The Boy Who Sailed the Ocean in an Armchair

by Lara Williamson

  “I think it has. It’s definitely gone to Mum,” I explained. “She knew I’d get her message and reply.” I faced the ocean. “I never needed to say goodbye, no matter how much I wished I had. Our story won’t ever end with a goodbye. How can it, when you’re all around us? When you’re in the sun and the rain and when you’re in my heart and Billy’s. You see, in the end I got your message. And our message back is that we love you and we’ll never forget you.”

  In the distance a church bell tolled and Billy and I headed back across the sand. Billy did a cartwheel and I thought of Mum and I was happier than ever before. The sun came up fully and the sky was completely cloudless and it was a new chapter for us all.

  TIME: 6.45A.M.: Billy reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze. I knew it was Billy’s way of asking if everything would be okay from today onwards.

  I squeezed back, my hand tightly furled around Billy’s. And I meant “okay” with all my heart this time.

  Billy looked up at me and asked, “Is it really okay?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “It really is.”

  How did you come across the legend of the paper crane?

  I’ve always had an interest in the things we wish on and what we’d wish for. I hadn’t heard of this story before so I was fascinated when I first read about it in an article on the internet. Once, when I was little, I tried to run to the end of a rainbow where I thought I’d be granted three wishes in return for the leprechaun’s freedom. I’ll let you make up your own mind as to whether I got the wishes. Even now I make little wishes on things all the time; some come true, some are impossible, and some I think I make happen with hard work and determination. Maybe the real magic is inside each of us and we just have to find it…

  If you had one wish, what would it be?

  Maybe I’d wish for Dorothy’s ruby slippers from the movie of The Wizard of Oz or I’d help Scooby-Doo solve a mystery. Or I’d wish to find a golden ticket in a Wonka chocolate bar. Those wishes would be fun but really, what I’d wish for most of all is something Becket would wish for too: one more minute with the loved ones I’ve lost.

  What was your inspiration for Becket?

  While I was thinking of ideas for book two I kept imagining two boys in an armchair sailing towards an island. At the time I didn’t know what their story was or why I imagined an armchair but I knew they were on a journey together and it wasn’t going to be plain sailing. As time went on and I began to write things down I realized Becket and Billy had lost their mother. This was to be a story about the journey through loss and I knew it had to be in the armchair as I’d first imagined. By the end I knew Becket and his brother would go through the storm, be stronger for it, move forward in life but never forget.

  If you could sail an armchair to anywhere in the world, where would you end up?

  Home. No matter where I’ve travelled, no matter how far, there is only one place I’ve ever wanted to end up and that’s at home with my family. In my books I have named the towns Paradise and Eden because the names suggest they are places of happiness and in each case they are the character’s home, surrounded by those they love.

  Do you ever wonder what happens to your characters after the end of the book?

  Just like in The Boy Who Sailed the Ocean in an Armchair it’s hard to say goodbye. Part of you wants to hold on to the characters but part of you knows you have to let them go. Eventually I do so accepting they’re stronger at the end of the story than they were at the beginning. By the last page, I know that despite what life might throw at them in the future they’re going to be happy. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for them.

  Lara’s debut novel, A Boy Called Hope, has been shortlisted for lots of prizes, including the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and the IBW Book Award, and won the Hillingdon Secondary Book of the Year and Hounslow Junior Book Award.

  Lara was born and studied in Northern Ireland, before moving to London. To this day, she still makes wishes on dandelion clocks, stars, rainbows and fountains. Meanwhile, her family wishes she didn’t go around blowing on garden weeds, staring into the sky, running to rainbows and throwing all her money into the water.

  Follow Lara on Twitter @LaraWilliamson

  My heartfelt thanks to the following people without whose help and encouragement I couldn’t have written this book:

  Madeleine Milburn, my agent, who is dedicated, loyal and supportive always; “Sweet Baby Cheeses! You’re ace!” as Becket would say of her able assistant, Cara Lee Simpson; Anne Finnis, Rebecca Hill, Becky Walker, Sarah Stewart, Anna Howorth, Amy Dobson, Sarah Cronin, Katharine Millichope and Neil Francis at Usborne. They helped in so many ways including reading and editing my work until, like the paper cranes, it was ready to fly. I thank you all from the four chambers of my heart. Special thanks go to Tomoko Nishigaki for help with research. Melissa Roske for being the best writing buddy and making me realise that writing as slow as a snail is okay especially when the snail ends up in the book. Love and thanks to Millie, Graham, Mum and my entire family. If I ever need to sail the ocean in an armchair you’re all coming with me.

