Granny Deedee came in with a massive tray full of more cups of tea, as if that were the cure for everything.
My head felt a bit sore and I was sick of talking, so I locked myself in the bathroom. It felt good sitting on the cold floor with the door shut and nobody looking at me or asking me questions or telling me I was rude, but I knew I couldn’t stay there forever.
By the time I came out, Dr. Sally was telling Granny Deedee how sometimes people need help even though they won’t admit it, and Ted was wooden-faced, nodding his head, as though he was a puppet, not a fully grown human being.
Dr. Sally told me that my granddad was going to “rest quietly” at home tonight and that at the end of the week she’d come back to do the “little test” again when everything was a bit calmer. If he didn’t pass it this time, they were going to take Granddad away to a nursing home.
“Gran?” I said, turning to her for a bit of support.
But she was in on the plan too. They all said I was going to be allowed to see him whenever I liked but that now I absolutely had to move in with my uncle Ted.
They said that I was allowed to go into my granddad’s room to say good-bye, as if someone had to give me permission to go to a place where me and granddad hung out all the time reading books and chatting.
“Has anyone asked my granddad what HE wants?”
There was this big awkward silence.
“He wants to stay here and he wants me to stay here too. He doesn’t want people coming and doing tests on him, and he doesn’t need it. You’ve all got this whole thing a hundred percent wrong. There’s nothing the matter with his brain.”
“Cosmo, will you for God’s sake calm down,” said Ted.
I hate it when people tell me to calm down. It’s basically one of the things I hate most in the world. And anyway, I was calm. I was thinking a lot more logically than most of the morons I was surrounded by.
“He’s getting better. I’ve been doing this system with him, and it’s working. I know it is.”
None of them had ever heard of the Memory Cure website, even though it was established in 2005.
“You’ve got to stay up-to-date with the latest developments,” I told them. “Otherwise you can’t call yourselves professionals at all.”
I made them stand around the computer, and I showed everyone.
“See? There are plenty of things you can do when someone gets forgetful—it’s only a matter of trying.”
“Oh, Cosmo, my love,” was the completely useless thing that Granny Deedee said then. And she came over to me with her arms stretched out like a zombie, and then she gave me a hug, which was something I was not particularly in the mood for. She held me by my shoulders very gently and she said, “Darling, there are thousands of things in this world that we’ll never be able to understand or control. There are things you have to accept, things you have to believe are happening for a reason, even if it’s not something anyone can explain.”
She loved saying things like that, about us not being able to understand things. And then she was all like, “Look, I know this has all been very difficult for you.” She went on with the exact same kinds of things that Uncle Ted had said earlier, about “learning to accept” and “coming to terms” and “the natural order of things.”
“Coming to terms” with something is another way of saying “giving up.” I wasn’t going to do that. I would never do that. And besides, action number four of the Memory Cure website said:
Negative thoughts are the enemies of brain health. Adopt a positive mental attitude at all times.
When I finally did go in to say good-bye, Granddad was lying on his side with both hands pressed together under his cheek.
His eyes were closed and he was snoring a little bit. I put my hand on his head.
“Granddad. Granddad. I’m really sorry, but I have to go. They think it’s better if I stay with Uncle Ted for a while.”
And it might sound a bit pathetic, but I kind of kept patting his head and I kept on not wanting to leave him. I didn’t think he was going to wake up.
But then his eyes opened. He grabbed my hand very tightly and he looked at me, alert and bright and focused, and he whispered:
“Cosmo. It’s you!”
I wanted to run out to them all. I wanted to shout, “SEE? See, everyone. He knows who I am. My system is working. He hasn’t forgotten me.”
I told him that I didn’t want to leave, that I had planned to stay here with him and Gran.
My granddad used to say that the best way to make the gods laugh was to tell them your plans. He reminded me about that in his room that day, and then he chuckled away and I was sure then that he was going to get back to being his old self completely. But there wasn’t time to go and explain it to anyone, because then he was saying something else:
“Listen to me, Cosmo. You must listen to me very, very carefully. There’s something I have to tell you. Something important. I’m only going to say it once.
“Here’s the thing: I know my mind is failing. And I know you’ve been doing your best, but there’s only one thing that can help me now.”
“What is it, Granddad?” I asked, my voice trembling a little bit.
“It’s a key, Cosmo. It’s going to help you find the answer to everything, and I’m going to give it to you. You’re the only person I could possibly trust with it. You must promise to use it carefully. It’s a key to the gates.”
“What gates?”
“The south gates.”
“The south gates of what?”
“Of the Abbey.”
“What abbey?”
“Blackbrick Abbey, of course.”
He reached his brown twisted hand over to a small box that had always, as far as I could remember, sat on his bedside table. He fumbled and scrabbled around a bit before he opened the box and took something out.
“Here,” he said, holding up this small, gray, dented thing. It took a good bit of looking carefully at it before I realized it must’ve been the key he’d been talking about.
