David Almond - Skellig

I thought he was dead. He was sitting with his legs stretched out and his head tipped back against the wall. He was covered in dust and webs like everything else and his face was thin and pale. Dead bluebottles were scattered on his hair and shoulders. I shined the flashlight on his white face and his black suit.

“What do you want?” he said.

He opened his eyes and looked up at me.

His voice squeaked like he hadn’t used it in years.

“What do you want?”

My heart thudded and thundered.

“I said, what do you want?”

Then I heard them yelling for me from the house.

“Michael! Michael! Michael!”

I shuffled out again. I backed out through the door.

It was Dad. He came down the path to me.

“Didn’t we tell you—” he started.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Yes.”

I started to brush the dust off myself. A spider dropped away from my chin on a long string.

He put his arm around me.

“It’s for your own good,” he said.

He picked a dead bluebottle out of my hair.

He thumped the side of the garage and the whole thing shuddered.

“See?” he said. “Imagine what might happen.”

I grabbed his arm to stop him from thumping it again.

“Don’t,” I said. “It’s all right. I understand.”

He squeezed my shoulder and said everything would be better soon.

He laughed.

“Get all that dust off before your mother sees, eh?”

I HARDLY SLEPT THAT NIGHT. EVERY time I did drop off I saw him coming out of the garage door and coming through the ragged backyard to the house. I saw him in my bedroom. I saw him come right to the bed. He stood there all dusty and white with the dead bluebottles all over him.

“What do you want?” he whispered. “I said, what do you want?”

I told myself I was stupid. I’d never seen him at all. That had all been part of a dream as well. I lay there in the dark. I heard Dad snoring and when I listened hard I could hear the baby breathing. Her breathing was cracked and hissy. In the middle of the night when it was pitch black I dropped off again but she started bawling. I heard Mum getting up to feed her. I heard Mum’s voice cooing and comforting. Then there was just silence again, and Dad snoring again. I listened hard for the baby again and I couldn’t hear her.

It was already getting light when I got up and tiptoed into their room. Her crib was beside their bed. They were lying fast asleep with their arms around each other. I looked down at the baby. I slipped my hand under the covers and touched her. I could feel her heart beating fast. I could feel the thin rattle of her breath, and her chest rising and falling. I felt how hot it was in there, how soft her bones were, how tiny she was. There was a dribble of spit and milk on her neck. I wondered if she was going to die. They’d been scared about that in the hospital. Before they let her come home she’d been in a glass case with tubes and wires sticking in her and we’d stood around staring in like she was in a fish tank.

I took my hand away and tucked the covers around her again. Her face was dead white and her hair was dead black. They’d told me I had to keep praying for her but I didn’t know what to pray.

“Hurry up and get strong if you’re going to,” I whispered.

Mum half woke up and saw me there.

“What d’you want, love?” she whispered.

She stretched her hand out of the bed toward me.

“Nothing,” I whispered, and tiptoed back to my room.

I looked down into the backyard. There was a blackbird singing away on the garage roof. I thought of him lying behind the tea chests with the cobwebs in his hair. What was he doing there?

I ASKED THEM AT BREAKFAST WHAT was going to happen to the garage now.

“When they coming to clear it out?” I said.

Mum clicked her tongue and sighed and looked up at the ceiling.

“When we can get somebody to come,” said Dad. “It’s not important, son. Not now.”

“Okay,” I said.

He was going to be off work that day so he could get on with the house. Mum was taking the baby for more checkups at the hospital.

“Should I stay off so I can help?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “You can take Ernie’s toilet out and scrub the floorboards around it.”

“I’ll go to school,” I said.

And I shoved my packed lunch into my sack and headed out.

Before we moved, they asked me if I wanted to change schools as well, but I didn’t. I wanted to stay at Kenny Street School with Leakey and Coot. I didn’t mind that I’d have to get the bus through town. That morning I told myself that it gave me time to think about what was going on. I tried to think about it but I couldn’t think. I watched the people getting on and off. I looked at them reading their papers or picking their nails or looking dreamily out the windows. I thought how you could never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening in their lives. Even when you got crazy people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupidly, and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them, either.

I wanted to stand up and say, “There’s a man in our garage and my sister is ill and it’s the first day I’ve traveled from the new house to the old school.”

But I didn’t. I just went on looking at all the faces and swinging back and forth when the bus swung round corners. I knew if somebody looked at me, they’d know nothing about me, either.

It was strange being at school again. Loads had happened to me, but school stayed just the same. Rasputin still asked us to lift up our hearts and voices and sing out loud in assembly. The Yeti yelled at us to keep to the left in the corridors. Monkey Mitford went red in the face and stamped his feet when we didn’t know our fractions. Miss Clarts got tears in her eyes when she told us the story of Icarus, how his wings had melted when he flew too close to the sun, and how he had dropped like a stone past his father, Daedalus, into the sea. At lunchtime, Leakey and Coot argued for ages about whether a shot had gone over the line.

I couldn’t be bothered with it all.

I went to the fence at the edge of the field and stared over the town toward where I lived now.

While I was standing there, Mrs. Dando, one of the yard ladies, came over to me. She’d known my parents for years.

“You okay, Michael?” she said.

“Fine.”

“And the baby?”

“Fine too.”

“Not footballing today?”

I shook my head.

“Tell your parents I was asking,” she said.

She took a gumdrop out of her pocket and held it out to me. A gumdrop. It was what she gave the new kids when they were sad or something.

“Just for you,” she whispered, and she winked.

“No,” I said. “No, thanks.”

And I ran back and did a brilliant sliding tackle on Coot.

All day I wondered about telling somebody what I’d seen, but I told nobody. I said to myself it had just been a dream. It must have been.

AT HOME, THERE WAS A HOLE IN the floor where Ernie’s toilet had been. It was filled with new cement. The plywood screen had gone. Ernie’s old gas fire had been taken away and there was just a square black gap behind the hearth. The floor was soaking wet and it stank of disinfectant. Dad was filthy and wet and grinning. He took me into the backyard. The toilet was standing there in the middle of the thistles and weeds.