Skellig

Chapter 35

WE WAITED AT THE TABLE AS THE light faded, and Dad didn’t come. I kept going to the front room, looking out into the street, seeing nothing. Mina’s mother kept comforting me.

“Don’t worry, Michael. He’ll come soon. Don’t worry, Michael. I’m sure everything’s all right.”

We drew and drew. I drew my family gathered around the baby. I drew Mina with her pale face, her dark eyes, the black fringe of her hair cut dead straight across her brow. I drew Skellig lying dry and dusty and useless on the garage floor; then I drew him standing proudly by the arched window with the owls flying around him. I stared at the changed Skellig. How had this happened to him? Was it just Chinese food and cod-liver oil and aspirin and brown ale and dead things left by owls? I drew Ernie Myers in striped pajamas looking out into the backyard. I felt how the more I drew, the more my hand and arm became free. I saw how what appeared on the page looked more and more like what I saw or what I thought of in my head. I felt how by drawing my mind became concentrated, even while one part of it still thought about and worried about the baby. I drew the baby time and again, sometimes focusing on her wide, bold eyes, sometimes on her tiny hands, sometimes on the way her whole body arched when she rested on your knee. I drew the world as the baby might see it: the long hospital ward filled with lumbering adults, the networks of wires and tubes and bleeping instruments filling the foreground, the faces of nurses smiling down. I drew the world twisted into weird shapes by the curved glass case that covered her. In the end, I drew Skellig at the door to the ward. I felt the burst of excitement she would feel to see this, the quickening of her heart, the flickering of her life.

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.