The Queen of New Beginnings (10 page)

It was a mortifying realization to discover that your father wasn’t normal.

Nothing could have proved Rufus and Natasha’s point more than when Alice’s father woke them early one morning during the Christmas holiday and announced that he was taking them on a mystery outing. “I’m not going anywhere,” Rufus muttered crossly. He caved in when Alice and Tasha, unaccountably consumed with excitement, bounced on his bed and begged him to come with them.

“It won’t be any fun without you,” Tasha pleaded.

“No dice,” he mumbled in a muffled voice from beneath his pillow. “I’ve got revision to do for my mocks.”

“Please come,” Alice tried, “you know how silly my father can be. He’ll behave himself if you’re with us.”

His hair sticking up all over his head, Rufus emerged from under his pillow. “God you’re right, Alice. Who knows what danger he’ll put you both in without a responsible adult around?”

Alice was shocked that she’d resorted to such a tactic, reinforcing Rufus’s view that her father was a dangerous lunatic, but at the same time she was delighted that Rufus would be joining them.

Julia declined to come, claiming she wasn’t feeling well; a headache. She suffered from a lot of headaches these days. The kind that meant she had to spend hours and hours alone in her sanctuary. She waved them off with a fluttery hand.

Alice had been on many mystery outings with her father. There were two that stuck in her mind. The day after her sixth birthday he had driven her to London. Except, of course, she hadn’t had a clue where they were going because that was all part of the game. On this particular trip, when excitement had eventually given way to tiredness, she had fallen asleep on the back seat of the car. When she woke up her father was pointing out of the window and saying, “Look, Alice, there’s Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament.” London. She was in
London!
Her father often visited with his work, as did her mother, but it was her father who had promised to bring her one day. And now he had.

They had driven round and round. She saw Buckingham Palace, The Royal Albert Hall, Trafalgar Square, Nelson’s Column, Downing Street, and a man peeing in the gutter. That was her abiding memory. It was what she rushed to tell her mother when, gone midnight, they arrived home. “Mummy, Mummy,” she blurted out, “I saw a man doing a number one in the street!”

“It wasn’t your father, was it?” her mother had asked. Then in a hissy voice that Alice knew she wasn’t supposed to hear and which immediately took the shine off the day, her mother had said to her father, “Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were taking off for the day? I didn’t have a clue where you were. I was worried.”

A long time later, Alice couldn’t remember precisely when or exactly where they had gone, but her father had taken her to Scotland. They had driven for what seemed like for ever and all she could really remember of the trip was that her father had stopped for petrol on the motorway and bought two cans of Coke, a large box of Quality Street and some egg and cress sandwiches which were gritty with eggshell. He had thrown them out of the window in disgust only to have a car overtake, driven by a woman who was gesticulating angrily at him—one of the sandwiches had glued itself to her bonnet. Alice and her father had laughed collusively; her father had even waved back at the irate woman. He had also bought a cassette at the motorway service station and played it on a continuous loop throughout the long journey there and back. Alice’s head had been spinning with songs by the Bee Gees when they eventually arrived home.

They never got out of the car when they reached their destination; they just cruised around, leaning out of the car window whenever there was something of interest to look at. Her father said the point of the outing had nothing to do with their final destination; it was all about the journey.

In the car now, on a bitterly cold December morning, Rufus in the front with her father—he’d bought a biology textbook with him to revise from—and Alice and Tasha in the back with a picnic hamper, Alice wasn’t feeling as excited as she had been earlier when she’d been bouncing on Rufus’s bed. She was feeling nauseous with anxiety. What if Tasha and Rufus didn’t enjoy the outing? What if they didn’t understand?

Then a worse thought occurred to her. What if
she
didn’t understand anymore? What if it would prove to be just a boring long drive somewhere? She realized then that it could never be like it used to be. She wasn’t a young child anymore; she and Tasha were fourteen and Rufus was seventeen. Why hadn’t she tried to stop her father? It was all going to go horribly wrong. The day would turn out to be a disaster.

She closed her eyes and willed her father somehow to make the trip special.

Fifteen minutes into the journey and the day really was destined to be a disaster.

