Flight of a Starling Read online

  “Where did that come from?” I ask. He shrugs slightly, shyness creeping in on him. “It’s clever,” I tell him. “Will you do another?”

  Dean takes his hands from the river and shakes them in the air. He moves to sit on the rock, his legs crossed over each other.

  “Do you have a coin?” he asks. His eyes make my skin shine warm. “Any will do.”

  I reach into my pocket and pull out some loose coins. Dirty copper smell spills into the air.

  “A two pence is fine,” Dean says, so I hand one to him. “It’s a normal coin, right?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  He holds it flat and covers it with his other hand, makes a small hole between his thumbs and blows into it, as though encouraging a fire. I don’t take my eyes from his hands as he passes it back to me.

  “Look,” he says. But it seems exactly as I left it, no burnt edges or color dripping from it. Queenie’s head smiling as it always does.

  “What?” I ask as I turn it over. And she smiles at me from this side too. I turn it over, and her crown is there, her neck, her shoulders on both sides. “How did you do that?” I look up at him. Pride is wrapped in his smile. “That’s amazing.” I rub my thumb on the pictures on the coin, feel where the lines dip and rise to make it real. “Can you do other stuff?” I ask. “Bigger stuff?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like making our circus have a permanent home. Just for a few months, so I can see what it’s like. And for longer if it’s good.”

  “Would you stay here?” Dean asks.

  “On this rock?” I laugh.

  “Around here.”

  “Maybe.” I feel my heart beat in time with my breathing, in time with my words. “I’d like to stand on a piece of earth and know it’s mine, even if it’s only for a bit. To be able to go away and come back to it.”

  “You’d really give it all up?”

  “Sometimes I want to.” Guilt licks at me. Guilt at betraying my mom and dad, at the thought that I’d let go of them.

  “You’d leave your sister?”

  Rita. “I’d keep her with me.”

  “What if she wouldn’t come?”

  I think of not hearing her voice every day. The way her laugh drags my own out. How sometimes we feel sewn together.

  “I’d make her,” I say. But they’re heavy words and wrong and I know they don’t work. I open my palm and look at the coin. And I have to let go of the patch of earth that my mind has already planted, watch the roots wither and twist brittle away.

  Rita

  I knock on Rob’s door and barely have time to pull my hair over my shoulder before he opens it. I don’t know how just seeing him now makes my heart stumble.

  “Rita?”

  “My Bridge class,” I remind him.

  “I hadn’t forgotten,” he says, but I can tell he has.

  When he bought his van, before he joined our circus, he took out the passenger seat so he could have a proper front door. I step up now and follow him through the black curtain he’s hung to separate his home from the cab. It’s a different world back here, and it makes me want to curl up in it forever.

  Rob’s bed by the window has been changed into a sofa and I sit on it, leaning back against the cushions, pretending this is the most natural thing for me to do.

  “Cup of tea? Coffee?” He’s at the tiny cooker, reaching for his battered kettle under the sink’s tap. “Or hot blackcurrant?”

  “Tea please,” I say, even though I don’t like it.

  “What are you making?” I ask, picking up some orange thread from the pile of colors in front of me. They’re on the table he pulls up from the floor each day. When Lo and I first came in here and he showed us how it worked, we made him do it again and again. There was the floor and then there was a table and it seemed like magic to us.

  “A dream-catcher,” he says.

  “It sounds like something Lil would like.” I stop my childish laugh quick.

  Rob sits next to me and the air secretly snatches my breath.

  “You’re meant to hang it by your bed and it makes your dreams good,” he tells me. I look at him, but I don’t know what to say. “No one wants bad dreams,” he says.

  There’s a strange pause I want to fill with so many things that my mind can’t think. Rob leans forward and picks up a crooked circle. “So that’s where these come in. But it’s more difficult than I thought. I’ve done the outside part, and now it’s all these complicated moves with all of these.” He takes the thread from my hand and holds it up. “Somehow, this is meant to end up like a beautiful spider’s web.”

