The Ultimate Truth (22 page)

And that would be the end of it.

I couldn’t let that happen.

6.56 p.m. Nan came upstairs to see how I was doing. I told her I was fine.

‘Do you want anything to eat?’ she asked me. ‘We’re just going to have sandwiches, but I don’t mind cooking something if you’re hungry.’

‘I’m a bit tired, Nan,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll just get some sleep, if that’s OK.’

‘Of course it is. Do you want me to make you some cocoa?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘All right,’ she said, smiling. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it then.’

7.02 p.m. I opened my laptop and started a game of chess.

But my heart wasn’t really in it.

And neither was my brain.

Five minutes later, the game was over.

Checkmate in ten moves.

7.44 p.m. I went to the bathroom. As quietly as possible, I opened the window, leaned out, and double-checked the drainpipe. Could I reach it from here? Check. Did it go all
the way down to the ground? Check. Was it sturdy enough to take my weight? Just about, I guessed . . . although it didn’t look quite as secure as I’d thought.

Don’t worry about it
, I told myself, closing the window.
You’ll be all right.

I flushed the toilet, ran the hot tap for a while, then left.

As I was heading back along the landing, I heard Granny Nora calling out to me from her room.

‘Travis? Is that you?’

For a second I was tempted to ignore her. Just pretend I hadn’t heard her, go back to my room, and shut the door. But I knew I wasn’t going to do that. I couldn’t. It was
Granny Nora . . . I couldn’t
ignore
Granny Nora.

‘Travis?’ she called out again.

I paused for a moment, let out a sigh, then opened her door and went inside.

When Granny Nora’s arthritis had started getting really bad, Grandad had fixed up the house to make things as easy as possible for her. He’d put in an en-suite
bathroom so she didn’t have to keep shuffling along the landing to the toilet, and although he’d rigged up a stairlift for her too, so she could still get downstairs even when her
arthritis was really playing up, he’d also built a little kitchen area into her room, with a microwave and a mini-fridge and stuff, so she didn’t have to come downstairs to eat if she
didn’t want to. Basically, her room was fitted out like a self-contained flat.

She was in her usual position when I went in that evening – sitting in her ancient armchair by the window. Her laptop and her mobile phone were in easy reach on the table beside her,
together with a pile of crime novels, a packet of biscuits, and her iPod. A paperback book was resting in her lap, and her binoculars were on the windowsill. Granny Nora likes to know what’s
going on, and when she’s not reading or listening to music or surfing the web, she’s quite happy just sitting by the window watching the world through her binoculars.

‘Hey, Granny,’ I said, going over to her.

‘What?’ she replied, cupping her hand to her ear.

‘Turn your hearing aid on,’ I told her, tapping my ear.

‘Oh, right,’ she said, grinning as she fiddled with her hearing-aid controls. ‘Silly me. I forgot again.’

‘It’s funny how you keep “forgetting” to turn on your hearing aid, but you never seem to forget anything else.’

‘What?’ she said, cupping her ear again.

‘I said it’s funny—’

She grinned again, and I realised she’d got me.

‘Yeah, good one, Gran,’ I said, smiling at her.

‘I might be old and decrepit,’ she said, ‘but I’m still too quick for you.’

I’ve always loved the sound of Granny Nora’s voice. She was born and raised in Dublin, and there’s something kind of comforting about her strong Irish accent, something that
never fails to lift my spirits. Even when she’s moaning about things, which she does a
lot
– cursing about this, griping about that, effing and blinding about her ‘stupid
bloody arthritis’ – I still love listening to her. She knows more rude words than anyone I’ve ever met. And unlike most adults, she doesn’t stop using them when I’m
around. ‘They’re only
words
, for goodness sake,’ she’d told Mum once (although she’d used a
slightly
stronger word than ‘goodness’).
‘The boy’s not a baby, is he?’ she’d added. ‘He’s going to hear a lot worse in his time. He might as well get used to it.’

The memory of Mum trying to stifle a laugh at this brought a smile to my face. Mum and Granny Nora had always been really close, and although Gran was my dad’s grandmother – and they
didn’t actually
look
anything like each other – there’d always been something about Gran that reminded me of Mum.

