I’ve been thinking about you and your dad (a LOT), and I think I know why you haven’t found your friends yet. See, if you’d been busy with a whole load of other people, maybe you wouldn’t have been keeping your dad company on Monday afternoons at the hospital. I reckon he probably really likes having you there, and you might be exactly where you’re supposed to be, Jossie.

So don’t waste your time on people who call you names. You do you, kid. Hold the line and keep an eye out around the edges. Your time will come. And by the way, you may be smart, but you’re wrong about one thing. You are definitely a king.

Sincerely,

Your friend, Danny Mulberry

P.S. By the way, I read this somewhere: ‘You should always speak the truth but not all truth should be spoken,’ which I think is exactly what your mum meant. Maybe if you think about it in that way it’ll be easier to remember – because I absolutely know you’ll understand what that means even though you’re ten.

35

Wolfie

My mother only ever told me two things about my Uncle Danny. The rest I had to find out for myself.

When I was in year one, everyone in my class had to do a three-minute talk about our families. We had a couple of days’ notice, but the night before, I confessed to Lou I was worried that even if I included Meiko and Larry and his parents, I might not have enough to fill the time. So Lou got out an old photo album, climbed into bed with me and showed me pictures of her as a baby, with her parents. I got the gist. My second set of missing grandparents. Both dead, though, sorry about that.

She flicked through a few others, and when we got to a picture of a windblown boy chasing a dog down a beach, she stopped. Who’s that, I said. She took the longest time to answer, and at first I thought she might have been trying to remember. Then, that’s your Uncle Danny, she said. Dead too? No. But that was another long wait.

It was the first I’d heard about any uncle, but once I’d seen the photo, that was that, and Lou clammed up. I need to know something, I said, for the class talk. She told me he had brown eyes and that he’d probably moved to Australia by now, which wasn’t very helpful but then that really was that. When enough time had passed and I guess she thought I was asleep, she slipped her arm out from underneath me, kissed me on the head and whispered, ‘Your Uncle Danny was my hero.’ I kept my eyes closed tight and didn’t let on I’d heard, and that was the first real thing I found out about him.

When I was eight and Lou was two weeks into what would be a month-long sofa holiday, she said I was probably old enough to know what had happened to my grandmother. I think she could have waited a bit longer, but to be fair everything about that story came bit by bit anyway, drip-fed like little out-of-order movie trailers. Part of me thinks she did it so it wouldn’t sound so awful, but maybe it was the only way she could get the whole thing out.