Inside Grandad by Peter Dickinson

just come into the room.
    "Hi, Grandad …"
    But it wasn't the same. The words came steadily, in his normal voice, almost as if he'd been talking about some other kid he'd watched wade into the sea and launch his model fishing-smack out on the morning breeze. He couldn't even make it interesting. He was just talking to himself because he knew Grandad couldn't hear him.
    He stopped before he'd got to the end. It wasn't worth the misery of pretending.
    And now it hit him. It was like a wave surging against a cliff. There was a particular cleft below the cliff path on the far side of Dunnottar Castle where sometimes just before high tide, even on an almost calm day, a slow, deep swell, something you could hardly see was a wave at all, would lurch against the cliff face, forcing itself into the cleft, and the sheer weight of the raised sea behind it would send a column of water roaring unstoppably up the cleft and shooting a glittering pillar of foam out into the sunlight above.
    Like that. Inside him. The awfulness of what he'd done, the lovely boat gone, the boat Grandad had given him, made for him, spent the last months of his life on, lost, lost, thrown away …
    He was really weeping now, gasping for breath between his sobs….
    "Oh, selkie, help me," he croaked as the tears streamed down his cheeks, down his nose. He licked them from his lips. They were salt, like the sea….
    "You wantin' something, young laddie?"
    He looked up, but couldn't see, blinded by his own tears. He wiped his sleeve across his eyes, trying to clear them, but everything was still a blur, as if the room was filled with fog.
    A shape loomed in the fog—somebody—who … ?
    He wiped again and saw it must be one of the hospital tea ladies, judging by her apron and cap, though he couldn't see her trolley—everything was still a blur, apart from her headand shoulders. She had a pale, round face, round dark eyes, and two or three hairy warts on her top lip.
    "I want my Grandad," he sobbed, like a small lost boy in a crowded market. "I want to talk to him."
    She just stared at him as if he were the strangest thing she'd ever seen. He was crying again, the tears filling his eyes, blurring her out, but he heard her laugh, a sharp, yapping noise. There was a roaring in his ears, drowning the swish of the door and the rattle of her trolley, but he knew she'd gone.
    He should have asked her for something to eat. He felt very peculiar, empty inside, hollow, like that time just before he'd fainted. He felt himself falling off the stool and tried to stand up, lost his balance, and staggered against the bed. Everything had gone muzzy, everything except Grandad's hand in his own hand. Desperately he clung to it as he tumbled across the bed.
    The bed didn't stop his fall. It melted round him, melted into a sort of red mist. Or was it him melting, vanishing into the mist? He opened his mouth to cry out, and the tears dribbled into it, salt, like the sea, but there seemed to be no throat behind the mouth, nothing to cry out through, no lungs, nothing except the sea-taste, salt on his tongue, and the feel of Grandad's hand in his own.
    And then even those were gone and there was nothing. Only a sort of bodiless Gavin-bubble, lost, helpless, floating in the roaring red mist.

hud. Thud. Thud. Soft, booming thuds, endless, unchanging, going on and on through the roaring.
    He'd been holding Grandad's hand….
    Where was Grandad's hand? He wanted to grope for it, but he couldn't, because his own hand wasn't there. It wasn't anywhere.
    What had happened to his hand? To his other hand?
Him?
    The mist seemed to pulse with the thuds, and the Gavin-bubble pulsed too because it was part of the mist, getting thicker and thinner as the mist pulsed, because the mist and the roaring were inside him as well as outside, a ghastly feeling. That was all there was of Gavin, a sort of feeling, floating lost in the mist. The feeling didn't have eyes to see the mist with, ears to hear the