Forever Geek

by Holly Smale

  All the blankets and tablets; the health foods and crystals; Annabel actually trying to cook; Dad’s weird helpfulness and willingness to cover for my dramas.

  And I’ve realised: Moonstone wasn’t Bunty’s friend.

  She was her nurse.

  As Bunty falls asleep and the plane takes off with a shudder, I quietly get Annabel’s tightly folded KEEP WITH YOU AT ALL TIMES sheet out of my satchel and stare at it for the billionth time since the party.

  Underneath her mobile number and Dad’s number – below UK doctors and hospitals and insurance and passport details – are three words that would have forced everything else to make a lot more sense.

  Sydney Oncology Department.

  Except I didn’t look at it, did I? I didn’t even think to.

  And if I had, I’d have seen Wilbur, Annabel, Bunty and Dad sitting round the kitchen table two weeks ago: constructing a plan.

  I’d have seen that this was never really a modelling trip at all.

  It was always about spending time with Bunty.

  Dad and Annabel are waiting at the airport.

  My grandmother wakes up just enough to give them a bright smile, and say, “Hello, darlings, I highly recommend prescription drugs, that went by in a jiffy,” before she drifts off to sleep again.

  And I’m abruptly wrapped in parental arms like a jar lid targeted by a very affectionate octopus.

  “Oh, my little girl,” Annabel whispers into my hair as Dad kisses my forehead. “We’re so, so sorry. We thought we’d planned everything so carefully but …”

  “Sometimes plans don’t work,” I say into her bobbly jumper.

  Then I blink. Hang on: Annabel’s wearing a jumper?

  And jeans?

  Where did they even come from?

  “Sweetheart,” my stepmother says, pulling back and holding my face in her hands. There are lines round her eyes I haven’t seen before, and it’s clear she’s been crying hard. “Mum was so determined to have this holiday, she begged us not to say anything. But we thought she had more …”

  “Chocolate,” Dad finishes, nodding sagely. “We thought she had more chocolate. But we’ve been through her bags and the boot of her car and everything’s made of hemp seed and avocado. A huge disappointment and we’ll be making our complaints known when your grandmother wakes up.”

  A gurgle of snot pops out of my nose.

  Annabel smiles and gives Nat a hug as well. “Thank you for being there, darling.”

  Nat nods in silence. We’ve barely spoken a word to each other for the last two days, but we haven’t needed to. Everything I’ve thought and felt, my best friend has heard and felt too.

  Scientists recently discovered that the limpet has teeth composed of thin, tightly packed fibres containing a mineral called goethite. They’re the strongest natural material on the planet: so strong, that if they were the size of spaghetti they could hold an adult hippopotamus in the air.

  That’s what the string between Nat and me is made of.

  We can tug and pull at it as much as we like: literally nothing and nobody is ever going to break it.

  “Where’s Tabby?” I say as we start pushing Bunty’s wheelchair out towards the car park.

  “Tabitha!” Dad says, smacking his head. “I knew we’d forgotten something!”

  “She’s with Toby and Rin,” Annabel smiles, opening the car doors. “Dressed as a unicorn complete with a light-up horn, I would imagine.”

  “I’d like one of those,” Bunty says, waking up momentarily. “Is there a spare?”

  “We’ll find one,” Dad confirms. “Unicorn horns for everyone.”

  Gently, we put Bunty into the car and wait patiently until she falls asleep again.

  Then I lean forward. “What happens now?”

  “Now,” Annabel says gently. “We go home.”

  give Bunty my bedroom.

  I don’t need my own bed and my dinosaur posters and my homework and my timetables around me anywhere near as much as I thought I did.

  The sofa is fine by me.

  Hugo – after his initial flurry of excitement at my return – settles down quietly at my grandmother’s feet and refuses to leave for the next five days.

  Two researchers at Goldsmiths College in London recently tested eighteen dogs, and discovered that fifteen responded compassionately to a human in trouble: even if they were a stranger.

