Flight of a Starling Page 11

  “It won’t be.” She’s crying harder now, gulping for air as she tries to keep quiet.

  “You just need to forget about Rob. Concentrate on Ash, Rita. He’s kind and honest and he loves you.”

  But she doesn’t answer.

  ★ ★ ★

  I wake in the morning curled into Rita, as we always used to. Like cats, Ma would say. But today I’m cramped by the small space. My shoulders hurt and my elbows ache. I think Rita is asleep, but suddenly she clicks on her lamp, scrambles over me, and jumps from the bed.

  She looks tired, but her tears have completely dried.

  She’s searching hurriedly through her clothes stacked neat in our cupboard.

  “Rita?” I sit up, my head skimming the ceiling of our room.

  “Mm,” is all she replies.

  “Are you OK?” I ask.

  “It’s a normal day, Lo,” she says, as though the thought of her and Rob was never with us last night.

  Our room suddenly feels too small, and I’m quick to dress.

  ★ ★ ★

  The hood pulled over my head has turned the world musty brown. My breath pulls the material in close to my lips and pushes it out hot. Ma ties my arms spread wide and clips my ankles in so I can’t move. She’s the mother of the human child and thinks that if she pushes me close to death, the fairy queen will save me and swap me for her daughter.

  The excitement steeps up around us. Dad will be showing the audience the knives, dramatically cutting material into shreds, pretending to lick the sharp blades.

  Dean didn’t come. My boy on the roof, who promised he would.

  Above the music, I can hear the people clapping, hands slapping together like seals.

  There’s a thud by my ear, as Dad’s first knife lands in the board that I’m tied to.

  Dean held my hands and said he would come.

  A thud close to my arm makes my fingers impulsively twitch, but I can’t move.

  Sitting on our moon rock, I felt safe to give him my thoughts. And he’d given me his.

  A split second of wind against my cheek and the thud of the knife.

  The music builds. The fairy queen hasn’t come, so now Ma pushes the board around with me on it and I begin to feel everything spin.

  The knife cracks next to my elbow, the next quickly by my ankle as planned.

  Maybe I’ll never see Dean again? The thought grabs at me too strong, as the final knife embeds above my head. They don’t know that Dad could throw knives at me in his sleep and he’d always miss.

  My mom will be slowing the spinning. The ground becomes still. My arms and legs are loosed enough for me to get free. Hands untie my blindfold and I stick on my wide smile, waving to the faces that merge into a blanket of cheering.

  Ma tries to grab me, but I float under her arms and spin cartwheels to escape.

  Rita peels the costume from her arms, turning her human again.

  “A full house,” Ma says, as she shakes her hair free from the beaded band that’s kept it tight. “Rob will be pleased.” Her reflection in the mirror shows that she doesn’t know what her words have done to Rita, to me.

  I rip off my feathers, stuff them roughly in the box. I want to tear my costume from me and then cut it into useless pieces. As soon as I’m in my clothes, I run away from them both, through the back door of our big top and away to the sea.

  The wall to the promenade is low enough to step over. A boy on his tricycle stares at me, and I know I must look strange, my tears smearing my make-up thick down my cheeks.

  I sit down in the sand, hugging my legs into me, watching the water rocking as I try to steady my world. Lay everything flat. I sit my mom and dad together, and they hold hands. Next to them, Rita sits with Ash. And at the end, balancing them all, is Dean. Just seeing him in my mind calms me.

  Seaweed bubbles at the edge of the waves, as I breathe the salt air deep inside.

  “Are you all right, Lo?” The voice is somewhere behind me. It’s Gramps, walking slowly across the sand. “Admiring the sea?” He sits down, his brown coat crunching up around him. His yellow socks poke out the top of his shoes.

  “It’s beautiful,” I say.

  “It is.” In front of us, the water stretches to the white sky.

  “It’s days like this that I miss Margaret more than ever.” His breath wheezes slightly.

