I couldn’t speak. My dad had invited a woman to dinner who wasn’t my mum. My dad had a girlfriend! I was just about to run upstairs and lock my bedroom door when the doorbell rang.
“That’ll be her now,” Dad said. “Please stay and eat with us, Jack. I know it’s hard for you, but I just couldn’t go on the way I was.”
So this Susie was the reason Dad had stopped drinking, and not my prayers. Or maybe God had answered my prayers, but certainly not in the way I’d meant him to! I was so mixed up about this that I missed my chance to nip out the back door and was still standing there when Dad brought Susie into the kitchen. She was very different from my mum – fair haired, like dad, instead of a brunette; smaller and quite a bit younger. She looked quite unsure of herself.
“Hi there, Jack,” she smiled nervously as Dad introduced us. “Hope you don’t mind me joining you two for tea.”
Of course I minded, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about it. I sat and pushed the food around on my plate, grunting in answer to the questions Susie asked me about school.
“Aren’t you going to have any more?” Dad asked when he and Susie had finished eating.
“No, I don’t feel too good.” Actually this was true – the smell of the chicken and roast potatoes was beginning to turn my stomach, and my arms and legs felt all achy. It must be the shock, I thought.
“Well, how about some of the dessert Susie’s made?”
Dad took away the dinner plates and set the strawberry pavlova Susie had brought on the table.
“No thanks, I really don’t feel well. I think I’ll go and lie down.”
Dad sighed, thinking I was making excuses, but Susie got up at once and felt my forehead.
“I thought you looked flushed. He’s burning up, Mike. You’d better get him up to bed.”
Startled, Dad helped me up the stairs and into bed. A few minutes later Susie came in with a thermometer, some iced water and a couple of tablets.
“39 degrees! There’ll be no school for you for the next few days,” she said, putting down the thermometer and handing me the tablets and a glass of water. “Now take these and try to get some sleep.”
I don’t remember much about the next couple of days except that Dad must have kept coming home in between jobs to take my temperature and bring me drinks. I slept a lot and had horrible dreams about Susie and Dad getting married, and me being sent off to boarding school.
On the third day, I woke up feeling hungry and thought I’d go down and get some breakfast, but my legs felt so shaky I didn’t get any further than the landing.
“Dad!” I yelled, hoping he was in.
The kitchen door opened and Susie appeared in the hallway below.
“Jack, you’re awake!” she called up. “Your dad had a big job on today and asked me to look in on you. Get back into bed and I’ll bring you some tea and toast.”
I was too weak to argue, though I didn’t like the thought of Susie alone downstairs in my mum’s kitchen – not that Mum had spent much time in the kitchen, but still. Afew minutes later Susie appeared with a tray, which she set across my knees on top of the duvet.
“You’re looking much better, but I still think you should stay in bed for a couple of days. You’ve had a nasty dose of flu. When you’ve finished this, you can show me where you keep your spare duvet covers and sheets. You can have a wash in the bathroom while I change your bed.”
It was lovely to sink back into a clean, fresh bed. Guiltily, I realised I was enjoying being looked after. It had been a long time since my bed had been changed. Because I had to do it myself, it didn’t get done very often.
“I see you like the Narnia books,” Susie said, noticing The Magician’s Nephew on my bedside table, along with the teen biography I’d started to read before I got sick.
“I’m on a waiting list at the library for the rest of them,” I told her.
“I’ve got the whole box set of them at home. I used to love them when I was a kid. I’ll bring them over later if you like. It’ll give you something to do while you’re lying in bed.”
Because she’d been so kind to me, I didn’t feel I could say no.
Chapter 6
In the end I was off school for nearly two weeks. During that time I read the other five Narnia books and more of the teen biography of CS Lewis.
The first school he went to in England after his mum died sounded like something out of Charles Dickens, with a headmaster who beat his pupils and in the end was declared insane! After this school closed down, Jack spent half a term as a boarder at Campbell College, about a mile from Little Lea, and was allowed to come home on Sundays. He would have been happy enough to stay at Campbell, but then he got sick. By the time he was better, his dad had decided to send him to another prep school in England, close to Malvern College where Warnie was a pupil. It was at this school, when he was about thirteen, that he stopped believing in God. He’d started to learn about other religions and beliefs and didn’t see why Christianity should be the only true one. He thought the world was a bit of a mess and, if God existed, he would stop things going wrong.
Too right, I thought. My world was in a mess too. As long as my prayers were being answered, I’d been sure God was real, but then Susie had popped up. OK, she was very kind and nice, but that only made things worse. With someone like her around, how would my mum and dad ever get back together? This was the thing I’d prayed for harder than anything else and God didn’t seem to be listening, though I kept on asking and seeking and knocking. Was I doing it wrong? I didn’t think I’d changed the way I prayed, but maybe I had forgotten to say the right words. Yet. . . my other prayers, about mum contacting me and dad stopping drinking, did seem to have been answered. Maybe I shouldn’t give up praying just yet. Maybe I needed to pray harder, more often. Maybe if I changed the words I used. . . Susie seemed to be the main problem at the moment so I started to pray, as often as I could, that she and Dad would break up (but that Dad would stay off drink).
