The Memory Cage

by Ruth Eastham

  When I’d finished telling them, everyone just sat staring at me while Grandad’s medal dangled in my bandaged hand. Nobody said anything. The breeze ruffled the pages of the scrapbook. Grandad was gripping the sides of his folding chair and his knuckles had gone pure white.

  Victoria still had hold of the tomato on a fork. Mum was looking at me, her mouth hanging open. Leonard was shaking his head from side to side. Sophie gazed from one face to another, her food forgotten. Dad’s knife had made a buttery hole in the tartan rug.

  The waves sighed as they spread over the sand. Somewhere overhead a lone seagull shrieked.

  I heard another noise. A funny sort of breathing. A stifled sob. I saw that Dad was shaking a bit and he had tears on his face. I’d never seen him cry before. Mum went to put her arms around him and she was crying too.

  Grandad got shakily to his feet. It was hard to tell what he was thinking. How he’d taken it. Whether he’d even followed what I’d been saying.

  But I guessed he must have done because the first thing he did was to come over to me and rest a hand on my head. I felt him stroke my hair.

  I held out the scrapbook and he took it from me.

  “I loved Tommie so much,” he said quietly, but so everyone could hear.

  Grandad turned to Dad. “He made me promise to marry Freda. That part was easy. I already loved her, you see.”

  I saw Dad nod. I felt like I was watching the two of them in a play. I wondered if Leonard and Victoria and Mum felt that way too. Embarrassed and awkward and sad for them all at the same time, and caring so much about what happened next.

  Dad pointed at Grandad’s scarred hands. “You got those from trying to save Mum?” he asked. “Mildred said it was an accident with some barbed wire when you were putting up fences once. Why didn’t you ever tell me the truth?”

  “Why didn’t you ever ask?” Grandad stared at the sea a moment, but then he looked back at Dad. “It was hard to talk about, Richard,” he said. “I often wished I’d died in that fire too. Or on that filthy beach in France with Tommie.”

  “It was an accident,” said Dad quietly.

  Grandad hung his head.

  “It was,” Dad said, more loudly. “You shouldn’t blame yourself.” I heard him swallow. His voice was breaking with emotion. “Tommie’s death wasn’t your fault.”

  A look passed over Grandad’s face. Something so raw and painful and loving that it stopped my breath. “Oh, Richard … You don’t know …” His words were all choked up. “You can’t know what it means to me to hear you say that, Richard, son.”

  Dad stepped forward and Grandad was hugging him. It was weird seeing them there like that, and uncomfortable, and happy too. Mum smiled at me and I saw Victoria smile at Leonard as he cuddled Sophie in his lap. Lia beamed at me. Sophie gave Leonard a kiss, and the fairy cake she’d been licking the top off, and then unwound herself from him and came to sit with me. I felt her little arms tighten around me and her warm, sticky breath against my neck.

  Dad wiped his eyes and turned to me. “Yesterday, Alex. What happened with Sophie. You did something unbelievable. Unbelievably brave. There wouldn’t be a medal anywhere near good enough for what you did.”

  He hugged me hard and then rubbed a handkerchief across his face. “I think we’ve got to admit that most of us have been turning a blind eye to what’s been happening with Grandad. Alex has been battling by himself all this time to look after him …” He whispered something to Mum and she smiled back at him, nodding hard. “From now on we’re all going to help.”

  “We’re going to all start doing our bit!” agreed Mum. “We’re a family! From now on we’re damn well going to act like one!”

  Sophie giggled. Maybe it was the effect of too many fairy cakes. Probably it was the shock of hearing Mum swear in a public place. Anyway, as if on cue, she started these great shuddering giggles.

  Victoria took one look at Leonard and they burst into a fit of hysterics too. It was the tension, I suppose.

  Dad laughed as well and put an arm around Mum. “We’ll shove the Sunflower Care Home where the sun doesn’t shine!”

  “Where doesn’t the sun shine, Daddy?” Sophie tumbled over the sand, squawking. “Where doesn’t it shine?”

  I felt it. The relief. Like the curtain coming down at the theatre.

  I’d kept my promise.

  Despite everything. I couldn’t believe it. I was numb.

  I’d kept my promise.

  The relief was like a wave. A warm, strong wave, full in the face, knocking you backwards, making you gasp and scream and laugh and …

  … Except, as I watched them, I somehow still felt like I was detached from them all. As if I were watching people in a family that I cared for, that I felt for, but that I wasn’t properly part of.

  “Stop your racket!” said Grandad. They were all piling around him, my sisters and my mum and my dad and my brother, hugging him, and he was laughing and looking embarrassed and wiping tears away. “Steady on.”

  I wanted to cry too.

  But I couldn’t.

  I watched the boy’s kite spiral and fall and struggle to rise again.

