Bringing the Summer by Julia Green

Author:Julia Green
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-04-17T03:00:00+00:00

It’s really tiny; just two two bedrooms and a small bathroom upstairs. Theo’s room is at the back, above the kitchen, looking over the garden. The tree fills the window space, throwing deep shadows into the room.

Theo turns on the desk light. He has lined up rows of photographs along a bookshelf, almost an echo of the photo display on the piano back at Home Farm. The familiar faces of his family smile out at me. And there’s one more face: the one I’ve been half expecting to see: the girl he played with as a child, and was fascinated by as a teenager, and who has planted herself in my brain, too: a ghost girl.

In his photo she’s older, with long dark hair, thin face, dark eyes; she’s wearing a sleeveless cotton dress. Her arms are painfully thin.

‘That’s Bridie, isn’t it?’ I ask.

Theo’s sitting cross-legged on the bed. He doesn’t look at me. ‘Yes.’

I pull out a chair, to sit facing him. I notice, now, how obsessively tidy the room is compared to downstairs. The books and DVDs are shelved alphabetically; his guitar hangs by its strap on a special hook, his clothes (almost all black) hang neatly on a rail. Even the floor looks clean.

‘And?’ Theo says.

‘Gabes told me about her.’

‘I know.’

‘You do?’

‘Yes, of course. We’re brothers. Closer than you think.’

‘So you know about . . . me, on the train, at the funeral and everything?’

‘Yes.’ He looks so terribly sad.

‘You weren’t there, were you?’

‘No. I hate funerals. I couldn’t bear it.’

I watch his face.

‘I think about her all the time,’ Theo says. ‘I go over in my mind what I could have said or done, to stop her. But I had no idea . . . I mean, I knew she got depressed, that she was ill, but . . . well, there was so much I didn’t know about her. Mum told me, afterwards, about the drugs, and what was happening in her brain . . . Mum felt guilty too, for not saving her.’

‘We felt like that when my brother died,’ I say. ‘My parents, Gramps and Evie, me.’

‘But it was an accident, right?’

‘Yes. I know that, now. But I didn’t always. For a while I wondered whether it was on purpose . . . that he meant to die.’ The memory of that summer is still so sharp and powerful I have to steel myself not to weep buckets all over again.

I concentrate on Theo. ‘What was Bridie like when you were both little?’

Theo stays silent for a while. He looks up at me. ‘She was funny and odd and very, very naughty.’ He leans back against the wall next to the bed, half smiles. ‘She always pushed things to the limit. Like, there was this game we played where you had to jump off the stairs on to the hall floor, and you had to keep going higher, to see how many steps you could jump off and she’d keep going, four, five, six stairs – crazy, she almost broke her neck doing that.

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