Corrección de escalas y homologación de datos

After Friday-night dinner, there was always Hair Dye Sunday. Always. Ellie would go round to Ari’s to assist in the monthly session with bleach, a box of Manic Panic Rock ’n’ Roll Red hair dye, and to share her spoils from Sadie.

‘I can’t believe you went out in public in a tracksuit,’ Ari exclaimed when Ellie walked through the front door of her tiny flat and took the four steps that led into the kitchen. ‘Are you really my

daughter?’

‘Yoga pants and a Uniqlo vest do not look like a tracksuit,’ Ellie said indignantly. ‘They look like I’ve been exercising. Tess got a voucher for a place in Islington that does that Pilates where they stretch you on Reformer machines.’

Ari looked up from her bowl of bleach solution. ‘Really? Sounds painful.’

‘Well, I don’t recommend it on a hangover,’ Ellie said as she slumped on a stool. Ari’s décor style could be summed up as rock ‘n’ roll kitsch meets Victorian clutter. The flat was stuffed full of

paraphernalia, from assorted taxidermy including a pair of ravens, a one-legged squirrel and a motheaten fox to Mexican Day of the Dead masks on the shelf over the cooker, three ceramic hula girls dancing above the mantelpiece in the living room, and posters, flyers and photographs of Ari’s musical past and present covering the walls. There were also amps, guitars, an accordion and other pieces of musical equipment stacked wherever there was space. Ellie lived in dread of a frantic phone call from Ari to say she was trapped and unable to get to the front door because there was so much crap in the way. ‘Your Mexican Day of the Dead masks are looking at me funny.’

‘You’re so cranky when you have a hangover,’ Ari said. She tossed something at Ellie. ‘Put on your turban. It will make you feel better.’

There were certain rituals that had to be observed on Hair Dye Sunday, and one of them was that Ellie had to wear a maroon velvet turban of the sort favoured by chic Parisian geriatrics. Then, once she’d applied bleach to Ari’s roots, they sat on Ari’s bright pink Chesterfield and watched the Grey

Gardens documentary. They’d both seen it so often that they could recite the lines from memory with

only one eye on the screen. Ellie was Little Edie, Ari was Big Edie, and when Ari said, as she

always did, ‘Do you think we’ll end up as two mad old women living in a big, decaying house full of feral cats?’ Ellie would tell Ari that she planned to stick her in a care home before that could ever happen.

They also doggedly ate their way through Sadie’s food parcel. Eventually all that was left was the apple cake, which they were saving to have with a cup of tea once the dye had been washed out. Ellie felt as if the worst of her hangover had receded and she could tell Ari about the night before.

Tess and Lola were adamant that Ellie shouldn’t waste a single night crying about Richey so Lola had dragged her to a Blitz-themed party in Shoreditch. They’d dressed in vintage frocks with stocking seams drawn down the backs of their legs with eyeliner, ordered cocktails from a menu designed like a ration book, danced to Glenn Miller tunes and tried and tried and tried to find a normal bloke for Ellie to hook up with.

‘I don’t think normal blokes hang out at Blitz-themed club nights in Shoreditch,’ Ellie said, her feet propped up on Ari’s lap as Ari painted her toenails a glittery red. ‘I know you’re probably not down with me going out with some normal guy who wears a suit and has a pension plan but I really need normal in my life right now.’

‘I’m down with whatever makes you happy,’ Ari said. ‘But you should know that there’s no such thing as a normal person. What you need is a man who’ll make you feel normal, even when you feel like you’re the biggest freak in the world.’

‘Is that how my dad made you feel?’ Ellie asked. She didn’t even know what had prompted that question, because it wasn’t something they ever talked about. Ari occasionally ranted about how he’d sold out as a musician, but she never talked about him as her lover, or about the year they’d been together, and the little Ellie did know had been gleaned from Tabitha, Tom and Chester (who would clench his jaw so painfully that Ellie had stopped asking him). ‘Did he make you feel normal?’

Ari didn’t answer at first. She applied a second coat of polish to the little toenail on Ellie’s left foot, screwed the top back on the bottle and only then did she look up. Even with a carrier bag tied around her head so she didn’t get red dye everywhere, she looked sad and pensive. But mostly sad. ‘God, normal was the last thing he made me feel,’ she said quietly, and before Ellie could apologise for dredging up painful memories, Ari patted her leg. ‘Come on, Little Edie, help me wash this crap off my head. It’s starting to itch.’

All the way through the rest of the hair-dyeing process, which involved some hardcore

conditioning, Ari kept up a stream of inconsequential chatter about The Fuck Puppets’ next gig and the guitar class she was running at a rock ’n’ roll summer camp for girls in the school holidays. She even talked about the weather, or rather speculated if it was ever going to rain again ‘because this

relentless sunshine is going to give me a tan and you know how I feel about tans’.

