Bringing the Summer by Julia Green Page A

lots of people. And they cook these big family dinners . . . it’s all very homey and nice.’
    Mum winces.
    I realise immediately I’ve hurt her. It’s not her fault our home is so empty and quiet. That so many of her and Dad’s friends just seemed to vanish away, after Joe died, as if grief was contagious. Or simply too hard to witness, perhaps.
    Mum starts packing the sewing things away for the night. ‘Your friend Danny phoned again, but he didn’t leave a message. I said I’d tell you. And Evie sends her love. We had a lovely long conversation. She’s missing you. She was wondering whether we might all go over at half-term, or Christmas.’
    â€˜How’s Gramps?’
    â€˜Much the same. A little more muddled. But happy enough, Evie says.’
    I take my tea upstairs to my room. I can hear Dad sloshing around in the bath as I go past. He’s listening to the radio, which means he’ll be there for ages.
    I stand in the doorway of the spare room. This would be Joe’s room, if Joe were still alive. Except not really: we wouldn’t have left the old house, with the garden leading down to the canal, if Joe hadn’t had his accident. We’d be living there still. What might have been . . . But I have to stop thinking like that. We all do.
    That night, I have the weirdest dream. I’m in a sort of open-sided car, no seat belt, being driven by Theo over a steep green hill, at a precarious angle, much too fast. To my left, the hill drops away to a cliff, and beyond that is the bluest sea. I try and persuade him to slow down but he won’t take any notice of me. I wake up too hot, my heart beating too fast. It’s still dark, no sound from the street yet, so I guess it’s three or four o’clock. I make myself breathe deeply, counting, in, out, slowly, to calm myself down.
    Theo.
    Bridie.
    Me.
    That pull towards darkness, danger, death that I have . . . my fascination with it . . . what is that all about, really?
    Bridie’s story is just sad. What’s even sadder is that there are so many stories like hers. You only have to watch telly for a week, or listen to the news, to see how much sadness there is in the world. Dad and I watched a programme the other evening about some children taken hostage at a school in Beslan, Russia, back in 2004. Hundreds of people died. The cemetery was full of children’s graves, headstones with photographs: children frozen in time, forever five, or eight, or eleven years old. The boys who survived thought all the time about violence and revenge. The girls were different. Quietly, deeply depressed.
    Something else struck me. All the children said that they must have survived for a reason. They would do something special and amazing with their life. They would make sure that they would be extraordinary adults.
    I saw in them something which I recognise in myself: that feeling about how precious life is. About how not to take it for granted, ever.
    Which is exactly what Bridie didn’t have, did she? Bridie gave up. She lost hope. And why was that? That’s the mystery, for me. The thing I need to understand.

Twelve
    It’s properly autumn now. Our sunny, golden September is just a memory. There have been huge storms: Evie sent me a letter describing the October gales which cut off the island for a week, and washed up the carcass of a rare Sowerby’s beaked whale on Periglis beach. She enclosed a photo, taken on Gramps’ old Leica camera. Twelve feet long, female. They are normally a deepwater species: it’s very unusual to see them.
    I wish I could be there. But it’s not practical, not even for half-term; it’s too expensive, and too likely that bad weather will mean I can’t get back on time for college, and Dad won’t hear of that.
    A postcard arrives, from Oxford. Theo’s message, written in fine italic handwriting in black ink, is a puzzle.
    Cycled to Binsey