Free Now I Know by Aidan Chambers Page B

After that is a door to a wall cupboard where Julie keeps her clothes.
    The bare deal floorboards are stained a shining dark oak colour. A strip of cheap, dark blue carpet lies by the side of the bed. The window looks out onto a small back garden—a garden shed, square of lawn, carefully tended vegetable patch chock-a-block with plants—and beyond, over the roofs of terrace houses stepping downwards, to the other side of the valley where some fields, then streets of houses, rise up to the skyline.
    The window is open and sun is streaming in, but the curtains are not blowing in a breeze, summertime sounds cannot be heard. Only now do we realize that we are looking at stills. But the noise of a football match being shown on television seeps into the room from next door.
    JULIE :   I haven’t told you this before. Didn’t want to. Couldn’t bring myself to, if I’m honest. But now I have to tell you, I think. It’s time. Because whatever happens when they take off the bandages—whether I can see again or not— nothing will be the same as before, will it? Can’t be.
    [ Deep breaths in and out. ]
    I think about it a lot. About when the bandages come off. And about the future after that. When we know for sure what’s left of me. [ Chuckles. ] Not that I’m any the wiser for thinking about it so much. More confused, if anything. Except, I know some things that weren’t decided before will be then. What you are to me, and what I am to you. That’ll be the important thing the great unwrapping will make me—us—sure about.
    You see, dear Nik, what I haven’t told you is that for years I’ve thought that I want my life to be all for God.
    [ Laughs. ]
    I know, I know! But don’t give yourself a hernia from hilarity. Lots of girls go through a nunnery phase just the same as they go through having crushes on hockey sticks and horses and pop stars and even on yummy teachers. I know that. But I got over those things before I was fourteen. This is different. The same way it’s different when people decide they’d like to become doctors or computer programmers or scientists. I want to be a God something. I don’t know exactly what kind of something, but something for God.
    I was trying to work out what that something would be when you came along. I was looking for the best way. A way that would be right for now, for today, and not a way that used to be right years ago but isn’t any longer.
    Not that I’ve said anything about it to anyone else. Mum knows, of course, and Dad, and my brother. Oh yes, and Philip Ruscombe. But no one else. I like to be sure of myself before I say anything to other people. And being a God-something isn’t the sort of subject people talk about very easily without . . . well, without laughing, I suppose. They find it hard to believe you mean what you say, or that anyone could seriously want to do anything like that these days. So I was quietly sorting it out for myself. Till you came along.
    Suddenly there you were, and I couldn’t think why I cared. Not at the time. I remember lying in my bath that Saturday afternoon, half of me still smouldering with anger at the pagans, and the other half wondering what on earth it was about you that disturbed me so much. I mean, you aren’t especially good looking. Sorry about that! You’re fairly clever, I suppose, but you aren’t a genius. And you’re younger than I am. I don’t mean only in years, but in yourself. You’re still a schoolboy.
    So I’m no fashion plate, and I’m not even as clever as you, but I do have a job, however lowly, and have had for two years. I feel like a grown-up woman, not a schoolgirl any more. [ Laughs. ] Yes, I know. But everyone can be wrong!
    Apart from those things, you were big-headed. All the way home you made fun of everybody else. The leptonic OBD, the kids in the film group, Leonard Stanley,