Читать книгу Bitter Sun - Beth Lewis - Страница 13

School on Monday buzzed with talk of the body. Whispers filled the halls and corners of the yard at recess. Even the teachers were gossiping between classes. The four of us were attacked with questions soon as we stepped through the doors. What’s a body like? Did you touch it? Does it smell bad? Who was she? How’d she die? And on and on. The worst though, was the one they murmured behind our backs, the one that changed the way they looked at us; did they kill her?

Through the day, the rumours swarmed, gained life and solidity, they grew into full-blown accusations and theories that, somehow, Jenny and me had killed the girl, dumped her body and then gone back to admire our handiwork before the cops found her. At the final bell, the doors to school flung wide and we poured out onto the front lawn where parents would be waiting. Some kids ran but slowed down to pass me and Jenny. They stared. I stared back.

‘Freaks,’ someone shouted and everyone laughed. A collective roar of giggling and jeers. Freaks, losers, weirdos.

‘Johnny, let’s go,’ she said, grabbed my arm.

Then I saw little Timmy Greer, runt of the class, try to make his name. He picked up a rock, wound back his skinny arm and hurled it at Jenny. I grabbed her, turned her away, and the rock struck my back. I cried out. The little shit had power. But the pain disappeared when I saw, across the lawn, away from the doors, Rudy and Gloria staring at us. They’d left by the side door, right where Gloria’s locker was.

Another rock hit the back of my leg and with it a chilling cry, ‘Killer!’

That stung the worst, the first time it’d been said out loud, given breath and life. Then Jenny screamed as a rock caught her shoulder. They all joined in. Laughing and shouting.

‘Freak!’

‘Perv!’

‘Murderer!’

Tears burned my eyes. They threw stone after stone and Rudy and Gloria didn’t move, like they didn’t believe what was happening. Neither did I.

Jenny dropped to the floor and me on top of her, covering her, protecting her best I could. It was hail. It was storm. Crack after crack. Sticky feel of blood in a dozen places. My head, my hands, my legs. Make it stop. Make it stop. Every time Jenny yelped, heat rose in me. Rage. Anger. The rocks kept coming, handfuls of gravel from the path, every strike cut my breath short.

Then mercy. The voice.

‘Stop it! Hey! Cut it out!’ Rudy. Charging in. A god in middle school. ‘Leave them alone!’

The laughing kept going but the rocks stopped. Caught doing something wrong, the pack scattered, a few parting shots but nothing hit hard. Just another school day done. An act of violence giggled through, it’s okay to throw stones when the targets are freaks and weirdos. Ain’t that right, Mom and Dad?

Make me a bird, I thought, that I may drag them all sky high and let go. Who would be laughing then?

Rudy helped me up. Gloria helped Jenny. My face stung in a hundred places. Jenny had cuts about her arms and legs but, mercifully, her face remained untouched.

‘They’re saying all sorts about you both, the bastards,’ Rudy said. He tried to sound older, like a pa telling off his boy, but the worry on his face at the blood on mine gave him away.

‘I heard,’ I said, my ears ringing with killer, murderer, my eyes boiling with tears. ‘They don’t know shit.’

Gloria picked out a piece of grit from Jenny’s arm with one hand and held her hand with the other.

‘Mandy will clean you both up,’ she said.

On the walk to Gloria’s house, a mansion by Larson standards, she asked the question I’d been dreading.

‘Why did you go back to the body?’

I stared at her, stunned, and then my eyes darted to Rudy. His were lowered. He knew I’d think he told her and he hadn’t. Unless he had and they didn’t believe me.

Jenny, limping from a deep gash in her knee, answered.

‘Because it was a hundred times better than being in that house.’

The harshness in her tone shocked me and our friends. I don’t think either Rudy or Gloria knew how bad it was for Jenny until then. In truth, neither did I. Sharp, drunken words were one thing but since when was a cold dead body better than a warm bed? Better company than a real live mother? I swallowed down grit and tried to understand it but I couldn’t.

Gloria put her arm around Jenny, Rudy didn’t say anything, he didn’t have to. He’d spent nights in the Fort on his own when his dad got heated. Better a dirt floor than Bung-Eye’s backhand or belt.

Rudy put his arm around my neck, a friendly headlock. Gloria and Jenny walked in front, entwined, their heads resting together.

They never asked about that night again. Plenty of people did, over and over, rumours sprouted like weeds after the first rain, but between us four, there was nothing more to be said.

