by Cj Flood
I ran to get them, and we sat at the table, looking at birds of prey.
‘This is the best one,’ I said, turning to a photo of a buzzard. Sam looked at it for ages. He went upstairs to get his pencil case and his new pens.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll draw it on your wall. But you can’t annoy me.’
I didn’t even promise not to in case that was annoying.
I sat on my bed, watching as he traced lines across the wall with his finger. He emptied his pencil case onto the floor. It was full of black pens with different-sized nibs. He told me to go and put his music on, loud, and leave the door open. When I got back, he was still staring at my wall. I wondered what he could see. I wasn’t good at drawing. I could never get the pictures from my head onto the page.
I hugged my knees as he started sketching with a pencil. Every few minutes, he stepped back to see what he’d done. It was all circles and triangles and lines.
‘There’s no point putting in the detail until you know the shapes are right,’ he said. ‘That’s where you go wrong. You do it too soon.’
It was true. I always started with the detail straight away. I couldn’t resist. By the time I realised it was wrong, it was too late. My people always had wonky eyes and a squashed head.
All day, he bossed me about but I didn’t mind. I changed the music when he got sick of it, and made us cups of tea and cheese toasties. He clasped and unclasped his hands sometimes to get rid of the cramp. When he was happy with his sketch, he swapped his pencil for a pen. The drawing got bigger and more detailed. Hills and trees and a stormy-looking sky appeared.
Sam pressed his lips together when he was concentrating, and it made his dimple pop. He was working on the foreground of the picture now. He had my book open, and looked at the buzzard occasionally. In its talons he drew a dead baby rabbit that wasn’t from the book. The buzzard carried it through the sky.
‘I love it,’ I said.
He stopped what he was doing, and stepped back. He put his pen in his mouth and smiled. The plastic knocked against his teeth.
At some point I stopped worrying about being annoying and started talking. I told Sam all about Matty, and how she thought she was so incredible because she wore a bra with underwire, and he told me about how nice Leanne was, when you got to know her. I tried to believe him. I didn’t say anything about Mum. I didn’t want to ruin it.
When Dad and Austin got back from work, I made them come and look.
‘Wow,’ Austin said, brushing sawdust from his eyebrows. It was probably the most he’d said all day.
Dad whistled. He was sawdusty too. The two of them smelled of petrol and sweat and leaves.
Sam didn’t stop drawing. He was finishing off the baby rabbit. Its eyes had been pecked out, and there was blood around its slack mouth. The background was a more dramatic version of the Dark Peaks. A small girl stood on a big hill staring out. Her brown curly hair blew in the wind.
‘I’ll never paint over it,’ I said, when Sam was putting his pens away.
‘You better bloody not,’ he said, and he looked so happy I wanted to hug him.
Dad and Austin went back out to unload the pick-up, and I heard myself say something I hadn’t been meaning to.
‘I won’t speak to her if you want,’ I said. I spoke really quietly, and Sam looked surprised, and for a horrible second I was worried that I’d wrecked everything, but then he shook his head.
‘Don’t be stupid, Eye,’ he said, in a gruff way that reminded me of Dad, and he zipped up his pencil case.
Twelve
By the time Wednesday arrived, when Trick had promised to do his best to sneak out, I was all mixed up. I went to the cornfield early because I couldn’t wait to see him. I needed to know I was right to trust him.
Midsummer night was long gone, and the days were getting shorter, but it was still light at eight o’clock. I’d never met Trick at night-time before. Clouds high in the sky towards Ashbourne Hall were turning pink at the edges like Chinese pork, and I was hungry. Maybe we could bake some corn later. If everything was all right.
I trudged across the stepping stones, climbed through the barbed wire, and passed the ancient oak. Butterflies thrashed about in my ribcage as I walked through the green corridor. Maybe Trick would be early too. Maybe he was there right now, lying down the way he had when we first met.
But the corn den was empty.
The cushions I’d brought out for us to sit on were where we’d left them, home to a few snails by now. Their shells tapped against the dry ground as I shook them off. Woodlice skulked out from the dark, dead patches underneath. I sat down and waited. The sun sank lower.
