Skellig

Chapter 33

I DID GO TO SCHOOL NEXT DAY. Rasputin started his lesson by welcoming me back. He said I’d missed a lot, but he hoped I’d be able to catch up. I told him I’d been studying evolution, and that I’d found out about the archaeopteryx. He raised his eyebrows.

“Do you think there are things like the archaeopteryx in the human world?” I asked him.

He peered at me.

“Humans that are turning into creatures that can fly?” I said.

I heard Coot sniggering behind me.

“Tell him about the monkey girl,” he said.

“What’s that?” said Rasputin.

“The monkey girl,” said Coot.

I heard Leakey telling him to shut up.

“Maybe there’s beings that’s left over from the apes,” said Coot. “Monkey girls and monkey boys.”

I ignored him.

“Our bones would need to become pneumatized,” I said.

Rasputin came to me and tousled my hair.

“Wings might help, as well,” he said. “But I can see you’ve been reading widely. Well done, Michael. And stop interrupting, Coot. We all know who the monkey boy is here.”

Coot giggled. He grunted like an ape as Rasputin turned and went back to the front. He said we were past evolution now. We’d moved on to studying our own insides: the muscles, the heart and lungs, the digestive system, the nervous system, the brain.

“Keep coming to school, Michael,” he said. “You don’t want to miss anything more.”

“No, sir,” I said.

He unrolled a long poster of a cutaway man, bright red lungs and heart exposed in his chest, stomach and intestines, networks of blood vessels and nerves, maroon muscles and white bones, blue-gray brain. He stared out at us through cavernous eyes. A few of the others shuddered in disgust.

“This is you,” said Rasputin.

Coot giggled.

Rasputin called him to the front. He acted out stripping Coot’s skin away, tearing open his chest.

“Yes,” he said. “Inside we’re all the same, no matter how horrible the outside may seem to be. This is what we would see were we to open up our Mr. Coot.”

He smiled.

“Of course, there may be a little more mess than appears in the picture.”

Coot scuttled back to his desk.

“Now,” said Rasputin. “I’d like you to place your hand on the left side on your chest like this. Feel the beating of your heart …”

We felt our hearts. I knew how stupid it would be to tell Rasputin that I could feel two hearts: the baby’s and my own.

“This is our engine,” said Rasputin. “Beating day and night, when we’re awake and when we’re sleeping. We don’t have to think about it. Mostly we’re hardly aware that it’s even there. But if it stopped …”

Coot squawked, as if he’d been strangled.

“Correct, Mr. Coot.”

Rasputin squawked too, and flopped across his desk.

I looked around. Half the class lay sprawled across their desks, pretending to be dead.

Leakey was watching me. I could tell he wanted to be friends again.

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.