We waited in Gloria’s kitchen. One single room bigger than my whole house. Gleaming white and red tiles, like a picnic blanket draped on the walls. Mandy tutted and shook her head at our injuries. Rudy leant against the cabinet holding but not drinking his glass of lemonade. Ice clinked. Condensation beaded and ran. Gloria fretted in the corner, pacing, talking about mess, impatient to tell us her big idea, only to be hushed over and over by Mandy. Jenny sat with Mandy at the table, getting cleaned up while the woman muttered about who did it and why and if Jenny were her daughter, oh you wouldn’t be sniffling over nicks like this if you were my girl, she said. I waited my turn, standing awkwardly in the middle of the tiled floor, like a statue put in the wrong place.

Mandy had all but raised Gloria and the pair had a tense, parent–child relationship the like Gloria never had with her real mother. Mandy was the one telling her to pick up her shoes, clean her teeth, eat her cabbage. Real Mother dressed Gloria in bows and made her twirl. I doubt Gloria’s mother knew a thing about her daughter other than what colour dress best matched her eyes. Mandy didn’t care about any of that. She was ruddy-faced, skin scorched and bloomed from years over a steamer iron, her thin blonde curls made lank from the heat. Her body was a pillow lined with steel. Tree-limb arms, stump legs and hips spread wide from six babies of her own.

Jenny hissed, cried out.

Mandy dropped a chunk of stone onto the table. Red, ferrous streak in the granite. My sister’s blood. My blood.

‘Hush your whining, whey girl, just a scratch,’ Mandy said. Thick, Ozark accent. Straight down from the mountains Mandy came, like an avalanche.

Jenny sat at the kitchen table, leg on the big woman’s lap, while Mandy dabbed and cleaned the cut on Jenny’s knee. Deep. About an inch long. Every time Mandy took a cotton wad to it, took off all that red so the edges of the cut were clear, Jenny’s blood would well up again, spill down her leg, drip onto the floor.

‘You ain’t got no sticky in you,’ Mandy said, talking more to the blood than my sister. ‘Idiot body of yours, needs the sticky to gum all this up and stop the running. Here,’ she handed Jenny a folded-up kitchen towel, ‘hold this against that hole long as you can while I tend your shoulder.’

The mound of cotton wool, clean and white on one side of the table, shrank and transformed into gore. Wool stained red and wet, slapped every time Mandy threw a used piece on the wood. Despite her grumblings, she was gentle. Carefully sluicing away the grit, responding to Jenny’s wincing and yelps. Every time I heard Jenny’s pain it was an electric shock through me, a tiny charge that made me want to leap forward.

‘Lemme see that hole,’ Mandy said, placed her hand over Jenny’s and pried the ruined cloth away from her knee. The old woman smiled. ‘Ah, there it is, the sticky done gummed it up. No more running away with you.’

Jenny smiled along with Mandy’s words, the music in them, so quick and up and down and lulling. Gloria said she’d sung her lullabies as a baby and my insides turned green. I didn’t know any lullabies. Momma wasn’t the singing type, unless it was on a table in Gum’s or humming Patsy Cline in the bath.

Bandaged up, limping but mostly undamaged, Jenny was on her feet. She took the untouched lemonade from Rudy and drew down half the glass.

Then it was my turn with Mandy and her thick, hard hands.

‘You telling who did all this to you chickies?’ she said as I pulled my ripped-up shirt off over my head and sat down.

Gloria stopped pacing and locked eyes with Rudy and Jenny. Then me. A minuscule shake of her head. Mandy was a talker, we all knew, and no one liked a snitch.

‘We were up at Barks,’ Rudy said before I could think of a lie. ‘The cliff side, you know Fisher’s Point? The Evel Knievel twins here got too close to the edge. Scared the shit out of us.’

‘Hush your nasty tongue,’ Mandy snapped, ‘don’t be cussin’ in my ears.’

Rudy met my eyes, winked. If there was anything Mandy hated more than a torn sock she had to darn, it was foul language. Piss, shit, fuck, all would shut her up quicker than a drunk can pop a bottle cap.

Dozens of small cuts and bruises covered my back and shoulders, but none as bad as Jenny’s knee. It took Mandy most of an hour to clean me up. Wet wool, dab dab, then the sting of Bactine. It pulled tears from my eyes and I couldn’t stop it, I tried, but it was tiny spikes all over my body, stabbing, piercing, deep down into my muscles. Be a man, John Royal, I heard Momma’s voice in my head, but it hurt, all kinds of hurt. Each spike was a reminder of the stone that made it, the hand that held the stone, the kid that threw it. Classmates. Friends.

