A Boy Called Hope Page 4

  Next time, I’m going to see him face-to-face.

  I’m going to be like Sherlock Holmes tracking Moriarty. This is going to take meticulous planning – even more than when I recreated the town hall from lollipop sticks. I take a piece of paper from my desk and write:

  DANIEL GEORGE HOPE

  AGE 11

  OPERATION BASKERVILLE

  (You have to use names like Baskerville because that way no one really knows what you’re up to. If I wrote Operation Meeting Dad then Ninja Grace would be onto me like a bloodhound.)

  The very first job of Operation Baskerville is to find Dad’s address.

  Thirty minutes and one very messy hallway later and I’ve found this ancient book that appears to have all the addresses of local people inside it. Yes, the actual addresses plus phone numbers. The thing weighs as much as a brick and when Mum asks me why I’m carrying the telephone directory up to my bedroom I tell her I’m going to stand on it so I can reach something at the back of my cupboard.

  “Really?” Mum arches her eyebrow. “I’m surprised you can open your cupboard without an avalanche falling on your head. Well, when you’ve finished whatever mischief you’re up to, I have an idea. Look up cleaners in the directory. I need someone to tidy this hallway. I think you’ll find the person under H for Hope. First name: Daniel.”

  There are three people in the directory with the same name as Dad: Malcolm John Maynard. Dad doesn’t have the same surname as us because Mum made sure we took her name, which I guess is kind of lucky now. Pulling out my mobile, I ring Malcolm J. Maynard number one. He says, “Wrong number, mate,” and then hangs up. The second one sounds faintly Scottish and calls me “bairn”, even though I tell him three times that my name is Dan. The third tells me he’s always getting phone calls for that new TV presenter and everyone is really getting on his goat. His goat must be the size of the biggest Billy Goat Gruff if everyone is getting on it. In the end I hang up, because I have no leads and I have to tidy the hallway.

  The whole of Operation Baskerville is in jeopardy until Big Dave makes me think otherwise. He appears on the dot of six and says he could eat a scabby dog. Mum tells him it would be wrong to eat Charles Scallybones the First so perhaps we should have a takeaway instead. Now, this is hardly riveting and has nothing whatsoever to do with Operation Baskerville, but what Big Dave says next does. Chippy chips are what Big Dave wants, from The Frying Squad to be precise. Mum says she’s not eating from a place where girls wear the scent of cheap malt vinegar.

  “Wok This Way it is then,” says Big Dave. “The man behind the counter can lure me with a number twenty-five and the scent of sweet ’n’ sour chicken balls instead.”

  And, thanks to Big Dave’s chicken balls, I know exactly where to find Dad’s address.

  “So…how’s it going with the medal?” whispers Jo, looking down at her list of fractions. “Do you still feel sad?”

  “I never told you I felt sad in the first place,” I whisper. “What’s the answer to 1/7 x 1/8?”

  “You didn’t need to tell me, it was written all over your face.”

  “What, in invisible ink?” I mutter. “Is it 1/56?”

  “Yes. That medal will change your life,” replies Jo. “Saint Gabriel always gets results. That’s what my grandma said.”

  “Before she died, yes,” I hiss. “What’s the answer to 41/3 + 41/3?”

  “Grandma might have died but that wasn’t the end of it. She sent me a feather, you know.” Jo looks at me. “A message from her was on my list of ten things and it arrived after her funeral. Feathers are angels’ calling cards. It means the dead person is up there and looking after you and they’re sending you a white feather to let you know that everything will be okay.”

  “Jo, I hate to break this to you, but feathers come from birds’ bums.”

  “The answer is 82/3.” Jo scribbles on her test sheet and turns away from me.

  “Class,” says Mrs Parfitt, “I’d like to add an extra verbal question to your test. Answer this: a group of Year Six students were working on their maths test. Their teacher noted that 3/7 were writing down the answers like good children, 2/7 were trying to figure out the answers but this involved them staring out the window, and 1/7 were looking at the clock and wishing it was over. And one person was chattering away in the middle of a test and distracting everyone else. What was the name of that one person?” Mrs Parfitt’s hand bangs on my desk. I’ve never seen her hands close up before. Her knuckles resemble an elephant’s knees.

