Free Broken Dreams by Nick Quantrill Page A

being slowly abandoned. Many of the residents had left and those who remained suffered from anti-social behaviour, with some parts of the area all but out of bounds to non-residents. Shop units which hadn’t been left to stand empty were generally run down and shabby. A few major chains still remained in the area, some I knew had been there since its heyday, but it was mainly local traders scratching out a living. It was the kind of area which seemed to lack hope and had been allowed to just wither away. It made me angry.
    Maria Platt’s house was as I expected; old-fashioned but neat and tidy. It was situated on one of the many rows of terraces, which ran like spiders legs off the main drag of shops. The furnishings and electrical goods were out of date, but that was the least of her problems. We sat down on the settee and she introduced us to Derek, her brother.
    ‘Have you got some news?’ she asked us. ‘I want her back here with me. I know I’ve not got long left and I can’t begin to tell you how that makes me feel.’ She looks terrible; underweight and gaunt. Her voice raspy and thin.
    Her eyes still have a sparkle of hope but I shake my head. ‘I’m sorry. Not yet.’
    Sarah took over. ‘We’ve been speaking to some of Donna’s friends; the girls she was in the band with. They suggested Donna didn’t get on too well with her father.’
    Derek cut in. ‘Ron loved his kids. Donna was always the apple of his eye.’
    ‘I’m sure he had their best interests at heart’ I said, hoping to sound diplomatic, ‘but we need to at least discuss it. If we can understand how Donna was thinking and acting, then it might help us find her. It’s surprising how the smallest detail can help.’
    The room was silent. Maria Platt looked at her brother and nodded before turning back to us. ‘Ron loved our kids. It was like Derek said.’
    Sarah and I sat quietly, allowing her the time to tell her story.
     ‘It was difficult raising the kids. It was difficult for me with Ron working away for weeks on end. I was at home trying to bring them up right; keep them on the straight and narrow.  Because Ron got paid depending how much fish they caught, I never knew how much money he would bring home. Sometimes it was next to none. It was tough to run a house under those conditions.’
    ‘A three day millionaire?’ I said.
    Derek smiled. ‘Those were the days, alright.’
    I’d read that when the trawlermen returned to Hull, they’d often pick up substantial pay packets. The men worked hard and played hard, taxiing around the city and spending their money in the pubs of Hessle Road, before heading back to the docks for another trip.
    ‘Ron had a family to look after’ Maria said.
    ‘But he was a drinker’ said Derek.
    Maria tutted and looked away.
    ‘They need to know how things were’ he said to her. ‘If it helps to find our Donna, you’ve got to tell them how it was.’
    Maria nodded. ‘He liked a drink. He didn’t always arrive home with the money.’
    ‘And I was as bad as anyone’ Derek said. ‘We’d go drinking, and once we’d started, we wouldn’t stop.’
    ‘Did you have a family to support?’ Sarah asked.
    He shook his head. ‘Not at the time, no.’
    Maria had turned away. It was obvious she hadn’t approved of their behaviour. I asked her what her husband had done once the trawler industry disappeared.
    ‘He never worked again.’
    ‘Never?’
    ‘Just the odd days here and there; working on a building site, you know, that kind of thing.’
    ‘I suppose it was difficult, given the skills he had’ said Sarah.
    ‘There was nothing for most of the men around here once the fishing went. I learnt to get by on his dole money.’ She shrugged and looked at her brother.  ‘It’s what we had to do.’
    I knew it wasn’t true because Donna’s boyfriend’s parents had opened an off-licence and made a decent living. I mentioned his name to her.
    ‘Tim was a nice boy’ she said. ‘I liked