And then the whole entire school seemed to be in on the news that my granddad was a proper mental case, which was getting more and more difficult to disagree with.
You’d think that having a mental granddad might make people want to be slightly nice to you once in a while, but it doesn’t work like that. D. J. Burke started to call me “Loser Boy.” It’s not like I cared what anyone thought about me—it was just that “Loser Boy” happens to be exactly the kind of name that is quite hard to get rid of, especially when D. J. Burke starts calling you it.
“Don’t give him any oxygen,” Granny Deedee said when I decided to tell her about it one night.
“Dee, that’s the most ineffective advice you can give a boy in those kinds of circumstances,” said Granddad.
I was thrilled. More proof that my granddad’s brain was still working fine.
Granddad took me by the shoulders and looked at me with a load of focus and enthusiasm, and he said, “Bring that boy to the ground with all the energy you have. Stand on his chest and point your shoe toward his chin, and tell him that your will is greater than his. Keep him on the ground like that until he agrees not to call you names anymore. That should do the trick.”
After my granddad was in bed, Gran said that I was not for a moment to consider taking that advice, and she explained that Granddad hadn’t really been himself when he’d given it to me. I said that okay, I wouldn’t, even though in my head I was thinking that it seemed like quite a good strategy. It felt like it would work much better than Granny Deedee’s metaphorical oxygen-restricting guidelines.
Not long after that, D. J. spent an entire recess shouting, “Hey, Loser Boy,” at me. He walked over and stood for about ten seconds staring very closely at my face and breathing quite loudly. Then he spat his bubble gum at me and pulled my bag off my back so that everything in it, like my compass and ruler and copies and pens, clanged and skidded and slid all over the floor of the corridor.
“Flip off,” I said as he was walking away, but I may have said it quite quietly, because I don’t think he heard.
“Cosmo, why does chaos appear to accompany you wherever you go?” asked Mrs. Cribben, my history teacher, who happened to be passing by. And I felt like telling her to flip off with herself as well. But in the end I didn’t bother.
Later in class when Mrs. Cribben asked each of us what our special skill was, I said “riding.”
The Geraghty twins both started to laugh in this identical way they have, showing off their oddly small teeth, and D. J. Burke did a mocking kind of snort until snot came out of his nose.
I didn’t see what the problem with telling the truth was, even if it did sound hilarious to the three biggest idiots in my class.
My granddad had taught me all the things he knew about horses, including how to gallop really fast on them. It’s a pretty difficult thing to do, but he always said I was a natural.
At least that’s what he used to say until he forgot my name and started asking me who I was and what I was doing in his house.
It was excellent to be the owner of a horse, even though everyone kept having a huge convulsion about it because of the expense of renting the stables, but as far as I was concerned, it was well worth it because otherwise we wouldn’t have had anywhere to keep him.
My horse’s name was John. I took him out after school every single day. I used to shout in for Granddad as soon as I got home, and then he’d put on his coat while I threw my bag at the door. And Gran would stick her head out the window when we were already on our way.
“WHEN are you going to do your HOMEwork?”
Me and Granddad would both say, “Later,” so that our voices sounded like we were one person, and then we’d walk down to the stables and Granddad would tell me that I was learning a million important things every time I went for a run with John—“Better than any homework,” is what he used to say.
Granddad would look carefully at each one of John’s feet, and he would trace his stump of an index finger around the grooves of John’s shoes and feel every single one of the little bolts to make sure they were fine and tight. If there was even the slightest thing loose or frayed or wrong, then Granddad would replace the shoe, filing down any scraggy bits, because only by doing that can you be a hundred percent sure that your horse is going to stay sound. Granddad showed me how to do it in case, he said, there might be a day when he wasn’t able to.
We’d carefully put his saddle and bridle on, and then my granddad would watch me as I jumped up. John was able to move extremely fast. He was a thousand percent better than a lot of humans I knew. For example, he never called me names or asked me nosy questions or got angry with me for being neurotic. Obviously. Because he was a horse.
Not everyone deserves to own a horse. It’s not like having a Nintendo Wii or a skateboard or anything. People with short attention spans like most of the idiots in my class wouldn’t have been able to take care of a horse in a million years. I mean, you can’t throw them in the corner when you’ve finished with them. They are a massive responsibility.
Horses’ feet are shaped like cups, and when they are galloping, the ridge of the cup connects with the ground and it expands ever so slightly to absorb the impact. So then the blood rushes to the horse’s foot, which is exactly what the horse needs when he’s running. Especially if there’s a full-size human on his back.
If you keep a horse enclosed in wet conditions, then his feet can get all soggy, and if they get like that, they will eventually become horribly sore. If you change his shoes too often, then you can put too many nail holes in the rims of his hooves and wreck them. If you ever see a horse that’s lame or limping, chances are that its owner didn’t care enough about his feet.
Just by looking at the way a horse is standing, I can immediately tell you what’s wrong and which foot needs attention and why, and I can file down parts of the rim of the hoof that have grown too much, and I can replace shoes or take off ones that are faulty.
