Olivia's father has been kidnapped, but she has had to continue with her exams and then wait for news. Now it's the sixteenth of August, she is at the school and has just opened the envelope containing her exam results.
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Reading the results felt like a hammer hitting her on the head. She had to breathe deeply and read it again, just to check that she was not seeing things. An A* in Art and an A in Maths, an A in Physics and an A* Chemistry. It wasn’t a joke or a mistake. It was her results paper. Her name was on it. Yang, Olivia, and her examination number. Two A stars and two As.
Now a wave of warmth and happiness rose up through her body, reached her head and she felt an urge to scream, and she did, and then jumped up and down.
“Yes!” she shouted, “Yessss! Yessss! Yessssss!” Her classmates came to see the results and hugged her.
Olivia had scored the highest in her year.
Now she felt like that girl who was the silver medallist, the one who had come from nowhere to achieve Olympic stardom, but she had scored gold!
She imagined walking up to the platform at the top of the hall with the other athletes who had won silver and bronze. She would stand on the top, her gold medal around her neck, waving, and shedding a tear or two.
Whilst Olivia stood at the centre of an excited group of students, at the end of the corridor, a woman in her forties with curly jet black hair was walking with quick steps, her eyes glinting through shiny spectacles, looking all around her, a face that radiated energy and vitality. She was wearing jeans and a pink top. She entered the hall, walked straight up to Olivia, saw the happy expression on her face and screamed at the top of her voice.
“Oh, Livvy darling, I knew you could do it!!!! I always said you had a fantastic brain!!!”
There were hugs, yelps and high pitched hurrahs, and she threw her arms around her daughter, still hardly able to handle the joy and the relief.
Olivia smiled with that characteristic kitten-like expression of hers, her dimples showing, and she brushed her hair to one side.
Mrs Portree, today wearing a black pencil skirt and tapered jacket, quietly circulated around the room and came to Olivia.
Smiling at her through narrowed eyes, she said in her north eastern English accent “I’m so pleased for you Olivia, you’ve done so well”. Her long, almost Scottish vowel ‘ooo’ of ‘no’, contrasted with the high ‘eee’ of ‘pleased’. “I’m soooooooo pleeeeeeeeased.” Olivia would always remember those words.
Now it was starting to sink in, now it was starting to become clear: the dream had become a reality; she truly was a star student, just as Esther had predicted on that cold afternoon in January.
But now her mood began to change, as another realisation began to take hold of her.
Liz pointed at the local newspaper reporter who was taking notes. A video cameraman was recording interviews. Liz called for them to come over. Olivia held her palms to her face and began to shake her head, and then waved her hand as if to say no.
“Oh go on, Livvy, they want to interview you. You can be on the news!”
Olivia turned away, still shaking her hand. The reporter and cameraman moved on to another part of the room, and the crowd started to disperse. Liz stood next to her with a feeling of sympathy and yet frustration. In the space of less than a minute, Olivia’s spirits had spiralled from the highest heights to the lowest depths.
“It’s just…” she explained “it’s just that I wish Dad was here,” and she started to cry.
“Oh yes, Olivia, I know he’s going to be very proud when he finds out, I know he will be.”
Liz put her arm around Olivia’s shoulder, and the two made their way out of the school. Dorothy’s husband drove into the car park in front of the two supermarkets, and took them home. Olivia sat holding the envelope to her body.
When she got home, she was able to sleep for a few hours. Later in the afternoon she felt calmer and more balanced. She had something to eat. They watched the evening news and regional magazine programme. She was very glad not to see herself on the screen.
The pain grew milder, but around the house, there was a deep mood of emptiness. It had now been 79 days since her father had gone missing, and 101 days since he had set off from home, but his presence remained.
That evening she did something she had not done for a while. She went upstairs and into his study and looked out through the windows over the balcony outside. All his possessions were arranged exactly as he had left them on the morning of his departure, even the yellow hat he wore when playing golf and the notebook and pens on the coffee table. Nothing had been moved.
She looked at all the books on the shelves about all the places he had lived and worked and the souvenirs he had brought back: a Buddha figure from the Orient, a carved knife from a jungle region in Africa, a picture frame with seven different types of sand from a Middle Eastern country.
What an amazing life her father had had! It had been filled with travel, adventure and achievement in many different parts of the world. As well as the places he had been to, the books reflected the things he was interested in: astronomy, science, chemistry, architecture, engineering and many other subjects.
She remembered all the comments from family friends, who praised him for his great intelligence and knowledge. He could talk about every type of scientific and astronomical subject, happy to discuss all the deepest and most complex questions of science.
He had – as Liz often said - such a brilliant mind, he was so well respected, but now it had come to this. There in spirit, and yet no longer there. Effectively, he was the same as dead, and yet not confirmed dead.
She opened the sliding doors, went out onto the balcony and looked up at the stars. Where was her father now? She remembered the evening they had sat on the balcony and he had announced he was leaving the next morning. She so bitterly regretted her behaviour. If only she had had a chance to tell him she loved him and to say goodbye. She continued to gaze up at the stars, recognising all the major constellations. The ISS wasn’t passing over tonight but she could see planes with their flashing lights. The moon hung low in the sky. It was a waning moon, now just a thin crescent. By tomorrow there would be a new moon, and Olivia knew that something was going to happen later in the evening. She would make sure she was back from Liverpool in time to witness it, whatever it was.
And then as she gazed, she heard a different voice in her head. A voice that told her something she didn’t want to hear. It was that arrogant, mocking, female voice again, the one her mum had told her about. It echoed as if heard down a long tunnel:
‘They don’t come back, you know.’
She remembered what Van Gogh had said about the stars, and an uncomfortable thought entered her mind. No, she wasn’t prepared to accept that thought. She wasn’t going to entertain it. She wasn’t going to allow it to take over her mind. Even if some people disagreed with her, her father was not dead, she still believed he was alive and would come back.
She stood for a few more seconds on the balcony, and then brushed her hair off her face, turned round, walked back, slid the glass doors shut, and left the office exactly as she had found it.
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I love this final scene when she is standing out on the balcony looking up at the night sky, wondering about what is going to happen. She keeps hearing that voice "They don't come back, you know." - Find out who said that in real life in my parallel true story 'Secrets of Stargirl of the Edge' (from Dec 2014). Her results turned out to be better than she expected. I had a similar experience when I got my German A level result. Unexpectedly, I got an A. That experience was partly the inspiration for Stargirl of the Edge.