maybe it fell out. I don’t think it matters. I don’t know why anyone would care how I found it, only about what was inside.
I should have taken a photo of it so that people would believe me later on, but that’s easy to say after the event. At the time, I was struggling to understand what it meant. I almost didn’t believe what I was seeing. I picked it up and turned it over, then twisted it around, trying to convince myself it was real.
It was a driving licence: a normal, British plastic card with Dad’s photo on it. He was giving one of those dead-eye stares to the camera like you have to do for those things. You’re not allowed to look human – but anyone would still recognise their own dad.
The problem was that it wasn’t Dad’s name on that licence – it was Alan’s.
Chapter Twelve
THE BEST PASTRIES
Emma: I couldn’t figure it out. I wondered if it was an old licence that actually belonged to Alan – but the issue date was from about six months earlier. By that point, Alan had already been dead for more than eight years. Then there was Dad’s photo. Everything looked new.
When I was fifteen, one of my friends at school said she could get us all fake IDs. There were about ten of us and we all gave her a fiver with a passport photo. She came back after the weekend with an envelope full of fake student cards, with every one making us seem three years older than we were. I had my first drink in a pub using that card. I was thinking of that as I was holding the envelope. It was a fake ID, with Dad’s photo and Alan’s details.
When we were kids, we needed those cards to make us look older – but Dad had this to make him look like Alan… to make him look like a man who’d died nine years before…
It wasn’t just the ID in the envelope. There were a couple of sheets of paper and a small key. I remember ‘Ag Georgios’ being written across the top and thought it was probably a person. There was a separate line that had ‘#133’ on it.
I definitely glanced at the rest but didn’t pay much attention because I was supposed to be finding Mum’s charger. I ended up stuffing everything into the envelope and putting it back where it came from.
It was only then that I saw Mum’s charger on the ledge next to the front door. She’d probably put it down on her way out and forgotten to pick it up. I grabbed that and then opened the door… but I couldn’t leave that envelope where it was. I just couldn’t. I ended up locking it in my cottage before running back to the taxi with Mum’s charger. I thought she might say something about the length of time I took, but she simply said ‘thank you’ – and then she left.
It didn’t even cross my mind to mention the fake ID to her then. Maybe I should have?
All I can say is that you weren’t there. People always read books or watch movies and judge the main character as if it’s them. They say ‘No one would ever act like that!’ – but what they’re really saying is that they wouldn’t. Except it’s not their story and it’s not their circumstances. They haven’t lived a whole life in someone else’s shoes. What those people are really saying isn’t that ‘no one would ever act like that’, it’s: ‘My existence and my thought patterns are so ingrained that I can’t imagine anyone acting in a way differently to me.’
You have to have a real ego to think like that.
Julius: It was quite a bit later when I heard what Emma claimed about that licence. I don’t know what to say about it. Either it existed and she was wrong about the details – or she made the whole thing up. Ask yourself this: If she’d found what she said she did, then where is it? She didn’t take a photo, she didn’t show anyone, she didn’t ask Mum about it.
If it was me, I’d have done all those things. Wouldn’t you?
Emma: After Mum’s taxi left, I was heading back through reception. There was a woman there talking to a man behind the counter. She wasn’t shouting, but she was speaking loudly enough that anyone could hear what she was saying. She