Children's and YA short story competition - Runner Up

Can you call it a show if you’re the only audience member? If all you’re getting is a set of photos? And a text file, Dad’s told me. Something big, Dad-style. My circuitry is lighting up, my fingers are poised. I’m sitting on the sofa with Larry.
Larry is our laptop. I do homework. Dad does the household accounts and keeps track of potential jobs. He’s a Cable Plant Technician. I work with wires, is what he says, if asked. The past couple of years have included short-term contracts taking him away to places like Berlin, Prague, Paris and Barcelona. It can be for a few days or sometimes weeks, but when he goes, Aunty Amy comes. She’s like my second mum. Mum died when I was seven. I’m twelve now.
Anyway, Larry the laptop is supposed to be for work stuff, but mainly what we do is plug him into The Multiplex to watch films, box sets or old sitcoms. The Multiplex is actually just a big plain wall in our living room. There’s a projector on the ceiling and when you plug Larry in, you get a full wall of larger-than-life images. Multiplex. We love that word. We say it a lot. Dad also does stuff in his job with multiplex cables, which are basically wires with different lines of communication running through them. Multiplex. It’s one of those words that gets nicer the more you say it. A word we also use when the separate wires of life have got so muddled that you can’t properly work out what goes where. Multiplex, we’ll conclude.
Click. Larry’s display pops up on The Multiplex screen. It’s five past eight and Dad has just left for work.
    This morning, Dad gave me a sealed envelope. He placed it in the centre of the kitchen table between our two plates. I was already wondering why the toast rack was at the side and not in the middle like on normal days. I guessed this wasn’t a normal day. He only ate two of his four pieces of toast. I scoffed my usual three. He also slapped on his butter thoughtlessly, haphazardly heaping it here and there so that it was in random wedges and peaks like a heavily daubed oil painting of a rough sea.
    Dad is usually careful and precise. It goes with his job. Multiple wires all with separate functions, separate destinations, separate safety features. Get it wrong and the system fails, which can mean (at best) malfunction or (at worst) fire or death. This maltreatment of his toast was the first signal that a corrupted wire was crackling.
    “It’s not my birthday,” I said, looking at the envelope.
    “It’s not a card. It’s a note.”
    “Money? What for? I don’t have a trip today.”
    “Not a money note, a written one. A sort of letter.”
    “From …?”
    “Me. From me.”
    “Right. And you can’t just tell me?”
    “No. I’m going to work as normal. The note will tell you what happens next.”
    “What happens next is I go to school. And this breakfast table is where we present our daily notes to each other. Spoken ones. You know, Dad, that thing called talking.”
    “Just wait until I’ve gone, then read the note.”
    Dad has two tones of voice: the joker, which tells me that something fun is fizzing into action; and the serious scientist for when things are fraying and something has to happen the way he says it.
This was his serious voice.
    The usual morning pattern is: Dad brings me tea in bed at seven; I read while he showers; I shower while he reads; we rendezvous in the kitchen for toast, togetherness and more tea; he leaves for work at eight; I read, write or potter, then make my own way to school at half-eight. It’s been like this since I started Year Six. The one change was in September when I started Year Seven, but the only difference was turning left instead of right at the end of our path.
    Dad’s note contained mystery: I didn’t want to do this on your birthday, but you’re twelve now and I know that you can handle this. I’m going to work as normal, but I’m not coming back as normal tonight. Plug Larry into The Multiplex. Look for a folder on the desktop with your name on it. There are four photos and one text file. Look at them in any order. They explain important things. You don’t have to go to school if you don’t want to. Aunty Amy will arrive at 9am. She knows you might still be at home when she arrives. If not, she’ll see you after school.
    I see the icon with my name on it. Click.
Five files.
    I don’t panic. That’s not my style. He’s twelve going on seventy, my dad says these days. He started this joke when I was eight and has enjoyed it ever since. He’s eight going on seventy-eight. He’s nine going on seventy-nine. He’s ten going on seventy. I’m not sure why Dad considers your seventies as the decade of wisdom, but there you go. He’s pegged me at seventy now. Whoever we’re talking to, I always just give a wry smile, a shrug and a flash of raised eyebrows. It perplexes others; but it binds us together, like a duplex wire.