‘You all done, mister man.’ Mandy gathered the soiled wool in one arm and the bowl of red water in the other.

‘Shoo shoo shoo,’ she said until Gloria moved away from the sink. ‘Go on now, go play outside.’

Gloria wasn’t allowed boys in her room. The only place me and Rudy could be with her was outside.

The house was a great whiteboard castle with red shutters and columns at the front pulled straight out of a Roman history book. Gloria said her father had the shutters repainted every year. Nothing like a fresh coat of paint to make you forget the troubles of the past year, he said. Sand them down, paint them over, good as new, it’s like those rain storms never happened.

The house sat in private gardens, surrounded on three sides by thick trees. Rose bushes ringed the front grass. A gazebo in the back. The back lawn was pristine, as if nobody had ever stood on it. Table and chairs on the patio. Pots of plants that had no business growing in this part of the world dotted all over. Going to Gloria’s house was like going on vacation. We’d be brought lemonade. We’d be cooked dinner. Me and Jenny never wanted to leave but Rudy never wanted to stay. He shuffled and fidgeted until we were outside. A bad kid in a good house never quite felt comfortable, he’d say. He always said he was bad. Bad stock, bad blood, bad name. A Buchanan through and through. A name isn’t anything, I told him once at the edge of Big Lake, you can change it like you change your shoes. You can be anybody. He liked that but he didn’t believe it.

On the far side of the back lawn, the trees crowded, came together like secret agents protecting the president in one impenetrable line. We weren’t allowed on the lawn, Gloria’s mother was particular and Jerry, her gardener, would take the blame if we rutted the grass. We went slowly, Jenny still limping hard on that right leg, across the flagstones to the edge of the trees and through. Gloria strode ahead, kept telling us to hurry.

The Roost and Fort weren’t our only spots. A wall encircled Gloria’s property way back into the trees. There was a break in the brick from when a beech dropped a branch two winters past. Too expensive to repair, thank you very much Gloria’s father. It was our exit. Doorway to our secret.

One step outside that wall and Rudy was Rudy again. A stopper pulled out of his back and the poison air hissed out.

‘Come on, Jenny,’ he said softly and helped her over the broken wall.

Rudy settled Jenny on the ground then held out his hand for Gloria, as if asking the lady to dance.

We sat with our backs to the outside of the wall, dried-out leaves beneath us, bright green life above us. No matter the steaming summer day, beneath the canopy our skin prickled and cooled, natural air conditioning.

‘So I’ve been thinking,’ Gloria started but Rudy held up his hand and shushed her.

‘No serious talk before a smoke. You know the rules.’

Gloria huffed but didn’t argue. Rules were rules.

Rudy took a crumpled pack of Camels from his back pocket and a matchbook from his front. He tapped out a joe and lit it up. Only one between us. They were precious, worth far more than money.

‘Took these off my old man,’ he said, took a drag and passed it to me. ‘He won’t notice. If he does, he’ll blame Perry. Big bro is always swiping off the bastard.’

I breathed in the smoke, let it fill me up and heat me from the inside. Then out, in one long delicious breath. I didn’t smoke much and Jenny never touched it. Both of us too scared Momma would smell it and show us Pa’s belt. But when I did partake, it was old man Buchanan’s Camels, lit with a proper match, not one of those gas lighters. Rudy was particular about that, which meant we were too.

I passed the butt to Gloria who took a short puff, followed by a cough. She never quite got the hang of it. We didn’t bother offering it to Jenny, she always said no.

But today, Jenny snatched the joe right out of Gloria’s hand. Took a drag. Too long, too deep. Blasts of grey smoke, one, two, cough up your lungs, then she spat. Rudy’s eyes bugged. Gloria cough-giggled. And I just stared.

‘Momma will smell it on you,’ I said.

In response, Jenny took another pull. The orange tip blazed.

‘Don’t care,’ she said, coughed some more.

The buzz was back in her bones. She shifted, tried to get comfortable on the ground. Raised her cut leg, rested it on a flat rock, then decided not and drew her knees to her chest. Rudy plucked the joe from her fingers and showed her how to hold it, how to breathe it in.

If anyone should be showing my sister how to pull on a joe, it was me but I didn’t move to take over. I was still wary of Jenny, still confused by her behaviour, felt like for the first time in our whole lives, I didn’t know my own sister.

Gloria refused another drag, tapping her foot with impatience.

Rudy noticed and, with a smile, kept the conversation away from her.

