He held out his hand, and that’s when I could feel my skin tightening all over, and it felt like my body had suddenly become too small to contain all the things that were in me. I could feel a ridge rising all the way along my back as if I were a dog. Because he wasn’t pointing, not the way most people are able to. There was something pretty noticeable about the finger he should have been pointing with.
It was missing.
Chapter 6
“WOW,” I whispered.
He put his hand down again, and he looked at me staring at his absent finger.
“Listen here, whoever you are, I might be short a finger, but there are worse things you could be missing, when you think about it.”
His eyes were clear and wrinkle-free, and there were no red veins in them and they weren’t watery.
“Wa HA!” My voice went floating into the sky again. “Granddad, you DID it! It’s really true, and I thought it was because you were losing your marbles, but you weren’t! You’re a genius! I always knew it, and now here’s the proof! You’ve made a bloody portal! Ha! You’ve done it. And it WORKS. You gave me the key, and here I am, and here you are.
“You’re, like, a million times better than Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking. You didn’t need any flux capacitors or TARDISes or cosmic strings or gravitational laser solutions. YOU did it with this one tiny key. I always knew it, Granddad. You really are the cleverest guy I ever met. I just didn’t realize you were able to do time travel. But you a hundred percent ARE.”
By then I was jumping around, and all these things were kind of dancing in my brain, mainly about how everything was going to be fine now that I was here. I would be able to tell him a whole load of important things that he should know, like, for example, about Brian falling out the window, and the value of getting into good brain-health habits as soon as possible so he wouldn’t lose his memory when he got older. Everything was possible again. Everything was going to be grand.
Prevention is always a million percent better than cure. Everybody knows that.
“What are you talking about?” he said. “I never gave you any key, and you’re not to go around telling anyone I did. Now, it would be more in your line to stop with your nonsense talk and tell me what your name is.”
“It’s me. It’s me, Cosmo!” I said.
“I’m not prepared to listen to lies. I’d ask you please to tell me the truth.”
“I am telling it,” I said.
But he said I couldn’t possibly be, because for one thing there wasn’t anybody in the world who had a name anything like “Cosmo.”
He was backing away from me the way someone does when they’ve come face-to-face with something dangerous or bizarre or mad.
And then I could hear my voice trailing off into a thin little thread the way someone’s voice does when he’s just realized that a brilliant situation might not in fact be that brilliant after all.
He was shaking his head.
He swiped his hand through his hair.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s get this straight: I haven’t the foggiest notion who you are. But whoever you do happen to be, I am definitely not your granddad. I’m nobody’s granddad. I’m Kevin. Kevin Lawless. I’m sixteen.”
He breathed in, and the fog crept up into his nose.
Even though his voice was gentle, he definitely thought I was the greatest nutter that had ever lived. I wasn’t stupid. I could see that.
“There’s not many who would believe a story like the one you’re trying to tell me,” he said.
“I know . . . I guess . . . I mean, I suppose it would sound kind of strange if you weren’t expecting it,” I said.
“Yes. It would,” he said.
“Okay, then. Please listen.” I walked toward him, holding my arms out in front of me, but he backed away even farther then.
“Hold on, steady now,” he replied. “Keep your distance if you don’t mind.”
The whole time I couldn’t stop thinking how young he looked and how strong he was and how he had whole big decades of his life still in front of him. Years and years and years that he hadn’t even started to live.
Very few people ever get to see their grandparents like that. Not even in their imaginations.
Neither of us said anything for more or less ages. We kept staring at each other, until I whispered: “You really don’t have a clue who I am, do you?”
And just as quietly he said, “No, sir. I don’t.”
It didn’t make a difference which stupid time zone I was in. Granddad Kevin didn’t know me in either of them.
You don’t have to be recognized by every single person you’ve ever met. Wanting that would be egotistical. But there are one or two people in your life who should always know who you are. You’ll probably never know how important that is unless one of those people starts to forget you.
I sat down on the wall. I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I might have started crying a bit. He came over then and sat beside me. The wall was kind of damp, and we looked up at the stars, which were bright and twinkling even though the cold fog still moved, like the ghosts of snakes, in between the trees and around our feet.
He took a big crumpled white cloth out of his pocket and he handed it to me. I blew my nose.
“Good man, that’s it,” he said.
He sounded as if he was trying to cheer me up, the way you might if you wanted to stop a very small child from being sad or lonely or scared. I didn’t need him to feel sorry for me. I didn’t like him thinking I was the world’s most pathetic loser.
“Are you all right?” he asked, and it sounded as though he really cared.
I sniffed, and I said, “Yeah, I’m grand, don’t worry about me.”
We got to chatting. I asked him what kind of work he did in this place.
He told me that he worked in the stables. He said that he was learning to be a farrier, but that the person who was teaching him had gone off to the war, like a lot of people who used to work here, and he wasn’t sure when he was going to be back. He started explaining that farriers were people who fix and mend and mind horses’ feet, as if I didn’t already know that.