I climbed the oak tree, identified insects and looked for dormice. I tried to remember how to make a corn dolly, and couldn’t, and still Trick didn’t come. I walked to the brook to see if I could spot a pike, but there were only the usual chubs and minnows, and a perch that I almost missed, hiding in the reeds.
It passed ten o’clock. Trick had said if it got this late he couldn’t make it. I felt hopeless. He wasn’t coming. Maybe he’d never meant to come. Why had I been so sure he wouldn’t steal from us? I didn’t know him at all.
I remembered his eyes, the black melty bit where his right iris drifted, and the way his hair fell across his face when he was listening to me. I did know him. It must be his dad. He’d found out he was hanging around with a country girl and grounded him. Or maybe he’d forgotten about me. Or realised I was an idiot.
Our harvest was shrivelling in the corner after days and days of sunshine. I picked a cob up and lobbed it at the oak tree. It was good that Trick hadn’t come. I was stupid to think we could be friends. He wouldn’t want to if he knew what I thought of his dad, what my family thought about him. That sometimes I wasn’t sure myself.
The cobs at the bottom of the pile were damp and turning black, and blind grey flies crawled over them. I aimed them at the tree’s middle where the trunk split into branches, until there were none left, and then I lay down. Corn stalks dug into my back and aphids landed on my arms, making me itch. The light left the sky and my arm hairs stood up.
I didn’t want to go home. I would stay out here on my own until it was dark and I caught cold, and then I would go to bed for a week and eat nothing but tomato soup until someone noticed and made Mum come back and Dad cheer up, and things go back to normal.
And then the corn rustled, and my heart was light again as if I’d never felt bad at all. Trick stepped into the corn den, and he sounded as happy as I felt.
‘Iris!’ he cheered, and I stood up. I couldn’t help it, I laughed.
He opened his arms out for a hug, and I stepped into it as though pressing the whole length of my body against his was completely normal. He smelled of soap and cigarettes and chips.
‘Thought you’d have gone,’ he said, giving me an extra squeeze. ‘You okay?’
I nodded, but when he let go, I couldn’t quite look at him.
The clouds had shifted from pink to grey, the sun had gone, but it wasn’t quite dark yet.
Things felt different between us as we sat down. He was wearing his red vest, and his palest jeans, and he wore them longer than usual, rolled down to his ankles, and I wondered vaguely if that was how he always wore them at night. He was quiet, looking down at his feet tapping the warm air. Normally he started telling me things the moment he arrived, as if he’d been saving stories up for me.
‘Saw the police Monday,’ he said, finally.
He’d let his hair fall to cover his eyes, and it made me nervous. Why didn’t he twitch it out of the way as usual? Why wouldn’t he look at me?
‘Tools’ve gone missing from the shed,’ I said, and my voice sounded strangely flat and robotic.
He threw his head back and laughed. ‘No way!’ he said. He reached across for a corn ear, sighing.
His feet stopped tapping the air now. They knocked together occasionally instead. He pulled the leaves of the corn back to reveal
the cottony strands that protected the fruit, still smiling a little.
‘We thought it was starting,’ he said.
I hadn’t seen him at dusk before, and he looked different. The dark made his eyes look bigger or something, more sunken, and then it clicked.
‘What happened to your face?’ I said, and my voice sounded so dismayed it made my cheeks burn.
Trick’s bottom lip disappeared under his front teeth as he bit it.
His right eyelid was puffy and had linked with the bridge of his nose to make a kind of swollen lilac eyepatch.
‘Me da did it. He didn’t mean to. He just pushed me. It was the way I landed. Knocked a pan off the side. It landed on me snout.’
‘Is it broken?’
‘The pan? Nah, it’s fine. Me mammy made eggs in it this morning.’
‘Trick.’
‘Sorry. Yeah, I think it probably is.’
‘Have you not been to hospital?’
‘No way,’ he said, quickly. ‘What can they do? Break it again? I can do that meself before long. Don’t worry,’ he said, and he stroked my cheek with the back of his hand, and my heart beat so wild that my head swayed with the force of it.
