Infinite Sky (11 page)

By the time Wednesday arrived, when Trick had promised to do his best to sneak out, I was all mixed up. I went to the cornfield early because I couldn’t wait to see him.
I needed to know I was right to trust him.

Midsummer night was long gone, and the days were getting shorter, but it was still light at eight o’clock. I’d never met Trick at night-time before. Clouds high in the sky towards
Ashbourne Hall were turning pink at the edges like Chinese pork, and I was hungry. Maybe we could bake some corn later. If everything was all right.

I trudged across the stepping stones, climbed through the barbed wire, and passed the ancient oak. Butterflies thrashed about in my ribcage as I walked through the green corridor. Maybe Trick
would be early too. Maybe he was there right now, lying down the way he had when we first met.

But the corn den was empty.

The cushions I’d brought out for us to sit on were where we’d left them, home to a few snails by now. Their shells tapped against the dry ground as I shook them off. Woodlice skulked
out from the dark, dead patches underneath. I sat down and waited. The sun sank lower.

I climbed the oak tree, identified insects and looked for dormice. I tried to remember how to make a corn dolly, and couldn’t, and still Trick didn’t come. I walked to the brook to
see if I could spot a pike, but there were only the usual chubs and minnows, and a perch that I almost missed, hiding in the reeds.

It passed ten o’clock. Trick had said if it got this late he couldn’t make it. I felt hopeless. He wasn’t coming. Maybe he’d never meant to come. Why had I been so sure
he wouldn’t steal from us? I didn’t know him at all.

I remembered his eyes, the black melty bit where his right iris drifted, and the way his hair fell across his face when he was listening to me. I
did
know him. It must be his dad.
He’d found out he was hanging around with a country girl and grounded him. Or maybe he’d forgotten about me. Or realised I was an idiot.

Our harvest was shrivelling in the corner after days and days of sunshine. I picked a cob up and lobbed it at the oak tree. It was good that Trick hadn’t come. I was stupid to think we
could be friends. He wouldn’t want to if he knew what I thought of his dad, what my family thought about
him
. That sometimes I wasn’t sure myself.

The cobs at the bottom of the pile were damp and turning black, and blind grey flies crawled over them. I aimed them at the tree’s middle where the trunk split into branches, until there
were none left, and then I lay down. Corn stalks dug into my back and aphids landed on my arms, making me itch. The light left the sky and my arm hairs stood up.

I didn’t want to go home. I would stay out here on my own until it was dark and I caught cold, and then I would go to bed for a week and eat nothing but tomato soup until someone noticed
and made Mum come back and Dad cheer up, and things go back to normal.

And then the corn rustled, and my heart was light again as if I’d never felt bad at all. Trick stepped into the corn den, and he sounded as happy as I felt.

‘Iris!’ he cheered, and I stood up. I couldn’t help it, I laughed.

He opened his arms out for a hug, and I stepped into it as though pressing the whole length of my body against his was completely normal. He smelled of soap and cigarettes and chips.

‘Thought you’d have gone,’ he said, giving me an extra squeeze. ‘You okay?’

I nodded, but when he let go, I couldn’t quite look at him.

The clouds had shifted from pink to grey, the sun had gone, but it wasn’t quite dark yet.

Things felt different between us as we sat down. He was wearing his red vest, and his palest jeans, and he wore them longer than usual, rolled down to his ankles, and I wondered vaguely if that
was how he always wore them at night. He was quiet, looking down at his feet tapping the warm air. Normally he started telling me things the moment he arrived, as if he’d been saving stories
up for me.

‘Saw the police Monday,’ he said, finally.

He’d let his hair fall to cover his eyes, and it made me nervous. Why didn’t he twitch it out of the way as usual? Why wouldn’t he look at me?

‘Tools’ve gone missing from the shed,’ I said, and my voice sounded strangely flat and robotic.

He threw his head back and laughed. ‘No way!’ he said. He reached across for a corn ear, sighing.

His feet stopped tapping the air now. They knocked together occasionally instead. He pulled the leaves of the corn back to reveal the cottony strands that protected the fruit, still smiling a
little.

‘We thought it was starting,’ he said.

I hadn’t seen him at dusk before, and he looked different. The dark made his eyes look bigger or something, more sunken, and then it clicked.

‘What happened to your face?’ I said, and my voice sounded so dismayed it made my cheeks burn.

Trick’s bottom lip disappeared under his front teeth as he bit it.

His right eyelid was puffy and had linked with the bridge of his nose to make a kind of swollen lilac eyepatch.

‘Me da did it. He didn’t mean to. He just pushed me. It was the way I landed. Knocked a pan off the side. It landed on me snout.’

‘Is it broken?’

‘The pan? Nah, it’s fine. Me mammy made eggs in it this morning.’

‘
Trick
.’

‘Sorry. Yeah, I think it probably is.’

‘Have you not been to hospital?’

‘No way,’ he said, quickly. ‘What can they do? Break it again? I can do that meself before long. Don’t worry,’ he said, and he stroked my cheek with the back of his
hand, and my heart beat so wild that my head swayed with the force of it.

He dug kernels out of the sweetcorn and threw them aside.

‘Suppose your da thinks it was us,’ Trick said.

I stuck my little finger into a deep crack in the ground. The fat little spiders came running out. We watched them dodge into different hiding places.

‘That why he was shouting the other day?’ he said.

I nodded.

‘What’s your brother say?’

