Stolen Skies Chapter 3, 4, 5 and 6

Chapter 3

I started off with scraps of paper, writing fragments of letters I’ll never send. Then the ink in my pen ran out, and I had to satisfy myself with a million ‘To Hannah’s traced on the carpet.

To Hannah…

To Hannah…

To Hannah…

I close my eyes, watch the words pulse and swarm like flies.

I don’t sleep.

 

Chapter 4

I peer into the hallway cautiously. Anyone could be in there. I should stay outside, but I feel the urge to look around, to check if Jess is back. She could’ve forgotten her key, broken in for that reason. That’ll be what it is. No one would steal from us. We’re not that kind of family. We’re just normal, with worn furniture and well �" loved possessions.

I step over the muddied doormat.

‘Jess?’                          

There’s no answer. Time is too distorted, so maybe that’s how seconds draw out into minutes and long, treacherous hours, maybe that’s why she hasn’t answered yet. Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me.

I feel a fizz in my stomach, acid awoken with anxiety.

‘Stay there’ I tell Lily.

Her face is slightly pale, and I can feel her worried questioning, perfectly mirroring my own.

I keep hold of her hand, squeeze it tight, try to reassure her. We shuffle forward, moving together as one.

The hallway is dark, and an array of letters and bills are scattered by my feet. I step over them, move towards the living room.

It’s a little dark, but the wreckage is visible.

I feel my heart moan and murmer with fright as I take in the scene. Jess’ books, the thumbed romance novels she’s amassed over the years, have been trampled and torn, pages ripped out of them and thrown over the floor. The TV is gone, and thick red paint is smeared over the carpet, damp and clotted like blood.

There’s a crunch of paper behind me, like the snap of a twig, and I feel the sickening sinking of dread, of inevitability, cling to me with the same strength and pungency as addiction.

My palms are sweaty; breathing jagged.

I turn around.

 

Chapter 5

There are people downstairs, but just the normal array of druggies and whinos and down-and-outs. There’s no use shouting, no one will hear, or at least no one will care. But that means I’m alone finally, able to speak freely. I speak to Hannah, tell her I’m sending the letter soon.

‘You’ll see me posting it, and then you’ll read it and know. You’ll understand’

She’s so vulnerable, so easily broken. The slightest thing could snap her in two; a comment, a glance, never mind this.

She’s dead now. As good as, anyway.

‘I’m sorry, Hannah. Read the letter, and you’ll understand.’

It’s all my fault.

I look at the pieces of my apologies, blackened with my dying biro, and stare out the window, through the glass that’s thick with dust and littered with the corpses of flies.

Down on the street, I must look like a normal girl, like someone with a choice.

I don’t realise I’m crying until I see my hands, wet with ink and tears.

 

Chapter 6

I whip my body round, look for the threat. There’s just Lily, and the fine November wind that curls round the door. 

Beneath her foot is a yellowed page.

The mess of the house is unbearable, painful to look at. All the things Jess has collected, all her hours of cleaning, making the place neat and tidy, have been wasted. The cold, threaded with rain, has slipped into the house, and Lily is trembling against my knee, her hands like ice.

I go to shut the door. Lock it. It doesn’t make me feel any safer.

‘Have we been robbed?’ Lily asks. We both know the answer to the question, and I put Lily on the sofa, sit her down with a colouring book and a bag of crisps.

Jess would go mad.

But she isn’t here, and it’s just me, me alone with a small child and a wreak of a house.

I start scrubbing the floor, and sweat trickles down my back. Everything is too warm and muggy, and my breathing becomes laboured. The fear has gone, and without it, all that’s left is the oppressive fist of withdrawal, punctuating every breath and decision, every scrub. My nails itch with the chemical burn of acrylic paint and disinfectant as I push my hands into the carpet, harder and faster, harder and faster. The toxic scent makes me nauseous, and I feel vomit lurch into my throat. I push it back, but there’s a crunching at the pit of my stomach, a promise of things to come.

I keep scrubbing.

I don’t know if it’s the burglary or Jess or the drugs, but I feel tears slip down my cheeks, hot and salty. Time takes on an ethereal quality, and I stop caring if the carpet is red or cream or the colour of the whole bloody rainbow. Jess can go to hell.

She knows how much I need her, and she left.

She obviously doesn’t care about me.

I let my head rest against the carpet, press my palms against my skull to stop the rattling of worries and the constant screaming from pulverising my brain, turning my best efforts to mush. The heat overwhelms me, but more than that, I’m no longer alone �" crescents of people shuffle in every beam of light, and daggers hang deep and imminent from every surface. It’s just a second before it’ll happen. I breathe, waiting, while time unspools, endless.

Lily moves across the room, and I see her lie belly-down opposite me, copying my pose. Her thumb, podgy and pink, hangs from the corner of her mouth, and with her other hand, she starts to stroke my hair. Comforting circles on my scalp, cutting though the grease and the grime and the dirt. Her eyes are plaintiff, black holes cut into the crusted moon of her face.

‘I’m going to help you any way I can’

Her voice is calm and clear, her chewed thumb resting on my shoulder, and I feel a surge of guilt that she is helping me, and not vice versa.

She looks straight at me, fierce with the determination and hope only a child can have.

‘And we’re going to sort this out. Together.’

I nod, and we lay there for a while, lying in the paint with our heads up to the sky, listening to the crescendo of the storm outside.

 

 

 

Once I’ve pulled myself together, I go into the kitchen, start making us some tea. Spag bol, over the kitchen hob, a treat for Lily. She sucks orange juice through a straw on the counter, swaying from side to side and tearing hunks off a loaf of bread, shoving it into her mouth.

