Infinite Sky (21 page)

‘We won’t be comfortable anywhere,’ I said.

Before she left, she told Dad not to rush me.

‘These things can be very traumatic for young witnesses,’ she said, and I wanted to hug her, until the words sank in.

I was now a witness.

We were allowed to see Sam for a few minutes during the night. He had a tube coming out of bandages on his head. Something about keeping the pressure in his brain under
control. It looked scary. He was still pale, and more tubes came out of his mouth and nose, and he had little suckered wires stuck to his chest as well as IVs in each arm.

The room was cold, because the doctors were lowering Sam’s temperature to try and decrease the swelling in his skull. He’d been put on a ventilator. The sucking, wheezing sounds made
me think of my lungs inside me.

Dad held Sam’s hand and told him he was proud of him, that he loved him, that he was sorry.

‘When you wake up, I’ll make it up to you,’ he said, really quietly, and he looked half embarrassed as he spoke.

I stood at the foot of the bed, unable to think anything except:
You’re my brother, you’re my brother, you’re my brother
.

I woke curled across two seats with my head on the jumper Dad had used to cover Sam. It smelled of metal, and when I lifted it, I saw blood. I felt sick.

‘What time is it?’ I asked, but Dad didn’t answer. He was looking out the window. We were high up, on the fifth floor. I could see fields out the window, and a white water
tower.

‘You wouldn’t hold back, would you? You’d just tell the truth, wouldn’t you?’

He turned to study me, and I nodded, but my throat was closing, and I wondered if I’d ever be able to talk to him again.

‘Things I said to him, Iris. Why would I say those things?’

He looked so confused.

The sun was beginning to filter through the blinds that covered the windows, and he pulled at the cord, but it didn’t do anything. He let go, and it rattled for a few seconds.

‘All that blood,’ he choked, and I felt myself drowning in it too.

At eight o’clock, Dr Kang came to talk to us. She had a clean shirt on and the same sweet perfume. She asked how my head was, then started talking in her rapid way.

‘The plan now is to see if we can bring your son out of his coma. We’ll turn the lorazepam off and see if he’s seizure free. If we can successfully bring him off the lorazepam,
that will tell us a lot. Off the meds we’ll be able to see how well his brain is functioning, for better or worse.’

We had questions as always, but she couldn’t give us any answers.

‘It sounds basic, but I’m afraid it’s true. All we can do at this point is wait and see. We won’t know the extent of the damage until we can bring him out of the coma.
Until then, we do everything we can to make him comfortable.’

I’d read the pamphlets they’d left. Brain damage could result in paralysis, amnesia, loss of vision, loss of intellect, loss of speech, changes in personality. Dad said he
didn’t care, as long as Sam woke up, but what if he woke up dribbling and dense and needing a nappy?

We got a taxi home to change our clothes, and clean our teeth and collect things for Sam. At the top of our road Dad asked the taxi driver to stop. He wanted to walk.

The sky was bright blue and white, and the firs choked with birdsong. In a garden nearby somebody yodelled as they watered the plants.

Trees hadn’t uprooted and stones hadn’t split. Birds hadn’t fallen from the sky, didn’t lie rotting on the ground, but a few metres from where Sam had fallen we found the
motorbike. Its scorched black frame leaned in a pool of melted rubber and metal, and I imagined Punky and Leanne and Dean coming back to leave it here in the early hours of the morning, dropping a
match into the petrol tank in Sam’s honour, and running as fast as they could, listening out for the explosion.

The bottom half of each tyre had turned to charcoal and ash, but the tops were untouched, and the track there was still perfect. Dad lifted a teardrop of liquefied metal from the ruins, and held
it out to me like a jewel.

‘This jog your memory?’

He wouldn’t stop looking at me, and I couldn’t tell when would be a normal time to stop shaking my head.

He put the jewel in his pocket, and we trudged back to the house.

Big Chapmun’s tractor sat on the drive. It was caked in mud, but it gleamed in the sun. I remembered Trick’s hair glowing in its lights a thousand years ago when he’d shouted
at them to stop, but just as quickly he was gone.

I was cleaning my teeth when Dad shouted.

‘Iris? Come up here a minute.’

He was standing by the window in his bedroom. I knew what I’d see before I saw it.

The paddock was empty.

The hollow feeling in my gut expanded. It pressed against my throat.

The fire had been kicked out, and there was a scalded black patch left. Charred logs were strewn in the long grass nearby. Two yellow rectangles marked where the caravans had been. Rubbish had
spread further around the paddock: nappies and the insides of toilet rolls and empty food cartons and scrunches of tin foil. The pile of scrap. The washing line that had been attached to one of the
caravans drooped to the ground, still attached to an alder.

Dad sat on his bed. The mattress wheezed as he shifted position. I didn’t ever want to stop looking out the window.

The sky was cartoon-bright, big white clouds against the blue, and across the brook, the maize flowers of the cornfield waved in the breeze.

I could feel Dad looking at me, working it out, and I dropped onto the bed beside him. The silence between us grew into a gigantic, living thing. It pressed against my neck and forced me to
start talking.

I told him the truth, all of it – that I’d gone to see Trick after the argument, that I was hiding by the ditch when he’d arrived in the tractor, that Sam had started it
– and my voice sounded small and far away, like it was coming from a radio somewhere high above us.

When I got to the bit where it was Sam, Punky and Dean against Trick, Dad raised a finger. He put it very close to my face.

‘Don’t you dare defend him,’ he said, and he spoke very quietly and slowly. The muscles in his face were working like mad. ‘I don’t
ever
want to hear you
defend that
thug
again.’