Bang Bang You're Dead by Narinder Dhami Read Free Book Online Page B

greenfly.
    A month later, Mr Culpepper's plants began dying, turning into rotting brown stems before our astonished eyes. It was the talk of the street, and Grandpa and Mum were sure that Mr Culpepper had been sabotaged by one of his gardening rivals. Jamie and I simply thought that it served him right. Eventually, though, I did feel sorry for Mr Culpepper when I saw him crying over a beautiful coral-coloured rose tree that was shrivelling and dying. Mr Culpepper didn't bother with the garden again after that. He moved away a few months later and we never saw him again.
    At the time it never entered my head that Jamie might – might – have had something to do with this. I only realized later that in the jumble of the old, collapsing shed at the bottom of our garden, there were several rusty cans of weedkiller.
    But could Jamie actually do such a thing?
    Would any six-year-old?
    I know the 'normal' ones wouldn't.
    And there were other happenings too.
    It would take me a long time to tell you them all. They mean almost nothing on their own, but if you put them together and look at them as one, they appear more than slightly sinister.
    These were the happy years, though, living with Grandpa. There was always food on the table and hot water for baths in the old claw-footed Victorian tub, and the electricity never got cut off because Mum hadn't any money for the meter, and we didn't have to hide whenever anyone came to the door in case they wanted payment for something or other. Jamie and I had always felt responsible for Mum, but now we were safe with Grandpa because he stepped in and took charge of her illness.
    'Your mum needs some help because the chemicals inside her body don't always work the way they're supposed to, the way ours do,' Grandpa explained to Jamie and me. 'It's not her fault, always remember that.'
    After months of persuasion, Grandpa managed to get Mum to see the doctor. Then, using a variety of methods, he would alternately wheedle, beg, blackmail or bully her into taking her medication regularly. At first Mum refused and would flounce off in a rage, but Grandpa never gave up.
    'Come along, my darling,' he'd say, stroking Mum's hair, and eventually she began dutifully taking her tablets, like an obedient child. Grandpa also tried to persuade her to start seeing a therapist, and she did, in a fitful kind of way.
    But, very gradually, the highs and lows of Mum's behaviour began to stabilize, and Jamie and I saw someone different, someone we hardly recognized as our mother, someone who wasn't either severely depressed or outrageously overconfident and full of her own self-importance. It was all very slow, and there were times when Mum slipped back into her old ways. But I was so much happier, and so was Jamie. I had always been much closer to Mum than he was, but now he would draw pictures for her at school or make breakfast or leave a flower on her pillow.
    Normal things.
    Suddenly we were a normal family.
    Remember what I told you? When something good happens to me, something bad follows right on behind? When Jamie and I were twelve years old, Grandpa became very ill, and a year of hospital visits began.
    'Grandpa has cancer and the doctors don't know if he's going to get better,' Mum explained. She was tearful when she told us, but the melodramatic outbursts that were such a feature of her illness were now a thing of the past. 'And he has to stay in hospital for a long time.'
    There was a poster on the wall of the hospital visitors' room where we spent so many unhappy hours, waiting for the latest update about Grandpa's condition. One in four people will get cancer in their lifetime, it said above a picture of a blonde white woman, a young black man, an elderly Asian lady and a middle-aged man. As Grandpa became thinner, more yellow-faced and shrunken, I used to wonder who the other three people in the world were who wouldn't get cancer now that my grandpa had it. I had to try hard not to hate them.
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