  Victor, on the other hand, sits on Bunty’s chest for two minutes, meows at her for food, then gets bored and escapes out of the window.

  Which is exactly what you’d expect of a cat.

  I’m just glad he was wearing a pink net tutu and a tiny pink bow at the time: as I’ve said before, karma.

  Rin goes to stay with Nat, and – with Jasper and Toby – my friends pop by regularly with hot chocolates and burnt biscuits and information about how flamingos can bend their knees backwards (thanks, Toby).

  And my family tiptoe around the house with our shoes off. Whispering and making green juices and trying to stay as calm and as cheerful as we possibly can. Because we know – without even discussing it – that it’s what Bunty wants.

  That and more crystals, hanging at the windows.

  “Rainbows everywhere,” she says, leaning back on the pillows with a gentle smile as I open the curtains and string up every wine glass I can find in the house. “Darling, let’s fill this room with as many beautiful colours as we possibly can.”

  And I don’t tell her that just by being there, she already does.

  Instead, I show it.

  Each morning, I ask her what she wants to know and then pull out every poetry book, every textbook, every schoolbook, every fact book.

  And – bit by bit – I break the world into pieces and give it to her.

  “Harriet?” Bunty says on Sunday as I put a glass of water on the bedside table and try to creep quietly out again. “Sweetheart?”

  I turn round and look at her.

  She’s propped up against a myriad of colourful pillows: my favourite geek-glasses-print duvet pulled up to her chin and a fluffy yellow cashmere blanket over her shoulders. Her face is drawn and pale, her teeth seem a little too big, but her pink hair is still candy-floss bright and the soft smile is there: dimpling the corner of her mouth.

  We sleep on average 229,961 hours in a lifetime, and Bunty now seems to be spreading hers out in little hourly bursts.

  “Mmm?” I say softly, turning on a small lamp.

  The Australian sunshine that briefly came home with us has gone and outside the clouds are dark and heavy: as if they weigh slightly too much for the sky.

  Bunty opens her eyes and pats the bed next to her.

  “Tell me more about sunrises,” she says as I perch and Hugo soundlessly shuffles into my lap and puts his head on my knee. “I’m so very curious.”

  With a lump in my throat, I nod.

  Downstairs I can faintly hear Toby, Nat, Jasper and Rin watching Kung Fu Panda for the seventeenth time: Team JRNTH has settled in for the long haul.

  Although it’s also raining pretty hard so there’s a chance they just don’t want to go outside and get soaked.

  “Ordinary sunlight is made of a spectrum of colours with wavelengths ranging from .47 micrometres for violet to .64 micrometres for red,” I say as my grandmother closes her eyes again and rain hammers at the window. “Air molecules are closer in size to the wavelength of violet light, which means the sky normally appears blue.”

  I glance out of the window. It’s not blue at all: it’s a dark, almost metallic grey, and it’s getting darker and rainier by the second.

  “Although,” I add, looking back, “if human eyes were more sensitive it would actually look violet to us.”

  “A violet sky,” she smiles. “Lovely. What else?”

  I glance out of the window again, but it’s hard to imagine a sun right now: let alone it coming up or going down.

  “At sunrise, the light takes a longer path through the atmosphere, a
nd that scatters the blue and violet light so that the light reaches us instead as pink and red.”

  There’s a silence, and for a second I think she’s fallen asleep again. In fairness, it wouldn’t be the first time somebody’s done that during one of my science monologues.

  Silently, I watch the rainwater for a few minutes, pouring in rivulets into the garden: filling the whole universe with water.

  And I try not to feel like it’s filling me too.

  Finally Bunty sighs and shifts slightly on the bed. “But the sky is still blue in other places?”

  “Yes,” I confirm as Hugo softly licks her hand. “The same light can look pink to us while to others it’ll look blue. It just depends what part of the world you’re standing in.”

  “Ah. Because the world keeps turning?”

