How To Be Brave (19 page)

Caught up in Ken’s infectious enthusiasm, Colin took the line and leaned over the boat edge to dangle it in the water. Those strong enough joined them, urging Ken to be ready with his spear. Before long a young shark emerged from the depths. The flashing yellow must have been like a mermaid song beckoning him.

Bott gripped the boat edge, muttering, ‘Come on, come on, come on.’

With a swift movement Ken stabbed the creature, piercing its side, disabling it. How fiercely it wriggled and squirmed to escape, all snapping teeth and thrashing tail. But these were desperate men, driven by hunger, and Ken, Bott and Platten held fast and heaved the shark aboard.

What a fine supper he made. Being big, he was enough to serve each of the now thirteen men a steak-sized piece, and perfectly moist. Blood was drained into a tin and shared around as a drink and as lip balm. The meal did much to lift them, even with Scown gone. The stronger ones made sure the Second got plenty of sustenance, though he barely seemed to recognise his mates now. Perhaps Scown’s refusal to take water near the end compelled them to make sure others in a bad state did. Whatever the reason, Leak and Bamford sat with the Second until they felt sure he’d consumed enough blood.

‘I’ll take the first watch,’ said Ken. ‘Who’s with me?’

Despite the nutritious meal, Colin still felt weak. Like his body existed but his head was elsewhere – or perhaps the other way around. None of it felt right. He didn’t think he could stare at the horizon in search of a ship that didn’t materialise without joining Scown.

‘I’ll watch for an hour,’ said Weekes. ‘If you’ve got a ciggie we can share.’ Jokes had been rare recently, but he got a few smiles.

‘I win,’ Ken said to Colin, in joy rather than with oneupmanship.

‘You do?’ Colin’s lips glistened bloody red like he’d taken wine as communion.

‘The catch,’ said Ken. ‘Thanks to Officer Scown.’

‘To Officer Scown,’ a few of the men chorused again.

‘Told you I’d succeed first.’ Ken paused, maybe realising that if Colin won they all would. ‘Now it’s your turn. I’ve done what I set out to do.’

Colin turned away, the weight of the game he’d created dragging him from the others. Fight gone, he found a solitary spot under the canvas and surrendered to sleep. There he dreamt of the girl with hair and eyes that gleamed as brightly as the sea. It was a vision so powerful it followed him into dawn and consciousness.

This time she came to the boat.

She smelt clean amidst the rotten stench of gangrene and decaying wood; she glowed like an angel. She leaned down by his ear and said, ‘No, don’t wake up. Stay asleep. Dream about nice things and you won’t be sad. But it’s okay to be sad cos that’s part of being brave – I just can’t remember the other part right now.’

Colin didn’t want to wake unless it meant he was home or in the silver kitchen or in the place with all the books.

When he opened his eyes on another day in hell, the girl had gone. But her words lingered, ebbing and flowing with the sea.

It’s okay to be sad cos that’s part of being brave – I just can’t remember the other part right now
.

Ken recorded his own words on a torn sail that formed another page in the on-going log.

SS Lulworth Hill –
Deaths – Scown. Mate. 4.30pm. 6th April
.

Midnight on Christmas Eve and wine had made me melancholy; the sweet tang that initially brought song and smiles and silliness had died, leaving me tearful. Sparkling wine is like insulin; if consumed in small doses it lifts, but too much leaves a person low afterwards. My bubbles had burst.

I put my half-empty glass on the table near the remains of the buffet I’d excitedly prepared earlier for the friends I’d invited over. My thoughts turned to Jake. I missed him. What he’d said the last time we spoke – about Rose and I being cooped up alone and getting morbid over Colin’s story – was haunting me.

Now that school was finished for Christmas I also grew concerned that Rose might feel isolated, home with me all the time. So I’d let her invite Hannah and Jade for a sleepover last night. Maybe my mum’s concerns and April’s words had influenced me too, and I decided Rose should be a child, that foolery and fun should flood the house again.

