Back to Blackbrick

by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

  It wasn’t the time for dwelling or brooding or debriefing, though, because Dr. Sally was going to be there very soon. Granddad and I spent about forty-five more intensive minutes training his brain and brushing up. We went over some things a few times until I was confident that he was as ready as he’d ever be. Then we got him into a clean shirt and tie, and Granny Deedee parted his hair on the side, kissed him on the cheek, and told him he looked very smart. When Dr. Sally arrived, Granddad welcomed her into the house with the politeness and warmth that you’d normally reserve for a long-lost relative that you’d been dying to see.

  He was able to answer every single one of the questions she asked him. Everything we’d studied came up. What his first job had been, how he’d lost his finger, when he’d first met his wife. My granddad told Dr. Sally it was a long story, and Dr. Sally said she had time, and so then he told her all about it. Dr. Sally thought it was a lovely story. I think I even saw her wipe a tear from behind her glasses. He was able to tell us how a carrot was like a potato, even though we hadn’t even studied for that one. “They’re both root vegetables that grow in the ground. Different colors, though. Different shapes.” Dr. Sally said that was an excellent answer and Granddad put his thumbs up and smiled at me, but it was just his gentle way of teasing her. It wasn’t as if he had done anything to be particularly thrilled about. The questions were very easy for someone as clever as he was. She nodded her smiley head the whole time like she was dead impressed.

  Dr. Sally took ages filling out this form, and then she said, “Mr. Lawless, congratulations. Based on your test results, I’m happy to say that it’s still quite appropriate for you to stay here in your own home.”

  After she left, me and Granddad gave each other a high five, and Gran and Mum came over and all of us did a four-way hug.

  “Thank God for that,” Granddad said. “I don’t care for those tests very much.”

  Chapter 22

  I’M NOT that interested in going into all the details about how my brother Brian died, but basically what happened was that he leaned out of the highest window in our house to wave to me because I was playing in our garden. And he kind of wobbled and then fell, and he made this huge “Whoa” noise all the way down and I thought it was a trick, so I started laughing even though he was dead. When I moved in with my granny Deedee and my granddad Kevin, they said that we wouldn’t talk about it anymore and that we’d do our best to put upsetting thoughts right out of our heads, which was fine with me. I hated the way everyone had felt sorry for us, and how they used to talk in these holy voices whenever we were around, the way people do when they’re in a hospital or a church. My grandparents didn’t want anyone to pity me, because pity is not that helpful. I think they hoped I’d forget the whole thing and get on with my life.

  I never did forget. I never will.

  I found out much later that Granddad had done his best to save Brian after all. My Granny Deedee said it was the strangest thing, but as soon as Brian was born, my granddad all of a sudden got very concerned about heights. “He was forever going about locking the windows and hiding the keys, and your mother thought he was going mad. He spent all of Brian’s childhood warning him about windows and how dangerous it is to dangle out of them. He was assiduous, Cosmo. It got so that he’d hardly let him anywhere NEAR a window. It was as if he already knew what would happen to Brian. And then eventually, when it did happen, well, he blamed himself so very much.”

  And what happened was that Brian found an open window one day and he loved the wind in his face and being up so high and the way things are when you are looking down on the world, and he leaned out too far, like people sometimes do. He just leaned out too far.

  It’s lousy, I know, but as soon as Dr. Sally disappeared, my granddad’s memory started going seriously south again.

  I opened up the Memory Cure website. I hadn’t looked at it for a while. Suddenly the instructions looked kind of stupid. I clicked on a link at the bottom that I’d missed, and there was this paragraph that more or less admitted there are some kinds of memory loss that nobody can do that much about. I sort of wish that particular piece of information had been a little closer to the top of the pathetic website.

  It shouldn’t have been called the Memory Cure at all. It should have been called: “Try a few useless things to improve someone’s memory, and then when they don’t work, give up.” That would have been a more accurate title.

  Later that night I wandered into the kitchen and I looked around. All the Post-its were there, like old soldiers whose jobs are done but who still refuse to leave their positions.

  I have all those colored notes. I keep them in a drawer in my own room, and I have a really good lock on it that you can only open if you know this number code, and I’m the only one who knows it. Sometimes, not very often, I take them out and read them. And the one I wrote about Brian makes me feel there is another version of myself out there somewhere, trying to comfort me still.

  Just because you can’t see someone anymore doesn’t mean that they’re not part of you. There are people who are gone and dead and there are even people you have never met, and things about them are buried inside you like golden fossils. It could be a saying or an idea or a habit that you have learned from someone in your family who learned it from someone else. It could be the way you pat someone’s hand when they need to be comforted. Or it could be the dimples in your cheeks that happen when you smile.

  Maggie McGuire died in 1943 of a thing called puerperal fever. It’s something that people used to get after they had a baby in unhygienic circumstances or if they couldn’t get fairly speedy access to antibiotics. Granddad never talked about it. After Maggie had died, he had wanted to take care of baby Nora, but nobody would let a young kid bring up a baby in those days. Actually, when I think about it, they probably wouldn’t even allow that now. In those days unclaimed babies were often sent to horrible places that pretended to be laundries. And babies who went there were treated like prisoners. Kevin had been pretty sure this might be what would happen to Nora, so he begged Mrs. Kelly to keep her safe and take care of her. By then Mrs. Kelly completely loved the baby and was pretty sick of working at Blackbrick herself, so she packed her bags, and even though she didn’t have that much money at all, still she was able somehow to take herself and the baby to Boston, which at the time people reckoned was as far away as, say, Sydney is now.

