Folk'd Read online

  His finger alighted on the next hospital in the list, and he dialled the number and spoke to the receptionist for a few moments, even as he heard his front door open and close and voices enter the house. He scrambled to his feet, hope surging in him even as he identified the voices and knew it was futile, but nonetheless when his mother and father entered the room, he couldn’t help but look behind them, as if the whole thing would turn out to be a gag.

  “…no, no, I understand that,“ he said, completing the phone call robotically. “Yes, I’m sure I should. Thank you.”

  “Well? Any word, love?” his Ma asked, though she must have already known the answer.

  Danny shook his head. “No-one’s heard or seen them-”

  He got no further, enveloped and interrupted by the impact of his mother’s impulsive embrace. He remembered those hugs from growing up, and how quickly he’d outgrown the days when they could make anything seem better. But he’d never dream of telling his mother that, because he knew she was hugging him for her own benefit as well. Sure enough, when she pulled away after a few seconds, she turned away and dabbed at her eyes before looking back, as if this would disguise the fact that she was upset. He loved her for it anyway.

  “Don’t you worry love. Don’t you worry. They’ll be fine.”

  He nodded in what he hoped was a sincere way. What else could he do?

  “Have you told her ones?”

  Danny regarded his Da, who’d spoken quietly. He was a soft-spoken sort, Danny’s Da; quiet and reflective. He remembered his Ma accusing him of being an intellectual, always staring out the window, always lost in thought.

  “Phoned them an hour ago. Just after you,” he said aloud. “They’re coming over. Wanted to try a few places first.”

  He was going red just remembering that conversation. He’d been dreading making the call, naturally, but he had to check and see if Ellie had gone to her Mum and Dad’s for whatever reason, and when he discovered that she hadn’t, well, he more or less had to tell them what was up.

  The phone had been passed to Michael Quinn in short order. Questions had been clipped to him, short and interrogative, the sort of businessman questions that had probably helped Duracell Man climb the corporate ladder. What had killed him most about it was that the bastard hadn’t even sounded that surprised; as if his daughter and grandson’s disappearance had been a inevitable happening, the long-awaited crashing of the fuck-up juggernaut with Danny Morrigan at the wheel.

  “They’re coming here?” his Ma said. Danny watched, exasperated, as she checked her reflection for a second in the hallway mirror. Seeming satisfied, she turned her attention to her husband and tugged at various invisible threads on his jacket. Tony Morrigan fixed her with a warning look and indicated Danny as subtly as he could, causing her to stop. Danny couldn’t summon up the energy to be angry. His Ma had always been terrified in any situation where she suspected she’d be propping up the social ladder.

  “I’ll…I’ll go and stick on the kettle on,” she stammered.

  Her husband smiled at her briefly. “Aye love, you do that.”

  “Yeah, great,” Danny echoed hollowly. Wonderful. Cup of tea. All problems solved.

  His mother walked into the kitchen, already with a slightly springier step since she now had a purpose. Maybe that was the key to tea - not the cuppa itself, but the comforting ritual of making one. Danny was too tired to ponder much on it, which only made him feel worse, more useless. Shouldn‘t he be running on adrenaline now? A barely contained explosion of affirmative action and plans and ideas? For the last three hours all he‘d wanted to do was sit down somewhere and stare into empty space, or even better lie down somewhere and sleep, and wake up to find out this was all one extended nightmare that would vanish like quicksilver in the first few seconds of wakefulness.

  His father was approaching him cautiously. Danny caught his expression and instantly knew what was on his father’s mind.

  “Don’t,” he warned.

  “You don’t know what I’m-”

  “Oh I do, Da. I do. Don’t even fuckin’ go there, alright? Although that’s your speciality come to think of it, yeah? Going.”

  He sat down heavily and snatched up the phone book from the floor, staring at its big yellow thereness resentfully. He flicked through pages of hospitals and horticulturists and hypnotists and fuck knows what else, but saw fuck all entries for ‘Phone Here For Location Of Missing Family’. With a sudden burst of energy he hurled the phonebook against the fireside wall of the living room where it hit with a papery whump and fell to the floor.

  His Da was watching him, not speaking, but he knew it wouldn’t last. And he was right.

  “Maybe I deserve that,” he said quietly.

  “Maybe you do?” Danny said incredulously, before shaking his head. “Don’t do the Irish martyr act, Dad. I don’t feel like listenin to it just now, OK?”

  “Don’t do it? What else have I got?”