  “I could help,” I say. The kettle whistles suddenly as steam falls from it. Rob gets up, and I watch as he takes two mugs from hooks on the wall, opens a tin, and takes out two tea bags.

  “Milk? Sugar?” He turns to me.

  “Just milk. Thanks.”

  I feel new, but somehow as if I’ve always been here. Rob takes a teaspoon from the drawer, stirs in the boiling water, takes milk from the fridge and pours its white into the mug to turn it caramel brown. He squeezes out the tea bags and throws them together into his bin under the sink.

  “There you go,” he says, passing a mug to me. “Careful, it’s hot.”

  I try not to put it on the table too quick, even though the heat pinches my fingers.

  “Are there instructions for your dream-catcher?” I ask, as Rob sits next to me again.

  “I’m kind of winging it,” he says. “I’ve got a picture of one, and I’m going from there.” He pulls out a piece of paper from under the pile of threads.

  “You’ve got to copy that?” It’s beautiful, but it’s a difficult pattern of twisted, connected lines.

  “It can’t be too hard.”

  “You’ll definitely need help,” I say.

  “And you’re the woman for the job?” Woman.

  “I could be.” I smile at him and wonder what else it is I’m saying and wonder if he even hears it.

  “So, Ash not with you today?” he asks.

  “We’re not together all the time.”

  “Will there be the sound of wedding bells soon?” He nudges me gently.

  “I don’t think so.” I try to laugh with him, but I feel like I’m betraying Ash.

  “Why not?” Rob asks, more serious now.

  “He’s my best friend.” I pick up the waiting dream-catcher from the table and turn its colored circle in my hands.

  “That’s a good start for a relationship.”

  I shrug as though I don’t care, when I know how much I do.

  “I don’t always feel it.”

  “You think there should be more?”

  I want to feel like Lo does with Dean. The way she lights up.

  “I don’t know.”

  Rob’s so close to me that it makes my skin ache.

  “Rob.” Tricks’s voice bursts through the front door. Rob jumps up, the top of his tea knocked from his mug as he bumps into the table. He goes through the black curtain, and I hear as he opens his door.

  “The back flight of steps is playing up again,” Tricks says.

  “It’s that same hinge, I think.”

  “No problem,” Rob says. “Give me one minute. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Thanks.” And the door closes and Rob is here, hooking the curtain back with his hand. He doesn’t come back in.

  “Sorry, Rita, I’ve got to help Tricks out.”

  “That’s OK.” I look to my mug of tea still hot and untouched on the table. As I stand up, I wish I could take the feeling from this van with me. “But will you teach me Bridge another time?” I ask. Rob steps far back as I pass him.

  “Of course,” is all he says.

  And I step down and out into the air.

  Chapter Five

  Lo

  Our big top waits for the evening performance. It’s empty of strangers now, but the smell of them and their dreams stays locked under the canvas. Even leaving the door rolle
d open doesn’t send it away.

  I see the back of Spider, standing in the middle of the ring. He’s holding the end of the wire, and high above him Tricks works on the clips that keep it safe. The seats all around look like rows and rows of gaping mouths.

  Spider hears me as soon as I step over the threshold.

  “You OK?” he asks quietly when I get to him.

  “Not really.”

  “Do you want to talk?”

  “No.” I look up at Tricks, wound tight in the black clothes he rarely changes from. If it was a dark night above him, his body would disappear. He’d be a floating white face. A strange bob of a star.

  “It feels like you’ve been avoiding me,” Spider says.

  “Well, I haven’t been.”

  “Can we just forget what we saw?” he asks quietly. “Go back to how we were?”

  “OK,” I say, as he moves the wire slightly.

  “You’re being different.”

  “Am I?”

  But I know I am. It feels like something is cutting through our friendship, but I can’t tell whether it’s Ma or my secret of Dean.

  “Where’ve you been going?” Spider asks. “Sometimes I can’t find you anywhere.”

