How To Be Brave (6 page)

You’ve found the book
.

Now, with Rose’s wishing-me-dead words in my head, I sat on the bed with it in both hands. I had thought about telling my dad we’d found it but wasn’t sure how he’d feel. I’d even picked up the phone a few times, but then felt we were meant to read it first. So I wanted to keep it for us; just Rose and me. Maybe the mysterious book would make magic, reignite the gold sparks in her irises.

My grandad had died long before I was born, but I knew without question that inside these pages he would come to life again. I just had to untie the ribbons and free the words.

One knot – that was all.

One knot to undo and it would fall open.

I pulled on a silky ribbon and the pages parted; another tug and a faint, recognisable smell emanated from the sheets. Where had I smelt it before?

The two black ribbons dangled like the sails I’d seen in my dream. Though eager to begin, to open the book, I paused. Held it to my chest a moment. It was like when you wait a long time for a baby – you go through two days of labour and when you finally hold her you hardly know what to do.

I opened the leathery cover to the first page. It was yellowed and the ink upon it had faded to ash grey. Looped words filled the space – graceful, level, high reaching – as though the writer had chewed his pen-end and thought carefully about what to record. They looked like the neat sentences of someone over the worst, someone looking back.

Am home. But home is not quite like it was before. Because I am not the same. Am home
.

The opening lines. I whispered them aloud, and then read no more. It was enough for now. Instead, I flicked gently through the pages. The draught lifted my hair from my face. A muddle of entries flashed past my eyes, in different pen colours, scribbles and ink stains, changes in flow.

Inside the front cover, stuck to the page with threadbare tape, were two buttons. One was small and brown, the other brass. I touched the dent they made in the material but didn’t free them.

What did these tiny things mean? Why had they been kept?

In the back I found more – newspaper cuttings from 1943, official letters addressed to my grandma, an invitation to Buckingham Palace, a scrap of paper with dates on, and one photograph.

I put the book down and looked at the black-and-white picture – it was the clearest image I’d ever seen of Grandad Colin. He stood by a flowering bush, the variety of which I couldn’t say without colour, and he wore a thick tie and had his hair slicked to the left and the start of a smile that hadn’t quite reached his eyes. He wore a suit. I didn’t need a colour picture to know its shade. The photograph confirmed all that I’d thought.

Am home. But home is not quite like it was before. Because I am not the same. Am home
.

Grandad Colin was the man in the brown suit.

He was the man who’d reassured me at the hospital.

He was the man who’d invited Rose to the shed.

It was no surprise at all. I had called him the stranger in the brown suit, but he wasn’t. He was my grandfather.

And I sensed him then, looking over my shoulder, sad also, knowing my pain. Knowing, somehow, that he was here for me. For us.

‘Find something Rose loves,’ Shelley had said.

So we did. We began trading blood for words. Rose would endure the pain of finger pricking and injections in exchange for a story. But when we made the pact I wondered if my stolen-from-newspapers-and-brown-diary words would be a fair price? Would they distract from finger prick after pierced thigh after finger prick after pierced arm after finger prick after pierced stomach?

Would it be enough?

This I often asked of myself when we began our swap. This I wondered each time Rose came into the book nook with her box of lancets and vials of insulin, ready to draw blood, to cut, to read and record numbers in a log like those kept at sea, to hear my story. A logbook full of dates and volumes of liquid is the dullest of stories and I had to make it interesting. So I dropped syllables into its endless ocean.

We first made our blood for words pact when Rose crept into my room three nights after I’d opened Colin’s diary. I didn’t mind that she woke me with a brusque shove. While I’d always responded gruffly to such disturbances in the past, now I was glad she’d come to me.

But I wasn’t glad for long.

‘I’ve come to just tell you something,’ she said, carefully and seriously.

In the darkness her voice reminded me of the wind when it picked up and dropped the worn tarpaulin on the shed roof. Some words fell so softly I had to fill the space with what made sense; others plummeted.

‘I’ve decided I’m not doing it anymore,’ she said. ‘I’ve thought and thought about it and I’m not having diabetes any more. I’ve done it for more than a month and that’s enough. I’m sure my pancreas can fix itself. Harry Potter would be able fix himself without bloody injections. So I’m not doing it. Don’t care if I go totally all unconscious again. I’m just going to go and lie in bed from now on and that’s it. Stay there and wait for my long-forever sleep.’

In the blackness I listened. As my eyes got accustomed to it, her silhouette became more defined, as though she’d not been real earlier and now was. I didn’t move. I could feel the lump of Grandad Colin’s diary under my pillow, kept safe the way Rose used to cherish her books.

‘Goodnight, mum,’ Rose said.

I couldn’t speak. I knew if I let her go back to her bed, I might never get her out of it. She began to head for the door.

