“I don’t know, I’m starting to like it here.”
“Seriously? I thought you said you hated being looked at all the time. You said in the city you can be invisible.”
“I know, but the city has downsides too.”
“Name one.”
He shrugs. “You can be invisible.” He nudges my shoulder with his shoulder. “Look, there are jerks everywhere. You might as well be somewhere you have a few friends too.”
I suppose now he’s besties with Sinead he thinks Little Murragh is wonderful. “There has to be somewhere in the world you can just be yourself and not get crapped on for it,” I mutter. “It’s just too depressing otherwise.”
“There’s Franconis’. Everyone there likes you.”
“That’s not much of an achievement when the place is run by your mum. Your parents have to like you.”
He snorts again. “Not necessarily.”
“I wish this year was over. I wish school was over.”
“Well, it’s not,” he says briskly. “There are fifty-seven days until summer and about a thousand until university, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“That helps, thanks.”
“All the more reason to ignore them. Don’t let them ruin the rest of the day – cheer up.”
I fold my arms even tighter. “No.”
“If you don’t cheer up, I’ll make you cheer up.”
I give him a sceptical look. He puts a hand in his blazer pocket. I know what he’s got in there.
“Don’t do it, Hector.”
“Don’t make me do it.”
“I mean it, I’m not in the mood.”
“Then you leave me no choice.” He takes his clenched fist out of his pocket and holds it between us.
“Don’t you dare.”
“I’m doing it.”
“Hector.”
“It’s happening.”
“Hector.”
He turns away for a moment.
“Hector, stop it right now.”
He turns back, big red nose taking up half his face, rests his chin between his palms and gazes challengingly at me. I stare back, face rigid.
His smile slowly widens.
I clench my teeth.
His cheeks balloon.
I purse my lips.
His eyes cross.
I try so hard, but once the corner of your mouth goes, you’re doomed, and you can either give in and laugh, or sit there looking constipated.
“I hate you,” I mutter through a very reluctant grin.
He waggles his eyebrows. “Don’t care.”
I shake my head at him. I’m still grumpy, but, if you have to be grumpy, being grumpy at Hector is a million times better than being grumpy at everyone else.
“Come on.” He hops off the wall and clown-marches down the road, nose in place. “We can go to yours after we see Birdie. I’ll let you throw teaspoons at me if you like.”
I grin and follow him.
A post on … er … throwing stuff
Posted by Birdie
The Juggulars are our Friday-night juggling club (except they’re here pretty much every night). I tried to get them to lay down their weapons for a couple of minutes to talk to me, but they refused, so we conducted this interview while they stood on each other’s shoulders juggling clubs over my head.
So, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, here are the Juggulars!
BF:
OK, guys and guyettes, what’s the secret of great juggling then?
TJ*:
Practice.
BF:
That simple, huh?
TJ:
It takes a while, but once you get the basic skills, you can build on them quite quickly.
BF:
And why would you recommend learning to juggle?
TJ:
Because you meet cool people. And team juggling is fun.
BF:
What tips would you give to beginners?
TJ:
You can concentrate too much. Stress won’t improve your juggling! Unless you thrive under pressure, in which case you should put all your most breakable possessions on the floor around you.
The Juggulars’ chillaxation tips for anxious jugglers:
1. Try singing while you juggle; it takes your mind off what your hands are doing and they start to behave more naturally.
2. Don’t watch the balls. Focus on a point about thirty centimetres from the end of your nose.
3. Drop your shoulders and you’ll stop dropping the balls!
4. If you’re becoming a “wandering juggler”, try facing a wall so the balls hit it instead of moving away from you.
BF:
What would you say to people considering joining the Juggulars?
TJ:
If you’ve got two hands, get down here – we can use you. Actually, if you’ve only got one hand, we can still use you. And if you have no hands, we can use your feet.
*I would never suggest that the Juggulars aren’t a diverse group of individuals. But they do tend to all talk at once. And finish each other’s sentences. And dress alike. And Dad calls them “the Clones”.
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When I get down to the warehouse, Hector is already there. (Mum gave him a key. Everyone has a key. The only person who doesn’t have a key is Py.) He must have been reading Birdie’s blog because he’s got his headphones in and he’s singing “Half a Person” by The Smiths at the top of his voice while juggling three rings. He’s facing away from the door, so I sneak in behind him and settle on the sofa to watch. He’s not doing too badly – maybe Birdie was right and I do make him nervous. Or it could be the singing. He’s even dancing a bit.
A ring goes over his head and he tuts and turns to pick it up.
“Holy…! Finch! You could have said you were there!”
“Are you kidding, that was priceless.”
He looks so embarrassed; apparently singing is more humiliating than doing pratfalls in baggy trousers. Or maybe he’s just embarrassed to be caught listening to The Smiths. Actually, The Smiths is one of my favourite bands (I inherited them from my dad) and I’m impressed that he likes them.
“You were doing really well!” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Maybe work on the high notes.”
He chucks a ring at me.
