Infinite Sky (4 page)

‘Not allowed to mix with the likes of us, I’m sure . . .’

I curled my lip at him, the way Sam did to me lately. ‘
You’re
the one hiding.’

‘Oh aye, we know what your da thinks of us . . .’

I lay back, embarrassed. It was nothing to do with me.

Maud caught up then. No sign of the maiming and murdering she’d been attempting. She purred and rubbed her head against me, then him.
No loyalty whatsoever
. He petted her, digging
his fingers in behind her ears, and she closed her eyes.

‘So?’ he said. ‘What were you doing?’

I stared at Maud, who purred loudly, and wondered how much to tell.

‘Your da send you?’

That made me laugh. ‘I was going to follow you,’ I admitted. ‘Wanted to see where you went.’

‘How d’you know I go anywhere?’ he said, and there was the slightest hint of his being impressed, so I looked blank, holding on to my mystery, but then he laughed, and told me
he’d been spying on me too. Amazed by his openness, I asked him straight out.

‘So? Where d’you go then?’

‘I’ll show you, if you want,’ he said, and I looked indifferent, but butterflies were hatching in my stomach.

Still cautious of our dads, we army-crawled the length of the ditch, away from Silverweed, past the caravans, to where the pig farmer’s land dipped to meet the brook. Brambles and nettles
grew thicker as we approached, and as the grass turned to silt and pebbles, we no longer had to be careful.

‘Didn’t realise these were here,’ the boy said, jumping across the stepping stones at the end of the pig farmer’s field. ‘I’ve been getting soaked.’

I didn’t respond. I was remembering Mum standing here in March. It was the first warm day of the year, and we were showing her what we’d built. Walking across, she’d caught her
shoe and fallen in. When Sam laughed, she pulled him in with her. I’d jumped in myself, not wanting to be the odd one out, and we’d sat in the freezing cold brook watching the
waterboatmen paddling over the surface, trying to catch the bull fish we knew hid under the rocks.

The boy held his hand out to me from the Ashbourne side of the stepping stones, and he was standing precisely where she had; smiling, wringing the water from her long dark blonde hair.

‘What’s your name anyways?’ the boy asked.

‘Iris.’

I left his hand to dangle as I landed with a squelch on the wet bank.

‘Trick.’

I waited, confused.

‘My
name’s
Trick. Too many Paddys at the old camp.’

We climbed the bank, stepping over convolvulus and ferns and the garbled roots of an ancient oak to the boundary of the Ashbourne Estate, which was a mixture of farmland and National Trust. Two
rows of barbed wire surrounded a maize field that stretched on for miles.

Trick held the top wire to make it easier for me to climb through.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Your hair’s caught.’

I yanked my head, leaving a dark brown curl of hair trapped inside the metal knot.

‘Christ,’ he winced. ‘Did that not hurt?’

I shook my head, blinking the tears from my eyes when he wasn’t looking. I held the wire for him, and close up, as he ducked under my hand, I saw the faintest spattering of freckles on his
nose, which was tanned like the rest of him, and that his eyelashes were longer than any girl’s. When he blinked, white-blond flashed at their tips.

‘How far is it?’ I asked, but he’d already started running uphill through the crop.

Long, thin strands of maize flowers waved in the breeze above our heads, and heavy green leaves whipped my face as I ran. We were completely hidden, and I wondered what he was going to show me:
a nest maybe – something impressive like a kestrel or a buzzard – or a litter of feral kittens, but when we got there it was nothing like that. Really it was nothing at all. And
that’s why it was brilliant.

At the top of the hill, beside a lonely oak, Trick had beaten out a room in the corn. Narrow pathways led from either end, one to the brook and the paddock, where we’d come from, and the
other – if you kept going for a mile or so – to Markeaton Park and the cemetery, and the ceramics shop over that way. The corn was so tall the pathways felt like corridors.

He threw himself down, and grinned up at me.

I grinned back, taking a patch for my own. The trampled stalks made a bumpy but comfortable bed. A few ripe corn on the cobs were piled in one corner. The rough grass scratched through my
T-shirt and made my skin itch, but I didn’t care. I half closed my eyes so that sunlight caught and glittered between my lashes.