“Open the gates with it. Make sure you lock them behind you as soon as you’re on the other side. It would never do to let anyone else in, do you hear me? Blackbrick. South gates. Do you understand, Cosmo? Do you understand completely?”
I didn’t understand. Not even partially. But I nodded and tried to make my face look reassuring and calm.
“There’ll be nothing to worry about, because guess what?” he said.
“What?”
He lowered his voice. I had to lean in really close to hear.
“I’ll be there. On the other side. Waiting for you. Bring a pen and paper. That’s what you’ll need to do, that’s a good fellow. Promise me you’ll go.”
It felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. It was proof that he really had lost it—that he really was a psycho, just like everybody kept saying.
The Memory Cure website’s action number five said:
Never act surprised or confused about what your loved one says. Always behave as if you know what they’re talking about, even if what they’re saying appears strange or incoherent.
I said, “Okay, okay, I will, I’ll go there,” even though I knew that I probably wouldn’t.
“Well done. Excellent,” he said, smiling. “I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”
I took the key from him, and I said, “Thanks.”
Thanks a bloody million.
Chapter 5
EVERYONE WAS waiting when I came out. Ted was smiling, and the social workers’ heads were bobbing up and down enthusiastically and they were saying things like, “Well done, Cosmo, good man,” as if this was supposed to be the best day of my life and I should have been delighted.
“Don’t worry!” said Dr. Sally as though she was about to explode with joy. “You’ll be in good hands!”
“Am I still going to be able to go to the stables after school?”
And that was when Ted said, “Oh yes, sorry, em, about
that, we forgot to tell you. We have to send John away. He’s going to a farm. In the country. Where he can run around all day and be happy.”
“A FARM in the COUNTRY?” I shouted. “What do you think I am, SIX? I know what that means. You’re going to have him put down. That’s basically MURDER.”
“Cosmo. I promise we’re not doing that.”
He gave me the phone number of the farm and said I could call and talk to them about John to prove that he wasn’t having him killed.
Dr. Sally told me that I should try to think about what my gran was feeling, and that it would be a good thing for me to think of other people for a change, and I told Dr. Sally to shut up and go away and never come back. She definitely heard me. It was the first time since I’d met her that she stopped smiling.
I called the farm in the country. They said I could come and visit John whenever I wanted, but it turns out that “the country” was Kildare, which is miles away. Even though I’m not the most practical person in the world, I already knew the logistics were going to be a nightmare.
Nothing was ever going to be the same.
I gave the farm person on the other end of the phone a load of instructions about how they should take care of John and what he liked to eat and how to brush him and how warm his stable should be and how to look after his feet, which are the most important thing of all you need to focus on when you’re in charge of a horse. I asked them if they were writing it down, because it was a lot to remember.
After a while I did calm down a bit, but it was just because I was tired.
I spent a long time looking at the ceiling of Ted’s spare room that night, thinking about John and about the mad promise I’d made to my granddad.
You shouldn’t break the promises you make to people. Nobody should. You can’t go around saying you promise to do something and then not do it. Even if you’re pretty much certain that the thing you have promised to do is for the birds.
I lay still on the bed the whole time, turning the little key that Granddad had given me over and over in my hand until it was hot. I waited until everything was quiet and there were no bumps or murmurs or clicks coming from anywhere. Then I slid off the bed, and I inched my way downstairs very quietly. Hanging off the back of a chair in the kitchen was Ted’s bag. Inside it I found a notebook with a hard black cover, a few pens, and a wallet full of fifties and twenties. I crammed everything back in, grabbed the whole bag, and called a taxi.
The taxi guy came pretty quickly. He wasn’t that talkative, but he knew where Blackbrick Abbey was, which was the first relief of that particular day. Soon we were on roads that I’d never been on before, all twisty and black.
When silence grows in a small space, it gets harder and harder to say anything at all. For example, there were loads of times on that journey when I wanted to tell the taxi guy to turn back. I needed to ask Granddad what the heck he had meant and why, out of the complete blue, he’d wanted me to go to a place that I’d never heard of in my whole life, and why it was suddenly so important that he’d made me promise. But I wasn’t able to speak. Ages of time went by, and the taxi guy kept on driving, and it kept on getting darker and foggier. I started feeling quite stupid.
It didn’t help that the taxi smelled as if someone had thrown up in it. For a while I thought I was going to throw up myself.
But then there was an old black gate with stone pillars on either side and forbidding walls, and in part of the wall were carved tall letters. It was so shadowy that first I could only see a big B, but as we got closer, I saw that the B was only the beginning and that the whole sign did say BLACKBRICK ABBEY. The huge crumbly black gates were closed and locked. Behind them was the beginning of what looked like a massive driveway covered in brown shiny gravel.
“Anywhere here is fine, thank you,” I said, even though anywhere there was not fine at all.
I uncurled my hand and looked at Granddad’s key.
