Inside Grandad by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online

he was saying, he thought. And then it had dived out of sight and you'd never have known it was there. But it had still been there, somewhere below the surface. And Grandad was still there too.
    Perhaps Gavin was the only person who really believed that, he thought. And maybe that meant he was the only person who could get Grandad back. How? How to be alone with him for a while, day after day, when it would always be Gran taking Gavin to Aberdeen and Mum coming to fetch them … ?
    "What's the physio like, Don?"
    "Fine. Obviously knows her stuff, but human with it. They're a pretty good bunch on the whole."
    "Do you think you could persuade her to tell Mum it's a good idea for me to be alone with Grandad some of the time ?"
    "You want him for just yourself?"
    "Course not. But …"
    Gavin hesitated. Donald hadn't sounded disapproving, just amused and surprised, but he was right too, in a way. Maybe there
was
something a bit selfish about thinking he was the only one who could really help Grandad, get through to him. Still…
    "I'm what he's used to, you see," he said. "We don't talk a lot, so he listens to me when I say something. Mum and Gran will just go and sit by his bed and talk and talk and talk, but that's no help because he's used to shutting them out."
    Donald laughed.
    "I suppose it's a point," he said. "I'll brood on it."
    Gavin plowed on. He could hear from Donald's voice that he was being pushy about this, but he'd thought the whole thing through, over and over, and he couldn't have stopped it coming out, even if he'd wanted to.
    "Don't try and tell Mum yourself," he said. "You'll just get into a row. But if you could get onto Dad and get him to say to Mum that it's okay for me to go over on the train after school. And then Mum and Gran wouldn't have to rush away from work but one of them could come over and be with Grandad for a bit and bring me back…."
    "Okay, okay—you'll be telling the consultant what to donext. Look, I was going to call Dad anyway—tell him about the scan. I'll see what he says."
    "Great. You can e-mail me on Grandad's PC. I've got an address there. I'll write it down."
    Gavin watched Donald roar away on his motorbike, then went in and got a take-away lamb stew out of the freezer. Mum always said supermarket instant meals were full of chemicals and stuff, but she'd stocked up with them for now, while they were having to go over to Aberdeen most evenings. Gavin guessed she secretly preferred instants to real cooking anyway.
    The sound of the freezer door woke Dodgem from his normal stupor, so to make up, sort of, for wanting to have Grandad all to himself when he mattered just as much to Gran, Gavin took Dodgem out on the usual snail's-pace round to sniff at every other gatepost for doggie messages and leave his own messages on top of them. That left just enough time to go up to the attic and put a final coat on
Selkie's
wheelhouse.

fter all that it was Gran who really did the trick, but Don helped too. When she picked Gavin up from Mrs. McCracken's next day she started telling him pretty well at once about Katie Wilson who dispensed the medicines at Boots and what a bright kid she'd been—mad about chemistry, and getting a scholarship to Cambridge University and how everyone had expected her to go on and get to be a professor and win the Nobel Prize and so on, but all she'd really wanted to do was come back and live in Stonehaven and marry Bobby Wilson and have six children only she couldn't because Bobby, despite him being such a fine upstanding lad to look at, had a sperm count which was pretty well zilch, but they adopted anyway and seeing them together with the kids you wouldn't ever guess it if you'd not been told.
    That lasted them till they got to the station. Gavin tuned most of it out, though other times he might have been interested because Tod Wilson had been in Arduthie Primary till last year, though Gavin hadn't had much to do with him, being a couple of years younger. Gran