Season of Secrets Read online

  Praise for Sally Nicholls’ novels

  Season of Secrets

  “Nicholls is a writer of enormous power and strength, using an ancient myth in new and surprising ways. A wonderful, evocative, lively book that will delight and move boys and girls over the age of nine – and adults, too”

  Literary Review

  “Yet another extraordinary story that is certain to touch you… The idea behind this book is so original . . . Stirring, moving and I could not help but be mesmerised”

  Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

  “A poignant novel exploring the complexities of childhood grief, its many manifestations and its healing”

  Irish Times

  “Sally Nicholls is simply an exceptionally talented writer. Her intelligent, warm fiction is honest and profound, complex yet accessible”

  Lovereading4kids.co.uk

  “Poignant and gripping … Sally Nicholls intertwines ancient myths of pagan gods with an emotive and touching love story”

  Bookseller

  “WAYS TO LIVE FOREVER was a confident, compelling debut novel. Sally Nicholls’s follow up is no less good… The balance the author strikes between metaphor and character-driven plot cannot be faulted”

  Financial Times

  “This is what a children’s book should be like! Absolutely wonderful”

  Bookwitch

  Ways to Live Forever

  WINNER

  Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize

  Glen Dimplex New Writer of the Year

  Concorde Book Award

  North East Book Award

  Hillingdon Secondary School Book of the Year

  Warwickshire Secondary Schools Book Award

  Bolton Children’s Book of the Year

  Calderdale Book of the Year

  Luchs Prize – Best Book of the Year (Germany)

  USBBY List of Outstanding International Books (U.S.A.)

  SHORTLISTED

  Branford Boase Award

  Manchester Book of the Year

  UKLA Children’s Book Awards

  Lancashire Book of the Year

  Brilliant Book Award, Nottingham Libraries

  Grampian Children’s Book Award

  Gateshead Libraries Children’s Book Award

  Mad About Books Stockport Schools' Book Award

  Le Prix des Incorruptibles (France)

  LONGLISTED

  WHSmith Children’s Book of the Year

  CILIP Carnegie Medal

  “I love this book”

  Jacqueline Wilson

  “Powerful, inspiring and courageous … the debut of the year”

  Waterstone’s

  “This is an elegant, intelligent, moving and sometimes even funny book. Young readers (and brave parents, and teachers) will love it”

  Guardian

  “A Jodi Picoult for teens that pulls no punches”

  Simply Books

  “Wonderful. Moving and funny and, yes, sad”

  Eva Ibbotson

  “Heart-wrenching … an exceedingly poignant read”

  Bookseller

  “Stunning . . . Nicholls’ greatest achievement is in creating an utterly real, flesh and blood character. On the pages, Sam truly lives… a powerful, moving book, not to be missed”

  Irish Independent

  “A deeply affecting and life-affirming read”

  Nikki Gamble, Writeaway

  “This award-winning novel is brutally honest, sad, touching and funny, often all at the same time. It’s a powerful book”

  The New Books Christmas Guide to Children’s Books

  Sally Nicholls was born in Stockton, just after midnight, in a thunderstorm. Her father died when she was two, and she and her brother were brought up by her mother. She has always loved reading, and spent most of her childhood trying to make real life work like it did in books.

  After school, she worked in Japan for six months and travelled around Australia and New Zealand, then came back and did a degree in Philosophy and Literature at Warwick. In her third year, realising with some panic that she now had to earn a living, she enrolled in a masters in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa. It was here that she wrote her first novel, Ways to Live Forever, which won the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize in 2008, and many other awards, both in the UK and abroad. Season of Secrets was published in 2009, and Sally’s third novel, All Fall Down, in 2012.

  www.sallynicholls.com

  To my family,

  For sticking around.

