Infinite Sky (25 page)

Finally, the door opens.

Dr Kang shakes her head. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘We did all we could.’

The room shifts and slips and swells.

Objects move around like gravity has been switched off.

Mum is making a loud noise. Her head is between her knees.

Dr Kang is saying we can stay with Sam as he passes, and medicine books are floating through the air like spaceships.

The curtains are pulled around Sam’s bed. They are pale blue and waterproof and they make a snapping noise when we walk in. He looks peaceful, and it isn’t right.
Mum goes to him. She says Oh God. She moans No in this terrible low way. She kisses his face. She rests her head on his chest and sobs.

Dad bows his forehead to Sam’s. His eyes are squeezed shut. He says My boy, my boy, my boy. No one knows what they are doing.

Sam’s hand is warm in mine and I’m not ready to let it go. I want to lie next to him, like we did before, on his bed. I want his hair to grow back, and his dimple to pop and him to
call me Eyeball. I don’t want to think about what he is, right now, my brother, plugged into machines and breathing and dead.

Mum is hyperventilating. She is clutching at Sam’s arms and looking at his face and shaking her head very slowly.

‘They can’t, they can’t, they can’t,’ she says, she can’t stop saying it, and Dad reaches across the bed. He puts his hands on her shoulders.

‘He’s gone,’ he says, and his voice breaks. ‘Anna. He’s gone.’

Sam’s chest rises and falls with the ventilator.

It’s like a black box has opened inside my head. The doctors give Mum something, and Dad buys whisky on the way home, but I’m just here, feeling everything.

Sometimes we’re in the kitchen and sometimes we’re in Dad’s room. Or is it Mum and Dad’s room? I don’t know, but me and Dad are in our pyjamas. Mum’s wearing
Sam’s navy blue Adidas Stripes and one of his white T-shirts. We don’t wash but occasionally Mum makes us all go and clean our teeth. The sun comes up and the moon comes up. And then
they go down.

At some point an envelope addressed to me arrives. Inside is something damp and crushed and purple. An iris. It’s dead, and sweet-smelling, and I know it means Trick made it home. I put it
on my windowsill next to his address. I think about writing to him.

At some point WPC Baker calls round. She wants to know if I’m ready to make a statement. Mum tells her I’m not. At some point she rings, and Mum says the same thing. Dad
doesn’t say anything. If I’m near the phone when it rings, and I can get away with it, I hang up without answering.

At some point Father Caffrey comes round. Tess is with him, and an order of service is made. We get old photos out to choose a nice one. Mum has to go upstairs to lie down, so I choose one, from
the end of last summer.

Sometimes Tess comes round. She feeds the cats and the dog and puts milk in the fridge. She forgot to stoke the Aga – she didn’t know how it worked – and so it’s gone
out. The kitchen is cold, and full of insects. The windowsills rattle with bluebottles and moths. Daddy-long-legs butt at the strip light.

‘Look after your mum and dad,’ Tess said to me when we first got back. She had washed all the lasagne plates and was putting a tray of savoury rice in the fridge, and I felt like she
was saying I hadn’t lost as much as them.

The heatwave continues outside, and the house is getting stuffy when Mum starts asking questions.

‘What was he doing out there?’ she asks, and it’s clear from her voice that her tablets have worn off.

The curtains are drawn and there’s a sheet pinned over them. The mirror on the dressing table faces down.

Her voice is very flat and very careful, and it makes me sit up because we’ve covered this; we’ve been over it a hundred times at the hospital.

Next to me, in the damp bed, Dad takes a swig of whisky. He repeats the sentences that in a certain order explain what happened to Sam.

‘But
why
was he out there?’ Mum says. ‘With those boys. How did he know them? And why was he wearing his football boots?’

She turns to look at Dad, who is the only one still lying down. His neck is tilted against the headboard at an uncomfortable angle. His arm, which must be numb by now, is lodged underneath the
pillow I’ve just moved from.

He lifts himself out of the bed and walks to the window. He pulls the curtains and sheet aside and looks out, rests one fist against the glass. The day shining into the room makes us close our
eyes.

‘Football boots,’ he says very quietly.

‘I’m just asking what he was doing out there. How did he meet them? It’s a reasonable question.’

Mum continues to list
reasonable questions
in the kind of voice a lioness might discover if it woke one morning on the savannah to find it could speak.

‘Bloody good time to come back and take an interest. Bit more of this a few weeks ago and we might have a son we could sit down and give a good talking to.’

Mum is standing now. Her cold blue eyes are on fire.

‘How
dare
you accuse me of not being interested? I did everything for the lot of you until a few months ago! You didn’t know your arse from your elbow! How
dare
you say
my leaving was anything to do with my kids!’

They take opposite sides of the room, and I stand between them on the bed. I hold my hands out, telling them to stop. My voice is tinny and unclear. I’m bouncing slightly with the effort
of asking them not to fight. I get the urge to laugh.

‘
Please
,’ Dad says. ‘Tell me again why you left. I’d
love
to hear it.’

‘I didn’t think I loved you any more,’ Mum says, and her blue eyes are frightening.

They step closer, until they are shouting into each other’s mouths.

‘I tell you why Sam was wearing his football boots, Anna. Because I’d hidden all his trainers. Because that’s how bad it had got. I didn’t know how else to keep him in. I
didn’t know
what else to do
.’

Mum wants to know why he didn’t tell her, why we hadn’t let her know.

‘Why didn’t we let you know? Why didn’t we
let you know
?’

Dad’s face is purple. He can’t breathe.

‘Do you remember leaving? Packing a van? Filing for divorce?’

‘I would have come back!’ Mum shouts. ‘I would have
come back
!’

‘But
I
didn’t know. Don’t you get it, woman?
I
didn’t know!’

‘Why didn’t you tell me, Iris?’ Mum says ‘All those times on the phone. Why didn’t you
say
something?’

They are both looking at me now, standing above them as I do, on their bed, swaying slightly, and it’s all the wrong way round.

‘Nasty habit you’ve developed,’ Dad says, and he’s slurring slightly. He stinks of whisky.

‘Don’t start, Thomas. Please don’t start on her.’

‘No, don’t
you
start. All your love and everybody’s equal. Bollocks. You weren’t here.’

He points at me, still looking at Mum.

‘She left me there, at the hospital, without a flaming clue about what had happened. Looked me in the eye.’

‘
Iris!
’ Mum calls, but I’m already halfway down the stairs.

All I want is to go outside, to feel the sky above me, to be on my own. Instead I go to my room. I pull Trick’s address out from my copy of
The Outsiders
. I copy it neatly, watching
my hand as if it’s someone else’s. I walk back upstairs. It’s like looking through the wrong end of binoculars.

‘What’s this?’ Dad says, when I hold the address out to him. His voice follows me out the room, terrible and quiet like a balloon full of toxic gas.

‘Is this it? Is this his address? How long have you had it?’

I don’t stay around for the balloon to explode.