  Margaret, my grandma. At two, I was too young to remember even her shadow. I only know her face from the photographs clustered on his bedroom walls. She looks warm and kind, with necklaces dripping from her and flowers nestled in her hair.

  “The most beautiful girl you ever saw. She’d knock sequins off the rest of you,” he chuckles. He forgets that he’s told me this a million times before.

  “It’s a long time to miss someone,” I say.

  “Fourteen years.” He nods.

  “Is it very hard?”

  He looks at me. It’s a question I’ve never thought to ask before.

  “It gets easier,” he says.

  I think of Dean, standing on the roof looking over the streets, and I ache inside. I barely know him, but missing him hurts enough.

  “And I’d prefer to have loved her,” Gramps says. “Even if it meant losing her.” I hadn’t realized that the stillness always sitting near him was Gramps missing his wife, his sparkling circus girl.

  I can’t tell whether I feel guilt or regret that I haven’t shared his memories more, that we’ve left him too often in silence.

  “Do you get lonely, Gramps?”

  “Not anymore,” he says. “At first, though, I couldn’t see how I’d survive. Margaret was everywhere but nowhere. She was just there, but she was gone. Her make-up was in the bathroom, and I’d stare at the lipstick for hours because it was only half finished. It didn’t make sense that she’d never put it on again. That it wouldn’t be used.”

  I’d been so young. I hadn’t noticed the grief that must have been sitting on his every word as I was growing up.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “None of it’s your fault,” he says warmly.

  “But you were sad and I didn’t know.”

  “Everyone gets sad, Lo. It’s all part of living.”

  A seagull floats down, landing quietly just a few meters from us. It pecks and rips at a paper napkin caught in a bundle of seaweed.

  “What’s troubling you, then?” he asks. “Being out here on your own.”

  I dig my hand deep into the sand. It’s cold underneath the surface and when I lift my fingers, the grains drip through and back onto the beach.

  “Everything’s gone wrong,” I say. Ma and Rob. Rita loving blindly. Dean. I can’t risk saying any more.

  “Not everything, surely,” he says. He nudges me gently with his shoulder. “The sun still rises every day, Lo. Things have a way of working out right in the end.”

  “But what about Grandma Margaret?”

  “She wasn’t scared of dying.” His sigh is from deep inside him, from thoughts I’ll never know. I make my eyes follow the perfect line of the horizon and imagine my grandmother watching us from the other side. “But when you lose someone, something happens. They leave you a gift. For the first time, you realize how precious life really is. And you learn to live properly, every day. You hear more and notice more. And you love more.” I wait for him to say something else, but he’s silent now. I wonder if he’s walking hand in hand with his Margaret in his mind, and I don’t want to disturb them.

  Together we sit as the sea folds itself onto the beach, again and again. It wets the sand, dragging bubbles back with it. And all the time the sun sits on top of it. Gramps’s sun that rises every day.

  Chapter Seven

  Lo

  I’m woken by a soft knocking on the door. It jumped into my dream, and it’s made me instantly afraid.

  “Rita?” I whisper, but there’s no sound from her and the knocking is still here.

  I get out of bed, crouch down, and look through a tiny
crack in the curtain, but there’s no one there.

  “Lo?” I hear the whisper and I know it’s him. I go to the door and open it and Dean stands on our steps, his coat wrapping him tight from the night-time cold. “Hey,” he says.

  “You came.”

  “I said I would.” His eyes make my heart beat as he smiles.

  “What time is it?” I ask.

  “Four thirty.”

  “Four thirty!”

  “I got up the same time as my mom. I thought we could go to the skate park.”

  “Now?” I whisper and the dark air scatters my laugh. “It’s not even morning.”

  “I want to teach you.” He holds up his board, the wheels still.

  “There’s a place just along from here. But maybe get dressed first?” He nods to the T-shirt that barely covers me. I’ve never been so naked in front of a boy. I’m normally covered with colors and thick tights invisible on my legs.

