How To Be Brave by Louise Beech Read Free Book Online Page A

knew that however scared I felt, Rose was the one truly enduring it.
    When she gave no response to my question, I’d gently touched her cheek, tried to turn her to look at me. She’d acquiesced, but her eyes were dead.
    ‘She was so compliant,’ I told Jake.
    ‘Well, isn’t that good?’
    ‘No,’ I whispered. ‘She wasn’t there . For three days she just gave me her fingers … let me inject her little legs. Oh, her legs – like two twigs. It was like some floppy, silly, obedient creature had replaced our daughter! But oh, she’s back now.’
    How suddenly Rose had changed from not there to absolutely there. On the fourth day at home she leapt out of bed and screamed when I approached her with the box of diabetes stuff. We’d circled the room, her the bull and me the bullfighter, her red nightie tempting me to tame her.
    Catch me , her eyes said.
    I did eventually, after verbal begging and persuading, after blackmail in the form of promised money and days out, after finally sitting on her tummy while trying to be kind, gentle, motherly.
    Is a mother supposed to do such things? Should she physically force something on her child? Smother her child’s protests, lose her own temper, and cause more pain? Forced flesh resists needle, resisted needle bites harder. But I had to put my guilt in the kitchen cupboard with the tins of beans so I could do what had to be done, and scream into a pillow later.
    ‘You’ve no idea how strong she is,’ I told Jake.
    ‘Oh, I can imagine.’ I heard a smile in the words and my instinct was to berate him for being cruel, laughing at my difficulties, but I knew affection shaded the sentence. Suddenly I could smell him as though he’d sneaked up behind me. Clouds of his aftershave and deodorant and man skin enveloped me; loneliness joined it, threatening to suffocate me.
    ‘She’s never going to forgive me for forcing this on her,’ I said.
    ‘She will. She knows you have to.’
     ‘I’ve already bruised her. I can’t do it today, Jake!’
    ‘You can ,’ he said. ‘You’re doing an amazing job. No one could do it like you. She was probably letting you because she trusts you.’
    ‘I’m going to lose her.’
    ‘Never,’ he said.
    But I already had. Whenever Rose thought I wasn’t looking she glared at me, hazel irises aflame with rage and resistance, and with something I’d no name for but I feared was hatred. She’d scribbled all over the blood readings I had to record in a log book and growled when I said she was behaving like a three-year-old. She’d taken the insulin out of the fridge and binned it. She’d snapped the ends off lancets and cut up the repeat prescriptions before I’d even figured them out and eaten four snack bars instead of one.
    Her pancreas was dying, and so was our relationship.
    ‘Can I talk to her then?’ asked Jake.
    I looked at the bedside clock – how could it be nine? Rose should be awake. Even though I’d kept her off school a few days she had still woken promptly each day at seven-thirty, ready for battle.
    ‘We’ve overslept.’ I got up. ‘I’ll go and get her. Oh, I bet she’ll be happy to wake up to a call from you. Might start the day a lot better.’
    I headed across the landing to her room, collecting the dreaded diabetes box from the shelf by her door. In only five days it had become second nature to pick it up but I imagined it would be many months more until I didn’t feel utterly sick with it in my hands.
    ‘Listen, Jake, can I do her finger prick while she’s talking to you? It might distract her.’
    ‘Of course.’ He seemed pleased to have a role in her care.
    I opened her door but she wasn’t there. The bed was empty; its covers were piled up like snow. Her pillow had fallen in what looked like haste, revealing the place where books used to be. I’d tried every night to tuck one back under her head and she’d say, ‘Dickhead.’ How could I punish her for such language – didn’t I use it every