Infinite Sky Page 14

  Fiasco jumped off the bed, and ran to the window. She let out a high-pitched bark. I opened the curtains.

  My heart plummeted or leaped. I couldn’t tell, but it made me dizzy.

  Trick stood behind the rose bush.

  Dad would kill me. He would kill him. I couldn’t talk to him. But he’d waited. He hadn’t run away.

  He wore the same clothes as last night, and his face was bruised and swollen on one side, with his bottom lip split, and I thought how he’d been right weeks ago about his nose ending up broken again before long because there was a flat bit at the top where his black eyes started that was the exact shape of a flint arrowhead.

  I opened the window.

  Trick pressed his lips together. Underneath the freckles on his nose the skin was turning lilac. His tanned face was pale, but he looked calm.

  He held his hands out to me, but I didn’t take them.

  ‘My dad’s in the shower,’ I whispered. I could hear the water running. Any minute now it would stop.

  Trick nodded.

  ‘I couldn’t go with them,’ he whispered. ‘They all went, but I kept seeing you, the way you looked at me, when your da came out, when I . . . Will you come out here, Iris? Please?’

  I was a metre away from him. Only my desk and the window and the walls of the house were between us. He held his hands out to me but I couldn’t look at them. My face had frozen. It had forgotten how to express itself. He put his hands in his back pockets, took them out again. He rested one against the wall.

  ‘How is he?’ he said, and he swallowed the last word.

  I looked at the windowsill. There were paw prints and mud flakes and burrs from where the cats climbed in and out. I brushed the bits into a pile.

  ‘Not good.’ My voice was robotic and flat, and I got that feeling again, that I was listening to myself on a radio. It was hard to get the words out. My throat hurt. ‘They think he might have brain damage. But they can’t tell till he wakes up. They’ve put him in a coma because his brain’s swelling inside his skull. He had to have emergency surgery.’

  It was strange to say, and the way Trick looked it must have been strange to hear too.

  ‘Thought he was dead,’ he said.

  He took some of the windowsill debris between his thumb and finger and scattered it on the grass.

  ‘I’m so relieved,’ he said, but he didn’t sound relieved.

  ‘Come out here,’ he said, and it was a plea, plain and simple, but I couldn’t move. He pushed his hair back off his face with his hand and took a big breath in and out, and all the time he looked at me. His face was so pale.

  ‘Me mammy panicked when I told her, started packing up. I kept telling her to stop, to sit down and listen, but she wouldn’t. She said we had to go, that she knew something like this would happen, that we could take me to hospital on the way. She wouldn’t shut up, she’d lost it.’

  He went to pull at his lip, but stopped in time.

  ‘She woke the little ones soon as me da got back from the pub. He was so late. They had a screaming row, and I couldn’t take it. Had to get out. I said I’d grab the things from outside, and I could hear them, me da swearing about what an unbelievable eejit I was, and how it wasn’t his fault, he’d warned me, and I just stood out there.

  ‘I couldn’t leave . . . I couldn’t let you think . . . It was bad enough that . . . Without . . . I just ran through the brook – I didn’t even use the stepping stones – I ran straight through, and I ended up in the corn den.

  ‘I could hear them from there, Iris, shouting their heads off: me da saying what would happen if I didn’t come out, me mammy saying she wouldn’t leave without me, Uncle Johnny trying to calm them down. She refused to go, and the girls were just wailing. They didn’t know what was going on. I climbed the oak tree, and sat there, watching them till he won, and she gave up, like she always does.

  ‘I didn’t think they would really go. I don’t know what I thought. But they got in the car and pulled away, and I was so relieved. I kept thinking your da was going to come back. I didn’t want any more . . .

  ‘Me mammy left an address,’ he said, and I imagined her, half mad with worry, her hands at her red hair. ‘Some cousins in Nottingham.’

  ‘You can have it,’ he said, meaningfully. ‘In case . . . So you can let me know. What happens.’

  His hand shook as he held out the scrap of paper, and I realised he wasn’t calm at all.