He dug kernels out of the sweetcorn and threw them aside.
‘Suppose your da thinks it was us,’ Trick said.
I stuck my little finger into a deep crack in the ground. The fat little spiders came running out. We watched them dodge into different hiding places.
‘That why he was shouting the other day?’ he said.
I nodded.
‘What’s your brother say?’
I started babbling. I told him how many years our sheds had been undisturbed for, trying to explain.
‘It’s not just you . . .’ I said.
‘Oh aye. Maybe it was one of the littl’uns . . . I’m not sure what they were doing Friday night. It was probably Ileen. Now she’s a real tinker!’
I thought of Dad watching telly with the curtains drawn, and for the first time since I’d met him I wished Trick would shut up.
‘Sorry,’ he said. His fair hair fell across his eyes as he looked down.
I picked a cat hair off my shorts. Trick sighed loudly.
‘Where would you go anyway? If you get evicted,’ I said, after a bit.
Trick shrugged. ‘Me da says there’s a new camp somewhere down south. Essex, I think. Me uncle bought a bit of land there. Dunno though. He never tells us nothing.’
‘You’d just disappear.’
Trick lobbed a cob at the oak tree, and we watched the leaves shake as it vanished into them. I thought of Mum driving away in her sky blue van. I felt like if I stood up, I’d drag the whole earth behind me, like I weighed as much as the field we lay in.
The fingers of his other hand were spread on the crumbling soil, and I imagined putting my hand over his.
‘Me mammy really likes it here as well,’ he said, and he sounded so fed up that my fingers curled themselves over his without my permission. He turned his palm over, and we were holding hands, just like that.
He looked at me fiercely, and his fingers were warm between mine.
‘You know none of us took nothing from your friggin’ shed,’ he said. ‘Do you know that?’
I nodded, hoping my face looked unextraordinary because I felt such relief to hear him say it, and to know I believed him.
He lifted his hand, the one I’d been holding, and put it round my shoulder, and I leaned into him, amazed at how natural it felt. He scratched at a bit of mud on his jeans with his other hand.
‘Me mammy’s mad about your place, you know. She dreams of the lot of us living in there. You lot booted out.’
I laughed. ‘Wish my mum was mad about it.’
Trick squeezed me. The corn shifted around us, nocturnal animals waking up.
‘Sometimes, I wonder what it’d be like if she’d died instead.’ It sounded terrible, even when I said it quietly. ‘I mean, if we’d talk about her more.’
Trick stroked my shoulder.
‘You can talk to me about her,’ he said, and it wasn’t the same, but it meant something that he said it. I told him how we’d talked for hours on Monday night, and then I said something I hadn’t admitted to myself properly: that part of me was glad that she’d gone, glad even that Sam wouldn’t speak to her, because it meant I got a look-in.
The moon had been rising for hours, and was at the top of the sky, and I shivered. Trick rubbed the goose pimples on my arms. I could just make out his swollen eyes in the moonlight.
‘Tough, eh?’ he said, catching me staring at his bruises. He dabbed at them.
‘Maybe if it was your knuckles that were smashed up.’
He half-laughed.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Nah,’ he said, but when I reached out to touch it, he flinched.
‘Sorry.’
I tried again.
We both watched as my hand closed in on his face. He shut his eyes, and I noticed his breathing, and mine. I thought of the word palpitation.
‘Does that hurt?’ I said, pressing my fingers light as I could against his skin.
He shook his head and swallowed, and I thought about him saying I was pretty, and what I’d said to Matty about having a boyfriend, and of all the kissing scenes I’d ever read that started just like this one. I imagined drawing my face to where his was, and putting my mouth on his, and it made my stomach flip so violently I yanked my hand away.
Trick didn’t notice, or pretended not to, and we sat cross-legged the way we had all the days before, only much, much closer.
As it grew darker, Trick’s face looked grainy, and my vision became less sure, but all around me buzzed and rattled and shook with life. I was aware of everything: the temperature of the breeze, the way it lifted the hairs on my arms, the distance between mine and Trick’s knees.