  “Then you haven’t been looking in the right places.”

  “Lo?”

  Above us, Tricks is caught too tight in his work to hear me.

  “I met Dean again,” I say.

  “That boy from the fountain?” Spider looks shocked.

  “Yes. He’s nice.”

  “Does anyone know?”

  “Only Rita.”

  I shouldn’t have told him. I can see his thoughts making no sense behind his eyes.

  “Do you hate Rob?” I ask him.

  “I thought you wanted to forget it,” he says.

  “I try, but I can’t.”

  Everything is strange now. This town with its unlucky coins that took my mom away, but gave me a boy on broken glass and moon stones.

  “Don’t tell anyone, Spider. About any of it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You mustn’t.”

  “Hold it straight,” Tricks snaps down. Spider looks up and locks his arm to steady the wire.

  “Do you hate my mom?” I whisper.

  “No.” But he doesn’t turn his eyes to me.

  “I don’t want you to hate her,” I say.

  “I don’t.” His neck is tense. The secret we know floats between us. “I’m sad, though. I thought she was better than that.”

  Pinpricks of shame and anger fight to find a place in me.

  “She’s still my mom,” I say.

  “I know.”

  “Why did you have to look in Rob’s van in any case?” I know I shouldn’t say it. I know my anger is putting me too close to Spider’s secret, which he doesn’t want to share.

  I turn and run away from him before I can say any more, and I leave him with the empty chairs who’ve heard it all but can’t say a word. And Tricks, oblivious above his head, his hands and mind twisted in with the bolts at the end of the wire, our line between life and death.

  Gramps sits in Mada with no light on, the curtains in the kitchen half closed.

  “Lass,” he says when I stumble inside.

  I go over and sit on the floor by his feet, curl my legs under, and lean my head against his knees. His hand strokes my hair, as though no years have passed since he was younger and I didn’t know that he’d really get old.

  “What is it, Lo?” But I can’t tell him. I can’t ask him if he knows.

  “Things are just wrong.” He must know I am crying. My tears soak through his trousers to his bones, as he strokes my hair.

  “When you were born,” he says, “my Margaret said you were a fallen star to earth. She knew that there was something special about you. That you had shine inside your eyes.” His words should make me happy, but they push my sadness deeper.

  “Lo?” I hadn’t heard Rita come in. Gramps stops speaking, and I know he must look up at her. “What’s wrong?” She kneels down beside me, moves me away from Gramps’s knees and brushes my tangled hair from my face. “What is it?”

  I shake my head at her.

  “Lo? Is it Ma? Dad? What’s happened?”

  “Nothing,” I say, when I realize her panic. “They’re fine.”

  “Why are you upset, then?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  Her eyes narrow at me. “Is it Dean? Have you seen him again? Has he hurt you?”

  I know Gramps hears it all.

  “No. He wouldn’t.”

  She stands, hands on hips, waiting, but I’ve got no answer I can give her.

  “I just felt sad, is all,” I say.

  “That’s a lot of tears for no real reason.”

  “You’ve done it before,” I say, feeling Gramps’s fingers lift from my hair. I get up clumsily, heavier than before, when I should feel lighter after all the crying.

  Rita leans over and hugs me so tight I think my bones will break.

  “Ma asked me to get lunch sorted,” she says, going over to the cupboards. “She says there’s some chicken stew left from last night, and I’ll do potatoes. Is that OK for you, Gramps?”

  “That’ll be perfect,” he says, looking over to the place where our mom should be.

  ★ ★ ★

  I think of Dean as Rita and I wait behind the ring door curtains. The wind knocks the sides of the tent, and deeper inside, our music sucks the air dry.

  Rob and Tricks stand talking to the side of us. Tricks is the one with the painted face, but it should be Rob. My skin feels empty, standing so close to him. Everything I know and thought and loved has been ripped and scattered, and I don’t know who he is any more.