The sky was blue and infinite.

Somewhere above us a skylark trilled, and a sweet, dry scent rose from the crop. Everywhere you looked fat little spiders ran in and out of the deep cracks in the earth, rearranging themselves
like kids in a game of Sardines. I asked Trick how old he was, and he told me to guess.

The sun had turned his thick hair blond at the ends, and he wore it long and to one side, so that every now and then he had to twitch it out of his eyes, which were strange because the pupil of
his right eye bled black into his iris. It made him look odd and quizzical, like he was considering some private thing that he wasn’t sure whether or not to tell you.

‘Fourteen,’ I decided.

‘Fifteen in September,’ he said, as though it were a correction.

‘So fourteen, then,’ I repeated.

‘And you’re . . .’ He dragged the last word out, scrutinising me, and I worried that he would mention the bean juice, or that my ladies shorts were tied on, or that my hair was
matted on the side from fidgeting in the night, but he just looked at my face, from eyes to nose to mouth, and up again.

‘Thirteen,’ he said, ‘no doubt about it,’ and he settled back, letting his palms make a pillow for his head.

I would be fourteen next month, but it would be babyish to point that out now. At least he hadn’t said twelve. Whenever anyone guessed Matty’s age they
always
said older. Once
a boy at the rec guessed sixteen, but he probably just wanted to kiss her. I was too small and flat-chested to be in my teens. And for anybody to want to kiss me.

‘Your brother’s older,’ he said. ‘Fifteen?’

I nodded. He was good at this.

‘Older than me, then,’ he said, as if it had been puzzling him for a while.

I asked about his sisters, and he said they were just babies, not worth bothering with, and he pronounced baby to rhyme with tabby, but I noticed that his words didn’t match his voice, and
I remembered seeing him on the caravan steps, leaning over to show them something cupped in his hands.

‘I’d
love
to have a little sister,’ I said, instantly embarrassed by the feeling in my voice.

‘I always wanted a younger brother,’ he said. ‘People’d call us the Delaney boys. All the girls’d want to double-date us.’

He spoke so fast I was sure I’d miss what he said, but if I waited a second the words caught up with me.

Trick turned to lean on one elbow, facing me, and I copied him. Our bodies made a V.

I asked what it was like living in a caravan, and he said pretty much like living in a house except that you moved all the time, and there’s no privacy, and I laughed and said, so not much
like a house at all then.

‘Me mammy’s desperate for one,’ he said. ‘She loves the idea of it, unpacked forever!’

I remembered my mum, packing her things in boxes and taking them to Oxfam. I’d heard her talking to Tess. She didn’t want to sit in the house drinking a bottle of wine by herself
every night, she said. When you want things to change, you have to do something different. This is certainly different, Tess had said.

Trick was telling me how his da said he would settle when he was in his grave, and how he felt just the same. As soon as he was old enough he was going to get his own trailer and go all around
the world.

‘Just me and me wife,’ he said. ‘No kids or dogs or nothing like that.’

He pronounced that like
dat
.

‘It’s all right now my uncle’s here, I’m in with him, but before that . . . The noise!’

He breathed out through his mouth to emphasise his point, and I remembered him lying under the caravan those first nights I’d watched him.

He talked so much I could hardly keep up. He told me about the old camp, where they’d pulled in next to his uncle, a different one, and had a great time until the land was sold for
redevelopment.

‘We ended up on the A52,’ he said. ‘Imagine putting that on a letter!’

I examined the tiny blue forget-me-nots which grew in bunches between the rows of corn. I couldn’t imagine it at all.

I thought about Sam saying gypsies couldn’t read, and I wanted to ask Trick about it. I wanted to ask how he got to school if he was living on the A52, but maybe it was a well-known fact
that gypsies didn’t go. But then, what about Grace Fitzpatrick?

As the sun climbed higher we grew slow and lazy like wasps trapped in a jar. He seemed to have talked himself out, for a while at least, and I was too hot to worry about thinking of things to
say. Sweat trickled down the backs of my knees. I changed position occasionally, uncomfortable in the heat, but Trick lay still as a reptile. He basked. His skin seemed to glow in the sun, like it
would never get burned.

