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The next time I woke, I could hear someone singing an old song all about the first time seeing a baby and wanting to hold the baby and keep the baby safe and stuff. I had dreamed of her so often, but whenever I'd opened my eyes before, she'd never been there. This time I wasn't dreaming. Though for a moment, even looking straight at her, I still thought I might have been.

She looked great. She might still have been suffering
from sadness, but if she was, it didn't show that much on the outside anymore.

“Mum . . . Mum . . . Mum . . . Mum . . . Mum.” I didn't care how pathetic I sounded saying her name over and over again like that. Like her name was a tune that I knew very well and couldn't stop humming. She wrapped her arms around me and she kept on telling me that everything was all right.

“Mum, how long have you been here?”

She told me she'd just arrived.

“And how did you know? How did you know that this was the day to come back?”

She said she didn't know. She said she'd just been ready to come home to me.

“Why did you leave me in the first place?” I said.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Why did you have to go so far away?”

She said that when Granddad had started to talk as if Brian were still alive, it had begun to torment her. She said she'd had to get away because she'd been afraid she was going to go crazy. And to think, all this time she'd been telling people it was because the market had dried up.

But anyway she was back now. She'd come back for one reason, and the reason was me. She said she really must have been crazy to leave me, and how she didn't know what she'd been thinking and how she couldn't bear to lose me, too. It was pretty nice to hear her say those things.

I thought of Brian then and all the great things about him and about how much I wished he wasn't dead. I turned over and pressed my face into the pillow. I could hear myself making this strange long small slow sound. She kept her hand on my head.

“I know, sweetheart, I know. I've been missing him so much. I just didn't realize how much you were missing him too. I thought it would be easier somehow if you tried to forget about it.”

I told my mum that there's no such thing as forgetting. I told her all the things I remembered about Brian. His long fingers. The dimples in his cheeks that happened when he smiled. The way he used to hum when he was reading books.

And my mum smiled too, and a couple of times we even laughed for a bit. And then we stopped smiling and laughing for another while.

“Granddad was supposed to save him. He was going to do something to save him.”

“Cosmo, love. You can't turn back the clock. I've finally accepted that, and now you have to try to accept it too.”

But even though I knew that, still I felt like telling my mum that she was wrong. I felt like saying there
is
going back. I felt like explaining to her that I'd
been
back, for God's sake. How I thought I'd gone back for a reason. How I'd thought I was going to be able to do something about what had happened.

I've done a lot of research on time travel since then, but even though I've studied it in quite a lot of detail, I still can't really explain what happened to me. There is a physicist in Hungary who reckons that wormholes are bigger than Einstein originally suggested, and that it's not impossible for a whole human to get caught in one, and so maybe that's what happened. And there's this cosmologist in Geneva who's been able to get subatomic particles to travel faster than light, and that means basically that time travel is possible, at least in theory. But I don't know that for sure. I guess I never will.

I'm not a moron. I know that most people don't believe time warps are real or anything. I'm fully aware that mostly they're a trick your mind plays on you when you really want things to have turned out differently than they actually have. I know that. Nobody has to tell me that.

So anyway, I told Mum how I'd shouted at Granddad and been really lousy and mean to him and how Granddad had held his hand up to his mouth and how his chin had trembled and how it was my fault for making him frightened and sad. And my mum said it was all right, everyone understood, and sometimes people do things and they can't help it.

But still for a good while afterward I often played the moment over in my head—that moment when I yelled at my granddad. I spent a good bit of time trying to change it in my head. I have invented this whole new memory, and in
it, instead of being horrible, I'm all kind and nice. It doesn't make me feel that much better about it, though. The very second something is done, that's it. There is no taking it back, no matter how much you wish there was.

I tried to explain all this to Mum, and it was a bit confusing and I got all mixed-up and she kept on saying, “Shh, shh,” and taking care of me and telling me that it was okay. And for the first time in a very long time, I didn't feel like I had to take care of anyone or rescue anyone or find anyone or hide anyone or feed anyone or comfort anyone. Which was a bit of a relief, to be honest.

After we'd all had a bit more of a rest, I sat at my granddad's old feet and I put my cheek against his knee. He patted my head gently and said, “There, there.”

“I love you, Granddad,” I said to him, and he said, “I know. I know you do.”

“I'm sorry I shouted at you.”

“I don't remember you shouting at me,” he said.

And then Mum was hovering and talking about having to have lunch out of the way early because Dr. Sally had just called to say she was on her way over. It was kind of sneaky of Dr. Sally. She wasn't supposed to be coming back until the end of the week.

Drat. Granddad and me were sitting there doing nothing when we should have both been studying for the test, and now there was hardly any time.

I took out my notebook, and the two of us made a start.

I told Granddad the whole story of his childhood.

“Do you know what your first job was, Granddad?”