  “I won’t be long,” I say.

  I leave the door open slightly and sneak quietly into my room, pulling on my jeans, opening drawers softly so Rita doesn’t wake. I can just see her shape lying sleeping in the dark, before I leave her.

  Dean is standing on the grass now, darkness moving around him.

  “I’m ready,” I say, and he reaches to hold my hand.

  Our site is silent and empty but for our circle of vans, and we cross it quickly.

  “What’s it like here?” he asks quietly.

  “It’s nice by the sea.”

  A car drives past and then the road is empty again.

  “How are things?” he asks.

  “Not great.”

  “Has your dad found out about your mom?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Have you told Rita?”

  “No.”

  The silence is awkward. It’s difficult to untuck my mind from Rita’s secret, but I don’t want to think about anything apart from Dean.

  We carry on walking in the speckled street lights. There’s no one else around. It’s only us.

  “Do you think we’re the only ones left?” I whisper. “That they’ve all gone, apart from us?”

  “Gone where?”

  “I don’t know. Just away.”

  Dean’s laugh drifts steady around us.

  “We’ve got the whole world to ourselves,” he says.

  As we cross the grass, I bend down to feel the dew on my palms and bring the wet to my forehead.

  “A strange place to wash your face,” Dean says.

  “Lil says it’s water left by fairies.”

  Dean smiles at me. “I’ve missed you,” he says.

  “You have?” But he only nods and looks down at his trainers in reply.

  We walk together to where the skate park starts and the ground turns hard and gray in the moonlight. Dean runs to the top of the closest ramp and his board thuds soft as he drops it flat. He stands on it, bends his knees low and sails fast down. He’s somewhere else for these seconds. Somewhere I can’t see. At the top of the other side he jumps so high that my dad wouldn’t even be able to touch him, before he spins his way back to me.

  “Ready to try?” he asks.

  “If I break my arm and can’t perform, Tricks’ll kill me.”

  “You’d better not break it then. We’ll start here.” He takes my hand again and we walk away from the ramp, to where the ground is completely flat and ends in a small, blackened dip. Dean kicks the board to my feet. “Right, it’s all about balance, so you’ll be fine. I’ll run alongside you the first time.”

  It feels unsteady, as if the whole ground is moving. Dean holds my elbows and starts to walk and then run.

  “Don’t let go,” I say.

  “I won’t.” There’s the sound of his feet next to me, the soft tumbling of wheels spinning. Dean moves down with me, and I think I’ll topple off the front but he keeps me steady until we’re going up the other side onto the flat again.

  “Easy.” His smile is so bright in the almost-dark.

  “I’ll try it on my own,” I say.

  “You sure? Your dad will have even more reason to hate me if you get hurt.”

  “He doesn’t hate you.” But the word whittles far too strong at me. “He just doesn’t know you.”

  “And if he did?”

  There’s silence and darkness and a million barriers between us.

  “You’re a flattie.”

  “Is it really that bad?”

  “It’s all he’ll ever see.”

  I can’t bear that Dean knows what that means, so I push off with my foot before he can stop me, stand steady with the cold night holding tight. At the edge of the dip I have the briefest second of regret, before speed snaps at my arms, my face and the sound of the wheels takes me downward, adrenaline fixing quick to my bones.

  I fly up the other side and jump off at the top, the board leaving me to skate to a stop on its own.

  “You did it!” Dean’s shout gets closer as he runs along the top of the ramp toward me.

  “Of course I did,” I laugh. “I’m a circus girl.”

  “My circus girl.” He picks me up and swings me around. His arms feel different but safe. I want to spread my hands wide under the moon, but instead I hold him close.

  And suddenly he kisses me. Dean kisses me. His lips are on mine, and his hand is gentle on my cheek. Around us, the skate park watches silently as I kiss him, my boy from the fountain. It plants stars in my blood, dizzy ones that feel like they’ve lost their way. And I never want it to stop.

