Never Ending (7 page)

The trail narrows just here, forcing them into single file; Shiv lags behind, shutting out what the other two are saying about Mikey.

Shutting out that face.

It was there in Make, too: flashes of Mikey’s bloodied features superimposed themselves as she tried to draw Dec’s. She never saw her brother’s face at the end. So, even if she wanted to (why
would
you?) she couldn’t have drawn his dead face, as Lucy had put it. But she was unable to draw his living face either.

Shiv wasn’t alone in finding Make tough. Caron, sitting opposite her at one of the tables – spare pencil between her lips as a surrogate cigarette – had little to show for the two hours: a few scrawls on the sheet she handed in to Assistant Hensher and several balls of crumpled paper littering the ground where they had sat. By the end, she looked as frustrated, as upset, as Shiv felt.

If Walk had stilled their minds, Make had stirred them up again.

The trees are thinning, big blots of brightness forming up ahead –
approaching
them, it seems, as though rather than Shiv, Caron, Lucy and the rest walking out into the daylight, the gloom of the woodland is being slowly erased to release them. The other two let her catch up, Lucy in full flow now. Only half listening, Shiv gathers that the girl is well into a monologue about studying marine biology at university, when the time comes.
If
the time comes, she adds.

Shiv knows she must rest or pass out altogether.

“Hold on a sec,” she says, spotting a tree stump at the edge of the path. She sits down a little unsteadily. Holds her side. “Stitch,” she tells them, as they pause.

Caron gives her a questioning look. Concerned. Not buying the “stitch” excuse.

Lucy just picks up where she left off. “I’ve already been off school for seven months, yeah, and I really don’t know if I’ll be well enough to go back this side of Christmas. And what with my GCSEs next year…” She trails off. Puffs out her cheeks. “Sorry,” she says. “Dad calls me Mimi when I get like this – as in
me, me, me
. He goes, “Oh, Mimi’s here again.” I mean, he used to. Before.”

Before what?
Shiv wonders.

The girl’s cheeks are pink but Shiv isn’t sure if that’s from walking or because she’s upset. Shiv dips her head. The wooziness has eased but the nausea is still there and her skin is cold and clammy. She wonders if she’s about to have one of her turns; she doesn’t think so, but it’s hard to tell when one is sneaking up on her.

Caron rests a hand on Shiv’s shoulder. “All right, girl?”

“Just a bit tired.”

When she’s recovered, they set off again – the last of the group now. Lucy is talking about Marine Biology again. Shiv’s always imagined herself doing English when she goes to uni, or maybe History – nothing science-y anyway. Right now, she can’t imagine going to university at all. Or getting a job, or what that job might be. Or marriage or kids or where she’d be living. Anything. Even her own GCSEs – next summer, same as Lucy’s – seem pointless, fantastical. Since Declan died it’s like all of her own possible futures have closed down, become as unattainable for Shiv as her brother’s never-to-be-lived life is for him. Just to be thinking about what she might be doing a year from now, five years, or ten, or fifty, seems wrong. Grotesque. Offensive.

How can she contemplate growing older when Dec never can?

Then there are the times when she wishes she could wake up one morning and two or three years will have passed overnight and she won’t feel like shit any more. But that would mean not missing him, not wishing he was still alive, not remembering how he died.

She can’t conceive of waking up to a morning like that even if she lives to be a hundred.

When they reach the orchard behind Eden Hall, Assistant Hensher is still waiting for them: a sheepdog rounding up the last of the flock. Shiv tells Caron and Lucy to go on ahead – she’ll come and find them in the dining hall.

“I’d like to see Mikey,” she says to Hensher, once the others are out of earshot.

“Mikey?” Hensher can’t be much older than Nikos yet the contrast between them is about as stark as it gets. She shuts down the thought of Nikos. “I’ll have to check where he is,” the care assistant says, unclipping a radio from his belt.

“I just want to make sure he’s OK,” Shiv says.

Hensher manages to meet her gaze. “D’you mind me asking why?”

“Because he’s my Buddy.”

Mikey is in the medical room, resting, so Nurse Zena can keep an eye on him for signs of concussion. When Shiv goes in, the young nurse is sitting at a desk in an adjoining office area, writing notes on a white card. Hensher must’ve messaged her because she smiles, gestures Shiv to go on through.

