The Key to Finding Jack by Ewa Jozefkowicz (best classic books to read TXT) 📕

eating in the dining room with Henry, the servants busy at work in the kitchen, making bread for the following morning’s breakfast.

I wanted to ask Uncle Michael who had painted the house, but he wasn’t there. The only other person was a bored-looking young man with a goatee beard, who glanced at us before turning back to his screen. Manfy led us into the staffroom, which was tiny, with a round table, chairs and a shelf with a microwave and kettle. I noticed that the place was spotless and Manfy took great care in making the tea, even arranging a little fan of biscuits onto a plate.

‘I’ll be back in a sec. Going to get changed,’ she said.

She disappeared into the loo with her rucksack and re-emerged a couple of minutes later resembling the girl I’d met at Sutty’s – in ripped black jeans and a T-shirt with a skull on it.

She sat cross-legged on one of the chairs opposite us.

‘I couldn’t breathe when I first saw it on the news,’ she said quietly. ‘But that must be nothing compared to how you’re feeling. I tried calling him straight away – bet you did too.’

I had. Fifty-three attempted calls so far. Fifty-three times I’d reached the recorded message in Jack’s joking tone, ‘What never asks questions but is always answered? Ha, that one’s too easy. I’ll try to answer the phone one day, promise. In the meantime, leave a message. Cheers.’ I had lost hope of him answering. I just needed to hear his voice.

The drumming in my head began to build. It was an angry beat – fast and heavy. How dare this girl who I hardly knew have done exactly the same thing as me when she found out about Jack? I’d spent a lifetime with him – he was a part of my earliest memories, and his name, according to Mum, was the first word I’d said. Manfy had known him for what seemed like five minutes. My fists clenched and I had to sit on them to try to calm down.

‘Sutty said that Jack helped you to get this job?’ said Keira, glancing at me anxiously.

‘Oh, he did a lot more than that,’ she said. ‘I was a right mess when he met me. I was pretending I wasn’t, of course, but it was awful.’

She stopped talking and began fiddling with the leather strap on her key ring, as if embarrassed by the memory.

‘Why was it so awful?’ Keira asked insistently.

‘I didn’t have a job, or a place to live, and I had £12.45 in my pocket to last me for ever. I’d been trying to save it, so I’d been eating rice cakes for a week. There were these guys at the hostel I was staying at who were always fighting. I’d be woken in the middle of the night by people being beaten up and I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay there for much longer. I felt as if I was drowning.’

I looked at her to see whether she was making this up. Jack always said I have a great knack for knowing if someone is lying, but she was deadly serious and looked me straight in the eye.

‘Why were you homeless?’ I found myself asking. My fury fell away and I was glad that I hadn’t said anything.

‘I’d had a massive row with my mum. We’ve never got on and we were always arguing. We lived in this tiny flat in Grimsby. She’d had it with me when I dropped out of college and then her boyfriend moved in. He’s a nasty piece of work. The less I tell you about him, the better. Anyway, I couldn’t stand it any more, so one day I took all the money that I had saved up – about a hundred pounds – and I caught a coach down to London.

‘Mum didn’t even call after I left and I didn’t call her either. The trouble was that I didn’t have a plan. I knew that I needed to get away. I got in touch with a friend’s brother who owned a pub in Vauxhall. He said I could work there in return for a room upstairs, but when I turned up, well – let’s say that things didn’t work out on any level, and I was stuck.’

‘Why didn’t you go home?’ Keira asked.

‘I couldn’t. One of the guys at the pub had found me this hostel and I kept trying to get work at the Job Centre, but I had no qualifications, only my driver’s licence. I managed to get an interview for a retail role, but in the end, they took on someone else who’d done it before. That was with Jamal, Sutty’s brother. He did get me a couple of cleaning jobs at Sutty’s which is where I first bumped into Jack.’

‘I remember that day. I thought you were a customer. You seemed so – you know…’

‘Confident? Chilled?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m a good actress. Your brother came after school the next day and found me in tears outside the shop after my shift. I was so hungry. He bought me fish and chips. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal in days… Then he asked if I wanted to talk about whatever it was that had made me cry. I thought he was trying to chat me up but I ended up blurting it all out because I felt so lonely. We sat together on a wall on Kavanagh Street and I talked and talked.’

‘And did he, you know – ask for your number?’ asked Keira. I could tell by the tone of her voice that she was getting impatient. She was itching to get to the real questions that we wanted to ask.

‘What? No. I mean he did, but not in that way. When I told him I was broke, he wanted to give me some money, but I refused. So he said that I should treat it as a loan, and I told him