  But he pulls away and looks at me. “What are we going to do?” he asks.

  “We’ll find a way,” I say, more confident than I feel.

  Dean puts his arms around me and holds me so close, my circus-girl heart beating into his. He kisses my forehead, breathing me so that I’m a part of him.

  “Let’s go on the board together,” I say.

  “You really do want your dad to hate me.” He laughs, but the word is harsh against my skin.

  “I won’t break anything,” I say. “It’ll be good.” I keep his hand in mine and lead him to the board, kicking it straight underneath us.

  “You’re serious?” he asks.

  “Yes. You step on too.”

  “But not down the ramp,” he says, as he holds me closer.

  “Don’t be scared, or we’ll fall,” I say.

  The space is tiny, but I push off with my foot. I lean to make it turn a bit and Dean instantly knows where we’re heading.

  “Laura.” But I don’t let him jump off. Instead, I kiss him. The skateboard falls forward down into the bowl, running away with us on it, the swoop of it stealing my stomach for a split moment.

  Suddenly we rock and spill from the board as we go up the ramp, Dean tripping but standing and holding me from hitting the ground.

  “You OK?” he asks, but he’s laughing, his eyes alive.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I think I should get you back before you break any bones.”

  “Do we have to go?” But I know he’s right. The darkness is being edged into morning, and we can’t risk someone catching us together. I hold his hand tight as we walk away.

  The wall next to us drops lower, enough for us to see a sparked line of the sun pressing above the horizon. I wish we could stop and watch it rise. I want to kiss Dean again as the sky turns itself blue. But instead we start to sprint across the grass, Dean’s board held close in his other hand. We only slow down when we see our site, the striped big top rising like a fire in the middle of our vans, clearer now in the new light.

  “Will you come and see me again?” I ask, stopping to look at him.

  “Of course.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “It’ll have to be early.”

  “How early?”

  “I’ll be here at five.”

  “Five? What is it with you and mornings?”

  “I want to take you to a place I go.”

/>   “I’ll meet you here then.”

  I want so much for him to kiss me, but I know there could be anyone watching.

  “Are you OK to get back to your van?” he asks.

  “It’s literally just there,” I smile.

  “OK.” He hesitates. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  And he turns and runs away from me, back to where he must have parked his car.

  My smile is still wide and safe as I go around the corner of our big top. But Dad is standing by his van.

  “Inside,” he says when he sees me. His sharp tone makes me too shocked to argue and I go past him and up the steps.

  Ma is standing by the sink.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asks. I want to ask her why she’s awake so early and what does she really care, but Dad’s anger is boiling beside me.

  “I was out,” I say.

  “That’s obvious,” Dad says, closing the door to the outside world. “Ma needed some air and she saw you sneaking off in the dark. Where did you go?”

  “Just out.”

  “With Dean?”

  Dad saying his name makes my mind loop in panic.

  “Who?” I ask, although I know it’ll only make things worse.

  “Do you take us for fools?” Ma asks.

  “No.”

  “How long did you think you could hide him from us?” Dad asks.

  “I’m not hiding him.”

  “So you just forgot to tell us?” It’s the disappointment in Dad’s eyes I look away from, my cheeks burning red. “You’re to stay away from him,” he says.

  “But there’s nothing wrong with him,” I say firmly, even though inside my nerves are beginning to split and fray.

  “Of course there’s not,” Ma says. “You know it’s not that.”

  “You don’t have relationships with them,” Dad says.

  “You can’t say that,” I tell him.

  “I can. I’m your dad, and you’re part of our family, our way of life, and these are the rules.”

  “You’ll wake Gramps,” I say.

  “Leave Gramps out of it,” Dad says, but he’s quieter now.

  “He’s worth it,” I say. I mustn’t cry. “He’s different to the rest.”

  “How many of the rest have you known?” Dad says, his voice thrown loud again.