It meant that Ellie didn’t have the opportunity to ask any more questions Ari couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. Ellie understood. She’d never had her heart broken quite like that, but there had been times when her heart had taken a beating, and even getting out of bed, much less talking about the person responsible, had made the ache almost unbearable. Still, her curiosity was piqued and when she got home and started to organise her outfit options for the coming week, ‘It Felt Like A Kiss’ was playing on the radio. It was a sign from God to stop what she was doing so she could sit on her bed and

rummage through her Dad box.

Even without fetching it from its hiding place and opening it, Ellie knew what was in the pretty art- deco tin, which had once contained some sablés au beurre Tess had brought back from a school trip to Brittany. Originally it had been a safe place to store her birth certificate, and the results of the

DNA test, requested four months after she was born. Slowly she’d added to its contents. There were a couple of black-and-white photos of her dad and a heavily pregnant Ari, with black hair in a truly monumental beehive, snuggled up on a bed. A Melody Maker interview with her father conducted in someone’s back garden in Primrose Hill with Ari throwing in a few comments from the sidelines that had made it onto the yellowing pages. A flyer from a gig at the Black Horse in 1986, when his old band, The Incognitos, had headlined and Ari’s group, the Saturday Girls, were third on the bill and legend (and Tabitha) had it that that was the night they’d first connected. A few pictures of him torn out of magazines, not that Ellie slavishly searched for her father’s likeness but if she came across a photo or an article she usually added it to her box.

The most recent cutting was from the Evening Standard’s party pages a few months before. Her father and his wife had been photographed at the opening night of a play. He was dressed in a sharp black suit and though he was fifty-five and starting to look a little weatherbeaten around the edges, it was easy to see why he was featured whenever a women’s magazine did a feature on silver foxes. Ellie always scrutinised his face for clues to see if there was any family resemblance, but Sadie and Ari were both united in their belief that Ellie got her looks from the Cohens.

magazines, was a CD of her father’s first and stratospherically successful solo album, Songs for a

Girl. He’d dedicated it to his wife; the wife he’d left for Ari and the woman he’d gone back to when

the affair was over. It was the record that had made him famous. Ellie had never listened to it,

couldn’t bear to, but the songs were woven into the fabric of British life and she was pretty sure that she knew all the words to at least half of them.

It wasn’t much of a Dad box, but then he’d never been much of a dad. Ari had tried to ensure that Ellie never really felt his absence. Between them, Chester, Tom and her grandpa had turned up for sports days and carol concerts, been the happy recipients of ineptly made Father’s Day cards and, much later, had been the ones to lecture Ellie on the perils of underage drinking and teenage boys who were only after one thing, and would come and pick her up in the wee small hours from the other side of London when she didn’t have enough money for a taxi.

Ellie had always had so many people in her life that the lack of a father shouldn’t have bothered her, but she’d still wondered what her life might have been like if he’d been in it. It had been a recurring but secret theme when she was younger. Every birthday, at Chanukah and Christmas-time, whenever she had a part in a school concert, Ellie would hope that this time her father would turn up, even though Ari said that he was really busy or that things were complicated and that Ellie would understand when she was older. Ellie had especially wanted her father to suddenly appear during the year when Ari had been getting up at five each morning to clean offices and had also worked until midnight as a barmaid to save for the deposit to join a shared ownership scheme and buy a flat, and Ellie had had to go and live with Sadie and Morry.

There had been so many times when money was tight and there’d been bailiffs at the door. They’d always turn up on a Friday afternoon, preferably the Friday afternoon of a bank holiday weekend when Ari could do nothing but hide behind the sofa with Ellie, both of them quiet as the quietest of mice. Then Ellie would wonder why her father wasn’t coming to their rescue because he had lots of money and he could make all the bad stuff go away.

That was back then, and now Ellie didn’t really wonder about her father any more. It was clear that he didn’t wonder about her. But sometimes, like this evening, her curiosity about this man she barely knew even though she had his DNA coursing through her veins (or whatever it was that DNA did) got the better of her. So Ellie kneeled down on the floor and stuck her arm under her bed, fingers ready to close around the edge of her Dad box, because it was always there beneath the right-hand side.

Always. Unless she’d knocked into it when she was vacuuming, because she knew for a fact that their cleaner didn’t bother with the bits that couldn’t be seen. Ellie lay flat on the floor, and peered into the shadowy recesses.

There was a plastic crate with her winter hats, gloves and scarves in it. Three long cardboard boxes where her winter boots nestled on boot trees. The concertina file containing all her important papers and another plastic crate housing all her Malory Towers, St Clare’s and boarding school books, which Ari had tried to ban with little success. There was even her Mason Pearson flat hairbrush, which Ellie had been looking for everywhere, but no Dad box.

Keep calm, keep calm, she muttered. Maybe the cleaner had moved it. Or she’d moved it herself when she’d reorganised her room a couple of months ago. Ten minutes later she’d rifled through her wardrobe, checked under the chest of drawers, done a second sweep of the wardrobe and searched through suitcases and travel bags. Each time she came up empty.

