Back to Blackbrick

by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

  “Yes, as a matter of fact you have. You were supposed to save Brian. You were supposed to stop him from falling out a window.”

  “Brian? Who’s Brian?”

  “He was your GRANDSON, you MORON. I told you. I TOLD you. It’s the last thing I said when I left Blackbrick. But noooo. Would you BOTHER doing anything about it? He’s still dead. Brian’s still dead.”

  Granddad looked at me then. He held his hands up to his mouth like someone who had forgotten something really dreadful and then remembered.

  “Don’t you remember, you old nutter? You! You were the one with the chance to make everything okay. Nobody usually gets a chance like that, but you did, because I gave it to you. And you didn’t take it. You wasted it, Kevin. And now everything is wasted and ruined and broken, and it’s all your fault.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “Yes, well, sorry is no good. I guess you’ll have to live with that for the rest of your STUPID old LIFE.”

  I didn’t really know why I was talking like that to my lovely granddad. I was already starting to feel like a stupid retard myself. But once you’ve done something, you can’t undo it. The past is frozen.

  And then Granny Deedee was standing in the doorway, and she came into the room and she stood between me and him and she started to speak.

  “Cosmo? What on earth are you doing? Get away from him. Stop it! How can you turn on him like this when you are the one whom he always adored? He would never have a word said against you, and you two have always been the best of friends. What’s gotten into you, Cosmo? Shame on you.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “No, I certainly do not. You, young man, are going to have to stop punishing everyone for something that no one can do anything about.”

  I could tell she was raging with me, not that I blame her or anything.

  “I’ve put up with your selfishness and your tantrums, but this . . . this is simply not acceptable. It doesn’t matter how much grief you feel. You’re not the only person in the world. I’m losing him too, you know. Day by day he gets further and further away from me as well, into that dark place he’s slipping into, and there’s nothing I can do. And you come here and you shout at him and you make him so desperately upset when you know we’ve got to try to make this time as peaceful and calm and gentle as he deserves it to be.”

  She was totally right, of course. But I couldn’t get out of the rage I was in. It seemed to be a bottomless pit there for a while. I started shouting at her then:

  “He doesn’t remember anything, does he? He’s never going to remember anything. All these people he’s supposed to love, he’s forgotten us, hasn’t he? And that’s basically that, isn’t it?”

  I went over to the picture table and held up the photos one by one. And for each photo I shouted a name. Mum! Ted! Brian! Granny Deedee! Me! Me! Me! Me! And I just said “Me” over and over again, which was pretty self-centered, I’ll admit. With my arm I swept all the photos off the table, and they clattered and slid and smashed across the floor. And then there was only one picture left. Only one picture that did not fall. It was old and black-and-white and it was of Maggie and baby Nora. Maggie was looking straight ahead, all serious, not even trying to smile, and the baby was snuggled in her arms with her little velvet head peeping out.

  I took the photo in my hands and looked down at it. It was still basically unbelievable how good-looking she was. Granddad reached over and he took the photo and he said, “Maggie, oh, Maggie, why did I bring you to Blackbrick? If only you’d stayed away, then you would have been all right.”

  I could feel the blood all sucking out of my heart and draining away into my feet.

  “What? Granddad, what are you talking about? What happened to her?”

  But Granddad went back to saying nothing again and there was no point asking him any more questions.

  “I’m sorry, everyone,” I said under my breath. And I was. I really was.

  Granny Deedee was in the kitchen by then, trying to get through to Ted, who never answers his phone. I ran past her, straight out to the shed, and got my old bike, which was quite rusty but it worked okay, and I cycled that morning all the way back to the gates of Blackbrick. I was going back there and I was going to find everyone again, and I was going to make sure nothing bad happened to Maggie.

  I cycled really fast. I could see a few faces looking nervously at me from cars and on sidewalks, but I never slowed down and I never stopped. It took a while, but I knew the way. The gates were locked and tied. I lifted a jagged rock from the ground, and I started to whack the padlock as if it were some living thing that I was trying to kill. Again and again I smashed the rock down on the lock with massive force, minding my fingers. Eventually it started to bend and dent and break, and then it fell, with this big, dead thump. I opened the gates and I was back. Back in Blackbrick.

  I ran up the brown gravelly driveway until I got to the end, but Blackbrick was ruined. Everything was. The windows were broken and boarded up. The big door that had twinkled and glistened at me was gone. There was an empty space where that door used to be. I walked inside, and the hall’s old floors were dusty and cracked. I saw the table where the silver tray had always been, but there was nothing there now.

  I don’t really know why, but I tried to fix a few things. The handle of the kitchen door was on the floor, with a black steel rod sticking out the back of it. I picked it up and put it back in the hole where it belonged. But it slipped out again and rumbled around, echoing in the empty corridor.

  And then I walked up the stairs, all sixty-four of them, even though they were leaning over and creaky and probably quite dangerous.

  Blackbrick’s skeleton was still there, but its soul had definitely gone. There wasn’t any point in hanging around. I did go to the stables, just for a second or two. I’m not stupid; I knew the horses weren’t going to be there or anything. I didn’t feel anything. Their spirits were gone.