  He was on his feet before he even realised it, toe to toe, shouting. It was too much. “My family are fuckin’ missing, Dad!” he shouted, right into his stupid fuckin’ Da’s stupid fuckin’ face. “My family are GONE! Can we make this not about you? Just for once?”

  And like a gunshot, the sound of a cup shattering from the kitchen next to them rang out in the quiet that followed his outburst. Both men glanced in that direction. Danny looked away, walked to the fireplace, put his head down on the cool marble just to feel something cold against his skin. He felt hot and dirty and tired and less than human. He felt ashamed.

  “I’m sorry,” his Da said softly behind him.

  “Yeah, I know,“ Danny sighed. “Fuck…it doesn’t matter. Not now. I just want them back.”

  “Son, there’s…I don’t know how to start, or even if I should start, or if this is the time…”

  Something was different in his Da’s voice all of a sudden. Curious despite the maelstrom of emotions raging inside him, Danny straightened up and turned.

  “There’s things we need to talk about,” his Da said.

  “Now?”

  “Yes now. Especially now. I just…” and his father blew out a long breath and ran his hands through his hair, sitting down and standing up and sitting down again, as if not sure what to do with his own body, “…I’m fucked if I even know how to start.”

  “Unless it’s an explanation for where Ellie and Luke might be, Da, I can’t say as I’m particularly interested.”

  He’d thrown that out there not knowing what to expect, but the silence that greeted it stopped him cold. He examined his father’s expression closely, not knowing whether to be scared or excited, or suspicious, or some terrible combination of them all.

  “I don’t know, son,” his Da said helplessly. “I’m probably just making all this worse. I probably shouldn’t be saying anything. But I’d never forgive myself if…if it turned out that…and I hadn’t told you, you understand?”

  “Understand? Understand what? You’re talking out your arse, Da, that’s as much as I can make out. If you’ve something to say, say it.”

  All his father did in response was to stare at him. He could see something was going on behind his father’s eyes, some inner turmoil, and once or twice the older man’s mouth opened, as if he were about to speak…but it would close again.

  “Well?” Danny snapped.

  His father’s shoulder slumped. “Did you ever think Ellie might have joined a cult?” he said.

  Danny stared.

  “A cult,” he repeated.

  “Yeah,” his father said wretchedly. “Run off to a commune or something…”

  “You think this is fuckin’ funny?” Danny snarled, and stepped forward. As he did, he felt the floor beneath his feet as soft and warm rather than hard and cold. He glanced down, and saw that he’d stepped on the collection of blankets they spread in the middle of the living room floor.

  Lying on top was the wraparound blue one that Luke slept in, lying agape.
r />   Tony stepped aside as his son flew past him and upstairs in a series of long strides, not bothering to explain his sudden burst of motion. No explanation was necessary. He knew what he was going up there to do - he had seen it in his son’s eyes as he registered what he was standing on.

  Linda emerged from the kitchen with a tray. The cups on it bp-bp-bp-bp’d together as her hands shook. Tony smiled at her and took the tray from her, setting it down safely on the sideboard. He saw the questioning look on his wife’s face.

  “Upstairs,” Tony said, by way of an answer. “He’ll be back in a minute.”

  “I‘ll go up-”

  Tony moved forward a half-step to block her exit from the room. “Let him be up there, love. Please. He’ll be down in a wee second.”

  She nodded, if a little reluctantly, and then started in surprise when she felt her husband‘s hand settle on her shoulder.

  “What is it?”

  He had to ask. Christ he didn‘t want to, but he had to.

  “Was this what it was like for you?”

  She looked away. He’d anticipated that, but it still hurt to watch her do it. “Aye,” she said, and he didn’t mistake the softness in her voice for affection. “More or less. I remember throwing up. But that was just me. Danny…he just kept looking at the door, out the windows. You know, he never even cried? Everyone said he was being so grown-up about it, but I wanted him to just…”

  She stopped, unable to go any further, and stepped away from his touch, leaving his hand to fall by his side. “I’m sorry,” was all he could think of to say.

  “The worst thing…the worst thing was when he got the letter instead of me. If only I hadn’t have been asleep…” she said, the anger in her voice directed solely at herself now as the memory came back. “I didn’t see him for the best part of two weeks after that letter came.”

  “I had to try and expl-”

  “It’s not something you can explain,” she cut him off neatly. Linda Morrigan did not raise her voice very often, and this was not one of those times. Nevertheless, you could have cut glass with every word she spoke.

  “I’m sorry,” Tony said again, staring out the window, unable to meet her eyes.