  Finally, Catherine and Billy Peden, this story is for you. We never needed to say goodbye, not really.

  Since his dad ran off with the lady from the chip shop, Dan Hope’s life has gone a bit strange, what with his sister acting mean and Mum’s new boyfriend keeping secrets. And now – even stranger – his dad has turned up as a presenter on TV.

  So Dan decides to sort out his messy family, starting with getting his dad back. But as one genius plan after another goes pear-shaped, Dan fears that his wish will never come true…until he starts to realize that your real family aren’t always the people you share your name with.

  ePub ISBN 9781409579366

  I’m Dan Hope, and deep inside my head I keep a list of things I want to come true. For example: I want my sister, Ninja Grace, to go to university at the North Pole and only come back once a year for twenty-four hours. I want to help Sherlock Holmes solve his most daring mystery yet. And if it could be a zombie mystery, all the more exciting. I want to be the first eleven-year-old to land on the moon. When I get there I want to say, “One small step for boy, one giant headache for his mother.” I want my dog to stop eating planets and throwing them upon the carpet. And finally, the biggest dream of all, I want my dad to love me.

  The last one is the most difficult to achieve, even harder than persuading my mum to let me travel approximately 238,857 miles to the moon. To be honest, I’d been getting along without him. Not that it was easy living without a dad, but I’d managed to keep my feelings squashed inside, until today. Today, everything changes.

  I’m on the sofa eating a peanut butter sandwich when it happens. Dad appears on my TV screen, right under my nose, right in my living room, where he hasn’t been for years. At first the sandwich attaches itself to the roof of my mouth. That’s what I love about peanut butter. It’s so sticky it’s a wonder they don’t put it in tubes and sell it as glue. I have to do tongue gymnastics to stop myself choking. Already this isn’t turning out like a normal Monday evening in Paradise.

  If I could, I would switch Dad off. Flick the button, say goodbye, let him dissolve into blackness. But there’s something wrong about making your dad invisible without asking his permission. As if he can read my thoughts, Dad looks up at me, holds my gaze and nods. To say this is a surprise is an understatement. I don’t mind admitting my shock soon changes into something else, a sort of stunned delight at seeing Dad back at 10 Paradise Parade where he belongs. Okay, so there is the small matter of him being a TV presenter and there being a glass screen between us that wasn’t there before. But it’s still so amazing that I smile. It is, I believe with all certainty, the smile of a boy whose dad is back in his life. Actually, it’s the smile of a boy whose teeth are glued together with peanut butter.

  When Ninja Grace wanders into the living room and glances at the TV screen, her mouth assumes a stunned-goldfish position. “Dad”, she
bubbles, “is on our TV.”

  Someone give my sixteen-year-old sister a medal.

  “What kind of fresh hell is this?” Ninja Grace says. “There should be an eleventh commandment for dads: Thou shalt not walk out on your family and then turn up four years later in a glamorous TV job. This is all kinds of wrong.”

  How can it be wrong? I blink back my confusion. Even Moses would be happy that Dad is back in our lives. Surely it’s epic. All right, it’s not exactly how we imagined welcoming him home. No fairy cakes, the rainbow-coloured hundreds and thousands bleeding into vanilla frosting, and no writing his name out in sparklers. But he’s still under our noses and we can see him every day. Must-watch TV, that’s what it is. Ninja Grace is out of her tiny mind if she doesn’t realize how brilliant this could be for us. In fact, this is the best thing that’s happened to me since Mum bought me a mossy-green skateboard with high-performance bearings.

  “Not pleased to see him then?” I ask.

  A string of saliva stretches inside Ninja Grace’s mouth. “One taxi straight to the nuthouse for Daniel Hope, if he thinks our dad being on TV is a good thing,” she says. The string snaps.