  ‘Surprised you can bear to look at me to be honest,’ he said, and he almost pulled at his swollen top lip again.

  I didn’t know what to say. My head was empty as a balloon.

  ‘I didn’t know what was happening, Iris. They were all coming for me. I didn’t know it was your brother. I swear. I just wanted them off me. I was waiting to be knifed. It wasn’t the first time either, you know. I didn’t tell you because the way you talk about him, I didn’t want you to think . . . I’d’ve fought them weeks ago, but every time they started, on the road, or in the village, I just took it. I let it wash over me, because . . .’

  He looked at me like he was considering something, and his face was tense as he lifted up his vest. His stomach was a mess of scabs and gashes. I remembered Punky and Dean holding his arms, Sam’s football studs catching the moonlight.

  ‘I was defending myself, Iris. I didn’t want any of it. You know I didn’t. I was trying to get to me da, that’s all. I told you it comes for me, didn’t I? You saw, didn’t you? You saw.’

  I examined his blond-tipped eyelashes, and the crooked nose and the freckles there. He wanted so much for me to say it was true, but I couldn’t do it.

  ‘You hit my brother, over the head, with a brick.’

  Trick looked at the ground. He crossed one arm over his belly, like he was holding himself together. He nodded his head, very slow.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and his voice was different now, flat.

  There was the longest pause while I looked at the way his pupil leaked into his grey iris, and I couldn’t speak, and then a pigeon beat out of a poplar nearby, and I realised the water had stopped running in the bathroom.

  The pull-string of the electric shower twanged. Trick heard it too. He opened his arms out one last time.

  ‘Please, Iris,’ he said, so quietly I almost missed it.

  I was so confused because Sam was in hospital, and Dad couldn’t look at me, but more than anything I needed a hug, and so I climbed onto my desk and jumped into the front garden.

  The sun was warm on my face, and I could smell the roses on the bush and feel their thorns against my back. I breathed in the sweat and smokiness of him. I tried to ignore the cold smell of metal underneath.

  I looked up at him, and he stroked my cheek, and whatever my brain thought, the butterflies in my ribcage batted away.

  He looked down at me, very directly, and his eyes were uncertain as always, but his voice was not uncertain at all.

  ‘I never wanted any of it,’ he said, and then he pulled away from me really quick.

  He coughed, a big, spluttering cough, into a tissue he pulled from his pocket. It was ragged and wet with blood.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said, wiping his mouth, and stuffing the tissue back in his pocket.

  ‘Trick, you’ve got to go to hospital.’

  ‘I will.’

  I realised that the whole time he’d been standing here, he’d kept one hand on the wall, had been leaning slightly, and I wondered if he could actually take his own weight. For the first time I wondered how he was going to get to Nottingham.

  ‘It’s not just a broken nose this time, Trick.’

  ‘I know.’

  The lock on the bathroom door scraped open then, and without thinking about it, I was scrambling into my bedroom.

  When I turned back, Trick had gone.

  Thirty-two

  Monday night, at seven o’clock, Dad waited by the phone. He picked it up before the first ring had finished, and told Mum what had ha
ppened. His voice was cold, right until the end.

  ‘Sh-sh-sh,’ he said to her then. ‘You know what his head’s made of. He’ll be okay.’

  The way he nudged the phone at my arm, I could tell he thought hearing me might help.

  Tess picked her up from the airport, and brought her to the hospital early the next morning. Benjy trailed behind, carrying Mum’s rucksack. I hadn’t seen him for ages. His hair had grown long, almost to his shoulders. He’d started wearing black band T-shirts and long shorts instead of sports clothes, but he looked as shy and awkward as ever – the same old Benjy.

  Mum walked into the waiting room, where we were sitting together, pretending to read books we’d brought.

  ‘How is he?’ she said, breathless, her eyes frightened. Dad told her the latest, that we were waiting to see if he could be brought out of his coma. His voice was hollow, and when he’d finished talking he told me he was going to get a cup of tea from the vending machine, and it was like she hadn’t come in at all.