  “Then why’d you do it?” she burst out with. “Why’d you leave us?”

  “I came back, didn’t I.”

  She glanced back at him. He was hoping for a smile, even a hint of one, but none was forthcoming. “Yeah. You came back.”

  “I tried to ask him. If she-”

  Linda shook her head firmly. “He won’t want to hear it.”

  “I know he wont want to hear it, but it‘s still a possibili-”

  “I don’t think it is,” Linda cut in. She walked to the window and shivered. “God help us, but I don’t think it is. She wouldn’t just leave him. Not with the wee one. Not like this. And if she had, sure why hasn’t she just gone to her ones or her mates or somethin’ and told him about it? No-one’s seen sight nor sound of them since this morning.”

  “Sometimes that’s not how it works. It happens, Linda.”

  There was quiet steel in his wife‘s voice when she replied.

  “Not to Danny it doesn’t.”

  ***

  Throwing up was vastly overrated, Danny had decided. He remembered as a kid when he’d gotten a stomach bug or some such his Ma would have been practically cheerleading the vomit on, telling him that he’d “feel a lot better after”.

  Of fuckin’ course he would. After the ordeal of throwing up, the feeling of your entire digestive system reversing its entire modus operandi, the flooding of your mouth with spittle, the hot sticky foul-smelling mess spewing forth from your throat, and the small fact that by blowing chunks into the toilet you were sticking your head into a place that was only ever meant to be plugged up by your arse, sticking your cock into a glory hole in the Camp Crystal Lake toilets during a Jason Voorhees rampage would seem like a fantastic voyage of fun and frolics.

  He got to his feet groggily and flushed. Mouthwash. He was fucked if he was going to smell of puke to her ones. He swilled it around his mouth and spat it into the sink, about to wash it away when he stopped for a fraction of a second to notice how the pattern of mouthwash gunk looked a bit like tea leaf patterns in a cup.

  Maybe he should get Bee over here to read his sink. Or maybe she hung out round bars on weekends, reading teenage girls’ futures in their barf-splashes. World’s first practising nauseomancer. Assuming people took her seriously, and didn’t think it was all a gag.

  That should have been his cue to start laughing uncontrollably, a therapeutic release to all the built-up tension within. He stood there for a moment in the hopes this might be the case, but nothing came forth. He flushed the toilet again and faced up to the fact that he was going to have to go back downstairs.

  Ding-dong.

  Again, he couldn’t suppress the instincts. He was out of the room in a second, bounding down the stairs. His father was already at the door but he shouldered him aside - fuck that - if anyone was going to welcome his girlfriend and wee son home first, it was going to be…

  Steve.

  “Alright lad.”

  Much as his hopes were dashed, at some level it was good to see him. His friend stepped inside the house, and Danny stepped forward and they came together in an embrace that wasn’t self-conscious in the slightest. He didn’t see his father’s eyes settling on the gesture of easy closeness, and wouldn’t have cared less if he had.

  “Phoned everyone I could think of,” Steve said as they broke apart and headed for the living room. “All the rest of the lads - although as ya know most of them are away…”

  “Away?”

  “Ach ya alright Mrs Morrigan?” Steve grinned easily as Linda beamed back at him. “Haven’t seen ye in ages. Aye, all of them except Flan and Vic are away in Fuerteventura for the week - one of them off season deals.”

  “Ach that’s nice,” Linda said. “Did you not want to head away too?”

  Steve shook his head with a goofy grin, the same grin he’d worn talking to Danny’s Ma since he was about four. “Nah. Not my scene these days Mrs M. Behavin myself. Bein a good boy.”

  “You?” her eyebrows skyrocketed theatrically. “A good boy?”

  Danny cleared his throat. Both had the decency to look slightly embarrassed. Steve went back to being all business. “Aye so the rest of them are on the case, ringin anyone they know. Flan and Vic wanted to come down here with me but ah…I sorta thought you’d probably be getting a pretty full house and...”

  He didn’t have to continue, but if he had finished the sentence it would have probably have gone something along the lines of …and I didn’t want to bring them two dickheads along and add a double murder charge to your current list of woes. Flanagan and Vic were good fellas for a night out with, but in a crisis situation they could be relied on for two things – getting shitfaced and playing first-person shooters with frightening excellence, often consecutively. Neither skill would prove particularly useful right now.

  “Ellie’s Ma and Da are on their way,” Danny said.

  “Oh. Great,” Steve intoned, clearly as thrilled at the prospect of this as everyone else.

  “Want a wee cup of tea, love?”