‘Heard you’re seeing the pastor tomorrow,’ he said to me.

‘Heard right.’

‘What are you going to talk about?’ he asked, ground the butt out on a rock and tucked the end in his shirt pocket. Rudy didn’t litter. He said it made the world ugly.

‘The body I guess,’ I said.

Rudy laughed. ‘Watch he don’t quote Bible at you. Did that to me once, some Sunday. He took me outside after, asked me where my old man was. I said he was working but you know that’s a lie.’

Nobody quite knew what Rudy’s dad did, one job one winter, another through the summer, selling, buying, this and that. Can’t quite put your finger on it. Ask around Larson what Bung-Eye Buchanan was up to and they’d walk the other way. One of those Town Truths everybody knew, like the secret of the Three Points.

‘Pastor Jacobs took me round the side of the church, away from people, then squatted down beside me like he was readying a shit. He asked me if I knew where my dad was this Sunday. When I said no, Jacobs, he said,’ Rudy shuffled, raised up his hands, took on the pastor’s mannerisms, ‘he said, “Rudy, one day you’ll tell me the truth. The more you lie, the longer the devil’s roots grow inside you. Proverbs teaches us that a false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh lies shall perish.”’

Rudy laughed, Jenny said the pastor was a creep. I bit my tongue.

‘I won’t forget that,’ Rudy said, ‘long as I live. Every time he sees me he asks about my old man, he’s got some kind of obsession with him,’ another laugh. An almost beautiful sound but for its sour edge, a strawberry picked too early.

‘He asks after your dad too,’ he said to Gloria and she sighed, arms crossed over her chest.

‘Maybe he’s got a thing for old Wakefield,’ I teased, ‘wants to hold hands and kiss him.’

Rudy made smooching sounds and Gloria punched him in the arm, called us both gross.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, ‘must be Mrs Wakefield. That red dress she had on at the parade raised a few eyebrows.’

Jenny laughed; it sounded hot and strained from first-time smoke. ‘Not just eyebrows. Gloria’s mom walking down Main Street in those dresses of hers raises a whole lot else, especially with Mayor Wills.’ She wolf-whistled and grinned wide.

‘That’s the least of it going round town about dear Mother,’ Gloria said with another sigh.

‘Your mom’s got more lipsticks than a New York tranny, and the jugs to match.’ Rudy slapped his knee and filled the forest with laughter. Birds fled their perches and I waited for Gloria to skin the boy alive.

‘You’re a jerk, Rudy Buchanan, you know that?’ she said.

‘But you love me still.’ He puckered up and planted a fat kiss on her cheek. A red blush spread over them both.

‘I hereby declare it, Gloria’s got half my heart,’ then he jumped up and grabbed Jenny’s hand, kissed it. ‘Jenny has the other half and Johnny has my whole butt!’

Then he pulled his shorts down, showed off his backside. We all screamed and fell about laughing.

Rudy the charmer. Rudy the handsome prince. Rudy had more hearts carved into trees around Larson than anyone, at least that’s what he said. But it was never a brag. He could say, I’m the best-looking guy in three counties, and you’d nod along.

There weren’t any girls in Larson carving a heart around my name.

‘Enough bullshit, you guys. Can we talk about what we came here to talk about?’ Gloria said. ‘Rudy, tell them what you told me earlier.’

Rudy went quiet, all the joking gone. ‘After you guys left the Backhoe yesterday, I stuck around. After the parade, everyone went to the football field for the fireworks. That’s when Samuels and that skinny one, Robin or Roberts, whatever, came in for their two-dozen doughnut snack. That sheriff, man, two bites and poof, no more doughnut, now you see it,’ Rudy waved his hands like a party magician, ‘now you don’t.’

‘So what?’ I said. ‘Samuels is a lard-ass, that isn’t a secret.’

‘Shut up. Point is the place was empty and they didn’t see me at the next booth, just minding my own with my chocolate shake. They were talking hush hush but I could hear them.’

‘What did they say?’ Jenny asked, rapt.

Rudy leant forward, like we’d be overheard out here. Ears in the trees, eyes in the leaves.

‘They were talking about when they found the girl,’ his eyes flicked to me. ‘Robin said the doctor who examined the body said she was maybe sixteen or seventeen.’

Four years, if that, older than us. I felt a lump grow in my throat. Gloria nodded along to the story.

‘Shit,’ I said, ‘that it?’

‘Messed up, huh?’

‘Do they know who she is yet?’ Jenny asked.

