Infinite Sky (9 page)

Dad made sure he was in the Stag when she called, so I got used to settling down in his armchair in the living room and talking about things that nobody else wanted to hear about: mainly Trick
Delaney.

It was funny, because when Mum actually lived here she could never listen to me. She pretended to, and thought she was pretty good at it, but I could tell when she was faking. I’d run
little tests to find out, throw in funny-sounding words that I’d learned, like
scrotum
and
vestibule
, and she would nod away.

On the phone it was different. She loved hearing about the travellers, especially Trick’s mum, and I told her everything I could notice. Like that all of Trick’s little sisters had
their ears pierced, even Ileen, the tiniest, and that sometimes in the morning before the babies were awake his mum did press-ups outside the trailer.

Matty said she wouldn’t be able to take her mum leaving, but sometimes, after just a few minutes at her house with her mum, I got the urge to walk out and lie down in a field full of mud
or take a swing and chuck it over the high bar in the playground so the chain twisted and nobody could play with it.

One summer, Matty pointed out that my house didn’t have family photographs. Hers was like a museum: the lot of them at Disney World and dressed up in Victorian costumes and Matty every
year at school.

Soon after, Mum said she couldn’t afford our latest school pictures. ‘We only just got the last one. You don’t look any different,’ she said, and she was trying to joke,
but I got upset. I told her she had to get it. It would be embarrassing to be the only kid at school not buying one, and why didn’t she take any pictures of us anyway? Why didn’t she
put some up?

‘Where’s this coming from?’ she said. ‘Why don’t you ever bother your dad about this stuff?’

But the next morning she gave us money for the pictures, and a few weeks later, a collage of our last visit to Skegness appeared in the kitchen.

We didn’t talk about anything like that on the phone. Instead, I told her how the two men and Trick were away from the paddock all day while Trick’s mum cleaned the trailers inside
and out, and how the little girls pretended to help, but mostly got in the way, and how the fire was sometimes left to go out and sometimes kept burning through the night. We spent longer on the
phone every week, and I started to look forward to Monday nights.

The Monday after the break-in though, I wasn’t in the mood. It was hard to be enthusiastic about the travellers with Dad walking around the way he was. He’d even let the bird feeders
go empty, which was unheard of. His robin kept popping up at the kitchen window and pecking at the glass as if to say,
What did I do?

I listened half-heartedly to Mum’s description of the souks in Tunis, and the people she’d met there, and I answered Yes, and I don’t know, and Probably, to her questions about
whether I’d got the bracelet she’d sent, and whether Sam had read her postcard, and whether Trick was okay, until eventually she gave up and let me go.

It was hours later, when I was learning the names for wildflowers in bed, when a pounding on my door almost gave me a heart attack. Sam burst in on the third bang. In the past he would have
waited, but these days he thought a warning was sufficient.

‘No,
please
, come in . . .’ I started, and then I saw his face.

‘What does she say?’ he slurred, and he put too much weight on the door handle, so it looked like it might swing away at any moment, taking him with it. His shaved head made his
brown eyes look enormous.

‘What?’ I put my book down.

‘What does she
say
?’ he said, louder now. He stepped into my room, without letting go of the door. One of his eyes was closed. He stank of booze.

I didn’t know what to say, and so I said, ‘Not much.’

‘Not much?’

‘She tells me about where she’s been, like Beni Khiar . . .’

‘
Beni Khiar?
’

‘And she asks how we are, says she loves us. That she’s sorry—’

‘Ha!’ he said, as if that was the stupidest thing he’d heard in his life. ‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘What does she
say
? When’s she coming back?
What does she say?
’

‘I . . . She didn’t . . . She didn’t say any of that.’

‘Don’t you ask her?’

I swallowed.

‘You don’t . . . ?’ He was incredulous, and his mouth opened. He dropped his head back and made this terrible noise, the sort a baby rhinoceros might make if it had three legs
broken, but was still about to charge.

His eyes glittered and he stared at me, swaying along with the door, one side of his lip raised in disgust.

‘Why don’t you speak to her? If you’re so desperate to find out. Why don’t you speak to her yourself?’

‘Doesn’t matter to you, does it?’ he sneered. ‘You don’t care, do you?’

He’d let go of the door handle now, and was halfway into my room, his face a mess of rage and tears and drunkenness, and I got out of bed, ready to fight him if he wouldn’t shut his
mouth.

‘You don’t, do you?’ he said. ‘You’ve got
Dad
.’

‘How would
you
know what
I
care about?’

I wished Dad would hurry up and get back from the pub.

‘I hate you, Iris,’ he slurred, pointing at me. ‘You shouldn’t talk to her. I hate you. And I hate Dad. And I hate
her
as well.’

He turned and slammed the door so hard that I felt the air sucked out from around me.

‘Why don’t
you
speak to her?’ I shouted after him. ‘If you’re so bothered! Why don’t you speak to her when she rings?’

‘Shut up!’ he shouted, and his voice broke, and he ran upstairs.

I heard Sam throw himself down on his bed in the room above me. I got up. The door handle was still warm from where he’d been gripping it. My hands shook. I
couldn’t hear anything out in the hall.

He wouldn’t want me; he’d tell me to go away, but I couldn’t stop. I didn’t knock, just pushed the door open gently.

‘Get out,’ he said.