Ellie stood in the middle of her room and looked around. Maybe the Dad box was hiding in plain sight, but if it was then she couldn’t see it.

into the hall to greet Tess with an anguished, ‘Have you seen a French biscuit tin? It’s usually under my bed but I can’t find it anywhere!’

Tess couldn’t even remember the French biscuit tin that she’d once given to Ellie. After taking precious minutes to be brought up to speed, Tess dutifully searched all the places that Ellie had searched, opened every drawer and created havoc where once there had been neatly folded clothes arranged by season, texture and colour. Then, mainly to humour Ellie, Tess even hunted through her own room.

‘Sorry, Ellie, but it’s not here,’ she said at last, as she finished shoving her own underwear back in its drawers. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to it.’

‘Oh, I do,’ Ellie growled. She marched into Lola’s room without knocking, and anyway it was seven o’clock and Lola had been mouldering in bed all day and Ellie had no sympathy for her. ‘This is all your fault!’ she snapped at a barely conscious Lola. ‘I told you not to let him into the flat. That was all you had to do. Just stand in the hall and pass him his stupid, bloody stuff and now he’s taken my Dad box. That’s the only explanation. Unless you have it. Do you have it?’

Ellie’s eyes swept over the mess that was Lola’s living space. There were heaps of clothes and dirty crockery everywhere and, quite frankly, Lord Lucan and Shergar could have been stashed in Lola’s room and no one would be any the wiser. As it was, Lola was struggling out of her fugue state and trying to sit up on the mattress that she slept on ever since she’d lent her bed base to a friend for a conceptual art piece.

‘What the fuck?’ she mumbled. ‘Why are you shouting?’

‘I’m shouting because Richey must have taken my Dad box when he was in my room, even though you made a big thing about how he wasn’t even allowed into the flat. How could you do this to me?’

‘What the hell is a Dad box? You don’t have a dad!’ Lola could go from catatonic to roaring in thirty seconds. ‘And don’t come into my room when I have a hangover and start screaming at me. What’s got into you, Ells?’

Panic and fear and the feeling that the end of the world was coming were what had got into her, but Ellie thought the words might choke her. In fact, she did make a choking sound when she tried to speak, so she settled for storming out of Lola’s room and slamming the door behind her. It was the first time in her life that Ellie had ever felt the need to slam a door.

It was the warning she needed to put herself on a timeout in the bathroom so she could calm down and stop doing out-of-character things like shouting and slamming doors. She stayed there for ten minutes, though that was mostly spent pulling everything out of the pot cupboard where they kept tampons, razors and a huge range of Korres toiletries, from whenever they did a TK Maxx run. The Dad box was not there or hidden behind any towels and it was obviously too big to fit in the cabinet over the basin, but Ellie still checked to be sure.

Ellie emerged from the bathroom, a lot less panic-stricken, because now she was resigned to the awful truth that the Dad box was gone. She also needed to apologise to Lola, who was in a foetal position on the living-room sofa.

‘Dude, it’s already forgiven,’ Lola said. ‘Sorry I shouted at you, but I can’t believe you’ve been holding out on me all this time. So, tell me, who’s your daddy?’

Ellie shot Tess a grateful look for not blabbing her darkest secrets. Ari’s affair and subsequent heavy-with-child-ness had happened before her father went from obscure purveyor of substandard mope rock to mega-famous, stadium-playing purveyor of anthemic mope rock, and also the internet hadn’t been invented then. Life had, apparently, been simpler when it was much, much harder for the whole world to get all up in your grille. Besides Ari wasn’t the type to sell her story, ‘because it’s no

one else’s bloody business and I am not going to be a sad cliché of the wronged woman’. Ellie had kept quiet too. Her father had never acknowledged her so there was no reason to

acknowledge him. And even though she and Tess were besties and had known each other since they were eleven, Ellie had still waited until the summer after they’d done their A levels to confess all. Lola had only been in her life for four years and for two of those years they’d glared at each other at parties, so she hadn’t yet earned access to Ellie’s secrets.

‘I can’t tell you that,’ Ellie replied. ‘It’s nothing personal, but you’re rubbish at keeping secrets. It would be on Twitter in the space of an hour.’

‘It wouldn’t!’ Lola made a hurt face, then Ellie saw her scroll back and reconsider. ‘Well, I can keep a secret until I get drunk, then all bets are off.’

‘Anyway, he’s only my father in the biological sense of … Why are you looking at me like that?’ Lola was staring at her as if she was seeing Ellie for the very first time. ‘Is it Paul McCartney? You do look a bit like him around the eyes.’

‘No, she doesn’t!’ Tess gasped indignantly. ‘She’s much prettier than Stella McCartney.’

‘I guess.’ Lola gave Ellie another appraising glance. ‘I can’t see Ari doing the nasty with Macca