Magenta McPhee Read Free Page A

wouldn’t show me.’
    â€˜Euch, that’s disgusting.’
    â€˜Anyway, there you are. I think I might be a witch. So I’m going to practise a lot. Jane’s having a barbecue tomorrow and I’m doing a rain spell. I hate barbecues. They just don’t cater for vegetarians, I don’t care what Jane says about fake sausages.’
    â€˜But you aren’t a vegetarian.’
    â€˜I am mostly. I’ll become a total proper one if I’m a witch. Except for Hawaiian pizza. It’s to do with loving all nature. You can’t kill your familiars. Anyway, this isn’t solving your father’s problem. Let’s get down to business.’
    â€˜If you were really a witch,’ I said, ‘then you could just cast a spell for my dad and he’d be fine.’ A bit of me didn’t like the idea of Polly being a witch. It gave her a lot of power, somehow.
    â€˜I’m not that powerful yet,’ Polly said quickly. ‘I think against something like depression – which is like an epidemic in today’s world – you’d have to be a very experienced witch. I’m just a beginner. No, I think we have to use twenty-first century remedies for your dad.’
    â€˜And they are?’
    â€˜Well, I asked Marcus if he’d ever been depressed and he said he was all the time.’
    That didn’t surprise me. Polly’s father was an artist.
    â€˜So I asked him what he did to get over it,’ Polly continued, ‘and he said work, but your dad doesn’t have any work, so I asked him what else and he said, love.’
    â€˜Love?’
    â€˜That’s right,’ Polly nodded, ‘and he must mean Jane because he’s always cursing me and Jeremy – in an interesting way, of course, and not to be taken seriously. So I don’t think we can save him from depression. In fact, we probably plunge him into it, more than anything else.’
    â€˜How can we find Dad love?’
    â€˜Easy peasy,’ Polly said triumphantly, ‘the Internet, of course!’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Oh come on, Magenta, everyone’s doing it these days. There are newspaper articles all the time – I met my husband on the Internet, romance on the Net, finding a partner online, cyberlove. You can’t pretend you haven’t heard of online dating!’
    â€˜But Dad’s too old!’
    Polly crossed her arms and looked at me. ‘My grandma’s on Two’s Perfect,’ she said slowly, ‘and she’s talked to lots of guys ... I mean, men. She’s had five dates in as many months and she’s in the Really Old bracket.’
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I didn’t realise. I thought it was all ... you know...’
    â€˜There are genuine lonely people out there looking for soul mates.’
    Polly should have been aiming at advertising as a career rather than changing the world. She could be annoying.
    â€˜Okay, okay, forget the guilt trip. How are we going to find my dad an online date when he hates technology these days?’
    â€˜Simple.’ Polly was utterly confident. I stared at her. ‘We set it up,’ she said and spread her arms out wide as though I should have guessed that was all we needed to do.
    â€˜I don’t get it.’
    Polly had already moved to her computer, turned it on and was typing in the password as I spoke. ‘We loginto an online dating site pretending to be him and then engage some likely partners in conversation.’
    â€˜So we’re matchmaking? On the Internet? For my dad?’
    â€˜Yes, that sounds about right.’
    â€˜It sounds awful,’ I said, thinking about it. ‘Polly, it sounds really awful. As though he isn’t old enough to make his own decisions. And as though we are. We can’t pretend to be him. It’s ridiculous. Also, it’s probably illegal.’
    â€˜Either this or he goes downhill. That’s