Flyaway (16 page)

It's only stuffed
. I can still remember Nan's voice, too, as she explained it to me. She'd laughed and cradled me to her.
This bird's not going to be chasing anyone, that I can promise you
. She'd placed it back into the shadows of the barn.
Silly old, useless thing
, she'd murmured.

It looks different to how I remember it, less scary somehow . . . more like something you'd find in a museum. I trace the outline of its wings on the glass. I can tell by its large black beak that it's a male mute swan. Its wings are outstretched and pinned to the back of the cabinet, mid
wingbeat. They're huge, beautiful. Its glass eyes aren't creepy in the way l remember. They just look lifeless and sad. Nothing like the intense eyes of the lone grey whooper at the lake.

I wonder how I could use this for my project. I almost laugh.

‘I wasn't going to make a life-size model, Dad,' I murmur.

But looking at these wings now, perhaps I could. Perhaps I could attach some wooden planks to the bird's body and make a kind of hang-glider with wings. It's a bit odd, but it might look like those da Vinci sketches, and Mrs Diver would love it.

The cabinet screeches as I drag it along the floor. I rest it against the edge of the old operating table, underneath an electric light. Then my head turns as I hear Mum yelling for me. She's outside, on the path to the barn. I hear her quick footsteps near the door. I stand up, waiting for her. She blinks as she steps inside, looks confused until she finds me.

‘Come on, it's time to go,' she calls over.

So I give up on the stuffed swan. For now at least.

CHAPTER 32

I
dream of wings that night; huge, powerful white wings. I dream they flap all around me, hundreds of them, beating around my head and body. Touching my skin and clothes, growing out from my back. They beat so fast that a cyclone whirrs up around me. My hair fans backwards. I shut my eyes against the wind and the cold. And I spin off into the night, held up by all those feathers.

CHAPTER 33

T
he first thing I see is Harry's shirt. I've left it on the back of my chair, ready to return to him. I get up and hunt around for one of my ordinary school shirts, but I've used them all. They're sitting in the clothes basket downstairs. Doing the washing was always Dad's job. Since he's not been in the house, none of us have even been near the washing machine.

I pull Harry's shirt off the chair. Can I get away with it? I thread my arms through its sleeves, tuck it deep into my trousers. I don't have anything else. I hang my school tie loosely around my neck. Cover it all with my spare school jumper. I have to wear my muddy trousers from the other night.

As I go down the stairs, I realise that I like having Harry's shirt on. It makes me feel different somehow. When he gave it to me, I thought it might be weird to be wearing a sick
boy's shirt. But it isn't. It kind of feels like I'm hiding a secret, but it's a nice secret. It still smells faintly of pine needles. I brush at my muddy trousers as I go into the kitchen, try to pick off some of the worst patches. Jack's already there, shovelling his breakfast in.

‘You're in a hurry,' I say.

‘Playing football before school. Meeting the others.'

‘Can I come?' I say it without meaning to, before I even know why I'm asking. Already I can see him trying to work out how to say ‘no' to me nicely.

I sit down opposite him, pour myself a bowl of Rice Krispies. I tip the milk in and mix everything around until I can hear the krispies crackle.

‘Why do you always want to come?' he asks. He's suspicious now, looking at me funny.

I stir my spoon through the cereal. ‘I dunno.' I think of his friends sitting together at the playground, the way they always seem so tight. I think of Crowy. ‘No real reason.'

Jack shoves his last mouthful in then clatters his spoon into the bowl. He sighs as he looks at me. ‘It's not Crowy, is it? You don't
like
him, do you?'

‘Course not.'

I say it too fast. I feel my cheeks go hot and red, and stick a spoonful of krispies into my mouth so I don't have to say any more. Jack notices, though.

‘Ha! Knew it!' He throws his arms up into the air. ‘What is it with that guy?' He frowns as he tries to work it out. Then he gets up from the table, turns as he has another thought. ‘So
it's not just sick boys you like, then?'

On the way to the sink, he stops to hold his spoon above me, waiting for a bit of milk to drop off and land on my neck. I flinch to the side.

‘Get off me!'

‘Bird's got a crush,' he taunts in an annoying singsongy voice.

‘I don't,' I say. Because I don't have a crush on Crowy; at least, I don't think I do . . . no more than any other girl in my school. Anyway, it's Harry I've been thinking of lately. I turn and snatch the spoon from Jack's hand before he can drip any more milk onto me. ‘He's just the nicest of your loser friends.'

I fling the spoon towards the sink. Only it doesn't get there. It pings off the worktop and hits a glass, which topples and then starts to fall. Jack dives for it, catches it. Just.

‘Hey, didn't mean to make you mad,' he says, laughing now. ‘I just think it's funny. First this sick boy in the hospital, and now Crowy. Settle down, sis!'

He washes the spoon then comes back to the table. He's smiling, but his eyes are still taunting me.

‘I don't like either of them,' I say. ‘Not like that.'

Jack raises his eyebrows. I'd hate to know what horrible things he's thinking about me. If Dad was here, he would have told Jack off by now. He gets up from the table, grabs his schoolbag.

