The Invisible Ones (26 page)

I’m superstitious, I suppose. I told myself it was just a coincidence. People—farmers and so on, especially—must kick buckets all the time, and they don’t die. Not right away, anyway. To calm myself down I drank some more of the whiskey and ate a few more sweets—I’m rationing them, of course—and then I don’t remember anything else.

The longer I’m awake, the more I remember about what happened last night, and the more I realize what a mess I’m in. My right hand is purple and swollen from where I punched in the window of the last car. My knuckles are bruised, and there’s dried blood on them. My hip bones are red raw where I slithered over the windowsill, and there’s a long, sore scrape down my side—I have no idea where that came from. The worst thing, though, is my left arm. I remember digging the glass dagger into
the skin above my wrist, but in a strangely detached way—it’s as though I’m thinking about someone else doing it, a crazy person that I’m watching for some reason. I wasn’t trying to kill myself, or anything stupid like that; it wasn’t that at all. I just knew I had to do it, like lancing a boil or something. Letting out the poison. It was horribly fascinating. Hard to do, despite the whiskey. I had to force my right hand as though someone else was pulling my arm away.

I had to grit my teeth.

But the rush when I saw the blood well up and run down my arm—it was amazing.

I remember all this now with great clarity, although, in daylight, it seems like a pretty dumb thing to do. I kind of wish I hadn’t done it, to be honest. I don’t think the cut itself is too bad—I mean, it’s not that deep, and it’s not bleeding anymore, but it hurts quite a lot, and it makes me feel sick to look at the inside of myself exposed to the air like that, so I pull my sleeve down to cover it up. It throbs with a hot sort of pain. I can’t cover that up.

I eat two more of the sweets—an orange one and one of the not-very-nice green ones. What are they supposed to taste of, anyway? There are only four left, and three of them are green. I’m incredibly thirsty, and I have to go to the toilet quite badly. Luckily, I have my watch on, so I know that by now Katie will have been taken to school, and there’s probably no one here. Or maybe just Mrs. Williams. Very slowly and cau-tiously, I peer over the top of my nest, then slide down the straw stack. The stable is so luxurious there’s even a tap in here, so I put my head under it and drink and drink, and then try to wash off some of the blood. Subadar looks around mildly. Now I see he’s tied up to a ring on the wall, probably to stop him from eating all the hay at once. He’s got some food in his rack, so it seems likely that someone has been in this morning and didn’t notice anything odd. I feel a warm rush. Was it Katie? Was she near me while I slept?

Halfway through an endless pee—I do it in the gutter that runs along the stalls, reckoning that as the horse does it there, it must be all right—I
remember that it’s Saturday. Why did I think Katie would be at school? She could come in at any minute. Luckily, she doesn’t—I don’t think I could have stopped peeing, no matter what. After, I shoot back up to my hiding place and lie down. I don’t feel too great. I feel kind of sick, and my head hurts, probably from the whiskey, and my various scrapes and cuts ache with different degrees of sharpness and heat. Soon I’ll be very hungry. And then—but only then—I’ll have to think about what to do.

When I wake up again I know, without having to look at my watch, that it’s afternoon. Where is everybody? Does she leave the horse on his own in here all day? Surely she’ll come and take him for a ride. I’m starving hungry and eat the rest of the sweets, even the green ones. I can’t see any point in saving any. But putting something in my mouth just makes me hungrier. My headache has gone, but the cut on my left arm is itching like mad. When I pull up my sleeve to have a look, the skin has gone red and swollen, and it’s hot—I can feel the heat coming off it when I hold it up to my lips. The raw flesh is disgusting—wet and crusty at the same time. I know this is not good—it’ll have to be disinfected. Stitched, probably. And my right hand is completely stiff, bent into a swollen claw shape, so it’s not very easy to do things with it. I wonder if I can hold out for another night.