  And years later my granddad married Cordelia, who is my gran, and now there’s my mum and my uncle Ted, who is actually one of the soundest guys I know, and there’s me, and well, you know, the rest is history. Everything becomes history in the end.

  Nothing turned out the way my granddad planned it, even though he was brave and clever when he was young, and his plans were usually quite well thought-out in advance.

  I googled “Nora McGuire” and found out that she had had loads of grandchildren. I e-mailed one of them, pretending I was doing a project on the history of Blackbrick Abbey for school. And now Nora’s granddaughter is a friend of mine on Facebook. She told me that Nora had been brought up in America by her legal guardian, a woman called Mary Kelly. And the reason they’d been able to travel to America, so the story goes, was that someone called George Corporamore had given them enough money to travel there and start a new life. Apparently Nora had always been a wonderful, kind, generous, and very courteous woman, much loved by everyone who knew her, which made me feel delighted and proud, not that any of it came as much of a surprise.

  Nora’s granddaughter thought it was slightly weird that my name was Cosmo, seeing as it had been her grandmother’s inexplicable middle name too. I was about to start explaining it to her when I realized how ridiculous it was all going to sound, so I stopped. “Yeah, it’s a freaky coincidence okay,” was all I said about it in the end.

  There are different kinds of stories about what Lord George Corporamore was actually like. Some said he was lousy and vain and snobbish and condescending and exploitative. Others
said that he was a good-hearted defender of the common people and fantastically decent. Hardly anybody knows the truth.

  Me and Nora’s granddaughter ended up Skyping each other a good few times. I asked her loads more questions. She said I was very thorough and that I was definitely going to ace my project.

  Granny Deedee said that the stories of those horses flying around Blackbrick were like a legend that had survived, but now there aren’t that many people around who remember if the legend was true. She remembers meeting Kevin when he was a stable boy and how handsome he was. “Were there any other handsome boys?” I asked her, and she said that before the war there had been lots and lots but their names and faces had floated away in the fog of time, and in any case she only had eyes for Kevin.

  She did say how she remembers that everyone had been amazed about how fit and fast and shiny those two remaining Blackbrick horses always seemed to be.

  It was all true. It totally did happen. The brilliant horses really were there, and Maggie McGuire was there too, and Nora was born and Maggie was a hero who would have done anything at all to protect her new baby. Maggie would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the fever. That and the lack of antibiotics.

  And sometimes I can still see Mrs. Kelly standing by the stove in the kitchen at Blackbrick Abbey, and in my mind she’s strong and kind and practical and on my side, just like she always used to be.

  Chapter 23

  AFTER THE whole Blackbrick experience, I took a bit of a break from everything, but my mum said that sooner or later I was going to have to start getting back to normal. I replied that there was no such thing as normal, and I tried to tell her that I was quite resourceful now and could probably figure out a way of taking care of my own education. She was having none of it, though. So I had to go back to school and act as if nothing had ever happened, which was a pain at first.

  As soon as I walked in the door, Mrs. Cribben was all, “Class, say hello to Cosmo. It is good to see you. Isn’t it, everyone?” Patronizing stuff like that.

  The very second she turned her back, D. J. Burke said, “Hey look, everyone, Loser Boy returns.” At lunch break I walked over to him in the yard. He stared straight at me, snapping his bubble gum the way he always used to. I stared straight back. And then I pulled him to the ground and I put my foot on his chest and pointed my toe toward his chin. I told him that my will was greater than his. I wasn’t rude or anything, but I said that I’d prefer if in future he didn’t call me that name, or any other names for that matter. I told him I wasn’t a Loser Boy. I told him that he didn’t have to believe me or anything but that as a matter of fact, I was a legend. He tried to hit me, but by then my reflexes were pretty good and I got there first.

  He had to go to the nurse for a while, not that there was anything wrong with him. He made a massive deal out of it. Nobody called me Loser Boy anymore after that.

  Very early one morning I went into Granny Deedee’s room to see if she was awake, and we got chatting. I asked her to tell me about her brother, Crispin. She said the reason she had never talked to me about him before was because I had enough sad stories of my own, but I said I was ready for it now. So she told me that he’d rescued a load of young soldiers who’d been lying in mud, dying because they’d been shot by their enemies, who were only boys as well. Crispin had been tormented when he had come home, haunted by those memories of war, and the night before he was supposed to go back after his break from it, he killed himself at the south gates. That’s why everyone hated people hanging around there. The gates had been locked up the day he died, and nobody was allowed to go through them after that.

  She said that she hadn’t cared to talk about it over the years, but I could tell it did her good, exhausting as it was to be reminded of such very sad things. I told her to stay in bed and I’d go down and bring her up some breakfast, and she said that would be very nice.

