Gone Missing

Gone Missing
Jean Ure

Jean Ure returns with more warmth and wit in a brilliant book about what happens when two girls decide to run away from home.Fourteen-year-old Jade is fed up with fighting with her mum and step-dad, and her shy sixteen-year-old friend Honey is having a miserable time with her mum, but when Jade decides they should both run away, Honey isn't so sure.It's only when they get to London and things don't work out quite how they expected that Honey shows she has hidden depths, and Jade realises that home is not so bad after all…

Gone Missing

Jean Ure

For Sarah Mason and Rachel Woolford

Contents

One

“Eat”

Two

“But where would we go?”

Three

Sunday was looming, with its roast and two veg. Dad…

Four

When we got to New Street, I said to Honey…

Five

It was seven o’clock when we got on the brown…

Six

It was kind of a weird evening. We started off…

Seven

There wasn’t anything! Not even so much as a mention.

Eight

I really couldn’t see what good it was going to…

Also by Jean Ure

Copyright

About the Publisher

one

“Eat.”

“I won’t!”

“You’ll either do as you’re told or you’ll sit there for the rest of the day! Do I make myself clear?”

Crash. Bang. Wallop.

That’s Dad, striking the table. This is me, shrieking at him: “I’d sooner starve!”

Whonk.

Me again, slamming the door as I rush from the room.

“Jade Rutherford, you come back here!”

Dad thunders after me, followed by Mum. (Kirsty just sits there, carrying on eating.)

“I will not have my meal times disrupted by tantrums!”

“Alec, leave her! It’s not worth all this upset!”

Mum pleads, Dad bellows, I shriek.

“You can’t force me!”

“Alec, please.” Now she’s clutching at him. I wish she wouldn’t! It’s so degrading. “Let her be! She’ll eat when she’s hungry.”

I yell that I am hungry. “But I’m not shovelling stinking, rotten flesh into myself! It’s disgusting, it’s unhygienic, it’s repulsive!”

Dad bellows, again, that I will eat what I am given. “We don’t have food fads in this house! We eat what the Lord has provided!”

I’m tempted to be smart and say that I thought it was Mum who’d provided. Instead I shriek, “Some weird kind of Lord, wanting us to eat dead stuff!”

I shouldn’t have said it; I’ve gone too far. Dad’s face turns slowly purple, like a big shiny aubergine. He shouts, “Right! That is enough! You get back in there and you sit yourself down and you eat.”

He can’t force me. Nobody can force me.

We stand there, facing each other, for what seems like minutes. Dad is breathing, very heavily.

“I’m warning you, my girl! You either eat what the rest of us eat, or you eat nothing.”

“So I’ll eat nothing! I’ll get anorexic and I’ll probably die. Then perhaps you’ll be happy!”

Mum bleats, “Alec…”

“Veronica, you stay out of this!”