I looked at the way his eyes moved underneath his eyelids and wished I was brave enough to ask him more questions.

A cabbage white flew into our hideout, and I watched it flutter on the breeze. I remembered how his mum had looked this morning.

‘Your mum’s really pretty,’ I said. ‘I was listening to her sing before you jumped on my back.’

He laughed. ‘She’s tone deaf. Drives me da mad.’

I thought of Mum practising her guitar, and how Sam would sing along with her. She tried to teach us harmonies, but I could never get it right in time. I got left behind.

The butterfly settled on a leaf. It blinked its wings, showing us the black eyes there, then took off.

‘Haven’t seen your mum yet,’ he said.

‘She doesn’t go out much.’

I smoothed my hands across the thick, battered stems on the ground between us. He did the same.

‘Actually. She’s out all the time. As in, she doesn’t live with us any more.’

I waited, but he didn’t put on a fake voice, or gasp, or give me his opinion, and so I told him how she’d left for Beni Khiar with hardly anything packed into a blue Ford Transit van
that she’d spent weeks fitting with a bed and storage space and a tiny gas stove.

‘It’s in Tunisia,’ I said. ‘She always wanted to go there for some reason.’

Trick looked impressed, so I told him more, about how she was living in the van and camping, stopping at places with names like Qalibiyah and Qurbus.

I looked at our hands stroking the dead crop.

‘D’you think it’s weird?’

‘Not for country people,’ he said, and seeing my blank face, he explained. ‘You know, you lot. The settled community, brick-lovers. Stationary folk. Country people always leave
each other . . .

‘Sorry,’ he added, and I wondered if I’d flinched.

‘And you lot don’t?’

He shook his head. ‘Think some of them wish they would,’ he said. He dug his nail into the ground leaving a little crescent there.

‘Know what we call you?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘
Gorgios
.’

He looked at me, delighted.

‘Am I supposed to be offended?’

He shrugged as if that were up to me, then started telling me about the
gorgios
that lived behind him for a bit when he was growing up. They all had the same clothes, he said.

‘White trainers and tracky bottoms. And they were shit-scared of us!’

I wrinkled my nose. ‘Doubt it.’

He started talking about how things used to be different, and how travellers used to be welcome. When he was older he wanted to live in the old way, he said: cooking over a fire and living off
the land and sleeping under the stars. He talked more about travelling the world, and the places he would go, and I listened happily, imagining myself out there too, driving around in a sky blue
van.

‘So, why’d she go, then? Your mammy?’

I looked at him, surprised, but his face was so friendly and open. I breathed in slowly, and thought about it.

‘She used to get really angry,’ I said, after a while. ‘She said she didn’t want us growing up with her like that. That we’re better off . . . She said she
didn’t want to blame us.’

‘
Blame
you?’ he said, and I shrugged.

He asked why I hadn’t gone with her.

‘
I
would have,’ he said, and I thought of Sam and how much he’d wanted to go.

I said it was because of school, because that seemed easiest, but really I wouldn’t have gone because of Dad. I didn’t tell him that she hadn’t wanted us.

‘Our ma gets pretty angry,’ he said. ‘But we just ignore her.’

‘There was no way you could ignore mine.’

‘My da’s like that,’ he said. ‘Happiest man in the world most of the time, but when he goes . . .’

He looked like he was going to say something else, so I stayed quiet and waited, but he only plucked a dandelion, leaves and all, and rolled it into a scrappy ball.

Lying next to him like that, I thought of an old picture of Mum and Dad. They are leaning on each other, laughing, in front of a caravan. He’s in flares and she’s in a flowery
minidress. She only looks a few years older than me. They were a boy and a girl, like us right now. I didn’t understand. How was it possible to
stop
loving someone?

I stood up, brushing the dirt off my shorts, and asked Trick if he wanted to see something cool, which, of course, he did.

If you followed the brook deep into the Ashbourne Estate, right to the furthest edge of the cornfield, past where the Shetland ponies feed in the meadow and the barbed wire is snagged with
sheep’s wool, you eventually came to Drum Hill, which the brook flowed through inside a concrete tunnel.

I let Trick go in front so he could see the view from the top first.

He whistled in appreciation.