It started when Rufus’s Nirvana cassette jammed in the tape player, just as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” started. He tried to eject it and when it got stuck—half in, half out—he yanked on it only to end up with the cassette in his hand and the tape unwinding inside the machine. He swore loudly, left the cassette dangling and threw himself back in his seat. He kicked at the dashboard. Not once, but twice.

“Hey, watch the car!” The Jaguar, like the one Inspector Morse drove around in, was Dad’s pride and joy. Yet as much as he loved driving it, he never cleaned or polished it; his love didn’t stretch that far. Instead, once a month he took it to a garage where it was cleaned inside and out. Occasionally, he’d just go and sit in it. It was where he liked to think, he said.

“Why should I?” retaliated Rufus. “It’s a bloody wreck, this car. It should be crushed for scrap metal. My father wouldn’t have been seen dead in a heap like this.”

“Then it’s a good thing he’s been spared the ignominy by dying so conveniently.”

“You bastard!”

Alice’s father laughed nastily. “Takes one to know one.” He then wound down his window and chucked out Rufus’s Nirvana cassette. But, of course, it was still attached to the tape machine and wasn’t going anywhere far. It clattered noisily against the outside of the car.

“You mad crazy bastard!” yelled Rufus. He gave the dashboard another vicious kick and the glove compartment popped open. Out fell a magazine. Rufus leaned forward to pick it up. From where she was sitting in the back, Alice saw exactly what kind of magazine it was. Her face turned the colour of beetroot.

Quick as a flash, her father snatched the magazine out of Rufus’s hands and threw that the way of the cassette. The cassette was still clattering frantically against the side of the car, somewhere near the back of it now. It sounded like someone knocking desperately to get in with them.
Let me in! Let me in!

Let me out, thought Alice miserably.

Rufus smirked. “Anything else you want to throw out of the window, my pervy stepdad?”

“Yeah, you!”

“You realize, don’t you, that my silence will cost you?”

“Rufus, dear boy, just so as you know, on the outside I might look the picture of cool composure but on the inside you’re making me shake with fear.”

“Oh, go to hell!”

Fraught with the need to intervene, to make the awful atmosphere go away, Alice leaned forward. “Dad, can we stop please?”

“Why?” he snapped.

“We need to rescue Rufus’s cassette or it will ruin the paintwork on your car.”

Her father looked at her in the rear-view mirror. “Good thought, Alice. At least someone cares about my car.”

Luckily Tasha had missed the entire exchange—she was listening to Take That on her Walkman with her eyes closed—and only opened them when the car came to a stop. “Are we here, then?” She asked, removing the headphones from her ears.

“No such bloody luck,” Rufus muttered.

Alice got out of the car and retrieved the tangled mess of tape. She bundled it up and passed it to her father, who then shoved it unceremoniously onto Rufus’s lap.

“What happened to that?” asked Tasha.

“Mr. Temper-Temper here happened, that’s what!” Rufus said through gritted teeth.

• • •

They had been driving for an hour when they ran out of petrol and ground to a halt in a deserted country lane.

An empty tank wasn’t Alice’s father’s immediate thought. Cursing and swearing, he marched round to the front of the car and threw open the bonnet.

Nobody inside the car moved.

“It’s turning out to be quite a day, isn’t it?” Rufus said. His voice was heavy with sarcasm. “Does your father have the first idea about engines, Alice?”

“Um…I’m not really sure.”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

Five minutes later and the reason for the breakdown became clear: they were out of petrol—or gas, as Alice’s father, for some strange reason, liked to call it.

“And naturally you’ve got an emergency can of petrol in the boot?” Rufus enquired. He managed to make his question sound both helpful and mockingly sceptical.

“Why don’t we have our picnic now?” Alice intervened once more. She knew very well there was about as much chance of there being an emergency can of petrol in the boot as there was of Rufus ever thinking well of her father. Or of Rufus ever loving her in the way she desperately wanted him to.

Wiping his oily hands on the front of his jeans, her father smiled. “As a matter of fact, Rufus, I do have an emergency supply of gas. Yeah, I thought that would wipe the smirk off your pretty-boy face.”

Bowled over with surprise, Alice felt like hugging her father. She stepped out of the car and went round to the boot with him to see if she could help.

