Читать книгу What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible - Ross Welford, Ross Welford - Страница 18

Great-gran was wheeled out of her room by one of the staff, Gram scuttling behind her, and I was left alone, staring at the sea.

There was something missing. Someone missing.

My mum. She should have been there. Four generations of women in the family and one of them – my mum – was being forgotten.

How much do you remember from when you were very little? Like, before you were, say, four years old?

Gram says she hardly remembers anything.

I think of it like this: your memory is like a big jug that gets gradually fuller and fuller. By the time you’re Gram’s age your memory’s pretty much full, so you have to start getting rid of stuff to create room and the easiest stuff to get rid of is the oldest.

For me, though, the memories I have of when I was tiny are all I have left of my mum. Plus a little collection of mementos, which is really just a cardboard box with a lid.

The main thing in it is a T-shirt. That’s what I always see when I open the box up because it’s the biggest item. A plain black T-shirt. It was Mum’s and smells of her, still.

And when I open the box, which stays in my cupboard most of the time, I take out the T-shirt and hold it to my nose, and I close my eyes. I try to remember Mum, and I try not to be sad.

The smell, like the memory, is really faint now. It’s a mixture of a musky perfume and laundry detergent and sweat, but clean sweat – not the sort of cheesy smell that people say Elliot Boyd has but that I’ve never smelt. It’s just the smell of a person. My person, my mum. It’s strongest under the arms of the T-shirt, which sounds gross but it isn’t. One day, the smell will be gone completely. That scares me a bit.

There’s also a birthday card to me, and I know the rhyme off by heart.

To a darling little person

This card has come to say

That I wish you joy and happiness

On your very first birthday

And in neat, round letters it’s handwritten: To my Boo, happy first birthday from Mummy xoxox

Boo was Mum’s pet name for me. Gram said she didn’t want to use it herself because it was special to me and Mum, and that’s cool. It’s like we have a secret, me and Mum, a thing we share, only us.

The nice thing about the card is that it has picked up the tiniest bit of the T-shirt’s smell, so as well as smelling of paper it, too, smells of Mum.

I was thinking about this, sitting in Great-gran’s room, when Gram interrupted my thoughts.

‘Are you coming, Ethel, or are you going to daydream? And why the long face? It’s a party!’

I’ll skip through it quickly because it was about as exciting as you would expect … apart from another weird thing that happened towards the end.