  Mum started packing the picnic things away. “The tide’s coming in.”

  Everyone started helping, Lia leaning forward from her chair.

  I climbed the long, zigzagging steps that went up the cliff from the beach. Nobody stopped me. They must have understood I didn’t want company right then.

  At the top I sat on a concrete pillbox and stared out from the headland.

  I remembered sitting there with Grandad. The look he’d given me when he didn’t know who I was.

  It all became clear to me.

  I’d worked it out.

  It was so simple, really.

  I didn’t know who I was.

  The clouds moved fast across the sky, making shadows skim the water like boats. Waves swirled and hissed on the rocks far below me. I thought about the hundreds of wrecks on the bottom of the Channel. The smoothly moving surface with all that mangled, rusting metal hidden underneath.

  To one side, the bay curved away towards Doverham and five figures moved about on the beach.

  Somebody sat down next to me, panting. I knew straightaway who it was.

  I felt for the medal in my pocket and handed it to Grandad. He turned it over and over in his palm and didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” he whispered at last.

  We stared out across the water in the direction of France.

  Grandad stood up. He had the medal in his hand and he raised his arm and looked at the water and looked to me. I nodded.

  “This is for Tommie.”

  He pulled his arm back and I imagined him throwing the medal and I imagined it flashing in the sunlight and arcing over the water and disappearing with a silent silver splash …

  … But then Grandad closed his hand around the medal and put it in his pocket.

  “I’d like to go back there one day,” he said. “To Dunkirk. Stand on that beach again. Remember what happened.”

  He held my hand. “I thought it was better to keep my past boxed up, Alex. But I was wrong.” He held my hand tighter. I felt my sores throb. “It suffocates you if you do that. In the end it eats you alive. I’ve learnt now it’s better to face things. However hard it is. However much it hurts.”

  I stared down at the beach. Soon the water would come and wash the sand smooth and flat. I imagined the fingers of tide on the walls of Sophie’s sandcastle, making it slump and crumble.

  Grandad held up his hands towards the sea.

  “No good,” he said, shaking his head with a small smile. “No ruddy good.

  “But maybe that King Canute bloke …” He laughed. “Maybe he wasn’t so daft after all when he claimed he could stop the tide, d’you think? Maybe in reality he was trying to teach his people a thing or two.”

  Grandad fingered his beard. The bruise under his eye was almost gone. H
e looked so unhappy, but there was a determination in his voice too.

  “I’ve been thinking about things, Alex. I’ve been thinking a lot. I’ve decided that it would be for the best if … I think I should go and live at the Sunflower after all.”

  I gaped at him. At first I couldn’t speak. “But Dad said …” I stuttered. “Everyone’s going to help …”

  “I know. I know. But after what happened yesterday …”

  I couldn’t believe what Grandad was saying! After everything we’d been through.

  “It’s not far away,” Grandad went on. “We could still see lots of each other. We’ll still be a family.”

  “No!” I shook my head. “No!” But he took hold of my face between his hands, his two scarred hands. I felt the palms press hard. Fierce and sad and loving.

  “I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to one of you because of me,” he said. “You, Alex. You’re the most, the most important … If it wasn’t for you …” Grandad bit his lip. “You saved me, Alex! Do you realize that? The first time we met … The first time I felt your little hand in mine …”

  I remembered a room with cracked walls. A row of beds with bars on the ends like cages. Mum and Dad wandering between the rows. Grandad kneeling to talk to me. He’d got it all wrong! It was Grandad who’d saved me, not the other way round!

  The figures on the beach had started making letters in the sand, but far up from the tideline so whatever it was they were writing wouldn’t get washed away. We sat and watched them in silence.

  I think they might have been using the point of Mum’s umbrella, or sticks or picnic knives or something. They were all writing at the same time. Lia to one side. Even Victoria was hobbling about.

  Each letter must have been at least as tall as Dad.

  Emotion shuddered through me.

  Grandad reached out and touched my shoulder. His shadow stretched like a giant along the edge of the cliff.

  “In Bosnia …” he said. “God only knows exactly what happened to you there. I only know what they told me at the refugee camp, and what I heard you shout in your sleep.

  “But the way I see it is, the water saved you. Got you away from the guns. You had to let your brother go, or you’d have both drowned.”

  I pressed my fingers to my head. I wished the tide would come into my brain. Wash out all the stuff I didn’t want. Take all the bad stuff away. Leave my mind smooth and flat and empty and …

  I felt my teeth clench. I could hardly speak. “But I promised Nicu I’d keep him safe.”

  Grandad stared out to sea. “Freda pleaded with me to take the baby first,” he said. “I couldn’t manage them both … I promised I’d go back for her, but …”

  He squeezed the shoulder of my coat in his fist.

  “But some promises can’t be kept, Alex. However much you want to keep them.

