Blue Like Friday Read online

  Larry doesn’t drink. Let’s face it, Larry is not one of nature’s rebels.

  But my parents don’t believe this. They believe all that stuff they read in the papers about Teenage Drinking. Larry is not exactly what you would call a typical teenager. I probably will be, when I get to that age. I will most likely be a total handful, get studs everywhere, wear the most way-out things, listen to really objectionable music. I will drive my parents up the walls. They’ve had it easy with Larry. They won’t know what hit them. I am looking forward to it.

  I got a list of instructions too, of course, before they left for the airport, about how I wasn’t to open the door to strangers, and I wasn’t to light any fires or leave the cooker turned on and how they’d be right back as soon as Larry’s plane boarded. I waved them off at the front door, and as soon as they’d left, I leaped onto my bike and scooted over to Hal’s.

  My kooky friend, I said to myself as I rode out of our estate; along the main road; past the Centra shop; around the corner into Hal’s estate; past all the nice, calm-looking gardens with their flower beds and their little gates with notices about BEWARE OF THE DOG and their WELCOME mats on the doorsteps and wishing wells in the middle of the lawns—all those houses with their curtains closed and sensible people inside them in their beds, which is where I should have been. My weird friend. Rosemarie and Gilda were beginning to look much more acceptable. At least they wouldn’t have me up at the crack of dawn bicycling around town on a mad escapade like this. They wouldn’t have the imagination for it to start with.

  Hal was waiting for me at his gate, looking pale and anxious, with his bike.

  Alec’s painter’s van stood in the driveway, a little white van with a ladder on the roof rack and ALEXANDER DEN-HAM INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR PAINTWORK NO JOB TOO SMALL painted on the side of it in rainbow colors.

  “Hi, Hal!” I called.

  Hal made a zipping signal across his mouth to shut me up, and he indicated that I was to dismount.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked in a loud whisper.

  “Nothing,” he whispered back. “But he’s up already. We haven’t much of a head start, so we have to dash, OK?”

  I nodded.

  “Right,” said Hal throatily, “wheel your bike quietly to the end of the road, and then we’ll cycle from there.”

  I nodded again. I am so cooperative, really. And away we went. Against my better judgment.

  There wasn’t much traffic about early on a Saturday morning, so we made good headway by cycling like mad. Every time a car came up behind us, Hal turned around to check if it was Alec, but it never was.

  “Maybe he’s not going to do it,” I yelled at Hal when we stopped at the traffic lights in town. “Maybe he doesn’t want to. Maybe your mother has made him go to the golf thing with her after all. Who’s supposed to be minding you, by the way?”

  “I mind myself,” Hal said.

  “You don’t!”

  “Yeah, I do. Unless it’s nighttime. Come on, Olivia,” he suddenly yelled, spurting ahead as the lights changed to green. “Keep up!”

  I jumped onto my pedals, and I kept churning all the way over to the hospital. We got off at the gate and I hung over my handlebars, trying to get my breath back after our crazy bike ride.

  The hospital is a big, sprawling place with blue railings and a lot of low, flat-roofed buildings. Just inside the gate, on the left, is a large notice board with signs in different colors that point you to the various departments, and on the right, before the notice board, is a glass kiosk sort of thing, with a security man in it. There’s a red-and-orange striped pole that goes across the gate, so you can’t get in unless the security man raises it.

  As soon as I could talk, I said, “Well, are you sure he got the message?”

  Hal was pretty winded too. “I think he must’ve,” he gasped. He breathed a bit and then he went on. “There was an ALMIGHTY row this morning. My mother threw her shoes out the window.”

  “Why?” I wondered if maybe he’d put stones in her shoes as well.

  “I have no idea. Anyway, she came down in her bare feet and her new outfit, and she jumped into her car and zoomed off to her golf tournament without even having any breakfast.”