‘Don't you dare say anything, to your friends or anyone.'

Jack stops, half turns. ‘So you're saying it's true?'

I shake my head quickly. ‘As if!'

He chuckles as he takes an apple from the fruit bowl. ‘Go get your own group of friends. Crowy's mine!'

He's smiling as he says it, but it still stings. I pat the Rice Krispies further into the milk until it all turns into one big, soggy mess. Then I get my sketchbook from my bag and draw wings until it's time for Mum to take me to school.

CHAPTER 34

M
rs Diver gives us the whole lesson to work on our flying projects. She walks between our desks, checking our ideas.

‘Once you've completed your studies on paper, you can start on the model,' she says. ‘Remember, it can be based on something real that flies, or you can design a flying machine like da Vinci's. Your models don't need to be big and you can use any material you like.'

I think of Old Swanson, and wonder if that's the kind of thing Mrs Diver means. A large stuffed swan hardly seems top of the standard list of art materials. I lean back on my chair and wonder how to use it. What about the wooden hang-glider idea, with the swan attached? It wouldn't have wheels and gears, like Leonardo's machines, but if I got it right it would look pretty amazing. Only it would be huge.

Mrs Diver jolts me out of my thoughts.

‘But before you start thinking about your model,' she says quietly, ‘I want you to continue doing your observation sketches.'

I go back to sketching the swan. I draw her wings outstretched, as she looked when she ran across the surface of the lake. I think about the way her feathers angled into the wind, and try to capture that. Behind me, I can hear Jordan complaining to Mrs Diver about how hard this project is.

‘Imagine how hard it was for Leo,' she tells him. ‘He was doing this kind of stuff over five hundred years ago.'

I stick my chin into Harry's shirt collar and smell the pine smell. Strange that it should smell so much like trees when Harry seems scared to go outside. I put my sketches of wings aside for a moment and draw a boy's face instead. Two big eyes. It's hard to make them sparkle with an ordinary HB pencil, though. I dot in the freckles on his nose. Stretch them out into his cheeks. I dig my pencil hard into the page until the lead snaps. The eyes are too big and the smile is too wide for Harry. And he doesn't look sick enough.

I take a light brown pencil from Sophie's desk and colour in the eyes until they're a chestnut colour. I scribble at the hair until it becomes longer and darker . . . a little more like Crowy's. I push away from my desk and look at it. What I've drawn isn't anyone. A bit of Harry, a bit of Crowy, and a bit of someone else entirely. Maybe it's my dream boy. Maybe Jack's right when he says I like them both.

Matt and Jordan start laughing. I turn around to them
quickly. They're leaning forward over their desks, looking at my picture.

‘Who's that?' Matt whispers. ‘Your boyfriend?'

I instantly cover it up with my hand. But they're hissing with laughter now, the noise coming through their teeth in breathy gasps.

‘You sound like a bunch of snakes,' I say.

That only makes them laugh more. I pull a clean sheet of paper over my picture and go back to planning a wing-based flying machine. I can't concentrate, though, not now that I know they're watching. I stare at Sophie's page where she's trying to draw an aeroplane. She sketches out a faint kangaroo design running down its side. The boys are still sniggering. I turn my body away from them and stare through the window. The sky is light grey today, like swan feathers. I don't want to be here, not even in art lesson. I want to be at the lake, running with the swan. I want Harry to come with me.

When the bell goes, I walk down the school corridors still thinking about him. People shove into me as they try to get to their lessons, everyone in such a hurry. It's not like the hospital corridors. These corridors are crammed with lockers and schoolbags and laughter. Smells of wet jumpers and sweat. At the corner of the corridor, Mr Symonds, the IT teacher, is waiting for us. I imagine Harry's standing there also, waiting for me like how he waited near Dad's ward.

In IT, I forget about spreadsheets and what we're meant to be doing. I wait until Mr Symonds is busy helping someone
then open Internet Explorer. I can flick back to my spreadsheet document if Mr Symonds comes close. It's not as if I'm the only one doing it. Most of the others are checking their emails, and the boys behind me are searching for dodgy sites. I hear them whispering as they click on to something new.

I type ‘how to make a winged flying machine' into the search engine. There are over fourteen million results. The first things that come up are about making model aeroplanes. I click on a related search that says ‘make your own wings'. These results are more practical, giving me instructions and patterns. I click on a link that shows how someone made huge angel wings using two bags of turkey feathers, and then wore them to a party. But there is nothing about swan wings, and nothing about how to turn stuffed swan wings into a moving model about flight.

I keep clicking.

On the ninth page, I find something different. The picture that comes up is of a pencil-sketched man holding his arms out straight. Behind him, attached to his arms and chest with what looks like some sort of harness, are huge white wings. Swan wings. They have to be. They're too big to be anything else. It looks like they're coming right out of his back. I lean close to the computer screen to see. The picture looks ancient and faint, as if it were drawn long before the Internet existed. It looks like something da Vinci could have drawn himself. I scroll down. Below the picture is a list of materials and, below that, instructions.