Girl Next Door - Alyssa Brugman [47]
Declan stops. 'What about this one? This number has been called a lot. Five minutes, then twenty-three minutes, then ten minutes. I know this number. Where do I know it from? Look, I can say it without even looking.' He rattles it off twice. 'Why would you have a number on your phone bill that I know so well?'
'Maybe it's in an ad? Maybe it's Pizza Eatza?'
He keeps repeating the number. He makes a song of it, until I crumple up an old envelope and throw it at his head. 'Why don't you just ring it?' I ask.
'I thought we were after the number for this Heather woman? I've never rung her, so that wouldn't be it.' He flicks the bill over and looks at the back. 'My mum has this big thing about the phone company ripping us off. When the bill comes in she goes through every number with a ruler under each line, and she writes down numbers she doesn't recognise in a little book that she keeps in her handbag. How weird is that? I've seen her ringing numbers to find out what they are, which is stupid because then on the next bill, her calling the number will come up as a two-second call, and then she'll be all suspicious of that. Sometimes I think she needs a job.'
'Let's try this one.'
Declan hands me his mobile.
Suddenly there's a voice attached to this Heather person, who had been merely a concept. In my head she's mid-twenties, blonde and goes to the gym, because that's what all home-wrecking secretaries look like, isn't it? But she doesn't sound like that. Heather must be older. She just sounds tired.
I put on the face that my mum used to call bolshie – back when Mum said things, before she was the chainsmoking, monosyllabic, trailer-park lady. I say in a bolshie voice, 'I wanna talk to my dad.'
Heather doesn't say Who is this? or any of the things I had been preparing myself for. I just hear her cover the mouthpiece and then after a few moments my dad's there.
'Yes, Jenna-Belle, what is it?'
I take a deep breath. 'You can't just answer the phone with "Yes, what is it?" as if we saw each other half an hour ago – as if I'm a nuisance.'
Then I told Dad about the sheriff. I skipped the part about our siege. I also skipped the part about the hotel, and went straight to the part where the whisperer was clinging onto the side of the caravan like a monkey. I told him what they said. I used the swear words. I told him how Willem was the squeaky wheel.
My dad didn't speak, but I could tell he was there because he had a whistle in his nose that came through the phone. That made me all choked up in the neck, because when I was small and my dad had a whistle in his nose, I used to ask him to play me a tune. He always did, and it was always 'Good King Wenceslas'.
With my choked-up voice I told him about the passport and how I had pictured him creeping out past his children and pregnant wife.
'What do you have to say about that?' I said. 'What are you going to do about it? Are you just going to pretend we don't exist?'
There was a space where his nose whistled for a while.
'And besides, yelling at the woman from the electricity company is not being proactive. A squeaky wheel is not proactive. It's the opposite, because if it had been taken care of properly, then it wouldn't be squeaky, would it? You know what would have been proactive? If you'd bought a generator, or windmill, or something.'
'Jenna-Belle, you need to understand something important,' Dad said. 'After you were born I had a vasectomy.'
'A what?' I said, but I knew what that word meant. 'No . . .'
So now Dad's lying around on the lounge crying while Mum gave me the little-brother-or-sister speech made a bit more sense.
'They can come undone, you know,' I add.
'It didn't come undone.'
'Oh.' I hang up the phone and sit for a while cross-legged on the floor not saying anything at all, until the suspense sends Declan insane.
'What did he say?'
'Dad had the snip.'
Declan stares at me. 'Then who . . .?'
'Yes, that's