  This house was beginning to sound odder and odder. I mean, it’s one thing to start turning a garage into a playroom and then go off the idea. It’s another thing to start threatening an odd little squirt like Hal with six years of compulsory rugby and another thing again to throw your shoes out the window because someone won’t take you to a game of golf. Maybe they were always flinging things out of the windows. Maybe they did worse than that.

  “Oh, Hal,” I said.

  “So, you see, Olivia?”

  I did kind of see. His family certainly seemed a bit peculiar, I have to say. I started to feel a bit sorry for Hal, and there’s only one of him too, which makes it harder. Larry would not be my idea of a person to spend the rest of my life on a desert island with, but if the chips were down, we’d stick together, me and Lar. Poor old Hal had no one. Only me.

  “But, Hal, you know, you can’t mess with grown-ups. They always win in the end.”

  Hal shrugged.

  We were just locking our bikes to a railing, out of sight behind a parked car on the other side of the road from the hospital gate, when Alec’s little white van appeared at the end of the road, and there was Alec hunched over the steering wheel, looking right and left before turning into the road we were on.

  To be fair to Hal, Alec wouldn’t exactly be my idea of someone I’d like to meet at breakfast every day from now until I was old enough to leave home. He’s a bit—ferrety And his face is shiny. I don’t know what it is about shiny faces, but they give me the creeps.

  I’m sorry if you have a shiny face and you are reading this. You are probably a lovely person, and you most likely have compensating features, such as not being ferrety. Having an aversion to shiny faces probably says more about me than it does about the person with the shiny face, but anyway, Alec is a man with a shiny face, there is no getting away from it.

  We crouched down behind the parked cars and watched. It should have been adventurous, but I just felt a bit lightheaded from cycling all that way with no breakfast, and a bit panicky, too, about what was going to happen next.

  Alec drove right up to the orange barrier. We could see him pointing and gesticulating and the security man scratching his head, but eventually the red-and-orange pole went up, and the little white van drove in. It stopped at the big notice, and then it turned right, in the direction of the physiotherapy department.

  “You know, Hal,” I said, watching the little white van disappearing around a building. “I can’t see this all ending in divorce, somehow.”

  “They’re not married,” Hal said, “so they can’t be divorced.”

  “No, but it doesn’t matter what you call it. The thing is, Hal, kids can’t make adults break up. This isn’t going to work. And it’ll be boarding school for you in September if you don’t start talking to him.”

  Hal didn’t answer. He just crossed the road to the hospital entrance and took a look around. I trailed along after him, still trying to reason with him, but he wasn’t listening.

  There was a separate little gate for pedestrians. We could just saunter in without having to go near the security man, if we left the bikes outside. But it was about six hours until visiting time. If we met someone who wanted to know our business, I didn’t know how we were going to explain what we were doing wandering around the hospital grounds at this hour of the day.

  “Maybe we should just wait here for a while,” I said. “It won’t take him long to discover it’s all been a hoax, and then he’ll just have to turn around and come out again. Then we can go home.”

  “Yeah, OK,” said Hal. He sounded a bit deflated.

  We sat on the hospital wall and kicked our heels against it. It was a low brick wall, with prickly things growing behind it, but if you sat carefully, you
could avoid getting scratched.

  My tummy was rumbling.

  “I could murder a doughnut,” I said after a while.

  “Stop,” said Hal. “You’re making it worse by talking about food.”

  Time ticked on.

  “The kind with jam in the middle are my favorite,” I said. “Though I like the ring ones if they have icing on them. And sprinkles.”

  “Olivia! Shut it!”

  “Half a dozen doughnuts,” I said after a while. “A mountain of doughnuts. I’m starving.”

  “Stop!” said Hal. His tummy was rumbling too. I could hear it.

  I checked my watch. “Hal,” I said, “it’s nearly ten o’clock.”

  “Yes,” he said, “long past breakfast time. That’s why we’re so hungry.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I mean, he’s been in there a good quarter of an hour. What do you think is going on?”

  “Heh-heh,” said Hal.

