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

slipped or spun out into psychosis, then he would pay it. These were adult choices he had to make. He knew that I would have fought my parents to keep us together. I would have made life a misery for all concerned until they realized that we couldn’t be split up. But Mal had decided to let Victoria go to give her the chance to grow up “normal.”
    “Why us, Nova?” he asked. “Why us? Why my mum? Why’d God pick on my mum?” I didn’t think he wanted an answer. He was just asking. Even if he did want or need a solid answer, I didn’t have one. I didn’t know who got chosen to go through life suffering. Having things happen to them. Putting up with things and not having any choice in the matter.
    I doubted I’d ever understand why them and not anyone else. Or maybe I would. Maybe at some point I would grow up. Not in the sense of being old enough to vote, get married, leave home, get a job. But in the sense of being able to understand the world more. Being able to pinpoint why some are chosen, some are not. Why some are blessed and others seem to suffer. Maybe that was what being a grown-up truly meant. You finally understood the ways of the world. You were finally given insight into the truth of life. Maybe you could do all those other things, live as though you were grown up, but you would never
be
grown up until you had that kind of understanding and knowledge. Until you had that kind of enlightenment. Maybe that’s what enlightenment was. Maybe it wasn’t being able to sit cross-legged while wearing white robes and chanting and feeling “at one with the world,” as I had been reading about; maybe enlightenment was simply being able to understand.
    I put my arm around him and was surprised when he crumpled against me like a cola can being crushed. All fight and strength went out of his body and I realized that what had been meant as a one-armed hug was now holding him up. His whole body weight was resting on me. He looked skinny as a rake, but he was heavy, so it took me a while to move him off my shoulder and pull him onto my lap. His head rested on my thigh as my eyes became more accustomed to the dark and could make out shapes in the small rectangle of our back garden, and throughthe black rails into the overgrown green that separated the end of our garden from the train track.
    Mal had climbed over that fence so many times to retrieve our footballs, shuttlecocks and tennis balls. And the time our budgie, Birdie, flew over there, he’d climbed over to catch it. He’d gently covered it with his T-shirt to stop it flying away whilst he scrambled back over the fence to bring it home. The wild, spiky weeds scratched his back and chest, but he hadn’t cared, all he cared about was bringing the terrified budgie home.
    He was ten at the time. Mum had told him not to climb over that fence but to wait instead for Dad to come back so he could use the ladder to get over the fence and up the tree. The second she went back into the house to check on dinner, he’d scaled the railings, jumped down onto the other side and shimmied up the tree. He’d only disobeyed Mum because it was Aunt Mer who had let out Birdie. She’d said she wanted to see Birdie fly. She was working on a design for wings for humans and she needed to see how budgies flew. It was a sign. We all knew that, we all knew that there’d be a visit to the doctor soon. Mal at that time hadn’t been able to do anything about making his mother well, but he did what he could, and that was to fix things. In this case, rescuing Birdie. Mal had done this as long as I could remember: anything she did, he tried to set right.
    A slither of wetness ran down my bare thigh and I instinctively checked the sky for rain. The sky, a beautiful, rich, velvet blue-black, didn’t have any clouds in it, and the air didn’t hold the heavy, musky scent of rain. Another slither crawled down my thigh and I realized what was happening. I wanted to place one hand on his back