The removal men came a little after nine o’clock, and that was very nearly punctual. Father said the family should follow on in the car an hour later: “We don’t want to overtake them,” he said, “we don’t want to get there before all our belongings, what would that be like?” Mother was cheerful in the car, and Father pretended to be cheerful too, he even let Mother sing that song that was all about the green bottles, he even joined in a bit. They stopped off at a service station along the way, and Father let them all buy travel sweets. Pretty soon it began to rain, and Father had to turn on the windscreen wipers, and the screeching noise they made against the glass acted as background accompaniment to Mother’s bottle singing—“Could you stop that now, please?” asked Father. By the time they reached their new town, and then their new street, it was pouring down, and the little girl wondered to herself why they were moving somewhere that was so wet. And there, at the bottom of a cul-de-sac, was their house; the little girl had been there several times before, of course, whenever Father had made one of his toothcomb inspections, but back then it had just been a house, and now it was a home, and that felt weird. The rain fell on all the other houses, but theirs was left dry, they were lucky, overhead there wasn’t a single cloud. “It’s an omen,” said Mother. “We’re all going to be so happy here!” And it meant that they could unpack the car without getting soaked to the skin.
There were so many cardboard boxes waiting for them, it seemed far more than had been taken from their old house that morning. And the little girl wondered how they would ever find the time to open them all, and yet she still marvelled that their entire lives had been crammed into such a small space. “We’ll open them tomorrow,” said Father, “Tomorrow!” said Mother, but they nevertheless rescued from one of the bigger boxes a saucepan and some plates. Mother made them scrambled eggs on toast. By now the rain had caught up with them, it battered against the windows as if it were trying to get in, and it sounded different from the old rain the little girl was used to. “It’s a fresh start!” said Mother, with a smile. And, at Mother’s suggestion, they also retrieved from one of the boxes the little girl’s teddy bear. The little girl wasn’t sure she wanted it, not yet; but she found, to her relief, that the teddy bear hadn’t changed in transit, it was just the same bear it had been that morning. And she cuddled it in her new bed. But some time after midnight, in the pitch black, in the unusual pitch black, she realized the teddy bear now smelled a bit boxy and a bit cardboardy, and that made her feel sick. And she had to turn on the lights, and open up all the cupboards—and inside one there was an old blanket that must have been left behind by the house’s previous owners. And the little girl wrapped the teddy in the blanket, and threw it right to the back of the cupboard—she knew that she was safe from the teddy now, she’d never touch it again, because to do so would mean she’d have to touch the blanket as well, and the blanket was even worse. And only then could she sleep—and the rain continued to fall hard all around the house, and hard on top of it.
The little girl’s new bedroom was right at the top of the house. It was an attic, really, with a bed put in it. The very roof was her ceiling, and the walls caved in on her in an inverted V, giving the room a triangular shape. And all the shelves for her toys and games and books buckled out at her at strange angles. The little girl wasn’t sure whether she liked the shelves doing that at first, and then decided she did like it, she liked it very much, even if she no longer liked any of the toys and games and books that sat on them. The walls were painted a pure and gleaming white. And set into the ceiling was a small skylight, and it let the sunshine in every morning and protected her from the rain and the wind. The little girl liked this best of all, and she stared up at the skylight when she lay on her bed, she didn’t need toys to play with or books to read. She was actually very happy—even if the rest of the house disturbed her, even if she couldn’t get used to its new smells and colours and shapes, and the way it seemed so very very still in the middle of the night. If that still bothered her, if it woke her up, she’d just look straight upwards, through the skylight, and out at the sky beyond, and she’d be fine.
“It’s a fresh start,” said Mother. “Everything’s going to be different from now on.” And the little girl agreed, it was already very different, and Father and Mother were now not talking to each other in rooms where the furniture was facing altogether new directions.
Father was still wary. The house had been too cheap, it had all been too easy, they had been taken for a ride. He wouldn’t rest until he found out what was wrong with it. Mother asked, really very gently, why he’d agreed to buy the house in the first place if he wasn’t satisfied—and Father just flared up, and said he’d been left little bloody choice, had he? But he was nobody’s fool. He’d get to the bottom of it. He’d get to the bottom of everything. And it took him a few weeks, but at last, he succeeded. He called out his family into the front garden so he could show them.
“Look,” he said. “It’s obvious once you know.” He pointed straight upwards.
“I don’t see anything,” said Mother, and Father clucked his tongue in irritation.
And it seemed ridiculous, but the little girl then thought she understood. “It’s the sky,” she said. The patch of sky above their house was unlike the patches of sky above the other houses. The skies were all blue, but theirs was a more muted blue, as if it had faded in the wash. And there was white creeping into the blue, and grey. The sun was shining down on them, but not very forcefully, really rather limply, as if it couldn’t quite make the effort, as if it weren’t quite up to the multitasking of producing both light and warmth.
