Plan B

Chapter Twenty-nine

Fran did not take the news at all well.  She was still in a state of shock when Brookie managed to bundle her back into their room, and the instant he locked the door, she broke down.  Without a word, he helped her to sit on her bed and then disappeared to fetch some tissue paper from the bathroom.  He had to prise her hands off her face in order to give her the tissues, and while her sobs began to ease after several minutes, her body wouldn’t stop trembling.

Eventually, figuring that there was no point to standing watching her, Brookie sat on the bed beside her and put an arm around her quivering shoulders.  She flinched.

“I dropped your brother back at school after I saw him,” Brookie said.  “And in the car, he showed me something I wanted to ask you about.”

When Fran didn’t respond, he rummaged in his pocket for his phone.

“Here.  I took a photo of it.”  Brookie held his phone in front of her.  Fran made no move to take it, but after a moment or two, she wiped her eyes and sat up a little straighter.  Brookie pulled her back against him and removed his arm from her shoulder to wrap it around her waist.

“When was this?” he asked her, resting his chin on her shoulder.  It seemed to have a calming effect on her, because she exhaled slowly.

“Late August,” Fran replied in little more than a whisper.  “About a week before I disappeared.”

The photo was of an obviously crumpled photograph.  In it were three people, all smiling at the camera.

“This must be your mum, right?”  Brookie pointed to the woman at the right of the photograph.  She had a roundish, rosy face framed by short strawberry-blonde hair and a fringe.  Leaning against her was a dark-haired, dark-eyed boy in a t-shirt sporting the Union Jack.  “And that’s Freddie.  But what I don’t get is who this is.”  He moved his finger across to the third person, his tone lightly teasing. 

The girl in the photograph looked about sixteen or seventeen, was dressed in designer clothes in such a way that her midriff was showing, and her waist-length hair could not possibly have been any straighter.  Her smile showed off a dazzling set of straight, white teeth and lit up her whole face.

Fran sniffed and tapped herself in the photo.  “That’s me.”

“No way.  I don’t believe you.”

“It is.”

“Go look at yourself in the mirror, dearest.  She looks like a girl.  You look like a guy.”

Fran scrubbed her hand self-consciously through her hair before she realised that Brookie was teasing her.

“You’re making fun of me,” she complained, pouting.

“Well, look,” he said, pointing to the photo and then at her.  “Blonde hair – brown hair.  Long hair – short hair.  Happy smile – long face.”

It did nothing to lift Fran’s mood, so he gave up.

“In all seriousness, I wouldn’t have recognised you just from this,” he said.  “But what I’m really interested in is that smile.  You’ve never smiled like that here.  What do we have to do to get you to smile like that again, eh?”

Fran looked up at him and shrugged listlessly.  “Dunno.”

Well, that’s helpful, Brookie thought dryly to himself.  She’s getting so depressed and absorbed by her situation that she doesn’t even know what makes her happy anymore.  He patted her on the shoulder and stood up.