Free Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel by Dorothy Koomson Page A

had her head bowed, her long wavy blond hair hiding her face, but not the tears that had puddled on top of the mahogany table. She was eight but her height, her mannerisms, her deeply ingrained sadness, made her seem so much older.
    Mal pushed out his chair, went around the table and took his little sister’s hand. “Come on, let’s go for a walk,” he said to her. He used to say that to Cordy when she was being “difficult,” which was pretty much all the time. He used to say that to Victoria when she would slink into silence at the dinner table. He used to say that to me whenever he had done something to annoy me and wanted me to still be his friend. This was the first time he’d said it and looked so heartbroken and scared as he spoke.
    They were gone for about half an hour and in that time Mumhad made herself a cup of tea, Dad a cup of coffee, and Cordy and me a cup of Ovaltine each. Cordy had been singing the tune to the Ovaltine advert ever since, and even though it was extremely annoying, especially because she filled in the bits she didn’t know with “da-de-da-da,” no one told her to stop.
    “Victoria has gone for a lie-down in Nova’s bedroom,” Mal said as he sat down in the seat he had occupied earlier. He sounded so grown up that I blinked a few times at him. “She wants to go to Birmingham. She wants to go away to school. Thank you, Uncle Frank and Aunt Hope, it’s what she needs. She doesn’t want to be here anymore, but she doesn’t want us to be cross with her because of it.”
    “No one would ever be cross with her,” I said at exactly the same time as Dad. Mum smiled to herself.
    “But I’m going to stay,” Mal continued. “I can’t leave Mum. I can’t ever leave Mum.”
    The words he said, his tone of voice, the slight shake of his head, told everyone he was serious, that no one could put asunder him and his mother.
    “We understand,” Mum said.
    “Yes, we do,” Dad agreed.
    Silence came to us as we all digested what this would mean for us. Once Victoria left, she would no longer be a part of our family. Once we didn’t see her every day, create memories and jokes and feuds with her every day, it’d be difficult to connect with her. We’d be a different type of close. No matter how many times she visited physically, she would always have grown up somewhere else. Somewhere other. With some others.
    “So,” Cordy said after a while, “if Malvolio’s not going away to school, can I go instead?”
    Later, much later, Mal said to me, “I wish my dad was here.”We had sneaked out of bed and were sitting side by side in the dark on the back step, staring into the garden and the railings that backed onto the railway line that ran past our house. (Mum and Dad probably knew that we were out here: apart from the fact we both had the grace of stampeding elephants, Mum and Dad seemed to know pretty much everything about everything. Which was why, I suppose, they’d been so upset about the sleeping tablets and vodka Aunt Mer had been able to get her hands on.)
    Mal never talked about his father. It was an unacknowledged agreement that Uncle Victor was something we never spoke about. This was a revelation to me that Mal not only thought about his dad—although I always suspected he did—but also missed him enough to want him here.
    “Do you?” I said.
    “I wish he was here so I wouldn’t have to do this alone. I know your mum and dad look after Mum, but it should be Dad. And then Victoria wouldn’t have to go away.”
    I understood at that moment why he could let Victoria go. He couldn’t take care of both of them as well as his mother, and if going to boarding school meant Victoria would be looked after, that she wouldn’t have to go through every moment of worry and fear that he had to, then he’d do that. He didn’t want to lose his sister, but if that was the price he had to pay to stop her going through the agony we all went through every time his mother struggled or