North of Nowhere (20 page)

“All of it. Pip turning up out of nowhere, and never really explaining where he’d come from.”

“Pip?” I said without thinking. It was so rare to hear Gran use Grandad’s nickname that I wasn’t sure who she was talking about for a moment.

“You know who I am, don’t you?” Grandad said, looking at me intently. “You know who I
was
?”

I nodded. “I — I think so.” For a moment, it felt too ridiculous to say out loud. What if I was wrong? No, that was silly. I
knew
I wasn’t wrong. “Peter?” I added in a squeak.

“I knew you’d have figured it out,” Grandad said with a hint of a smile. “You remember our conversation on the beach when you told me your real name was Amelia but your friends called you Mia?” he went on. “When I found myself stranded in Luffsands, it hit me that I could do the same thing. So I made a fresh start with a new name. My middle name’s Philip, so I decided to use that. Your gran’s pet name for me was Pip.”

I shook my head. My grandad — Pip — really
was
Peter. It was so much to take in.

Gran turned to me. “And then there was you, Mia, disappearing without trace,” she went on. “There were so many unanswered questions back then.”

“So how did you deal with them all?” I asked.

“I suppose there were too many other, more pressing, matters on my mind. After the storms and the move to the mainland, we all had to rebuild our lives, start again. I had Mother to look after. No time to sit and ponder a mystery that I would never get to the bottom of: the mysterious girl who came into my life only to disappear into thin air after helping to save my family’s lives.”

Suddenly, at least one thing made sense. The reason why Gran never talked about feelings; the reason she’d always believed in just getting on with things rather than lamenting and discussing everything. Because that’s what she’d had to do as a child. She hadn’t had time to sit around crying about it all; she’d had to hold her family together.

“Didn’t you talk about it to anyone?” I asked.

Gran shook her head. “How could I? They still took girls my age into what we called lunatic asylums back then, you know. It would only have taken a signature from my father and I’d have been locked up for life.”

I studied Gran’s face. Was she joking? “What about Peter?” I asked. “I mean, Pip. Couldn’t you talk to him?”

Gran smiled softly. “Ah, yes. So many times, it was on the tip of my tongue to ask. But you see, that was even more of a risk. To utter such questions to him and risk him thinking I was a crazy girl? No, I couldn’t do it. Not when I knew I was falling in love with him. Too much had gone already. I had no home, no Luffsands, no island.”

“You lost it all,” I said quietly.

“Almost all. I still had friends — in fact, I could see more of them now. But it wasn’t the same. They had no idea what I’d been through. Pip did. It was a bond like nothing I’d ever known, and Pip and my family and the other islanders were the only ones who shared it.”

At the word “family,” I suddenly realized something. Sal had been silent since Grandad had arrived.

Maybe it hit him at the same moment, I don’t know. But just then, he turned to her, his eyes like pools about to overflow, and said in a whisper so soft it was like a wave lapping gently onto sand, “I’ve missed you.”

At that, Sal shook her head. Biting hard on her bottom lip, she turned away. Then she stood up. “I can’t handle this,” she said, and started off back to the pub.

“Sal, wait!” Grandad called.

Gran put a hand on his arm. “Give her a moment,” she said. “It’s going to take time.”

“I’ll go,” I said.

Grandad was standing, too. “No,” he said. “We’ll all go. They’re as much my family as you are, and I owe
all
of you an explanation.”

He reached out to help Gran up.

“Are you sure about this?” she asked.

Grandad’s face was as firm as concrete. “I’ve never been more sure of anything.” As I got up from the bench, he put his other arm around me. “This story has been locked up inside me for too long,” he said. “And now that it’s finally safe to do so, I need to tell it — to all of you.”

Sal had joined her parents, and now she sat squashed into the bench seat with them in the lounge. Her eyes were red, her face hard and closed like a locked door. Mom was there, too.