  There was nothing left at all.

  I ran all the way down the avenue again, past the gate lodge and through the south gates, pulling them closed behind me as tight as I could. By then my legs were very tired and the thought of cycling back to my life felt a bit exhausting. So I lay down and rested my face on the cold ground, and even though it was very uncomfortable, I fell asleep.

  Chapter 21

  I DON’T really know how long I was there for, but the next thing I could feel was someone’s hand on my shoulder.

  “Get off me,” I said.

  “Okay. Sorry, Cosmo,” said a voice. “Cosmo, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry about everything and I’m here to ask you if you’ll come back with me. We can go back to Gran and Granddad’s if you like.”

  And then I repeated Maggie’s and Kevin’s and baby Nora’s names over and over again, but afterward when I thought about it, I guess he couldn’t possibly have known who on earth I was talking about.

  It was Uncle Ted. I stood up. Everything felt like it had come to an end and there was something dead somewhere inside me that was making me shiver. He kept on saying how worried he’d been. There was a car waiting, and Ted helped to put my bike in the trunk, and then we went back to my granddad’s house.

  I sat in the back and kept turning around and looking out the window, knowing that there could never be any more going back, even though I kept wishing that there could.

  On the way home Ted said a few things to me, and he didn’t sound like the self-obsessed person I’d once thought he was. It was even quite good to see him. I told him it was me who’d stolen his bag, but he was totally fine about it.

  I was very tired when we got back, so I fell straight asleep. When I woke up again, I looked around. I was in my own room at Gran and Granddad’s. I knew because my lava lamp was throwing its wobbly gentle light around. I was sleeping in my comfortable wide bed and I was covered by my huge white duvet and there were tons of green pillows thrown around the place.

  I threw the duvet off. I sli
d a hand under one of the pillows at the top of the bed and I found my pj’s. I wriggled into them and squirmed around there in my old bed for a while like I used to do when I was a kid. The room was all bright and warm and clean. It smelled of lavender.

  The next time I woke, I could hear someone singing an old song all about the first time seeing a baby and wanting to hold the baby and keep the baby safe and stuff. I had dreamed of her so often, but whenever I’d opened my eyes before, she’d never been there. This time I wasn’t dreaming. Though for a moment, even looking straight at her, I still thought I might have been.

  She looked great. She might still have been suffering from sadness, but if she was, it didn’t show that much on the outside anymore.

  “Mum . . . Mum . . . Mum . . . Mum . . . Mum.” I didn’t care how pathetic I sounded saying her name over and over again like that. Like her name was a tune that I knew very well and couldn’t stop humming. She wrapped her arms around me and she kept on telling me that everything was all right.

  “Mum, how long have you been here?”

  She told me she’d just arrived.

  “And how did you know? How did you know that this was the day to come back?”

  She said she didn’t know. She said she’d just been ready to come home to me.

  “Why did you leave me in the first place?” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Why did you have to go so far away?”

  She said that when Granddad had started to talk as if Brian were still alive, it had begun to torment her. She said she’d had to get away because she’d been afraid she was going to go crazy. And to think, all this time she’d been telling people it was because the market had dried up.

  But anyway she was back now. She’d come back for one reason, and the reason was me. She said she really must have been crazy to leave me, and how she didn’t know what she’d been thinking and how she couldn’t bear to lose me, too. It was pretty nice to hear her say those things.

  I thought of Brian then and all the great things about him and about how much I wished he wasn’t dead. I turned over and pressed my face into the pillow. I could hear myself making this strange long small slow sound. She kept her hand on my head.

  “I know, sweetheart, I know. I’ve been missing him so much. I just didn’t realize how much you were missing him too. I thought it would be easier somehow if you tried to forget about it.”

  I told my mum that there’s no such thing as forgetting. I told her all the things I remembered about Brian. His long fingers. The dimples in his cheeks that happened when he smiled. The way he used to hum when he was reading books.

  And my mum smiled too, and a couple of times we even laughed for a bit. And then we stopped smiling and laughing for another while.

  “Granddad was supposed to save him. He was going to do something to save him.”

  “Cosmo, love. You can’t turn back the clock. I’ve finally accepted that, and now you have to try to accept it too.”

  But even though I knew that, still I felt like telling my mum that she was wrong. I felt like saying there is going back. I felt like explaining to her that I’d been back, for God’s sake. How I thought I’d gone back for a reason. How I’d thought I was going to be able to do something about what had happened.

  I’ve done a lot of research on time travel since then, but even though I’ve studied it in quite a lot of detail, I still can’t really explain what happened to me. There is a physicist in Hungary who reckons that wormholes are bigger than Einstein originally suggested, and that it’s not impossible for a whole human to get caught in one, and so maybe that’s what happened. And there’s this cosmologist in Geneva who’s been able to get subatomic particles to travel faster than light, and that means basically that time travel is possible, at least in theory. But I don’t know that for sure. I guess I never will.

  I’m not a moron. I know that most people don’t believe time warps are real or anything. I’m fully aware that mostly they’re a trick your mind plays on you when you really want things to have turned out differently than they actually have. I know that. Nobody has to tell me that.