She’d loved sleeping on the blow-up bed with her friends, watching
Doctor Who
, telling ghost stories, being allowed to stay up until midnight and have sugary popcorn for once.

‘We won’t tell Shelley,’ I said, away from Hannah and Jade, ‘and if your blood’s a little high in the morning, it’s just one time.’

In the middle of the night I’d looked in on them all, breathing in comradely unison, three fluffy heads sticking out of the green camping duvet like flowers in a spring bed.

Since the hypo at the shops I’d been watching Rose constantly, analysing every colour change, every mood swing, every word use. I’d told Shelley about it and she said I’d always remember the first one. They would catch me out again but I’d never again feel quite so helpless. A bit like when your heart breaks the first time; that’s it, it’s broken.

I was exhausted from watching her all the time, but witnessing Rose’s joy at a simple sleepover had lifted me and I’d decided to have my own little party.

Rose and I left out cake for Santa. Then Vonny, her friend Jane, and my boss Sarah came for festive drinks. We cracked open bottles of Prosecco and played music and ate April’s cake and talked about men, holidays, childhood and life. For a while I forgot blood tests and lifeboats and needles and hunger; I felt thirty-five again instead of three hundred.

But now, hours later, I sat in the grim afterglow of buzzing Christmas lights, sausage roll crumbs and empty bottles, and thought about Jake.

I remembered our early, childfree days, times when we only had to think of ourselves. I worried that he would come home to a woman he didn’t recognise. To someone who only slept for an hour at night before waking to go and check Rose, then do her midnight blood test. Someone who paced the house, worrying about hypos, jumping at every phone call, old while she was still young.

‘Mum?’ Rose stood in the doorway, hair tousled and eyes red like she’d rubbed them. She came into the living room, squinting at the light.

‘What are you doing up?’ I went and touched her forehead but she swiped my hand away. ‘Are you okay? Do you feel low?’

‘Just can’t sleep.’

Rose fingered leftover sausage rolls and cheese bites, perhaps imagining how it could feed the lifeboat crew for a whole day. I hated food waste now. I’d recently become obsessed with portion size, not only to keep Rose’s blood sugars stable but because I’d imagine how long each uneaten morsel might sustain Colin. I couldn’t discard pieces of chicken or potato without guilt.

And I’d never spill a drop of water. I followed Rose around the house with her cups of it, checking the bath didn’t overfill, using half the amount I usually did for washing pots.

‘Did our noise keep you up?’ I asked. ‘Sorry we got a bit loud. They’ve gone now. I’m about to go to bed.’

‘It wasn’t you,’ said Rose. ‘Though you were very silly singing Lady Gaga like that. You shouldn’t sing, Natalie.
Ever
.’ She paused. ‘I can’t sleep cos I keep thinking about Colin – about all of them. I can hear them crying out on the boat when I close my eyes. I can hear Fowler.’

On the twenty-second day, which we’d shared on Monday, Young Fowler had woken unable to move. He sat with his back against the mast, incapable of eating breakfast but eager for his water ration when it came. I’d wanted to gloss over his end, make pretty the pain, and did so by telling Rose that when he passed away in the afternoon the men were surprised. But Rose had interrupted my flow and insisted I tell her how it had really happened.

Being pulled out of the story made me more factual and I listed the events preceding his death, how he had spoken only when approached by Colin, who asked if Fowler needed anything.

What could he have done if the boy had asked for water? Food? His mother? Instead Fowler said, ‘Just sleep. Let me sleep. I’m so very tired. No pain now – just need sleep.’ Afraid of what the boy really yearned, Colin encouraged him to share lookout duty in the late afternoon and they sat back to back against the mast, too weak now to be without its support.

Colin fell asleep, even in this awkward position, and when he woke the crew were standing around Fowler. He had passed; his eyes were open, watching for a ship that never came. Colin could not accept his death and gripped the boy’s limp arm until Ken prised him away. He’d been such a cheerful creature, hardly grumbling. And Colin had punched him.

Now he’d never make it up to him.

