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Manon Steffan Ros

• Herausgeber: Firefly Press Ltd
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 115

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

When Huw's nan calls him Johnny - the name of her never-mentioned brother who disappeared in WWll, he realises things are changing. As Nan slips into dementia, Huw begins to discover things about his family past that he never could have imagined.

Leseprobe

In Loving Memory of Dafydd Pryce Edwards Taid Bont

Contents

Title PageDedicationChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11AcknowledgmentsAbout the Author Copyright

Chapter 1

I never expected to have a story to tell.

You just don’t get books about people like me. I’m not a main character type. I know some people that are – the popular kids at school, who always have loads of people to hang out with, and who the teachers like. Usually the ones who live in the villages or in the posh part of town, up on the hill. My mate Kieran is a bit like that. You could totallyimagine someone writing a book about him.

But me, I’m just ordinary. Average. I’m not the least or most popular in my class, and I’m not gifted at English or football or anything really. I live with my dad in town, and I’m one of the people that other people tend to forget about. Not in a mean way – I’m just invisible, I suppose. I’m lucky that Kieran wants to be my mate, because that’s how I think people remember who I am – Huw, Kieran’s mate.

But I dohave a story, and here it is. I’m not going to pretend to be popular or rich just to make you like me, but I’ll tell the truth, exactly as it happened. 2

‘Hello! It’s only me!’

I pushed open the front door and kicked off my trainers. Nan’s house smelled amazing, like cake and polish and open windows. I could hear music blaring in the back kitchen. She was listening to ABBA again.

Nan lived on the High Street, next to a computer shop and across the road from a Chinese takeaway. Her house used to be a grocer’s shop, long before I was born. There was a black and white photo on the wall of the living room of how it used to be, all bulging shelves of food and soaps and cigarettes.

‘Come through!’ Nan called, as she did every afternoon.

You’ve probably already got an image in your head of my nan. Most nans in books and films and games are pretty similar to one another. White or grey hair in that short, curly, old-fashioned cut; always quite short; almost always in dresses or skirts. But my grandmother was nothing like that. She was tall and had long wavy hair that she dyed a dark brown; she wore jeans and cool trainers and rings on most of her fingers. Her house wasn’t like the houses that my friends’ grandparents lived in. Hers was chock-full of plants, with dozens of 3pictures and paintings on the walls and colourful lamps dotted about the place.

I walked through into the kitchen and grinned at Nan, who was in the middle of cutting me a slice of a huge, freshly baked cake. ‘I thought we should celebrate!’

‘Celebrate what?’ I asked, puzzled.

Nan giggled. ‘I don’t know. That it’s a Friday?’

‘Ace!’ I grinned, sitting down at the table and taking the plate. The slice of cake was almost the size of my head. ‘Looks yummy!’

‘I put peanut butter in it instead of jam.’ I loved peanut butter. She cut herself a thick wedge of the cake. ‘How was school?’

‘Okay. I still don’t get long division.’

‘Pah!’ She shook her head and grimaced, her mouth full of cake. ‘What a waste of time! What’s the point in learning all of that stuff when they’ve invented calculators?’

See what I mean about Nan being a bit different?

‘It’s such nonsense!’ she went on. ‘They’ll teach you all that stuff you don’t need, but no one will tell you how to pay a bill or how to cook a decent bowl of pasta!’

I’d heard this many, many times before, and I never got tired of it. It was always good fun when Nan got on her high horse. She’d be saying next that schools should teach lessons on kindness. 4

‘What they shouldbe teaching you is lessons about kindness.’ She stabbed her cake with her fork and shook her head. ‘How to disagree with other people without falling out, that kind of thing. The world would be so much better if you could have a GCSE in kindness!’

I nodded, though I could just imagine how difficult it would be to find anyone to teach thatclass. ‘Hey look, Nan! Percy’s back!’

Nan turned in delight to see the collared dove perching on the kitchen windowsill. Percy had been coming to see her for at least a year, and she loved him. Sometimes he’d bring his mate, Petra, with him and they’d sit in the garden cooing as Nan fetched them something to eat.

She immediately crumbed up the remains of her cake and went out to the garden. Percy fluttered away to a safe distance while Nan scattered the cake onto the sill. Then she stood back to see Percy return and peck happily at the cake. I watched her smile.

She lovedbirds. They seemed to love her too, and know that they were safe with her. She’d told me a million times about her father, who’d kept racing pigeons, and the way he had a special voice that he used with the birds. It was a soft and kind voice, though his usual tone was hard and clipped, even with his own children. He’d always keep a pocketful of raisin 5biscuits for the birds, though he’d tell Nan and her brother that biscuits were unnecessary and wasteful. My great grandfather didn’t seem like a very nice man from the stories I’d heard, but he’d certainly given my nan a wonderful love of birds.

Dad sometimes told her off for feeding them all the time – ‘You’ll get rats again! They love cake and bread and nuts too, Mum!’ – but Nan wasn’t going to let any rodents spoil her fun. Her mind always seemed to wander to faraway places when she was watching the birds, as if she wasn’t quite here. I loved the way her face softened when that happened, the way her eyes didn’t seem to focus on anything in particular.

I sat by the kitchen table, savouring the last of my cake. It really was delicious. ABBA was still playing in the background, and Percy was demolishing his cake outside in the sun, and I had no school for six entire weeks. Life seemed pretty much perfect.