  “Hal?” I said. “Hal, that building you described behind the physiotherapy department. The one he is supposed to paint. What exactly is it?”

  “It’s the mortuary,” Hal said. “Heh-heh!”

  “What?”

  “The mortuary.”

  “Hal, is that something like a morgue?”

  “Yeah,” said Hal. “I suppose you could say that. Only smaller.”

  “Hal! You can’t have!”

  “Heh-heh,” said Hal again, sounding like the evil vampire character in a horror movie. “Heh-heh!”

  “Why on earth did you direct him to the morgue, Hal?”

  “Well, I was trying to think of the most lugubrious place. It seemed like a good idea.”

  “Lugubrious!” I snorted. “Hal, you are seriously deranged. I mean, I always knew you were weird, but this is positively Gothic!”

  “Yeah,” he said with a grin. “You and me, we’re Gothic. Like the cathedrals. Aren’t we, Olivia?”

  I suddenly didn’t want to be Gothic anymore. I mean, I was on Hal’s side, but Romanesque looked quite attractive from where I was sitting, outside that hospital with madboy beside me and my stomach screaming for food. My parents would be home from the airport soon too, and I would be in right trouble if they arrived back to an empty house.

  I clenched my teeth and said nothing for what seemed about ten minutes. I checked my watch. Two minutes had passed. It was now exactly ten o’clock. Still no sign of Alec coming back and looking thunderous or puzzled or whatever it was that Hal was hoping for.

  “Maybe he got lost,” Hal said after a while. He was starting to get a bit jittery. I could see.

  “I’m so hungry,” I said a minute or two later.

  “Well, what do you think?” asked Hal. “Will we go off and get some food someplace, or will we hang on here a bit longer or what?”

  I wasn’t sure what we were doing there anyway, and I was very tempted by the idea of food, but at the same time I felt we couldn’t just walk off and leave poor old Alec in there—with the bodies. Even if he did make people throw their shoes out the window. (I suppose she must have been throwing them at him. What a pair they must be!)

  “Maybe we should go in after him and see what’s happened,” I said. “What do you think, Hal? We got him into this, whatever it is. We are sort of, you know, responsible. He might have run into some sort of trouble in there, trying to convince people there is a Clem Clapham on the staff. They might have decided he’s an escaped loony or a spy or anything.”

  “A spy!” snorted Hal. “What would a spy be doing snooping around a hospital mortuary dressed up like a painter? And it’s Callaghan.”

  “Well, what would anyone be doing snooping around a hospital mortuary?” I said.

  “Do you want to wait a bit, so?” Hal asked. He looked a bit worried himself, though he wouldn’t admit it.

  “We’ll give it another fifteen minutes, will we?” I said.

  “OK,” he said. “And then what?”

  I couldn’t imagine what we’d do if Alec didn’t reappear soon, so I pretended I hadn’t heard the question.

  Chapter 8

  Five minutes crawled by.

  “My stomach thinks my throat is cut,” Hal remarked.

  “Mine, too,” I muttered.

  He has to come out soon, I thought. I mean, what can he be doing in there? He must have discovered by now that there is no paint, there is no Clem Callaghan, there is no painting job, there are no triple rates, and he should have gone with his wife—or his not-wife—to the golf tournament and saved himself a heap of trouble.

  “Olivia,” Hal said after another little while, “I don’t think he’s coming out.”

  “He has to come out sometime,” I said. “We said we’d give it fifteen minutes.”

  “OK,” he said with a sigh, and kicked the wall some more.

  I checked my watch again. Eight minutes past ten.

  I began to hallucinate about food. I could see mounds of mash and great big troughs of porridge and a whole gingerbread house, just waiting to be gobbled and chomped and munched and swallowed.

  Time moved agonizingly slowly.

  “It’s fifteen minutes, Hal,” I said at last, watching the second hand slipping around toward twelve. “When the second hand hits twelve, it’s fifteen minutes from when we said we’d give it fifteen minutes. And that was after he’d already been gone about fifteen minutes. That’s half an hour that he’s been in there with those dead bodies, Hal.”