“How’s he doing?” Shiv whispers.

Zena whispers back, “Worse than the tree, is my guess.”

Mikey is on an adjustable bed, the back raised, his head propped up by pillows. For once, he doesn’t look agitated or keen to be anywhere except right where he is. Shiv changed out of her jumpsuit before coming here but the boy is still in his, the yellow fabric spattered in places with dried blood. His fringe is encrusted, too, like he’s tried to highlight his short, dark-blond hair with ketchup.

“Hey,” Shiv says.

He doesn’t reply, just looks at her through half-shuttered eyes. A dressing covers most of his forehead, his right eyebrow is zippered with soluble stitches and the skin around his eyes is several shades of purple. The rest of his face is deathly pale.

Shiv pulls up a chair and sits beside the bed. “Most people walk
round
a tree,” she says, putting on a cheery grin. “Not straight through it.”

Mikey points at her T-shirt. “What’s that mean?”

She doesn’t look down at the slogan; she doesn’t need to. “It means if you make friends with someone it’s going to hurt when you stop being friends with each other. Or if they go away.”

He looks unimpressed. Actually, it’s difficult to know what he’s thinking.

“It’s from a book,” Shiv says. “
The Catcher in the Rye
.”

“Yeah?” It’s not a curious “yeah?”, more of a so-what “yeah?”.

“It was my brother’s.” Shiv plucks at the front of the T-shirt. “My dad thinks it’s a bit morbid, me wearing his stuff.”

Mikey just sniffs. Touches the gauze patch on his forehead, as though to check whether any blood has seeped through. It has. He wipes his fingers on the bed-sheet.

“Your head must hurt,” Shiv says.

“She gave me something so it wouldn’t.” A glance towards the open doorway to the nurse’s office. “I told her I didn’t want nothing but she jabbed me anyway.”

She wonders why he asked not to have pain relief. Why he bashed his head against a tree in the first place. She doesn’t ask. Whenever she kicks off, she hates people asking why.
Why? Why? Why?
She suspects Mikey’s the same.

“Got yourself out of Make anyway,” Shiv says. She starts to tell him about the session but the boy cuts across her.

“Why are you here?” he asks.

Shiv hesitates. “I don’t know, I guess I just—”

“Feel sorry for me.”

“No, I … it
upset
me. Seeing you do that to yourself.”

“You seen the freak show, now you’ve come to see the freak.”

Shiv can’t help laughing. “Are you always this obnoxious?”

He goes sulky on her, trying to stare her down. The boy who doesn’t want a Buddy. “No one asked you to come,” he says.

She keeps her voice soft. “How old was your sister, Mikey?”

He looks at her, fiery-eyed. Says nothing.

“Younger than you?” Shiv says.

His eyes are an amazing colour – hazel, but flecked with yellow. He breaks eye contact. Takes a bite out of one of his thumbnails. “Nine,” he says, aiming his words somewhere over the far side of the room. “Feebs was nine.”

“Feebs?”

“Phoebe. I always called her Feebs. Or Feeble, sometimes – to wind her up.”

“Phoebe? Seriously?”

“Yeah, why?” He sounds cross.

“Nothing. It’s just—” she touches the front of her T-shirt. The slogan. “That was the name of Holden Caulfield’s sister.”

From Mikey’s expression, he has no idea what she’s talking about.

Shiv changes tack. “Were you
friends
, you and Feebs?” He doesn’t answer. “’Cos
I
was, with my brother. Declan. Dec. He was twelve but he…” She won’t cry. She absolutely won’t cry. “He was my best mate.”

“He was on the TV,” Mikey says. “You both was.”

Shiv nods. “Yeah. Yeah, we were.”

The others have been more subtle about it – Shiv’s “celebrity” status – but it’s been buzzing beneath the surface in the way some of them look at her, or the sudden halt in conversation when she enters a room. She can’t tell if it’s resentment (
Why did your story make the headlines when ours didn’t?
) or curiosity – the thrill of meeting someone, for real, whose face you’ve seen on the news. Like she’s a singer or actress.

A hush envelops them. Just the ticking of a clock and the
scritch-scritch
of Nurse Zena’s pen in the adjoining room. Food smells drift in from elsewhere in the building and Shiv realizes how hungry she is.