As soon as we walked through the door, Mom leaped out of her chair as if it were on fire. “Dad!” she screamed, and ran over to throw her arms around him. “Dad! You’re safe, you’re safe,” she said, over and over. When she pulled away from him, she had tears streaming down her face.

So did Grandad. But he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at Sal’s dad, who was staring back at him. His expression was very different from Grandad’s, though. I’d describe it as the way someone might look if a ghost walked into the room and politely asked if they’d like some coffee.

Sal’s mom turned to look at Grandad and instantly her face turned pale. “Bernard?” she said, her voice a cracked whisper.

Grandad took a step closer to them. “I’m not Bernard,” he said. His voice broke even more than hers had.

“Who’s Bernard?” I asked.

“My grandpa,” Sal replied woodenly.

“My father,” her dad said.

“He died fifteen years ago,” her mom added. “And he was the spitting image of this man.”

Gran had disappeared into the kitchen and was coming back out with a couple of teacups. She poured some tea from the pot that was already on the table, then she sat down next to Mom.

Grandad sat next to her. I squeezed in at the other end of the bench seat, next to Sal.

Sal’s dad looked confused. “If you’re not Bernard,” he asked, “who are you?”

Grandad took a deep breath, then slowly let it out. He held Sal’s dad’s gaze so firmly it was as though a laser beam connected them. “Dad, it’s me,” he said. “It’s Peter.”

I held my breath. I think everyone else did, too. The world held its breath and nothing moved; not the air, not a blink, nothing. Time stood still. Maybe literally. By now, I would have believed anything could happen.

Sal’s mom was first to break the silence. “Who are you?” she whispered.

Grandad cleared his throat. “It’s me, Mom,” he said.

“Don’t call me that!” Sal’s mom snapped. “You must be thirty years older than me. I can’t be your mother!”

Grandad nodded slowly. “I know,” he said. “It’s a lot to take in.”

Sal’s dad snorted. “Really? You
think
?”

Gran put a hand on Grandad’s arm. “You’ve had a whole lifetime, remember,” she said softly.

Sal’s mom stared at Gran. “Who
is
this man?” she asked, her voice as taught as a wire.

Grandad reached out for her hand. “Mom, please believe me. I —”

She pulled her hand away. “How dare you! Coming here making fools of us at a time like this. Who do you think you are?”

“I keep
telling
you who I am,” Grandad said, a blotchy rash reddening his neck as his frustration grew. “Why won’t you believe me?”

Sal’s mom’s face turned gray. She was staring at Peter. “Your neck,” she said.

Grandad reached up to touch his neck. “What about it?”

“The rash,” she said simply. “That’s what happens to Peter when he gets agitated.”

Grandad met her eyes. “I know. I
am
Peter,” he said.

The room fell silent. Eventually, his mom spoke again. “But how?” she asked. “How is such a thing possible?”

“You really want to know?” Grandad asked.

“Yes,” Sal’s dad —
his
dad — replied firmly. “We
need
to know.”

“Well, it started a few months ago,” Grandad began. “The town council had made some brochures, trying to bring some tourism to Porthaven.”

“Brochures?” Sal’s mom asked. “The ones advertising the fishing vacation?”

Grandad nodded.

“Wait — Gran told us about those,” I butted in. “She said you acted all weird when they came around. And then you said you wanted to go away for the weekend.”

“I always suspected that weekend away wasn’t really a spontaneous romantic gesture,” Gran said.

“It was that as well,” Grandad said.

“But that wasn’t the main reason for it,” Gran insisted. “I realize that now. It was because of the brochure. You wanted to take it to your parent’s house, didn’t you?”

“
You
brought us that brochure?” Sal’s mom said. “But why?”

Grandad took a deep breath. He clasped his hands in front of him as he let his breath back out in a long, low whistle. “I . . .” he began. His face had reddened. As I looked at him struggle to get the words out, it hit me. I knew what he was trying to say.

