Chapter 29

Interlude

I arrived home from rehearsal just in time to start preparing dinner and ten minutes before my daughter arrived home from school.

I had only just entered the kitchen when I heard her voice.

“Mum, I’m home,” she called.

“In the kitchen darling,” I answered.

She walked in, taller than me, she got that from her father, but with the same colouring and, according to my husband, the image of me at the same age, fourteen.

He was extremely proud of his little girl and I was hoping he would be happy when I imparted the news I had for him when he got home tonight.

Sammy and I were having a simple ham salad, which wouldn’t take much preparation, then I was expecting him at the airport at around ten, from where I was picking him up.

“What time does Dad get back?” she asked.

“I’m picking him up at the airport at ten, so we should be back about eleven.”

“Can I come with you?” she asked.

“Sammy, it’s school tomorrow,” I replied, “you know the rules.”

“I know Mum, but I won’t sleep anyway, so I may as well come with you.”

“Get all your homework done and we’ll see,” I answered.

“Now, go and get changed, tea will be ten minutes,” I said.

She scooted off to her bedroom and returned ten minutes later dressed in a pair of shorts that showed off her long legs and an old t-shirt. One that David had given to me all those years ago when we ran off to LA together.

I put our two plates on the table while she went into the living room and brought out a bottle of Pepsi Max and two glasses.

“Mum,” she said, as we started to eat our salads, “if a boy at school asked me out, do you think Dad would let me go?”

“That would depend on the boy, where he wanted to take you and you bringing him home to meet us first,” I said, “but I don’t see why not. You could always use the system we used to use when I was your age. A whole group of us going out together.”

“Do you think he’d let us?” she asked.

“Ask him,” I suggested, “he’s not an ogre and he does love you but maybe he is a little overprotective.”

“All right, I will,” she said, “maybe tonight when we pick him up?”

I looked at her and smiled.

“Nice try kiddo,” I said quietly, “but not unless all your homework is done. That’s all, not some.”

“Yes, Mum,” she agreed, sheepishly.

We finished our salads and after clearing the table, dashed off to her room to do her homework. I decided that, after a long hard rehearsal going over and over the Gotterdammerung immolation scene, I needed a nap before I set off to pick the husband up. I refilled my Pepsi glass and walked through to the living room, turned on the TV set and found a programme that at least wasn’t too mind-numbingly stupid. It didn’t take long before my eyes began to droop and I dozed off.

I had the dream again, I was lost in a dark maze and I had to find him. Whichever way I turned I ran into a wall, a solid, formless wall that seemed to be everywhere. I was panicking, I needed to find him. And in the distance a voice urging me on to find him, keep searching, not to give up. The voice of my daughter, Samantha. But that couldn’t be, I didn’t have a daughter and yet, there she was urging me.

“Mum, Mum,” she was crying, “wake up, you have to wake up, you need to find him, everything depends on that.”

I woke up with a start.