Summer of Blue (novel published June 2013/Creaya Books) First Two Chapters

Prologue

Neel, I refuse to believe you’re dead. I just have to look at your photograph. We had laughed into the summer sun as you stood proud and happy in your army kit. When you left, you gave me the wooden frame and your eyes sent a strange message as you said, ‘Keep it safe. Look at me every day until I return. Promise?’ I did, but my promise wasn’t worth anything when you didn’t come back.

Now every thought leads back to you, like a lost cat trying to find its way home. My head feels jumbled and heavy. I only pretend I have a life because believing you’re alive is not the same as knowing you are. Today the radio announced two more British soldiers dead on foot patrol in Afghanistan. My heart began to pound and my breath came in rapid bursts. The old gunfire roared inside my head again, scattering star-shaped limbs into a dusty orange sky. Afghanistan. You.

One moment you were with your army unit and the next there was an explosion. They told us that an improvised roadside bomb went off, two Afghan soldiers blew up like firecrackers into the air and men disguised as Afghan military police arrived on the scene and took you hostage. You had disappeared in Helmand, the most dangerous province in Afghanistan. The faces of those casualty notification officers at our front door were as grey as the

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Cambridge rooftops on our street. Mum collapsed in the hallway. I screamed. I told them there had to be some mistake. It couldn’t be my brother. It couldn’t be you. Missing in action.

If only you’d come back like you were supposed to. If only. Each time I hear bad news from Afghanistan it shakes me up, shakes my belief you’ll ever return. I think of the way you once described a storm there. A strange yellow light had entered the sky. The dust swirled over the tents. After a spell of lightning and rain, a big wind came whistling through, battering the ground and ballooning debris upwards for miles. You thought you were going to die. Then you wrote your last letter, and two days later you’d disappeared for real.

I think about it over and over – do things happen in the universe because they are meant to, or do they happen by chance? Because as long as there’s a chance you’re coming back, I won’t give up.

Every now and then I unwrap the bundle of letters and pretend they’re new. Sometimes we got news all at once during your first months in Afghanistan. You often stuffed the letters into your pockets, waiting for a helicopter to drop supplies and pick up mail.

Herat, Helmand, Kabul and Kandahar meant nothing to me a year ago. Now Afghanistan is in my dreams.

It’s all got to be about me from now on, though. My counsellor says I’ve got to focus on myself with university applications and everything else this coming year. She says writing may help me move on. I’m not into the Dear Diary stuff (I’ve nothing exciting to confess), so I was thinking of keeping a journal until my eighteenth birthday. With chapters. Like a story. I’ll call it Summer of Blue. Know why?

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Because the day we stood together laughing into the sun, the sky was blue, but it was really that leap of my heart like when you know everything’s perfect, life is perfect and the world is smiling and you want to hold that moment forever. Summer isn’t a season, it’s a feeling.

I turned seventeen today and I’m sending my letter to Afghanistan because that’s where you were last seen alive. I’m making three wishes over my birthday cake. You’d better make them come true. I’m counting on you. Give me a sign that you’re listening. That you’re still out there. I’ve never had happy beginnings – I was a breech baby – but when you come back, I’ll believe in happy endings.