  Contents

  1 The Roman Road

  2 Nowhere Man

  3 Night Thoughts

  4 The World According to Books

  5 A Face Like That

  6 Emily

  7 Up the Lane

  8 A Man in the Barn

  9 Really Real

  10 Mum

  11 Flower and Tree

  12 Jack

  13 Wish Upon an Oak God

  14 Un-Quality Time

  15 Dad

  16 A Mizzle Full of Questions

  17 Long Distance

  18 Golden Leaves and Kings

  19 An Aneurism in the Family

  20 A Man in the Lane

  21 Demeter

  22 King Conkers

  23 Empty

  24 A State of Terror

  25 Solstices and Equinoxes

  26 Back Home

  27 Orphaned

  28 November

  29 Mistletoe and Crime

  30 Pictures in the Earth

  31 Two Kings

  32 Loki

  33 Sleeping and Waking

  34 Fear

  35 The Year Is Dying in the Night

  36 Ice

  37 Storm

  38 Blizzard

  39 The End of the World

  40 Inside Outside

  41 Quiet

  42 Dad (Almost) Talking to Me

  43 Christmas Day

  44 You Owe Me a Bear Cub

  45 Candlemas

  46 Bonfires and Magic

  47 Alliances Forged in Clay

  48 By Moonlight

  49 Snowdrops

  50 Happiness

  51 The Amazing Upside-Down Boy

  52 Emily on Ice

  53 A Flower for March

  54 Grandma

  55 Kew Gardens

  56 Back

  57 The Midnight Hunter

  58 Talking to Miss Shelley

  59 A Game I Stopped Playing

  60 End

  Acknowledgements

  Ways to Live Forever

  Footnotes

  Copyright

  I’m Molly. Molly Alice Brooke on school registers. If you’re a friend of mine, or someone in my family maybe, then I’m Moll too. If you’re an adult in my family, which right now is complicated, then I’m love, or Molly-love, or Curly-Mop, or Sweetheart. At my old school I was Molly-Mop. At Christmas I was an Angel and a Hotelkeeper.

  Names are important. Everyone has one, except really tiny babies maybe, or stray dogs, or people who’ve forgotten who they are. And even stray dogs and people with amnesia have names. They’ve just forgotten them.

  And then there’s my man. He didn’t have any name at all.

  The Roman Road

  It’s raining when we come up the hill from school today. A sudden, heavy flash of rainstorm; here then gone. Hannah sticks her school bag over her head and stamps through the puddles.

  “Back home we never had to walk in the rain. Back home someone would’ve picked us up. In a car.”

  “They wouldn’t have just driven down a street to get us,” I say. Hannah’s always so sure she’s right. Talking to her leaves me full of half-finished arguments, dangling fights I know I should have won. If Mum a
nd Dad were here they wouldn’t drive down a poksey hill just to save us getting wet. We only got picked up at home because we went to some stupid school miles across town. “We had to wait at after-school club till someone finished work. And then we had to do shopping. And if it was gymnastics or piano we had to have tea in the car. In a box. And—”

  “At least someone came,” says Hannah. “Someone cared.”

  Someone is Mum.

  “Grandpa cares,” I say, but I don’t think she hears me. Hannah is one and a half years older than me, yet she takes up about one and a half million times more space.

  The trees in the gardens up the hill rustle, as if they’re talking about us. But trees don’t talk. I look at them over my shoulder, all rain-dropped and rain-drooped, and hurry after Hannah.

  She’s pushing open the door to Grandpa’s shop. She stands inside and shakes herself, drops of water smattering the bread and the biscuits, leaving dark spatters on the newspapers in their rack.

  “I hate this place!” she says. Loudly.

  I come in small behind her. I don’t hate this place. Grandpa and Grandma’s shop. It’s poky and dark and higgledy-piggledy. It sells a mess of things I’ve never seen in normal shops, like Eccles cakes and Ordnance Survey maps and home-made jam, next to ordinary boringables like Coco Pops and Fairy Liquid. There’s a misty fridge with milk bottles with JONES and ENTLY written across them in felt tip, in case people go home with the wrong bottle. You can order more exotic things – mangoes or ricotta cheese – if you don’t mind waiting for the van, though most people don’t, they just go to Tesco’s. In one corner, there’s a metal grille where the post office used to be and in another are baskets of earthy potatoes and onions. It has a friendly, muddly smell all its own: newspaper and bleach and earth.