Even though he was the expert horseman, Granddad said that I taught him a few things too. He said I was able to get horses to trust me. They never freaked out when I came near them.
He said that being worthy of trust is half the battle in life, no matter what it is that you’re trying to do.
Me and John often galloped so fast that the people at the stables took stopwatches out. They told my granddad that I should definitely think about entering some of the competitions in my age group.
But we never wanted to win any prizes. Granddad didn’t keep track of our progress or our speed or anything like that, no matter how often people kept saying that he should.
“When ambition lifts its nasty nose, joy creeps away,” is what he used to say.
“What does that mean?” I asked him.
“It means that when you’ve found something that’s worth doing for its own sake, you don’t wreck it,” he replied.
It was great when John and me were out there flying around the place. My granddad would watch us, as he leaned up against the fence, resting his chin on his arms with a smile on his gentle old face. We never knew how far we had galloped. We never knew how fast we had gone. It didn’t matter. We just did it for the sake of it.
And when we were going really fast, I talked to John the way anyone might talk to someone who cared about them. I told him some of the mean things that people said to me, which was the kind of stuff I would have told Mum if she’d happened to be around at the time. I explained to him how Sydney, Australia, was roughly 17,420 kilometers away, and about what had happened to Brian—things that were hard to talk to anyone else about. I’m not saying he understood all the details or anything, but he definitely listened to me, unlike a lot of other people I know. As we thundered along, I sometimes whispered a song to him that my mum used to sing to me when I was smaller. I don’t really know why, because it was all about seeing a baby for the first time and wanting to kiss the baby and relatively embarassing stuff like that, but I know he liked th
e sound of it. John was warm and strong and full of power. I always had this feeling, even when we were going very fast, that somehow he and my granddad were keeping me safe.
All the time we galloped around the place, Granddad would be proud and delighted-looking, with his cheeks getting lovely and red. After we’d finished, Granddad would help me hose John down and brush him. And then we’d feed him and settle him back in his stable, and me and Granddad would walk home.
I wanted it to be like that forever. The three of us hanging out together at the stables. But in the end Granddad couldn’t come with me anymore. He tried his best and everything, but just because you try your best doesn’t always mean you get superb results.
That last autumn was cold but it hardly ever rained as far as I remember, and by the time we’d finished, the light was always completely gone.
“I love the dark. I love the dark,” he’d say as we walked home together under the evening sky.
“Yeah, I know, Granddad. You keep telling me,” I’d say back.
But I understood what he meant. The dark is like a blanket, lying over the world, waiting to be pulled back so everything will be clear again.
Chapter 3
I KNOW THERE’S a recession and everything, but Australia? That’s more or less the farthest away you can get. I bet Mum that there were new markets somewhere a bit closer than that, and she even said I was probably right. But anything Mum says doesn’t count if she’s checking e-mail on her cell phone when she’s saying it. She’d been gone for ages. She’d said she’d be back in no time. I was beginning to think that “no time” was right. No time, as in never.
ACTION NUMBER 3: Make omega-3 fatty acids part of your loved one’s daily nutrition plan.
Omega-3 oils contain all of the ingredients you need to help keep the brain strong. The best source is fish—smoked salmon is a handy staple to have in the fridge. It can be used in a wide range of snacks and healthy meals.
There was an excellent special offer in the supermarket, where you could buy two whole sides of smoked salmon in taped-together packets for ten ninety-nine. I took enough money out of Gran’s bag to buy five packs, because it’s not every day you come across money-saving offers like that.
The woman at the checkout wanted to know if I was having a party. It was none of her business. I just said yes, I was.
“Well, the best of luck with it,” she said, and I said, “Yeah, right, thanks.”
When Gran opened the fridge, about three of the packets fell out onto the floor, and she went ballistic, which is something she usually never does. She said I was no better than a thief, which was a total misrepresentation of the situation. She said I needed immediately to snap out of whatever behavioral issues I was in the middle of having, because she had enough to deal with already.
I made smoked salmon pâté from a recipe I got on the Internet, with lemon juice and pepper. It took me ages. “God bless the information age,” said my granddad. He said that it was pretty much the most delicious thing he’d tasted in his whole life. Gran said that, funnily enough, she often used to make that exact same recipe many years ago, but that Granddad must have forgotten. She stood up, threw her napkin down on the chair, and walked really fast out of the room.
And then, as if there weren’t enough tension in the house already, Granddad fell down the stairs. We had to call the ambulance, and me and Granny Deedee had to go with him to the hospital. It turned out he’d broken his leg. Granny Deedee gave the doctors a whole load of private information about Granddad and his recent behavior, which I knew straightaway was a mistake.
The people in the hospital lent us a wheelchair. The sun was coming up when we eventually brought Granddad home.