  She’d cut all her hair off and it had turned white blond in the sun, and she was skinnier than before, wearing these weird baggy beige trousers. Her thin white shirt was creased all over, and her left wrist was full of wooden bracelets like the one she’d sent me. Her freckles had joined together and taken over her face, and all of these things, except the creases in her shirt, made her look out of place in the hospital.

  She walked towards me, arms held open, and I just froze, until she was right there. I let her wrap me up.

  She rubbed her hands over my shoulders roughly in a way I’d forgotten about and clasped the back of my head so it felt small and precious, and I could feel the rings on her fingers digging in and the hardness of her nails and all of it felt so familiar and smelled just the same as ever except perhaps more like coconut, and when she looked at me and said my name, that, out of all the things that had happened, made me cry the most.

  Tess had brought cheese sandwiches and apples and grapes, and Mum had football magazines for when Sam woke up and nobody felt like telling her he’d been kicked off the team since she left. Benjy held a box of chocolates which, after a couple of hours, we opened for ourselves because we were so restless and, as Mum pointed out, they sold them in the shop just along the corridor so it wasn’t like we couldn’t get any more.

  We shared them around with everybody, the hazelnut and caramels going first, just like they did on Christmas Day, and between the two of them, Mum and Tess managed to make the atmosphere a bit more like a really depressing coffee morning than the waiting room of Intensive Care.

  Mum kept repeating the positives: Sam hadn’t broken his neck, or damaged his spine. She asked me over and over about the moment he’d woken up.

  ‘Definitely a good sign,’ Tess said when I told her that he’d looked frightened, and Mum agreed, though she looked as if she might lie down on the floor and die herself.

  Dad was gone for ages longer than it took to drink a cup of tea, and when he came back Mum went, mumbling about replacing the chocolates and checking there was time left on the car.

  Benjy ran after her, and I saw her smile gratefully at him before they disappeared down the corridor.

  I moved over so Dad could sit next to me, but he took a seat on the opposite row.

  In his hand was the jewel from the burned-out motorbike.

  Tess went to sit by him. She told him he looked well, which was a bit of a lie, and that she was happy to see him, which clearly wasn’t a lie at all, and then she went over the positives again, very softly.

  Dad looked at her, and I thought he was going to ask her to stop with the nonsense, but instead he started talking.

  ‘I almost had it sorted. I was right in the middle of it, finally getting rid, and then . . . I almost had it sorted, Tess.’

  I kept my eyes down, scared he was going to move on to how I’d disappointed him, how all summer I’d lied, but he just rubbed at his teardrop of metal. He rubbed and rubbed at it, and it made him look so mad I wished somebody would take it off him.

  Tess put her hand over his, the empty one, and squeezed.

  ‘Tough summer, eh, Tommo?’

  Dad pressed his lips together. He let out a shaky breath, and shook his head.

  Mum and Dad took turns to sit in the waiting room. Mum was self-conscious when Dad was around, and Dad acted all gruff and surly, so it was a relief when one or other of them cleared out. I started to dread the doctors coming. They never had any good news.

  The CT scans continued to show swelling on Sam’s brain. If things got worse the surgeons would have to operate again, and that had its own risks.

  Dad told Tess his version of what had happened, and Tess told Mum. I couldn’t talk about it. Whenever Dad started up about finding the gypsy who’d done this to his boy, and making him take responsibility, I felt like he was daring me to contradict him, right there in the waiting room of Intensive Care. I spent a lot of time in the toilet cubicle staring at my feet.

  I thought of Trick, the way he’d turned away from me, to spit blood into his tissue, and I hoped he’d made it to Nottingham, or to hospital. I felt guilty for not trying to help him more. I felt guilty for worrying about him. I stared at my feet.

  We’d eaten another grim canteen lunch and I was getting teas for Dad and Tess and coffee for Mum when I saw the sign for Accident and Emergency. It was on the floor below, and I was out of breath when I reached the desk. I asked if a Patrick Delaney had admitted himself. The man on the desk asked if I was a relative and I nodded. I was his sister.

  He looked at me, typing, and reading his computer screen.