“No,” he said, and then I said, “You were a stable boy.”

I explained how brilliant he had been with the horses. I said how Somerville and Ross were probably the best cared for horses basically on the planet.

“Do you remember now?”

“Ah yes, a stable boy, of course. That's what I was. The best stable boy in the country.”

“Yes, you were. No doubt in my mind about that,” I said.

“And we smuggled Maggie into Blackbrick. Do you remember?” Granddad said.

“Well, technically it was me who did most of the work getting her in,” I replied.

“Oh yes, it was you. Indeed it was, but I was the one who told you what to say.”

He pointed at me with his old brown hands and his half a finger.

“By the way, how did you lose that finger?” I asked him, hoping to hear our joke.

“Isn't it a common accident for a stable boy to have?”

And his old arms mimed the landing of an invisible hammer on his hand. He explained that one little slip into a daydream when you're shoeing your horse, and you'll be lucky to have a single finger left.

“How do you hitch a horse to a cart?” I asked him, and
he reeled off the list of instructions as if he actually were Google.

I asked him how he had learned to read and write, and he said he couldn't quite remember, but that it was something he was always going to have gotten around to, one way or another, despite the obstacles he had faced when he had been young.

We had a pretty good laugh that day. I showed him the drawing of Blackbrick that I'd done at the front of Ted's notebook. He traced his fingers around the shape of it as if he was touching something very precious. He said it was a perfect likeness.

“How many steps from the kitchen to the study?”

“Sixty-four,” he said, without even having to think about it.

“Where was Nora born?”

“Nora? Ah, Nora. She was born in the gate lodge.”

Granny Deedee came back through the door with tea and biscuits. The steam from the teapot rose in front of her face, and she said, “Are you two still talking about Blackbrick?”

She put the tray down on the table.

“Blackbrick was where your grandfather and I first met,” she said then.

I definitely did not know that, I told her, suddenly feeling confused again.

“Blackbrick was my family home.”

“Sorry, Gran?” I said. I didn't know what she was saying,
because sometimes you can't see things that are staring you in the face.

“I was born and grew up there. Cordelia Elizabeth Corporamore. I always thought it such a silly name.”

My gran was old. She looked old, and her skin was wrinkled, but her eyes were sparkly and you would have known by looking at them that she was smiling even if you weren't able to see the rest of her face. I'd known her my whole life, but that was the moment I first recognized who she was.

Granny Deedee, my own gran. She was Cordelia. God almighty, my granddad had married Cordelia Corporamore. She'd changed her name because of how silly she thought “Cordelia” was. How she came to decide that “Deedee” was a more sensible alternative, I may never know.

She spent a few minutes asking me if I was okay, because she said I'd gone all pale and sort of shocked-looking.

And there in my grandparents' living room I kissed my gran and I hugged her and I said, “Oh, Gran, you turned out lovely. You really did.” I'm glad nobody except Granddad saw me doing that, because they would have thought I was definitely a hundred percent pathetic.

It is still pretty hard to believe that I met my own grandmother when she was young. Okay, the circumstances were freaky enough, but that's what happened. I'd never be able to look at her now without seeing the person she'd once been.

It wasn't the time for dwelling or brooding or debriefing, though, because Dr. Sally was going to be there very soon. Granddad and I spent about forty-five more intensive minutes training his brain and brushing up. We went over some things a few times until I was confident that he was as ready as he'd ever be. Then we got him into a clean shirt and tie, and Granny Deedee parted his hair on the side, kissed him on the cheek, and told him he looked very smart. When Dr. Sally arrived, Granddad welcomed her into the house with the politeness and warmth that you'd normally reserve for a long-lost relative that you'd been dying to see.

He was able to answer every single one of the questions she asked him. Everything we'd studied came up. What his first job had been, how he'd lost his finger, when he'd first met his wife. My granddad told Dr. Sally it was a long story, and Dr. Sally said she had time, and so then he told her all about it. Dr. Sally thought it was a lovely story. I think I even saw her wipe a tear from behind her glasses. He was able to tell us how a carrot was like a potato, even though we hadn't even studied for that one. “They're both root vegetables that grow in the ground. Different colors, though. Different shapes.” Dr. Sally said that was an excellent answer and Granddad put his thumbs up and smiled at me, but it was just his gentle way of teasing her. It wasn't as if he had done anything to be particularly thrilled about. The questions were very easy for someone as clever as he was. She nodded her smiley head the whole time like she was dead impressed.

Dr. Sally took ages filling out this form, and then she said, “Mr. Lawless, congratulations. Based on your test results, I'm happy to say that it's still quite appropriate for you to stay here in your own home.”

After she left, me and Granddad gave each other a high five, and Gran and Mum came over and all of us did a four-way hug.

“Thank God for that,” Granddad said. “I don't care for those tests very much.”

Chapter 22