  Grandma’s leaning against the counter, writing in a big accounts book. She looks up when we come in and her face tightens.

  “Hannah Brooke,” she says. “Have a bit of sense now! Stop dripping all over the floor. Go on,” she says, when Hannah doesn’t move. “Get upstairs and into something dry.”

  Hannah kicks the shelf.

  “No!” she shouts, and then her face screws up like she’s going to cry. “I want to go home,” she says instead, ridiculously.

  Grandma doesn’t fight her, like Mum would have done, but you can tell she’s angry. She comes out from behind the till, presses her hand on Hannah’s shoulder and pushes her through the door into the kitchen, where Grandpa’s mashing the tea and whistling.

  “Upstairs,” she tells Grandpa. “Clean clothes. Now.” And she stalks back into the shop.

  Hannah’s face twists. It’s pink and white with cold, and streaked with blue dye where her bag’s run in the rain. You can see the fight boiling up inside her.

  “Go and die in a field!” she screams at the door and Grandma’s back. Then she runs out of the room, up the stairs.

  Me and Grandpa are left in the kitchen. Grandpa rubs at his face, just the way my dad does. He breathes in this big breath – I can see his stomach rising, under the faded check cloth of his shirt. It’s gone a nasty yellow around his neck and against the cuffs. My dad’s shirts are always stiff and clean and white: you button him up all the way to his throat and there he is, locked up safe and going nowhere. But Grandpa Lived Through A War, so he wears things till they fall apart.

  “All right, love?” he says now, and I nod.

  “You don’t want me to die in a field, do you?” he says, and I shake my head.

  “You shouldn’t listen to Hannah,” I tell him. “She’s always like that. Dad should have put her in an orphanage or something, instead of sending her here. She would have liked that, I expect,” I add, virtuous, “since she doesn’t want to live here.”

  Grandpa comes over and pats my shoulder. “Now, now,” he says, in an absent sort of way. “No one’s going to any orphanage.”

  But why not? If Dad could send us here, he could send us anywhere.

  I go through the back door of the shop, into the hall and up the narrow stairs. The shop is part of Grandma and Grandpa’s house, so all of their rooms are muddled: the kitchen is downstairs, next to the storeroom, but the living room is upstairs. At night, when I lie in bed, the light from the television flickers against the landing wall, and studio laughter plays across my dreams. Everything is darker here, and older. Nothing matches, so you’ll have our old settee from Newcastle next to a high-backed red chair with feet like a lion. There’s a dark wood bookcase, with glass doors, where Delia Smith and Dick Francis sit beside ancient cloth-bound books with gold and silver printed up the spine.

  The room I have here was Auntie Meg’s when she was my age. It’s got horrible yellow wallpaper and a grown-up picture of a tree, and a yellowy sink in the corner that doesn’t work. Some of my things are here – my old bear Humphrey, my best books, my art things. But nearly all of my stuff is still at home, because we’re not staying here for ever, just until Dad gets things Sorted Out.

  Whenever that is.

  I take dry clothes out of the wardrobe – blue jeans and my soft yellow jumper – but I don’t put them on. I wrap my arms around them and stand by the window looking out over the garden. The rain is rat-a-tat-tat-ing on the roof and streaming down the windows. The trees are roaring with the wind in them, more like they’re fighting now than talking.

  “Listen!” Mum would say, if she was here. “There’s a night with a devil in it.”

  It wouldn’t be a bad thing – the devil in the night – but something exciting. Mum loved thunder-and-rain-storms. If she were here now, like if we were staying with Grandpa and Grandma because it was a holiday maybe, we’d all go out and jump in the puddles. Even Hannah would, probably.