When Nan came in, her face was bright and seemed to shine with happiness. All because of one hungry bird! She put her empty plate in the sink and turned to look at me, smiling.

Oddly, she seemed surprised to see me.

‘Oh, Johnny! I’m so glad you’ve come!’ she said, and leaned in to give me a hug.

And that’s when I knew that Nan was not well. 6

Because I’m not Johnny, I’m Huw. Johnny was Nan’s brother, who died some eighty years ago in the Second World War.

Chapter 2

‘You sure you’re okay?’ asked Kieran over the sound of the football game we were playing on his console.

‘I’m sure.’

‘Because you’re rubbish at this today.’

I shook my head, pretending to be annoyed, although I knew that he was telling the truth. ‘I just need to warm up.’

We were in his bedroom, which was huge and had a bed, a sofa, two consoles and a computer. He even had his own mini fridge with all the drinks Dad only let me have on special occasions. His mum let him do what he wanted, and always seemed to be on his side, even when he was being a pain. When he got in trouble with school for being lazy or rude, his mum would complain that the teachers had it in for him. (Some of them did, but only because he could be lazy and rude.)

I hadn’t told Kieran about what happened with Nan, because I couldn’t quite find the words to explain it. And anyway, how was he meant to respond? Sorry8thatyournan’slosingit?People just didn’t talk about things like that, especially me and Kieran. We only really talked about gaming and football and which cars we liked.

All my friends loved Nan. Her house backed onto the huge car park by the Dingle, the nature reserve in town. Nan would always keep ice cream and freezing lemonade for my friends and me on the long summer days when we did nothing but sunbathe and paddle in the water. Everyone adored her, and was jealous that I had such a cool Nan. Even Kieran, who was quite fussy about who he liked. I wasn’t ready to tell him that she was becoming someone else.

Nan had realised pretty quickly that I wasn’t Johnny – it was as if she woke up from some kind of weird dream, and she corrected herself. ‘What am I on about – Johnny! You’re not Johnny!’ And then she carried on as if nothing had happened. But I still told Dad about it that night because it felt like the right thing to do. Nan hadn’t just mixed up our names – everyone does that sometimes. I’d seen it in her eyes. For a few seconds, she’d actually thought that I was her long-dead brother.

If I’d been hoping that speaking to Dad would make me feel better, I was disappointed. He’d just finished his shift and was in one of his moods when he doesn’t have 9much to say. Sometimes, it felt difficult to say anything in our house, just in case it started one of Dad’s quiet moods, I don’t say that much. It was one of the reasons I loved Nan’s house, with her music blaring and her constant chatter. There was so much silence at home.

But I’d decided that what had happened with Nan was too important to keep to myself, so that night, when we’d both sat down to some tinned spaghetti bolognaise, I told him what she had said.

‘I knew it,’ Dad said flatly.

‘She definitely thought I was Johnny. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue.’

‘Something’s up. She hasn’t been able to talk about him, ever. Not even when I was a little boy.’

That was true. Nan could talk about anything – the weather, the books she was reading, her favourite programmes, trees and flowers, even politics – and make it interesting. But she didn’t like to talk about her brother, Johnny. Whenever anyone mentioned him, she’d turn her face away and say as little as possible. Once, when she was telling me a story about when she was little, I’d asked about him, what he was like. But she’d become very quiet and said that it was all such a long time ago now. I hadn’t asked again. It must have made her sad, to talk about someone she’d lived with so long ago.10

So the fact that Nan had mistaken me for Johnny was a big deal. A verybig deal. Thinking about it made my stomach feel odd, all queasy and unsettled. Nan was going to be fine, I silently told myself. Nan was alwaysfine.

But, as if he could read my mind, Dad wasn’t sure. He rubbed his eyes, which always seemed tired but were particularly exhausted now. ‘I suppose I ought to do something about it really.’

As we half-heartedly picked at our dinner, we started listing the odd things Nan had been doing recently. It didn’t seem so bad to begin with – they were tiny things, things that could happen to anyone. But putting them all together made me realise that she really wasn’t well.

She had forgotten where she’d left her car keys and became flustered because she wanted to go to Bangor to do her shopping and couldn’t go. The keys finally appeared in a plastic shopping bag under the sink. (I didn’t think that this was much of a big deal – Dad lost his keys all the time or left precious things in stupid places. Dad once mistakenly put his bank card in the bin by mistake. Even my phone charger had somehow ended up in the laundry basket one time.) 11She’d return from the shops having forgotten to buy a few things, although she always took a list with her. This wasn’t a big problem – I could always run down to the supermarket to get her some milk or a bag of onions – but that wasn’t the point. (Again, I didn’t think that this meant all that much – she probably just got chatting to people in the shop and forgot what she’d already put in her trolley. Dad disagreed with me. He said that what I was saying soundedreasonable, except for the fact that Nan had been shopping at the same place for almost fifty years, with the same list, more or less, always buying the same things. It was only recently that she’d started to forget things.)Dad thought that Nan was avoiding using people’s names, because she was trying to hide the fact that she couldn’t always remember who we were or what we were called. I was about to protest about this – of course she knew who I was. I went there nearly every day after school! – but before I said anything, I remembered how often Nan called me ‘love’ or ‘sweetheart’ these days. When was the last time she’d called me Huw? Had she really forgotten?She was having exactly the same conversations with us, at different times. I must admit that this shocked 12