All Sorts of Possible (27 page)

‘Dad said you didn’t want to see us.’

‘Your father was very protective of you. He was in love with your mother and then when she died you were his world. He didn’t want to share you with me or anyone else. I think it was
his way of coping with his grief. You and he grew together. But no one else grew with you.’

‘Maybe you reminded him too much of her?’

His aunt nodded. ‘They were very much in love. I’ve never seen two people so connected like that. You came out of all that love.’

Daniel reached out and held his father’s hand. ‘How did you let go of Mum?’

‘I don’t think anyone ever really lets go.’

Daniel nodded and stared at the man in the bed, the man who might have heard everything or who might have heard nothing at all each time he’d come to sit beside him. Daniel could almost
hear his aunt’s brain ticking.

‘You never forget,’ she said quietly.

Daniel nodded. But then he looked at his aunt. ‘But how do I say goodbye?’

‘You can say it whenever you want to, whenever you feel the time’s right for you.’

And Daniel just sat there with his lips shut tight.

Bennett’s little sister had rubbed her eyes red. Her pale face was still puffy. Every now and then, a breath crackled in her chest as she sighed and her lips wobbled.

‘At least she’s stopped crying,’ said Bennett, popping the top off a cold beer and handing it to Daniel. ‘It was a drama.’

‘What was?’

‘The death.’ Bennett looked at Daniel and before he could say anything else a little voice piped up.

‘Chester isn’t dead,’ squeaked the little girl as she studied the shoebox which she was busily painting gold. ‘He’s just in a different place. Like your dad,
Daniel.’

‘Who’s Chester?’ asked Daniel.

‘Where’s Chester seems to be the more relevant question.’

‘Chester was our friend. He’s in heaven. He was a good guinea pig.’

‘You remember him, Daniel. About so high. Nice coat of hair. Partial to dandelions.’

Daniel nodded. Sipped his beer.

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Lola.’

‘That’s OK. I just wasn’t expecting it. It was such a shock.’ She sighed and picked up the shoebox and dabbed the paintbrush at a couple of spots. ‘I must feel
exactly like you do.’

Bennett chinked his beer bottle against the one Daniel was holding.

‘To your dad. And to Chester.’

Bennett took a swig from his beer and the bottle fizzed. Daniel nodded and took a sip of his own too.

‘How’s Amanda?’ he asked.

‘Healing. Like the others. I think you need to keep clear of my brother for a while though.’ And they were silent for several moments. ‘I’m sorry about what he
said,’ said Bennett eventually.

The late afternoon sun was still very hot. The beer bottle was strung with cold beads. Daniel rolled it across his brow to keep cool and then he took a large mouthful. And then another.

He took out the golden flask and sat it on the garden table between them and then told his friend everything that had happened, as always.

By the time he had finished, all that was left of his beer was a warm golden disc in the bottom of the bottle.

Bennett picked up the flask and studied it, turning it round. He jiggled it up and down. ‘So there’s nothing left?’

Daniel shook his head. Bennett unscrewed the top and looked inside with one eye, like peering into a microscope. Eventually, he screwed the cap back on and put the flask down on the table.

‘It’s yours,’ said Daniel. ‘To replace your hip flask.’

Bennett nodded a thank you. ‘So tell me again what happened after the sinkhole, before you found your way out.’

‘I thought I was going to die.’

Bennett necked the last of his beer and didn’t take his eyes off Daniel. ‘Go on.’

Daniel shifted in his seat. The sun was like a lamp in his face. ‘I asked for help.’

‘Who did you ask?’

‘Anyone who was listening.’

‘And do you think someone was?’

Daniel watched as Lola knelt beside the flower bed further down the garden, digging a hole with the trowel, the faint chiming of stone on metal as she scooped and her shoebox a golden brick on
the grass beside her. And then Daniel shook his head.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if that’s what matters.’

Bennett nodded. ‘We need more beer,’ he announced. He scraped his chair back and headed towards the kitchen door.

‘When’s your mum back?’ shouted Daniel.

‘Not for ages yet,’ hollered Bennett as he disappeared inside.

