“Thanks, Cordelia. Thanks for the advice. I have to go now.” She looked very small and actually a little bit pretty. “I hope you have a nice life,” I said.
“I hope you do too,” she said back, and I walked away, closing the door quite gently behind me.
Chapter 19
WHEN YOU’VE decided to leave a place, you get a new energy and it swirls around you like a force field and affects everything. But I didn’t know if there was anything I could do to get out. I went down to the south gates and I shook them just as I had done before. A strange, faint smell of something urgent and hopeless lurked in the air. And I really did think that I was always going to be the ghost of the future, stuck in an endless routine in Blackbrick.
But sometimes you get a gift just when you need it most, and the person who brings it is often the person you least expect it to be.
It was right after that despairing session at the gates, and when I was walking back up the south driveway, kicking bits of gravel here and there, that I saw someone running toward me. I hoped it was Maggie, come to tell me all the things she wanted to say, like that she had heard that I was trying to leave and to beg me: “Cosmo, don’t go, my life doesn’t make sense without you, etc.” But as you know, the people who run toward you at Blackbrick are often not the people you want them to be, and this time it was Cordelia.
She was holding something. The thing she was holding was small and silver and bent and dented. She handed it to me. She was out of breath and she put her hands on her knees and panted there for a little while. “Listen,” she said, “just listen. This is the key—the one to the south gates that you need.” I obviously already knew that. She told me that she had stolen it from her father. If he ever found out, she was going to be in serious trouble.
“You can get out whenever you like now,” she said.
I guess I should have felt happy, but I didn’t know what I felt anymore. Lots of things. Tired, mainly.
She said I shouldn’t waste too much time. There wasn’t much point in waiting around, especially now that I had everything I needed. She was sorry about the cruel things she’d thought about Maggie. She said that I should go and visit Maggie to say good-bye because it’s important to say good-bye to your friends when you’re leaving somewhere. So that’s what I did.
“Hi, guys,” I said, smiling. I tried my best to be really cheerful, but Maggie must have sensed something in me, because immediately she asked me what was wrong.
“I’m leaving,” I said. She stood in front of me with baby Nora squashed up all warm and tight in her arms.
I brushed a couple of little strands of hair away from Maggie’s face again then, and I tried to tuck some of it behind her ears, so that I was nearly holding her face with both my hands and looking at her. I touched the bridge of Nora’s very small nose. The baby sighed her own shuddery little sigh, but she didn’t open her eyes or anything.
Gorgeous. That’s what she was. That’s what they both were.
I didn’t tell them, even though I wanted to. I wanted to say, “Maggie, you are beautiful and you are strong and you are great, and you can do anything you want in your life.” There was a funny old camera in Mrs. Kelly’s room with a zigzag accordion telescope instead of a zoom lens. I asked Maggie if it was okay if I took a photo of the two of them. Maggie stared straight into the camera all serious, not even trying to smile, with Nora’s little velvet head snuggled up close. Taking the camera with me would have been stealing, so I put it back on the shelf, wishing that I could have done something a bit more effective to hang on to the moment. At the last minute I asked her if there was a chance she and Kevin and the baby would come with me.
“Cosmo,” she said, “I’d love to. It’s just . . .” She looked down at the sleeping Nora, and I guess she didn’t need to explain. The thing is that people who’ve recently had babies have different priorities than boys do. And it really doesn’t matter whether they are boys from the past, boys from the present, or boys from the future.
The very last thing I ever said to Maggie was that I’d definitely see her again.
Which is lousy when you think about it.
Because I never did.
Kevin couldn’t believe it was Cordelia who’d given me the key. I said I was definitely leaving, and he said he guessed he’d known that this day would come again sooner or later. I asked if he’d go with me to the gates. “Sure, of course I will,” he said, and we jogged down the driveway as if it was something we had done together every day for our whole lives. He said he was sorry about how cross he’d been with me about Maggie and the baby. He told me he knew none of it was my fault and that I had been a great help and that I’d never been in the way and that the only reason he’d said I had been was because he was angry. He said he didn’t think Maggie was his girl anymore, and I said he should try not to worry about it too much.
He asked me what I was planning to do. We slowed down when we got to the end near the old south gate lodge.
“Who knows what the future holds?” I said, like I was some kind of walking cliché. I told him I was pretty confused, that everything felt completely random and I knew I needed to get out but I wasn’t sure where I was going to go. I told him I was lost and there were a lot of things I hadn’t a clue about.
I wanted to tell him about everything he meant to me, and I wanted him to put his arm around me and share his cleverness with me and make everything better. But he was still only a kid, and there are times when you want people to do things that they can’t actually do.
I told him I had some advice for him, and I asked him to listen very carefully because I was only going to say it once. I said that he should keep exercising and do crosswords and keep reading books and have plenty of friends. Write everything down. And think about his past and all the important moments in his life and good things that he did and the exciting things that happened. And have a positive mental attitude and don’t get distressed or anxious if he says something that other people don’t understand or believe.
