David Almond - Skellig

In the yard that lunchtime, I played football as hard as I could. I did sliding tackles and diving headers. I dribbled and dummied and went for wild overhead kicks. I scored four goals, made three more, and my team won by miles. At the end there was a long rip down the side of my jeans. The knuckles of my left hand were scratched and scraped. There was blood trickling from a little cut over my eye.

The guys on my team surrounded me as we headed back inside. They said it was the best I’d ever played. They told me I should stop staying off. They needed me.

“Don’t worry,” said Leakey. “He’s really back this time, aren’t you, Michael?”

We had Miss Clarts in the afternoon. I wrote a story about a boy exploring some abandoned warehouses by the river. He finds an old stinking tramp who turns out to have wings growing under his ancient coat. The boy feeds the man with sandwiches and chocolate and the man becomes strong again. The boy has a friend called Kara. The man teaches the boy and Kara how it feels to fly, and then he disappears, flapping away across the water.

I saw the tears in Miss Clarts’ eyes as she sat beside me and read the story.

“It’s lovely, Michael,” she said. “Your style is really coming on. You’ve been practicing at home?”

I nodded.

“Good,” she said. “You have a true gift. Look after it.”

It was just after this that the secretary, Mrs. Moore, came in and whispered something to Miss Clarts. They both looked at me. Mrs. Moore asked me to go with her for a moment. I was trembling as I went to her. I put my hand on my chest and felt my heart. She led me through the long corridors toward her office. My dad was on the phone, she said. He wanted a word with me.

I chewed my lips as I lifted the handset.

I heard him breathing, sighing.

“It’s the baby,” I said.

“Yes. Something’s not right. I need to go in, to sort things out.”

“Something?”

“A lot of things, son. They want to talk to me and your mum together.”

“Not me?”

“I talked to Mina’s mum. You can have tea there. You can wait there till I come home. I’ll not be long. You’ll hardly know I’ve been away.”

“Will the baby be all right?”

“They think so. They hope so. Anyway, nothing will happen tonight. It’s tomorrow they’ll be doing it.”

“I should have stayed at home. I should have kept thinking about her.”

“I’ll give her a kiss from you.”

“And Mum.”

“And Mum. You’re very brave, Michael.”

No, I’m not, I thought as I felt myself trembling. No, I’m blinking not.

I SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE WITH Mina. Her mother was above us, cutting up lettuce and tomatoes and bread. The table was spread with paper and paints. Mina had been painting all afternoon. There were little streaks of paint on her face. Her fingers were bright with daubs of color. There was a large drawing of Skellig, standing erect with his wings high above his shoulders. He gazed out at us, smiling.

“What if she sees?” I whispered.

“It could be anyone,” said Mina. “Or anything.”

Her mother turned toward us.

“Good, isn’t it, Michael?” she said.

I nodded.

“The kind of thing William Blake saw. He said we were surrounded by angels and spirits. We must just open our eyes a little wider, look a little harder.”

She pulled a book from a shelf, showed me Blake’s pictures of the winged beings he saw in his little home in London.

“Maybe we could all see such beings, if only we knew how to,” she said.

She touched my cheek.

“But it’s enough for me to have you two angels at my table.”

She stared hard at us, making her eyes wide and unblinking.

“Yes,” she smiled. “Isn’t it amazing? I see you clearly, two angels at my table.”

I thought of the baby. I wondered what she would see, with her innocent eyes. I wondered what she would see, if she were near to death.

I turned my mind away from her. I pulled a sheet of paper toward me. I found myself drawing Coot, giving him twisted arms and legs and bright red hair. I drew hair sprouting from his back, his chest, his legs.

“That’s your friend,” said Mina. “A proper little demon.”

I looked at her, looked just past her, wanting to see her ghostly wings again. Her mother started singing:

“I went back to him today,” Mina whispered.

I drew horns growing from Coot’s skull.

“I came for you first,” she said. “Your dad said you’d gone to school. Shouldn’t I be working? he asked. Shouldn’t I be at my lessons?”

She leaned over and drew a skinny black tongue protruding from Coot’s mouth.

“Skellig said, ‘Where’s Michael?’ ” whispered Mina. “ ‘At school,’ I said. ‘School!’ he said. ‘He abandons me for school!’ I said you hadn’t abandoned him. I said you loved him.”

“I do,” I whispered.

“I said how terrified you were that the baby might die.”

“She won’t,” I said. “She mustn’t.”

“He says you must keep coming to see him.”

She chewed her lip, leaned closer.

“He says he’s going away soon, Michael.”

“Going away?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Where to?”

She shook her head.

“He wouldn’t say.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

My hands were trembling. I grabbed some more paper. I drew Skellig, flapping across a pale sky.

Her mother leaned over us, began clearing a space to put down our plates.

“ ‘For the time of youth was fled,’ ” she sang, “ ‘And gray hairs were on my head.’

“Come on,” she said. “Food’s ready. That’s a lovely picture, Michael.”

WE WAITED AT THE TABLE AS THE light faded, and Dad didn’t come. I kept going to the front room, looking out into the street, seeing nothing. Mina’s mother kept comforting me.

“Don’t worry, Michael. He’ll come soon. Don’t worry, Michael. I’m sure everything’s all right.”

We drew and drew. I drew my family gathered around the baby. I drew Mina with her pale face, her dark eyes, the black fringe of her hair cut dead straight across her brow. I drew Skellig lying dry and dusty and useless on the garage floor; then I drew him standing proudly by the arched window with the owls flying around him. I stared at the changed Skellig. How had this happened to him? Was it just Chinese food and cod-liver oil and aspirin and brown ale and dead things left by owls? I drew Ernie Myers in striped pajamas looking out into the backyard. I felt how the more I drew, the more my hand and arm became free. I saw how what appeared on the page looked more and more like what I saw or what I thought of in my head. I felt how by drawing my mind became concentrated, even while one part of it still thought about and worried about the baby. I drew the baby time and again, sometimes focusing on her wide, bold eyes, sometimes on her tiny hands, sometimes on the way her whole body arched when she rested on your knee. I drew the world as the baby might see it: the long hospital ward filled with lumbering adults, the networks of wires and tubes and bleeping instruments filling the foreground, the faces of nurses smiling down. I drew the world twisted into weird shapes by the curved glass case that covered her. In the end, I drew Skellig at the door to the ward. I felt the burst of excitement she would feel to see this, the quickening of her heart, the flickering of her life.