Judy in Disguise

By Drew Liddle

Everything changes for Judy Manners the moment Mum runs off to an artists’ commune on a remote Scottish island. Overnight, she goes from being happy and normal to depressed and introverted – even before a Polish Punk moves in with Dad to compound her misery.
Taking herself in hand, Judy begins to write down her experiences, trying to make sense of her chaotic emotions. Soon, she starts to piece together all the clues and make some sense of what is happening. Trusting her instincts and encouraged by her boyfriend, Milo, she embarks on a fantastic coming of age journey of discovery, following in Mum’s footsteps, using Dad’s psychological skills to guide her.
It is a dangerous quest that takes her to the dark heart of London’s drug scene and, through Glasgow’s mean streets, eventually to the safe haven of the Isle of Mull, where it seems Mum is leading an idyllic existence. Then tragedy strikes - but might it actually lead to her parents being reunited?
This is a warm and tender work of teenage fiction that captures all the heartache and joy and the strength and vulnerability of being young and romantic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Drew Liddle
• Release date: Jun 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370865154

Drew Liddle

Dr Drew Liddle has written several works of self-help non-fiction under his own name and a great deal of genre fiction and children's fiction under a variety of pseudonyms. In a long and diverse career, he has been a grave-digger, a lorry-driver, a university lecturer, school teacher, journalist, advertising copywriter and management consultant. He has travelled widely and broadcast regularly. He is an acknowledged authority on early Jazz and writes a monthly Jazz column.

Book preview

JUDY

in Disguise

Andrew Liddle

Published by Ofrezco Press

Copyright © 2017 Andrew Liddle

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organisations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Dedicated to my two daughters,

Corinna and Rosie.

Chapter One

It’s as though my whole life is being lived in the shadows and time has frozen. I'm not sure, but I think at the tender age of 15 I might be having a midlife crisis.

It is a difficult age for any girl, the moment when we are trying to find our adult self. But this does not account for why I’ve suddenly stopped answering my phone or even bothering to check my emails. When anybody in the house speaks to me, I tend to storm off to nowhere in particular. I’m trying to think about what I need to do and can’t stand people butting into my thoughts.

I used to be shy but friendly, a little bit socially awkward, I guess, but not too much. I was reasonably popular, hung out with my own friends in our year group. I was nice to everyone and most people were all right with me.

Now, I am simply nothing like the same person I used to be. I just don't want to be around anyone, including my family and friends. Basically, I feel resentment and I’ve a lot to feel resentful about.

Today, I made up my mind something must be done about it. First of all I decided to keep a record of my feelings. Agony aunts in girly magazines always advise keeping a journal, putting it all down on paper, if you have problems.

This was going to be my first entry, but I’ve now decided to try and go one better and write a novel that’s basically true about the difficulties of being a teenage girl in my situation. Actually, I intend it to be sort of part journal and part novel, something new to literature in fact!

It’s difficult to know where to start. Let me just say, I suffer badly with no support from the adults around me when I am at my most vulnerable. My Mum has left us and it’s not particularly helpful that Dad, a psychologist by profession, keeps telling me that childhood traumas are both normal and character-building and that decades into the future I will look back on them and realise they’ve shaped my life and made me a better person.

Really all I want to do is slam the lid on the Pandora’s box that was flung open when out of the blue Mum ran off to a remote Scottish island. That was the start of all my problems.

It’s going to take a lot of conscious effort and hard work, but I’ve already taken a big step forward, I reckon, by starting this book. It’s a sunny early summer’s day and this for me has got to be the beginning of a new life, as a writer. Then again, trying to write an interesting novel on the basis of a teenager’s uneventful miserable existence will not be easy, probably a fool’s game, I guess. We’ll see. I’ll give it a try.

Since Mum walked out, I have gone through a whole range of negative emotions: a sense of betrayal, sadness, shock, hatred, anxiety, denial, I suppose. I still suffer some of these every single day. There has to be some relief but nothing has worked so far and although almost a year has gone by it seems like she left only yesterday. I know it's time to stop dwelling on the past and viewing myself as a victim. I need to start rebuilding my life.

Do you know when I miss her most of all? That time of early evening when Mum, Dad, my sister Heidi and I used to sit down for a meal together as a family and tell each other about the sort of day we’d had, listen to the news and discuss it, laugh out loud together, sometimes watch funny videos. Mum used to try to finish off Dad’s slow sentences, to hurry him along, and sometimes get it hilariously wrong. It was all good fun.

That’s when we were a proper family.

The first Christmas without her was the worst time. I’d gone to bed on Christmas Eve stupidly imagining that when I woke up in the morning everything would be nicely laid out like it always had been. I even secretly held out the hope that Mum would come back on this special day. Christmas would bring her back. It would be the best present ever.

I remember coming down on Christmas Day to nothing. There were no presents, no decorations, no tree, no sign of the season. I suppose Dad had been in too much of a state of shock to be even aware what day it was and, of course, it never occurred to Heidi to do anything. She was spending it with her current boyfriend’s folks, anyway, so what did she care?

To be fair to Dad, when he realised what day it was, he rang round all the restaurants and eventually managed to book a table for two for lunch.

We hardly ate anything. We just sat there bleakly staring out of the window each lost in our silent thoughts while people in paper hats were whooping it up all around us, gorging themselves and popping corks.

If I could get over that I suppose I could get over anything. But just as I was almost beginning to come to terms with Mum leaving, something even worse happened.

Danuta.