  Ninja Grace wasn’t always Ninja Grace, by the way. Once upon a time she was as normal as a sister could be. But all that changed when she turned thirteen. That’s when she turned into a word ninja. By the way, a word ninja is someone who uses words as a weapon. Whatever you say, the word ninja will hit back at you with their insult arrows. Think you’re smart? Think again, because a word ninja will wound you instantly with their cutting remarks. That is exactly what Grace Hope turned into when she became a teenager, and that is exactly why Ninja Grace is screaming at me now.

  “That man is dead to this family.”

  Word ninja fires a dagger at my back!

  “And you’d better accept it if you know what’s good for you.”

  Ninja Grace is shooting from the lip.

  But whatever the ninja says, this time it will not be enough to stop me thinking that this is brilliant. If Dad has been catapulted to fame, then his children will be famous too. The kids at school will beg for my autograph. From this day forward I’ll be a star at Our Lady of the Portal School. I can see it all now: I’ll have my own web page. I’ll go super viral. Perhaps I’ll have my own newspaper. The Son, I’ll call it. The boys will ask me to be the captain of the football team and the girls will write Mrs Dan Hope in their notebooks. What’s more, the dinner ladies will put extra helpings of chips ’n’ curry on my plate and I’ll say I couldn’t possibly eat that much and they’ll say I can because they love watching my famous dad on TV. (I think this is what Mum calls “to curry favour”.)

  To be honest, Dad always wanted to be on the telly so I guess it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise. Interviewing, dealing with the public and talking – he was good at the lot. Mind you, we didn’t think he’d ever leave his job as a journalist on the local newspaper. How wrong we were. Fast-forward four years, job and children left behind and – wham – hello, star TV man.

  It’s the leaving-your-children-behind bit that hurts the most. I was only seven when Dad walked out. The day started like any other but ended up with me sitting at the top of the stairs with Grace. She was twelve and still normal in those days. Drawers were banging in the kitchen and I remember thinking Mum must be angry. I didn’t want to eat the dinner she was cooking if she was so mad about it. It had to be cottage pie. Cottage pie always made me angry too because the mince was full of rubbery bits that bounced off my teeth. Grace said the correct name for the rubbery bits was gristle. There was this doof-doof sound and a noise like someone whistling through a blade of grass. Grace looked at me and said she didn’t really think this was about cottages or gristle. Dad was trying to calm Mum down but really he was cranking her up. Over and over again, Mum said she was very upset about The Other Woman.

  In the end I thought they were talking a foreign language because Grace said, “It’s all Greek to me.” And my bum was so numb that I knew if I didn’t move I’d never be able to straighten up or walk like I wasn’t a baboon. But Grace said I couldn’t leave, as it was getting exciting because Dad was talking about going on a whole new adventure while Mum was shouting about playing around. Grace said this was great news because it would mean fun for us all. Maybe we’d be going on a family holiday. Only then Dad was shouting about being on his own and I wasn’t sure that it sounded like the sort of laugh-a-minute holiday I wanted. Not once did he mention caravans or candyfloss. Or even us.

  I didn’t hear what Dad said next because his voice was flat and there was a thump that sounded like a big ham dropping on the kitchen table. Mum was crying and the drone of it went up and down as if she was single-handedly flying a light aircraft. Mum shouted that she was sick of his extra-curricular activities and Dad said he couldn’t take it any more and he’d had enough of her histrionics. (When I pressed her on the matter, Grace whispered that histrionics was a subject at school.)

  At that moment the kitchen door flew open and Grace slithered snake-style on her belly towards her bedroom so she wasn’t spotted by Dad. But me, I couldn’t move. Dad opened the front door and let it slam behind him. The daffodils on the wallpaper vibrated with the force.

  I returned to my bedroom, glad the whole thing was over. I vowed I’d never eat a cottage pie, speak a foreign language, study histrionics or walk like a baboon. (Well, maybe I’d walk like a baboon because that could be kind of funny.) But after that evening, things went a bit weird.