He was lying exactly as I knew he would be: diagonal across his bed with his face shoved into his pillow. His Adidas Stripes had got pushed up, and I could see the ribbed ankles of his white
sports socks. Their dirty soles confronted me; two sad eyes. Mum’s postcard was in pieces on the floor by his bed. I’d memorised what it said.

I remembered coming in here when Mum and Dad were arguing. When I was small enough to climb in next to him and not care that we were squashed together.

There wasn’t enough room, and he wouldn’t budge over, and it took some effort to balance, but I made it onto the bed beside him. His breath was jagged and sad, and it hurt the piece
inside me that felt just the same as it.

On the wall behind him was the outline of a king that he’d drawn in black marker pen. He’d pestered Mum and Dad to be able to do it for ages. Finally Mum had convinced Dad to let
him. As long as he drew a practice picture first, and showed it to them, she said, why shouldn’t kids be allowed to express themselves in their own rooms?

The king’s long hair curled outwards as though he stood in the middle of a great wind. Beyond the king a medieval castle was in the process of falling down. The drawing wasn’t
finished.

There was a new box of pens on the floor Sam still hadn’t opened. Him and Benjy both loved drawing. Benjy did these brilliant cartoons that made everyone laugh, and Sam did intricate
pictures of nature and magic. He hadn’t done any art stuff for weeks.

‘Sorry,’ I whispered, not knowing what I had to be sorry for but meaning it completely.

Sam’s throat made a weird noise.

‘I didn’t. I didn’t . . .’ I stopped, not sure exactly what I didn’t.

Sam lifted his arm up, and I ducked my head under, and we lay there like that, him face down, me tucked under his arm, until the world outside disappeared, and only the drawings that covered his
bedroom walls could be seen in the window.

Mum left on a weekend in the middle of May. Summer hadn’t started, and it had been raining for weeks. She said she would come back. Not to Silverweed, but to Derby. She
was just going away for a bit, to work things out, she said.

She’d packed the van overnight while we were sleeping.

She only took three boxes with her: one of clothes, one of cooking stuff, one of books.

‘What on
earth
is the point of having all this crap?’ I’d overheard her asking Tess on the phone.

I didn’t understand why she’d started calling everything ‘crap’, like it had all just appeared one day to annoy her. Like she hadn’t picked all the items
herself.

Sam wanted to keep all the stuff she was leaving behind, or to put it at Tess’s if it would upset Dad, but Mum wouldn’t let him.

‘It’ll only weigh you down,’ she said. ‘You’ll see one day.’

And all the time she spoke in this maddening, soothing way because she didn’t want us to be sad about what was happening. Like that was even possible.

In the morning we had breakfast together, the three of us. Dad stayed out of the way, chopping wood. Pouring out the tea, Mum pressed her lips into a white line. She didn’t look at us.

After she’d washed our plates, she crouched down and put her head against Fiasco’s.

‘Be a good girl now, won’t you? I’ll be back before you know it.’

Fiasco licked her nose.

I couldn’t stop crying. I was scared we’d never see her again. She’d talked about travelling for as long as I could remember and now she was actually going. Sam just stood
there and stared, and it was weird because they were the closest.

They used to mock me and Dad when we went out looking for rare insects or wildflowers. They preferred shopping and singing. It was always the two of them, making loads of noise. It had been that
way since forever.

Mum had on her denim shorts and a thin beige shirt I hadn’t seen before and a pair of sturdy walking sandals she’d bought from a catalogue recently. We followed her out. I stood on
the drive while she looked quickly around at the yard and the flowerbeds and the pebbledash walls of Silverweed, and I thought,
Why don’t you look at
us
?

Sam stayed where he was, at the midpoint of the path.

Dad put his axe down, and came to wait behind Sam. Fiasco ran up and down the path with her head low, like she was in trouble.

‘I’ll ring every week, and write,’ Mum said. ‘And as soon as I’ve worked out a proper plan, we’ll talk about what’s going to happen next. This is
nothing to do with you. Remember that.’

She pulled me to her and kissed the side of my head, and told me not to worry. I was a teenager now, and I had my dad and my brother, and we were to look after each other. She said she needed to
do something for herself, but she’d be back, and she’d be
happy
.

‘I’m not leaving
you
, I love you,’ she whispered, but it didn’t make me feel better, because Dad was standing right there and she couldn’t say the same to
him.

She went to hold Sam but he shrank away. She looked at the ground where rain had pooled in the dips of our wonky paving stones. She nudged at the water with her toe.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘
Okay
.’

Her van was painted sky blue, and it was the only patch of colour in the yard, and I thought that if it had been sunny she wouldn’t be able to leave because it was so beautiful here
then.

She opened the door and got in, and it creaked like any other car door on any other day and I wanted to jump in the back and throw her stuff out onto the drive, but instead I watched as she got
the engine going, and struggled with her seatbelt, and waved very seriously, like she was taking the dog off to the vet’s to be given a lethal injection. And then she went.

Sam’s face was grey when I looked at him, and he was trembling, but his eyes were dry. The sound of her tyres passing over the rocks and stones on the lane was really loud for a few
seconds, maybe because we were all so stunned and then Sam ran onto the lane. He ran after her for a few seconds, then stopped and picked up a stone. He threw it, and it crashed against the van.
She didn’t stop.