Lark

by Anthony McGowan

  I put my lips next to her wet head and spoke to her. What did I say? I don’t know. The words you say to dogs. She put her tongue out and curled it upwards to try to lick my face. The tip of it touched my nose. It was rough and dry.

  The water was still rising. I had my back to the stone wall of the gorge now. But I didn’t care any more about drowning. I didn’t want to be alive without Kenny, knowing that I’d sent him to die in the cold water.

  And then I remembered something else. Something to do with one of those stories. Another sad one. A small girl selling matches on the streets. Imagine that, someone so poor they had to sell matches? But she’s so cold and so lonely she lights the matches, and the light of the flames makes her less sad.

  Why was that story in my head? The ending wasn’t happy …

  Matches.

  LIGHTER!

  I had my mum’s old lighter. In the inside pocket of my jacket. I reached in there with fingers as numb as stone. I found it. I turned the wheel with my thumb twice, and only sparks came. The third time the flame caught. The gold and blue of the burning gas was as bright as the sun, and the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I put my frozen fingers almost in the flame, and my fingers ate the warmth. Before I burned myself, I changed hands, letting the flames dance around my other fingers.

  “Here, Tina, come, try to get warm,” I said to the little dog. But all she could do was turn her head to look at me for a second before she slumped down again.

  After a minute, the metal at the top of the lighter grew too hot to hold. I let go of the plastic button that kept it alight.

  Suddenly the world became black. Blacker than it had been before. And I was as scared now of the black as I was scared of the cold and the rising water. I struck the lighter again and lived off its flame for another two minutes. I struck it for a third time and I thought that the flame was thinner, smaller. When I let it go out, I put the hot lighter in between my jumper and my T‑shirt. That was glorious, for a few seconds.

  The fourth time, the flame lasted for less than a minute. Then it died, and the darkness was everywhere, and I lost all my hope.

  Eighteen

  It was the morning. Light filled the gorge. Pale blue light with golden lines in it, like rays of the sun drawn by a little kid. And then the rock of the gorge opened out, like a scallop shell, or like a book. Or like when you’re holding a butterfly, and you show your friend, your dark‑haired girlfriend, and she comes over and you open your hands. And the butterfly – nothing special, only a cabbage white – spreads its wings and flutters them, making sure they still have power in them, and then it’s away into the blue and gold air. And I was lying on my back, gazing up, watching the soft white lines in the sky. Remembering what my dad said – that when he was a kid, before the internet, when there was nowt on the telly during the day, him and his friends used to watch the white contrails for hours in the endless blue of summer skies, just like me and Kenny watching the telly. And Kenny was here. That was good. I couldn’t see him, but he was here. And Sarah. I knew if I turned my head she’d be there, too. I reached out, trying to find a hand, thinking it would be Sarah or Kenny, but I could only feel the soft hay we were lying on. The hay of the field near the wood where the badgers lived.

  And then I heard the sound. The mad, ecstatic music of the lark. I peered into the brightness and saw the small bird straining upwards, its flight not like the easy, carefree swooping of the swallows and swifts. The lark’s flight was all effort, as if hauling itself up by sheer will – a wanting, a yearning. To fly and to sing was work, it was grit. And it was beautiful. And then the lark flew so high it escaped the earth’s gravity, and suddenly flying was no effort at all. And finally the lark was so high that I lost the song, and though I tried to keep my eye on the tiny dot in the blue forever, striving to keep my eyes open in case I couldn’t find it again, at last I blinked, and my eyes opened not into the blue and gold but into the black.

  And then I understood that the lark wasn’t a lark, but a soul, and that I was alone, and that a beautiful thing had left this world.

  Nineteen

  “Listen to me. Nicky. You’re OK. Can you hear me? Look at me.”

  Lines of light were playing about the gorge. Like searchlights in the war.

  There was a man. He had a yellow helmet on. A torch in the helmet. I’d always wanted one of those. He had a moustache. Who had a moustache these days?

  I didn’t understand.

  “Kenny,” I said.

  “Kenny?” the man asked. “Is that your brother?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Kenny’s fine.”

  Other men were there. Not just men. There was a woman. They all had the helmets with the torches, and scratchy clothes. They were doing things to me.

  “On three,” someone said. “One, two …” And then rotten pain, the worst for ages. They’d lifted me into something.

  They wrapped me up in tin foil.

  “You’re the world’s biggest turkey,” someone said.

  “Where’s Kenny?” I asked.

  “He’s waiting for you.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “No, lad! Hospital. Hypothermia. But he’s fine. Watching the telly, I expect.”

  All the time the people were working, doing things. Straps. Grunting.

  Someone said, “Let’s get him out of here while we still bloody can.”

  I turned my head and saw Tina still lying on the rock.

  “My dog,” I said.

  But I already knew.

  “I’m sorry, son,” the man said.

  “Don’t leave her.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “Will you bury her? Somewhere nice …”

  “Course I will.”

  “Don’t tell Kenny,” I said.

  “Course not.”