The thing is . . . here’s the thing. The thing is, me and Katie, we’re not boyfriend and girlfriend. In fact, I’ve barely spoken to her in the last two weeks. Since that afternoon in her study, which I’ve thought about at least a thousand times a day, we’ve gone back to our previous habit of basically ignoring each other’s existence. This is the way I expected it would be at school, so it was no surprise, and I didn’t mind too much. She lifted her eyebrows at me on the second day, and I smiled before I could stop myself, and she turned away with a toss of her hair, quick as a flash. I felt I’d failed some kind of test, and I cursed myself for being so uncool. Stella has been talking to me more, though, which made me wonder if Katie had told her anything. On the whole, I don’t think so.
She didn’t say anything that made me suspect that she knew what had happened; she was just her normal, friendly self, like before she came to our trailer and it all went wrong.

Somehow, though, I’ve had the feeling that Katie was thinking about me, too. I had a feeling that I would see her outside of school again—and not like this, by breaking into her stable—properly, I mean. Because she wanted to. Despite that, I’m very aware that it’s a big risk to jump out at her, which is why I was planning to leave it for another day. But I’m getting worried about my arm. And, I tell myself, it won’t make any difference to her whether I’ve been here for one day or two.

Sometime afterward, the door opens and she walks in. I can’t see her— I don’t dare raise my head, but I can hear footsteps, and I reckon they sound like hers. Then I hear her talking to Subadar in that cooing, baby-ish voice she uses to him. My heart is thumping a mile a minute. I feel dizzy. I raise my head until I can see the glint of her honey-colored head, and take a deep breath.

“Hey . . . Katie!”

I try to make it a whisper that will travel just to her. And it does. She freezes. I can feel her fear from here.

“Katie . . . over here.”

Her head snaps around, her eyes wide and suspicious.

“Stella?”

She looks cross. Why on earth does she think it would be Stella? “Katie, it’s JJ . . .”

“Yeah! I’m just coming . . .”

Stella is outside, that’s why. She walks in through the door; I bury my head in the straw, but it’s too late. Katie can see the voice didn’t come from outside, that it wasn’t Stella.

I sit up, furiously brushing straw out of my hair, in time to see the looks going from one girl to the other, and then from both to me—hard, sharp, suspicious.

“It’s just me. Sorry if I scared you.”

“Fuck!” says Katie. She sounds scared. “Christ on a bike, JJ.”

Stella says, “What on earth are you doing here?”

She looks furious—but she’s looking at Katie, not at me.

I swing my legs over the side of the stack and slide down. As soon as I do, I feel really dizzy, and my legs don’t feel like they’re going to hold me up. With a muzzy feeling that things could go either way, I decide to go with the flow, and sort of collapse in a heap at the bottom. My eyes close, and my head comes to a stop at an awkward angle against something hard and painful—the same bloody bucket that tripped me up last night.

I think, Okay, I’ll just wait and see what happens now.

For a long moment, no one moves or speaks.

I imagine them looking at each other in horror.

“God, do you think he’s dead?” says Katie.

“I think he’s just fainted,” says Stella.

Someone moves toward me.

“What’s he doing here?” Stella is quite near to me. I can hear the sharp edge in her voice.

“I don’t know! I didn’t know he was here!”

“Really? But he’s been here before?”

“Well . . . once! Ages ago . . .”

“We should get your mother.”

“Oh, she’s in a foul mood. She’ll think it’s my fault.”

“You really didn’t know about this?”

“No! God, look at his hand . . .”

“Oh, gross . . . JJ?” Stella kneels in the straw beside me. She prods my shoulder gently.

“JJ, are you all right?”

How long do faints last? They never say in those old books, just talk about smelling salts bringing people around. I have a feeling it’s not very long, though. Plus, they might call her parents at any minute.

I make my eyelids flicker a bit, then open my eyes. I think about groaning, too, but am not sure I can pull it off.

“JJ?”

“Yeah?”

Stella looks relieved but still cross. Katie crouches down beside her and smiles. She doesn’t look pissed off now.

“God . . . What’s happened?”

“Katie . . . I’m sorry about this. Being here. Didn’t know where else I could go.”

“It’s all right.”

I don’t think they’re going to call anyone. They’re both on my side now; I can feel it. Amazing. All I did was fall over.

“What happened to your hand?”

I raise my hand to be the center of attention: it’s purple, bloated, and horrible-looking.

“I was in a fight . . . I had to get away. He threatened to kill me.”

Sharp intakes of breath.

“Who?”

