The Brave Read Online Free

some spiteful goblin inside him were playing tricks with them all, it would happen again: he would wake in the early hours to the silence of the house and that familiar warm wetness between his thighs. And he would lie there, cursing and hating himself and silently sobbing with rage and self-pity.
    Nobody seemed to be sure why he wet the bed. His mother claimed it was the result of a bad attack of mumps at the age of three. This, she maintained, had weakened his waterworks. One doctor, the one Diane called The Trick Cyclist, said that Tommy was doing it on purpose, just to get attention. He prescribed a routine of reward and punishment. And for about a month, they had put it to the test. A dry night and Tommy was allowed to stay up for an extra half hour. A wet one and he wasn't allowed to watch television or have any ice cream or chocolates. It was soon clear that the only effect of this routine was to make everybody miserable and bad tempered and, like all the previous remedies, it was eventually dumped and off they trooped to see another doctor, then another.
    The one they went to see in Harley Street provided them with a special new kind of rubber undersheet. It had already proved, he told them, a great success in America and was fitted with electric sensors and a length of black rubber cable that you had to plug in to the wall. At the first hint of wetness, even the slightest trickle, it would administer an electric shock—nothing too severe, the doctor assured Tommy's mother, just enough to rouse the boy—and set off an alarm bell. Tommy didn't know how much it cost, but judging by his mother's expression when she saw the invoice, it was obviously a lot.
    In the early hours of the first night they tried it, there was a blue flash and a loud bang and Tommy was launched out of bed like a space rocket. He landed on the floor with a burn on his bottom that took two weeks to heal.
    These last few months, with the date of his departure to the brave and manly world of Ashlawn Preparatory creeping ever closer, the hunt for a cure had escalated to a kind of frenzy. And the more they all talked about it, the less control he seemed to have over his bladder.
    All summer long he had been taking some little yellow pills, which were supposed to make him sleep so lightly that he would wake when he had to pee. They didn't succeed in waking him but all day long he felt like a different person, like some crazed character from a cartoon. He'd never had more energy in his life, was unable to sit still, not even for a minute, and was so noisy and frantic that a few days ago, his mother couldn't bear it any longer and flushed the remaining pills down the toilet.
    The latest—and what would probably be the last—attempt to stop his bed-wetting was to prop the foot of his bed up on two stout logs. His mother had read about it in a magazine. The idea, she explained, was to relieve the pressure on his bladder by harnessing the force of gravity. This meant that Tommy had to sleep with his feet at an angle of about thirty degrees to the floor. So far he had wet the bed every night and woken each morning crumpled against the wall with a stiff neck.
    By the time his father arrived home, Tommy was in bed, trying to banish thoughts of boarding school by reading one of his collection of Illustrated Classics, Custer's Last Stand. General Custer was one of Tommy's real-life heroes. There was a full-page picture of him, in his buckskin suit, completely surrounded by bloodthirsty savages, a smoking gun in each hand, his long yellow hair flying in the wind.
    Arthur Bedford was an accountant and worked for a company that made parts for motor cars in Birmingham. Tommy didn't really have a clear idea about what this involved except that it meant looking after money and being very good at arithmetic, which was, by a long way, the most horrible subject in the world. The mere word division made him shiver. So it seemed only natural that his father came home