PART ONE
Chapter One
Sophy Stevens was having a bad day.
Correction. A bad week.
Make that a bad month.
Maybe even a bad year. In fact, she might even have been born during a bad moment in the cosmoverse when none of the constellations were aligned, Mercury was well and truly in retrograde and it was a full moon.
It would explain a hell of a lot.
But right now she could only focus on one bad day at a time and, as bad days went, this particular Thursday was fair to middling.
As Sophy came out of Chalk Farm station, the February sky was a perfect blue. Not a cloud in sight, which was odd when she felt so downcast.
It was really too cold to eat ice cream, and Sophy would have much preferred a large white wine, but she’d been meeting Johnno at Marine Ices for years. The tradition was long-running enough that she could remember the ice cream parlour when it was in its original spot, just opposite the tube station. Run by an Italian family, Marine Ices was a London institution, and one that Sophy hoped would never fall out of favour because a large bowl of their hazelnut ice cream would be her Death Row meal.
It was also a tradition that sometimes Johnno would turn up and sometimes he wouldn’t. Sophy took her phone out of her bag to check if there was an apologetic message heavy with emojis.Though sometimes, when he was a no-show, he didn’t even message. Not for a few days.
Just to make sure, though it was a case of hope over experience, Sophy messaged him.
There in five.
But when Sophy reached the ice cream parlour in three, she was amazed to see Johnno already waiting for her with a knickerbocker glory in front of him, two spoons, because he still thought she was eight.
‘Kiddo! I swear you get more beautiful by the day,’ he greeted her, with the broad Australian accent that even thirty years in London couldn’t wither.
‘I have a huge spot on my chin,’ Sophy said as Johnno stood up so he could hug her. He wasn’t much taller than Sophy and she was only five foot four in her socks. But what Johnno lacked in height, he made up for in sheer charisma.
It wasn’t just that he was wearing a pink and white cowboy shirt tucked into leather trousers or that what little hair he had, close-cropped, was the same shade of neon pink as his shirt; it was Johnno’s presence.
He could charm the birds right out of the trees. He could make the starchiest, stiffest people break out into sunny smiles (a skill that came in particularly useful when dealing with traffic wardens). He could walk into a room and within five minutes he was everyone’s best friend. Johnno was a chancer. A ducker and diver. A wheeler-dealer. A cowboy. A wide boy. A bad boy. Or as Sophy’s mum had said gently to six-year-old Sophy when they’d waited in vain for an hour at Marine Ices one Saturday afternoon for Johnno, ‘I know that he can be tremendous fun but the thing is, Soph, you shouldn’t really expect too much from your dad.’
It was a lesson that Sophy had learned the hard way. Though she couldn’t even remember a time when the three of them had been a family because Johnno had left, or ratherCaroline had thrown him and all his stuff out onto the street, when Sophy was still a baby.
Sophy was ten when Caroline had got married (Johnno had promised to marry her when she first got pregnant but never got round to it) and she always thought of Mike as her proper dad. A dad who’d done PTA evenings and school plays and ferried her around north London to dance classes and competitions, sleepovers and trips to Brent Cross shopping centre to hang out with her friends.
But biologically Johnno was still her dad. He might have been a somewhat absent, unreliable presence in Sophy’s life but, when they did manage to meet up, he was very good at imparting useful life advice. (‘Never trust a bloke who doesn’t tip well.’ ‘Anyone you meet after midnight is up to no good.’ ‘Always make sure that you’ve got a spare pair of pants and a tenner on you.’) He was also quite handy when Sophy needed backup. Like the time she’d been working as a waitress in a French restaurant in Soho and her boss had put his hand up her skirt, then sacked her when she’d objected. Johnno had rolled up, fixed her ex-boss (who was a good head taller than him) with a flint-eyed look and then threatened to break every bone in his body and pluck out his internal organs for the pigeons in Leicester Square to feast on. Even Sophy had believed him. Her lecherous ex-boss had taken three hundred quid out of the till, given it to Sophy and begged her forgiveness.
You had to take the rough with the smooth when it came to Johnno, so Sophy sat down, picked up her spoon and asked him how he’d been.
‘Can’t complain, Soph,’ Johnno said, because he wasn’t a moaner and couldn’t stand whingers. Especially whinging Poms. ‘The sun’s shining, birds are singing, I’m eating ice cream with my beautiful daughter, what more could a bloke ask for?’
‘Right, yeah, when you put it like that.’ Sophy took another mouthful of ice cream and wondered how best to lead in to her news. ‘You don’t miss Australia at all? It’s been ages since you visited.’
Johnno steepled his hands, so Sophy could see the words ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattooed on his knuckles. Johnno’s life motto was that it was better to regret something that you had done rather than something you hadn’t done, but he’d once told Sophy that the only thing that he really regretted was having the word ‘hate’ tattooed on his body. ‘I went back for Mum’s sixtieth,’ he calculated. ‘That was what? A couple of years ago?’
‘She’s going to be seventy-three this year,’ Sophy said gently.
‘That so? Bloody hell.’ Johnno widened his faded-denim-blue eyes in disbelief. ‘So, you’re in regular contact then with your grandparents? I know your other lot want me horsewhipped.’
Not horsewhipped, but it was true that Caroline’s parents didn’t have a good word to say about Johnno, and as for his own parents, Bob and Jean just sighed a lot when his name came up during the regular FaceTime chats Sophy had with them.
‘I speak to them, occasionally,’ she explained now. ‘Well, once a month. Sometimes twice a month.’
‘Well, why shouldn’t you? I must give them a ring,’ Johnno said vaguely, which meant that he might remember this urge at some point in the future but who could even guess if he’d act on it.
