Free How To Be Brave by Louise Beech Page A

like it was before. Because I am not the same. Am home .
    Grandad Colin was the man in the brown suit.
    He was the man who’d reassured me at the hospital.
    He was the man who’d invited Rose to the shed.
    It was no surprise at all. I had called him the stranger in the brown suit, but he wasn’t. He was my grandfather.
    And I sensed him then, looking over my shoulder, sad also, knowing my pain. Knowing, somehow, that he was here for me. For us.

6
A FAIR RATE OF EXCHANGE
    I don’t think they are looking for us .
    K.C.
    ‘Find something Rose loves,’ Shelley had said.
    So we did. We began trading blood for words. Rose would endure the pain of finger pricking and injections in exchange for a story. But when we made the pact I wondered if my stolen-from-newspapers-and-brown-diary words would be a fair price? Would they distract from finger prick after pierced thigh after finger prick after pierced arm after finger prick after pierced stomach?
    Would it be enough?
    This I often asked of myself when we began our swap. This I wondered each time Rose came into the book nook with her box of lancets and vials of insulin, ready to draw blood, to cut, to read and record numbers in a log like those kept at sea, to hear my story. A logbook full of dates and volumes of liquid is the dullest of stories and I had to make it interesting. So I dropped syllables into its endless ocean.
    We first made our blood for words pact when Rose crept into my room three nights after I’d opened Colin’s diary. I didn’t mind that she woke me with a brusque shove. While I’d always responded gruffly to such disturbances in the past, now I was glad she’d come to me.
    But I wasn’t glad for long.
    ‘I’ve come to just tell you something,’ she said, carefully and seriously.
    In the darkness her voice reminded me of the wind when it picked up and dropped the worn tarpaulin on the shed roof. Some words fell so softly I had to fill the space with what made sense; others plummeted.
    ‘I’ve decided I’m not doing it anymore,’ she said. ‘I’ve thought and thought about it and I’m not having diabetes any more. I’ve done it for more than a month and that’s enough. I’m sure my pancreas can fix itself. Harry Potter would be able fix himself without bloody injections. So I’m not doing it. Don’t care if I go totally all unconscious again. I’m just going to go and lie in bed from now on and that’s it. Stay there and wait for my long-forever sleep.’
    In the blackness I listened. As my eyes got accustomed to it, her silhouette became more defined, as though she’d not been real earlier and now was. I didn’t move. I could feel the lump of Grandad Colin’s diary under my pillow, kept safe the way Rose used to cherish her books.
    ‘Goodnight, mum,’ Rose said.
    I couldn’t speak. I knew if I let her go back to her bed, I might never get her out of it. She began to head for the door.
    Do something , my mind screamed.
    Then, in the dark, Rose stopped and said, ‘Will you say bye to Dad for me?’
    ‘The thing is,’ – I tried to stop my voice breaking, glad of night’s camouflage – ‘how will I be able to tell you about the man in the brown suit if you go to sleep forever? Don’t you want to know who he is?’
    Silence. I waited for her to speak. What more did I have to say? What lifeline did I have to keep her? I’d played the only card I had straight away, like a novice. If she expressed no interest what else did I have to offer?
    I touched the book. I’d read more the previous evening. Childhood memories had returned. I’d let them wash over me, fill my pores, hydrate me.
    Eventually she said, ‘You could just tell me about him now.’
    ‘It’s way too long to explain in minutes,’ I said.
    ‘If we start right now we might be done by tomorrow night.’
    I was throwing her a lifeline and then pulling it away. But I had to make it more appealing. Hide my pain and pretend I didn’t mind if she wanted to grab