‘If they did, it’d be all round town,’ Gloria said.

Jenny shuffled closer to me, awkward with her leg. She scratched at a smear of dried blood on my t-shirt. ‘I can’t believe they don’t know her name.’

‘It’s awful, just awful,’ Gloria said.

‘She’s just … nothing,’ I said. ‘Without a name they can’t do anything. They can’t tell her mom or dad, or have a funeral without anything to put on the headstone. But it’s just a couple of made-up words, they could give her a new name if nobody claims her.’

‘Names are everything, Johnny,’ Rudy said with a scowl. ‘Those made-up words are all some idiot needs to brand you a no good thief or a pussy. Sure you can sign a piece of paper and change it, but that’s just like putting on a pair of pants. You still got an arsehole underneath. Bet some folk in town think all sorts about the Royals, especially now you’ve been sleeping with dead bodies.’

Rudy, all flashing smiles and eyes, threw a twig at me. I threw one back.

‘Shut it, Buchanan.’

Gloria snapped her fingers like old Mr Frome did when we were horsing about in biology class. ‘Shut up both of you. Rudy, keep going.’

He stuck out his tongue at her then carried on. ‘The sheriff said the doctor reckons she’d only been in the water two or three days but dead for four or five. At the most.’

‘How did she get in our lake? Who knows it’s even there?’ Jenny said.

‘She must have been dumped elsewhere and, like … dislodged her upstream.’ Gloria raised her hands. ‘Samuels hasn’t got a clue.’

‘Get this,’ Rudy said. ‘Samuels said something about paint. He said they couldn’t find a match to the green paint they found on her back. Did you guys notice any paint?’

We shook our heads. We hadn’t seen her back. We’d dragged her and laid her out face up. Maybe she’d been lying in spilled paint that mostly got washed away.

‘It gets worse,’ Gloria said.

Rudy leaned in, pointing and stabbing at the air with a twig for emphasis. ‘That lardo’s too lazy to even go looking for her. It’d take too much time away from stuffing his face. Samuels said, word for fucking word, “Let’s check the missing person notices, if there ain’t nothing there, fuck it.” Fuck it, he said.’

Disgust transformed Jenny’s face. ‘He’s going to give up? That was a bullet hole, right? Someone killed her, didn’t they?’

Gloria punched the ground. ‘Exactly.’

‘How can nobody care?’ Jenny rested her head on the wall, puffed out a sigh.

None of us had an answer to that. It deflated us. Maybe some cop in Mora’s town was fretting, wringing his hands and sticking her picture on a pin board while our cops were scratching their balls.

Gloria stood up, brushed off her skirt. ‘That’s why I asked you here. We are going to solve the murder.’

‘What?’ I asked. This was the big idea? The plan she couldn’t talk about in the Backhoe?

Gloria nodded. ‘We have to find out who she is and who hurt her. Someone has to.’

‘Stellar!’ Rudy jumped up.

Jenny’s eyes widened. ‘I’m in.’

‘If Samuels can’t find out who she is, what makes you think four kids can?’ I said. I didn’t want to go digging, I didn’t want to see pictures of Mora, I didn’t want more rumours circulating. I didn’t want to see what that would do to Jenny.

‘Samuels isn’t looking,’ Gloria said. ‘He’s just ticking boxes. If he really wanted to find out what happened, he could. Everyone in this town knows everyone’s business.’

‘She’s right.’ Rudy stuck his hands on his hips. ‘Someone will know something. People don’t talk to cops.’

‘People don’t talk to kids either,’ I shot back.

Then Jenny pushed herself up. ‘We have to, Johnny. She can’t be nothing. She can’t be nobody.’

‘This is stupid.’

Jenny folded her arms, just like Momma did when she was about to shout. ‘It’s not stupid. You’re stupid. What kind of people are we if we do nothing?’

Bad people. Just like Samuels. Just like whoever did it. I clenched my teeth. Three pairs of eyes on me. Waiting.

‘Fine. Fine.’

Rudy let out a whoop. ‘Let’s do this! What’s first?’

The question was directed at me.

‘Oh right, you want me to solve the murder?’ I glared at them, at Jenny.

‘You’re the practical one, Johnny,’ Gloria said, nudged my shoulder with a smile.

The others had the ideas, I worked out how to make them happen. It was me who drew up plans, with a stick in the dirt, for constructing the Fort, me who worked out how to dam the river and make Big Lake. Now it was me they looked to again. Identify a dead body, solve a murder, catch a killer. Easy as that. Jesus.