  “Some promises just can’t be kept.”

  My eyes stung, but still no tears came.

  Grandad took the scrapbook from inside his coat and held it against his chest.

  “That’s one of my most important memories, that is. Finding you in that camp. But what about before that?”

  I tried to move away from him, but he had a tight hold on my hand again.

  “What about before that? What happened to you before that?”

  Then he says my name. The name I haven’t heard anyone say in years. The name nobody ever uses.

  “Alexandru,” he says softly. “Alexandru. Don’t you think it’s time to open your box?”

  – CHAPTER 25 –

  PANDORA’S BOX

  I reach under my bed and pull out the box. It is just where I left it.

  It is the box they gave to me when I left the camp. When Grandad, Mum and Dad came to adopt me.

  I smooth off the dust.

  A single elastic band is the only thing that keeps me from opening it.

  It has a lid that lifts off, like the lid of a coffin.

  I look inside, at the photographs, the letters, the memories of my other life.

  Photos Grandad took when we first met.

  The pictures I drew in the camp. Crayon guns and crayon blood.

  A wedding photograph.

  A cutting from a newspaper. A picture of a boy looking out through the bars of a bed.

  A photo of the four of us. My other family. Standing smiling by our house, before they came to burn it down.

  There is an envelope. I ease it open. Unfold a thin piece of paper from inside. It is headed United Nations. It is flimsy, like a dried leaf, and on it is a list of the dead.

  My family are written on it. I touch their names. Carefully, afraid the words will tear. I run my fingers over the letters spelling them out.

  My father. My mother. My brother.

  Babo. Mama. Nicu.

  And finally I can cry. I feel the tears squeeze themselves from me. I can’t stop. My chest heaves. I struggle to breathe. I feel like I am drowning. But I don’t want to stop. I cry the tears that have been bottled up inside me for too long. I cry and I cry.

  For my babo. My mama. For Nicu. For the other fathers and mothers and grandmothers and grandfathers and sisters and brothers from my village.

  I cry for that day, when the men with guns came and took away my other life.

  What’s your earliest memory?

  Mine’s with Babo, learning to swim, in the deep, cold river near our village. I’m splashing the water and I’m afraid but I’m laughing too. Laughing out loud because I know I can do it.

  Alexandru.

  Me.

  THE YUGOSLAV WARS (1991–2001)

  Yugoslavia was a country in south-east Europe, made up of six republics – Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia.

  Some of these republics wanted to be independent and a lot of fighting took place, with men, women and children caught up in the violence.

  Tens of thousands of people died, making these Europe’s deadliest conflicts since the Second World War.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The publishing team at Shrine Bell, Vertebrate Publishing: Jon Barton, Lorna Hargreaves and Camilla Barnard; for deckchairs and lemonade.

  Nathan Ryder at Ryder Design for the cover design and typesetting.

  Writers Sarah Mussi and Caroline Johnson for supplying buckets and spades.

  Anne Dewe and Polly Nolan for turning the tide.

  My agent, Caroline Walsh, for pearls of wisdom.

  Anna and Elena and Matt Dickinson, for everything else under the sun.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ruth is an award-winning British author. Her debut novel, The Memory Cage, was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and won the Inspiration Book Award. Teachers voted it best story in the UK Literacy Association Book Award, and it won and was shortlisted for many other regional prizes. The Memory Cage was also nominated for the prestigious Carnegie Medal. Her second book, The Messenger Bird won and was shortlisted for many local authority book prizes and its Enigma Code themes made it a featured book at the famous Bletchley Park.

  Ruth is a popular speaker in schools, in the UK and abroad, fascinating children with the real life mysteries and dramas behind these and her other books: Arrowhead, The Jaguar Trials and The Warrior in the Mist. Her latest children’s book, The Warrior in the Mist, will be published by Shrine Bell in September 2017.

  Ruth has lived in New Zealand, Australia and Italy and has two daughters. Find out more: www.rutheastham.com

  OTHER TITLES FROM

  RUTH EASTHAM

  The Messenger Bird

  Arrowhead

  The Jaguar Trials

  The Warrior in the Mist

  First published in 2011 by Scholastic.

  This digital edition published in 2017 by Shrine Bell, an imprint of Vertebrate Publishing.

  Shrine Bell

  Crescent House, 228 Psalter Lane, Sheffield S11 8UT UK.

  www.shrinebell.com

&
nbsp; Copyright © Ruth Eastham 2011.

  Ruth Eastham has asserted her rights under the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  Cover illustration, design and typesetting by

  Nathan Ryder – ryderdesign@gmail.com

  Author photograph © Ruth Eastham 2017

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, events and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  978–1–911342–57–1 (ebook)

  978–1–911342–56–4 (Paperback)

  All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means – graphic, electronic, or mechanised, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems – without the written permission of the publisher.