Skellig

Chapter 17

AT LUNCHTIME I WENT TO HER front garden. She was sitting there on the lawn, on a spread-out blanket beneath the tree. She had her books, her pencils, her paints scattered around her. I was off school again. All morning I’d been clearing the backyard again. Dad had been working in the front room, painting, stripping the walls, getting ready to hang wallpaper.

“The mystery man,” she said. “Hello again.”

She had a book open at a skeleton of a bird. She’d been copying this into her sketchbook.

“You’re doing science?” I said.

She laughed.

“See how school shutters you,” she said. “I’m drawing, painting, reading, looking. I’m feeling the sun and the air on my skin. I’m listening to the blackbird’s song. I’m opening my mind. Ha! School!”

She picked up a book of poems from her blanket.

“Listen,” she said.

She sat up straight, coughed to clear her throat, held the opened book before her.

She closed the book.

“William Blake again. You’ve heard of William Blake?”

“No.”

“He painted pictures and wrote poems. Much of the time he wore no clothes. He saw angels in his garden.”

She beckoned me. I stepped over the wall, sat on the blanket by her.

“Be quiet,” she whispered. “Be very, very quiet. Listen.”

“Listen to what?”

“Just listen.”

I listened. I heard the traffic on Crow Road and the roads beyond. I heard birds singing. I heard the breeze in the trees. I heard my own breath.

“What can you hear?”

I told her.

“Listen deeper,” she said. “Listen harder. Listen for the tiniest sweetest noise.”

I closed my eyes and listened again.

“What am I listening for?” I said.

“It comes from above you, from inside the tree.”

“Inside the tree?”

“Just do it, Michael.”

I tried to concentrate on the tree, on the branches and leaves, on the tiny shoots that grew out from the branches. I heard the shoots and leaves moving in the breeze.

“It comes from the nest,” she said. “Just listen.”

I listened, and at last I heard it: a tiny squeaking sound, far off, like it was coming from another world.

I caught my breath.

“Yes!” I whispered.

“The chicks,” she said.

Once I’d found it, and knew what it was and where it was, I could hear it along with all the other, stronger noises. I could open my eyes. I could look at Mina. Then I could close my eyes again and hear the blackbird chicks cheeping in the nest. I could imagine them there, packed close together in the nest.

“Their bones are more delicate than ours,” she said.

I opened my eyes. She was copying the skeleton again.

“Their bones are almost hollow. Did you know that?”

“Yes, I think so.”

She picked up a bone that was lying beside her books.

“This is from a pigeon, we believe,” she said. She snapped the bone and it splintered. She showed me that it wasn’t solid inside, but was a mesh of needle-thin, bony struts.

“The presence of air cavities within the bone is known as pneumatization,” she said. “Feel it.”

I rested the bone on my palm. I looked at the spaces inside, felt the splinters.

“This too is the result of evolution,” she said. “The bone is light but strong. It is adapted so that the bird can fly. Over millions of years, the bird has developed an anatomy that enables it to fly. As you know from the skeleton drawings you did the other day, we have not.”

She looked at me.

“You understand? You’ve covered this at school?”

“I think so.”

She watched me.

“One day I’ll tell you about a being called the archaeopteryx,” she said. “How’s the baby today?”

“We’ll see this afternoon. But I think she’ll be okay.”

“Good.”

She put her hands together, blew between her thumbs, and made the owl sound.

“Brilliant!” she said. “Brilliant!”

“I made the hooting noise last night,” I said. “Just after dawn, very early in the morning.”

“Did you?”

“Were you looking out then? Did you make the hooting sound?”

“I can’t be certain.”

“Can’t?”

“I dream. I walk in my sleep. Sometimes I do things really and I think they were just dreams. Sometimes I dream them and think they were real.”

She stared at me.

“I dreamed about you last night,” she said.

“Did you?”

“Yes, but it’s not important. You said you had a mystery. Something to show me.”

“I have.”

“Then show me.”

“Not now. This afternoon, maybe.”

She gazed into me.

“You were outside,” she said. “There was an eerie light. You were very pale. There were cobwebs and flies all over you. You were hooting, just like an owl.”

We stared at each other.

Dad started calling.

“Michael! Michael!”

“See you later this afternoon,” I whispered.