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.
Chapter 37
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.
“You’ve got to come and help me,” she said.
Dad nodded.
“I’ll come for you this afternoon,” he said. “When the operation’s over. Go with Mina.”
She took me to her garden. She gripped Whisper tight. On the rooftop, the blackbird started yelling its alarm call.
“Bad boy,” she said to the cat, and she went to the open front door, threw him in, pushed it shut behind him.
“The fledglings are out,” she said. “Stay dead still and quiet. Watch out for cats.”
We sat on the front step and didn’t move.
“Under the hedge,” she said. “And under the rose tree by the wall.”
I started to ask what I was looking for, but then I saw the first of them, a little brown feathered ball with its beak gaping in the darkness beneath the hedge.
“This is how they start their life outside the nest,” she said. “They can’t fly. Their parents still have to feed them. But they’re nearly all alone. All they can do is walk and hide in the shadows and wait for their food.”
The parents came closer, the brown mother to the lowest branch of the tree, the jet-black father to the top of the hedge. Worms dangled from their beaks. They called softly to each other and the fledglings with little clicks and coughs.
“First day out,” whispered Mina. “Think Whisper’s had at least one of them already.”
The parents waited, wary of us; then at last they dropped into the garden. A fledgling tottered out from beneath the rosebush, let its mother drop the worms into its beak, tottered back again. The father fed the one beneath the hedge. The parents flew away again.
“They’ll be doing this all day,” said Mina. “Flying and feeding all the way till dusk. And the same thing tomorrow and tomorrow till the chicks can fly.”
We stayed watching.
“Cats’ll get them,” she said. “Or crows, or stupid dogs.”
Dad came out of our house. He came into Mina’s garden. Mina pressed a finger to her lips and widened her eyes in warning. He tiptoed to us.
“The fledglings are out of the nest,” she whispered.
She showed him where to look.
“Yes,” he whispered. “Yes. Yes.”
He crouched beside us, dead still.
“Aren’t they lovely?” he said.
He cupped my cheek in his hand and we looked deep into each other’s eyes. Then he had to go.
“You just keep believing,” he said. “And everything will be fine.”
He went to the car and drove from the street as quietly as he could. Mina and I watched and waited as the brown mother and the jet-black father flew in and out of the garden, feeding their young.
Chapter 38
