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I'M NOT that interested in going into all the details about how my brother Brian died, but basically what happened was that he leaned out of the highest window in our house to wave to me because I was playing in our garden. And he kind of wobbled and then fell, and he made this huge “Whoa” noise all the way down and I thought it was a trick, so I started laughing even though he was dead. When I moved in with my granny Deedee and my granddad Kevin, they said that we wouldn't talk about it anymore and that we'd do our best to put upsetting thoughts right out of our heads, which was fine with me. I hated the way everyone had felt sorry for us, and how they used to talk in these holy voices whenever we were around, the way people do when they're in a hospital or a church. My grandparents didn't want anyone to pity me, because pity is not that helpful. I think they hoped I'd forget the whole thing and get on with my life.

I never did forget. I never will.

I found out much later that Granddad had done his best to save Brian after all. My Granny Deedee said it was the
strangest thing, but as soon as Brian was born, my granddad all of a sudden got very concerned about heights. “He was forever going about locking the windows and hiding the keys, and your mother thought he was going mad. He spent all of Brian's childhood warning him about windows and how dangerous it is to dangle out of them. He was assiduous, Cosmo. It got so that he'd hardly let him anywhere NEAR a window. It was as if he already knew what would happen to Brian. And then eventually, when it did happen, well, he blamed himself so very much.”

And what happened was that Brian found an open window one day and he loved the wind in his face and being up so high and the way things are when you are looking down on the world, and he leaned out too far, like people sometimes do. He just leaned out too far.

It's lousy, I know, but as soon as Dr. Sally disappeared, my granddad's memory started going seriously south again.

I opened up the Memory Cure website. I hadn't looked at it for a while. Suddenly the instructions looked kind of stupid. I clicked on a link at the bottom that I'd missed, and there was this paragraph that more or less admitted there are some kinds of memory loss that nobody can do that much about. I sort of wish that particular piece of information had been a little closer to the top of the pathetic website.

It shouldn't have been called the Memory Cure at all.
It should have been called: “Try a few useless things to improve someone's memory, and then when they don't work, give up.” That would have been a more accurate title.

Later that night I wandered into the kitchen and I looked around. All the Post-its were there, like old soldiers whose jobs are done but who still refuse to leave their positions.

I have all those colored notes. I keep them in a drawer in my own room, and I have a really good lock on it that you can only open if you know this number code, and I'm the only one who knows it. Sometimes, not very often, I take them out and read them. And the one I wrote about Brian makes me feel there is another version of myself out there somewhere, trying to comfort me still.

Just because you can't see someone anymore doesn't mean that they're not part of you. There are people who are gone and dead and there are even people you have never met, and things about them are buried inside you like golden fossils. It could be a saying or an idea or a habit that you have learned from someone in your family who learned it from someone else. It could be the way you pat someone's hand when they need to be comforted. Or it could be the dimples in your cheeks that happen when you smile.

Maggie McGuire died in 1943 of a thing called puerperal fever. It's something that people used to get after they had a baby in unhygienic circumstances or if they couldn't
get fairly speedy access to antibiotics. Granddad never talked about it. After Maggie had died, he had wanted to take care of baby Nora, but nobody would let a young kid bring up a baby in those days. Actually, when I think about it, they probably wouldn't even allow that now. In those days unclaimed babies were often sent to horrible places that pretended to be laundries. And babies who went there were treated like prisoners. Kevin had been pretty sure this might be what would happen to Nora, so he begged Mrs. Kelly to keep her safe and take care of her. By then Mrs. Kelly completely loved the baby and was pretty sick of working at Blackbrick herself, so she packed her bags, and even though she didn't have that much money at all, still she was able somehow to take herself and the baby to Boston, which at the time people reckoned was as far away as, say, Sydney is now.

And years later my granddad married Cordelia, who is my gran, and now there's my mum and my uncle Ted, who is actually one of the soundest guys I know, and there's me, and well, you know, the rest is history. Everything becomes history in the end.

Nothing turned out the way my granddad planned it, even though he was brave and clever when he was young, and his plans were usually quite well thought-out in advance.

I googled “Nora McGuire” and found out that she had had loads of grandchildren. I e-mailed one of them, pretending I was doing a project on the history of Blackbrick Abbey for
school. And now Nora's granddaughter is a friend of mine on Facebook. She told me that Nora had been brought up in America by her legal guardian, a woman called Mary Kelly. And the reason they'd been able to travel to America, so the story goes, was that someone called George Corporamore had given them enough money to travel there and start a new life. Apparently Nora had always been a wonderful, kind, generous, and very courteous woman, much loved by everyone who knew her, which made me feel delighted and proud, not that any of it came as much of a surprise.

Nora's granddaughter thought it was slightly weird that my name was Cosmo, seeing as it had been her grandmother's inexplicable middle name too. I was about to start explaining it to her when I realized how ridiculous it was all going to sound, so I stopped. “Yeah, it's a freaky coincidence okay,” was all I said about it in the end.

There are different kinds of stories about what Lord George Corporamore was actually like. Some said he was lousy and vain and snobbish and condescending and exploitative. Others said that he was a good-hearted defender of the common people and fantastically decent. Hardly anybody knows the truth.

Me and Nora's granddaughter ended up Skyping each other a good few times. I asked her loads more questions. She said I was very thorough and that I was definitely going to ace my project.

Granny Deedee said that the stories of those horses
flying around Blackbrick were like a legend that had survived, but now there aren't that many people around who remember if the legend was true. She remembers meeting Kevin when he was a stable boy and how handsome he was. “Were there any other handsome boys?” I asked her, and she said that before the war there had been lots and lots but their names and faces had floated away in the fog of time, and in any case she only had eyes for Kevin.

She did say how she remembers that everyone had been amazed about how fit and fast and shiny those two remaining Blackbrick horses always seemed to be.

It was all true. It totally did happen. The brilliant horses really were there, and Maggie McGuire was there too, and Nora was born and Maggie was a hero who would have done anything at all to protect her new baby. Maggie would have been fine if it hadn't been for the fever. That and the lack of antibiotics.

And sometimes I can still see Mrs. Kelly standing by the stove in the kitchen at Blackbrick Abbey, and in my mind she's strong and kind and practical and on my side, just like she always used to be.

Chapter 23

AFTER THE whole Blackbrick experience, I took a bit of a break from everything, but my mum said that sooner or later I was going to have to start getting back to normal. I replied that there was no such thing as normal, and I tried to tell her that I was quite resourceful now and could probably figure out a way of taking care of my own education. She was having none of it, though. So I had to go back to school and act as if nothing had ever happened, which was a pain at first.

As soon as I walked in the door, Mrs. Cribben was all, “Class, say hello to Cosmo. It
is
good to see you. Isn't it, everyone?” Patronizing stuff like that.