Infinite Sky (13 page)

Dad looked like he was about to stop me, and I stared at him, my whole face shouting,
And who do you think I’m going to meet out there?

Austin unloaded the chainsaws, oblivious, and eventually Dad waved a hand, as if I wasn’t worth bothering about. He unhooked the back end of the pick-up, let it drop, carelessly. The metal
twang reverberated around the hills.

‘Back for dinner,’ he barked after me. ‘Half twelve latest.’

I stamped my walking boots into the dried-out grass, trampling the pretty marsh flowers that so many other times I had stopped to identify.

He didn’t have any faith in me.

We used to walk here every Saturday. If it was really sunny, Mum and Sam would come too, but generally they preferred shopping. Dad would test me on the names of trees, and I’d try to
impress him with my knowledge.

‘Turkey oak, defo.’

‘Nah, Cecil.’

‘
Turkey
. The lobes are
way
too pointy for a Cecil!’

‘Could be a hybrid,’ he’d say, letting me have it.

We’d stop at the White Hart and look through his pocket books about wildflowers and insects, talk about what we’d
seen. He’d let me have half a pint of bitter shandy with my dinner.

Maybe I’d stop seeing Trick. It wouldn’t be that hard. I’d only known him for a few weeks. I’d make up with Matty and things would go back to how they used to be. The
travellers would be evicted and I’d never see Trick again. I’d forget all about him. I’d show Dad that I was loyal, that I could be trusted.

But why? When I’d done nothing wrong?

And how could I make up with Matty? She made me feel stupid just for being myself.

Dad was so certain about everything, but sometimes he didn’t have a clue. I kicked at the dry floor. A cardinal beetle crept, bright red, along a piece of rotting bark. As if it could ever
be inconspicuous!

I lifted my eyes, and focused straight ahead.

I would identify nothing.

Dad only liked me if I was doing what he wanted. If I was walking beside him, calling out the names of plants
he’d
taught me, I was okay, but if I was doing what
I
thought
was right, he had no time for me at all. He hadn’t asked me a question for months. He hadn’t even listened when I told him about spotting the azure blue damselfly.

The hill was steep, and I started to run, half tripping over the frazzled tufts of grass, feeling the burn in my thighs. I filled and refilled my lungs with fresh air. I felt like I was learning
something I didn’t like, a hard truth, as Mum would say.

‘Some people can’t fit the mould that’s made for them, Iris,’ she’d said to me before she left. ‘They get squashed in. And it’s hard for them to leave,
but it’s harder for them to stay. They have to find other ways to be. D’you understand that?’

I’d said no, I didn’t understand, because I hated it when she got like that, using annoying metaphors and talking about people who were obviously her. I’d wanted to make things
harder for her, and who knows? Maybe I didn’t understand then, not really.

From the hill’s peak, I looked at the clouds that banked to the east. There was a wind building, and it blew my hair into knots. The branches of the rowan trees overhead crashed into each
other, and the wind caught in my ears, howling at me. I thought about Dad down there, taking the elms down branch by branch, so sure he was right about everything, and I knew in my heart that he
was wrong about this.

I made a silent promise to go and see Trick as soon as I could.

Whenever I got the chance, I still crept up to Dad’s window to watch Trick’s family. Now we were friends, I was interested in a different way. I wanted to hear how
they talked to each other, and what they laughed about. I wanted to know what they said about us, the country people who were trying to get rid of them.

Trick’s mum was always saying things that made him turn away, smiling, and I imagined her doing the same to me, saying things like, ‘And look at you with your curly hair, a fine
figure of a girl,’ or pointing out that my boobs were finally growing, that I’d soon be needing to borrow one of her bras.

She was that kind of mum, I could tell. Like mine. She wanted to make people laugh.

And then one morning, when I was sitting at the table eating a cheese toastie, she walked past the kitchen window. The baby, Ileen, was wrapped in a blanket in her arms. Dad was in the outside
loo, which was next to the back door. He still used it sometimes, even though there’d been plumbing inside for decades.

She knocked three times, and I froze. What if she’d come to tell me to stay away from Trick? Dad was right there, behind the chipped green paint of the outside toilet door. He’d
think I’d been sneaking out before I’d even had chance. I’d never be allowed out by myself again.

She knocked harder, and I opened the door.

She was even more beautiful up close. She had a freckled nose and smooth tanned skin like Trick’s, but her eyes were a melting brown, and her mouth curled up at the sides, not quite in a
smile.

‘So sorry to bother you . . .’ she said, and her voice was hoarse like Trick’s, but her accent was different. Messier and more Irish. Her words crumpled into each other like
kids impatient to go down a slide. They got squashed at the end.

‘Who’s that?’ Dad called. ‘Iris?’

‘It’s Nan Delaney . . .’ she answered for me. She spoke as though this wasn’t the first time they’d met, and I realised it wasn’t.

‘Nan De—? Hold on.’

The toilet roll holder swivelled, and I felt my cheeks burn. The chain flushed, and Dad stepped out of the loo, tucking his T-shirt into his jeans.

Nan took a step back so that she was on the path. Dad was on the doorstep, and I was behind them both, in the house. He was as thrown as I was, and I could feel him bristling.

Nan looked at Dad with hard, flat eyes, and I wondered what they’d said to each other when they’d talked before.

‘I’m embarrassed to bother you, I am, but I thought it must be worth a try . . .’ She let out a nervous laugh that didn’t suit her. She pronounced thought as taught, like
Trick. ‘It’s me second youngest, Patsy. The moment we’ve run out of water she’s taken ill. Men are both at work, you see, and I can’t go far because of the
babies.’