Dad’s new Polish girl friend, a pink-haired Punk would you believe, moved in and took over like she owned the place. For a few months it had been just me and Heidi and Dad. We all missed Mum horribly but the three of us got on reasonably well together. When Danuta arrived it all changed again.

She goes to Kingston University where Dad is a lecturer in Applied Psychology. She’s studying Sociology, I think, and the age difference between them is so great that it cannot be a relationship of equals. Although neither of them will say how old she is, I know she’s much nearer Heidi’s age than Dad’s. Goddammit, she’s probably nearer my age!

Dad’s method of coping was to trim his beard, go back to wearing denim and throw himself even more into his work, thinking he could just kind of sub-contract me out to Danuta. For a few weeks she made a token effort at running the house, doing the washing, preparing meals and driving me to school.

She soon stopped and Dad said it was because I hadn’t been very nice to her. I know that wasn’t the real reason although he possibly had a point, but how could I be nice to someone who was not my mother? Anyway, I found it very hard to even talk to her because she never seemed to listen and her mind was on other things. She’s one of those who is never off her phone and expects to find answers to everything there at the click of a button.

I’m not like that. I think my passion is for writing. Writing is the only thing I’ve ever been good at. I am talking about real writing not that stuff that other people do on their phones and blogs. I tend to spend my time writing while other people spend theirs talking.

I’m not sure that this is going to work as a novel, but I am determined to give it a try. Funnily enough, writing about your problems is one of the things that my Dad in his psychology book recommends you do in order to keep track of your progress if you are trying to raise your self-esteem.

Chapter Two

‘Dad,’ I wheedled, ‘what would you say about me going up to Scotland in the summer holiday – to see Mum?’

He was at the French windows, looking gloomily at the rain falling heavily on the garden, no longer tended as keenly as it once was when Mum was in charge. He turned to me and said sharply: ‘Has she asked you to?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘So why do you need to go?’

‘I don’t need to go. I want to go. I want to see her.’

‘I don’t get this,’ he said, speaking slowly and frowning behind his glasses, ‘she walks out on us without a word, doesn’t communicate with us, shows next to no interest in any of us – and you want to go and see her!’

‘She’s my mother. I love her.’

‘Yes of course you do. But …’

‘But nothing,’ I snapped, ‘I want to go. Can I go?’

‘Let me think about it.’

‘What is there to think about?’

‘It’s not that simple, Judy. You’re only fifteen, too young to be going all that way by yourself.’

‘Well come with me then!’

‘Not a chance!’ He’d said it syllable by slow syllable. ‘Not a prayer!’

‘I’ve got a right to see my mother.’

‘Well tell her to come down here then.’

‘You want me to ask her to come back? I don’t think Danuta would approve!’

‘I didn’t say that your mother could come here. I am saying she has a duty to see you. She should be the one doing the visiting. She can stay in a hotel.’

‘That’s not going to happen.’

‘Then you are saying she has no desire to see you, even though you want to see her. What does that tell us?’

I can’t stand it when he takes that tone to me like I’m one of his students not his daughter.

‘Stop being the psychology teacher, Dad, and start showing some compassion for a change.’

‘Compassion?’ He was suddenly almost screaming. ‘Compassion! What kind of compassion did she show when she upped and left us? Just decamped, leaving me to hold it all together.’ He drew breath but waved away my attempt to interrupt. ‘A girl your age needs a mother. She has behaved despicably, totally irresponsibly, totally without heart, totally without feeling for anybody but herself. Don’t talk to me about compassion!’

I couldn’t really think of how to answer that because I knew, from his point of view, it was all true. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him as passionate as that before. His sloping nose, which gives him a look of the classic Sherlock Holmes’ type, was actually quivering, or so it seemed.

‘And for what,’ he went on, ‘so she could follow her artistic destiny to daub paint on a canvas. It wouldn’t be so bloody tragic if she could actually paint, if she had any artistic talent!’

‘She has talent,’ I said, ‘it’s modern art she does.’

‘Is that what it’s called,’ he snorted. ‘And, I suppose, what she’s doing with this Cedric guy is called modern love!’

He’d stormed out into the pouring rain, leaving me to wonder who Cedric was.

You’d think a psychologist would be mature enough, clear-sighted enough, to be able to meet his ex for the sake of his kids but obviously not. He’s made it crystal clear it’s not going to happen.

Until now I think I have been taking a too laid-back approach and I need to make things change. I need to make it happen.

But for now, I am going to use this novel to set down on paper just how badly scarred a young person can be from being left to fend for themselves, and express the hope there might be light at the end of this dark tunnel. My contribution to the process will sounds passive, I know, to those who think you should confront problems head on rather than just write about them. But I do hope it will propel me forward, help me to get some clarity.

At times it's hard not to develop an intolerance of everybody else in my house and this seems to put me in the wrong in their eyes. I am really, really trying to be patient and understanding but it’s not easy. It would be so much easier to just stay frustrated, stressed and angry because I am the only one pulling their weight, doing housework and stuff. The other three are just so selfish and never do anything.

I think about Mum all the time but I guess my biggest problem at the moment has got to be Dad who is wasting his life with a woman not much older than my sister. That would be bad enough when you have youth on your side and naivety to excuse you but at his age? My God!

Pursuing a relationship with someone who has no real concern for him or his children’s wellbeing suggests Dad’s in a really bad place. Maybe Mum was right to leave him, I guess, although until recently deep down I’ve been blaming her for walking out on us.

School ends