A Week without Tuesday by Angelica Banks

Author:Angelica Banks [Banks, Angelica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2015-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

On Thursday morning in the hospital cafeteria, Serendipity caught sight of a news bulletin that caused her to splutter into her coffee. Filling the television screen were pictures of her own home in Brown Street – but who was that standing in the front doorway? It was a woman Serendipity didn’t recognise – a woman with short pink hair, a rather hideous pale blue velour jumpsuit and a vacuum cleaner.

‘How long have you worked for the McGillycuddys?’ yelled one journalist. ‘What do you know about Tuesday and her dad?’ called another.

‘Where do you think Tuesday is?’ said one, running up to her and flashing a camera in her face. ‘Have the police got any leads?’

‘Why don’t you lot get on your bikes and get out of here?’ said the woman.

And although she spoke in a very un-Miss Digby-like accent, Serendipity realised with awe that it was, none the less, Miss Digby in that extraordinary garb.

‘Go on. Off you go, the lot of you.’

On the hospital telephone, Serendipity rang the house at Brown Street.

‘McGillycuddy residence, and you’d better not be a journalist,’ said Miss Digby, in that extremely un-Miss Digby-like accent.

‘I seem to have acquired a new staff member. With pink hair. And an interesting taste in velour jumpsuits,’ Serendipity said.

Miss Digby chuckled down the line.

‘It was rather fun,’ she said. ‘But you need to come home. There is someone here that I think you should see.’

‘Not a journalist?’ said Serendipity with a grimace.

‘No, of course not,’ said Miss Digby.

‘The police again?’

‘Actually, no.’

Serendipity sighed. She wanted Tuesday to come home, she wanted Denis to wake up, she wanted a long hot bath, and she wanted to sleep. She did not want to talk to anyone. Then, she wondered. Surely not …

‘It isn’t Tuesday, is it?’ she asked cautiously, hopefully.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ said Miss Digby. ‘It isn’t.’

‘Then how important can it be?’

‘I believe it may be vital,’ Miss Digby said.

And so, after speaking to her favourite nurse and making him promise to call her if Denis so much as wiggled the tip of his little finger, Serendipity stepped out of City Hospital and hailed a cab in the pouring rain. A few times on the drive home, her eyes closed and her head fell heavily to her chest. Each time, she woke with a start and jerked her head back up again, only to look out the windows at the wet, dismal city streets. She tried to hold on to the distant hope that, by some wonderful chance, Miss Digby was trying to surprise her, and that it was Tuesday waiting at Brown Street to see her.

The rain appeared to have frightened most of the journalists away and only two of them remained in a huddle beneath the trees on the street. They called to her, asking if she had news. Serendipity shook her head and continued up the steps to the front door. Once inside, she called out.

‘Hello?’

Miss Digby emerged from the lounge room, and Serendipity saw that the pink wig and the blue jumpsuit were even more dreadful in real life than they were on television.

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