Daniel sat there, trying to convince himself he didn’t need to pee. But his bladder throbbed all the harder. He sighed because he was perfectly warm. Through the buzz of the beer, he could
hear a breeze lifting the leaves in the trees.

He stood up and walked over the grass to the nearest bush, passing like a ghost through a cloud of midges. He stood watching the patch of hard earth turn a darker brown. A waxy foam bristling
and popping in the sun.

He looked up when he heard Lola laughing and applauding. And, when her feet thundered over the hard lawn towards him, Daniel zipped up quickly and stepped out, almost colliding with her.

‘Oh, thank you, Daniel,’ she cried out loud, hugging him. ‘Thank you.’ Before he could ask, she was pulling him across the lawn to the grave she had dug. The garden moved
a little quicker than him and he stumbled and he knew he was drunk. Lola’s hand was sweaty and covered in grains of dirt. Suddenly, he remembered the time he had spent hidden away from the
rest of the world. A dark shadow passed across him and he shivered.

‘There! Look!’ shouted Lola, clapping her hands and beaming, then pointing and dancing a jig. Daniel looked down and saw the creature stumbling over the grass, like a wind-up toy. It
was breathing fast in the heat.

‘He wasn’t dead,’ explained Lola. ‘Chester wasn’t dead!’ she shouted as Bennett walked smartly over the grass with two bottles, each capped with a nipple of
white foam. He started laughing when he saw Chester picking up speed. He handed a beer to Daniel and clinked it and drank.

‘What happened, Lola? Did you do magic?’ asked her brother.

‘No,’ she said as if her brother was stupid. She took out the golden flask from her skirt pocket and handed it back to Daniel. ‘I just filled it up with water, Daniel, from the
garden tap. I did think it might be magic because it looked so pretty.’

When Daniel looked up, Bennett was staring straight at him. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Chester panting in the heat.

Lola slipped her hand into his and pulled him down to her eye level and kissed him on the cheek.

‘But Mummy’s gonna be mad if she knows you’ve been drinking.’

She put her finger to her lips as the gravel crackled and a car stopped out of sight in the driveway. Bennett tossed the bottles end over end into the hedge, tracing arcs like Catherine wheels
spun off their posts. They told Lola that Chester had fallen into a coma, just like Daniel’s dad, but had woken up. And she nodded back, saying it all made sense, and told them that magic was
made up anyway.

When the heavy oak door opened, Daniel heard his heart all around him, beating in the cold, empty space of the church.

The coffin was balanced on three wooden trestles in front of the first row of pews. It looked like a magician’s prop left behind after a show. When Daniel laid his hand flat on the top,
the wood was cold and hard. He said something quietly to anyone who might be listening and then set to work.

The lid was heavy, unwieldy, and the trestles below the coffin creaked as Daniel raised it all the way up. His father was dressed in his favourite clothes and looked exactly as he had done in
the hospital, but this time there was something missing. And, as Daniel kept looking at him in the moonlight, he could not work out what it might be.

When he unscrewed the cap from the flask, Daniel waited for the silence to settle again. A few drops were all it took and, when his father opened his eyes, Daniel felt a weight fall away from
somewhere inside him because he had been waiting for this moment for what had seemed like an age, ever since the sinkhole had opened.

After helping his father out, they walked down the aisle together in silence, hand in hand, the faces in the windows looking down at them, watching them on their way.

‘What about the coffin?’ asked Bennett as he yanked the gear stick of his mum’s red Fiesta nastily, grinding the gears. Rosie was sitting in the front
passenger seat.

‘We stacked some hymn books inside it,’ whispered Daniel as the red Fiesta rattled and bumped over the dirt road. His father leant forward in the back seat and pointed.

‘Is that it?’

Up ahead was a huge dark saucer in the ground that grew and deepened as they drove closer.

‘Yes,’ said Daniel. ‘That’s where it all started.’

‘I don’t remember anything.’

‘Neither do I.’

Bennett wound the car past the warning signs and manoeuvred carefully round the sinkhole, the wheels crackling over the loose stones, and Daniel and his father peered into the dark pit through
the metal grille of the fencing erected around it.

‘We made it out,’ said his father.

‘Yes we did,’ replied Daniel.

