Ways to Live Forever (14 page)
DREAMING | 12th April |
This time when I fell asleep, I dreamed.
I dreamed I was sleeping in Mum and Dad’s big bed again. Mum and Dad were there too, and Ella. It was very early in the morning. I could see the light coming through the windows and the sky, pale and fragile and still. There were no clouds. I could see everything very sharp and clear. I could see the curtains moving in the breeze from the window. I could see the apple tree in the garden, all covered in new little leaves.
In my dream, we were all asleep. Ella was sleeping on her back, next to me. Her face was pink and I could see the muscles moving under her skin, so I knew she was dreaming. Dad had his arm around her. The back of his hand was just brushing against mine. Mum was sleeping on her side. She was curved around me. I could feel her hair against my neck, soft and light.
I was sleeping too, warm there in the middle of my family-nest, but it was as if I was outside myself. I was watching myself sleeping, from above. There were no bright lights. There were no angels. There was just Mum and Dad and Ella, all asleep on the big bed with me there above them, watching as they got smaller and smaller and further and further away.
I woke. I was lying in the big bed, just like in my dream. The room was full of pale light and soft with early morning quiet. Mum was asleep on her side. Dad was lying awake beside me. When he saw me watching, he smiled.
“Hey,” he said, and stretched out his hand. I held it loosely in mine.
“Why am I in your bed?” I said.
“Because you’ve got a temperature,” he said.
I lay there, quiet. I felt very strange. It was as if my body didn’t belong to me any more; as if I were floating just above it. It felt heavy and old and very, very tired.
“I love you,” said Dad suddenly.
He seemed very far away and unimportant.
“I know,” I said.
We lay there, just the two of us, very quiet and still, me holding his fingers between mine. Then I closed my eyes again and drifted back into sleep.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS | |
First of all, huge thanks to Julia Green and everyone on the wonderful MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa: Sandra-Lynne Jones, Kellie Jones, Julia Draper, Sian Price, Tara Button, Sarah Oliver, Lucy Staff, Sarah Lee and Liz Kernoghan. Without you this book would never have been written. Thank you for your encouragement, for saying, “No, Sally,” week after week and for all your invaluable suggestions.
Thank you to CLIC nurses at the Royal United Hospital in Bath and to the Children’s Hospice in Bristol for answering all my questions. Particular thanks to Cylla Cole at the Bristol Royal Hospital for Children for her enthusiasm and for reading the manuscript before publication. Thanks to Anna James for telling me about platelets (“yellow and squishy”) and children’s oncology wards (“surprisingly cheerful”) and for letting me see her Hickman Line.
Thank you to my dear mum for believing in me and supporting me and to my family for all the bits of real life I borrowed for the book. Thank you to the Republic of Stanley Road for saying, “Of course you should be a writer!” and laughing at me in such an encouraging way. Thank you to Tom Harris for smiling at me lovingly over the top of a laptop. Thank you to Raoul Sullivan for telling me about how great airships are. Thank you to Rosemary Canter for saying yes.
Finally, thank you to Oliviero Muzi-Falconi for being the handwriting of Sam. Thanks to Filippo Muzi-Falconi for drawing Sam's pictures, to Freya Wilson for drawing Ella's, and to Nikalas Catlow for Dad's. Also thanks to Caro Humphries and Tom Harris, for providing handwriting.
Sally Nicholls
London, 2007
WEBSITES
CLIC Sargent
Children with Leukaemia
Macmillan Cancer Support
National hospice charity
FICTION FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
Two Weeks with the Queen
by Morris Gleitzman
Charlotte’s Web
by E. B. White
Becky Bananas: This Is Your Life!
by Jean Ure
Through a Glass, Darkly
by Jostein Gaarder
FICTION FOR ADULTS
Oscar and the Lady in Pink
by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
Spoonface Steinberg
a play by Lee Hall
REFERENCE BOOKS
The Private Worlds of Dying Children
by Myra
Bluebond-Langner
On Death and Dying
by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Living with Death and Dying
by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Final Gifts: Understanding and Helping the Dying
by Maggie
Callanan and Patricia Kelley
Sally Nicholls
was born in Stockton, just after midnight, in a thunderstorm. Her father died when she was two, and she and her brother were brought up by her mother. She has always loved reading, and spent most of her childhood trying to make real life work like it did in books. After school, she worked in Japan for six months and travelled around Australia and New Zealand, then came back and did a degree in Philosophy and Literature at Warwick. In her third year she enrolled in a Masters in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University. It was here, at the age of twenty-two, that she wrote Ways to Live Forever, her first novel. Sally is now living in London where she works part-time and continues to write.
1
Ashrita Furman, on 23rd July 1999. Ashrita Furman has broken over sixty world records, including the record for the person to break the most world records.
2
It’s called an IV stand. I’ve got my own IV stand with vampire stickers stuck all over it. They don’t actually tie you to it. It just feels like it.
4
In my type, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, my body makes too many lymphoblasts, which are baby white blood cells. But the result is the same.
6
Auntie Sarah also gave Ella a whole lot of Sylvanian families stuff, which is good, because otherwise she moans about not getting anything. You get lots of free stuff if you’re sick, but it doesn’t work if you’re just someone sick’s sister.
7
It’s true. Leukaemia was invented by this guy John Hughes Bennett in 1845. The first kid diagnosed with leukaemia was in 1850. Dr Bennett looked at her blood through a microscope and said it was full of “colourless, granular, spheroidal globules”. That was the white blood cells, only he didn’t know it then.
The reason it took so long to diagnose a kid was that they didn’t used to let kids go to hospital because they thought they carried infections. How weird is that?
First published in the UK in 2008 by Marion Lloyd Books
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Marion Lloyd Books
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Text © Sally Nicholls, 2008
Lines from
Children and Death
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Definitions of ‘Death’ and ‘Airship’ from the Concise English Dictionary (9e)
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eISBN 978 1 407132 79 2
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.