No Goodbye by Marita Conlon-Mckenna Page B

his meal cold, that’s his decision.
    Dad is in good form. He got a long letter from Mum in the post this morning and he’s going for a drink in the golf club tonight with three of the guys he works with.
    ‘Grace, run up and tell Conor to come down!’ Dad tells her.
    ‘Not there,’ she announces, shaking her head and waggling her two skinny, crooked plaits. Conor is always late or last in. Dad opens the back door and roars out his name. Sometimes it works, if Conor is hanging round the garden or the road.
    ‘He never misses it! He knows I’m going out tonight and that I want to get his homework checked after tea,’ Dad fumes.
    * * *
    Conor still has not turned up. Lucy tidies up eventhough it is his turn to pack the dishwasher today. Dad sends me off on a wild-goose chase to a few of the neighbours, in case he has gone into one of their houses and forgotten the time. No such luck!
    ‘Which of his friends would he be with?’ Dad demands, pacing up and down and getting more annoyed.
    I can’t make any suggestions. He hasn’t got a lot of friends, the kid’s a loner.
    ‘Dad, he might be in his club, you know, with that guy John,’ Lucy offers.
    ‘That’s it! That’s where he probably is. I’ll kill him when I get my hands on him!’
    Dad gives it about another forty minutes, then he and Lucy head off in the car to John’s house. None of us can remember his Dad’s name, but Lucy thinks she knows the house.
    Conor’s not there. His friend said there was some kind of row and that none of them has seen him for hours. Dad is furious, shouting at the three of us: ‘Phone this!’ ‘Get that!’ ‘Do you know this?’ as if we are to blame for what Conor does.
    ‘Bet he’s run away,’ Grace announces. I manage to clap my hand over her mouth before she gets achance to say what I know is coming next: Just like Mum.
    Dad slumps on the chair. If Lucy or I had said that he would have exploded, but Gracey with those big blue eyes – he nods, just accepting another family calamity.

The Big Search
    GRACE –
Monday
    Dad is really cross about Conor. He phoned the Guards to tell them that Conor was missing, and a Garda car came to our house. There were two Guards, a man and a woman. They wrote down everything Dad said, and they asked him about Mum. They went upstairs to Conor’s bedroom and Dad told them what clothes he was wearing.
    They asked me all about him and if he ran away often. Everybody is searching for him.
    Lucy and Granny keep on crying and saying allkinds of bad things that might have happened to him.
    I wish we had a dog. If we had a pet dog, I would get him to sniff some of Conor’s clothes and then track him down.
    Dad says I am to stay with Granny and Lucy and not to budge.
    I wonder is Conor gone to find Mummy and bring her back?

The Long Hike
    CONOR –
Monday Night
    Kingstown – that’s what they used to call Dun Laoghaire in the old days. I, Conor Dolphin, made it. I walked all this way, miles and miles.
    ‘The King of Kingstown has arrived,’ I shout across the watery blackness of the coast.
    The big car-ferry is docked, all lit up like a cruise-liner you’d see in a film. The hatch is down, like a huge open mouth for the cars to drive into. Crowds of people are making their way onto it and others arestanding at the ticket office. Down below, cars and motorbikes, vans and lorries and container trucks all wait their turn, revving their engines. Lucky people going on holiday. One car has floral wreaths spread all over the back seat – I guess they’re going to a funeral. Wouldn’t it be great if I could stow away? Then by tomorrow morning I would be in Holyhead, gone from Ireland.
    I saunter down to the office, hoping there’s some way that I can slip through. If only I could spot a family, then maybe I could pretend to be one of their kids. I notice a hopeful – a guy in a brown corduroy jacket, and he has a kind of file with tickets and papers in it, which the girl behind the