  They were lifting me. The men and the woman. Carrying me. I strained back my head to see. The man picked up Tina, our dog, who had given up the last of her warmth to me.

  It always feels like cheating in a story when people black out and wake up later. Well, I didn’t black out. I remember being carried back along the gorge, the men and the woman sometimes splashing in the water, sometimes climbing over the rocks. And then we went up, the rescue people grunting as they tried to keep the stretcher level. And then it became easier, and then we were at the road, and an ambulance was waiting with its light flashing blue. All the time I cried for Tina, with sadness, and for Kenny, with relief. And I cried a bit because my fucking leg hurt so much.

  It took ages to get to the hospital, the ambulance going along the narrow roads. But I didn’t mind. I was warm. Then we got there, and there was a big fuss when I got in. The lights of the hospital were too bright. Nurses checking things, doctors checking things. It was only then that I realised the man who’d picked up Tina wasn’t there. I wanted to thank him, and the others. Maybe I had, I couldn’t remember.

  The first thing they did was to wash my face and put a bandage on my head. I’d forgotten that I’d bashed it when I fell. Then they wheeled me in to have my leg X‑rayed. A doctor told me they couldn’t put a cast on it till the next day, as they had to wait for the swelling to go down. They gave me tablets that made the pain go away. Other things happened. Then my dad was there, and Jenny. It was still the night time.

  “Sorry, Dad,” I said.

  My dad had wet eyes.

  “Daft bugger,” he said. I think he was talking to himself.

  Then I was on a trolley being wheeled around the hospital, with Dad on one side and Jenny on the other.

  “Are we going to Kenny?” I asked.

  “Aye,” Dad said.

  “And he’s OK?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “How do you know he’s OK?”

  “We’ve already been in to see him,” said Jenny. “He’s good.” Jenny wasn’t our mum, but I loved her.

  And then we got to where Kenny was. It was a ward with five beds in it, and Ken
ny was in one. He was watching the telly, but with no sound on.

  “All right, our Nicky,” Kenny said. “I was worried. But they said they’d get you. I freezed me knackers off. Tina didn’t like it when the water got deep, so she ran back to you. I lost my hat. A doctor said he’d get me a new one. I said Man City not Leeds. Leeds are rubbish. What have they done to your leg?”

  “They fixed it up,” I said. “They’ll put a cast on it tomorrow and you can sign it.”

  Kenny loved writing his name. He put his own special swirls and loops on all the letters.

  “They said it was too late to have the sound on the telly,” Kenny told me. “So I was just watching the pictures. Where’s Tina? Do they not let dogs in the hospital? Is it cos they’ve got germs?”

  Kenny didn’t look at me but kept his face towards the small TV screen.

  I knew what I was going to say. I’d practised it in the ambulance.

  “Tina loved it there, on the moors. She didn’t want to come back to our town. There was a farmer waiting when we got to the road. He said that Tina could go to his farm, and he’d train her to be a sheepdog. The farmer said it was the best life for a dog, with all the walks she wanted and other dogs to play with. He said it was heaven for a dog.”

  Kenny’s face was pale in the light from the telly. I could tell that he was imagining Tina there on the farm, herding the sheep and playing with the other sheepdogs.

  “Yeah,” Kenny said. “I’m tired.” The remote for the telly was on the bed. He picked it up and turned the screen off. “I’m glad you’re OK, our Nicky.”

  “Only thanks to you, Kenny,” I said. “You saved me. You’re a hero.”

  It wasn’t until then that I realised he had on his Spiderman pyjamas. Jenny must have brought them for him. Dad would never have thought of it.

  They put me in the bed next to Kenny’s. I could reach out and touch him. Dad and Jenny went home. It was dark in the hospital, but nurses still moved about quietly, their shoes making almost no sound. Kenny was asleep, his long arms and his big hands outside the covers. I reached out and took his hand in mine.

  “Tell me a story,” Kenny murmured.

  And so I told him about Tina on the farm, and the time she saved the sheep from the gytrash, and how the farmer gave her sausages as a reward. Then the Queen came to give Tina a medal, and she got married to one of the Queen’s corgis and spent half the year in Buckingham Palace and half on the farm.

  If I’m honest, it wasn’t my best story ever.

  Twenty

  A week later, we were at Manchester Airport. Me and Kenny had never been to an airport before. He loved everything about it, the escalators and the shops, and the way everything was shiny.

  And then we got to the area with big windows that looked out over the planes ready to take off. Kenny pressed his face against the glass and gawped. I gawped a bit, too. Stupid, I know, two teenagers staring at aeroplanes like they’d just been invented. But we’d never seen one this close before. Mixed up with the beauty of everything, and the excitement of so many people around us, and all the new things, there was also a bit of sadness in me. Not just sadness. Anger at the unfairness of it all. Because I’d seen so little in my life. Never even been out of Yorkshire before this drive to Manchester. And for the first time ever, I wanted to go away, to fill my eyes with the new. To have something different to look at every day …

  But we weren’t here to look at planes and think about escaping.

