Infinite Sky (22 page)

I felt the corn den and Trick, and this whole summer, the way it had been, slipping away from me, becoming something else.

After a million years, he looked at me again, and his eyes were cold.

‘You know, not very long ago, I wouldn’t have believed you
could
lie to me. Not very long ago at all.’

Outside the window the poplars shimmied in the breeze, and I noticed how if you really looked, each leaf had its own little dance. They never stopped moving, just did their dance up there, over
and over, and for nobody.

A cobweb heavy with dust hung from my bedroom ceiling. I noticed how even when you couldn’t cry any more, your body hurt with wanting to. Trick was gone. Dad had been
right. Sam might die. The insides of my veins ached, and my fingertips throbbed. Fiasco squirmed beside me, trying to lick my face.

Dad was in the shower now. Water slapped the bath as he washed. The sun shone through my curtains, and I watched the shadow of the rose bush dance across the wall.

I had drifted into a kind of trance when I realised the shadow had swollen, that there was a scratching noise at the glass.

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.

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 happened. 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.