Do something
, my mind screamed.

Then, in the dark, Rose stopped and said, ‘Will you say bye to Dad for me?’

‘The thing is,’ – I tried to stop my voice breaking, glad of night’s camouflage – ‘how will I be able to tell you about the man in the brown suit if you go to sleep forever? Don’t you want to know who he is?’

Silence. I waited for her to speak. What more did I have to say? What lifeline did I have to keep her? I’d played the only card I had straight away, like a novice. If she expressed no interest what else did I have to offer?

I touched the book. I’d read more the previous evening. Childhood memories had returned. I’d let them wash over me, fill my pores, hydrate me.

Eventually she said, ‘You could just tell me about him now.’

‘It’s way too long to explain in minutes,’ I said.

‘If we start right now we might be done by tomorrow night.’

I was throwing her a lifeline and then pulling it away. But I had to make it more appealing. Hide my pain and pretend I didn’t mind if she wanted to grab hold of it or not.

So I said, ‘Rose, I’m going back to sleep, and so are you. And when we get up in the morning, I’m going to tell you the greatest story you can imagine. About the man in the brown suit. It could take weeks, even months. But
only
if you let me do your finger pricks and injections. Let me do them and I’ll give you a story way better than
War Horse
or
Harry Potter
.’ I paused. ‘Because it’s true.’ She didn’t say a word so I continued. ‘We can get up a bit earlier and you can do your blood in the book nook. It’s entirely up to you. You have a big think about it. Go on – go back to bed now.’

Breath held, I waited. Then I heard the soft swish as she opened my door again and the sound of her bare feet going across the landing and then the closing of her bedroom door. I had no idea if she’d departed with plans to meet me in the book nook or if she still intended to lie down in her bed forever.

I could not get her words out of my head –
Will you say bye to Dad for me
? I’d never tell Jake she’d said that. Never. It would kill him deader than any landmine or gun could.

I tried desperately to sleep. I wanted to escape Rose’s death wish, wanted to drift on the sea again. How could an abandoned lifeboat hold more appeal than my own home?

I did dream of the boat and this time I wasn’t alone. Other shadows crowded into its limited space. The lack of moonlight equalised them; they shuffled for the best spot in a craft designed for half their number and they sang softly until sleep washed whispers away, a mixture of accents and tones and depth.

One sang the loudest.

Grandad Colin.

He sang a song I felt I’d heard before. Then the other shadows added their notes. They told stories. Mouths I knew must be cracked and bleeding didn’t talk of that place beyond the makeshift lifeboat; they didn’t say ‘home’. Home was too painful. They told made-up stories to escape. Lies bounce best on ocean waves; pretence gives more comfort than truth. And in the dark we’re all the same; no one is more hungry or happy or needy or worthy or injured than the next person.

Then I was alone. Just the sea and me. I knew as I bobbed about on the boat that I’d wake soon, and I desperately clung to its edge. I wanted to hold onto Grandad Colin. Wanted to shout him to come back.

I woke the next morning and remembered my grandmother taking me for fish at this fancy restaurant and telling me Grandad Colin hadn’t talked much about what had happened to him. That he’d taken his thoughts to the grave, leaving only physical mementoes, medals and photos, official letters and locks of hair. Had she even known there was a diary? Had the leathery book been overlooked by everyone until now? Had it been waiting for us?

Today I had to tell a story.

I wasn’t sure I could.

When the clock digits changed to 7:00 – the perfect blood sugar reading – I got up and went on to the landing. The distance to Rose’s door seemed longer, like the horizon moving away the closer you get.

Would she want to start our trade? Could the story I’d promised shrink her bruises? Could it ease the constant cycle of changing injection sites to cause least damage, cushion the cut of finger end?

I opened her bedroom door, inhaled sleep and glue and wax crayon. The bed was empty but neatly made, each pillow symmetrical with the duvet. What did it mean? She was never tidy.

Where was she?

Downstairs I went, afraid of what I’d find, dreading an empty house and open back door. I sneaked into the kitchen, the hallway, the dining room. There in the book nook, cross-legged on a cinnamon cushion with the diabetes box on her knee and a scowl on her face, sat Rose.

‘If this story is rubbish,’ she said. ‘I’m going back to bed.’

I nodded – the joy and relief at her being there suffocated all words.

‘It’d better be more good than…’ Rose stopped to think. ‘Than
Charlotte’s Web
and all the Harry Potter books. Something I can look forward to. Not boring and with really proper chapters.’

I hid my panic with a calm nod.

‘So who’s the man that whispers to me all the time?’

The weight of responsibility stopped me midway across the dining room. What if I couldn’t tell the story? What if I didn’t do it justice? Paint it well? Find the right words or put them together in a way that Rose loved? I’d written stories on notepads until I was perhaps fifteen, and still often woke with ideas in my head and lovely lines on my tongue, but I was no writer.