Daniel and his father set up camp as they had always planned to do, finding a flat patch of woodland floor for their tent, springy with dead brown needles mattressing the
ground.

‘It’s just like you said it would be,’ said Daniel’s father.

‘Yes it is,’ said Daniel.

They lit a fire inside a ring of stones and watched the pieces of dry timber burning black and orange, the sparks dancing up around them and disappearing into the dark above. And Daniel tried
not to watch them vanishing as he stared into the fire and kept the warmth on his face and his chest.

‘Did you hear everything I told you in the hospital?’ he asked.

‘Some things,’ replied his father. ‘It was like being in a dream. So maybe it’s just that I can’t remember it all.’

Daniel poked a stick into the embers and a log sprouted a flame.

‘I don’t hate you,’ he said.

‘Of course you don’t.’ His father took hold of him and held him tight in his arms. ‘Your mother and I loved each other so much too.’

‘What was she like?’

‘She was like you. Strong. Powerful. Brave.’

‘We had a good time, didn’t we?’

‘The best.’

When Daniel noticed his father’s fingers beginning to fade, he tried to look up, but his father held him tighter. ‘Keep looking into the fire,’ he said.

And Daniel kept looking into the light, keeping the heat on his face.

‘Tell me the best bits,’ he said. ‘About what we did.’

And his father began to tell him everything he could remember, laughing about the one Christmas Day the fire brigade had arrived because they’d fallen asleep while the turkey was cooking .
. . and about the holiday they had taken in Greece and booked themselves into a nudist resort by accident . . . and about the piglet they had found one day trotting down a lane and tried to catch .
. . and so much more.

But the more Daniel laughed, the sadder he became, and he had to try harder and harder to keep looking into the fire and not think about what was happening.

And, when his father’s voice had finally stopped, Daniel felt the cold and the dark all around him and he moved closer to the fire to keep warm and smiled and wiped his eyes. Rosie wanted
to get up and hug him straightaway, but Bennett told her they should stay where they were, watching on from their own spot beneath the trees, saying that Daniel needed some time on his own.

Eventually, all three of them fell asleep beside the fire.

When the morning came to meet them, the light was pure and clean and fresh, and the trees all around them crackled with dew, their branches steaming as the sun rose higher, and
it filled Daniel with a sense of hope.

After packing away the tent and kicking over the hot embers left in the fire, the three of them walked back between the trees and found the track where Bennett had parked the car.

They didn’t say a word because there was nothing to be said.

They drove back down the dirt road and, when they passed the sinkhole, Daniel asked Bennett to stop.

He walked to the metal fence around the hole and clambered up it and sat astride the top with the flask in his hand, winking in the sun.

‘What should I do?’ he shouted.

‘Whatever
you
think is right,’ said Bennett through the open window.

And Daniel thought about it for some time and then made a decision and climbed down.

The early morning had promised a good day and that promise was kept.

When Daniel stood with his aunt and watched the coffin being lowered into the grave, he whispered something that nobody else heard.

And then, as the first shovel of earth landed with a crash, he took his aunt’s hand and they turned away, listening to every sound as the hole was filled back in.

When he felt another hand in his, he knew it was Rosie’s without even looking.

‘It’s the what not the why, just like you said,’ she whispered as they walked on.

‘I know,’ said Daniel. ‘We can be anybody we want to be, no matter what happens. It’s up to us to be whoever we want.’

‘And we can be anyone, can’t we?’ said Rosie.

‘Yes, we can be all sorts of possible.’

Writing a novel means I spend a lot of time with made-up people but there are lots of real people involved too who are just as important, helping and encouraging me, as I work
on the manuscript.

I would like to say thank you to Bella Honess Roe, Nick Roe and Emma Timpany for all their thoughts and comments, and to Matt Wheeler for all his optimism and confidence. Thanks also to Ollie
and Noah for reminding me what it’s like to be a teenage boy.

Thank you too to my agent, Madeleine Milburn, who is always so enthusiastic, believing in what I write.

I must also thank my editor, Jane Griffiths, for all her patience and good ideas and generosity of thought. Thanks also to everyone at Simon & Schuster involved in the process of bringing
the book to publication, especially Paul Coomey who is always so inspired in his cover design.