David Almond - Skellig

Mina looked at my drawings, one after the other. She made a pile of them before her. She gripped my hand.

“You couldn’t have done these before,” she said. “You’re getting braver and bolder.”

I shrugged.

“You get better at playing football by playing football,” I said. “You get better at drawing by drawing,”

We waited and waited. The light fell. The blackbirds sang in the trees and hedges outside. Mina’s mother switched a lamp on. The phone rang but it wasn’t Dad. Mina’s mother gave us little squares of chocolate that I allowed to melt slowly and gently on my tongue. She kept singing songs from time to time. Some of them were songs of Blake’s, some were ancient folk songs. Mina joined in sometimes, with her bold high voice.

Mina smiled at my silence.

“Soon we’ll have you singing too,” she said.

The day darkened and darkened.

“I want to show you something,” said Mina.

She filled a little bowl with warm water and put it on the table. She reached up onto the shelf and took down a ball of skin and bone and fur, like the one she had taken from the garage floor. She dropped it into the warm water. She rubbed it with her fingers. It separated into fragments of dark fur and ripped skin. She pulled out tiny bones. There was a skull, the skull of a tiny animal.

Her mother watched and smiled.

“Another owl pellet,” she said.

“Yes,” said Mina. She looked at me. “Owls eat their victims whole, Michael,” she said. “They digest the flesh. Then they regurgitate the parts that can’t be digested. Skin and bone and fur. You can see what the owl has been eating by inspecting the pellet. This owl, like most owls, has eaten small creatures, like mice or voles.”

Her mother turned away, worked at the sink.

“This is the pellet I brought out from the garage,” she whispered. “There were dozens of them in there, Michael.”

“It came from Skellig,” I whispered.

She nodded.

“What does it mean?”

She shook her head.

“What is he?”

She shook her head.

There was nothing more I could say.

“Extraordinary!” she whispered.

She started singing again.

When I looked out into the street I saw lights in windows, the treetops etched black against the mauve sky. I looked up and saw the last birds heading for their nests.

Then the phone rang again and this time it was Dad. Mina’s mother held the handset out to me. I couldn’t go to it.

She smiled.

“Come on,” she said. “Come on.”

Dad said everything was fine. The baby was sleeping. He’d seen the doctors. He was staying for a little while longer with Mum.

“Is the baby okay?” I said. “What are they going to do?”

“They’ll operate tomorrow,” he said.

“What are they going to do?”

No answer.

“Dad. What are they going to do?”

I heard the sighing, the fear in his voice.

“They’re operating on her heart, Michael.”

He said some more but I couldn’t hear it. Something about being with me soon, about how everything would be fine, about how Mum sent me her love. I dropped the phone.

“They’re operating on her heart,” I whispered.

I WENT OUT INTO THE FRONT GARDEN with Mina. We sat on the front wall waiting for Dad’s car to turn into the street. The door was open behind us, letting a wedge of light out into the dark. Whisper came, slinking through the shadows below the wall. He sat below us, curled against our feet.

“What does it mean,” I said, “if Skellig eats living things and makes pellets like the owls?”

She shrugged.

“We can’t know,” she said.

“What is he?” I said.

“We can’t know. Sometimes we just have to accept there are things we can’t know. Why is your sister ill? Why did my father die?” She held my hand. “Sometimes we think we should be able to know everything. But we can’t. We have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.”

We talked about the fledglings in the nest above us. We tried together to hear their breathing. We wondered what blackbird babies dreamed about.

“Sometimes they’ll be very scared,” said Mina. “They’ll dream about cats climbing toward them. They’ll dream about dangerous crows with ugly beaks. They’ll dream about vicious children plundering the nest. They’ll dream of death all around them. But there’ll be happy dreams as well. Dreams of life. They’ll dream of flying like their parents do. They’ll dream of finding their own tree one day, building their own nest, having their own chicks.”

I held my hand to my heart. What would I feel when they opened the baby’s fragile chest, when they cut into her tiny heart? Mina’s fingers were cold and dry and small. I felt the tiny pulse of blood in them. I felt how my own hand trembled very quickly, very gently.

“We’re still like chicks,” she said. “Happy half the time, half the time dead scared.”

I closed my eyes and tried to discover where the happy half was hiding. I felt the tears trickling through my tightly closed eyelids. I felt Whisper’s claws tugging at my jeans. I wanted to be all alone in an attic like Skellig, with just the owls and the moonlight and an oblivious heart.

“You’re so brave,” said Mina.

And then Dad’s car came, with its blaring engine and its glaring lights, and the fear just increased and increased and increased.

AN ENDLESS NIGHT. IN AND OUT of dreams. In and out of sleep. Dad snoring and snuffling in the room next door. No moon in the sky. Endless darkness. The clock at my bedside was surely stuck. All it showed were the dead hours. One o’clock. Two o’clock. Three o’clock. Endless minutes between them. No hooting of owls, no calling from Skellig or Mina. Like the whole world was stuck, all of time was stuck. Then I must have slept properly at last, and I woke to daylight with stinging eyes and sunken heart.

And then we fought, my dad and I, while we crunched burnt toast and swigged tepid tea.

“No!” I yelled. “I won’t go to school! Why should I? Not today!”

“You’ll do as you’re bloody told! You’ll do what’s best for your mum and the baby!”

“You just want me out of the way so you don’t have to think about me and don’t have to worry about me and you can just think about the bloody baby!”

“Don’t say bloody!”

“It is bloody! It’s bloody bloody bloody! And it isn’t fair!”

Dad kicked the leg of the table and the milk bottle toppled over on the table and a jar of jam crashed to the floor.

“See?” he yelled. “See the state you get me in?”

He raised his fists like he wanted to smash something: anything, the table, me.

“Go to bloody school!” he yelled. “Get out of my bloody sight!”

Then he just reached across and grabbed me to him.

“I love you,” he whispered. “I love you.”

And we cried and cried.

“You could come with me,” he said. “But there’d be nothing you could do. We just have to wait and pray and believe that everything will be all right.”

Moments later, Mina came knocking at the door.

She had Whisper in her arms.