Arching a brow, I peer beneath hooded eyes. ‘Aren’t you going to work?’ I counter.
‘When are you going to stop doing this?’ Joe’s voice is strained. And unhappy. His unhappiness hurts me too. Still, he was the one who set me on this path to find my mother.
He’s being downright unfair. My head jerks up. I suck my breath in at his appearance. His red eyes behind the lenses of his glasses look as tired as I feel. His face is waxy and pale. I’m horrified by the way he looks, but the words are already tipping out of my mouth. ‘I know exactly what to get you for your birthday. A shovel.’
His face screws up. ‘What?’
I shouldn’t say it, but I do. ‘So, you can dig. Because that’s what you keep doing, having a dig at me any chance you get.’
‘That’s unfair.’ Joe’s nostrils flare.
I’m on my feet. ‘You were the one that encouraged me to look for my mother, to meet Danny.’
He yells back, ‘And I wish I hadn’t. That Miriam—’ His lips smack together tight.
‘That Miriam what?’
He throws his hands in the air. ‘I was going to say that you didn’t have to go to the police station to bail your newly discovered sister out of jail. But, hey, that’s just me digging again.’
Head shaking, jaw twisted and tight, Joe stalks out of the kitchen. I hate this. I had visions that when I began to look for my mother Joe would be right there at my side. I can’t stop now, not even for Joe.
I turn back to the computer and spend the next hour trying to find anything I can on Pretty Lanes. Nothing comes up. In between I call Miriam and she’s a no-show too. After a while I start to worry about Miriam; she looked so ill last night and was also behaving oddly.
I call Danny. ‘She won’t answer her phone and she wasn’t well last night.’
‘I haven’t seen her since I had the great pleasure of springing her out of prison.’
‘I’m worried about her.’
How can he be so casual? Eventually he tells me, ‘She’s probably gone AWOL again.’
‘AWOL?’ My annoyance shows.
‘Vanishing trick,’ Danny clarifies. ‘She does them all the time. One minute she’s here, the next she’s not.’
‘And when that happens aren’t you concerned about her? Where she is?’
My mind rewinds back to the first time I went to Danny’s for dinner. To the portrait of a happy family basking in the sunshine in the back garden. Chatting, laughing, talking. Boats and swans drifting by. The squawking chatter of the ducks flying overhead. Everything was so seamless. But that’s the thing with families. Seamless simply hides all the cracks. And the crack I never saw that day was between Miriam and her father until their big bust-up on the street.
I hear the clink of what must be Danny’s teacup. ‘Let me tell you about the day that Miriam was born. The expectation and joy of being a father for the first time was like nothing I have ever experienced on this earth.’ His tone changes. ‘Then the worry set in because the baby wouldn’t come. All kind of things ran through my head; my poor baby is the wrong way round, she has the cord tied around her neck.’
Wincing, I unconsciously rub my neck. Danny carries on. ‘Thank God it was none of the above. Despite the baby being in position she just wouldn’t come. Then my wife was in medical distress.’ A long-drawn stretch of air sounds down the line. ‘I thought she was going to die. Finally, Miriam made her grand entrance into the world.’
I hear Danny get up. ‘The way Miriam arrived is the way she’s lived her life. Going about her business regardless of the distress it causes the people who love her the most.’
‘Do you have any idea where she might be?’
‘If she’s not at her flat, she’ll be in some fleapit drug den or squat. Anywhere she can cower in the dark while she sticks a needle filled with poison into her arm.’
Shock hits me at his matter-of-fact delivery. The way he just doesn’t seem to care. ‘I thought she was off the drugs. That that was all in the past?’
Danny flatly throws back, ‘Once a junkie, always a junkie.’
How callous and cruel. Or maybe he’s been there one too many times with Miriam and just can’t go back there.
‘I wish I could talk for longer,’ he says. I imagine him sweeping the subject of his daughter away with a full-on smile. ‘I’ve got people to see.’
The line goes dead.