The wasted body was cast into the sea with a prayer. I didn’t tell Rose how the men likely covered their ears to the swirl of waters as sharks tore him apart; I told her he sunk to the bottom, like the ship, like Scown, where there was only peace.

Now Rose said, ‘They’re all starting to die, aren’t they?’ She squashed a handful of the cake Vonny had left on her plate. ‘If only we could go to the boat with all this food. Don’t seem fair that we have all this and you don’t even want it. And I can’t have it, can I?’

‘
Doesn’t
,’ I corrected. ‘I’ll cover it up and we can have some tomorrow.’ I paused. ‘Maybe we should take a break from the story if it’s keeping you awake.’

‘No! You can’t stop now.’ She wiped the crumbs from her hands in a violent motion and held my waist, eyes pleading. ‘It’s like totally inside me. You’ll ruin everything if you stop! Why do you keep saying it?’

‘I don’t mean we should stop altogether.’ I put my hands over hers and she let go. ‘I just mean we could take a break and carry on again after Christmas.’

‘What’s Christmas got to do with it?’

‘We’re supposed to be happy, aren’t we?’

‘I won’t be if you stop.’ Rose sat on a cushion in the book nook. ‘Anyway we have to finish before Dad gets back.’

‘Do we?’ I joined her, in the flickering lights.

‘You don’t get it,’ she said, miserably. ‘When he’s back you won’t be bothered about it. You’ll have him again. You won’t need me or Colin.’

Did Rose really think I’d abandon her when he returned?

‘I’d never do that,’ I said. ‘If we’re not done by then, we can come to the book nook like this and I’ll tell Dad he has to keep out, it’s our time.’

Rose shook her head. ‘If you stop now, you’ve broken your promise. You said if I gave you my blood you’d give me a better story than
Harry Potter
or
War Horse
. I’ve done my bit. Have you forgot? Just because I get a bit sad about Fowler dying doesn’t mean we stop. Why do people think you have to avoid that stuff? You have to know how to be sad to know how to be happy and if you know both of those things you’ll know how to be brave.’

I had no words. My beautiful, wilful daughter had said them all.

‘Also,’ she added, ‘I want to be able to do my own injections and stuff when Dad gets back and I can only do that with the story.’

Since her first clumsy attempt at finger pricking last week, she’d been preparing it but letting me draw blood. The same with her injection; she’d screw on the lancet and measure the dose while I’d push the needle into her flesh.

‘There’s no pressure,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to do any more than you are. Dad will be overjoyed at how you’re coping with it all. He won’t expect you to be able to do it yourself.’ I paused. ‘He’ll be as proud as I am.’

Rose looked at the clock and her eyes grew like saucers. ‘It’s Christmas Day,’ she said, suddenly a child again. ‘Can I open some presents?’

‘Santa hasn’t been yet,’ I said, thinking of the bag of gifts I’d yet to carry down and put under the tree.

‘Why don’t you just get my pressies from the airing cupboard and let me have one?’

‘Rose!’ I laughed, unable not to. ‘Not until morning. Come on, we should go to bed or we’ll both be shattered.’

She got Colin’s diary from the bookshelf. ‘Can’t we just do one page? It’s Christmas Day. If you won’t let me have a pressie, read me a bit.’

I sighed. ‘Okay, a tiny bit. But that’s all. It’s bedtime and Santa won’t come if you’re awake.’

‘If you say so.’

I sat next to Rose and without words we agreed that she let a page fall open. Again, I found it startling that we opened it in a spot I’d not shared with Rose, on a page that spoke so perfectly to us in that moment. I might have questioned the miracle of this in more everyday circumstances, but something happened when we held this diary, and I doubted I could ever fully explain it. I’d been reading it myself, privately, along with letters, newspaper pages, and the photocopies of Ken’s sail scrap log. But the diary was magic when I shared it with Rose.

