The Year of the Ladybird Read Free Page A

picture was my biological father. I turned the photo over in my hand. On the back of it someone had written one word in pencil. The pencil had faded just like the photo, but it
was still easy to read what was written there: Skegness.
    One word. It was a word I’d peered at many times, as if it were code or a mantra or a key of some kind. My father had taken me to Skegness when I was three years old – I don’t
know where my mother was at the time – and I was told he’d suffered a heart attack on the beach. I was with him at the time, though of course I had no memory of these events. Later my
mother married my stepfather. This was the only photograph I had of my father. I’d stolen it. I don’t even know whether Mum knew I had it, though she might have guessed.
    I’d found the photograph when I was old enough to snoop. It was in a tin box kept at the foot of my mother’s wardrobe. In the box were various documents like birth certificates and
some old costume jewellery plus a series of postcards. There were photograph albums in the house so I knew instantly this one was rogue. I quickly figured out this was my natural father. At some
point in my teens I took and kept the photograph for myself.
    It was not as if we had never discussed my biological father. Any time I asked I would get some basic biographical details and the same account of a tragedy that took place on a beach. The
account was always consistent and unvarying.
    ‘Why on earth would you want to go there?’ This was my stepfather, Ken, when I announced I was going to Skegness to look for seasonal work.
    It’s an extraordinary thing. If my mother had dropped the dishes on the floor or they had turned to gaze at each other meaningfully, I could have understood it. But when I said that I was
going to Skegness they instantly announced their serious displeasure by not doing anything. Ken was eating his fried breakfast and Mum was at the sink. I’d been back from college for just two
days. The fact that they made no movement – made no eye contact either with each other or with me – tipped me off to the fact that I’d just lobbed a grenade.
    Ken gazed down at his breakfast, carefully sawing through his bacon and sausage with his knife. His blond eyebrows seemed to bristle over his red, weathered face. Mum rinsed a plate and shook
the droplets from the plate as if they had to be counted.
    Finally she spoke, but still without turning to face me. ‘But Ken’s got you good work with him.’
    Ken was a builder. He usually had a number of projects going on different sites. I’d worked for him before, mostly as a ladder-monkey and errand boy. It was okay but unless you like
running up and down a ladder and whistling at passing girls once every four hours it was dull. ‘I know that, Dad,’ I said. Sometimes I called him Ken and sometimes Dad, without
particular intention. ‘But I want to do something different.’
    ‘How much are they paying you?’ he wanted to know. ‘It won’t be much.’
    ‘I haven’t even got a job yet,’ I said.
    ‘Why there?’ Mother said.
    ‘I’ve got a friend who is working there.’ This was a lie.
    ‘I’d got it all set up for you,’ said Ken. ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
    My mother turned off the running tap and with agonising delicacy she set the plate on the draining rack, as if it were a fragile and rare piece of china.
    The next day at the morning briefing I got to meet some of my fellow Greencoats. One was a rather sad and overweight sixty-year-old with a pale face and a rotten wig. The three
girl Greencoats were professional dancers in the evening theatre, doubling on the entertainments programme in the day-time. They were all sweet-natured, leggy, tanned and beautiful, and seemed as
unattainable as the planets in the night sky. The other male Greencoat was absent to no one’s great surprise or concern.
    Offered the choice between organising a Whist Drive or a