Inside Grandad (7 page)

It was a good day for fishing, mild and cloudy, and judging by the seagulls there were enough food scraps in the water to bring the mackerel in as well as the gulls. He landed a medium-sized one after a dozen casts.

At that point Tacky Steward showed up, and immediately came over to sympathize about Grandad. Gavin told him what was happening—easily, as if it were something that had happened to someone else—while he went on fishing, and before Tacky could get round to teaching him the best way to catch mackerel he hooked into another one. That gave Tacky the chance to advise him how to land it, and say, "That's the idea. Well done," as if it hadn't all been obvious stuff that Gavin had only just done with the first fish. Tacky was obviously set to go on like that all afternoon. Gran had a tiny appetite, and two good fish was quite enough for the three of them, with a
bit to spare for Dodgem, so as soon as he'd landed the second one Gavin started to put his tackle away and Tacky had to go back to his own end of the wall and wait for someone else to show off to.

Dodgem actually came half awake on the beach. It was full of fascinating smells, and shallows to waddle in and out of, and then shake himself off, preferably over some sunbather or a passing jogger. Gran didn't take him there nearly often enough. She preferred the town center, because she met more people there. Donald had once calculated that what with her stopping to chat and Dodgem stopping to read and reply to his pee-mail they averaged a bit under half a mile an hour on their walks.

Gavin let him off his lead for a bit and mooched along, looking for smooth flat stones to play ducks and drakes with. The sea was calm enough for that, and he did a couple of twelve-skip throws—fifteen was his best ever. Then he put Dodgem back on his lead, hauled him along to Safeway, and left him behind the trolleys to guard the fishing gear in his sleep. He bought the sugar snaps, and bacon for Sunday breakfast, and three individual butterscotch-and-custard desserts, which Mum loved but never bought for herself because they were full of weird-sounding chemicals. If you bought one for her she ate it, because "it would have been wicked to waste it." Then he coaxed and lugged and bullied Dodgem back up to Arduthie Road.

Despite his having caught the fish so easily, it had all taken longer than he expected. He was turning the fish over to grill on the other side when he heard Mum's key in the door. He
put the sugar snaps on to steam, set the timer for three minutes, and opened the kitchen door.

"That smells good," she called. "I won't be a moment. How did you get on?"

"Okay," he called back.

He'd probably have said that anyway, but it was true. It had been an okay day. Something he'd really needed without knowing it. Ordinary.

hat was Friday. Saturday morning was swimming lessons down at the Leisure Center, which Mr. Tweedie had coaxed him into signing up for at the start of term, and Mum and Grandad had said was a good idea. Saturdays are a busy time for estate agents, but Mum had got Elsie and Bob to stand in for her and drove the three of them up to Aberdeen. She left Gran and Gavin at the hospital entrance and went off to do her shopping.

Several of the other patients had visitors, which would have made it awkward to do the exercises anyway, so Gavin simply settled on the other side of the bed and half listened to Gran's chat while he did the easy bits of homework. Her stories seemed really lively and interesting and amusing that day. He guessed she was making a special effort for Grandad. He'd never have known how sad she was inside if it hadn't been for what she'd told him at the hospital that time.

When she went off to chat with the nurse on duty—a new one Gavin hadn't met—he held Grandad's hand and told him, slowly, spinning it out with pauses, about fishing the day before, and Tacky wanting to teach him how to do it. Then he settled back to his homework, saying something about it every now and then, as usual, until Gran came back. When Mum arrived she talked to the nurse about how Grandad was getting on and what would happen next, and then came and told him
about it, doing her best, but it wasn't her kind of thing. She liked stuff to happen when she spoke. Nothing happened with Grandad. After a while she took them home.

After supper he called Brian about coming round to look at his computer game the next day, and then watched TV with Gran. He wasn't that keen on the programs she liked, but she needed somebody there so she could tell them what she thought about everyone in the soaps, and he was feeling a bit ashamed about the way he'd been behaving and thinking, as if he were the only one Grandad truly mattered to, the only one who really cared. For the same reason he went to church with her next morning, which he didn't most Sundays, though Grandad usually did. Gavin didn't know what to think about church, and Grandad wouldn't tell him. "Got to make up your own mind," he said. "Only not yet." Mum believed in earth spirits and stuff, so she stayed home and cooked Sunday dinner.