I started babbling. I told him how many years our sheds had been undisturbed for, trying to explain.

‘It’s not
just
you . . .’ I said.

‘Oh aye. Maybe it was one of the littl’uns . . . I’m not sure what they were doing Friday night. It was probably Ileen. Now she’s a
real
tinker!’

I thought of Dad watching telly with the curtains drawn, and for the first time since I’d met him I wished Trick would shut up.

‘Sorry,’ he said. His fair hair fell across his eyes as he looked down.

I picked a cat hair off my shorts. Trick sighed loudly.

‘Where would you go anyway? If you get evicted,’ I said, after a bit.

Trick shrugged. ‘Me da says there’s a new camp somewhere down south. Essex, I think. Me uncle bought a bit of land there. Dunno though. He never tells us nothing.’

‘You’d just disappear.’

Trick lobbed a cob at the oak tree, and we watched the leaves shake as it vanished into them. I thought of Mum driving away in her sky blue van. I felt like if I stood up, I’d drag the
whole earth behind me, like I weighed as much as the field we lay in.

The fingers of his other hand were spread on the crumbling soil, and I imagined putting my hand over his.

‘Me mammy really likes it here as well,’ he said, and he sounded so fed up that my fingers curled themselves over his without my permission. He turned his palm over, and we were
holding hands, just like that.

He looked at me fiercely, and his fingers were warm between mine.

‘You know none of us took nothing from your friggin’ shed,’ he said. ‘Do you know that?’

I nodded, hoping my face looked unextraordinary because I felt such relief to hear him say it, and to know I believed him.

He lifted his hand, the one I’d been holding, and put it round my shoulder, and I leaned into him, amazed at how natural it felt. He scratched at a bit of mud on his jeans with his other
hand.

‘Me mammy’s mad about your place, you know. She dreams of the lot of us living in there. You lot booted out.’

I laughed. ‘Wish my mum was mad about it.’

Trick squeezed me. The corn shifted around us, nocturnal animals waking up.

‘Sometimes, I wonder what it’d be like if she’d died instead.’ It sounded terrible, even when I said it quietly. ‘I mean, if we’d talk about her
more.’

Trick stroked my shoulder.

‘You can talk to me about her,’ he said, and it wasn’t the same, but it meant something that he said it. I told him how we’d talked for hours on Monday night, and then I
said something I hadn’t admitted to myself properly: that part of me was glad that she’d gone, glad even that Sam wouldn’t speak to her, because it meant I got a look-in.

The moon had been rising for hours, and was at the top of the sky, and I shivered. Trick rubbed the goose pimples on my arms. I could just make out his swollen eyes in the moonlight.

‘Tough, eh?’ he said, catching me staring at his bruises. He dabbed at them.

‘Maybe if it was your knuckles that were smashed up.’

He half-laughed.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Nah,’ he said, but when I reached out to touch it, he flinched.

‘Sorry.’

I tried again.

We both watched as my hand closed in on his face. He shut his eyes, and I noticed his breathing, and mine. I thought of the word
palpitation
.

‘Does that hurt?’ I said, pressing my fingers light as I could against his skin.

He shook his head and swallowed, and I thought about him saying I was pretty, and what I’d said to Matty about having a boyfriend, and of all the kissing scenes I’d ever read that
started just like this one. I imagined drawing my face to where his was, and putting my mouth on his, and it made my stomach flip so violently I yanked my hand away.

Trick didn’t notice, or pretended not to, and we sat cross-legged the way we had all the days before, only much, much closer.

As it grew darker, Trick’s face looked grainy, and my vision became less sure, but all around me buzzed and rattled and shook with life. I was aware of everything: the temperature of the
breeze, the way it lifted the hairs on my arms, the distance between mine and Trick’s knees.

We sat there not talking while the sky darkened, closing us in, the sides of our bodies touching, a long warm strip where we joined together.

I was standing in the chip shop the next time I saw Matty. It was Friday night, and Dad was leaning on the counter waiting for three cod. I’d been making a Pointillist
picture of a kingfisher on the steamed-up glass when I saw something moving outside.

It was Matty. In the passenger seat of her mum’s car, she waved, doing her fakest smile. They’d pulled into the spot in front of the pick-up. Donna was leaning through the gap
between the seats to get her handbag from the back. If this were the old days, I would have been handing it to her.

I didn’t wave, just got on with my drawing. I began building a speech bubble from the kingfisher’s beak out of dots. Donna slammed the car door, and made her way towards the shop. I
was at the top of the curve of the bubble now, and I could see Matty trying to look as if she didn’t care what I was going to write inside it. I knew she did.

We used to do this together. When Donna was queuing for our chips, Matty would knock on the window to get a person’s attention, and whisper instructions to me, and I would trace a heart or
a kiss, or write
Piss Flaps
backwards if it was someone we hated. Someone
she
hated.

The bell rang as Donna entered, and people budged up so she could get into the packed shop. I watched Matty pretend to be interested in the houses on the opposite side of the road. I took my
time with the bubble.

‘Tommo!’ Donna called. ‘Tut, tut, is that your truck? Are you driving tonight then, Iris?’

Dad leaned away from the counter where he’d been examining the battered things, and grinned. I hated seeing them together. Their eyes flashed. Donna couldn’t stop smiling.

‘Same as usual when you’re ready, Poll,’ Donna called over the counter.

Poll nodded over her shoulder, shovelling chips from one compartment to another. There were spots all round her hairline even though she was old.