I told him that, as a matter of fact, I had a lot of equine-related skills myself, and he said, “Is that right?”
And I said that yes, it was.
And he asked me had I ever shod a horse, and I said I was practically an expert.
He asked me was I a good rider. I said I wasn’t bad.
He wondered if I knew how to attach horses to a cart, and I admitted that I didn’t. But I told him that I was very good at talking to horses and keeping them calm and getting them to trust me, and he said, “Well, that’s half the battle, no matter what you’re trying to do.”
We were quiet then for a few minutes.
I told him I’d better go home because there wasn’t much point in sticking around. There were millions of things I wanted to tell him—important advice that would make a massive difference to us all, but I couldn’t really think of a way of saying it without sounding like even more of a weirdo than he’d already taken me for. I told him I was sorry for trespassing and that I hadn’t meant to cause any trouble. He said it was nice to meet me, and I said, “Yeah, right, thanks.”
I started walking toward the gates. But I could feel my heart getting cold because I knew the bizarre chance that I was walking away from. So I stopped walking and I turned. My young granddad was still looking at me.
“Listen, maybe I could stay for a little while,” I suggested. “I mean, only for a few days. And maybe we could hang out.”
He asked me what “hang out” meant, and I told him it meant spending time together, talking and suchlike. And for a while he didn’t say anything, and I thought my chance was going to disappear, so then I did my best to think on my feet.
I said, “Is there anything that I could help you with, would you say?” It turns out that that’s quite a good question to ask someone who doesn’t trust you yet
.
“Well, you know, in actual fact, now that you say it . . . yes. Yes, there is.”
We were both shivering by then because a wind had started to blow, and it was making the trees shudder, and it was getting harder to hear each other.
“Come with me,” he said.
I followed him, and his feet were solid and strong and we ran up the driveway, and again I could hear the crunch of his footsteps. They sounded like the beating of someone’s heart.
Chapter 7
IT’S NOT as though I’d forgotten about my old grandparents and Uncle Ted, and it’s not like I wasn’t worried about how mental they were definitely going to go when they got up the next morning and nobody could find me. Fifteen minutes was well up. The enchanted taxi guy of delight with the brilliant people skills had probably gone ages ago anyway, with the money in his pocket. There was a while there when I thought I probably should’ve run back to tell him I’d gotten a bit delayed. But when you find yourself seventy years or so out of your normal time zone, you’re not necessarily thinking too straight.
Blackbrick Abbey was like a house, only much, much bigger. It sat at the end of the driveway, looking like it was more or less growing out of the ground. A shiny black door twinkled in a huge stone doorway, and there were steps leading up to it that glinted and flashed. My young granddad walked past the steps and tiptoed along a path that twisted its way around to the back. He kept looking over his shoulder, checking that I was still there. We crept through a small archway, shady and gray. Leaning from the wall, a weak flickering lamp lit the way.
“Stay close, move quickly, be quiet.”
I did stay very close and I did move quickly and I was very quiet. We went in through another door. This one was squeaky and warped. And once we were in, everything smelled of smoke and leather. I followed him down all these ramshackle corridors.
We walked and walked for ages, and it got warmer the whole time until we were in this big cave of a kitchen. There was a massive table in the middle that at least twenty people could have sat around. There were big jars on counters in rows with labels on them saying FLOUR and SUGAR and OATS and GOOSEBERRY PRESERVES and stuff like that. Tons of wooden spoons stuck out of blue-and-white stripy pots, huge saucepans hung from pegs on the wall, and a load of sacks, full of potatoes, were lined up in one corner on the black stony floor.
He dragged a couple of chairs beside a gigantic hot stove. He leaned down to a wide bucket and he picked up rocks of coal, and then with an iron bar he lifted a round disc on top of the stove and an orange glow shone out of the hole, and he threw the bumpy, fist-size lumps into it. Then he clapped his hands together. A black cloud hovered around him for a second.
There was a huge kettle that my young granddad had to lift with both hands to put on the stove. The tea he made was strong and brown, and when he took a sip, he sighed and said, “Ah, fantastic.”
Being a stable boy at Blackbrick was the first job he ever had. They’d taken him out of school when he was young so he could help take care of the horses. I told him that was the most excellent thing that could probably happen to anyone.
He said that the only reason I thought that was because I didn’t know how much work was involved, especially now that all the farriers had gone off to the war.
I pulled Ted’s black notebook out of the bag and asked my young granddad if I could take a few notes as long as it was okay with him. He said I could if I wanted, it was all the same to him.
And the whole time I started to warm up. It was mainly because of the stove and the tea. But it was also because of how I knew I was going to be able to give my old granddad a full briefing when I got back home, where he needed to be reminded about a few things, and he’d definitely pass Dr. Sally’s test and would be able to stay at home with me and my gran. All I had to do was keep my head and remember everything, and not panic and try not to think about how weird the whole situation was.
“So, you want to help me?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do.”
