Her father had been an insomniac. All night he would sit up in the kitchen and use the endless hours to catch up on the washing. He liked to pretend he was in a launderette. For the company, he said. You could pretend that the most fascinating people were there, or were just about to walk in. Those are places filled with dead time and so it wasn’t time you could think of as wasted. When she thought back, Penny remembered Dad often talking about wasting your time, wasting your life. He said that was the only real crime.
When she was small and couldn’t sleep, Penny would slip downstairs and wordlessly come to sit beside him. She would bring a book and read, or they would both watch the washer. Before she grew sleepy and mesmerised, they might strike up a conversation out of the blue, as strangers might. In this way Penny’s father was, he explained, teaching her how to deal with all the ordinary strangers in the wider world.
Once when she was nine she came down and found him in his coat and shoes, watching the washing. She spoke to him straight away.
‘I feel strange, Dad.’
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I thought it was too quiet in here tonight.’ He rubbed thoughtfully at his beard. ‘Maybe you could use the machine at the far end. I think I noticed somebody emptying it a minute ago.’
Penny wasn’t up to pretending that night. ‘I feel really strange.’ She sat down and spread her fingers, fat, squashy fingers that could break her dad’s heart to look at them. Her black fingernails made his insides twinge whenever he saw her hands. Penny was staring at her damaged fingernails now as if they were to blame for how she felt. Her dad took off his anorak and put it around her shoulders.
‘How strange?’ he asked.
‘Sort of tingly. Tingling.’
‘Oh.’'
At this moment the machine’s cycle stopped and there was silence. He felt for the stacked ten-penny pieces they kept on the bench and pretended to feed more into the washer, thinking. These coins they saved, usually, to spend on boxes of After Eight mints. They had a craze for these and ate them all through the night, talking and dipping their hands into the snug emerald boxes, pulling the mints out of envelopes, writing messages to each other and leaving them about the house in the black slips of paper. They loved getting these tokens from each other, stowed like litter all about the place, on scraps of paper, sticky with smears of peppermint cream. ‘Tingling?’ he said.
She took a deep breath and used a word she had learned only recently in a Susan Cooper novel. ‘I think I’ve had a premonition.’
‘Oh?’ He made it sound like the most natural thing in the world, popping an After Eight into his mouth.
Penny nodded grimly. ‘I can see that I’m going to be something big.’
He said, ‘What you’ve got is growing pains.’
‘It was a premonition. It’s more than being tall.’
‘What then?’
‘A guru or something.’
He was impressed. He gave her a big hug.
When Penny was twelve she once had to go outside to their Ford Capri to find him. In the dark street he was pretending to be stuck in a traffic jam. That was more dead time he could cheerfully waste. She climbed into the passenger seat and watched him mime bored exasperation. Then he turned to her with a worried look.
‘You haven’t locked us out, have you, Pen?’
She jangled the keys.
‘Is it the tingling again?’
She nodded. ‘I’m having another premonition. It’s bigger than just being a guru, I think.’ She looked out of the window, down the street. Through the black trees you could only just see the cathedral, lit up gold and green on its hill. She always thought of it as the colour of frankincense and myrrh. ‘Dad,’ she went on. ‘When you were a kid, did you ever think that you might be the Messiah?’
He gripped the steering wheel with a faraway look in his eyes. Eventually he said, ‘I was never sure that what I was going to be would ever really be me.’ He shrugged and laughed. ‘Does that make sense?’
it sounds straightforward enough. Straightforwarder than what I’ve got.’
‘Go to bed.’ He smiled gently. ‘Second Coming or not, you still have to get to school tomorrow.’
At the end of the morning Penny was there with her head in her locker once more, putting books and files away and wondering where to go for lunch. Today was a good day because she had a fiver and she was thinking about going into town. Maybe she could even ask around and see if anyone in the common room was up for a walk and a laugh.
They were a pretty uninspiring bunch in there. Boy scientists and girls in dark skirts who did history. She didn’t have many friends yet. Someone was playing Ice-T on the crappy old tape deck. Some of the more interesting lads were ranged around that end of the room, and she saw them look up sharply when the door beside them flew open and Mr Northspoon came swishing in with a stack of photocopying. He pulled a face at the music and then sought out each member of his English group, thrusting handouts at them. They were pages Xeroxed from other Forster novels, from articles on him. ‘I forgot to give them out before,’ he