And I’d have to speak this story, put together the collectanea of things I’d read in newspaper cuttings and Colin’s diary recollections and my own imaginings. And all on the spot.

‘Well,’ said Rose. ‘Who is he?’

‘Let me get your cereal and some milk first,’ I said. ‘Then we won’t have to stop. We’ll do your blood reading in the book nook and you can eat your breakfast here too and have an injection without interrupting the story.’

‘What about school?’ demanded Rose, still scowly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘When you do my injection at dinnertime – what then?’

‘Oh.’ I thought about it. ‘Maybe I could read a few lines from the diary then?’

‘What diary?’

‘The brown book by my bed. The book you found in the shed,’ I said. ‘It’s his – the man in the brown suit.’

Rose stared up and to her right. I’d once read somewhere that when we remember we look to the right as we try and recall. If we’re asked to imagine something, to invent or create, we look left. Left to lie, right to recall.

‘He got a diary to match his jacket,’ she said, more to herself than to me.

‘I suppose he did,’ I said.

I went quickly to the kitchen and got the packet of Bran Flakes and a bowl and spoon and some milk before Rose changed her mind and crept back off to bed. I sat on the cushion opposite her with everything we needed, and put the strip in the blood machine with nervous fingers.

Hands behind her back, Rose said, ‘So who is he?’

She wanted this story – I could tell – but the price for hearing it was high. I held my hand out to take hers and she looked at it but not at me.

‘I promise I’ll tell you if you let me do your blood,’ I said.

It seemed an age until she held her arm out straight in front, like children did in the days when schoolteachers rapped their fingers with a ruler for bad behaviour. I was going to hurt her too. I had no choice. But I could take us somewhere else; we could escape to the ocean.

‘He’s your great grandfather,’ I said, selecting a finger that didn’t look too sore. ‘My grandad, my dad’s dad. And his name was Colin.’

I decided to try and start gently. Wasn’t that how great stories began? I pricked Rose’s finger end and she scratched me.

Quickly I tried to find words that would soothe. I said, ‘Colin’s story started about a thousand miles off the coast of Africa, near a place called Ascension Island, on 19
^th
March 1943. This small volcanic island was a safe haven for mariners and named so because it was discovered on Ascension Day. That was when the resurrected Jesus was taken up to heaven and everyone…’

‘No bible stuff,’ snapped Rose. ‘We do enough at school! Tell me the adventurey stuff or I’m going upstairs.’

‘It kind of fits in with the story,’ I said.

Her blood read nine-point-four and I was pleased. I poured milk on the cereal and handed it to her.

‘I’m supposed to try and make it as good as a proper book remember,’ I said. ‘With the descriptions and interesting stuff. If I’m going to be as a good as JK Rowling I’ve got to do the build-up and all that haven’t I? That’s the part you loved when you were little and we read together. You’d bounce about and get excited at the start.’

‘Bet I didn’t.’ She noisily ate her Bran Flakes.

‘So it all began in the middle of the night when an Italian navy submarine torpedoed the ship carrying Colin – he was a merchant seaman and had been for a while. There have been arguments about whether the submarine even was Italian; one seaman said that Germans surfaced after the sinking and they machine-gunned some of the men in the water. Of course, there must have been a great deal of panic so I imagine…’

‘This isn’t a build-up,’ said Rose, spitting milk. ‘This is an info dump.’

‘A what?’

‘Info dump. At school Miss said you should scatter your information through the story like bits of bread. You know like in “Hansel and Gretel”. Otherwise readers get really bored. You’re supposed to hook your reader with action first, not lots of crappy tell-y bits.’

‘Oh.’ I wasn’t sure how to go on. ‘Do you want to know about Colin’s ship?’

‘Suppose.’

‘Okay, she was called the
SS Lulworth Hill
, a cargo ship travelling from Cape Town back to England. She was carrying rum and sugar from the West Indies, and probably explosive material too, which might be why they sailed separately from a convoy. She was attacked in the middle of the night and sank in just one and a half minutes while most of the crew were asleep. She split right in two when she sank. Each part landed in the seabed miles from the other.’

‘You sound like one of those newsreaders,’ said Rose.

I knew I was saying all the things I’d memorised from the newspaper articles, afraid to let go and wander off the factual path in case I lost my way. How did actors in the theatre find the character? I’d watched rehearsals at work; I should be able to do this.

I took the insulin pen from the box and measured the correct dose. Rose got up and my heart sank. But she put her empty bowl on the table and came back; her face was still unreadable, a blank page waiting for paragraphs.

‘What did Colin do when the ship sank?’ she asked.