My boss asked me to take his daughter to prom, promising he'd make it worth my while
My boss asked me to take his daughter to prom, promising he'd make it worth my while — I thought it was just a favor until she opened the car door, looked at me, and said, "Wait. My dad didn't choose you by accident. And it wasn't for my sake."
THE ELEVENTH OF JUNE, 2011. ABOUT HALF SEVEN IN THE EVENING.
She had the door open and one foot out and then she stopped.
"Wait."
I looked at her.
"My dad didn't pick you by accident. It wasn't for me."
2010.
I was eighteen when I started at Gaskell Plant Hire.
I needed that job more than Vernon probably understood. My mother was bringing up my sister on her own and there was never anything spare. Part of every wage went to her for the shopping and whatever Kayla needed for school.
So I was never late. I never rang in unless I had to. If Vernon asked me to stay an hour, I stayed.
Inside a year I was the one he gave everything to — the runs, the keys, locking up.
THE TENTH OF JUNE, 2011. HIS OFFICE, ABOUT FOUR O'CLOCK.
"I need a favour, Dylan."
"Course."
He stopped for a second.
"Freddie's prom's tomorrow."
I had seen her about the yard a few times. We did not know each other.
"The lad she was going with has pulled out. I want you to take her."
I laughed, because I thought he was at it.
"Me?"
"You're sensible. I trust you."
Then: "Do this for me and I'll make it worth your while."
I thought about the money and what it would do at home.
"All right."
THE ELEVENTH OF JUNE, 2011. SEVEN O'CLOCK.
I borrowed my uncle's car and put on the one suit I had and drove up there.
Vernon met me at the door and he was more nervous than she was, which I thought was odd at the time.
"Just make sure she has a good night."
Then Freddie came down the stairs.
She looked lovely, and the second she saw me the face went off her.
She hardly said a word while he took the photographs.
SEVEN TO HALF SEVEN.
That drive was eleven minutes and it was the longest eleven minutes of my life to that point.
I asked her about her friends. About music. Whether she was looking forward to it.
Three or four words each time, then the window.
I gave up somewhere round the roundabout at Barrowdale.
When we pulled up outside the Ferniehurst I turned the engine off.
"Well," I said. "Hopefully it won't be too awful. Your dad was keen for you to go, anyway."
She did not smile.
HALF SEVEN. THE CAR DOOR.
After she said it, there was a gap of about four seconds.
Then she told me.
She had somebody to go with. That had been sorted since about the March.
It was not Lorcan Peale, who is the name her father gave me and who had not pulled out of anything, because he had never been asked.
It was a girl in her year called Pearl Lauder.
Vernon found out about it in the May.
WHAT I ALREADY KNEW ON THE TENTH OF JUNE.
I have told this for fifteen years as a lad being handed a thing out of nowhere in an office.
I knew there had been something at that house.
The yard is nine men and Vernon's wife rang that office twice in the May and both times he took it in the back and shut the door, which he never did.
On about the twentieth of May he was in a state all day and Brian on the saw said something about there being trouble with the daughter.
I knew that much on the tenth of June when he asked me.
I did not ask one question. Not whether she wanted to go. Not what had happened with the lad who had supposedly pulled out.
A boy I had never met had apparently dropped an eighteen-year-old four days before her prom, and I did not think that was worth a single question.
I said all right in about two seconds, and then I thought about the money the whole way home.
WHAT HE DID IN THE MAY.
He did not shout. That is the first thing she said about it and it is the thing I have thought about most since.
He told her she could go with whoever she liked.
Then over about three weeks he made it clear, in the way that man makes things clear, that there would be photographs, and that his mother would see them, and that there were people from the trade coming to the house that summer.
By the end of the May, Freddie had told Pearl she could not.
Then her father said he would sort out somebody respectable.
HALF SEVEN, STILL IN THE CAR.
She said: "So that's what you are. You're the photographs."
She was not being hard on me. She said it flatly, the way you would read something out.
Then she said: "He picked you because you'd say yes."
I said something about how it was not like that.
She said: "Dylan. He's paying you."
WHAT SHE ASKED ME.
Then she asked me for something, and this is the part of that evening that matters.
She said Pearl was at her cousin's at Thorn Lane, which is about ten minutes the other side of Barrowdale.
