Surly leans in close enough for us to catch the surprisingly pleasant scent of perfume and cigarettes.
“One fork per order only and the free refills is only for a family party who get the lunchtime special. Not timewasters and broken biscuits who haven’t got nothing better to do with themselves than hang around here making one order last all day.”
A crescent-moon smile spreads across Holly’s impish face.
“Ooh, you’re good! Nicola, is it? You’re GOOD!” She starts scribbling in the book.
Taken aback by Holly’s apparent delight, Surly straightens up, gives a derisory snort and stalks off.
“Thank you!” Holly calls after her with a wave. She turns to me, still beaming, before doing her best Professor Higgins, “By George, I think she’s got it!” She turns the notebook round. The entire list of band names has been scratched out and underneath in letters as big as her grin she has written THE BROKEN BISCUITS.
Before long we’re laughing and the world almost feels the right way round again. Pirate can do that to a person.
We stumble out of the café and take the bus up the coast. As we bump along, Hol gives a particularly animated account of her escape from double maths and a life in which she might have grown up understanding long division.
We end up in a little village a couple of miles out of town. Its selection of shops is pretty odd – a tearoom, a fancy dress shop and a newsagent that also sells reproduction antiques. Somehow Holly convinces the owner of the fancy dress place that we are fashion students looking for kitsch accessories for our end of term show. We spend an hour trying things on. Wigs, feather boas, clown noses, witches’ hats…In the end we buy a pair of cat ears (me) and rabbit ones (her). We add them to our disguises, Holly promising to return to buy more “when we’re closer to curtain up.” There’s nowhere else to go and no more money. So we walk down to find a bench on the freezing beach and split a packet of bubblegum.
Glad once told me there is actually no definitive line where the sea ends and the sky begins. They are made of the same thing. I didn’t understand at the time but today I know just what she means. I can feel the sea in the air, like silk. We watch the waves throw themselves one by one on to the sand, each trying to escape the sea. Failing. That’s how the tide comes in, I suppose.
Still in our comedy ears and sunnies, we sit huddled together blowing orange bubbles that look like plastic Halloween pumpkins. We hunch together in the cold for a long time, looking out to sea as if we’re waiting for a ship of loons to come and rescue us, to take us to a place where people wear rabbit ears and sunglasses every day and love music as much as we do. I think about Operation Awesome – Pirate’s the kind of person who’s just about mad enough to manage to make that happen. I need her help with something else. I take a deep breath, the damp February air is cold enough to sting my teeth.
“I think I need to find my dad.”
Hol’s bubble freezes mid blow, then she sucks it back in thoughtfully, bursting it with a smacking sound.
“Is this cos of the wedding?”
“Yeah, kind of. I mean, I’ve always wanted to know who he is. But in a way, not knowing was cool before. Like, he could be anyone. He could be Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt or something. Stupid.”
She smiles and resumes chewing. “It’s not stupid. I used to wish I was adopted for the same reason. Then I realised that it was unlikely my mam would have wanted to adopt, like, her fifth baby when the others were still little. Unless my dad actually had been Brad Pitt. He loves that kind of thing.”
I roll my eyes at her. “Ha ha. The thing is, now that Ray’s going to be my stepdad, I care. He’s taking my dad’s place. Whoever he is. But I can’t do this on my own. I’m going to need help. From you.”
“Of course! Mi casa su casa!”
“Thanks, Hol. I don’t think ‘mi casa su casa’ actually means—”
She cuts me off, pointedly blowing a bubble in my direction. “Does when I say it. What about your mum?”
“Useless. Everything she says about when she was young contradicts everything else. All I know is, she lived in London, she was going to be the next Kate Moss and then…”
POP.
“Have you ever just, like asked? WHO IS MY FATHER?”
“I can’t.”
“Pourquoi pas?”
“I just kind of…can’t. She doesn’t want me to.”
“How do you know?”
“Just do.”
“OK, dude. I’m on board. We now have two projects. Operation Awesome and Operation Who’s-the-Daddy?” She grins. I frown at her.
“Do we have to call it that?”
“Yes,” she says finally, before unfurling a bubble the size of a space-hopper between us. We get my MP3 player out of my bag and take a headphone each. I scroll through to a really old album I just discovered. Marquee Moon by Television. Apparently they are the band who invented punk, which is funny because they totally look like teachers. My favourite track comes on, Friction. Tom Verlaine starts screaming, “I don’t wanna grow up/There’s too much contradiction!” and looking up at the sky I feel like gravity could just switch off and I could step out into it. In my other ear the sea keeps breathing. Wave. Wave. Wave. Keep trying.
On the bus back, I think about Mum crying sometimes when I was little. Wet eyes and a big smile on my birthday. Hiding it but not very well. I heard her at night sometimes, through the bedroom wall. The day after something bad had happened, when she wouldn’t get up. She always said it was a headache but I stopped believing that ages ago. The answer I need is underneath those tears. I have always known not to ask. About any of it. Suddenly it strikes me that I haven’t heard her cry for a while. Definitely not since…I push the thought back down. He’s an idiot. And he’s not my dad.
The bus drops us back at the stop outside The Blue. It’s quarter past three and already it’s beginning to get dark. Navy spreads through the empty sky like ink in water. Hol fluffs her hair with the back of her hand and stares into the dimly lit café window, half at her own reflection, half through it trying to catch a glimpse of Dan Ashton. “Want to come to mine?”
“Nah. I’d better go home.”
My stomach gives a little lurch at the thought. Holly notices and gives me another conciliatory pat.
“OK soldier. Listen, tomorrow we begin a new phase. We have a name. We are the Broken Biscuits. I think it’s time Operation Awesome went overground.”
“Meaning?”
“We start recruiting. This isn’t a two-woman operation. We need band members. At least two more.”
I salute. “Yes sir.”
I hug Hol and watch her stride away purposefully. I suppose I’d better get home before anyone notices I’m gone.
I arrive back to an empty house. Mum is still down in the salon and Ray…he’s probably teaching some business-dude to pretend he’s a tiger so he can go in and ‘kill it’ at his presentation tomorrow. Lame-a-rama. I try to imagine him actually living here, bursting through the door with a “Honey, I’m home!” every evening, like a character from a bad sitcom. It’s the end. No more TV nights, lounging around in our pyjamas watching films. No more Pizza Wednesdays. No more Mum practising salon treatments on the pair of us, candles and wine glass balanced on the side of the bath; The Pixies on the stereo. The bathroom will probably stink now. Man-stink. In fact that’s the best way to describe Ray’s arrival – a bad smell emanating through