“Two more minutes,” the nurse calls out. “I need to do a couple of tests.”

On Mikey, she must mean. Shiv shifts in her chair, starts to say her goodbyes. But the boy stalls her with a question.

“What did you do?”

He’s looking at her hands, the tips of the fingers which she rubbed raw digging away at the seat in Dad’s car yesterday. They’d scabbed over but opened up again in the shower this morning and have been weeping on and off ever since. Shiv looks at them. Tells Mikey how they got to be like that.

“I damage things,” she says. Then, gesturing at his face, “You damage yourself, I damage other stuff. We’re the wrong way round, you and me.”

“How d’you mean?”

“Girls usually turn the hurt in on themselves; boys usually hit out.”

“I don’t believe all that shit,” Mikey says, shaking his head. “All
this
shit,” he adds, with a gesture that Shiv supposes to mean this place, the clinic.

I do
, Shiv stops herself from saying.
We have to, or what else is there?

“See you later,” she says, instead, rising from her seat. Halfway to the door, she pauses, turns back towards him. “Mikey, how did Feebs die?”

He looks at her for so long she wonders if he’s going to answer. Finally, he does. “She drowned.” His voice is hard, heavy with self-disgust. “I tried to save her, but I didn’t. And she drowned.”

Kyritos

Nikos didn’t show up at the villa that evening after the turtle trip, or the following day. Shiv was caught between breathless expectation that he might appear at any moment and the appalling certainty that she’d never see him again.

What had she been thinking, telling him where she was staying?

There probably wasn’t a single day on the boat when one of the tourists didn’t come on to him. He could take his pick: Italians, Americans, Swedes, French – sexy, confident girls. No way would he bother with an English schoolgirl who’d still been wearing a dental brace two months ago. Most likely, he’d be having a laugh with his mates about the skinny kid who had lied about her age.

Shiv couldn’t decide who she hated the most: Nikos, for not coming; or herself for being stupid enough to believe he would.

She’d gone over and over the moment when she told him the name of the villa. The way he spoke to her, the way he looked at her, the way he smiled, the way he stood so close. He
liked
her. Shiv was sure of it. Just as strongly, she’d never been less sure of anything.

Another day, forty-one hours since she’d last seen Nikos.

They were packing for a trip to the local beach. Shiv didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay around the villa; but she’d persuaded them to do that the previous day, complaining of a stomach upset. Mum and Dad – especially Dad – wouldn’t agree to
frittering away
another day just lazing by the pool. In any case, Nikos would be out on the boat again till late afternoon.

“You feeling up to this?” Mum said, rolling up towels to go in the beach bags.

“Yeah, I guess.”

Dad came by, looking for his sunhat. “D’you think it was something you ate?” he asked. “That lunch on the boat? I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Shiv glared at him. “What, they’re
foreign
, so the food’s
bound
to be dodgy?”

She’d been like this for the past two days, veering between bickering snipes and sullen silence. Meanwhile, Declan kept on about the
brilliant
turtle trip and how he wanted to emigrate to Greece one day and run boat cruises for tourists.

They chose the end farthest from the windsurfers and jet-skiers, pitching camp beneath two thatched parasols in a line that ran the length of the beach like so many giant straw hats. Snack kiosks, tavernas and a minimart fronted onto the strand and, behind them, the hills of the interior rose sharply above the resort, gleaming pink and green. Positioning her lounger directly in the sun, Shiv stretched out, stripped to her bikini and lightly coated her skin with Ambre Solaire. Mum sat in the shade with a book of Sudoku puzzles. Dad and Declan went into the sea to swim.

She must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew, Mum was tickling the sole of her foot and saying, “Wakey-wakey.”

She jerked her foot away. “Hmm
?
”

“We’re going for some lunch,” Mum said.

“I’m not really hungry.”

“I’ll eat yours, then.” This was Dad, his sunhat too bright in the glare for her to look at him. He grinned, rubbed his belly. “I love it when you’re off your food.”

They sat at a table on the terrace of a taverna overlooking the spot where they’d spent the morning. Shiv saw that Dec had written his name in huge letters in the wet sand near the water’s edge.

The waiter took their order. When he’d gone, Mum asked Shiv if it might be a good idea to put a T-shirt on.

“So the waiter can’t gawp at my boobs, you mean?”