I looked at Granny now, trying to see my mum in her, but all I could see was something my mum would never be: an old woman. My mum would never be an old woman. She’d never be a nan or a
granny. She’d always be thirty-seven years old.

If
that
wasn’t unfair, I didn’t know what was.

‘Sit down, Travis,’ Granny said gently. ‘Talk to me for a while.’

I hesitated, not sure what to say. I loved being with Granny, but I didn’t really feel like talking right now.

‘Just sit with me for five minutes then,’ she said, as if she could read my mind. ‘I’m not
that
boring, am I?’

‘You’re never boring, Gran,’ I told her, settling down in a cushioned wicker chair on the other side of the window. ‘You might be really annoying sometimes, but
you’re definitely not boring.’

‘Well, that’s good to know,’ she said.

‘How are you feeling today?’

‘You don’t want to know how I’m feeling.’

‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.’

‘Yes, you would. You’re just being polite.’

I sighed, shaking my head. ‘You wanted me to talk to you, Gran. That’s all I’m trying to do.’

‘I know,’ she said softly. ‘I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean anything.’ She grinned. ‘My default setting seems to be “grumpy old woman” these
days. I don’t even know I’m doing it most of the time. Just ignore me when I’m like that, OK?’

I didn’t say anything. I just stared out of the window, pretending to concentrate on something outside.

‘Travis?’ she said. ‘Did you hear me?’

‘Sorry, Gran,’ I said, turning round. ‘I was ignoring you. What did you say?’

She nodded, smiling, and pointed a bony finger at me. ‘That’s one-all, I believe.’

It was nice having a joke with Gran, and just for a moment everything felt OK again, but we both knew it wasn’t. As the moment faded, our smiles faded with it.

‘Listen, Travis,’ Granny said quietly, her eyes suddenly gentle and caring. ‘There’s nothing I can say to ease your pain, and I know you probably don’t want to talk
about it anyway. But if you do ever want to talk about it, or if you just want to talk about anything . . . well, you know I’m always here for you, don’t you?’

I nodded.

‘If you don’t feel like talking,’ she continued, ‘you can always just come in here and sit with me if you want. And if you don’t want to, if you want to be on your
own, that’s fine as well.’ She leaned forward in her chair and looked into my eyes. ‘At times like this, Travis, you just have to do whatever feels right for you.’

I looked at her. ‘But what if it
only
feels right to me? I mean, what if I feel that I have to do something that everyone else thinks is wrong?’

‘Do you care what everyone else thinks?’

‘I care what Nan and Grandad think. And you, of course.’

‘Ah, I see,’ she said, nodding thoughtfully. ‘Well, that’s different, isn’t it? That puts you in a bit of a tricky position . . .’ She leaned back in her
chair, her brow furrowed in thought, and I wondered then how much she knew about everything. Had Nan or Grandad told her what was going on? Had she worked it all out herself? Did she know a lot
more than she was letting on?

‘I can’t tell you what to do, Travis,’ she said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

I nodded.

She smiled. ‘I remember saying the very same thing to your grandad when he was a boy.’ She gazed out of the window, her eyes lost in the memory. ‘Joseph had just turned sixteen
when he told me he was leaving home to join the army. He knew I didn’t want him to, and I knew it pained him to go against my will. But for some reason – which I still don’t
understand – he was absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do. As far as he was concerned, he just
had
to join the army.’ She sighed. ‘He’d prefer to leave
with my blessing, he told me, but in the end he was going whether I liked it or not.’

‘What did you do?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ she said emptily. ‘What could I do? I wasn’t going to lie to him and tell him he had my blessing, because he didn’t. I despised the idea of him being a
soldier. But I couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t lock him up, could I? All I could do was . . .’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t do anything. I just had to let him
go.’

‘Do you still wish he hadn’t joined the army?’

She looked at me for a moment or two, then said, ‘There’s never any point in wishing things were different. Things are what they are. Good or bad, right or wrong. You can’t
change the past, Travis. You just have to live with it.’