  So anyway, I told Mum how I’d shouted at Granddad and been really lousy and mean to him and how Granddad had held his hand up to his mouth and how his chin had trembled and how it was my fault for making him frightened and sad. And my mum said it was all right, everyone understood, and sometimes people do things and they can’t help it.

  But still for a good while afterward I often played the moment over in my head—that moment when I yelled at my granddad. I spent a good bit of time trying to change it in my head. I have invented this whole new memory, and in it, instead of being horrible, I’m all kind and nice. It doesn’t make me feel that much better about it, though. The very second something is done, that’s it. There is no taking it back, no matter how much you wish there was.

  I tried to explain all this to Mum, and it was a bit confusing and I got all mixed-up and she kept on saying, “Shh, shh,” and taking care of me and telling me that it was okay. And for the first time in a very long time, I didn’t feel like I had to take care of anyone or rescue anyone or find anyone or hide anyone or feed anyone or comfort anyone. Which was a bit of a relief, to be honest.

  After we’d all had a bit more of a rest, I sat at my granddad’s old feet and I put my cheek against his knee. He patted my head gently and said, “There, there.”

  “I love you, Granddad,” I said to him, and he said, “I know. I know you do.”

  “I’m sorry I shouted at you.”

  “I don’t remember you shouting at me,” he said.

  And then Mum was hovering and talking about having to have lunch out of the way early because Dr. Sally had just called to say she was on her way over. It was kind of sneaky of Dr. Sally. She wasn’t supposed to be coming back until the end of the week.

  Drat. Granddad and me were sitting there doing nothing when we should have both been studying for the test, and now there was hardly any time.

  I took out my notebook, and the two of us made a start.

  I told Granddad the whole story of his childhood.

  “Do you know what your first job was, Granddad?”

  “No,” he said, and then I said, “You were a stable boy.”

  I explained how brilliant he had been with the horses. I said how Somerville and Ross were probably the best cared for horses basically on the planet.

  “Do you remember now?”

  “Ah yes, a stable boy, of course. That’s what I was. The best stable boy in the country.”

  “Yes, you were. No doubt in my mind about that,” I said.

  “And we smuggled Maggie into Blackbrick. Do you remember?” Granddad said.

  “Well, technically it was me who did most of the work getting her in,” I replied.

  “Oh yes, it was you. Indeed it was, but I was the one who told you what to say.”

  He pointed at me with his old brown hands and his half a finger.

  “By the way, how did you lose that finger?” I asked him, hoping to hear our joke.

  “Isn’t it a common accident for a stable boy to have?”

  And his old arms mimed the landing of an invisible hammer on his hand. He explained that one little slip into a daydream when you’re shoeing your horse, and you’ll be lucky to have a single finger left.

  “How do you hitch a horse to a cart?” I asked him, and he reeled off the list of instructions as if he actually were Google.

  I asked him how he had learned to read and write, and he said he couldn’t quite remember, but that it was something he was always going to have gotten around to, one way or another, despite the obstacles he had faced when he had been young.

  We had a pretty good laugh that day. I showed him the drawing of Blackbrick that I’d done at the front of Ted’s notebook. He traced his fingers around the shape of it as if he was touching something very precious. He said it was a perfect likeness.

  “How
many steps from the kitchen to the study?”

  “Sixty-four,” he said, without even having to think about it.

  “Where was Nora born?”

  “Nora? Ah, Nora. She was born in the gate lodge.”

  Granny Deedee came back through the door with tea and biscuits. The steam from the teapot rose in front of her face, and she said, “Are you two still talking about Blackbrick?”

  She put the tray down on the table.

  “Blackbrick was where your grandfather and I first met,” she said then.

  I definitely did not know that, I told her, suddenly feeling confused again.

  “Blackbrick was my family home.”

  “Sorry, Gran?” I said. I didn’t know what she was saying, because sometimes you can’t see things that are staring you in the face.

  “I was born and grew up there. Cordelia Elizabeth Corporamore. I always thought it such a silly name.”

  My gran was old. She looked old, and her skin was wrinkled, but her eyes were sparkly and you would have known by looking at them that she was smiling even if you weren’t able to see the rest of her face. I’d known her my whole life, but that was the moment I first recognized who she was.

  Granny Deedee, my own gran. She was Cordelia. God almighty, my granddad had married Cordelia Corporamore. She’d changed her name because of how silly she thought “Cordelia” was. How she came to decide that “Deedee” was a more sensible alternative, I may never know.

  She spent a few minutes asking me if I was okay, because she said I’d gone all pale and sort of shocked-looking.

  And there in my grandparents’ living room I kissed my gran and I hugged her and I said, “Oh, Gran, you turned out lovely. You really did.” I’m glad nobody except Granddad saw me doing that, because they would have thought I was definitely a hundred percent pathetic.

  It is still pretty hard to believe that I met my own grandmother when she was young. Okay, the circumstances were freaky enough, but that’s what happened. I’d never be able to look at her now without seeing the person she’d once been.