Infinite Sky (23 page)

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.

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.

‘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.’

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.

‘The lorazepam is almost out of his system, so he might be more active than he has been before,’ Mary said, and I thought ‘active’ seemed a strange word to use.

Mum held her hand out as if I was a little girl, and asked if I was sure I wanted to see him. I said of course I was, I’d
already
seen him, more times than she had, and she looked
hurt, but I was angry with her for trying to take control suddenly and, more than that, I was disappointed in myself, because part of me didn’t want to see him one bit.