  Me and Kenny and Dad were here to meet my mum. I was in a wheelchair, my leg stuck out like a cannon. A shit cannon made from plaster. Kenny had signed it. Some of my mates from school had come round and scribbled on it. Some had drawn knobs, which I changed into Norman soldiers. (That’s a good tip, if someone draws a knob on your exercise book.) And Sarah had written her name …

  To begin with, Kenny had pushed my wheelchair around the airport. But then he got too excited about everything else, so now it was my dad.

  We got to the arrivals hall and waited.

  “Plane’s on time,” my dad said.

  He was wearing the nearest thing he owned to a suit. Well, it was two suits, really. The jacket from one suit and the trousers from another. He’d combed his hair. I noticed that Dad was going grey at the sides and his hair was a bit thin on top. But he looked pretty good, for an old feller.

  Kenny had on smart new jeans and a sweatshirt from Gap.

  The arrivals hall was filled with light from the big windows. There were dozens of people there, waiting to meet passengers off the flight, like us. Lots of them were taxi drivers holding up names written on cardboard. But there were some other families – mums and dads and kids.

  “You OK, Nicky?” my dad asked. He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Yeah,” I told him.

  And then I said something I’d never said before.

  “I love you, Dad.”

  I felt my dad’s hand tighten on my shoulder.

  “Because, Dad, you were always … you never went … away.”

  “No, Nicky,” Dad said, his voice thick. “I went away. It was you who stayed. It was you …”

  “It was us, Dad, us,” I said.

  And then I heard a noise from Kenny. It was a mix of a laugh and a cry and a shout of joy and a groan of pain. And then, in the light that was so bright I had to half shut my eyes, I saw her …

  Epilogue

  And the years went by. Forty of them, and I was here again in the hospital with Kenny.

  Mum and Dad were gone. Jenny was still Jenny. She hardly looked different, but she was a little old lady now.

  I’d been in the room with Kenny for six hours. They told me he didn’t have long. He was asleep for most of the time. Twice he woke up and looked at me, and I took his hand in mine – as I had all those years ago, when he’d saved me. He was bald, Kenny, from the chemo. But he was going bald anyway. A bit of fuzz had grown back on his head after they’d stopped the treatment. It was so soft it was hard to resist the urge to stroke it.

  They loved their uncle Kenny, my two kids. He’d never got tired of playing with them when they’d been small.

  “Do horsy, Uncle Kenny!” they’d squeal, and they’d both ride around on his long back.

  He’d had their names, Ruth and Stan, tattooed on his knuckles.

  Kenny had loved his job at the garden centre. He’d always wanted to work with animals, but that had never happened, and plants were the next best thing.

  I think his life had been happy.

  Happier than mine? Maybe. I was OK. Me and Sarah had our ups and downs, but we were still together. Teaching was hard work, but it was good when you saw some snotty‑nosed scamp in Year 7 growing up and getting four A levels and going off to uni.

  Kenny opened his eyes again. This time they focused on me, rather than into the world beyond.

  “Did Tina really go to the farm to be a sheepdog?” Kenny said, his voice just a sigh.

  I hadn’t thought about our little Jack Russell for years. I thought about lying to Kenny now, but I couldn’t, not at the end.

  “No, Kenny,” I said. “Tina kept me warm until the mountain rescue team found us. She gave up all her warmth for me.”

  Kenny’s breathing carried on for a while.

  “You shouldn’t have told me a lie, Nicky.”

  “I know, brother,” I said. “But I didn’t want you to be sad.”

  Breathing, breathing.

  “Will Tina be in heaven?” Kenny asked.

  “I think she will, yeah.”

  “And will I see her there?”

  “Course you will, Kenny.”

  “How will I find her?”

  “You won’t have to,” I said. “She’ll come and sniff you out when you get there.”

  Breathing, breathing. Softer. Kenny’s eyes were almost closed.

  “Nicky?” he murmured.

  “Yeah?”

  “All our adventures … Snuffy and Rooky, and when we got that wat
ch off that man who was drowned …”

  “Yeah. I remember,” I said. “I remember all of them. They’re not the sort of things you forget.”

  “You always said you’d write them down. Get them made into a book.”

  I had said that. I’d told my kids all about the stuff we’d got up to, me and their uncle Kenny. But I’d never had the time to sit down and write it all out.

  “I’ve been … busy, Kenny. Life gets filled up with stuff.”

  “Promise me you will,” Kenny said.

  “What?”

  “Write it all.”

  “Aye, Kenny, I will.”

  “You’ve got to promise.”

  “I promise.”

  Kenny’s eyes were closed now, but he nodded.

  And then his last words, so faint I could hardly hear them. Yet in another way so loud that they rang out like the ecstatic song of the lark in the endless blue sky.

  “Tell me a story.”

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks, as ever, to the brilliant Barrington Stoke team, most particularly Ailsa Bathgate and Jane Walker.

  Thanks also to Charlie Campbell for doing my deals.