Skellig

Chapter 5

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.