  ‘No Delaneys,’ he said.

  I spelled it out for him, just in case, and he shook his head. ‘Sorry. No.’

  ‘He’s got blond hair, gingerish maybe? A bit older than me. He had cuts and bruises all over his stomach. He’d been coughing up blood.’

  The man’s expression changed. ‘Was an ambulance called?’

  My guts twisted. It hadn’t even crossed my mind.

  The man behind the desk was looking at me suspiciously now.

  ‘Where are your parents?’ he said, scanning the room behind me. ‘How old are you?’

  I thought of Mum and Dad waiting for their drinks, and Sam lying in his high-railed single bed, and I didn’t know what else to do. I ran.

  Thirty-three

  On my way back, I caught Benjy looking through the window of Sam’s ward. He rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands, wiped them on his black T-shirt.

  ‘Not looking too perky, is he?’ he said.

  ‘I’m going to go outside when I’ve taken these in,’ I said, lifting the cardboard cups in my hands. Benjy nodded, and when I walked back out of the waiting room he came with me.

  We watched the coloured lines that led to the different areas of the hospital pass beneath our feet. Intensive Care was a peaceful blue. Maternity was black. Benjy stepped over the lines whenever they crossed.

  I didn’t want to go back in the waiting room. Mum tried too hard to make everyone feel better, and paid too much attention to me. I just wanted her to be quiet and admit she couldn’t do anything. I wanted her to leave me alone.

  Benjy held the heavy door open for me, and we stepped out into another perfect summer’s day. The hospital garden was full of smokers in pyjamas and dressing gowns, some of them laughed in groups and some of them stood alone. One man leaned against his own drip.

  ‘Cancer ward,’ Benjy whispered, and when I looked at him he was smiling in his shy way, looking at me with his head tilted away, and I realised how much I’d missed him.

  We walked clockwise, breathing in the cafeteria smell of beans and fag smoke and the pollution from the main road, which we couldn’t see behind the trees. The grass was scorched and the earth was cracking. Flowers drooped in their beds, some heads so low they kissed the soil.

  Benjy stopped at an empty bench and I sat beside him. He set his trainered feet wide, and let out a gigantic sigh.
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  ‘Speedboat,’ he said, and I looked up at a vapourless aeroplane trailing through the blue, remembering summer days lying with Sam and Benjy and Matty in the paddock.

  I picked a daisy and started a game of He lives, he lives not.

  ‘Did he tell you about our fight?’ Benjy said, and I shook my head. He laughed out of his nose.

  ‘He’d been messing about for ages, climbing out the window when the teacher wasn’t looking, nicking food in the cafeteria – and I don’t just mean eating potato smileys in the queue, I mean more chocolate than he could fit in his pockets. He loved it. He’d been so good till now, he could get away with anything.

  ‘I thought it was pretty stupid, but it didn’t bother me. Free chocolate, so what? But then one day, we were walking out of form room, on our way to RE, and I told him I’d spoken to your mum. It was only us, nobody could hear or anything, and I asked if he was going to blank her forever, just because, I don’t even know why, because he’s my friend, but he went completely mental.

  ‘He was like, what’s it got to do with you, and how dare you speak to her? Like she’s not even my godmother any more, and then he went for me. I couldn’t believe it! I ran at him and knocked him over. I wish I hadn’t – but the girls were all watching by then – I didn’t want to fight him. It was stupid. I don’t even know how to fight.’

  Benjy sniffed and shifted positions.

  ‘Then Hawkins came along and split us up. It was embarrassing. I told Sam not to talk to me, that we weren’t friends, and I felt like puking, but he didn’t care. The girls were staring at him, and he was sort of peacocking about, like a right dick, all the way to the Head’s office . . . I haven’t spoken to him since. He was always with that Punky Beresford after that.’

  Thirty-four

  Another night’s visiting hours were beginning when our favourite nurse, Mary, with the long dark hair, came out and told us that another ventriculostomy would be performed immediately. We could go in and see Sam before they took him through to the operating room, she said.