At 9.15, as the sun finally dipped below the horizon, I made one last adjustment to the pillows I’d stuffed under my duvet, then I went over to the bedroom door and
studied my handiwork from there. I’d never actually seen myself asleep in bed, so it was hard to know whether the body-shaped lump I’d constructed under the duvet would fool Nan and
Grandad or not. It obviously wouldn’t stand up to close inspection, but if you were standing in the doorway, and you didn’t turn on the light . . . well, it might just do the trick.

I nodded to myself.

It would have to do.

I picked up my trainers, opened the door, and paused, listening. The TV was on in the sitting room, and I could just make out the muffled sound of Nan’s voice as she asked Grandad
something . . . and a moment later he grunted something in reply . . . and then they were both quiet again.

With my trainers in my hand, I headed along the landing to the bathroom. I didn’t try to keep quiet, I just tried to walk as normally as possible, as if all I was doing was going to the
bathroom. It was a surprisingly difficult thing to do, and the more I thought about it, the more abnormally I walked. Eventually, worried that I was going to burst out laughing or fall over, or
both, I stopped thinking about it, and that seemed to work.

Inside the bathroom, I switched on the light, locked the door, put on my trainers, then stood still and listened again. Everything sounded the same. My abnormal hobbling didn’t seem to
have rung any alarm bells. I waited another minute, then flushed the toilet, ran the hot tap, and opened the window. After twenty seconds or so, I turned off the tap, switched off the light,
unlocked the door, opened it, and then very quietly closed it again. There was nothing I could do about the lack of footsteps going back to my room. I just had to hope that Nan and Grandad
didn’t notice.

Moving very carefully, and as quietly as possible, I stepped up onto the windowsill, then crouched down and eased myself through the open window. The ledge outside was wide enough to stand on. I
cautiously shuffled along it, inching towards the drainpipe.

The drainpipe was one of those big old metal ones, which had the advantage of being easy to climb down. But the closer I got to it, the more I started worrying that it might be too old to take
my weight. It looked pretty solid – bolted to the wall with hefty metal brackets – but close-up I could see that the paintwork was peeling away, revealing thick patches of rust
underneath.

Don’t think about it
, I told myself.

Don’t think about anything.

Just do it.

I reached out my right arm, got a hold on the pipe, then stretched out my right leg and placed my foot on one of the brackets. I gave the pipe a couple of good shakes to test its strength, and
then, satisfied that it seemed sturdy enough, I stepped off the window ledge, pulling myself towards the pipe, and grabbed hold of it with both hands. My heart stopped for a moment as my left foot
missed the bracket and I felt myself slipping, but once I’d scrambled around and found the bracket with my left foot, I felt relatively secure.

I hung there for a second or two, waiting for my heart to get back to normal again, then I began climbing down.

For the first few metres or so, everything was fine. The drainpipe held steady, the brackets took my weight, the pipe was easy to hold on to. In fact, it was all so easy that I began to relax a
little, taking my time, breathing in the cool night air, looking around at the view – the night sky, the street lights in the distance, the neighbouring gardens down below . . .

And then, with a rusty creak, a bracket gave way and the drainpipe lurched away from the wall. I’ll never forget the momentary terror I felt, deep in my belly, as I felt myself falling
backwards, still gripping onto the drainpipe, but suddenly aware that it was no longer connected to anything. Luckily for me the other brackets didn’t break off immediately, and as the
drainpipe held for a moment or two, groaning with the strain, I just had time to look down, see that I was only about two metres from ground, and jump.

It was an instinctive, split-second decision, so I don’t really know if I was aiming to land in the big old lavender bush on the other side of the path, but that’s what I did. And
there was no doubt that it cushioned my fall. I just kind of dropped down into the bush, flopped around for a bit, then rolled off backwards into a flower bed.

Apart from a few scratches – and a horrible shaky feeling in my belly – I wasn’t hurt.

I got to my knees, brushed myself down, and carefully peeked round the lavender bush at the house. The damaged section of drainpipe was leaning out at an angle from the wall, but now that it
didn’t have to support my weight any more, it didn’t look as if it was going to get any worse. Inside the house, the kitchen light was on, but there was no sign of Nan or Grandad.