After that he went round to Brian's. Brian's dad was in computers, so he had a lot of cast-off kit that still worked okay. The game was called Spec Ops, which stood for Special Operations, and two of you could play it on separate PCs, working together to shoot up the baddies. Brian had had plenty of practice, but Gavin picked it up soon enough and they had a good time until Brian's dad came and shooed them out into the open air for a bit of exercise. They took their bikes up into Dunnottar woods the other side of the stream and joined Terry and Tony and a couple of others whooping round the mountain-bike track in the old quarry. Gavin came off into
a bramble and cut his arm. It bled a bit, but he licked it clean and got home tired enough and hungry enough to feel he'd had a really good time.

Another okay, ordinary day.

The first Monday after the change he got to the stroke unit telling himself, Okay. Mum's right. There's no point in my wearing myself stupid trying to get through to Grandad by some sort of crazy magic pressure inside me that nobody else can do. Who do I think I am? Harry Potter? It isn't all down to me, and anyway I'll be much more use to him if I do it the sensible way, and forget about the selkies and all that.

But it didn't work out like that.

Lena wasn't in the ward, and he decided he'd better not start in on the exercises without her say-so, so he just took hold of Grandad's hand, as usual, and started to tell him, a bit at a time, about the new system, and what Mum had said, and why she'd been right really, and it was crazy of him to think the selkies had anything to do with it. But almost at once his voice started to choke up, because it all mattered far, far too much for him to control, and he realized that the pressure was back, worse than it had ever been, and there wasn't anything he could do about it.

He stopped talking and simply waited until he thought he could speak normally again, provided it was about something else, like the e-mails or Tacky or school. It was only then that he felt something pressing against the side of his palm, and looked down and saw that Grandad was holding his hand again.

He'd no idea how long he'd been doing that for, and now, as he stood staring, Grandad gave a gentle sigh and let go.

He told Lena when she came, and she was interested and puzzled, but he didn't try to make it happen again. He was pretty sure it wasn't any use. And nothing like that happened when he went on to do the exercises. He didn't get any response at all, and he was just as tired as ever when he finished.

But thinking about it on his way home in the car, he decided that was a sort of private message, for him alone, and what it told him was that though Mum had been right, and getting Grandad well wasn't all down to him alone, there still
was
something that only he could do, and no one else. He didn't know what it was yet, but it was something to do with the pressure inside him, and he'd been wrong to try and stop it. What he'd got to do was let it happen, and find out about it, and then, in the end, he'd be able to use it.

So for the next three weeks Gavin's life fell into two halves. He felt almost as if he'd become two different people. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends he was Stonehaven Gavin and Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays he was hospital Gavin.

Hospital Gavin felt utterly different from the normal, Stonehaven Gavin. The moment he woke, all through breakfast and school, he could feel the pressure beginning to build. He nursed it, looked after it, let it happen unseen inside him. He didn't think about it all the time, did his work okay, talked with the other kids, and so on, but he didn't waste any energy getting involved. His friends might have noticed he was a bit quieter those days, but they probably didn't.

Then the bell went, and he gathered his things, and Robert was waiting in his car out in the road, and they drove up to Aberdeen. Lena was usually in the ward. Some days she watched him for a while; mostly she just said hello and left him to it.

He said hi to Grandad, sorted his stuff out, talked, or read to him if he'd got anything to read, and then started on the exercises.

Now the sense of pressure reversed as he tried to pour everything that was in him, his whole soul, all that gathered strength and need, into the slow, monotonous exercises.

"Now, Grandad, see if you can touch your nose."

Count slowly to six. Adjust arm. Grip wrist and elbow. Raise forearm. Shift grip. Uncurl forefinger. Lower arm and hand to touch nose.

"Great. Now you can put it down again."

Count slowly to six….

There was never even a flicker of response, apart from the slow lopsided blink every so often, and it wasn't Grandad doing that, really. It was just something that happened. There was never even the slightest glimmer in the vague blue stare. It was as if the selkie had gone from the harbor and mightn't ever come back.