My first Christmas being home and Mum went to extra trouble. She had been saving housekeeping money for months to give us a veritable feast of choices. We got a good fire going and it crackled and spat while we ate. All I could smell though was the sweet, tart satsumas in the bowl on the cabinet. Oh, how we’d have devoured those at sea. We left a chair empty for our Stan, as we have done the last two years. None of us said anything about it – just like last year – and no one sat in the seat either. I couldn’t stop thinking that there might have been two empty chairs for my mother to fill with her memories. But I’d made it. I’ve always found Christmas to be rather melancholy but that one I quite found the jolliest. Curious, really. I expected the cheer to grate on me. But the tot of sherry and seeing my brothers together – even Stan really, in spirit – had me quite grateful for my lot
.

‘Poor Stan,’ said Rose. ‘Lots of people died in that war didn’t they?’

I yawned, stroked her hair. ‘Come on – it’s bedtime.’

‘Would you keep my chair out if I died?’

‘Don’t say that.’ I shook my head at the thought.

‘But would you?’ she demanded.

‘Bedtime!’

I made sure Rose was tucked in and stood on the landing for ten minutes until I was sure she’d fallen asleep. Then I took her bag of gifts down and put them under the tree. When I got into bed I expected to lie awake for a long time but exhaustion had her way.

The next I knew was my phone ringing on the bedside table. It was so early that the heating hadn’t even kicked in and daylight would be an hour yet. A first Christmas morning with Rose still asleep; a first Christmas morning with Jake not there; a first Christmas morning with injections to be done.

I picked up the phone, croaked, ‘Hello’ into it.

‘Happy Christmas, Natalie.’ It was Jake.

I smiled. ‘Happy Christmas.’ Now it felt special. ‘What a lovely surprise.’

‘They’ve let us all make quick calls home.’ He sounded distant, strained. ‘Sorry to wake you early but I knew Rose would be up. Is she there? I bet she’s opened half her presents already. Did she like the sewing machine?’

‘She’s not awake,’ I said. ‘She was up late and had a sleepover the other night so I bet she’s tired.’

‘Is she okay though?’

‘Yes, she’s fine.’

‘Injections okay?’

‘They don’t bother her so much now.’ I thought about telling him of Rose’s pledge to be able to self-administer for his return, but didn’t. ‘So it’s just us for once. How are you?’ I hadn’t stopped thinking about the young soldier who’d died with Jake at his side, not unlike Young Fowler passing on a final lookout with Colin. ‘You don’t have to edit anything,’ I said softly. ‘Tell me how you
really
are.’

‘I’m sad not to be there today,’ he admitted.

‘Me too.’

‘But we’ll have a hundred more Christmases,’ he said.

‘A
hundred
?’ I smiled. ‘How long do you plan on living?’

‘Forever,’ he said.

‘You’d better,’ I told him, never forgetting the dangerous place he was in.

‘Natalie, I’ve some news you won’t like.’

I closed my eyes as though this would shut out sounds too.

‘I hate to tell you – it’s about my R and R. I don’t think I’ll be home in January.’

I sat up in bed. ‘What?’

‘I
might
make it, I just can’t say for sure. It just might not be January now. You know I can’t talk in detail about these things but some of our helicopters are being tasked elsewhere and…’

‘I don’t
want
the details,’ I said, deflated.

‘You know there’s nothing I can do.’

‘I know.’ I tried not to be sulky or difficult. It was so much harder for him. At least I was home with our daughter at Christmas. ‘It isn’t your fault. When will you know for sure?’

His silence answered me. ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘Please kiss Rose for me. And remember, I
will
be home, soon.’

When he hung up I sat for a long time, trying not to cry. I hadn’t in a long time; I bottled up tears whenever Rose was around, not believing a child should be saddled with adult trouble. So much that I wondered if I’d forgotten how.

Now I remembered.

I buried my face in Jake’s pillow, his smell both comfort and hurt, and cried as I had that morning after the hospital. Though I’d washed the bedding since he’d been gone, I’d left his pillowcase alone, and his memory lingered there, only just. I barely noticed that Rose had come in until the bed gave under her slight frame and she was patting my head, awkward but well meaning. I had to stop and get a grip, or I’d alarm her. But I was a broken tap, gushing salty water.