Under a tatty, oiled-stained tartan blanket, there was a red metal can. “Thank goodness for that,” she said.

“Don’t tell me you doubted me, Alice?”

“Of course not, Dad.”

He grinned and unscrewed the black cap. He peered inside the can, then shook it. “Oh, shit!” he said. “It’s empty.”

“No!” she cried. “It can’t be!” She snatched it from him and shook it herself.

“Sorry, Alice. Looks like I’ve ruined the day.”

She swallowed back something that felt like tearful anger. “Couldn’t you walk to the nearest garage and get it filled?”

He scratched his head, looked about him vaguely. “I could, I suppose.” Frowning and surveying the deserted road to his right and to his left, he scratched his head some more as if weighing up the pros and cons of her suggestion. Then: “Can you cover for me?”

“How do you mean?”

“Tell smart arse Rufus that…that there was a dead mouse in the can and we couldn’t use it. You’re good with stories; you’ll easily convince him.”

“He’s not a smart arse, Dad.” Her tone was tight and defensive.

Her father looked at her doubtfully and shrugged. “If you say so. Right, I’ll be off.”

“Haven’t you brought a coat?”

He wrinkled his nose. “Didn’t think I’d need one.”

“But it’s freezing.”

It was; the sky was grey and low with the threat of snow. Two minutes out of the car and she was shivering with cold.

“I’ll be fine. Tootle-pip!”

Alice watched him saunter off, the empty can swinging from his arm. She then got back into the relative warmth of the Jag.

“So,” Rufus said with weighty emphasis. “Just as I suspected, we have a zero fuel situation.”

“There was a dead mouse in the can,” Alice replied without hesitation. “It would have been dangerous to use the petrol when it was contaminated. It would have ruined the engine.”

Rufus slowly turned round to face her. His face was dark and hopelessly handsome. “And just how did the mouse get into the can in the first place?” he asked. “Was the lid not screwed on properly?”

Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! She wanted to shout at him. Stop making me choose between you and my father! To her horror and shame she burst into tears.

“Now see what you’ve done!” Tasha said. She put her arm around Alice, which made her cry all the more.

“I’m sorry, Alice,” Rufus said. “Really I am. Don’t make the day any worse for me than it already is by crying. I couldn’t stand that.”

“Shut up, Rufus!”

“I’m…I’m sorry,” Alice blubbed with confused embarrassment. She couldn’t recall every crying in front of anyone. “I don’t…I don’t even know why I’m crying.”

“I expect it’s just that time of the month for you,” Rufus said matter of factly. “It’s well known that women lose all sense of proportion when—”

“
RUFUS!
” said Tasha. “If you don’t shut up, I swear to God, I will personally throttle you.” Then more gently, she said, “Alice, how about something to eat from the picnic? That’ll make you feel better, won’t it?”

Calmer now, Alice managed a small nod. She found a tissue tucked inside her sleeve and blew her nose loudly. “Sorry,” she said again. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“I do,” Tasha said with a laugh. “My brother did. He can be a right pain at times. Isn’t that true, Rufus?”

Rufus snorted a laugh and smiled wickedly. “Me, oh, I’m a total tosser. Take no notice, Alice. Here, come and sit in the front with me. Tasha can act as waitress and serve us from the back, which is, of course, just where she belongs. And since there’s no heat, perhaps it would be a good idea if we put on our coats, girls.”

Alice did as Rufus said; she put on her coat and slipped into the driver’s seat. Just as Tasha had done moments before, Rufus put his arm around her. “There, that’s better, isn’t it?”

She didn’t know what he was really referring to, but everything did indeed now feel better. “I’m sorry about your cassette,” she said.

He cast a casual glance in the direction of the footwell where his Nirvana cassette now lay in a tangled mess. “No worries, I can easily replace it. It’s no big deal.”

“And I’m sorry about my father. He doesn’t mean half the things he says.”

“I’m not so sure about that. But you have to admit, his behaviour is not that of a normal sane man, is it? He’s a destructive force if you want my honest opinion. I’m just glad he’s not my real father. But none of that’s your fault, Alice, so no more apologizing.” He put a finger to her chin and turned her face towards him. He stared intently at her, his gaze piercing right through her. “OK?”