  “Don’t!” said Hal.

  “Well, the mortuary part was your idea. In fact, this whole thing was your idea, Hal King. I am suffering from sleep deprivation and I am on the verge of starvation and you expect me to mince my words.”

  “Don’t say ‘mince,’” wailed Hal.

  “Mince!” I said spitefully. “Hamburger. Bolognese. Mince pies.”

  “I can’t think if you keep talking about food.”

  “And I can’t think if I don’t eat. If we don’t eat soon,” I said, “there’ll be two more candidates for the mortuary.”

  “Olivia, that is not nice,” Hal said reproachfully.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t we just ask the security man what the story is? And then we can decide what to do.”

  You know, it was a bit weird. There was Hal, trying to get rid of Alec, and now that he had finally disappeared, we were putting all this energy into trying to find him again. Life is not very logical, is it?

  Anyway, I went up to the little glass kiosk and knocked.

  The security man looked up from his copy of the Irish Independent. “Yes?” he said, opening a little sliding glass door in the side of the kiosk.

  “Did a man drive in here about half an hour ago?” I asked.

  “Listen, a-lanna,” said the security man, pushing his peaked hat back off his forehead, “any number of men have driven in here in the last half hour. Which per-tick-ler man would you be thinking of?”

  “The one in the white van with the ladder on top,” I said.

  “The painter?” said the security man, and laughed. “Looking for the mortuary? Only he didn’t seem to know it was the mortuary.”

  “That’s the one,” I said.

  “Ah, yes,” said the security man. “Yes, indeed.”

  “Well?” I said.

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, where is he now? I mean, would you have any idea?”

  “I beg your parsnips?” said the security man.

  Parsnips! What was he on about?

  “The painter,” I said, enunciating carefully. “What happened to him?”

  “How would I know?”

  I looked at Hal. Hal shrugged.

  “Is he your da or what?” asked the security man.

  “He’s his da,” I said, pointing at Hal.

  Hal opened his mouth in a big O shape, like a goldfish. Please, Hal, I breathed silently. Please don’t announce he is not your father, not even your stepfather, he is just this fly-by-night your mother ha
s given houseroom to. Just-—don’t—say-—it. I don’t know if thought transference works, but Hal closed his mouth again and said nothing.

  “And Saturday is pocket-money day, I suppose,” the man went on, turning it into a joke. “But I’m afraid I can’t help you. I definitely saw him coming in, and a right story he had, too, I can tell you. But what I can’t tell you is what happened to him once he got inside. I haven’t got a telescope in here, you know.” He gave a little chuckle at his own wit, and he slid the window closed.

  We stood there for a moment. I was wondering what to do next, and Hal was blowing his nose. Next thing, the little sliding door opened again.

  “You two planning on standing there all morning?” the security man asked.

  “We were just wondering,” I said carefully, “suppose he couldn’t find who he was looking for in there, what would happen to him?”

  “Happen to him?” said the security man. “Nothing would happen to him. I suppose he’d just come out again, wouldn’t he? We haven’t got a policy on checking what happens to people who drive in here, you know. We have trouble enough making sure the patients get looked after.” He gave a short bark of laughter at that.

  “So he’s still inside then?” I ventured.

  “Well, now,” said the security man, and he pushed his hat farther back off his forehead. It looked as if it might topple over the top of his head and down his back. “I can’t really comment on that. He could be. And then again …”

  Hal winced.

  “And if we went in to look for him …?” I asked tentatively.

  “It’s a free country,” said the security man, “and this is a public hospital. As long as you don’t go trampling on the flower beds or charging around the wards spreading germs and upsetting people, you’re welcome to come in and take a look around. I wouldn’t think you’re a security threat. And if you’ve lost yer da …”

  Hal gulped at that.

  The little glass window slid shut again, and the security man went back to his paper.