Jean Ure - Gone Missing

“Duncan McAleer,” said Honey.

Wow! She’d even remembered his surname. It was more than I’d done. I hadn’t even remembered his first name. All I remembered was that they’d lived in Glasgow. They’d given us their addresses and said to call if ever we were up there. I’d chucked the addresses in the bin cos a) I couldn’t see I’d ever be going to Glasgow, not in the foreseeable future, and b) even if I did I wouldn’t particularly want to meet up with them again. Duncan wasn’t actually too bad, but Ian had been a geeky little thing with red hair and a pointy nose and a face like a ferret. Yuck! Not my type at all.

“Is that where we’re going to go?” said Honey. “To Glasgow?”

I said, “No! That’s where the bread crumbs are going to go.” I could see that I’d lost her, but the bus was starting to fill up and I didn’t have time to explain. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Why can’t you tell me now?”

“Because it’s a secret,” I hissed. “Our secret…just between you and me. Right?”

She nodded. “OK.”

“Promise you won’t tell anyone!”

Honey was always very biddable. She ran a finger across her throat. “Slit my throat and hope to die.”

I giggled. “You probably would die, if you slit your throat!”

She meant “cross my heart” but she sometimes got things a bit muddled. It could be quite funny.

On the way home that afternoon, I explained to her what I meant about the bread crumbs. I’d stayed awake half the night hatching elaborate plots, laying false trails, like I was in some kind of spy movie.

“We have to make them think we’ve gone to Glasgow. Not London. We don’t want them to be on to us!”

Honey muched at her lip. “Why can’t we do it the other way round? Make them think we’ve gone to London?”

“Because we are going to London!”

“I’d rather go to Glasgow.”

“We don’t know anyone in Glasgow!”

“Yes, we do. We know Duncan! I’d rather go and stay with Duncan than with Darcy.”

“Well, we can’t, cos I’ve lost his address. And anyway, we don’t actually know him.”

“I don’t actually know Darcy.”

“No, well I do, and that’s where we’re going.”

Honey fell quiet for a bit. I could see she was turning things over in her mind.

“Are we really going to run away?” she said.

“We are if things don’t improve at home! You don’t know what it’s like, living with my dad. And you can’t go on living with your mum. She’ll destroy you! You know that, don’t you? You do know?”

I fixed her with this stern look. Honey just made a vague mumbling sound and let her eyes slide away. Honey’s mum was like a forbidden subject; she wouldn’t ever talk about her. I went on about Dad practically non stop, but Honey never once said anything bad about her mum. I knew she was a bit frightened of her-not physically, I don’t mean, cos I don’t think her mum was ever violent. It might almost have been better if she had been; at least then someone would have had to sit up and take notice. As it was, I think I was probably the only person that knew how hateful she could be to Honey. Honey was just scared, the whole time, of displeasing her. Doing the wrong thing. Saying the wrong thing. Dropping something, breaking something. Being told she was stupid.

Stupid, useless, hopeless. Clumsy, gawky. Nothing but a liability, can’t ever do anything right. Totally moronic! Drive me up the wall.

These were all things I’d heard Mrs de Vito say to Honey. When she’d had too much to drink she actually used to jeer at her. Make fun of her.

“Look at it! Great lumping thing! Can’t even walk straight.” And then she’d imitate Honey moving across the room, bumping into chairs and knocking stuff over. “What’s the matter with you? You got cerebral palsy, or something?”

She could be really nasty. Sometimes she used to try and rope me in. She’d look at me and roll her eyes, like she was expecting me to agree with her. I hated it when she did that! It made me feel so bad for Honey. I mean, they were cruel, the things she said. She didn’t deserve Honey being so loyal! Maybe, in spite of everything, Honey still loved her; I guess it’s always possible. I just don’t know. But I honestly did feel she had to get away, I really did! I wasn’t only thinking of me. At least, I don’t think I was.

That evening, I sat upstairs in my bedroom laying trails of bread crumbs…all the way to Glasgow! First off, I doodled hearts and flowers all over my school books, with the name DUNCAN in big capitals. (I chose Duncan rather than ferret face. I couldn’t stand the thought of being linked with ferret face!) Then I took our surnames, McAleer and Rutherford, and crossed out all the letters we had in common. Precisely two! I’d have been in despair if he’d really been my boyfriend.

I got a bit carried away with the doodling. I was still at it when Mum and Dad got home from the shop (the Steeple Norton Mini Mart. Oh, please!) and I had to go downstairs and report on school and whether I’d done my homework. It was like the Spanish Inquisition every night. Dad used to say, “This doesn’t please me any more than it pleases you.” He never did it with Kirsty because Kirsty could be trusted. She’d never bunked off school or failed to hand in her homework three weeks running. But all that had been back in the winter term! Back when I was still mates with Darcy. It was very belittling that Dad still kept grilling me.

I told him that I was doing my homework. Dad said, “You’d better be.” I said, “I am!” and went rushing back upstairs to scatter more bread crumbs. I would look up train times! On the computer, Birmingham to Glasgow. I knew the first thing the police would do when they started to investigate would be to take away the computer and examine it. They can find out all sorts of things, from a computer. Just to make sure, I even went to Google and put in the word “Glasgow”, so they’d think I’d been looking at the map. I’d have liked to put in Stonebridge Park, which was where Darcy had gone to live with her sister. I knew that Stonebridge Park was in London, and I knew you could get there on a tube train, cos Darcy had told me. She had said it was totally brilliant.

“You can be in the West End in thirty minutes!”

I wasn’t bothered about trains from Birmingham; I knew there were plenty of those, all times of the day. Money was the real problem. I had some saved up in a piggy bank-an old china pig with a slit in its back, which had belonged to one of my nans when she was a girl-and I thought I probably had enough for a single fare to London, but it wasn’t going to leave very much over. What did other kids do when they ran away? Did they steal off their parents? I couldn’t steal off mine, or only very tiny amounts. Dad didn’t believe in having large sums of money lying around. He’d been robbed twice at the shop and it had made him very grim. But I didn’t think most people would exactly have fortunes waiting to be taken, so what did kids do? I had a sneaking suspicion that maybe they went on the streets and begged, or even worse, they sold themselves. I wouldn’t want to do that! No way!

I decided not to think about it. As I’d said to Honey, you can’t plan everything in advance. Sometimes, you just have to wait and see what happens.

That’s the good thing about fantasies. If there’s a part you can’t work out, you just skate over it and move on to the next bit.

It was still a fantasy. But growing more and more real, every day.

Next morning, at school, Marnie comes up to me and says, “Hey! Wanna know something?” So I’m like, “Yeah, what?” She tells me that this boy, Rory Mansell, that’s in Year 10, has a thing about me. She knows this cos she’s going out with Jason Dobbs that’s also in Year 10. She says Rory told Jason in the hope that he would tell Marnie and Marnie would tell me, and then maybe I would—