Flyaway (14 page)

‘Thanks,' I say.

I pick up my sodden clothes, feeling bad about the puddle they leave behind. Harry pops his head out from under the covers. His eyes skim quickly over his shirt on me and I feel my cheeks reddening a little.

‘What do I do with these?' I ask.

‘Easy,' he says. ‘Chuck them out of the window.'

He goes across to it, fiddles with a small latch on the side and then opens it as wide as it goes, which isn't all that far. I look directly below. There's a skip, and around it bare concrete.

‘Full points if you get it in,' he says.

‘I can't chuck my school clothes out of the window.'

‘Well, you're not allowed to have dirty clothes in here.' He raises his eyebrows at me. ‘Come on, I haven't been picking the lock on that window for nothing.' He nods towards the glass. ‘It's either you or the clothes. You choose.'

He starts laughing, which makes me laugh. I'm laughing too hard when I throw them and they land with a smack on the concrete. Harry peers down.

‘Maternity Ward will have got a shock,' he laughs, ‘they're right underneath us.'

I think about all those women giving birth, wonder if any baby's first view of the world was of my wet shirt flying past the window. I close the window quickly and Harry locks it
again. He hops back into bed.

‘Thanks for the shirt,' I say. I'm about to head back out the room to catch Dad when Harry calls me back.

‘Aren't you going to tell me what happened out there? I was watching you.'

So I do. Or I try to anyway. It's hard to get the words out so they make sense. Plus I don't want to be too long and miss Dad altogether.

‘Do you believe me?' I say, when I've finished. ‘About the swan following me and looking at me like that?'

‘Weird things happen all the time,' he says quietly. ‘They've happened to me all my life.' He glances at his wall with its lime green wallpaper and its pictures of sailing ships and cherry trees. ‘I'd rather have your weird thing than my weird thing.'

He looks back to the window. It's black outside now and I can see our reflections in the glass.

‘So what are you going to do next?' he asks.

I sigh. ‘If Dad had been there, he'd know what to do. There's probably a simple reason for why she was following me.'

A thought suddenly hits me, and I sit down on Harry's mattress, feeling stupid that I haven't asked it before.

‘You watch that swan every day, right?'

‘Most days. She's only been there about a week.'

‘Have you ever seen her take off?'

He shakes his head.

‘And have any other swans ever arrived, any of her flock?'

‘Never.' Harry pushes the covers down and crosses his legs.

‘But she must have flown there in the first place . . . so why isn't she flying now?'

Harry chews his lip. ‘She's forgotten?'

‘That would be like us suddenly forgetting how to walk. Birds don't do that.'

‘Some might, this one might. Are you sure she hasn't had an accident or something? Are her wings OK?'

‘I got a close look at them. They seemed fine. No obvious broken bones.'

Harry blinks slowly. His eyelids look heavy, as if he's trying to force them to stay open.

‘Perhaps she just wanted some company,' he says.

‘How do you mean?'

‘Well, if I were that swan and you came to my lake, I might want that too.'

‘As if I were her flock, you mean?' I watch a smile grow on his face.

‘Maybe. Birds aren't famous for their intelligence, are they?'

I shake my head as I remember the intense look in that swan's eye. ‘She's not stupid.'

‘Maybe she just doesn't want to fly then.' He leans over to get his glass of water on the bedside. He flinches as he stretches across.

‘You all right?' I ask.

‘I'm fine,' he says, but I don't believe him. Perhaps he's just trying to look tougher than he is. I remember what the nurse said last time about not staying too long.

‘I better go.'

Immediately he leans towards me with his eyes wide.

‘I'll come back,' I say. ‘Don't worry. I just need to catch Dad.'

He nods at that. I feel guilty about going, about leaving him on his own.

‘I'll watch her for you,' he murmurs.

CHAPTER 28

I
hurry down the corridor. Mum's waiting outside, her arms crossed over her chest.

‘Where have you been? Dad's visiting hours are almost up.'

‘Sorry, I got caught . . .'

‘ . . . in the rain, it seems.' Mum looks me up and down, frowns. ‘I can't take you in like this, you're a mess. And where's your jumper?'

I look down at my feet. ‘Left it somewhere.'

Mum's mouth seems to tighten. ‘We'll come back tomorrow, with Jack. You can see him then. Dad's tired today anyway.'

‘But I want to see him now.' I bite down hard on my lip. ‘I've got things to tell him.'

‘You had your chance,' Mum says quietly. ‘What have you
been doing anyway?'

She's so mad. She's trying to keep her voice steady because we're in the middle of the hospital corridor and there are people watching. Or starting to. She walks ahead of me, and I jog to keep up.

‘I'm sorry, I didn't mean . . .'

She spins around. ‘Dad was looking forward to seeing you, Isla, and you let him down just because you went to look at a swan.'

‘But there's time now . . .'

‘We need to pick up Jack from football training.'

I shut up. I don't even look at her as we go through the car park. Mum's bristling with too much anger to talk to me. She drives too fast, goes through two orange lights. I fold my hands in my lap and look down at them. My stomach feels heavy, as if weighed down by a stone.