  A few people start scribbling down my name and laughing.

  “Daniel Hope,” she says, pointing to my test paper. “If you don’t stop these cosy chats with Jo and work out the answers yourself, what score do you think you’ll be getting on this paper?”

  “Zero,” I reply.

  “Correct,” Mrs Parfitt replies.

  The whole matter would have been closed with Mrs Parfitt’s telling-off, only I look over at Christopher and he glances up at me and then Jo. For a split second he seems embarrassed, but that’s not all. Christopher also looks a bit smug, as if I deserved a telling-off for talking to Jo. But that doesn’t even make sense.

  At morning break I’m standing by the toilet block when Christopher walks past and throws a tennis ball against the wall. When it bounces I snap it up and hand it over to him, saying, “You were good at tae kwon do. Sorry I couldn’t hang around and watch for longer but I had my dog with me.”

  Christopher nods but doesn’t answer.

  “Have I done something else to annoy you?”

  “No,” he replies.

  “Is this about Jo? You looked sort of happy that I got into trouble because we were talking. But it’s not my fault that Jo keeps jabbering on about religious relics and feathers that come from angels’ bums.”

  Christopher bounces the tennis ball up and down, then stops and looks across at Jo.

  She’s slouched on a bench, with long copper waves of hair falling down past her shoulder. One sock is up and the other down and she’s playing with a badge on her blazer lapel. When she senses Christopher and me looking at her, she waves. Christopher smiles back and does this ridiculous little micro finger-wave that makes him look about two.

  “Hey,” shouts Christopher, “come and talk to me.”

  Jo pulls up her sock, wanders towards us and then asks me if I want to come round to her house after school.

  I shake my head. “I’m busy with Baskerville.”

  Jo’s eyes widen. “What’s that?”

  I shrug and say I could tell her but then I’d have to kill her. Jo laughs and informs me that I’m missing out. She has a new plastic statue of the Virgin Mary that I’ve really got to see. When you switch the lights off her heart glows in the dark and if you wind up her halo she plays “Ave Maria”.

  “I’d like to see it,” says Christopher.

  And that’s when I know for certain what Christopher’s problem is.

  The Frying Squad sits beside the alleyway between the Paradise and Ireland estates. It is a small shop with a black and white chessboard floor and a neon-pink flying fish flashing in the window. For the past four years I haven’t been allowed to go inside. Mum wouldn’t even mention the name in our presence. Grace said we would catch carbohydrate scurvy if we couldn’t eat chips from the chip shop but Mum didn’t care and said we’d have to fur up our arteries another way. Grace told me this whole mess was thanks to Dad coming home stinking of battered sausages.

  I don’t remember that. The bit about battered sausages, I mean. When I think of Dad I imagine spiced apples. And I’d almost forgotten that whenever I thought there were burglars in my wardrobe, Dad would whip my plastic sword from the toy box, fling open the door and whack the inside of the wardrobe until no thief could survive. And when I thought a monster might have hidden under my bed, Dad sneaked under there to check.

  I don’t believe in monsters any more, but then again, I’m not sure I can believe in Dad either.


  Charles Scallybones scuffs my leg with his claws and then puts his nose to the chessboard, searching for food.

  “Your dog is vacuuming my floor,” says the man behind the counter.

  “All part of the service,” I say, resting my elbows beside this huge glass jar full of prehistoric eggs. “He’ll eat anything.” I pause and take a deep breath. “I wondered if I could get…”

  “Pollock?” he asks, scratching his chin.

  “No,” I reply.

  “Pea fritter?” His greasy quiff wobbles.

  “No.”

  “Cod?”

  “An address for Babs,” I say. I don’t mention the busty bit, just in case.

  “Do you want chips with that?”

  Seems I’m being blackmailed. All I’ve got in my pocket is a button the dog ate from my blazer and then threw up in Grace’s beanie, a half-eaten chewy sweet and a fifty-pence coin. (Saint Gabriel didn’t help with number one on my list. I’ve already scored it off because I’m still broke.) Fifty pence is not enough for chips, but it is enough for a prehistoric egg from the jar saying CHEAP AS CHIPS* (*it’s your lucky day – they’re cheaper than chips).