She asked me to drive her there, and to come back for her at eleven, and to say nothing.
She said: "He'll never know. He's not going to ring the school."
I sat there with the keys in my hand.
WHAT I SAID.
No.
I said it kindly. I remember being pleased with myself afterwards for how kindly I said it.
I said I could not do that to her dad. I said he would find out, these things always come out. I said she would have a better night than she thought.
I said all three of those in about ninety seconds and not one of them was the reason.
The reason was that I was nineteen and that job was my mother's shopping.
SEVEN THIRTY-FIVE.
She did not argue. She did not call me anything.
She said: "Fair enough."
Then she got out and shut that door and walked into the Ferniehurst on her own in a blue dress.
I sat in the car park for about twenty minutes before I drove off.
ELEVEN O'CLOCK.
I was back at ten to.
She came out at twenty past with two girls I did not know and she said thank you for coming, and she talked more on the way home than she had all evening — about the food, about somebody's shoes.
Perfectly pleasant the whole eleven minutes.
At her gate she said thanks again and went in.
THE THIRTEENTH OF JUNE, 2011.
Vernon gave me four hundred pounds in an envelope in that office on the Monday.
I took it.
I gave three hundred of it to my mother that week and told her it was overtime.
She asked me twice what the overtime had been for, because three hundred was not an amount that happened in our house, and both times I said a weekend job.
THE PHOTOGRAPHS.
Vernon took eleven of them at that door. I know the number because of where they ended up.
Two of them went in frames in that house. One was still on the wall in the hall in 2017 when I left the company, six years later.
I walked past a photograph of myself in a borrowed suit, standing next to a girl who did not want to be in it, about nine hundred times.
In the August of 2011 he had one of them on the desk in his office.
A customer asked him about it that autumn — I was standing there — and Vernon said: "That's my girl at her prom."
Not that's my lad from the yard. He did not name me at all.
The man said she looked lovely and Vernon agreed and that was the end of it.
That is what the four hundred bought, and it took about four seconds to spend, and I watched it happen from three feet away with a clipboard in my hand.
THE TWELFTH OF JUNE, 2011. THE SUNDAY.
The day after. I have never told anybody what I did on the Sunday.
I drove up Thorn Lane.
Not to do anything. I went past it twice, at about two in the afternoon, in my uncle's car, which I still had until the Monday.
I do not know what I was looking for. A house, I suppose. Whether it was a real address.
It is a terrace of about nine houses and there was a girl's bike against a wall at one of them and I drove on.
Then I went home and had my dinner.
That is the whole of it and it is the part that makes the least sense of anything I did that weekend.
A lad of nineteen who would not drive a girl ten minutes on the Saturday drove the same ten minutes on his own on the Sunday to have a look.
I have never been able to work out whether that was guilt or something else.
2011 TO 2017.
I stayed at Gaskell's six more years.
I was yard foreman by 2014 and I was on proper money by 2015, and that money did everything it was supposed to do. Kayla went to college. My mother stopped doing the Saturdays at the shop.
None of that is nothing and I am not going to pretend it is.
WHAT THE FOUR HUNDRED ACTUALLY WAS.
I have called it a favour and I have called it overtime and I have called it a bonus.
In the January of this year I went and looked at my own wage slips from 2011, because I keep everything.
It is not on any of them.
Four hundred pounds, cash, in an envelope, in an office, from a man who ran a limited company and who did everything else by the book.
He was not paying me for a lift. You put a lift through the books.
He was paying me for the other half of it, and he knew exactly what that was, which is why it was cash.
I did not think about it once in 2011. I thought about what it would do at home.
At nineteen I could not have told you what an envelope means.
I have been in the trade sixteen years now and I could tell you in about two seconds.
THE MARCH OF 2013.
He asked me for a second favour.
It was not like the first one. It was a lad called Micky Vane who had hurt his back on site, and there was a question about how it had happened, and Vernon wanted me to say where I had been standing.
What he wanted me to say was not untrue, exactly. It was one version of about four, and it was the one that helped.
I said it.
Micky Vane left that company in the August of 2013 and I have not seen him since.
That is the thing about the eleventh of June, 2011. It was not a one-off and I have never been able to tell myself it was.
It was the first time, and it established something, and that man never had to ask me twice about anything for six years.