I don’t panic, but coldness descends like a jellyfish cloaking my head, shoulders, arms, torso, legs. I know that you can handle this. I’m not coming home as normal tonight. Not good. But, also, it won’t be bad. Dad doesn’t do bad stuff. He does stupid stuff, non-thinking clunky stuff, but never anything bad.
    I don’t panic, but Dad did say he wasn’t coming back as normal. What does that mean? There’s only one thing to do.
    Open the files.
The photo files are numbered, so I decide to do them in order. First comes one I recognise. The blue-eyed lovers: Mum and Dad’s graduation day at Sheffield City Hall. Mum is twenty-one, Dad is twenty-four and with them is Amy, aged fourteen, with her sour teenage face on. Mum and Dad full of joy, Amy brooding, dark, preoccupied. Sheffield stories zap along the zipwires of our lives. I click to the second photo. Another familiar one: Mum holding me less than a year later, my chestnut eyes shining. On graduation day, she didn’t know I was on the way. Photo Three: Amy holding me. I haven’t seen this one. She’s about fifteen here, I guess. Photo Four: Dad – and a mystery woman. In front of the Eiffel Tower.
    The front door sounds – key, clunk, rapid footsteps – and then the living room door flies open.
    “Stop! Do you know? Has he told you?”
    “Aunty Amy!” The picture of Dad and the mystery woman is still up on The Multiplex. “Do I know what?”
    She looks up at the photo. Her eyebrows rise. Her eyes widen. Her shoulders drop. She shakes her head. “I can’t believe he’s done it like this.”
    “Done what?”
I look at Amy. She’s quaking. Hot. Spuming molten thoughts. She blinks slowly. As her lashes rise, there’s a lava flow in her liquid brown eyes. She’s searching into me as if I’ve come down with something horrendous and life-threatening.
The photo. Paris. Dad’s trips. The woman. Separate streams of life are ferrying bits of information from disparate sources to gather as a torrent in the delta of my mind.
I point at the photo. “That woman. She’s my new mum, isn’t she?”
“Darling –— ”
“It’s Paris. Look at Dad’s face. That’s his secret girlfriend, isn’t it? She’s moving in, isn’t she?”
“Yes. Maybe. But he can tell you about all that himself. He’s such a loose wire!”
“There’s a text file here too. I’ll open it.”
“No!” Aunty Amy darts forward and snatches the mouse away. She sits, wraps her arms around me, kisses the top of my head. “Show me the other photos, please.”
I sit back from her embrace, look up. “Your eyes look like wet conkers.”
“I think I know what’s coming, my love. Can I see the other photos?”
Click.
I narrate them to her.
“One: Mum and Dad all smiles. You, Teenager of Doom.”
She smiles, blinks heavily. “I had a lot on my mind that day.”
Click.
“Two: Mum and me.”
Aunty Amy bites her bottom lip. A pulse behind my eyes. A narrowing of hers. A sparking down the wires.
Click.
“Three: the proud aunty.”
“Look at those baby eyes,” she says.
Her hand has reached out for mine. It’s a gentle hold. In the photo, she’s doing the same, holding my tiny hand as she cradles me.
We turn to each other. Her brown eyes are steady now, waiting. They flicker and jostle as she searches into mine. Inside my head – and it feels like I can hear it inside her head too, and between us – there is an electric buzz, increasing its volume as the multiplex of memory moments cascades into clarity.
She has always been there for me. Always looks after me when Dad can’t. Never misses a school thing. Helps me with homework, takes me out, buys me books.
Those brown eyes.
    No need to be told. The knowledge has always been there in the wires, buzzing down the years.
I look at Aunty Amy.
She holds still.
“Mum wasn’t my real mum, was she?”
“No, she wasn’t.”
“Dad isn’t my real dad, is he?”
“No, he isn’t.”
“And he’s got a new girlfriend, who might become my new mum?”
“Yes, she may well do. She’s very lovely. You’ll like her.”
Four fibres of life – mine, Mum’s, Dad’s, Amy’s – and now the fifth strand of the mystery woman – all entwined in one long cable taking us from Sheffield days to now.
“But the big news is you, isn’t it?”
She’s nodding. “Yes.”
“You’re my real mum.”
“Yes.”
“Wow. Two new mums in one day.”
“Yes.” She gives me a blank, uncertain look.
I half smile. Five wires now. A thicker bind. A different arrangement. A restrung cable.
“Multiplex,” I say.