As well as all this reading and praying, I spent a lot of time writing letters to Mum. I wondered if I should tell her about Susie, but decided not to. OK, it might make her jealous and bring her rushing home to try to win Dad back, but more likely, if she knew Dad had found someone else, it would put her off coming back altogether. I was quite sure if she did come home, Dad would forget all about Susie. Hadn’t he told me over and over how much he loved Mum and hadn’t he been heartbroken when she’d left? No, the important thing was to get Mum to come back, so I wrote her letter after letter telling her how sick I’d been and how much we needed her at home. I wasn’t well enough to leave the house to post these letters so I slipped them to Kate when she called in with her mum to see me one day.
“I don’t have enough stamps, but here’s money to buy some more,” I told her while Eileen was in the kitchen getting tea ready.
“There’re loads of them!” Kate gasped when she saw the stack of envelopes. “What on earth have you found to write about when you’ve been stuck in the house for so long? But no problemo, I’ll post them for you.” And she stashed them in her canvas shoulder bag before her mum could see them.
By now I was well enough to be downstairs most of the time and it was good to get back to playing games on my PlayStation. Dad was in most evenings and we watched a lot of TV together. One night it suddenly struck me that Susie hadn’t been around for a few days, yet Dad was still in a pretty cheerful mood. Could my prayers have been answered? Maybe I’d got the praying formula right again! As the days went on without Dad mentioning Susie, I became more and more certain I had. I thought of asking Dad what had happened to Susie, just to be sure, but I didn’t want him to think I was missing her or anything.
By the Friday of my second week off school I was feeling much better and was fed up lying around the house.
“Do you want to do something tomorrow?” I asked Kate on the phone after she’d got home from school.
She thought for a moment. “Could we d
o that bus tour? You know, the one where the tourists all took photos of you. It sounded fun and it might help you with your project.”
“Well, OK, but I’m not posing for anyone this time. I’ll call for you tomorrow around eleven.”
Next morning, I left the house at ten o’clock as I wanted to stop at the library to check my emails. Dad was already up and about, whistling as he fixed a dripping tap in the kitchen. Spring had arrived while I’d been stuck in the house, and crocuses and mini-daffodils were smiling from pots and flowerbeds as I walked down the street. I felt very hopeful things were going to work out OK.
It was a bit disappointing when I got to the library and saw there’d been no emails from Mum in the past two weeks. She should have got my letters by now. Maybe she didn’t have an email address at work or wasn’t allowed to send personal messages. Then again, all my other prayers seemed to have been answered, so maybe she was busy packing up and planning to surprise us all by arriving home any day now.
“Good to see you again, Jack. Are you feeling better?” Mrs Armstrong said as I stood up from the computer. When I nodded, she went on, “A couple of Narnia books came in for you while you were sick and also the DVD I told you about.”
I told her I didn’t need the Narnia books any more, but slid the Shadowlands DVD into my coat pocket and set off down the road towards Kate’s house.
We got a bus into the city centre, and found the place where the special tour buses started from. The Titanic bus was about to go, but it turned out the next CS Lewis tour wasn’t until two o’clock, so we looked around the shops for a while and had some lunch. When we arrived back at a quarter to two, the open top of the CS Lewis tour bus was already half full. I saw that the driver was the same one who’d nearly knocked me down outside Little Lea and hoped he wouldn’t recognise me.
“Ha, it’s the cute little Irish boy. I’ll have to tell everyone to get their cameras out,” he grinned, as I tried to hand him money without looking him in the face. “Only joking, mate. Put your cash away and go on upstairs. You deserve a free trip after what you went through a few weeks back – and you don’t need to pay for your girlfriend either. Only make sure you don’t tell anyone or I’ll lose my job.”
I opened my mouth to set him straight about Kate not being my girlfriend, then shut it again. He was the sort of man who’d never believe she was my aunt. But it was nice of him not to charge us anything. We climbed the stairs and found seats halfway down the bus on the right hand side. There were little headphones you could set to hear the tour commentary in your own language, so I switched mine from German to English, made sure Kate was OK and settled back to enjoy the trip.
First, the bus took us around the city centre and we saw the building in Royal Avenue where CS Lewis’s father, Albert, had worked as a solicitor, and the Linen Hall library which Albert, Jack and Warnie used to borrow books from. Heading out to the east of the city, we passed Kate’s street and waved at Dean, who was kicking a football against the boarded up windows of an empty shop. He looked totally gobsmacked to see us on the top of a bus with headphones clamped to our ears! We went past the sculpture outside the library, Dundela Villas, Ty- Isa, and St Mark’s Church.
As we approached Little Lea, the commentary told us the new housing development across the road used to be the site of a house called Bernagh, where Jack’s best friend, Arthur Greeves had lived. He and Jack had written hundreds of letters to each other during the years Jack lived in England, and Arthur had kept most of Jack’s. When Jack was 33, just after he’d come to believe in God again and accepted that Jesus was God’s Son, he’d stayed for a couple of weeks at Bernagh while he wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress, his first Christian book for adults. Knowing how long it had taken me to write the first part of my project, how could anyone write a whole book in two weeks?!
