Skellig (4 page)

I TRIED TO STAY AWAKE THAT
night, but it was hopeless. I was dreaming straight away. I dreamed that the baby was in the blackbird’s nest in Mina’s garden. The blackbird fed her on flies and spiders and she got stronger and stronger until she flew out of the tree and over the rooftops and onto the garage roof. Mina sat on the back wall drawing her. When I went closer, Mina whispered, “Stay away. You’re danger!”

Then the baby was bawling in the room next door and I woke up.

I lay listening to Mum cooing and comforting and the baby squeaking and hissing. The birds were singing outside. When the feeding was over and I was sure everyone was asleep, I crept out of bed, got my flashlight, pulled some clothes on, and tiptoed past their room. I took a jar of aspirin from the bathroom. I went downstairs, opened the back door, and tiptoed into the yard.

The take-out trays were down under newspapers and a heap of weeds. They’d tilted over and lots of the sauce had run out. When I looked inside, the char sui was all gluey and red and cold. I dropped the soggy spring rolls into the same tray and went down toward the garage.

“You must be stupid,” I told myself. “You must be going round the stupid bend.”

I looked up at the blackbird on the garage roof and saw how it opened its yellow beak so wide as it sang. I saw the sheens of gold and blue where the early light shined on its black.

I switched on the flashlight, took a deep breath, and stepped inside.

The scuttling and scratching started. Something skittered across my foot and I nearly dropped the food. I came to the tea chests and shined the light behind.

“You again?” he squeaked. “Thought you’d gone away.”

“I’ve brought something,” I said.

He opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Aspirin,” I said. “And number 27 and 53. Spring rolls and pork char sui.”

He laughed but he didn’t smile.

“Not as stupid as you look,” he squeaked.

I held the take-out tray across the tea chests toward him. He took it in his hand but he started to wobble and I had to take it back again.

“No strength,” he squeaked.

I squeezed between the tea chests. I squatted down beside him. I held the tray up and shined the light onto the food. He dipped his finger in. He licked his finger and groaned. He stuck his finger in again and hooked a long slimy string of bean sprouts and sauce. He stuck his tongue out and licked. He slurped out pieces of pork and mushrooms. He shoved the spring rolls into his mouth. The red sauce trickled down from his lips, down over his chin onto his black jacket.

“Aaaah,” he said. “Ooooooh.”

He sounded like he was loving it, or he was in pain, or both those things together. I held the tray closer to his chin. He dipped and licked and groaned.

His fingers were twisted and stunted. His knuckles were swollen.

“Put the aspirin in,” he said.

I put two aspirin in the sauce and he picked them out and swallowed them.

He belched and belched. His hand slipped to his side again. His head slumped back against the wall.

“Food of the gods,” he whispered. “27 and 53.”

I put the tray down on the floor beside him and shined the light on him. There were hundreds of tiny creases and cracks all over his pale face. A few fine colorless hairs grew on his chin. The red sauce below his lips was like congealed blood. When he opened his eyes again, I saw the tiny red veins like a dark net across the whites of his eyes. There was a smell of dust, old clothes, dry sweat.

“Had a good look?” he whispered.

“Where you from?”

“Nowhere.”

“They’ll clear all this out. What will you do?”

“Nothing.”

“What will you—”

“Nothing, nothing, and nothing.”

He closed his eyes again.

“Leave the aspirin,” he said.

I took the top off and put the jar on the floor. I had to push aside a little heap of hard furry balls. I held one up to the flashlight and saw it was made of tiny bones glued together with fur and skin.

“What you looking at, eh?” he said.

I put it on the floor again.

“Nothing.”

The blackbird on the roof sang louder and louder.

“There’s a doctor comes to see my sister,” I said. “I could bring him here to see you.”

“No doctors. Nobody.”

“Who are you?”

“Nobody.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing.”

“My baby sister’s very ill.”

“Babies!”

“Is there anything you can do for her?”

“Babies! Spittle, muck, spew, and tears.”

I sighed. It was hopeless.

“My name’s Michael. I’m going now. Is there anything else I can bring you?”

“Nothing. 27 and 53.”

He belched again. His breath stank. Not just the Chinese food, but the stench of the other dead things he ate: the bluebottles, the spiders. He made a gag noise in his throat and he leaned away from the wall like he was going to be sick. I put my hand beneath his shoulder to steady him. I felt something there, something held in by his jacket. He retched. I tried not to breathe, not to smell him. I reached across his back and felt something beneath his other shoulder as well. Like thin arms, folded up. Springy and flexible.

He retched but he wasn’t sick. He leaned back against the wall and I took my hand away.

“Who are you?” I said.

The blackbird sang and sang.

“I wouldn’t tell anybody,” I said.

He lifted his hand and looked at it in the beam from the flashlight.

“I’m nearly nobody,” he said. “Most of me is Arthur.”

He laughed but he didn’t smile.

“Arthur Itis,” he squeaked. “He’s the one that’s ruining me bones. Turns you to stone, then crumbles you away.”

I touched his swollen knuckles.

“What’s on your back?” I said.

“A jacket, then a bit of me, then lots and lots of Arthur.”

I tried to slip my hand beneath his shoulder again.

“No good,” he squeaked. “Nothing there’s no good no more.”

“I’m going,” I said. “I’ll keep them from clearing the place out. I’ll bring you more. I won’t bring Dr. Death.”

He licked the dry sauce from below his lips.