  We weren’t allowed to get chips from the local chip shop, The Frying Squad, any more. According to Grace, who had sussed out the whole thing, Dad had run off with the woman who worked there. Busty Babs was her name and Grace said luring men in with fried spuds was her game. Grace said Dad had “had his chips” and that was that. I argued that I’d had my chips from there too. Grace said my chips weren’t his chips and Dad wasn’t coming back. In fact, he was gone for ever. I shrugged, because at seven years old I thought for ever would last a week or a month.

  How wrong I was.

  For ever did mean for ever.

  On the outside I might look like any other eleven-year-old boy. But on the inside, I’m full of bright ideas. At Our Lady of the Portal School they do not recognize this amazing ability I have, which is a shame. Then again, I hide it well because that way I can continue thinking my bright ideas while my teacher, Mrs Parfitt, is boring everyone with maths. On this very day, the day after seeing Dad on the telly, and while Mrs Parfitt is attempting to get into the Guinness World Records for the largest amount of waffling one human being can do on the subject of BODMAS, I am finalizing a cunning plan. Seeing Dad on the TV was incredible but now I want more. While Mrs Parfitt babbles on about brackets, orders, division, multiplication, addition and subtraction, I think about how much I want Dad to talk to me and how I’m going to make it happen.

  “Pssst,” whispers Jo Bister. “I’ve got a new saint relic in my collection. It’s the best one ever. You’ve got to see it to believe it.”

  I shrug. “I thought the deal with saints is you don’t have to see them to believe them.”

  Jo mumbles that I think I’m so clever. Which, technically, I am. “This bit of fabric,” she says, keeping an eye on Mrs Parfitt, “swiped the feet of someone who touched the feet of someone else who kissed the feet on the statue of Saint Christina the Astonishing.”

  You cannot give an answer back to a person who thinks they have a hotline to God. You may try but you will fail. What you will do is go along with them and pretend you are as loopy as they are. This method has worked for me for many years. Ever since reception, Jo Bister and I have been friends. In those days she was interested in finger-painting the walls with snot and I was into grabbing her plaited hair and shouting “Gee-up”, pretending she was a show pony. I sort of wish she was still digging out bogeys instead of all this religious stuff. She says these relics help her to be a better person. In fact, she even brushes her teeth in hol
y water because she says it means every word that escapes her lips will be a kind one.

  By the way, that’s total rubbish. Yesterday, she said I had a spot that resembled Mount Vesuvius. Holy water didn’t make her say that. I might add that Jo still has freakishly long hair, despite me tugging on it when we were five. She says she won’t ever cut it because there is a lot of superpower in hair, just ask Samson. (Our neighbour has a dog called Samson, but I don’t think she’s talking about him because his only superpower is yapping.)

  My second friend at Our Lady of the Portal is Christopher. He’s new to the area and only joined the school at the beginning of September. When he arrived, the teacher asked him where he came from and he laughed and said the Emerald Isle. Mrs Parfitt’s eyes looked like someone had lit a match behind them, and she set a globe of the world on her desk before telling the class that the Emerald Isle was the third largest island in Europe and approximately 6.3 million people lived there. She called Christopher up to the front of the classroom and asked him to point out the Emerald Isle. Christopher said he didn’t think the Emerald Isle was on this globe because it was just the nickname for the Ireland housing estate, ten minutes’ walk from school.

  At break I sidled up to Christopher, shook his hand and told him I welcomed anyone to the school who could make Mrs Parfitt go the colour of the skin under a picked scab. Christopher looked at me as if I was a two-headed alien and walked away. That was the beginning of our friendship though, and a few days later, when Jo was telling me about her plastic glow-in-the-dark statue of Our Lady of Knock, Christopher came over and said he enjoyed playing guitar. He was also a green belt in tae kwon do and had a hamster. When Jo asked the hamster’s name, Christopher shouted, “Boo!” and Jo said a word that was anything but saintly and nearly fell backwards over the wall. Apparently, Boo was the hamster’s name. Jo admitted that Saint Francis of Assisi would have loved the hamster, even if it had a stupid name. And I told her to shut up because the name Boo was far more astonishing than the name Saint Christina the Astonishing. Christopher said he wanted to know more about Jo’s saints and asked her to go through the alphabet, naming a saint for every letter.