I started to wonder again about what made Jack come back to believing in God, but just then the bus suddenly speeded up. I realised the driver was steering up past Little Lea as quickly as possible, before the voice on the commentary had even finished telling us about it! There was a lot of muttering from the other passengers. Kate and I looked at each other and tried not to laugh. A few minutes later we came to a roundabout and glimpsed the red brick towers of Campbell College through tall trees. It was a really old building, set in enormous grounds – very different from my own ultra-modern-looking school. I know Mum had been keen for me to try to get into a grammar school like Campbell, and I probably could have, if I’d wanted to, but I hadn’t liked the thought of going to a different school from my mates. Maybe if I’d done what Mum wanted, she’d have been prouder of me and decided to stay with us. I tried not to think about this as the bus swung onto the dual carriageway, heading for the coast.
The headphones played music until we finally reached the village of Crawfordsburn, where CS Lewis and his wife, Joy, had spent their honeymoon. This was quite a long time after their wedding as Joy had been ill with cancer when they got married and everyone expected her to die. They’d actually had two weddings – one in a registry office after Jack had offered to marry Joy to stop her and her two sons from being sent back to America, and the other at her hospital bedside when Jack realised he loved her and wanted to bring her home to die at his house in Oxford. Only she hadn’t died then; she’d made an amazing recovery and lived for three and a half more years – the happiest years of Jack’s life, the commentary said. It suggested we should watch the film Shadowlands, which was based on the story of Jack and Joy. I took the DVD from my pocket and showed it to Kate.
“I’d like to watch it with you, but when Joy dies, I’ll probably cry,” she warned.
I was glad we’d gone on the bus tour as, apart from the few minutes near Campbell College, it had taken my mind off my own problems for a while. It also made me keen to do more work on my project. I’d taken some photos on my mobile from the top of the bus and over the next week I downloaded these and printed them out in the library. Dad was still in good form and was home every day by tea time. Susie seemed to have completely dropped off the planet. We just needed Mum there to make things perfect and I was working on that, writing her a letter every day, as well as praying hard.
The next Saturday, Dad woke me around nine o’clock.
“It’s a gorgeous day,” he said. “How would you like to go to Newcastle for a picnic? I’ve rung Kate and she’s keen to come with us.”
It had been a long time since I’d gone anywhere in the car with Dad, apart from to the supermarket. I got dressed quickly and ran downstairs to grab some breakfast while Dad loaded up the boot. We picked up Kate and then, just as we’d started heading out on the road to Newcastle, Dad turned into a side street and pulled up outside an apartment block.
“Susie’s coming too,” he explained, jumping out of the car. “She just got back from holiday last night and I thought it would be nice for us all to spend the day together before she goes back to work.”
I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach. So Dad hadn’t broken up with Susie – she’d just been on holiday.
“Oh no, didn’t Mike tell you she was coming?” Kate whispered, seeing the look on my face.
“No, he didn’t!” I muttered back as Susie got into the seat beside Dad. She was tanned and glowing. If she’d been anyone else, I’d have thought she looked very pretty.
“Great to see you up and about again, Jack,” she said, twisting round, “and I’m glad to meet you, Kate. I didn’t believe Mike at first when he said he had a 10-year-old sister!”
“11 next week!” Kate smiled back at Susie.
We turned back onto the main road. Susie wondered what had happened to the postcard she’d sent us on the second day of her holiday.
“Oh well, postcards often don’t arrive until after you’ve got back home,” she said. “My mum didn’t get hers, either. She didn’t sound too pleased about it when I phoned her last night!”
I wished we had got Susie’s postcard. At least then I’d have
known she was only on holiday. Still feeling numb, I spent most of the journey staring out the window, only speaking when one of the others asked me something. But it really was a beautiful day and as we got closer to Newcastle and caught sight of the Mourne Mountains, I couldn’t help feeling excited. One of the booklets from the library said that CS Lewis once told his brother, Warnie, that the countryside around the Mournes – the mountains, the rounded hills, the loughs and the sea – had given him the idea for what Narnia should look like. On a day like this, if you looked up from the busy road to the snowcapped mountains standing out against the blue sky, you could nearly imagine Fledge, the flying horse from The Magician’s Nephew, soaring over them.
Dad parked the car along the seafront in front of an amusement arcade. “How about a go on the dodgems?” he suggested. “I haven’t been on them since I was a kid.”
Kate and I had never tried dodgems but they looked fun, so she and I got into one car and Dad and Susie into another. After the first go we swapped seats so Kate and Susie were driving. They did what they were supposed to and tried to dodge the other cars, so for the third go Dad and I had to take over again and make sure we bumped into each other as much as possible.
We went down onto the beach for our picnic lunch and while we were eating, there was a beep from Susie’s handbag.
“A text from my sister to see if I’ve got home safely,” she told us, peering at her mobile. “Only problem is I don’t know how to text back.”
“It’s easy. Here, I’ll show you,” I said, reaching for the phone. Fifteen minutes later Susie was punching the SEND button after keying in a reply to her sister.
“I think I’ve done it!” she exclaimed.
Jack and the Wardrobe Page 5
