Scarlett - Cathy Cassidy [8]
I write a text message. Kidnapped and sent 2 Ireland. Please help. I press send.
The conveyor belt creaks into life and luggage starts tumbling down on to the carousel, black bags and brown bags and fancy plaid bags, suitcases and rucksacks and finally my old case. I let it circle the carousel three times before dragging it off the conveyor belt and on to a trolley and by then all the other passengers have gone.
It’s only when I turn to start pushing the trolley that I see a familiar figure in the distance, watching me. I miss my footing for a moment, and have to grab on to the trolley. It’s just these stupid sandals – walking on three-inch wedges is never a picnic.
He’s coming towards me. There’s nowhere I can hide, and that’s not fair, because Mum said he’d meet me by the main exit. He’s not allowed to turn up here, when I’m still tired and rumpled from the journey. I am not ready for this.
‘Scarlett!’ he says. ‘I waited a while and you didn’t appear, so I thought I’d come and find you. Couldn’t wait to see you!’
I fix my face into a cold, blank mask and refuse to look at him. He touches my arm and I shake him off furiously. How dare he touch me? How dare he?
‘OK, Scarlett, OK,’ he says softly, the way you’d talk to a startled pony or an unruly puppy. He grabs my case and swings it off the trolley, striding through the hall and out to the car park where his old Morris Traveller is sitting, a stupid, ugly, ancient car from about a hundred years ago. It actually has strips of wood round the windows and doors, like something out of The Flintstones.
He dumps my suitcase on to the back seat, so I have no choice but to sit in the front beside him. The car smells of warm leather and Polo mints, just like it always did. He turns the key and the engine shudders to life, sounding like a small tractor and moving only very slightly faster. It is easily the most embarrassing car in the whole universe.
‘Right then,’ says Dad. ‘Let’s go home.’
Think of a girl, a skinny, grinny ten-year-old girl with curly brown hair and freckles and the kind of giggle you can hear a mile away. That was me. I was pretty I was popular, I worked hard at school – yes, me. Seriously.
I was pretty much your typical middle-class, over-achieving London kid, with classes every night of the week, from karate and keyboards to drama and ballet.
I lived in a three-bedroom house in Islington with Mum and Dad, and I dreamt of having my own pony, shiny-black with a white blaze on its forehead. I planned to turn the garage into a stable, turn the backyard over to grass. I was going to call my pony Star and braid its mane with ribbons and feed it hay that smelt of summer and happiness. Together, we’d win horse shows and races and cross-country trials, collecting rosettes and trophies.
‘One day, Scarlett,’ Dad used to say. ‘When we live in the country. Imagine it – chickens, a veggie patch, room for a pony…’
‘Don’t encourage her,’ Mum would snap. ‘We’re not moving anywhere. You can’t have a pony in central London, Scarlett. How about a hamster?’ In the end I got two rabbits, Coco and Fudge, who lived in a hutch in the garden.
Mum worked late most nights even then, but Dad was self-employed, so that didn’t matter. He ran a web-design business, working from home, so he was always around to pick me up from school, take me to classes, heat up frozen pizza if my mates came round for a sleepover and pretend not to notice if we sat up past midnight, eating ice cream in bed.
He was a cool dad – embarrassing, sure, but cool. I didn’t mind the Morris Traveller back then, not even when Dad called it Woody in front of my mates and pretended it was farting every time the engine backfired. I didn’t mind when we went to eat out and he sat at the dinner table balancing a spoon on the end of his nose, not even that time it fell off into his soup and splashed his shirt with Cream of Tomato and Basil. So what?
I was just about the luckiest girl alive, and I didn’t even know it.
Dad moved out just after my tenth birthday. He’d met someone