  I sliced up a cottage loaf and I did the slices of bacon very carefully and I scrambled the eggs with exactly the right amount of butter. And when she saw me coming back in with the tray, she had this questiony look on her face, and when I put the tray down on her covers, she took me by the hands and she said, “Oh my goodness.”

  She said it was perfect. All she asked for was an extra spoon of sugar in her tea, because she was feeling a little dizzy.

  She looked at me for a much longer time than people normally do, with her big unblinky eyes, and she said, “Cosmo? Cosmo?” and I said, “Yes.” And she said, “It really is you.” And I was all like, yes, of course it’s me. It’s been me the whole time. And I smiled at her, hoping the whole scenario wasn’t freaking her out too much. “Oh, deary me,” she said. “Why did I never see it before?” and I said that some things are mysterious and some things are difficult to explain.

  “Thank you for everything, Cosmo. Thank you for this lovely breakfast and for all the other lovely breakfasts. I want you to know that you’re a very special boy.”

  “Special” didn’t even get close to describing me. I’m not just special. I’m a Time Legend, that’s what I am.

  Mum and Ted brought John back from the farm. When I went down to the stables near Granddad’s house, John was waiting for me. Someone had taken good care of him after all. His hooves were in pretty good shape. As soon as he saw me, he whinnied and danced. He practically smiled at me.

  Me and John galloped again, the way we always used to. In through the trees and the fields and around the hidden corners. We leaped over barrels and old flower beds. We screeched to a halt every so often, and then we were off again. I could hear his breathing, fast and certain. I told him all about Blackbrick and Maggie and Nora and my young granddad, and it didn’t matter if he didn’t understand the whole thing fully. I could hear his hooves landing with cloppy, thuddy echoes as they grasped for a second on to the ground beneath before rising again. And I could hear someone laughing. For a second I didn’t know that it was me. I was laughing the way normal people do. The way I’ve heard other people laugh when they’re going really fast or when they’re surprising themselves by doing something they’re already very good at.

  I sat with my granddad every single day before he died as that last autumn hardened into winter. I always tried to make sure he was as comfortable as possible. I usually held his hand, or at least I patted it a few times to let him know I was there. And even though everyone thought his brain was banjaxed by then, it actually wasn’t. It was there the whole time; it’s just that other people didn’t know. My mum and Uncle Ted told me I should really try to stop hoping for any sign of recognition and not to be sad if he didn’t know me. They said that it was going to get harder and harder for me to see Granddad the way he was, considering what a bright, brilliant guy I had always known him to be, and considering how he used to be so clever and sharp and intelligent, known for living on his wits.

  But nobody knew what used to happen when it was only him and me and we were able to talk about the past.

  There had always been millions of photographs in Granny and Granddad’s house, and during those last days I gave him a load more—of Blackbrick Abbey and of the stables and the horses and the driveway and Nora and Maggie. I had to make a few calls to get some of the others, and I had to spend a few hours on the Internet and go on a couple of journeys to get them. But I definitely think it was worth it. Nora’s granddaughter sent me a couple of JPEGs of Nora when she was a grown-up. She was totally recognizable.

  Me and my granddad had exactly the same conversation a good few times.

  “Granddad,” I would say. And at first he wouldn’t say anything at all. But then I would lean closer to him, and very quietly I would say, “Kevin, it’s me. Don’t you remember?” and when I said that, he would open his eyes and a massive smile would creep across his lovely old face.

  “Ah, Cosmo. I’ve been waiting for you. I knew you’d come. I didn’t want to go without seeing you,” he would say, and I would say, “Thanks.”

  “What happened to t
he baby?” he would ask.

  I told him the baby had grown up, and she had been fine and she had had children and grandchildren. I held up her photos close to his face so that he could see for himself.

  I reminded him I’d been there when she was born, and I told him that with my own eyes I had seen her take her first gulps of air as a brand-new person, and I saw her name, Nora Cosmo, settle on her when she was a tiny, squirming, fresh newborn baby, full of a thousand possible futures. And he’d always say, “Yes, of course. I remember now. Trust you, Cosmo. Trust you for keeping me on the straight and narrow.” And when he said that, he would look as clear and bright and glittery-eyed as he had ever been.

  “I thought it was going to be you and Maggie,” I would say to him.

  “So did I,” he’d say, “but things don’t always turn out the way you plan them.”

  Too bloody right, I’d think to myself.

  I told Granddad that I still thought that Maggie dying was the biggest disaster of all, and how I still wished there had been a way that we could have done something about it, and he said yes, it was terrible, but you can repair life. Even in the middle of a tragedy, there’s still the possibility of joy. Joy always bubbles under the surface, waiting to break through. He admitted it was difficult to believe when you were in the middle of the tragedy, but he said that I should still always try as hard as I could to remember the joy. I told him I’d do my best.

  It was during one of those conversations that I realized who my great-grandfather was. I can remember exactly the moment it hit me, because at the time I was looking down at my fingers. You’re so used to your own fingers because they’re attached to you that you don’t usually think there’s anything particularly remarkable about them. But if I look at mine even now, I still notice that they are a bit pointy.