  Gramps pulls back the curtain, and Stanley and Spider come rushing through. They breathe heavily as they pass us, Stanley patting Spider on the shoulder, taking the swords from him.

  I run to stand in the middle of the ring, surrounded by strangers who wait for something spectacular to weave into their stories. They don’t see that my smile is stuck on over a mouth that wants to scream.

  I open the middle of the giant plastic bubble hanging from the roof, climb in and close it behind me. I see Sarah—the stolen human child—do the same. I mirror her, moving my legs up the curve of the ball, as Dad and Rob pull the ropes to lift us higher. They work together, and still my dad doesn’t know.

  I balance angry in the air, turning slowly. We’re two girls, with bodies twisted in bubbles that don’t burst. The changeling child and the one whose life has been stolen. Sarah opens her feathers as we crack our bodies in two, our muscles bending in the way they know. As simple as breathing.

  And as we spin, I close my eyes and try to hold the world still. The people watching see me here, but in my head, I’m gone. I’m running to Dean, telling him to follow me. He reaches for me, but his mom pulls him back and he spins away.

  I curl my wings around as the bubble slows and the ground comes closer, until it’s here enough for me to open the plastic. Sarah and I step out. We wave to the blur of hands and moving light sticks, as the audience calls for us, two beaming girls, their skin sewn with sequins. If only they could see inside.

  When we walk off, Gramps closes the ring door curtains behind us. Rob’s smile is wide, and he tries to hug me as he normally does, but I leave my hands by my side.

  “Lo?” he asks. I just shrug and move away, letting him and Tricks through.

  “What’s up?” Rita asks, as Rob disappears into the ring.

  “I’m not feeling well,” is all I say to her and it’s not a lie. My bones feel splintered.

  ★ ★ ★

  I let Rita tell Ash about Dean. She wouldn’t come to the skate park without him and Spider, especially not in the dark. I know he’s not happy as he walks with us now, his face unsure as we keep close together.

  “You’re sure it’s not some elaborate trap?” Spider asks.

  “What, and they ambush
us?” I say.

  “It happens,” Rita says.

  “It’s OK,” I say, wanting to chase away her nerves. “Dean told me to come.”

  “But how much do you really know him?” Spider asks.

  “I know him enough.” I link my arm with his, steadying him through his doubt.

  We turn the corner and see the skate park sitting strangely in the next stretch of grass. There are lots of people not like us, huddled and split and spinning down the concrete dips and hills.

  “We could turn back,” Rita says.

  “You can, if you want,” I say.

  “Can you even see him?” Ash asks.

  There are so many of them, faces getting clearer as we get closer. I look at each of the boys, but none of them are Dean.

  Tall lights guard the area, and the dark fades as we near them.

  “What shall we do?” Spider asks. He’s nervous, and I’m not used to that.

  “We’ll look for him.” I keep my head up high, my shoulders back, shaking my bracelets on my wrist gently just to hear their familiar noise.

  At the line of the skate pit, where the grass ends and the concrete starts, a few people watch us. But they’re not our audience here. It’s different, and we’re all on solid land together. I hold tight to Spider’s arm and feel Rita and Ash get closer.

  We stop to see the girl in front of us stand one foot on her skateboard and push hard away. She balances slouched but steady, as though she’s not even thinking. She jumps the board up, and it scratches fast along a low metal pole before she skates off the other side.

  There’s a strange electric feel in the air that sits bright on my skin. “See. It’s worth coming for this,” I say. For a moment, I forget about Dean, about needing to see him, because there are so many people, boys and girls in jeans, with caps keeping their eyes hidden from the moon. There’s the steady sound of wheels spinning on smooth concrete, the thud of boards.

  “They’re looking at us,” Rita says to me, pulling on my sleeve, her eyes dipped in a fear I haven’t seen before.

  “It’s OK,” I tell her, because it is. “This is living, Rita.”

  It’s Ash who puts his arm around her and pulls her close, and she lets him.