  “Pickled egg, please.” I slide my coin across the counter. As he reaches for it, I pull it back and say, “Plus Babs’s address. She used to work with you, I believe.” (Saying “I believe” makes you sound grown up.)

  Charles Scallybones has moved on to eating a corner of paper napkin on c7.

  The man puts the egg specimen into a paper bag. “You’ll need to eat this fast or the bottom will fall out of the bag.”

  “And the address?” I let him take the coin.

  “It was years ago now but I think it was the end house on Swallow Street. It’s near that big hill where all the children go. That’s all I know and it’s worth more than fifty pence.”

  I push the button across the counter with my index finger. “Don’t spend it all at once,” I say. I think about winking, only I change my mind halfway through and end up walking away with a drooping eyelid.

  “Your pickled egg, I believe,” the man shouts after me. “You’ve forgotten it.” I have to turn back and pick it up from the counter.

  Outside, I offer the egg to Charles Scallybones, who sniffs it and jumps away as if it’s alive. A few seconds later he returns and wags his tail. Another whiff and he thinks it might just be edible. The pickled egg is swallowed whole. A moment later, the pickled egg comes back scrambled.

  The hill, I tell myself as I walk back home, is not more than twenty minutes from our house. I’ve skateboarded down it many times. Is that where Dad has lived since he walked out? But it’s so close that we could have easily bumped into each other. And if it’s so close, why didn’t he come and visit? I go through a whole list of possible reasons why not, but none of them amount to much. The fact remains that Dad didn’t come. But it doesn’t stop me going to him.

  Part two of Operation Baskerville involves the searchyourstreets website. With Dad’s address in my mind, I switch on the computer and check out Swallow Street. (A good detective does stuff like this. You don’t think Sherlock Holmes would storm straight in, do you? Instead, he would prepare, plan it out and make deductions before visiting the scene.) I find the end house.

  For a start, this is no Buckingham Palace x 1, let alone x 3. No fancy walls and curling iron gates. As for a flag fluttering in the wind, forget it. What this turns out to be is a normal-looking house with a neat hedge and wooden fence. To the side there’s a long alleyway littered with bins. I zoom into Dad’s back garden, where there are rose bushes, trees, a pathway that looks like large pebbles dotted on the lawn, a bird fountain and a wooden shed. All very ordinary for a celebrity, that’s for sure.

  To the right of the house, further down the road, there is a wooded area and to its side drops Skateboarding Hill, which leads down to Paradise estate. I’ve been in that wood a few times. Once I built a den out of cardboard in there, only it rained and I ended up walking home looking like a papier-mâché monster.

  The first thing I think, as I jam my skateboard under my arm and make my way to the summit of Skateboarding Hill, is how much I want this. I didn’t think it was possible to need my dad as much as I do now. Down below in the valley, November has just tipped into December and frost is spreading like a glittery disease through the streets. In the distance I can see the fairy lights around Aladdin’s Supermarket, where Mum is at this very moment probably ding-dinging frozen Brussels sprouts through her scanner. Far beyond Aladdin’s, just on the edge of the Paradise estate, the dark frosted fields roll away into eternity. You can’t see what is beyond and although I know it’s just the next town, I imagine it to be the end of the world.

  Above me the inky sky has been flicked with a white paintbrush. There are zillions of tiny snow-white dots, some big, some small, some splattered. And the crescent moon is like the tip of Ninja Grace’s manicured nail. I breathe in and out. Plumes rise into the chilled air. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do it right now.

  I hide my skateboard in the wood, thinking I’ll pick it up on the way back home. No point in carrying it over to Dad’s house. At this stage I haven’t planned what I’m going to do when I get there. But that’s okay. I’m going to take everything as it comes. If I decide to ring the doorbell and wait for Dad I will. If I want to ring the doorbell and hide then I can do that too. In fact, I can do anything I want, because I’m the master of Operation Baskerville.

  I am invincible.

  I am a genius.

  I am unstoppable.

  I am scared.