“Come on, let’s try some tandem stuff.” I plug his phone into the sound system and then we stand there with our arms round each other. I launch into the song myself and he gives me a look of complete mistrust, but then shrugs and joins in.
Three Smiths albums and a “Best of” later, we’re hoarse, knackered and I officially award Hector his Franconis’ Level One Juggling certificate.
You’d think it was a Nobel Prize. He tears up, makes a speech and then we go out for pizza to celebrate.
I’ve hardly seen Birdie all week because she’s been having millions of tests; every time I showed up at the hospital, they were wheeling her off to another department. So we’ve all had a nasty, nervous feeling hanging over us, like when exam results are due at school. Except this matters.
Hector and I are still with her on Friday when Mum arrives to take the evening shift. But Dad has come with her this time, and the doctor follows them into the room, holding Birdie’s chart like a shield between her and us. We stand, as if the head teacher’s just walked in, then the adults make small talk about the weather and the traffic and the canteen food and how the doctor’s been on duty since midnight – “you poor thing” – but I realize no one’s listening, because everyone in the room is staring at the chart.
Mum and Dad are craning their necks a little, as if they might be able to see over the top of it, looking scared and hopeful. The doctor grips it with both hands like it weighs a ton, and frowns at the scrawled writing, even though I get the feeling she knows what it says already. The adults never make eye contact, and Hector and I glance between them, wondering who’s going to cave first
and actually say something about what’s scribbled on those green pages.
Eventually the doctor raises her head, and her smile is a lovely one; kind, reassuring, as if it’s been lifted from a box labelled “kind, reassuring smiles”. Mum and Dad smile back determinedly, like being nice to the doctor will make her say Birdie is going to be fine. Dad is squeezing Mum’s shoulder so hard it looks painful.
“Thanks for coming in, Mr and Mrs Sullivan. I thought we should have a chat about Bridget’s progress.”
I almost laugh. It sounds like something Mr Cooper would say at school; has said, on several occasions. “We’re concerned about Finch’s progress, Mrs Sullivan. Perhaps we could have a chat?” You’re in trouble now, Birdie, I can’t help thinking. A month’s detention for sleeping through class. And lunch. And dinner. And all your favourite TV shows and many, many conversations with me.
“Of course,” Dad says.
The doctor looks at me and Hector.
“I’ll wait outside,” Hector says.
“Perhaps you could wait with your friend?” the doctor says to me.
“I want to stay.”
“Finch is Birdie’s brother. Her twin,” Dad says. “Can’t he stay?”
The doctor puts her head on one side and the smile says Best not.
I follow Hector out of the room but stand close to the door, trying to listen. I hear muffled voices, but the corridor’s too noisy to make anything out.
“Do you want to know what they’re saying?” Hector asks.
“Of course.”
He bites his lip, considering, then he says, “If you’re sure. Follow me,” before dashing off down the corridor.
“Hector, wait! Where are you going?” I don’t want to leave the door, but the muffled sounds are only getting quieter, so I give up and run after him. At the end of the corridor I find him standing round the corner, at a fire exit.
“This goes outside,” he says.
“It’s a fire door – there’ll be an alarm.”
“There isn’t, I’ve been watching. There’s a little garden where the nurses go to smoke – they go in and out all the time. Birdie’s room looks out onto it and her window’s open.”
“Are you actually Sherlock Holmes?”
“Come on, do you want to hear or not?”
I follow him through the door, which doesn’t summon the fire brigade as we open it, then I almost trip over him because he’s crawling along the ground by the hospital wall. The top half of this wall is lined with windows and one of them must be Birdie’s.
Of course, Hector knows exactly which one, but I’d have found it anyway, because about six windows down I hear Mum saying, “What do you mean by brain damage?”
Hector looks back at me, his eyes wide, regretting bringing me out here. We hunker down, side by side, backs against the wall. The window is only open a crack, but the garden is quiet and we can hear every word.
“We can’t know for sure until she wakes up; it’s just one possibility we have to consider. After a head trauma, people sometimes have memory loss or difficulties with speech, vision, hearing, or there could be learning difficulties or motor impairments.”
“That’s difficulty with moving your body,” Hector informs me in a whisper, but I shush him.
“So she might not remember us? Or be able to talk to us? Could she be paralysed?” Mum’s voice.
“There doesn’t appear to be any damage to the spine, so she shouldn’t be paralysed. But movement, like everything else, is controlled by the brain, and we don’t yet know how her brain has been affected.”
“But she might be all right?” Dad says. “There might be no damage?”
“I had hoped she would be awake by now,” the doctor says. I notice she didn’t answer the question. “With a head injury it’s normal for the brain to sort of switch off for a while, to recover,” she goes on. “But the longer the coma continues, the more likely it is that the person has suffered some permanent damage, or that…”
“What?”
“Or that they may not wake up.”
