How To Be Brave by Louise Beech

books. Something I can look forward to. Not boring and with really proper chapters.’
    I hid my panic with a calm nod.
    ‘So who’s the man that whispers to me all the time?’
    The weight of responsibility stopped me midway across the dining room. What if I couldn’t tell the story? What if I didn’t do it justice? Paint it well? Find the right words or put them together in a way that Rose loved? I’d written stories on notepads until I was perhaps fifteen, and still often woke with ideas in my head and lovely lines on my tongue, but I was no writer.
    And I’d have to speak this story, put together the collectanea of things I’d read in newspaper cuttings and Colin’s diary recollections and my own imaginings. And all on the spot.
    ‘Well,’ said Rose. ‘Who is he?’
    ‘Let me get your cereal and some milk first,’ I said. ‘Then we won’t have to stop. We’ll do your blood reading in the book nook and you can eat your breakfast here too and have an injection without interrupting the story.’
    ‘What about school?’ demanded Rose, still scowly.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘When you do my injection at dinnertime – what then?’
    ‘Oh.’ I thought about it. ‘Maybe I could read a few lines from the diary then?’
    ‘What diary?’
    ‘The brown book by my bed. The book you found in the shed,’ I said. ‘It’s his – the man in the brown suit.’
    Rose stared up and to her right. I’d once read somewhere that when we remember we look to the right as we try and recall. If we’re asked to imagine something, to invent or create, we look left. Left to lie, right to recall.
    ‘He got a diary to match his jacket,’ she said, more to herself than to me.
    ‘I suppose he did,’ I said.
    I went quickly to the kitchen and got the packet of Bran Flakes and a bowl and spoon and some milk before Rose changed her mind and crept back off to bed. I sat on the cushion opposite her with everything we needed, and put the strip in the blood machine with nervous fingers.
    Hands behind her back, Rose said, ‘So who is he?’
    She wanted this story – I could tell – but the price for hearing it was high. I held my hand out to take hers and she looked at it but not at me.
    ‘I promise I’ll tell you if you let me do your blood,’ I said.
    It seemed an age until she held her arm out straight in front, like children did in the days when schoolteachers rapped their fingers with a ruler for bad behaviour. I was going to hurt her too. I had no choice. But I could take us somewhere else; we could escape to the ocean.
    ‘He’s your great grandfather,’ I said, selecting a finger that didn’t look too sore. ‘My grandad, my dad’s dad. And his name was Colin.’
    I decided to try and start gently. Wasn’t that how great stories began? I pricked Rose’s finger end and she scratched me.
    Quickly I tried to find words that would soothe. I said, ‘Colin’s story started about a thousand miles off the coast of Africa, near a place called Ascension Island, on 19 th March 1943. This small volcanic island was a safe haven for mariners and named so because it was discovered on Ascension Day. That was when the resurrected Jesus was taken up to heaven and everyone…’
    ‘No bible stuff,’ snapped Rose. ‘We do enough at school! Tell me the adventurey stuff or I’m going upstairs.’
    ‘It kind of fits in with the story,’ I said.
    Her blood read nine-point-four and I was pleased. I poured milk on the cereal and handed it to her.
    ‘I’m supposed to try and make it as good as a proper book remember,’ I said. ‘With the descriptions and interesting stuff. If I’m going to be as a good as JK Rowling I’ve got to do the build-up and all that haven’t I? That’s the part you loved when you were little and we read together. You’d bounce about and get excited at the start.’
    ‘Bet I didn’t.’ She noisily ate her Bran Flakes.
    ‘So it all began in the middle of the night when an Italian navy submarine