WHAT I TOLD PEOPLE.
For about two years I had a version of that night.
My mate Ciaran got it. So did two lads in the yard, and my cousin at a wedding.
In my version the boss's daughter was a bit stuck-up and the night was awkward and I got four hundred quid out of it.
I did the voice. I did a thing with my eyebrows about how she sat looking out of the window.
That got a laugh every time and I told it for two years, and in all of it there is no Pearl Lauder, no Thorn Lane, and nothing about a girl asking a favour of a man who was being paid by her father.
WHAT PEARL LAUDER WAS DOING THAT NIGHT.
I did not think about her once in fifteen years. Not once, and I am not going to soften that.
At that table in the March, Freddie told me without my asking.
Pearl was at her cousin's at Thorn Lane from about six o'clock, in a dress, with the cousin's mother doing her hair.
She had been told she was going. Then she had been told she was not, in the May.
Then on the day Freddie had rung her and said she would try.
So there was a girl of eighteen at a house on Thorn Lane on the eleventh of June, 2011, who got ready anyway, in case.
At about half nine she got changed and they watched something.
Freddie found that out in the September, from the cousin, which is about when the two of them started going wrong.
I was eleven minutes away in a car park at the Ferniehurst, pleased with how kindly I had said no.
THE AUGUST OF 2012.
Somebody at the yard asked me, about a year on, what she had been like.
I had the version ready by then.
He said: "Aye, she's a funny one, that."
Then he said something about her and a girl, in the way men said things at a yard in 2012, and three of them laughed.
I did not say anything.
I was twenty and he was my charge hand and I did not say anything, and I have thought about that about as often as I have thought about the car.
THE FOUR HUNDRED, AND WHERE IT WENT.
Three hundred to my mother. I have always said that and it is true.
The other hundred I have never accounted for to anybody, including in this.
I bought a watch.
Not a good one. Eighty-five pounds in a shop at Barrowdale on the Saturday after, and I wore it for about four years.
It is in a drawer at my mother's with my grandad's things.
I knew when I bought it. That is the part. I stood at that counter on the eighteenth of June, 2011, a week after a girl asked me for ten minutes of driving and got a lecture about how these things always come out.
There is no version of that watch that is anything other than what it is.
I could have given my mother four hundred. She would never have counted it.
2017.
I left Gaskell's in the September when I got the job at Caldworth.
Vernon shook my hand and said I had been the best lad he ever had.
Freddie was not there. She had been in Manchester since about 2014.
I have seen Vernon four times since and he is perfectly friendly and he still calls me son.
THE FOURTEENTH OF MARCH, 2026.
Here is why I am writing any of this down.
I was in a place at Barrowdale with my wife and Freddie Gaskell was two tables over.
She is thirty-three. She came over, which I would not have done.
She was fine. She asked about my mother, who she had never met, and she remembered that I had a sister.
Then she said: "You were all right with me, that night."
I said I had not been.
She said: "You were nineteen."
THE ELEVEN MINUTES HOME, AT TWENTY PAST ELEVEN.
She talked the whole way, which I have always given as her being all right in the end.
In the March I asked her about it at that table, because it had never sat right.
She said: "I was being nice to you."
Then she said: "You'd said no, and you were nineteen, and you looked like you were going to be sick in the car park."
An eighteen-year-old who had just had her evening taken off her spent eleven minutes in a car making conversation about somebody's shoes, to settle the lad who had refused her.
I had that as her having a good night.
I told her father on the Monday that she had had a good night. He asked and that is what I said.
So the one piece of information Vernon Gaskell ever got out of that evening — the only thing he ever had to go on — came from me, and I got it completely wrong, and he has believed it for fifteen years.
WHAT SHE TOLD ME AT THAT TABLE.
She has been with somebody eleven years and they are in Manchester and her father has met her twice.
Not Pearl. Pearl Lauder went to Leeds in 2012 and they have not spoken since about 2014.
Then she said the thing that has had me sitting up at night for seven months.
She said: "It wasn't about Pearl in the end. I'd probably have packed it in with her anyway, I was eighteen."
She said: "It was that I did what he said. I'd never done that before and after that night I did it for about three years."
WHAT I SAID TO VERNON ON THE MONDAY, IN FULL.
He asked how it had gone and I said grand.