I rubbed the back of my neck, slick with summer sweat. ‘In the books the detectives always go back to the beginning.’

‘Where’s that?’ Jenny asked.

‘Where all this started,’ I said. ‘Big Lake, of course. We should follow the river upstream and see if we can find the place she was dumped. Maybe we’ll find something the cops missed.’

‘When?’ Gloria asked, looked at Rudy and Jenny.

I stole a look at my sister. She was almost trembling, her fingers working in the dirt, clawing thin furrows, raking at broken leaves. She didn’t seem to notice her nails darkening with mud. After the rock fight, and now Jenny itching in her skin to investigate a murder, I didn’t have the heart for searching tonight. But I couldn’t say, my sister is going mad, I need to get her home.

So I made an excuse. ‘It’s too late now. We’re out of daylight. Tomorrow, after school. I’ll meet you outside when I’m done with the pastor. Jenny and me have to get home now.’

Jenny frowned, went to argue but thought better when she saw my expression.

‘Momma will be waiting,’ Jenny said.

‘Tomorrow then?’ Gloria nodded.

I sighed out the word, ‘Tomorrow.’

Jenny and me left Rudy and Gloria as the sky turned gold. Must have been close to eight when we cut through the forest onto the back Barton road, the dirt track that ran behind Wakefield land. Word was the road led all the way to Paradise Hill, through the scrubland east of Larson. There were all kinds of hidden roads around here, all kinds of paths you could take and never be seen. We turned west on Barton without having to think. You don’t go east. Another one of those Town Truths.

We went slow because of Jenny’s leg.

‘I don’t want to go through town, Johnny,’ she said, halfway along the track.

‘Me either. We can loop up to the railway line, cross up by the Hackett place.’

She held out her hand for me to help her. I took her weight, just as blood began to seep through the dressing on her knee. I hurried us, the starlings would soon be flocking.

This route home would take us an hour longer than going through town but it was worth it. The Hackett land had a hill, a rare and precious feature in Barks County. It was the Island, salvation in a sea of wheat. Our path took us right up and over.

From the top of the Island the land swept down onto a flat plain. The view always reminded me of that moment when you lift and flick a blanket to lay it neatly on the bed. The moment it curls upward, the perfect, effortless curve, made by the air and the weight of the cloth.

The top of the hill gave one of the only full views of Larson for miles. The white, bulbous water tower dominated the east side of town, the Easton grain elevator rose up in the north, and spiked in the centre of town, the wooden church spire. Then Larson spread out in squares, Main Street and Monroe and Cypress, until it gave way to swaying corn and fences, hemming us in. But up here, on the Island, it was as if the world had fought back and drove a fist up through the rock and soil, made this little piece unworkable, unchangeable, left it for the wildflowers and meadow grass to flourish. I stood at the top with my sister and breathed in the higher air, like I was breathing in a taste of another world.

‘Johnny,’ Jenny grabbed my arm, ‘Johnny look, the birds.’

I turned to where she was pointing, down the slope, far off to where the field met the road. There, above power lines and fences, a great flock of starlings pulsed in the sky. Dark specks wheeled across the field, outstanding against the colour of the evening. They dipped down to the top of the wheat then surged upward as one. A rolling boil of wings and thrumming bodies. It was gasoline flicked into water, the swirling pattern of it changed with every blink, every ripple.

‘I love them,’ I said.

‘I do too.’

‘Why did you go back to the body?’ A sudden burst of nerves grew in my gut. Why did you say that, Johnny? Where did that come from?

You know where.

Jenny turned to me, cheeks reddening, squirming embarrassment in her eyes. ‘I …’

‘I’m sorry. I just … I need to know.’

Her jaw clenched. ‘I wanted to see …’ tears rolled down her cheeks, every word was forced, ‘I wanted to see what would happen to me if a fight ever … if she drank too much … I don’t know. It was dumb. Forget it.’

She turned away from me and back to the birds.

I hated what she said, it hurt some primal part of me and my instinct was to round on her. How can you say that? How can you think that? She loves you. She loves you more than you realise. You’ll see. But I stood still, silent, and a deep sadness washed over me. I took my sister’s hand and held it tight.

The flock danced for ten or so minutes then settled on a nearby stand of ash trees, foregoing the pylons and fence poles, instead filling the branches. A great big screw you to human handiwork.

With them settled, and unmoving, the sky was dull again, the land just flat and my sister seemed calm inside, smiling like the girl I knew. We started down the hillside, another mile and we’d be at the edge of Royal land.