Infinite Sky (26 page)

All day I stay out in the corn den. I dig holes in the ditch to go to the toilet. I make a fire and I bake corn. Fiasco chases rabbits, and I will her to catch one so she can
eat something and we never have to go home again. Night comes, and I feel like a traitor but all I can think about is Trick.

I keep seeing his odd eyes, the way they looked when Sam was on the floor. I see his chest and stomach, cut up, and his expression, outside my window, when he told me he hadn’t wanted any
of it.

The further back I go the more it hurts, but I can’t stop. I remember him lying next to me in his red vest and jeans, listening to me in that serious way of his. I picture him hiding out
here in the dark, his mum and dad shouting, Sam’s blood drying on his hands. How much pain he must have been in.

He’ll have to go to prison for years. He picked up a brick and cracked it against someone’s skull, and now I don’t have a brother.

The stars come out and I stare at them until they throb and grow and shrink again. I remember Sam’s face as I washed his cuts at the kitchen table, how he warned me about Trick.

I wish he was here to act smug and rub it in, to say he was right all along. I want to argue it with him, to tell him Trick was backed into a corner, that he should never have started on him in
the first place. Suddenly I can hear his voice.

But to brick someone, Eye? That’s messed up.

‘But Punky cut someone!’ I say out loud. ‘What’s the difference?’

I remember Trick’s lip, exploded, his ear ripped at the top where it should join his head, and the bloody tissue in his pocket. I remember Sam’s hair, thick with blood, and I regret
cuddling Trick, and then I’m back to the unforgettable thing, the thing that is at the beginning and end of every thought, which is that it really doesn’t matter if I hugged Trick or
not, or if I told Dad about Punky’s knife.

Because Sam is never coming back.

I lie in the corn den nestled against Fiasco, not always certain if I’m sleeping or awake, and then I jolt from somewhere warm to heartache, and Fiasco’s gone, and Mum is standing
over me.

Sun shines through her short hair which is messy in that way that has nothing to do with fashion, and her eyes are swollen and sore-looking. She’s wearing Dad’s wax jacket over
Sam’s clothes, even though it’s already getting hot.

Fiasco wags her tail treacherously, comes to lick my face.

‘Poor old girl must have been hungry,’ Mum says. Her voice is empty. ‘She been out here with you all night? She ate a whole tin of food just now.’

Mum passes me an apple, and pulls Dad’s work flask from her pocket, and sits in Trick’s corner. She pours out hot chocolate. I don’t know who she is. Her face is so
straight
.

‘Got brandy in it,’ she says, almost apologetic, and holds the lid out. I take it, amazed at how the milky brown liquid swirls, and how the steam floats up, and how Sam will never
again taste a thing as delicious as this.

‘We shouldn’t have done that. In there. I shouldn’t have asked you that. Your dad’s right. It wouldn’t have made any difference. If you’d told me. If
I’d come back. Nobody knew Sam was going to die. How could they? It doesn’t make any sense.’

She takes the lid back and refills it, and passes it to me. She swigs from a small bottle of brandy in Dad’s pocket. Her whole body trembles.

‘He’s angry with you now, Iris, but he won’t hold it against you. Me, maybe. Not you. He loves you.’

Why isn’t he out here then? I want to ask, but my tongue has swollen to the size of an adder. It blocks my throat.

‘Loves me too, I suppose.’ She shakes her head. ‘No suppose about it. He just doesn’t always know how . . . He loves you and your brother so much. He cried when you were
born. Both of you. Couldn’t believe he was lucky enough to get a boy and a girl, in that order.

‘He told everyone that’s what he wanted, when we were expecting you. “A frilly knicker,” he said. I didn’t want to curse it, and I didn’t mind, as long as you
were healthy, but he told everyone, he didn’t care. “A frilly knicker, or we’re sending it back.”’

Mum looks around at nothing, but her voice comes a little bit back to life as she talks.

‘All the other men steered clear of the baby phase, but not your dad. He loved it. Nappies, winding, the lot. Let you crawl all over him. Took you everywhere when he wasn’t
working.’

She looks up. It’s another one of those blue and white days. The bright clouds move fast.

‘We were happy then, you know. The four of us. I wish you could remember it.’

I drink the last of the chocolate. It’s so sweet. The brandy burns my throat. It feels good in my veins.

‘You’ve broken his heart, not telling him things, and he doesn’t understand. You’re still his little girl. But I . . . It’s different with us. All those
conversations we had. I know the way you felt about him, Iris. About . . . Trick.’

She swallows in the middle of saying his name, and I want her to stop talking for once because I feel so guilty, but she doesn’t. She never does.

‘You didn’t
do anything wrong
, Iris. Yes, you shouldn’t have lied, or snuck out behind his back, but you’re thirteen now. Fourteen nearly. He forgets what
that’s like. He’s so old-fashioned! You only did what teenagers do. And this boy. Trick. He was there for you. I know that.’

I wipe my eyes.

‘You’ve got that to deal with on top of everything else, on top of losing your brother. But your dad doesn’t think like that.
He knows
you wouldn’t lie about what
happened, no matter what you thought of this boy. If you held things back . . . He knows you loved your brother. Of course he does.’

I want to talk, to get some of what I’m thinking out, but I’m so scared of saying the wrong thing and, anyway, she won’t stop.

‘We’re so different, me and your dad. Always have been. That’s why we liked each other so much at the start. See, I don’t care who’s responsible. Because nothing
can be done about it. It won’t stop me feeling guilty and it won’t bring Sam back. He isn’t coming back. That’s all I care about. That’s all I’ve got room for.
But your dad, he wants to
do something
.’