The voices float on over our heads, mingled with the beeps from Birdie’s machines. The doctor is talking about “care options”; Mum and Dad aren’t saying anything. On the concrete between us, Hector’s hand moves over and takes mine. I turn to look at him, but everything feels sort of unreal and I can’t quite focus on his face. I pull my hand away, place it on top of my knees and examine it instead.
My hands look like the feet of a hiking enthusiast. Trapeze artists wear leather hand guards called “grips” for a more secure hold and to protect their skin, but you end up covered in calluses anyway. Sometimes I cut the tops off the calluses with a knife or a razor, because if they stick out too much, they can rip and bleed, and then you get blood all over the trapeze bars. My knuckles are huge, my fingers are skeletal, my skin is dry and rashy from the constant contact with chalk dust, and my palms are like sandpaper. I’ve always been a little ashamed of the state of my hands, and I don’t want Hector to touch them.
“I’m sorry, Finch. I shouldn’t have brought you out here,” he says.
“I have to go.”
“OK. They’ll be finished soon. We can wait in the canteen if you like?”
“No, I mean I have to get out of the hospital.”
“Don’t you want to see your mum and dad?”
“No. I have to go.” I’m crawling back to the door. I don’t know why I’m crawling; I could just walk, since it doesn’t matter now, but I keep crawling and Hector crawls after me. The concrete under my knees feels good for some reason.
At the door I stand up, and then run unsteadily down the corridor. I pass Birdie’s room without looking in, jostle through groups of nurses and people in dressing gowns at the hospital entrance, and run on down the street, faster and faster, leaving Hector panting miles behind.
Birdie’s hands are as bad as mine. Later that night, after Mum and Dad have gone and there’s no danger of running into them, I sit on her bed, take one hand in mine and turn it over. Raw, red, still rough, but definitely softer than it used to be. She complains about her hands as much as I do, but she never uses hand cream. The thing about the calluses is you earn them. You have to work hard to get them, and even though they’re ugly, they protect you, like armour. As soon as you take a break, they start to soften. If the break is too long, they go altogether.
Sometimes Birdie and I compare hands to see whose are worse.
“God, they look terrible,” she always says, holding her big-knuckled, rough-palmed hand up next to my bigger but identical one.
I lift her hand now and hold it palm to palm with mine. It’s like trying to slide two pieces of sandpaper over each other. Our hands are designed to lock together and hold on tight.
Tony comes in then and tells me I’ll miss the last bus if I don’t go soon. When I let go of her wrist, Birdie’s hand flops, lifeless, onto the bed, leaving mine empty.
For a few days Hector does little more than trail after me everywhere I go (including litter detention and even the bathroom on one occasion), bring food to my house (Mum’s stopped cooking again) and send me text messages every five minutes from the time he leaves my house in the evening until I fall asleep. He’s even started talking about “our act” again, which I know is just to keep my mind off Birdie.
“I’m fine, Hector, you don’t have to keep fussing,” I tell him repeatedly.
“OK,” he says, and then keeps fussing anyway.
What are you doing? he texts one evening, even though I told him ten minutes ago I was going to bed.
Going to bed. You?
Watching TV. Did you see Vampire Diaries tonight?
You watch that?
Vampires, werewolves – what’s not to like?
Whiny girls, convoluted plot – what’s not to hate?
So you do watch it.
I may have accidentally seen it once or twice.
Liar.
Geek. Go to bed. Do you ev
en get free texts?
No.
Your dad is going to freak out when he sees your phone bill.
I’ll blame you. Night then.
Night.
Actually I don’t mind the texting. Or the company on the way home from school. And the food comes in handy.
I turn my lamp off and leave my phone next to my alarm clock, which I don’t even use any more because Hector texts me at 7.35 every morning without fail.
I can only sit with Birdie for so long before the silence makes me want to scream. Besides, other people want to sit with her too and we’re not supposed to crowd the room. So I take to sitting in the garden Hector showed me, doing my homework below her window. The first few times the nurses catch me out there, they usher me back inside, but soon they get used to me and we start chatting about how terrible their day has been or doing my homework together. The nurse I see most is Tony, because he smokes so much – he goes through more lighters than Py.
“All right, Finch, how’s it going?” he says one day, squatting beside me and lighting up. He blows the smoke out like it’s the breath he’s been holding all afternoon.
“She’s about the same.”
He fans the smoke away from me and says, “I asked how you were, not how Birdie is.”
“Oh.” I have to think about that for a minute. “I suppose I’m OK. Apart from Hector driving me nuts talking about clowns.”
“Is he the one who trips over Birdie’s heart monitor or the one who smells like a petrol station?”
I laugh. “He’s the blond one. The other one is Py; he’s a fire eater.”
“Each to their own. The doctors all seem to know him.”
“He gets treated for burns a lot. I expect they’ll be getting to know Hector soon too.”
“Do your friends have any safe hobbies?”
“Says the guy who smokes like a chimney.”
“Good point. But at least I’m trying to quit.”
“This is you quitting?” I wave a cloud of smoke away from my face and cough pointedly.
Flying Tips for Flightless Birds Page 16