  It’s not dark yet, but you can tell that tonight isn’t going to be fun. The sky is full of anger and the trees are raging like they want to kill someone. Standing here alone by the window, I almost believe in a devil in the rain.

  Inside, the house is full of fighting too. I can hear Hannah next door, crying. I can hear Grandma downstairs, her voice high and angry, and Grandpa, murmuring at her.

  I put on my dry clothes and climb into bed, pulling the funny old-fashioned quilt-and-blanket over my head. I get my book out and read, trying not to listen to the loneliness of being alone in a house full of noise. I’m reading Three Cheers, Secret Seven, which is Secret Seven book eight, so when I’m done I’ll only need to read six more and I’ll have read all the Famous Five and Secret Seven books there are.

  Outside, the rain falls quieter now.

  It’s getting dark.

  “Molly? Are you there?”

  Hannah is standing in the doorway, still in her wet clothes. There are two wet patches on her shoulders where the water’s run off her hair and on to her jumper.

  “Come on,” she says. “Quick – before they find us.”

  “What are we doing?”

  “Shhh.” She clutches my arm and pulls me towards to the edge of the bed. “We’re going home. We’re running away.”

  This is so surprising that for a moment I can only blink at her. This is way more my sort of thing than Hannah’s. I’ve read loads of books about people running away. Hannah only reads Girl Talk and Top of the Pops Magazine. She’ll have no idea what to do.

  “Hey,” I say. “Hannaah. Stop pulling. We need to pack. Sleeping bags – and food – and a knife – and toothpaste—”

  “Where d’you think we’re going?” says Hannah. “The Arctic? We don’t need any of that stuff. We’ll just walk to Hexham and get the train.”

  There’s a big map of Northumberland up on the landing. Hannah and I count off the miles to Hexham on the old Roman road.

  “Seven – eight – nine – ten. Ten miles! We can walk that. Come on!”

  She drags me downstairs. I want to argue, but I don’t want Grandma to hear. Tonight isn’t a night to be running away. It’s dark and furious outside.

  “We can’t walk ten miles,” I say. “Hann
aah. That’ll take ages. It’s miles. Can’t we go in the morning?”

  “We’re going now,” says Hannah. She tugs on my arm and I nearly fall.

  “What about Grandpa? What’ll he do when he finds we’ve gone?”

  “Who cares?” says Hannah. She lets go of my sleeve and starts rummaging through the coats on the rack. I can hear the radio playing next door in the kitchen, and the hiss of fat from Grandpa frying sausages.

  “Hannah?”

  “What?”

  “What about Dad?”

  Hannah stops, one arm half-into her jacket.

  “What about Dad?”

  “Won’t he just send us back here?”

  There’s a silence. I look up. Hannah’s standing perfectly still, her jacket still dangling from one arm.

  “I don’t care,” she says, “what Dad does. And I don’t care what he says. I’m not staying here any longer.” And she pulls open the door, wet wind blowing into the porch, and runs into the night.

  I hesitate for a moment. Then I run out after her.

  Once outside, the air is wet and cold, and full of the smell and icy spat of rain. The wind blows the hood of my jumper up against the back of my head. My coat’s still hanging on the peg, and behind me the door slams shut. We’re locked outside.

  “Hannah!” I shout. “Hannah! Wait for me!”

  Someone answers, but I can’t tell from where. To my left, the lane curls out across the fields and up on to the moor. To my right, it slopes down the hill into the village, curving round across the village green and over the humpback bridge, past the church and the school and the little pub with the swinging Full Moon sign with the picture of the man in the moon. Is it up the lane or through the village to get to Hexham? Hannah would know, but I don’t. I go up, out of the village.

  It’s dark. Much darker than it ever gets at home. No street lights. No torch. I have to feel for every step, arms outstretched in case I fall; I can hardly see where I’m going. I splash straight into a puddle.