  “Exactly.” The lump in my throat is getting so big I’m not sure how my voice is getting out, but somehow it is. “For some of us it’ll be a sunrise, and for some it’ll be a sunset, and for others the sun will be directly overhead.”

  Bunty smiles. “So it’s always there.”

  I look out of the window at the rain again and it suddenly feels like every bit of love I’ve ever felt is a bright golden ball, burning warmly in the centre of my chest.

  “Yes, the sun’s always there.”

  My grandmother opens her light blue eyes, and there’s nothing but happiness: nothing but peace, and love, and contentment, and a life lived gloriously shining out of them.

  “Then you can let go, my darling,” my grandmother smiles gently. “And know that it always will be.”

  She dies the next day.

  Fourteen days later

  ’ve never actually been on a night-time hike through a wood before.

  Probably for these three very good reasons:

  “You know,” Dad says, temporarily blinding me with his head-torch as I smack into yet another large trunk and let out my thirteenth ow. “I might get myself one of these for everyday use. They’re kind of nifty.”

  The adult anglerfish is a deep-sea creature with an esca at the tip of its dorsal ray: covered in symbiotic bacteria that make the front of its head glow with a bright light.

  It currently looks like this wood is full of them.

  As instructed, each of us is carrying a coloured lantern and wearing a matching camping torch on an elastic band round our head: all you can see are bobbing coloured lights as we stumble and trip over roots and into bushes, grunting loudly.

  Everyone apart from Annabel and Nat.

  My stepmother refused to wear a head-lamp because she’s “not a miner, for God’s sake”, and Nat has customised her red one with a red headscarf.

  “I think Bunty would like it,” my best friend asserts for the millionth time, rearranging it carefully and straightening out her red coat.

  “I’m certain she would,” I grin, looking down at my new leaf-green coat and lantern, then at everybody else: Tabby in white, Dad in blue, Annabel in yellow, Jasper in purple, Rin in pink and Toby in orange.

  The list that was left behind was very specific.

  And at the very top was written, in her usual beautiful curly writing.

  It had even been underlined, twice.

  Annabel and I suspect we’re being very gently mocked, even now.

  “Did you know,” Toby says, flashing his bike helmet light on and off, “that the only anglerfish with a light is actually the female of the species? It attracts the tiny male fish, who then fuses into the female while his insides melt?”

  “Such an appropriate story,” Jasper sighs, rolling his eyes over the top of his purple lantern. “Any others you’ve kept for this occasion, Tobes?”

  “Oh, yes,” Toby confirms, orange light bobbing up and down. “Manakin birds moonwalk to impress the ladies.”

  “Like the Michael Jackson Five!” Rin nods, flashing pink.

  “I’ve been known to do a bit of that too,” Dad says, walking his blue light backwards straight into a tree stump. “What do you think, Annabel? Am I significantly hotter travelling in the opposite direction?”

  Annabel doesn’t look up from the compass she’s studying.

  “Exponentially so,” she says, narrowing her eyes in her yellow light. “It’s very dark too, so that helps.”

  “Burn,” Dad tells Tabitha soberly. “Baby, burn.”

  My sister beams under her tiny white flashlight and smacks him gently on the nose.

  “Like mother like daughter,” he sighs proudly.

  “OK,” Annabel says, turning the compass again and finally looking up. “It’s here. Why Mum couldn’t just have left the coordinates so I could use GPS on my phone I have no idea.”

  Honestly, I think we all know why.

  We’re lucky we’ve not been expected to navigate to this precise spot via owl hoots, moonbeams and vague leaf markings done in charcoal. Directions, a map and a compass was actually more technology than any of us could have hoped for.

  Blinking, we all flash our torches into the dark.

  “What does it say next on the list, Harriet?” Nat says, leaning forward with her red headlight. “Read it out.”

  It goes without saying that I’m in charge of Bunty’s list.

  I mean, of all the things I’ve been training for my entire life, being in charge of other people’s lists is right at the top of that list.