She said babies to rhyme with tabbies, and can’t with ant. And she wasn’t here because of me.

It was obvious what she wanted, but Dad wouldn’t make it easy. A look of annoyance crossed her face then disappeared just as quickly.

‘I wondered if you could sell me some water, a bucket’d do. For me babby, so I can give her a bath, make her some soup . . .’ She trailed off. Her green eyeliner shimmered as
it caught the sunlight, and I wondered how she’d learned to apply it so perfectly.

I used to watch Mum sometimes, at the bathroom mirror. She would widen her pale blue eyes and blink onto her mascara wand. Her eyes would roll into her head for a second as she did it, then be
there again, staring at themselves in the mirror. She was relaxed when she did her make-up. It was like she was in a trance.

‘A mother has to swallow her pride,’ Nan Delaney said, and she looked at me then, as if I might understand that, and I might have, but it was too unexpected. I couldn’t smile
back in time, and then her bright, hard eyes were gone, gleaming again at my dad.

He breathed in slow through his nostrils, and I tensed my stomach. I couldn’t bear it if he was rude when she was asking for help. I held my breath.

‘You want amenities,’ he said finally, ‘get to a camp site.’

Nan winced, but her eyes didn’t leave his. ‘Easier said than done,’ she said. ‘Travellers not welcome at the sites these days, ruin people’s holidays they say . . .
Don’t like us when we travel, don’t like us when we stop,’ she said, and I remembered Trick saying the same thing.

She reminded me so much of him. She was beautiful and tanned and freckled, but she looked hard too.

‘I’m not getting into that with you. I want you gone. And you can tell your lad to stop sniffing around my daughter and all.’

He said it as an afterthought, but Nan’s face changed for a second.

The sky was blue behind her, and I could hear the traffic sweeping past on Ashbourne Road, and everything seemed to slow down for a minute as she examined me, puzzling over something. When she
spoke it was as though she was clapping her hands.

‘Well! That’s that, then!’ she said. ‘I’ll go back to me daughter, see if I can magic her up something out of the woodwork.’

‘Got me own litter to sort,’ Dad said, and he turned around and walked into the house.

‘
Cold
man,’ Nan said, then muttered something else I couldn’t make out. She took a step back, then changed her mind. Her eyes were soft again.

‘Say,’ she called into the kitchen, ‘is the brook water right for drinking?’

Dad came back to the door. He laughed out of his nose. ‘Sheep fall in. Rot, you know . . . But it’s your call,’ he said, shaking his head at her.

‘Thank you
very
kindly!’ Nan said, and she wasn’t exactly polite, but as she walked off, I thought she looked dignified, with her back ironing board straight, and her
baby wrapped in a blanket.

Dad filled the kettle noisily. He was trying to avoid me.

I watched from the living room window. Nan took the road round our yard to get to the paddock.

‘Oh, she respects that’s mine at least!’ Dad called from the doorway. ‘Bloody woman.’

I went into the kitchen.

‘Don’t start,’ Dad said, before I’d even opened my mouth. ‘Who goes off in the morning, and leaves four kids without water?’

‘Maybe he didn’t realise.’

‘
Iris
.’

His beard was so bushy now, it was all wispy at the edges, and it made him look old. I wished he’d shave it off.

‘I mean it, don’t start. Not my fault if her husband
is
a careless pillock. And I don’t trust a word she says anyway.’

‘Why would she lie?’

There was amazement in Dad’s eyes as he looked at me. My cheeks prickled.

‘You really do believe everything everyone tells you, don’t you?’

‘I don’t,’ I said, too quickly, and the little stags were there, charging at the backs of my eyes. I blinked them away.

‘You’re too soft, Iris. You need to toughen up. Before you get taken for a ride, good and proper. If they’ve run out of water, then I’m . . .’ He trailed off,
searching the kitchen for inspiration.

Fiasco lifted her nose from her ball and grinned at us, her pink tongue flopping from the side of her mouth, frothy with slobber.

‘Then I’m Fiasco’s mother,’ he said.

I didn’t laugh.

‘You’re just saying that so you don’t look bad.’

‘What? I’m not Fiasco’s mother?’

I opened my mouth to say something else, and he lost his temper.

‘You’re wrong, Iris. And I don’t want to fall out with you again, so let’s just leave it at that, shall we?’

The question sounded aggressive, probably because I wasn’t really being asked anything, and I stared at him fiercely, but I didn’t say any more.

Later that afternoon, Dad and Austin had to get some wood chippings and cement and because they needed the space in the pick-up, Dad said I could stay home. As soon as
he’d gone, I ran upstairs to watch the travellers. Trick’s dad’s van wasn’t in the paddock. The men worked all day in the week. His mum was in the caravan, and three of the
little girls were doing cartwheels and handstands outside. Patsy must have been in bed. I thought of Mum, on her own, needing water somewhere.

My arms ached as I headed down the bottom field with a bucket full to the brim. It got heavier by the second, and I had to stop halfway for a rest. I tripped on a rock crossing
the lane, and sent some of the water flying, but I kept going. I hadn’t been in the paddock since the travellers arrived.

Dad hadn’t mown the grass since Mum left. It was soft and springy under my feet. Daisies and dandelions and dock leaves crowded cow parsley and hogweed. I had to be careful not to get my
foot caught in the tangles or slop water over the sides.

When I looked up, two of the little ones were sitting on the steps. A line of white washing flapped above their heads. It smelled like Trick. They stared at me, then, clutching at each other,
ran up the caravan steps, calling for their mammy.