They put me in the bed next to Kenny’s. I could reach out and touch him. Dad and Jenny went home. It was dark in the hospital, but nurses still moved about quietly, their shoes making almost no sound. Kenny was asleep, his long arms and his big hands outside the covers. I reached out and took his hand in mine.

“Tell me a story,” Kenny murmured.

And so I told him about Tina on the farm, and the time she saved the sheep from the gytrash, and how the farmer gave her sausages as a reward. Then the Queen came to give Tina a medal, and she got married to one of the Queen’s corgis and spent half the year in Buckingham Palace and half on the farm.

If I’m honest, it wasn’t my best story ever.

Twenty

Twenty

A week later, we were at Manchester Airport. Me and Kenny had never been to an airport before. He loved everything about it, the escalators and the shops, and the way everything was shiny.

And then we got to the area with big windows that looked out over the planes ready to take off. Kenny pressed his face against the glass and gawped. I gawped a bit, too. Stupid, I know, two teenagers staring at aeroplanes like they’d just been invented. But we’d never seen one this close before. Mixed up with the beauty of everything, and the excitement of so many people around us, and all the new things, there was also a bit of sadness in me. Not just sadness. Anger at the unfairness of it all. Because I’d seen so little in my life. Never even been out of Yorkshire before this drive to Manchester. And for the first time ever, I wanted to go away, to fill my eyes with the new. To have something different to look at every day …

But we weren’t here to look at planes and think about escaping.

Me and Kenny and Dad were here to meet my mum. I was in a wheelchair, my leg stuck out like a cannon. A shit cannon made from plaster. Kenny had signed it. Some of my mates from school had come round and scribbled on it. Some had drawn knobs, which I changed into Norman soldiers. (That’s a good tip, if someone draws a knob on your exercise book.) And Sarah had written her name …

To begin with, Kenny had pushed my wheelchair around the airport. But then he got too excited about everything else, so now it was my dad.

We got to the arrivals hall and waited.

“Plane’s on time,” my dad said.