  Carefully, I take it out of my backpack.

  “It says You will enter a beautiful clearing of trees,” I read slowly, holding my green lantern over the paper. “One of them is much prettier than the rest.”

  “Prettier?” Annabel says in frustration. “How are we supposed to objectively and scientifically quantify, then identify which tree is—”

  “It’s this one,” Dad says, pointing. “Look.”

  And sure enough: as we hold our lanterns up, the most beautiful tree I’ve ever seen looms out of the darkness. Huge and knotted and curled and ancient: the roots an intricate network like lace winding across the ground and the branches like a myriad of arms raised to the sky.

  Round the bottom of the tree is a blanket of closed night-time daisies.

  There’s a short silence.

  “OK,” Annabel agrees with a tiny smile. “Prettiest tree, Mum. Tick. What’s next?”

  I look at the list. “Get me out. Try not to drop me, darlings. I’m awfully spilly these days.”

  And I know we’re not supposed to laugh right now, but we do.

  Something tells me that was kind of the point.

  Carefully, Annabel gets an elegant tin pot out of her bag: beautifully engraved with flowers and swirls and elephants, collected on one of Bunty’s many journeys through India.

  Then she bends down and puts it among the daisies.

  “Done,” Dad says, putting his arm round Annabel and helping her stand up again. “Now?”

  I look at the paper, turn it over and then back again. “Next it says: Wait.”

  We frown at each other with our rainbow lanterns.

  There’s a long silence.

  “Does it mention for roughly how long?” Dad asks tentatively. “Because it’s the middle of the night in a dark wood and I’m no scaredy-cat but …”

  In the distance to our left, there’s the sound of a twig cracking.

  We all jump and spin towards it.

  There’s a tiny blue light, emerging from the darkness.

  “What the—” Annabel says, breathing out.

  Then there’s another crack to our right, and we jump again: towards the sound of trees rustling and a green light, bobbing closer and closer.

  We blink as a shadow emerges from the darkness.

  Then behind us, bushes part and a yellow light appears, suspended by a shadow from the air. Followed by a purple one, another blue one, a white one, a yellow one; two red ones, an orange, three pinks, one turquoise.

  Slowly more lights emerge from the trees.

  People are walking through the darkness, each carrying with t
hem a compass and a different-coloured lantern.

  Men and women of every description: an old, white-haired man in a yellowy-orange tunic and orange trousers; a young dark-skinned woman in a long, floaty blue dress; a bald lady with a long green scarf and a small child in her arms.

  Each appearing from between the trees, one by one.

  “Annabel,” Dad whispers as the crowd gets bigger. “We’re going to need more sandwiches.”

  We watch in amazement as the clearing slowly fills with dozens of brightly coloured lights and people, standing noiselessly in the dark. Peering with my green lamp, I see Wilbur appear from between two trees in a pink suit: he gives me a little wave and points triumphantly at his silver wellies.

  Then Yuka emerges too, clad entirely in white.

  She nods with a small smile.

  I look back at the list, but there’s just one thing left on it.

  oodbye.

  We say it every single day, yet not all of us know that it’s actually a diminutive of God Be With Ye … godbwye.

  I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in love.

  And I think it’s kind of saying the same thing. Because when a person leaves us, we instinctively ask them to take all our love with them.

  And when we go, we leave as much of it as we can behind.

  I don’t know how Bunty did it.

  Magic, or pigeon-carrier, or (more probably) email.

  But she must have known the end was coming for quite a long time, because the wood is filled with people from all over the world: from India, from Bolivia, from Georgia and Russia; from Lithuania and Mongolia; Portugal and Nigeria; Romania and Slovenia, Taiwan and the Philippines; Vietnam and Thailand, Malaysia and Mexico, Tibet, Peru, Japan and Zimbabwe. All of whom have travelled across the planet to say goodbye.

  And as they step forward, they all have a different story for how Bunty touched their lives.

  A sofa when they were tired; a hand when they were lost.