Free How To Be Brave by Louise Beech

interested. And anyway she’s not stupid – she knows it’s just a ruse to get her to do what she doesn’t want.’
    ‘Is there anything at all that she loves?’ asked Shelley. ‘Anything, no matter how small or seemingly silly?’
    For a moment I heard the sea swelling and falling, felt the tickle of its breeze about my bare ankles. Gentle – like the spray in my recent dreams – it swirled around my calves, climbed higher, caressed my knees, as familiar now to me as my own face. But this time it was just leaves near the back door being teased by the wind. I got up and closed it.
    ‘There might be something,’ I said. ‘Some one .’
    ‘Might they come and stay for a while, pet?’
    I knew it would be impossible to explain to Shelley; I hardly understood it myself. So I just said, ‘Yes, maybe.’ Then we looked at Rose’s logbook for a while, discussed upping each dose of insulin a tad, and she said she’d only come now if I requested it. Though her visits sometimes felt intrusive, as I waved her off I felt like I was being abandoned. No more hospital, no more nurses, no more help. Just us. Though I’d told Jake I wanted to face the injury under the plaster full on, I still felt sick.
    You’ve found the book .
    Now, with Rose’s wishing-me-dead words in my head, I sat on the bed with it in both hands. I had thought about telling my dad we’d found it but wasn’t sure how he’d feel. I’d even picked up the phone a few times, but then felt we were meant to read it first. So I wanted to keep it for us; just Rose and me. Maybe the mysterious book would make magic, reignite the gold sparks in her irises.
    My grandad had died long before I was born, but I knew without question that inside these pages he would come to life again. I just had to untie the ribbons and free the words.
    One knot – that was all.
    One knot to undo and it would fall open.
    I pulled on a silky ribbon and the pages parted; another tug and a faint, recognisable smell emanated from the sheets. Where had I smelt it before?
    The two black ribbons dangled like the sails I’d seen in my dream. Though eager to begin, to open the book, I paused. Held it to my chest a moment. It was like when you wait a long time for a baby – you go through two days of labour and when you finally hold her you hardly know what to do.
    I opened the leathery cover to the first page. It was yellowed and the ink upon it had faded to ash grey. Looped words filled the space – graceful, level, high reaching – as though the writer had chewed his pen-end and thought carefully about what to record. They looked like the neat sentences of someone over the worst, someone looking back.
    Am home. But home is not quite like it was before. Because I am not the same. Am home .
    The opening lines. I whispered them aloud, and then read no more. It was enough for now. Instead, I flicked gently through the pages. The draught lifted my hair from my face. A muddle of entries flashed past my eyes, in different pen colours, scribbles and ink stains, changes in flow.
    Inside the front cover, stuck to the page with threadbare tape, were two buttons. One was small and brown, the other brass. I touched the dent they made in the material but didn’t free them.
    What did these tiny things mean? Why had they been kept?
    In the back I found more – newspaper cuttings from 1943, official letters addressed to my grandma, an invitation to Buckingham Palace, a scrap of paper with dates on, and one photograph.
    I put the book down and looked at the black-and-white picture – it was the clearest image I’d ever seen of Grandad Colin. He stood by a flowering bush, the variety of which I couldn’t say without colour, and he wore a thick tie and had his hair slicked to the left and the start of a smile that hadn’t quite reached his eyes. He wore a suit. I didn’t need a colour picture to know its shade. The photograph confirmed all that I’d thought.
    Am home. But home is not quite