Then I started listing all the dates and times of the lousy things in the world that I could remember. I told him when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers; when bombs killed people in London; when the Asian tsunami made all those people drown, and the Burmese cyclone, and the Chinese earthquake, and the property crash. I tried to remember all the dates and times as accurately as I could. I got the feeling that I was leaving a lot of the world out. But under the circumstances, it was the best I could come up with.
He was full of respect and silence.
I kept the rest as short as I could. I left out a lot of details, because time was running out.
“There’s a boy in the future who’s going to be your grandson. He falls out of a window on his tenth birthday. His name is Brian. He’s not supposed to. It’s a terrible accident that happens. And he’s only young, and he is supposed to have loads more years ahead of him just like all of us should, and he’s great and clever and funny and he has long fingers, and whenever he reads a book, he always hums.”
I didn’t know if any of this was making any sense to him. It probably wasn’t, but I kept going.
“Whatever you do in your life, Kevin, please don’t let it happen. It’s your job now. You’ve got to find a way to save him. Remember: Brian is his name. Don’t let him fall out the window. It’s the only thing I need you to do for me.”
He said he wouldn’t forget.
He promised.
And I got this feeling that soon there might be no more battles to fight and no more sad things to feel.
“Look, I know that sometimes you’ll think about me and doubt that I ever came here. I’ve doubted it a few times myself. But whenever you start thinking that, I want you to remind yourself that it was true. It is true. It will always be true. And I want you to know how great I think you are, and how sound you have always been and how much I will always remember you. In a million different ways.”
I told him that we need to hold
on to each other at the times when it matters. It’s the way of things. I said that being together, I mean with your family, the people who love you, well, it’s very important, and I said how we sometimes have to fight very hard to stay with those people, even if there’s a price to pay for it. The price is worth it, I told him, whatever you think at the time.
I thought about my list of crucial people: my mum and Granddad Kevin and Granny Deedee and Uncle Ted and Brian. And young Kevin and baby Nora. And Maggie.
“Yes,” he said, “but sometimes letting go is important too. And we have to learn to do that as well. We have to learn to do it without allowing it to destroy us.”
And I think we both kind of knew the hard lessons we’d been trying to teach each other.
“I never got a chance to say this to you before, but you’re a total legend,” I said. And he said, “A legend? I always thought that a legend is something that didn’t happen, something that’s not real.” And I said, “Well, where I come from, a legend is someone brilliant and fantastic and sound.”
“In that case, then, I think you are a total legend too,” he said.
“Don’t forget me, Kevin,” I said to him then. “Please don’t forget me.”
“Sure, how could I possibly forget? What kind of person would I be if I forgot you?”
“Kevin, please, I need you to promise.”
He said he’d do his best.
And I know now that he did do his best. He really did.
I walked over toward the gates, and for some reason I felt this pain deep and dark inside my chest, and I felt hot and cold at the same time and everything was tight and sharp.
I dug into my pocket for the key and I unlocked the padlock.
He said he still couldn’t believe how it was Cordelia who had gone to the trouble of stealing the key back from her dad just for me, and I said that maybe she was okay after all and we had probably been a bit hard on her, and I suggested to him that it might be worth giving her a chance.
“Are you really from the future?” he asked, and I told him that yes, I really was, and for the first time it looked like he actually believed me. Something strong and true had crystallized inside me. I think maybe he saw it too.
“This belongs to you,” I said then, holding the key out to him.
“What do you want me to do with it?” he asked.
“I’d like you to keep it until you’re a very old man, and then one day, in the far distant future, I’d like you to give it to me.”
I knew he was going to protect it and I knew how careful with it he was going to be.
And then I watched myself cross over the threshold through those gates as if I wasn’t even in my own body.
And I could hear this massive clanking bang behind me. It was the gates being shut very loudly. And I tried to look back in through the bars, but everything seemed to disappear and there was all this fog and it was floating around and swirling. Kevin’s voice still echoed through the air for a while—saying things about how he was never going to forget.
Chapter 20
I STOOD outside the south gates for quite a while, waiting for something big and possibly fatal to happen. But everything was still. The old noises of Blackbrick trickled away. It was pretty cold, as though all of a sudden it were winter again. And then I realized that I could smell things like rubber and chewing gum and plastic and gasoline—hints and clues like that, wafting through the air. Things I hadn’t smelled for what felt like a very long time. I could see bands of blue light in the sky too, a different kind of light from the threads of dawn and dusk that I was used to seeing at Blackbrick.
Everything is different in the present. It doesn’t only smell different. It sounds different. There’s a constant buzz humming away in the background like a machine. And when you open your mouth and taste the air, which you might not think would taste of anything, it actually does have a different flavor. And you can feel something on your skin—the wind of now has a different texture from the wind of then. Even the dark is different. There’s a kind of blue light in the present’s dark that you don’t see in the past. The light of the past is kind of yellowy gold.