I got out. Taxi Guy was sitting there waiting for me to pay, his big fat elbow resting saggily on the open car window. I felt lousy and on my own, and my heart had started to gallop around. It was something to do with the way the air smelled. Something to do with the sounds of the massive big trees that were creaking like hundreds of old doors opening very slowly, and it was also a little bit to do with the whistling of the wind through the black branches. But it was mainly to do with being in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the stupid night.
“Em, listen,” I said. “Can you take me back, please?”
“Back where?” he asked, looking kind of amazed.
“You know, back to where you picked me up.”
“Sorry. No can do,” he replied. “I’ve gone out of my way already.”
“Out of your WAY?” I said. “Stop me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the whole POINT of driving a stupid TAXI?”
“Calm down, mate,” he said. “There’s no need to be rude.”
As well as hating it when people tell me to calm down, I hate it even more when someone I don’t know calls me “mate,” especially if I’ve never met them before and it’s obvious that they don’t even like me. I paid him what I owed him, which was thirty-seven fifty, and then I pulled out another twenty. I kept my voice steady, and I said to him, “Okay, listen. I need you to give me fifteen minutes. That’s all. If I’m not back by then, you can go.”
He sucked some air in through his nose for a second or two, calculating something in his head.
“All right, then,” he said, snatching the money with impressive skill and transforming it into a crumpled blur as he slid it into his pocket. Then he took a newspaper from under his seat, and it crinkled as he spread it out over the dashboard. “Fifteen minutes. But that’s it. I’m not waiting any longer than that.”
I could feel a draft of cold air creeping into my body as I walked toward the gates. I was going to keep my promise to Granddad. It’s not like I was going to stay very long or anything. I thought it would be okay to have a quick look around the place. And then I was going to go back to Ted’s before anyone had even noticed I was gone. And next time I saw my granddad, I was going to try to explain to him how I’d done what he had asked. That I’d kept my promise. And that was going to be that.
A massive old padlock hung, dead and heavy, from a bolt where the two gates joined, all caked with knobbles and flakes of rust. It took ages of pulling and twisting. Finally I loosened the padlock and dragged it toward me. It looked as though nobody had opened it for a very, very long time.
I felt around for the keyhole and wiggled Granddad’s key into it. At first it didn’t look like it was going to work. I was standing in the night with fog all around me and Granddad’s key stuck in the padlock now, and I couldn’t twist it or move it in any direction, and I couldn’t pull it out. I looked back. I could see Taxi Guy lit in a dim orange glow inside his car, reading the paper, not caring about me or anything else, as far as I could see.
I shook the gates backward and forward, and they made a heavy, low clanking noise.
“Where have you sent me? Where am I?” I shouted, and the sound of those questions went floating into the black sky. I cursed myself for being brainless enough to have gone to so much trouble, only to find myself in this empty, cold place. But what else did I expect?
I was just about to turn away, when there was a little crack. The padlock sprang open.
I stopped breathing for a few seconds, pulled the padlock off, and slid the bolt across. It took another huge amount of effort, and my hands got covered in rust, which was gross.
I pushed the gates forward, and the entrance opened like an enormous toothy mouth doing a slow yawn. Small clusters of gravel piled up at the bottom on either side. I walked through and I closed and locked the gates again, just as Granddad’s mad instructions had specified, and I shoved the key into my pocket.
It was Monday night. Ted was probably going to be up early in the morning to kick me out of bed for school. I hadn’t done any homework because of the
traumatic events of the day, so I seriously wasn’t planning to stick around for too long.
I couldn’t see much. A tiny low wreck of a cottage sat tucked away to the right, but there was no light or sign that there was anyone living there. The driveway looked as if it led to something much bigger, the way it widened and curved and stretched off into the distance.
And then out of the quiet foggy air came a rustle from the trees to the left, and I knew someone was there even before I could see them. The trees parted for a second as if somebody was pushing them to one side, and that’s because somebody was, and then the somebody was walking toward me and all I could hear was the echoey crunch of their feet stamping on the gravel.
For a while I thought I was going to fall. I wouldn’t have been that surprised if I’d lost consciousness, because in fact you can only get so nervous before you pass out. I saw shadows and I smelled the foggy smell of night there inside the gates of Blackbrick.
And I saw his gradually brightening shape coming toward me.
It was a boy. And soon he was standing, strong and tall on top of this low wall beside the trees, right in front of me with his hands on his hips and his legs wide apart, and there was a soft-looking frown on his young smooth face.
“How did you get in here?” he asked me.
“I’ve got a key to these gates. I just opened them up,” I said.
“But it’s the middle of the night. No one ever uses those gates. They’ve been locked for a long time. What are you doing here?”
I tried to keep my voice steady.
“I was only having a look around. I have permission. At least I wasn’t hiding behind a bunch of trees and giving people massive heart attacks like you were.”
“I live here. I’ve got a right to be here,” said the boy. “This is where I work.”
“Yeah, well, that still doesn’t explain what you were doing, hiding in the trees like that, here in the dark.”
“I love the dark,” he said.
I blinked a few times and looked at him very carefully then.
“Now, tell me,” he said, “who on earth are you?”
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