He asked whether she had enjoyed it and I said she had, and that she had been chatting away on the road home.
Then he said: "Was she all right with you? She can be hard work."
***She can be hard work.*** A man of forty-eight, about his own daughter, to a lad of nineteen on a Monday morning.**
I said she had been lovely.
Then he gave me the envelope and I said thanks and went out to the yard.
In four hundred seconds in that office I had three chances to say one true sentence.
I could have said she had not wanted to go. I could have said she had asked me to take her somewhere and that I had not.
Neither of those would have cost me the job. I know that now and I half knew it then; Vernon Gaskell was not going to sack the best lad in that yard for repeating what his daughter said in a car.
I said she had been lovely.
THE THREE YEARS.
She told me the rest in about four minutes and then we talked about something else, because her partner came back with the drinks.
Between the June of 2011 and 2014 she did the course he picked. She came home at the weekends he wanted. She was at the house for the people from the trade.
She said: "He never had to make me do any of it after the prom. He'd done it once."
KAYLA.
My sister was twelve in 2011 and she is twenty-seven now and she teaches at Barrowdale.
In the April of this year, a month after that table, I told her.
She is the only person I have told and I did it badly, in a car, the way everything in this story happens.
She listened to the whole thing and then she said: "You were nineteen, Dyl."
Everybody says that. Freddie said it. My sister said it.
Then Kayla said the other thing, which nobody else has.
She said: "What would you do now?"
I said I would drive the girl to Thorn Lane.
She said: "Would you? Or would you ring her dad first to check?"
I did not have an answer for that in the car and I have not got one in seven months.
Because the honest version is that at thirty-four I would probably ring Vernon Gaskell. I would do it nicely. I would say I thought he ought to know.
That is what being sensible turned into.
WHAT I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO PUT DOWN.
He did it once to her and once to me, in the same week, with the same four hundred pounds.
He found out what each of us would do if he was pleasant about it and there was something we needed.
Then he never had to ask either of us properly again.
Six years, in my case. Three in hers.
And neither of us knew the other one was in it, because we did eleven minutes there and eleven minutes back and I spent the first eleven asking her about music.
WHAT MY MOTHER ASKED ME IN 2014.
Three years on, out of nothing, doing the dishes.
She said: "That Gaskell girl. Did you take her to a dance once?"
I said I had, for her dad.
She said: "Was that the three hundred?"
My mother worked that out in 2014 and said nothing about it for three years, and when she finally said it she said it to a plate and not to me.
I said it had been overtime.
She said: "Right."
Then she said one more thing and she has never raised it since.
She said: "I'd rather you'd told me, Dylan. I'd have taken it anyway."
She would have. That is the bit.
I was never protecting my mother from anything. There was no version where she said no to three hundred pounds in 2011 and we both knew it.
I lied to her so that I would not have to say out loud what it was for.
WHAT I HAVE DONE SINCE THE MARCH.
Seven months and the honest answer is one thing.
I have not told my wife. She was at that table and she asked me afterwards who Freddie was and I said the daughter of an old boss.
She said: "She seemed to know you well."
I said we had worked together.
That is a lie told in a car park at thirty-four, with nothing at all at stake, about a thing that happened when I was nineteen.
Nobody is paying me now. There is no job in it.
I did it because the true answer has the car in it, and the car has the no in it, and I have never said the no out loud to anybody in my life.
Not to Ciaran. Not to my mother in 2014 when she gave me the opening at the sink.
Fifteen years, and the only two people who know I said no are me and the woman I said it to, and she has never once mentioned it to a soul.
THE LAST THING.
At that table in the March she said one more thing on her way back to her chair.
She said: "Did you ever go up Thorn Lane?"
I said no.
She said: "No. Nor did I."
She did not go that night and she did not go afterwards and she never saw Pearl Lauder outside school again.
Then she said: "I only asked you because you were the only person my dad had put in front of me that week."
That is what I was.
Not the chaperone and not the photographs, in the end.
I was the one adult who was pointed at her by her own father on the worst week of her year — and for about forty seconds in a car park she thought that might be worth something, and she asked, and I said no kindly.
May you like
She has never once held it against me. She said so twice at that table.
I have been holding it against myself for fifteen years and I had the details wrong for fourteen of them.