The image haunted him. On the Saturday morning Dad was home Gavin took him down to fish for mackerel, and between them they caught enough to spare one for a seal, if it had appeared, but it didn't. Dad was obviously having a great time—he used to fish with Grandad years ago, he said, whenever Grandad was home from
his
ship—so Gavin was careful
not to let him see how he was feeling. He knew it was stupid, but he'd really longed for the seal to appear and look at him the way it had that first day, and it hadn't. Why should it? Magic doesn't work in the real world.

As the days went by he got to know the nurses. They were very kind to him. When there wasn't anyone else in the ward they treated him almost like one of themselves, as if he was part of Grandad's treatment, which he was, sort of. They took him out into their office for a cup of tea when the shifts changed and they were all in the ward together. The tea trolley didn't come round the stroke unit on weekdays because it wasn't any use to the patients there. They let him draw the curtains a little way along the bed so that he could be more alone with Grandad, and Angie found a high stool he could sit on so that Grandad could see his face, supposing he was seeing anything.

There were four of them: Angie, who was Scottish, and three foreign ones, Duli from Thailand, Janet from New Zealand, and Veronique, who he'd met before. She was French, but she wasn't just working here for a couple of years, like the other two. She was married to a Scotsman, an airline pilot, so now she lived in Aberdeen while he flew all round the world. She showed him a picture of her two daughters. They were twins, but they didn't look at all like each other.

"Everybody tell me one is Scottish and one is French," she said.

"Bet you they both talk better English than you do," said Angie, which Gavin thought was funny coming from her as she talked really broad Scots herself. He showed Grandad the photograph so that he could see what they were laughing about.

The ward sister was Sister Taylor. She was older than the others, hardly taller than Gavin, plump, with a pale round face and a very soft, even voice. There was something about the way she looked at him with her round gray eyes that made Gavin feel he had to be careful with her and not do anything she mightn't like. He wasn't exactly scared of her, but he guessed she could be very, very tough if she wanted to. From one or two things the nurses said, he could tell they felt the same.

The nurses never said anything to suggest Grandad wasn't going to get better, but after a while he began to notice that they never said anything either to suggest that he might. He was careful not to ask because it wouldn't have been fair. They'd have had to say yes, of course he might, even if they didn't believe it.

Lena was the only person who said anything directly. About three weeks after Grandad's stroke, Gavin was a bit late getting to the hospital because they'd been doing something to the Torry Bridge and it had taken Robert a while to get past the traffic lights. Lena was still in the ward and he could tell she'd been waiting for him.

"There's something I wanted to ask you," she said. "I've got a hunch that there's something a bit odd about Robbie's case. I've got almost nothing to go on, nothing I can show or explain to anyone else. The suddenness with which the ataxia stopped is a bit unusual, but apart from that there's only what I've got from you, only the two or three times your grandfather seemed to be deliberately holding your hand. I don't think you're making that up—I saw it happen once, but there's no
denying that he's made very little progress since those first couple of days, and other people are going to say, ‘Okay, it did happen then, but that might have been just a coincidence, and maybe the kid's persuading himself about the other times.’ You see?

"But I still believe there's something there, and that's the only clue we've got. So let's go back to that first time. You were holding his hand and talking to him, and you said something that seemed to produce a moment of awareness in his eyes, and you think that's when it began."

"That's right."

"Can you remember what you were talking about? I'm clutching at straws, really, but I wonder if it mightn't possibly provide us with a clue."

"Er … well … Look, this is going to sound pretty stupid, but … You see, the day before Grandad's stroke we were fishing down at the harbor, fishing for mackerel, and …"

Stumbling and ashamed, because it felt like something stupid and private, he told her about the seal, and Grandad saying it might have been a selkie, and then about the boat Grandad was making for him, and deciding to call her
Selkie
, and Grandad saying he'd better go and ask the selkies if they minded—just one of Grandad's jokes, of course—and that being the moment Grandad had had his stroke. And then about getting back from the hospital and going down to the harbor next morning and saying sorry to the selkies and asking them for permission.

"So that's what I was telling him I'd done," he said, "when … when I saw his eyes change."

This time he managed not to cry, just.