  Dad’s house sits on the junction between one row of houses and the beginning of another. Just a glance at it and my stomach lurches. At first I walk past, whistling. Whistling is never suspicious, oh no. Next door, the neighbour’s curtains move and I’ve been spotted, so I run into the alleyway at the side of Dad’s house. As I rest my head against the cool shadows I hear a cat meow and footsteps coming towards me. A bin bag rustles. I haven’t got time to wonder what Sherlock Holmes would do. Instead, this is what Dan Hope does: I climb up onto a bin and throw myself over the nearest fence and into a garden. Behind me I hear a bin lid lift and the thump of rubbish. The footsteps dissolve.

  There is good news and bad news. The good news: I have avoided being discovered lurking in the alleyway outside Dad’s house. The bad news: I am now lurking in Dad’s garden. Eventually I sneak down the garden path. And here’s the odd thing: when I was on searchyourstreets I didn’t see the trampoline by the fence. Nor did I spot the small football net or the discarded plastic water pistol. They look out of place in the garden, as if they don’t belong.

  At the point where I reach the trampoline, the kitchen light goes on and I can hear a key rattling in the back door lock.

  “Hello?” A voice cuts through the darkness.

  Sweat spouts from my scalp and a small river snakes through my hair as I run down the garden and throw my body against the shadowy side of the shed.

  “If someone is hiding in the garden I’ll ring the police. I’ve got speed dial on my mobile.”

  I hug the dark, trying not to breathe.

  It’s hard not to breathe. Breathing’s sort of important.

  I know I can’t hide here for ever and I pray for the person to go back into the house. And I think they might have done if I hadn’t just then seen a huge hairy monster rise from the depths of the garden path and throw itself against my leg. I kick out and my trainer connects with a furball. It lets out an almighty hiss that breaks the silence. To tell you the truth, that’s the moment when it all goes wrong and I forget I’m supposed to be breathing like a sleeping baby and start chuffing like an old steam train climbing Mount Everest.

  The cat, because that’s all it is, patters away from me as the dark figure runs towards me, screaming and hollering how they knew there was an intruder in the garden. “If you’re paparazzi there’s going to be trouble. There are laws against this sort of stuff. You can’t spy on a minor
just because my dad is famous.”

  My dad?

  Your dad?

  Our dad?

  There are about ten million thoughts going through my head but the main one is RUN. This boy races towards me, arms flailing like Catherine wheels. As he approaches, I realize he’s about fifteen and built like a bulldog, if that bulldog was actually made of bricks.

  I bomb towards him as if I’m a superhero with wings on his feet. Speed is mine and I’m going to get past Catherine Wheel Boy. My trainers are moving so fast they’re a blur. I’m halfway up the pebble path when his toe connects with my ankle. He loses his balance, which is no bad thing, because suddenly there’s this ooooof sound coming from my stomach and I’m less superhero, more the boy with broken wings sprawled on the path.

  “Paparazzi paparazzi paparazzi,” he shouts quickly, which is impressive since it sounds like a tongue-twister.

  Swallowing back the pain, I jump up and run away from him, leap onto the trampoline and boing up and down as fast as I can. On the final bounce I’m on top of the fence, then over the other side and onto a rubbish bin. After that, I jump to the ground and half run, half hobble down the alleyway and into Swallow Street.

  “Loser,” screams the boy and I can hear a thud as he kicks the fence.

  Reaching Skateboarding Hill is the only target in my mind. The pain is forgotten as I run through the wood, and I don’t stop or look back in case Catherine Wheel Boy is behind me. I find the spot where I hid my skateboard and drag it out from under the brambles, then run through the wood with it in my clutches. When I reach the top of the hill, I risk a backward glance. The boy hasn’t followed me. With a quick flick my skateboard goes down onto the pathway and I jump on and whoosh down Skateboarding Hill, grateful for those high-performance bearings. At the bottom I dive off and land face down in the long grass.

  I lie there for ages asking myself the same question.

  How could my dad be his dad?

  Frosted blades of grass tickle my cheeks and the Paradise estate is on its side. I thought I was the only boy in the universe who could say Malcolm Maynard was my dad. But I can hear Catherine Wheel Boy’s words inside my head and my eyes see dark sponge clouds gliding across the horizon. I found Dad’s house. Operation Baskerville was a success. A tear eases out and runs along the side of my head and seeps into the earth. I think I’m a genius. Another tear follows. I think I am invincible. A third tear follows the path of the first two. I think I’m lonely.