Mum pulls into the car park next to the school playing fields. Jack gets in. I don't look out for Crowy behind him, not this time, I just keep my head down. Instead, I think of Dad in the hospital, waiting for me. Every inch of me feels guilty. Every mile we drive away from him feels too far. My heart is stretching like an elastic band, stretching between him and here. Something feels like it's going to snap.

CHAPTER 29

T
he next evening, I take the drawings I've done of the swan and show Dad. I pull out my mobile phone and show him the photographs I took, too. He's not so pale today, and he's sitting up in bed. He doesn't look mad, or even disappointed.

‘I'm sorry about yesterday,' I mumble.

Dad shuffles between the drawings. ‘I'd rather you were doing these,' he says. ‘They're beautiful.'

I take them back from him, embarrassed. ‘We're studying flight in art,' I say. ‘I'm going to make a model of a flying machine, like da Vinci did, but I'll base mine on swan wings. We have to sketch them first.'

‘That's hard. Wings are so complex.' He reaches over to grab my hand. ‘I wish I could help.'

I think about all the times he has helped me with my
school projects, about all the good marks I got when he did.

‘You'd be good at making a flying machine,' I say.

He laughs, but it's not his usual big laugh . . . it's soft and sad somehow. ‘Right now I think I need one.'

He sighs heavily and turns towards the window. The sky is white as paper through the pane. I want to say something, something to make him forget about his sick heart. So I tell him, finally, about what happened when I went to see the swan on the lake. I watch his face as I talk.

‘She followed me,' I whisper. ‘Around the lake.'

He hooks his little finger around mine in a fairy's handshake; at least, that's what we always used to call it.

‘I think that swan is just curious,' he says gently. ‘Nothing to worry about.'

I want to argue with him, explain about the way she looked at me and how she towered her wings over me, but I see how tired he's looking and I can't somehow.

Instead I nod and say, ‘Maybe'. Because he could be right. That swan could just be curious, and I could be imagining that there's something different about her. I pull out the feathers I took from the lake and give them to him. He holds them lightly and smoothes them out as if they're precious.

‘Beautiful,' he murmurs, running the edge of them across the back of his fingers. ‘Like tiny works of art themselves.'

He struggles to push himself up a little further in his bed as he looks at me. ‘You know, real flying machines would never work,' he says. ‘Not ones based on birds anyway.'

He grins and I see for a moment that he's more like he
usually is, more excited about my school project than I am.

‘My model doesn't really have to fly,' I say, reaching forward to make sure his pillows are comfortable. ‘Anyway, why wouldn't flying machines work?'

He leans in to whisper. ‘Because people aren't birds.'

I pull away and smile. ‘Yeah, I worked that out already, thanks.'

‘No.' He grabs my arm. ‘That's the problem. For one of da Vinci's designs to work, the person operating it would need the same muscle power and coordination that a bird would have. But of course, we don't.'

I keep smiling. ‘Because birds are too amazing, right?'

He smiles with me. ‘Sort of. But they've also got hollow bones and huge hearts and more muscles on their bodies than we could ever imagine.' His mouth twitches at the edge as he thinks of something. ‘You know,' he begins. ‘There's something in Granddad's barn that could be useful for you. You might think it's a bit yuck, but it's been there ever since Granddad moved in. I think it came with the house.'

‘What is it?'

Dad hesitates. ‘Maybe you remember it from when you were young, you might not like it.' He looks up from the feathers, his mouth stretching into a yawn. ‘Your nan used to call him old Swanson. Ask Granddad to show you.'

When his eyes start to close, I move his cup of water nearer to him. He murmurs to me as he's slipping into sleep.

‘Swans
are
amazing though,' he whispers. ‘Pretty magical.'

I grab his hand again, thinking he's going to waffle off facts
about whooper swans for the fifty billionth time. But he doesn't. His eyes flicker open and he gazes at the sky.

‘Some say swans' wings catch souls,' he says.

I grasp his hand a little tighter. ‘What are you talking about?'

He wakes up a little then. ‘It's a myth,' he says, nestling into his pillows. ‘Some people used to think that if you were dying when a swan was flying overhead, the swan would catch your soul in its wings and take it up to heaven . . . singing a swan song as it went . . .'

His words drift away and I try to get him to wake up.

‘What do you mean swan song?' I ask. I don't like where this conversation is going or what it seems like Dad is thinking about. His eyes start closing again.

‘It's the final song,' he murmurs. ‘The last thing a dying person is meant to hear . . . not moans of pain, but singing . . . the most beautiful song ever sung.'

His fingers relax in mine and he sleeps. I think about the swans flying overhead when Dad fell down in the field. Perhaps Dad was meant to die that day, and the swans that were circling were meant to catch his soul. I swallow down the sudden tightness in my throat, listen to the soft beeping coming from the machine beside his bed. His electric heartbeat.

‘You soul's not going anywhere,' I whisper to him.

When his breathing starts to get heavier, I take my hand carefully out of his and go out to find Mum.