“27 and 53,” he said. “27 and 53.”

I left him, backed away toward the door, went out into the light. The blackbird flew away over the gardens, squawking. I tiptoed into the house. I stood for a minute at the baby’s crib. I put my hand beneath the blankets and felt the rattling of her breath and how soft and warm she was. I felt how tender her bones were.

Mum looked up at me and I could tell she was still asleep.

“Hello,” she whispered.

I tiptoed back to bed.

When I slept, I dreamed that my bed was all twigs and leaves and feathers, just like a nest.

NEXT MORNING, DAD SAID HE COULD
hardly move. He was all bent over. He said his back was killing him. He was stiff as a blinking board.

“Where’s those aspirin?” he yelled down the stairs.

Mum laughed.

“All this exercise’ll do him good,” she said. “It’ll get that fat off him.”

He yelled again:

“I said, where’s those blooming aspirin?”

I kissed the baby and ran to catch the bus to school.

That morning, we had science with Rasputin. He showed us a poster of our ancestors, of the endless shape-changing that had led to us. There were monkeys and apes, the long line of apelike creatures in between, then us. It showed how we began to stand straighter, how we lost most of our hair, how we began to use tools, how our heads changed shape to
hold our big brains. Coot whispered it was all a load of rubbish. His dad had told him there was no way that monkeys could turn into men. Just had to look at them. Stands to reason.

I asked Rasputin if we’d keep on changing shape and he said, “Who knows, Michael? Maybe evolution will go on forever. Maybe we’ll go on changing forever.”

“Bull,” whispered Coot.

We drew the skeleton of an ape and the skeleton of a man. I remembered what Mina had said and I looked really closely at the poster. I put my hand up and said, “What are shoulder blades for, sir?”

Rasputin crinkled his face up. He reached behind his back and felt his shoulder blades and smiled.

“I know what my mother used to tell me,” he said. “But to be honest, I really haven’t got a clue.”

Afterward, Coot hunched his shoulders up and lowered his head and stuck his chin out. He lurched through the corridor, grunting and running at the girls.

Lucy Carr started screaming.

“Stop it, you pig!” she said.

Coot just laughed.

“Pig?” said Coot. “I’m not a pig. I’m a gorilla.”

And he ran at her again.

In the yard when I played football, I realized how tired I was with being awake so much during the night. Leakey kept asking what was the matter with
me. I was playing crap. Mrs. Dando came again when I was standing by myself at the side of the field.

“What’s up?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“And how’s the little one?”

“Fine.”

I looked at the ground.

“Sometimes I think she stops breathing,” I said. “Then I look at her and she’s fine.”

“She will be fine,” she said. “You’ll see. Babies so often bring worry with them into the world, but you’ll be wrestling with her before you know where you are.”

She touched me on the shoulder. For a moment I wondered about telling her about the man in the garage. Then I saw Leakey looking so I shrugged her off and I ran back, yelling,

“On me head! On me head!”

It was a dozy afternoon. Some easy math, then Miss Clarts reading us another story, this time about Ulysses and his men trapped in the cave with the one-eyed monster Polyphemus. I was nearly asleep as she told us how they had escaped by pretending to be sheep.

I took my skeleton picture home. I kept looking at it on the bus. There was an old guy sitting beside me with a Jack Russell on his knee. He smelled of pee and pipe smoke.

“What’s that?” he said.

“Picture of what we used to be like long ago,” I said.

“Can’t say I remember that,” he said. “And I’m pretty ancient.”

He started going on about how he’d seen a monkey in a circus in his young days. They’d trained it to make tea but it was nothing like a person, really. But maybe it had just been practicing. There was spit dribbling at the side of his mouth. I could see he wasn’t all there.

“There’s a man in our garage,” I said when he’d shut up.

“Aye?” he said.

The Jack Russell yapped. He put his hand around its mouth. He seemed to be thinking hard.

“Aye,” he said again. “And there was the loveliest lass on the trapeze. You could swear she could nearly fly.”

DR. DEATH WAS THERE WHEN I
got home. He was in the kitchen with Mum and Dad. He had the baby on his knee and he was fastening her undershirt up. He winked at me when I came in. Dad poked me in the ribs. I saw how flat Mum’s face was.

“It’s this damn place!” she said when Dr. Death had gone. “How can she thrive when it’s all so dirty and all in such a mess?”

She pointed out the window.

“See what I mean?” she said. “Bloody stupid toilet. Bloody ruins. A bloody stupid yard.”

She started crying. She said we should never have left Random Road. We should never have come to this stinking derelict place. She walked back and forth in the kitchen with the baby in her arms.

“My little girl,” she murmured. “My poor little girl.”

“The baby has to go back to the hospital,” Dad
whispered. “Just for a while. So the doctors can keep an eye on her. That’s all. She’ll be fine.”

He stared out the window into the backyard.

“I’ll work harder,” he said. “I’ll get it all ready for when she comes back again.”

“I’ll help,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear.

We had bread and cheese and tea. The baby lay there in a little carrier beside us. Mum went upstairs to put together the things the baby would need in the hospital. I put the skeleton picture on the table and looked at it but couldn’t concentrate on it.

“That’s good,” Dad said, but he wasn’t looking at it properly either.

I went up and sat on the landing. I watched Mum throwing undershirts and diapers and cardigans into a little case. She kept clicking her tongue, and going, “Agh! Agh!” like she was mad at everything. She saw me there and tried to smile but started to click her tongue again.