‘I just feel so sick all the time,’ I manage.

‘I know you do, baby,’ she says, and she pulls me to her.

‘No. I mean . . . I feel
so sick
.’

‘Look at me, Iris. You’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. Do you understand? Sam was your brother and Trick was your friend, but what they did had
nothing to do with you
.
You don’t have to
choose
. Just because me and your dad couldn’t live together, didn’t mean you had to stop loving one of us, did it? Doesn’t work like that. Love
doesn’t work like that.’

It is like a giant thing has let go from round my neck.

She screws the empty lid back onto the flask, rubs her hands over her face and scratches her head, hard and all over. She strokes her
hands across Sam’s Adidas Stripes. She looks at me and looks at me and looks at me.

‘The only thing we can do now,
the only thing
, is be honest with each other. We have to tell each other how we’re feeling, and be honest, and get through this. That’s
all we can do, Iris. I mean it. That’s all we’ve got.’

She takes my hand, and rubs her thumbs against my fingers, and I dare myself to speak, to say what it is that’s making me sick.

‘I’m so
angry
with him, Mum, for starting it. He knew Trick was my friend. And he started on him, for nothing. No reason at all. And Trick was scared, Mum. He didn’t
know what he was doing. They were all on him. He was a mess when I saw him. Afterwards. He was coughing up blood. He waited all night, here, this was our place. His mum and dad left and he waited
to see me. To give me his address. And I didn’t even know if he’d made it home, but he did.’

Mum is looking at me, chewing her top lip, and I can’t carry on. Her blue eyes are wintry.

‘It’s just so hard to hear, Iris. It’s like you’re saying . . . It’s like you’re saying he deserved it.’

‘I know,’ I say, but I don’t stop talking, because she’s right. All we can do is tell the truth, and see what’s left. ‘But if Sam had lived I’d forgive
Trick, I know I would, because he didn’t want any of it. And what’s the difference? Really? He’d still have smashed my brother round the head with a rock. What he did would still
be the same.

‘It shouldn’t have happened, none of it should. But I just can’t understand why Sam started on him, Mum. I don’t understand why he did it. Why did he do it?’

I don’t really know what I’m saying any more, and I feel so far away from things, and then Mum wraps her arms around me.

‘I’m so sorry that I left you here by yourself. That you’ve been trying to cope with all this . . . You’ve got to talk to your dad, Iris. You’ve got to make him see
. . .’

She can’t talk any more, and it’s strange to hear her cry, because all my life I’ve never seen it, and now she can’t stop.

‘I thought you’d be all right,’ she chokes out. ‘I thought you’d all be all right.’

For some reason then, I remember how Sam hated to be laughed at, and all of the times I did it anyway, because I wanted him to feel stupid, and I wonder how anybody can be cruel to someone they
love. How can anyone do anything but love each other and be kind when at the end of it all, waiting quietly, sure as the dark at the end of the loveliest day, is only this?

The night before Sam’s funeral I slept in his bed. At some point, Dad walked in. He didn’t expect me to be there. I could smell the whisky and fags on him. He
backed out of the room slowly. I hoped he hadn’t thought somehow that Sam had come back.

I have a black linen dress to wear and new black leather ballet shoes. Matty and Donna brought some things round for me to choose from. In the end, they chose for me. I didn’t care. Matty
tied a black ribbon round my hair, so it was off my face for once.

‘You’re so pretty,’ she said, fiddling with my curls, and I knew she meant she was sorry about everything.

The sun’s only just come up, but I put the dress on and sit on my bed. I feel like somebody’s sister in a play about a funeral. I wait. Dad gets up too early as well. I can hear him
in the shower, and I think about Trick at my window. How Sam opened his eyes in hospital and saw nothing.

On my wall, the girl that is meant to be me stands on a hill before a storm. She looks out at a buzzard that rips a baby rabbit into the sky. The drawing seems threatening now, like a bad omen.
I love it. It makes me think of chocolate pancakes. I lie down and pull the covers over my head.

At nine o’clock, Tess and Benjy arrive. Tess has more brandy. She pours three glasses.

Dad isn’t down yet. Mum knocks brandy back. She’s wearing sunglasses, but no one’s mentioned it. Benjy is wearing black trousers and a white shirt, and his hair looks wrong in
a side parting.

If it was him who’d died, Sam could have worn his clothes. If it was me, Matty could wear mine. Mum could wear Tess’s or the other way round. It’s like we’re all in
costume, and I get the urge to laugh, and then I’m sad because I wish we’d had time to organise something better.

Mum takes her sunglasses off for a second, and her eyeballs are pink. Her eyelids are puffy. She says she’s wearing them in the chapel.

‘They’ll think you’re making a statement,’ Tess says.

‘Screw ’em,’ Mum says. ‘They make me feel better.’

Tess nods into her glass. She tops Mum up.

It’s almost time, and Dad still isn’t down.

I find him sitting on the end of his bed with his head in his hands. The way he turns his head to me, like a toddler or an animal, makes me run out of the room.

‘Mum. You need to go and see Dad.’

She necks her brandy and goes upstairs.

Benjy has been stood by the Aga looking lost. Tess walks over and gives him a cuddle.

Mum’s older brothers arrive, Uncle Martin and Uncle Tim, with his wife, Aunty Paula, and my two little cousins. They’ve been driving since four and the kids are bickering about
something. They won’t stop. After a few minutes, Tim shouts at them to go outside. They run out, and a minute later we hear them laughing.