It takes a good while for your body to adjust too. When you stand up after traveling back to the present, you immediately fall down again and it takes a few tries before you can walk straight.
I had to crumple up my eyes just to focus on anything at all. And when I did, I could make out the dim light of a car glowing like an alien in the distance. There was a newspaper spread out on the dashboard, and it took me a minute or two to realize what exactly I was looking at.
It was money-pocketing Taxi Guy, with the brilliant people skills.
“Wow,” I said, stumbling up to the door and seeing his big elbow leaning on the open window, “You waited. You totally waited for me.”
“Yes, well,” he said, folding his paper and not looking one tiny bit amazed or surprised to see me, “I did say I would.”
The time I’d spent in Blackbrick had been like the closing and opening of an eyelid. It was the exact same time I’d left—the autumn morning of all that time ago, very early.
“Wey hey!” I said, all happy, getting into the taxi. “It’s not too late. Nothing’s too late.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
It wasn’t any of his business. I told him I hadn’t been looking for anything. That I’d just been checking something out. I wasn’t even that interested in talking to him, because all I could think about then was that I was going to go home. And I was delighted with myself because I was pretty sure I’d fixed everything. Brian was definitely going to be there, because my granddad Kevin had promised that he wasn’t going to let him fall out the window, and I knew he wasn’t going to let me down, especially considering how much advance warning he’d gotten. Plus now I had a load of information for Granddad that would help him pass the memory test. Taxi Guy’s eyes were looking at me in the rearview mirror, but I didn’t care. All I kept saying to myself was, “Sorted, everything’s sorted.”
I was thinking that maybe I wasn’t a loser anymore. I was thinking that maybe I really was a legend.
The taxi man was a pretty sound guy after all. I told him that my brother had been dead for a while, but that I thought I’d reversed the whole thing and everything was going to be okay, and he said, “Buddy, it’s a nice thought all right; it would be great if things worked like that, but I don’t think they do.” And the whole time I kept thinking that he wasn’t a Time Lord like me. It wasn’t his fault or anything. There were a million things I knew about that nobody else was ever going to understand. I wasn’t going to be rude and tell him, so all I did was give him directions to my grandparents’ house.
When I got in, I found Granny Deedee lying on the sofa with a scratchy-looking blanket over her. I shook her to wake her up, and slowly she opened her eyes.
“Gran, Gran?”
“Oh, hello, darling. What are you doing back here? Is Ted with you?”
“Gran, I’ll explain all that in a minute. I need you to tell me where Brian is.”
“Oh dear, Cosmo, do we have to go through all this again?” she said. It definitely wasn’t a good sign.
She sat up straight and put out her arms to me as if she wanted to hug me, but I stayed standing with my hands by my sides. I didn’t want anyone hugging me, not even Granny Deedee. I only wanted someone to answer my questions.
“Darling, you know that Brian is in everything we do, and he’s in the trees and he smiles at us from another place, and that’s what’s going to have to keep comforting us.”
And I said, “Gran. Tell me, will you? Is he still dead?”
I kept asking her that same question over and over again until she answered it. Until she said that yes, yes, of course he was.
“I know it doesn’t get any easier, my love. But why are you acting like this? Don’t you remember?”
“Of course I remember. Seriously, who does that? I mean, he wa
sn’t a baby or anything. Who falls out of a stupid window? What kind of a moron was he to do something as slow as that?”
My voice was wobbly and I was crying again.
“Hush, Cosmo, there, there. I know. It always seemed so pointless and random to me, too. But we have to learn to live with it. We really do. Otherwise we’re all going to lose our minds and our sense of reason, and there’s no point in us doing that. It wouldn’t be very practical.”
There’s one thing I can say about my gran: she’s always been full of common sense.
But everything felt too late all of a sudden, and something cruel and hard and angry was rising from somewhere very deep and very furious inside me. All I could think of was how I’d gone to this huge amount of trouble. I’d spent practically a whole stupid year in my granddad’s childhood, for God’s sake, and I’d done a load of things for him. And I’d only asked him to do one thing for me. One measly thing, and he couldn’t even do that.
I ran to my granddad’s room. He was lying in his bed in exactly the same position I’d left him the very last time I’d talked to him, my poor old granddad, all slumped and heavy-looking. I tried my best. I really did. I tried to see the boy in him. The boy I loved so much. But I couldn’t. All I could see was someone who had made a promise to me, with his own voice. A promise that he’d totally broken, as far as I was concerned.
“Granddad Kevin. It’s me.”
He opened his eyes and gave me the foggy look.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Cosmo, for God’s sake, you stupid retard. I’m Cosmo. Cosmo. COSMO. Does that name mean nothing to you? Does this face not ring some tiny bell inside your stupid brain? Don’t you know who I am?”
“Oh no. Have I forgotten something?” he asked.
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