The very next day this woman called Dr. Sally arrived at our house with a few other people. I was standing by the living room window. I saw them coming. They parked up on the sidewalk, which is illegal, and whispered to each other as they walked toward our front door. My gran told me they were social workers.
Dr. Sally wore a clean, smooth white shirt with small transparent plastic buttons in the shapes of flowers. The first thing she did was tell me all about her own spectacular children and how one of them was the same age as me, as if I actually cared. She smiled practically all the time. There’s no possible way that anyone could really be as permanently happy and delighted and thrilled as she seemed to be.
She kept asking these irrelevant nosy questions, like where I did my homework and how long my mother had been away, and what we did on the weekends and how many people came to visit us.
She pronounced all her words fantastically carefully, especially when she was talking to Granddad, whom she obviously mistook for some kind of an imbecile. And in fairness, Granddad wasn’t really much help in my mission to get everyone to leave us alone. By then he had more or less stopped being able to do anything.
Dr. Sally said she was going to give Granddad “a little test.”
“Who is this, Kevin? Who. Is. This?” she shouted at him, loud and slow, pointing her neat nail-polished finger at me. Granddad looked pale and vacant and said, “Thank you,” which was obviously not the right answer.
“Stop it,” I said to her. “You’re stressing him out. Leave him alone. He knows who I am. Just because he’s not telling you doesn’t mean he doesn’t know.”
She kept saying, “All right, Cosmo. It’s all right.”
And she kept saying how heartbreaking it must have been for me to have to see my granddad suffering like this. But to tell you the truth, it didn’t break my heart. It just embarrassed my brain, which is a different thing completely.
I never asked her if I could see a copy of her qualifications, though I should have. I never asked her for a search warrant, either, but I should have done that, too, considering all the prying and poking around she did. Dr. Sally sat down with Granddad and asked him a whole load of other questions, like who the president of America was and why was a carrot like a potato and what year did World War II start and what was his first ever job and how did he lose his finger.
My granddad looked down at his hand and went, “Good God! My finger! It’s missing. Assemble a search party!”
“That’s what he always says. It’s a joke,” I tried to explain, but I could see from the way she was scribbling everything down on her clipboard that she didn’t think it was funny.
A few days after that, without warning, Uncle Ted came back from San Francisco.
Gran was delighted to see him, and she said he was looking marvelous, which was definitely not true. He had a massive peeling red nose and a leather bag dangling over his shoulder. When Gran went off to make tea, Ted looked straight into my granddad’s face and he said, “Howerya, Dad?” but Granddad didn’t happen to be in the mood for a conversation, which was totally his prerogative. Ted asked me what all the Post-its were for, but I didn’t feel like explaining the whole thing to him. Eventually he said, “The signs are for Dad, aren’t they, Cosmo?” like he thought he was some kind of detective, and I said, “Yeah. Who did you think they were for?”
Ted is a scientist. The way he talked about his work, you’d get the impression that he spent his whole life splitting atoms and growing human spleens from the ears of rats and stuff. But he was very uncreative when it came to problems closer to home. Ted told me that no one ever recovers from Alzheimer’s, which is what he said my granddad had. I definitely wasn’t going to accept that. Why should you take one person’s word for it when there are approximately a thousand websites that say the complete opposite?
“Cosmo, you’re interfering with the natural order of things,” he said.
“Yes, well, what’s wrong with that? If the natural order of things is as lousy as this, then it’s my responsibility to interfere with it.”
He sighed.
“Listen, you’re going to have to adjust like the rest of us. There’s no point. You have to accept it. There’s nothing we can do to get his memory back.”
“Shut
up,” I whispered. “His memory might not be that great, but his hearing’s perfect.”
And to prove it, as soon as the doorbell went, Granddad said I’d better get it because maybe this time it was Brian come back at last. And I said, “For the last time, Granddad, it’s not Brian.”
Chapter 4
IT WAS DR. SALLY again with the gang of social workers. They all clustered around our doorstep with their fake-friendly faces. Ted said he had wanted to have a bit of a chat with them to help us decide what was best for me and Gran, and that he’d gotten this so-called fabulous idea that involved him staying in Ireland permanently and renting a house down the road. And then he said that I could move in with him. He wanted me to start packing more or less straightaway. He also said he thought that we needed to start thinking of Granddad and about how he’d probably have to be moved to a place where he would be able to get full-time care.
“Eh, hello, sorry,” I said. “In case you haven’t noticed, that’s exactly the kind of care he’s already getting. Here with me and Gran.”
Ted seemed genuinely amazed that I wasn’t treating his plan as though it was the highlight of my entire life. He said it was time I started to grow up a bit and to realize that things don’t stay the same forever, as if I didn’t already know that. I think I might have thrown an empty teacup in his direction then. I can’t exactly remember.
After that, Uncle Ted went a bit mad himself, and he started to say how one of my problems was that no one had ever taught me proper manners. He said I was being purposely difficult and extremely disrespectful, especially considering he’d rearranged his whole life for us. I told him that nobody had asked him to rearrange his stupid life.
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