Free The Bright Side by Alex Coleman

“last year”. But there was no improvement. I was still a zombie, slouching silently from room to room, crying more often than not. I hadn’t slept for more than a couple of hours at a stretch since the accident and was stupefied by even the simplest of everyday tasks. There had been several occasions when I had been reduced to a quivering heap on the kitchen floor by the sight of a pile of ironing. Even my beloved cooking had lost all appeal; for the first time in their lives, the kids came home not to long-since perfected favourites or to bold new experiments but to boil-in-the-bag curries, oven-ready chips, frozen pizzas. Gerry was worried, and repeatedly told me so. He thought I should “talk to someone”, meaning a counsellor or a psychologist. Every time he brought it up, I just shook my head and shuffled out of his sight. Talking couldn’t possibly help. Nothing could. My sole consolation was that this, surely, was my allocation of misery for the next couple of decades. There would be no more bad news for a long time. There couldn’t possibly be; it would be unfair .
    And then, one crisp January day, Chrissy came through the front door in tears. The tears were not so unusual in themselves – she’d been known to come in crying because it was cold out. When I asked her what was wrong this time, she buried her head in her hands and sobbed so hard that I couldn’t make out what she was saying. She’d bumped into someone or other who’d told her something or other. Gradually, I realised that she was talking about Jonathon Mullen. Then I heard the words “brain tumour” and I joined her in the sobbing. Jonathon was an eight-year-old neighbour of ours. He was quite possibly the sweetest child I’d ever met in my life. I don’t think I would have liked him so much if he’d been physically cute; the effect might have been overpowering. But he had buck teeth and a big nose, and I had never seen him without a little green river snaking its way down his top lip; it was like his trademark. He was obsessed with toy cars. Most little boys like them, of course, but Jonathon was something else. He had literally hundreds, which he used to line up on the footpath outside his house, as if he was some miniature Arthur Daley. If you expressed even the tiniest bit of interest, he’d bend your ear for half an hour, holding one of his fleet in the palm of his hand and telling you all about its real-world counterpart .
    “This is a Ferrari F50, Mrs O’Connell,” he said to me one day. “It has a four-point-seven-litre engine and a top speed of two hundred and two miles an hour. They only ever made three hundred and forty-nine. Everyone goes on about how cool they are in the magazines. But I think they’re butt-fugly.” He kicked a football into our front garden one summer’s evening and took out a rampant sunflower which was far and away the most successful plant I’d ever had. I found out about this tragedy, and who was behind it, because Jonathon immediately rang the doorbell and owned up. He stood on the front step with his football under his arm, slowly shaking his head as he shifted from foot to foot. “I’m very sorry, Mrs O’Connell,” he said solemnly. “I really liked that flower myself. It always looked like it was smiling. ”
    It’s stupid and wrong to think that one particular child deserves to get a brain tumour less than another, but still … that was exactly what I thought at the time .
    Jonathon’s dad was a tall, whip-thin forty-something called Tony. He’d been our neighbour for about two years. Gerry and I knew three things about him: he worked for Bank of Ireland, he’d moved around the country a lot, and he was a widower. His wife – we didn’t even know her name at that point – had died of liver cancer when Jonathon was just a toddler. If we’d known him a little better, no doubt we’d have found it easier to call over and express our sympathies on this, the latest tragedy to