“You had to give it to Peter, didn’t you?” I blurted out. “You had to deliver it to your younger self!”

I don’t think I’d ever seen so many open jaws all at the same time. I could almost see the cogs working in everyone’s brains as they tried to process this information. It was impossible — but it was true. I knew that now.

“Mia’s right,” Grandad said. “As soon as I saw the brochure a few months ago, I knew what it was. I recognized it as though I had seen it only yesterday.”

“Even though, for you, the last time you’d seen it was actually fifty years ago,” I said.

“Exactly. And that was when I finally understood why I’d had that blinding headache all those years ago as a child — the one that had me bedridden for almost the entire weekend.”

“Two different versions of you came face-to-face!” I said. I’d seen the
Back to the Future
films. I knew the consequences of things like that. But this wasn’t a film — it was real life. My family’s life!

“Exactly,” Grandad said. “Young me and old me were right there at the same time. As soon as I made the connection by looking right at myself, the pain was unbearable — for both of us. That day, I realized one thing: I couldn’t go through that again. I wasn’t sure either of us could survive it.”

“Either of you?” Mom asked. She hadn’t spoken up till now, but she was hooked on every word of Grandad’s story, just like the rest of us.

“Either version of myself,” Grandad mumbled. “It’s weird. Having the same moment twice, fifty years apart and from two different angles. Blew my mind. I dropped off the brochure and scurried away. Got to the end of the road. And then, even though I knew what would happen, I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t resist taking one quick glance at the boy I’d once been.”

“And you were struck with a bad headache,” I said.

Grandad snorted. “
Bad
doesn’t even begin to describe it. Never had anything like it — apart from that other time.”

“And that was the end of our romantic weekend,” Gran said. “You spent the rest of it lying on the bed in the dark, moaning about how terrible you felt.”

“Sorry,” Grandad said sheepishly. Gran smiled and squeezed his hand in reply.

“That was when I knew I had done what I needed to do,” he went on. “My family would come here for their vacation. I’d done my bit to ensure that would happen. But I had to be gone. There was no way I could afford to take the risk of something like that headache happening again. It could ruin everything.”

“Ruin everything?” Mom asked.

“I had to make sure that young Peter was in Porthaven this week.” Grandad turned to me. “He had to be here to meet you.” Then he turned back to Gran and took her hands in his. “And to go to Luffsands for you.” Holding her eyes with his, he went on. “That was why I
had
to leave. I couldn’t risk Peter seeing me and being incapacitated by another headache — or worse.”

Gran stared down at the hands wrapped around her own. “All these years, you held this in,” she said. “Why did you never tell me?”

“How could he have?” I answered for him. Hearing Grandad’s story made me realize he was the one who’d lost more than anyone in this. A whole lifetime without his family, and a lifetime of keeping the truth from his wife. “You’ve already told us what they did to crazy people. How would your family have reacted if he’d told you that he’d come from the future to save you all?”

“Mia’s right,” Grandad said. “So many times, I wanted to say something, and I almost did. But every time, the same thought stopped me. What if you thought I was crazy, or lying, or just a plain fool? What if I lost you? How could I try to convince you of something I could barely believe myself? So I kept my secret locked away in my heart. Carried it everywhere for fifty years. Gave everyone a glib lie about being an orphan boy on his travels when they asked where I’d come from.”

“I’ve got a question,” I said.

Grandad turned to me.

“How come you went over to Luffsands in the boat? You promised you wouldn’t, but you did anyway.”

Grandad lowered his face. Looking at the table, he replied, “You think I didn’t ask myself that a thousand times?” He shook his head. “I wanted to surprise you. I thought, what’s best — doing what I’m told, or trusting my abilities and making a bunch of other people smile? Not that there were many smiles that day.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But think what could have happened if you hadn’t gone. If you hadn’t taken the boat and gone back to the Luffsands of fifty years ago.”