Art
Art
The safety curtain came down, and Ant and Dec disappeared offstage, leaving Art and Kerry feeling entirely alone, despite being in a room filled with thousands of people. Kerry. The woman he hadn’t seen since she was seventeen years old. He could still make out the girl she’d been, but every change, every wrinkle, every gray hair was a rebuke. A reminder of how much time had been lost.
“Kerry,” Art croaked again. “I can’t believe it’s really you.”
Art reached for her hand.
“You can’t manipulate me into meeting you like this and expect a fairy-tale happy ending,” said Kerry, snatching her hand away. “I’ve hated you for so long.”
“Not as much as I’ve hated myself,” said Art. “Ever since you left, there’s been a hole inside me. I’ve tried and tried to fill it, but it’s impossible. I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed you. I’ve replayed that day thousands of times in my head, wishing I could go back and make it different.”
“Katie died asking where you were, Dad,” said Kerry. “The last words she heard Mum say were a lie. She said you were on the way to the hospital. She didn’t tell Katie the truth: that she’d tried and tried to find you, calling you on the set where you’d told her you were working, not knowing you’d been shacked up with another one of the extras in a Travelodge for two days.”
“I know. It haunts me every day. It replays every night in my dreams,” said Art. “I lost a daughter and didn’t even get to say goodbye.”
“I lost a twin . A part of myself. I know now that it wasn’t your fault. It was meningitis that killed her, not your lies or betrayal, but for so long my anger and grief were all mixed up, and I couldn’t separate them out.”
“I know,” said Art again, because there was nothing else he could say.
“Why didn’t you come and find me?” she said.
“I did. I tried and tried. Your mother wanted nothing to do with me,” he said.
“You made some effort, for a year or two. But then you just gave up,” said Kerry, her voice hard and cold.
“You moved. You changed your numbers. I could have tracked you down, of course, but it was too difficult,” said Art. “It hurt too much. Anyhow, you knew where I was. I’m still in the same house. Your house. I couldn’t move. I kept your bedroom for you. It’s still there.”
“It’s too late now, Dad,” said Kerry, with the same determined, stubborn look he remembered from her teenage years. “There’s too much damage done.”
“We’re live in one minute!” shouted a voice from offstage. “Clear the set! Places, please!”
A runner approached both cautiously and urgently, as if he’d been sent in to defuse a ticking bomb. “Sorry, but you need to move,” he said.
And then Kerry was gone, and Art was in a large, crowded room backstage with Maggie, alongside all the other human and canine contestants, but feeling more alone than ever. There was a huge screen on the wall, transmitting the live show.
“Welcome back to Me and My Dog !” said the presenter, standing alone in the spotlight. “It’s time to announce our three finalists, in no particular order.” Art could never have imagined that around thirty people and forty dogs could be so silent.
“Tony and the Tiny Tots!” the presenter announced, and backstage the man with the three slutty Chihuahuas yelped, and was ushered toward the wings by two men in black wearing headsets. “Mary and Mungo!” said the presenter. Art held his breath. “And Art and Maggie!”
Art and Maggie were escorted through the crowd by the men in black, emerging, blinking, back into the blinding lights on the stage.
The three final acts stood around the presenter. Art was unable to follow what he was saying. He could hear the highlights of the three acts playing on the screen behind him.
“And in third place…” said the presenter. An unnatural, cruelly long silence followed, before he said, “TONY AND THE TINY TOTS!” The audience cheered, and Tony beamed and wept simultaneously, smothering his tiny Chihuahuas in kisses.
“And in second place…ART AND MAGGIE!”
Mary leaped into the air as her first place was announced, and Art used every ounce of his acting skill to look thrilled. He smiled broadly, and leaned down to pat Mungo, a stupid little sausage dog in a tutu, with a ridiculously long back and legs far too short to be useful. A dog designed so badly that it couldn’t even climb a flight of stairs.
Mary gave him a hug as she sobbed and jabbered incoherently, thanking everyone from her parents to Mungo’s vet. Art told her how incredibly delighted he was for her, how much she deserved the prize, and he tried not to imagine himself plunging a knife into her back. He should have been deliriously happy. Second place was amazing. But it just wasn’t amazing enough.
A microphone was shoved into Art’s face and he gushed to the presenter about how thrilled he was, and how he’d never, in a million years, expected to get this far.
It was, Art thought, his best ever performance.
···
The mood on the bus ride home was both jubilant and subdued, as they replayed every single minute of their day and the triumph that it had so nearly been. Apart from Art’s reunion with Kerry, which no one was mentioning.
They were all desperate to know what Daphne had done to make her flee so spectacularly. Except for Lydia, who was keeping remarkably tight lipped, making Art suspect that she, like him, knew Daphne’s secrets, and was keeping them to herself. It was safer that way and, besides, he didn’t like the idea of everyone knowing Daphne, or Delilah, as well as he did.
Art kept looking across at the empty seat. The seat that Daphne had occupied that morning. He wondered where she was now. Did she know about their success, and their failure? He wished he could tell her about Kerry. How he’d found her and then, just a few minutes later, lost her again. He wished he could give her the piece of the jigsaw puzzle he’d deliberately withheld: the reason he’d not been there the day Kerry’s twin sister had died so suddenly of meningitis. Then tell her how Kerry would never forgive him. How the hole she had left felt more gaping and irreparable than ever.
“That’s strange,” said Anna, across the aisle from Art.
“What?” he said.
“I’m sure I had my passport in this bag, but it’s gone,” she said, rummaging through the bag’s contents.
“Anna,” said Art, quietly, “do you think you’ll ever need that passport again?”
“Hell no,” she replied. “I’ve done enough traveling to last a lifetime. And I’m not exactly mobile anymore, am I?”
“Well, might you be able to stay quiet about it going astray? At least for a while?” said Art, and he nodded over toward Daphne’s empty seat.
He watched Anna’s expression slowly morph from confusion to understanding.
“What passport?” she said, finally, zipping up her bag and putting it back on the seat beside her.
“OMG!” said Ziggy from the back of the bus, waking up Kylie, who began yelling indignantly. “You know that GoFundMe page I set up? It’s gone crazy! We’ve raised over seventy-nine thousand pounds, and it’s climbing every second. We’re going to do it! We’re going to save the community center!”