‘Watch that.’

She raises her eyebrows slightly, and keeps chewing, swaying more and more, tiny hands pressed against the worktop. 

She looks smug, and I’m not sure how effective I am as a parental figure. I stir the sauce with a wooden spoon, and her hand reaches out for more bread.

‘Oi!’ I look over at her, feeling exasperated. Is this what it’s like in Jess’ life? Chaotic and slightly amusing.

‘We’re eating tea in a minute. You won’t have room if your keep pigging on the bread.’

I gesture over at the spaghetti, which is cloaked in steam.

She give me a look, and says ‘There’s no way I’m eating that in one minute.’

She has a point. The spaghetti is pale and brittle, nowhere near cooked. At least it’s distracted her from the bread.

‘Hannah?’

‘Yes?’

She comes and stands next to me, taking the spoon out of my hands and stirring the sauce herself. She has to stand on her tiptoes, bend her arm at an impossible angle, to reach the saucepan.

‘Where d’you think Mummy is?

I sigh. There’s no answer to that. She could be a thousand places �" in theory �" but in reality, she’d never be anywhere but here, where she belongs. I try to maintain an air of joviality, try erase the smudges of worries from my eyes, my face.

‘I’m not sure. She might be at work.’

She nods slowly, as if processing the information.

‘Yeah’ I say ‘she might be at a work do. I think she mentioned that. I must’ve just forgotten.’

She looks surer of herself now, and I think my answer has satisfied her. I go to the other side of the room, get a chair for her to stand on. My nose is running, treacle oozing out of it with an irritating lethargy and persistence, so I get a kitchen towel too for me to wipe it on. No matter how many times I blow my nose, it refills: replenishing and replenishing and replenishing. Lily steps up on the chair, and starts stirring the sauce with a new gusto. I think about getting her an apron, but her shirt is already creased and splattered with vivid red acrylic, so a bit of Bolognese doesn’t seem to matter too much.

‘Cos you were ill?’

I feel my heart thump harder, smashing it’s fists against the prison of my ribcage, and I wipe my nose again.

‘Yeah’

‘Why are you always ill?’

She hops off the stool, and pulls herself onto one of the work surfaces. Cheeky thing. I start stirring the sauce again, adding herbs and spices.

‘I’m not’ I taste a bit of the sauce, blowing on the wooden spoon. It tastes like dirt, grubby and dry in my mouth. ‘See’ I say. ‘I’m fine �" eating and everything?’ My guts scrutinize the food, twisting and groaning. I feel a lurch of nausea, but breathe deeply through my nose, dampening the feeling down.

‘You look green.’

‘Don’t be stupid. No one really goes green when they want to be sick’

‘They do in cartoons’

I put the wooden spoon in the sink, get another one out to stir the sauce with.

‘Yeah, well…’

She hops off the counter �" top, and shoves the spoon in her mouth.

‘Mmmm.’ She makes a groan of appreciation and plonks the spoon back down in the sauce. I stare at it in horror. It looks brown and grainy, like dog food.

‘Alright then, you look grey. Harry says it’s cos you’re a druggie’

Embarrassment and shame course through my veins. I look down, because then it’s not lying, not really. It’s just saying words you don’t mean.

‘He’s wrong. How does he know about me anyway?’

‘Cos I talk about you at school’

I feel better now, more whole, and I start to strain the pasta, breathing in the clouds of steam and letting it rinse over my face.

‘What do you say?’

‘Well, who you are and that, and what you’re like. Everyone wanted to know who made the cupcake, cos they wanted to buy them in the shops.’

I smile, and get out a bowl, twirling in pasta and ladling in sauce.

‘That’s nice’

‘Yeah, I split it up between me and my friends, and they asked where it was from and I said you made it. So that’s how I said that you didn’t have a job cos you were ill, but if you did, I think you’d be a baker. D’you want to be a baker?’

‘Not really. So is that how Miss Whatsherface took it off you?

‘Miss Deaton? Yeah, but she only took it cos she wanted to eat it.’

‘Really?’

I raise my eyebrows, and start heading upstairs. We decided earlier to eat in Jess’ room, because the living room is just too much of mess for us to relax in. It’ll be better for me, too, with a bed and no window.

‘Yeah, she’s really fat. She keeps biscuits in her cupboard and sometimes we see her eat them at break. A few weeks ago Ella stole a few and we all ate them in the dining hall. It was great!’

‘You shouldn’t have done that. Do you want a cupcake after tea?’

She starts bounding up the stairs, a pure force of energy.

‘Yeah! Where’s your tea?’

‘Not that hungry’

And then she stops at the top of the stairs, an angel in the winter sunlight, and says

‘Mummy never normally leaves you when you’re ill’

I feel tired. The stairs are making me woozy, sleepy.

‘No.’

I hear her leap onto Jess’ bed, jumping on it with such a force that the springs squeak and groan. The noise makes me 

cringe, but I plough my irritation into the stairs, pushing myself up one after another after another. Finally, I reach the summit, arriving into the soft sheets and lying my head on the cotton down of the pillows. Lily has already spilt Bolognese on the bedsheets, and it joins the partially cleaned spatters of blood and tea.

I switch on the telly.

‘Hannah?’

I scroll through the channels, wondering why Jess isn’t here with me, why she would leave.

‘Yeah’

‘Do you think we should tell Mummy’s boyfriend she’s not at home?’

My stomach lurches, and I rush to the bathroom to throw up.