We sat there not talking while the sky darkened, closing us in, the sides of our bodies touching, a long warm strip where we joined together.
Thirteen
I was standing in the chip shop the next time I saw Matty. It was Friday night, and Dad was leaning on the counter waiting for three cod. I’d been making a Pointillist picture of a kingfisher on the steamed-up glass when I saw something moving outside.
It was Matty. In the passenger seat of her mum’s car, she waved, doing her fakest smile. They’d pulled into the spot in front of the pick-up. Donna was leaning through the gap between the seats to get her handbag from the back. If this were the old days, I would have been handing it to her.
I didn’t wave, just got on with my drawing. I began building a speech bubble from the kingfisher’s beak out of dots. Donna slammed the car door, and made her way towards the shop. I was at the top of the curve of the bubble now, and I could see Matty trying to look as if she didn’t care what I was going to write inside it. I knew she did.
We used to do this together. When Donna was queuing for our chips, Matty would knock on the window to get a person’s attention, and whisper instructions to me, and I would trace a heart or a kiss, or write Piss Flaps backwards if it was someone we hated. Someone she hated.
The bell rang as Donna entered, and people budged up so she could get into the packed shop. I watched Matty pretend to be interested in the houses on the opposite side of the road. I took my time with the bubble.
‘Tommo!’ Donna called. ‘Tut, tut, is that your truck? Are you driving tonight then, Iris?’
Dad leaned away from the counter where he’d been examining the battered things, and grinned. I hated seeing them together. Their eyes flashed. Donna couldn’t stop smiling.
‘Same as usual when you’re ready, Poll,’ Donna called over the counter.
Poll nodded over her shoulder, shovelling chips from one compartment to another. There were spots all round her hairline even though she was old.
‘Second chippy this week,’ Donna fake-whispered to my dad, putting her hand to her mouth theatrically.
A chubby mot
her nearby rolled her eyes.
‘Have you seen this?’ Donna pushed her belly out.
‘Have to get a crane round to get you out soon enough,’ Dad said.
Donna pretended to hit him. It was disgusting. Her hair was a big, black curly mass, and I could just make out the smell of her hairspray and perfume over the vinegar and grease of the chips.
I turned back to the window, and caught Matty staring straight at me. I’d finished the bubble, and she was looking at me as if to say, Get on with it then. I imagined writing, Your mum wants to have it off with my dad, but her dad, Jacob, popped into my head.
He always brought us something nice when we were waiting for tea: a crab stick or apple slices or some crisps in a bowl. He would squeeze the backs of our heads while we were watching telly, and tell us we’d end up boss-eyed.
I settled for: Piss flaps.
‘Coming to see us soon, ducky?’ Donna called over to me. I wiped the window quick. ‘Matty’s missing you.’
Her voice changed when she talked to me, like I was a different species or something. Mum always talked to us like we were adults. Ever since I could remember she had done that.
‘Suppose you’re busy these days, eh?’ Donna said, and she wriggled her eyebrows at me. I had no idea what she was talking about. Then I choked. Matty must have told her about Trick. I’d forgotten she even knew.
‘What’s that?’ Dad asked, taking three forks from the box on the end of the counter.
Donna winked in my direction. I felt sick.
‘Think the girls’ve fallen out,’ she said, pouting slightly. ‘Can’t get anything out of Mats.’
Dad shrugged, and Donna changed the subject.
‘Hear you’ve been invaded anyway,’ she said, and for once I was relieved to hear Dad starting on about the travellers and the tool shed, and the uselessness of the police.
Poll joined in.
‘Oh it’ll be them all right,’ she said, plonking a battered fish on top of some chips.
Her hands worked fast, wrapping up paper, putting packages into a brown bag.
‘We had some near us. Moved on in the end, we got rid of them, but Jesus and the Holy Ghost. Dog shit everywhere. Nappies. They had a massive horse in the garden at one point. Hundreds of dogs chained up in front. Kids were bloody terrified. Had to get professionals in to sort the mess after.’
