qualifying questions to be eligible for your regional final
.

Tara was puzzled. ‘What’s all this about?’ she asked. ‘Are you planning to enter that quiz? I didn’t know you liked geography that much.’

Elma shook her head. ‘It’s not for me. I’m looking it up for my dad. He loves quizzes, and he really, really wants to enter this one.’ This, of course, wasn’t true, but Elma had made up her mind that her dad was going to enter this quiz whether he wanted to or not. She simply wasn’t going to give him a choice in the matter.

Tara shrugged. ‘Whatever. Now can we do something interesting?’

At lunchtime, Elma was so excited that she didn’t even notice the huge pile of soggy carrots and lumpy gravy that her mum served her. And when school was over, she practically skipped all the way home.
And when Mum and Dad argued over what to have for tea, Elma didn’t even listen.

Then, at about four o’clock, her opportunity arrived. Mum decided to go to the shops, and she took Zac and Dylan with her. As soon as they were gone, Elma took the portable phone into the kitchen, and dialled the competition number. A bored-sounding woman answered.

‘BBC Geography Quiz. Name, please.”

Elma hesitated. ‘Er … em … Elma. Elma Davey.’

The woman suddenly seemed to pay attention. ‘How old are you, Elma?’

‘Eleven – well, nearly twelve.’

‘I’m sorry. You need to be eighteen to enter the quiz. Thank you for calling.’

‘No, wait,’ Elma said before the woman could hang up. ‘It’s not me. It’s my dad who wants to enter.’

‘So why didn’t
he
make the call?

Because he doesn’t want to do anything except lie on the couch and watch TV, and I’m hoping that if I hand him the phone there’s just a teensy weensy chance he won’t argue, and he might answer a few geography questions without thinking too much about it.

She couldn’t say that, though, so she thought quickly and said, ‘Well, he
did
call. But while he was waiting for an answer, my baby sister started to cry,
so he asked me to hold the phone. I think she’s stopped crying now, I’ll go and get him.’

She ran into the TV room, and bravely turned off the television.

Dad glared at her. ‘What the–’

Elma pointed to the phone in her hand, and whispered, ‘It’s a quiz. A geography quiz. You only have to answer ten questions. And they’ll be easy for you, ’cause you’re so good at geography.’

Dad said something under his breath about ‘stupid quizzes’, but Elma smiled to herself as he reached for the phone.

He gave his name, and said yes and no a few times, and then Elma could see by the concentrated look on his face that he was being asked the first question. He wrinkled up his forehead as he thought. ‘Papua, New Guinea,’ he said.

Elma crossed her fingers, and tried to cross her toes, probably impossible for anyone, and certainly impossible for someone wearing too-small trainers.

Then something very strange happened. A smile, something she hadn’t seen on her dad’s face in a very long time, began to lurk at the corners of his mouth. Before she could say anything, he spoke into the phone again. And again. And again.

‘Green.’

‘Seven.’

‘White with pink spots.’

‘The Sumatran hare.’

‘The Brazilian rainforest.’

‘Once a year.’

With each answer, Dad’s smile became broader and broader. Elma hardly dared to breathe. She’d lost count of how many questions he’d answered.

Then he answered three in a row, very quickly.

‘Autumn.’

‘The Zambezi.’

‘The giant armadillo.’

And then Dad jumped up and actually punched the air. Next he made a shaky gesture with his hand that either meant he had completely lost his marbles, or else he wanted Elma to get a pen.

Elma raced into the kitchen, grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper, and ran back to the TV room. Dad took the pen and quickly wrote down a date, a time and an address. Then he clicked off the phone and dropped down heavily on to the couch, where he sat with a huge grin on his face. He didn’t even reach for the remote. He spoke, half to himself, and half to Elma.

‘Ten out of ten I got. She said that’s very rare. She sounded like she was really impressed. And now I’m in the regional final. It’s the BBC. Imagine me, Michael
Davey, on BBC radio. Whoever would have thought?’

Then he stopped and thought for a minute, and the smile vanished from his face. He put his head in his hands and groaned. ‘How could I be so stupid? What was I thinking of? That can’t have been a real quiz. It must have been some prankster. Why on earth would the BBC phone me?’

Elma jumped up, desperate to get her dad smiling again. ‘Actually, Dad, they didn’t phone you.’

Dad shook his head sadly. ‘I knew it. A stupid wind-up. I just knew it. I–’

Elma rushed to correct him. ‘No, Dad, it’s not a wind-up. It’s real. But they didn’t phone you.
I
phoned
them
.’

Dad looked at her with a puzzled expression on her face. ‘But why would you do that?’

She spoke in a rush. ‘Because I saw it on the Internet. And there were only six days left. And I wanted you to enter. And I knew you’d say no. And I knew you’d win. And …’ Her voice trailed off, and then she spoke softly. ‘I just wanted you to do it, that’s all.’

And Dad smiled at her, and rubbed her cheek, and for the first time in a very long time it looked like, maybe, just maybe, things were going to get better.

When Mum came home and heard the news, she
and Dad hugged, and that was such an unusual sight that Zac and Dylan got all giddy, and danced around, and Elma thought that if things went on like this it would be sooo embarrassing, but at least it would be an improvement, and so she joined in the dancing too, and all the Daveys were happy at the same time.

There were only a few rows that night, and they were small ones. And things weren’t perfect over the next week or two, but they were a whole lot better than before.

A week later, when Mrs Lawrence said there was only one day left to send off the next penfriend letter, Elma remembered that she’d been so busy not being unhappy that she’d forgotten to thank Luke Mitchell. So that night she sat down and tried to decide what she should say. She thought of telling Luke the truth at last, but she couldn’t really figure out a good way to do it.

How could she say – thanks for giving me such a great idea that might well change my life, and by the way, I spend most of my time thinking you are stupid? Oh, and by the way again, I’ve told you nothing but lies since September?

And so she began to write.