I feel a bit bad about this, but, shutting my eyes as if I can’t bear to think about it, I say, “My uncle. He . . .”

With an effort, I use my injured hand to pull back the sleeve on my left arm. Both girls gasp in horror.

“Oh my God! He did that?”

“JJ, you should call the police!”

I shake my head. There are limits, even with Ivo, that I am not prepared to cross. “No, no, I can’t. Everyone would get into trouble. My mum, my great-uncle . . . They’d get evicted.”

“That looks infected. It’s all red. You have to . . . get it seen to.”

Katie sounds worried. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her sound worried before. It’s kind of nice.

I move my head off the bucket, and both of them hover over me, sort of helping without touching, as I sit upright against the straw.

“I’m really sorry about turning up here, but I didn’t know what to do. I had to get away, and then I ended up near here—it was the middle of the night . . . I just wanted somewhere to sleep, and think.”

“You should have woken me up.”

Katie looks soft now, her lips parted. Stella glances at her.

“We have to get something for that cut. You should really go to hospital. You need stitches.”

I touch my bad hand to my forehead, which brings an entirely unfeigned gasp of pain.

“I don’t want to do anything that’ll get my family into trouble. You mustn’t call the police or anything, please. Will you promise?”

I look them both in the eyes. Both of them nod. Stella more reluctantly than Katie.

“If I can just get some antiseptic . . . and something to eat. I’ll be able to work something out.”

I have no idea what I could work out. But I figure that if I sound like I know what I’m doing, they’re less likely to go and get the council leader. I don’t think he would be too sympathetic, somehow.

“You can’t hide in here forever, though. Her parents are bound to suspect something.”

“I know. I know. Just for a day or two.”

“Does your mum know about this . . . fight?”

Stella is frowning, thinking things through.

I hesitate for a moment. What to say about Mum? I can’t even imagine speaking to her at the moment. What would I say?

I nod. Stella looks shocked.

Katie is, by contrast, businesslike.

“Of course you can stay here. I’ll bring you food and stuff. That’s easy. Then we can think about what to do. You can’t go back home. Not at the moment, anyway.”

Katie looks pleased. I think she’s decided to enjoy this. It’s a game, a secret she can keep from her parents.

“Okay. I’ll go and get some stuff from the bathroom. And then . . . I’ll say we’re going to take our tea with us when we take Subadar out. We can get stuff from the kitchen.”

She grins, excited.

Stella still looks unsure. She chews her lip.

“Thanks, Katie. I really appreciate this. I don’t know what I’d do otherwise.”

Katie stands up, her eyes gleaming with plans.

“Stella, come on . . .”

“Okay.” Stella still looks grave.

“Can you get back up there by yourself?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“We won’t be long.”

I feel light-headed with relief. I’m overwhelmed with love for them both. They are angels.

Katie goes back over to Subadar for a moment, as if to reestablish her alibi, then the girls go out, chatting, sounding as natural as though they are walking down the school corridor, and I am somewhere else, miles away.

As soon as I lie down in my little hollow, I start shaking. I haven’t eaten for nearly twenty-four hours, on top of everything else that has happened. For a minute I think I’m going to be sick, but instead, for some reason, I start crying. Why now, I don’t know. Tears run sideways out of the corners of my eyes into the straw. I must be a bad person. I have done so many bad things—breaking in to somebody’s home, smashing and stealing and lying. But aren’t other people worse than me?

I want to see Mum, and I can’t bear the thought of her, all at the same time. I hope she’s feeling sorry about throwing me out last night, and about saying what she did. I am sorry about the things I said to her, although it seems to me that they’re all true. And Ivo must have come back by now. They’re going to realize that it was me who broke into his trailer. Maybe he will even realize that I went through everything. That I saw what he keeps in his cupboard. So what? I don’t care. I’m never going to see him again. I just need to get a message to Mum at some point, to let her know that I’m all right. Eventually.

One thing at a time, I tell myself. One thing at a time. All I have to do now is stop crying before Katie and Stella come back and catch me.

34.

Ray

The building site at the Black Patch has become a crime scene. I spot the fluttering yellow tape strung across the entrance as I drive up. That’s the first thing you see from the road; the second is the pall of sullen brown water creeping across the site from the watercourse under the alders.