Lifesaving for Beginners

the spitting image of Tony Blair, who used to be the boss of England but isn’t now. I think he got fired or something.
    Faith throws away her cigarette. She cups her hands round her mouth and blows into them.
    I say, ‘Why did you walk past the house?’
    ‘I don’t know. I just . . . I need to think about what I’m going to say.’
    ‘I thought you were doing that on the plane.’
    ‘Doing what?’
    ‘Thinking about what you were going to say.’
    ‘I couldn’t think of anything.’
    We look towards the sea for a while. I think it’s cold enough to snow. Ireland’s climate is mild, moist and changeable. Mrs O’Reilly told us that. It doesn’t feel mild today. I stuff my hands inside the sleeves of my jacket. I have ski gloves at home. I don’t use them for skiing but they’re great for building snowmen because they don’t get wet, like woolly gloves do.
    I jump off the wall. ‘You could write a note.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You could write a note and we’ll leave it in the letterbox. There’s one attached to the pillar at the start of the driveway. I saw it. A green one with a lock so no one can get the post out of it except the person who lives in the house.’
    Faith slithers off the wall. She’s still looking at me but I don’t think she’s seeing me exactly. She’s thinking. You can see it in her eyes.
    She says, ‘That’s not a bad idea, Milo.’
    I’m glad she likes the idea. Maybe now we can go someplace where it’s warm. I could change my money. Buy some gloves for Faith and me. Her hands are blue on account of the cigarettes and the cold.
    ‘You could write your mobile number on the note. Then, we could go to a café where it’ll be warm, and we can have a muffin and I’ll think of things that you can talk to the woman about. There’s tonnes of stuff you could talk about.’ Girls are always talking. Like Imelda and her mam. They never stop talking. Sometimes it’s fighting but mostly it’s talking.
    Faith opens her bag. Takes out a notebook. The one she writes her songs in. The last one she wrote was called ‘All About You’. It’s a love song but it’s not bad. She wrote it a long time ago. Before Mam was in the accident.
    Faith holds her pen between her fingers but she doesn’t write anything down. She looks like she’s thinking again and not coming up with any ideas.
    She glances up. ‘I don’t know what to write.’
    You’re supposed to know loads of stuff when you’re an adult, but I’m not so sure about that anymore.
    ‘Just put your name and your mobile number. And say you’re in Dublin and you’d like to meet her. That’s all.’
    After a while, Faith says, ‘OK.’ She blows into her hands again and then begins to write.
    I say, ‘Don’t mention me, whatever you do.’
    Faith says, ‘Why not?’
    ‘Some adults aren’t mad about kids.’ This is true. Like Mr Swinton at our school. The caretaker. He says, ‘What’s it got to do with you?’ if you ask him when the leak will be fixed in the hall so we can play dodgeball again.
    When Faith gets mad, her face turns sort of pink and her eyes go into a sort of narrow line. She unfolds the page and adds a line at the bottom of the note.
    PS. I am with my brother Milo, who is ten .
    I say, ‘I’m not ten yet. I’m only nearly ten.’
    Faith draws an arrow in the gap between ‘is’ and ‘ten’ and writes, at the top of the arrow, ‘nearly’. ‘Happy now?’
    I nod. If people think you’re ten, they might expect you to be bigger than you really are. There’s a pretty big difference between nine and ten. Even Damo doesn’t pick his nose in front of people anymore. Not since he turned ten. He wants girls to fancy him. None of them do yet, apart from Tracey in Miss Roberts’s class, and she fancies just about every boy in the school, even Donald Battersby, who tells on everyone and cries when you say you don’t want to play with him on account of him being a telltale.
    We walk back. The buses in Dublin are blue and yellow instead of red. The postboxes are green. The national emblem of Ireland is a shamrock. That’s green too. Irish people are mad about green. There’s green in the flag, which is called the Tricolour. It’s flown at half-mast when a patriot like James Connolly dies. Mrs O’Reilly said the Brits tied him to a chair and shot him in the head. I asked Mam if that were true. Mam said it was a Rising, which was a bit like a war and that it all happened a long time ago. I