“Well, that’s grand, because there’s an errand that I’ve been wanting to run for quite some time, and it requires getting out of here on two horses and a cart someday soon and then coming back, without anyone knowing. Would you be interested in giving me a hand with that?”
It sounded pretty easy, so I said, “Sure, no problem at all.”
And then he was delighted, like someone who was realizing something that they hadn’t realized before. He shook my hand and kept saying, “Well, sir, that’s good news. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much indeed.”
I told him that he didn’t have to call me “sir” or anything like that. I told him that we were equal. I said I didn’t want to get anyone into trouble with this plan and that I hoped he had thought the whole thing through as carefully as possible.
According to him there was nothing to worry about. Even though what we were going to do might seem a bit illegal, in actual fact it was an extremely good deed I was getting involved in. Apparently there was a person who needed a break because the person had about a million brothers and sisters whose parents could barely afford to feed them all, and the person would be much better off here at Blackbrick Abbey, where there was food and a lot more room.
I told him it sounded as if whoever this guy was, he was in a pretty socioeconomically disadvantaged situation. I said that it sounded like a very good idea to help him out.
And Kevin said, “It’s not a him. She’s a girl, and I’m bringing her here to Blackbrick. And now that you’re prepared to assist me, there’s nothing to stop us from going tomorrow. Tomorrow after my chores are done.”
“A girl?”
“Yes, a girl. The girl. The girl I’m going to marry.”
He was only sixteen years old, which was pretty young to be talking like that, but at the time I didn’t care, because I could feel a thrill rippling through me. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he was obviously talking about my own gran, Granny Deedee. And it was exciting to think that I was going to meet her, too. I knew that as soon as I did, things were going to take a massively brilliant turn for the better. The much, much better.
My gran was the one who was always saying how there are things in life that we can’t understand. She was the one who had this theory about there being so much in this world that we have to believe, even if we can’t explain it. And I knew for sure that if I met her here, she would definitely believe me when I told her who I was, and when she did, everything was going to be a hundred percent grand.
That night Kevin showed me around my bedroom, which took about two and a half seconds, seeing as all there was in it was a bed and a chair. He picked up a limp pillow and started gently wrestling with it. He said he hoped I’d be comfortable. The chances of that looked quite slim, but still I said thanks.
I told him it had been a very confusing day. He said he’d be in the next room if I needed him but that I should try to get some sleep and maybe things would make more sense in the morning. I said nothing was probably going to make sense ever again in my whole life.
He asked me if I’d had any upsetting experiences recently, and I said, “I guess that’s what you could call them.”
He said, “I think that as soon as you have any distressing or strange thoughts, it’s always the best thing to put them right out of your head.”
He asked me to remind him what my name was again, and I said it was Cosmo. And he said, “No, honestly, what’s your real name?” and I said seriously, that really was it. He said, “All right, then. Good night. See you in the morning.”
Even though I was dog-tired, it was pretty hard to fall asleep. I don’t reckon anyone would be able to go to sleep that easily after a) they’d just found out they were a time traveler who’d b) met their granddad when he was young, and c) were then trying to sleep on an extremely uncomfortable mattress in a very cold room.
There was a crack under the door, and I could hear Kevin still loitering outside, whistling, soft an
d low. And there was a whooshing noise that was possibly his feet dragging along the flagstones. I heard these clickety footsteps too, coming quite fast, closer and closer. They stopped, and a woman’s crackly voice said, “Kevin! Goodness but this is a very late hour of the night for you to be up.” And he said, “I know. I’ve been waiting to talk to you.” And then he said, “There’s something I need to tell you about.” And Crackly said, “What could you need to be telling me that couldn’t wait till the morning?” and Kevin explained all about how he’d found this strange boy on the grounds and now the strange boy was asleep in the spare servant’s room.
There was a pause, and I held my breath because it was a bit hard to hear everything.
“And how in the name of God did he get onto the grounds?”
“He had a key. A key to the south gates.”
“Holy Saint Joseph, well, that’s certainly a surprise,” said Crackly. “I didn’t think there was a single soul who had a key to those gates anymore.”
“Neither did I,” said Kevin. “And you see, the thing is that the fellow seems a bit unhinged. He had a daft story. Didn’t seem to want to leave once he’d met me. Was in what you might call a bit of a state. I thought the best thing was to get him to calm down and put him to bed.”
“Oh dear. Didn’t you know that every stray boy you meet these days is madder than a brush? Gracious me, but will you ever learn? And you know you’re not supposed to linger around those south gates. You know how upset everyone gets. What do you think Lord Corporamore would say? And why didn’t you tell me?” she said.
“I’m telling you now, aren’t I?” he replied.
The crackly voice laughed and said, “Yes, well, I suppose there’s no arguing with that.”
He went on a bit more about me then, all about how I looked like I could do with a chance to “steady” myself, and that maybe this was my place of temporary refuge. But he didn’t say a single thing about me helping him to bring my young gran into Blackbrick.
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