“We’ve bought ourselves a defective sky,” said Father.
It all made sense to him now. Why the house had been on the market at all. That sometimes the rain, or the wind, or the sunshine, seemed to be lagging as much as half an hour behind those of his neighbours’. That, sometimes, when he left for work, dawn had broken over the rest of the street, but not over their house, it made it difficult for him to find his car keys in the dark.
“What do you think is wrong with it?” asked Mother.
“Just old age,” said Father. “It’s wearing down. It’s dying.”
“What are those up there?” asked the little girl. She’d seen the specks before, peeking out behind the clouds, just little brown smears in the air. She hadn’t thought they were anything unusual before. Now it was clear only their sky had them, no one else’s did.
“Liver spots, I expect,” said Father. “I don’t know.”
“What can we do?” said Mother.
“We’ll probably have to replace it altogether,” said Father. “We’ll have to rip it out, and start all over. God knows how much that’ll cost. God. This sky’s had it. It’s probably years old. Probably hundreds.”
“Just think,” said Mother, cheerfully, and it was mostly addressed to the little girl, “just think of all the things it must have seen!”
“It hasn’t seen anything,” snapped Father. “It doesn’t have eyes. It’s a sky. It breathes wind, and eats sunlight, and, and shits clouds, that’s what skies do.” He glowered up at it. “But not this one. Not well enough for my liking.”
He went indoors, got straight on to the estate agent. He shouted at him down the telephone. Father was triumphant; he’d been right all this while. And although that first conversation with the estate agent proved inconclusive, each day he’d call the estate agent back, it became like a little hobby, and he’d threaten him with lawyers and courts and things. Father seemed so much happier now. He’d smile at Mother and the little girl over breakfast and over dinner—it was a bitter sort of smile, but a smile all the same. The little girl hoped he’d stay happy for a long time.
“It’s a fresh start,” Mother would say to the little girl. The little girl would nod, but nodding didn’t always seem to be enough; Mother would add, so earnestly, “I need you to believe that, I need you to believe a
ll of this is going to work.” And then she’d cry, well, usually; but even if she cried she’d be laughing, even then she’d stay cheerful through the tears, and the little girl just didn’t know what to make of that at all.
The little girl went to her new school. And pretty soon she was invited to the birthday party of another little girl; she hadn’t been around long enough for any of her classmates to realize they didn’t like her yet. The other little girl had a big house, with a big garden and swimming pool; most of the children played in the pool, but our little girl didn’t like water, and stayed on the side, and on her own. And looked up at the sky. It was brighter and bluer than her sky, and had been especially polished for the occasion. There were balloons and fairy lights attached to the sky, some hanging off white puffy clouds in the shapes of elephants and sweets, and someone had rearranged the stars so that they twinkled in the daylight and spelled out “Happy Birthday Trudy,” which just happened to be the other little girl’s name. Our little girl knew this sky was nicer than her sky, but preferred her sky nonetheless. When it was time to go home, she was given a goodie bag; the other little girls had got inside it, and torn up the slice of birthday cake, and broken the toy, and had written on the napkin, “Turdmuncher.” There was an apple, and the little girl didn’t dare eat it, she thought it might have been licked, or spat on, or worse; but there was also a bar of Milky Way, and the wrapping didn’t seem to have been interfered with, it had been squashed a little but the chocolate inside was untouched. So she ate that.
The skylight got dusty. And looking up through it on her bed, the little girl couldn’t tell what was dirt on the glass and what were liver spots in the air.
The little girl was really too little to reach the skylight. Mother would have to clean it for her. But Mother would sometimes get distracted, she might sit downstairs in the kitchen all day and drink and smoke. Mother went through a lot of these distracted phases. And the little girl found she could get to the skylight—so long as she was standing on tiptoe, and standing on her bed, and standing on some of those fatter books to lend her those few extra inches she needed. She wiped away the dust. She gave the glass a push. It moved within its frame. She realized that the skylight could open!—and she fumbled at the catch, it was stiff, she had to tug at it hard and the effort made her fall off her tower of encyclopaedias, she had to build it all up again and start over. She opened the skylight. She expected that straight away the sky would simply come flooding in. It didn’t.
If she pulled herself up with all her strength, the little girl could poke her head through the skylight. If she scrunched all her limbs together, really very tight, and thought about how very small she wanted to be, she could squeeze her shoulders through too. But her stomach was too big. So she began to leave her dessert. And, when that didn’t make her stomach shrink fast enough, she stopped eating her dinner as well, and her lunch, and her breakfast. She’d put the food in the bin when her parents weren’t watching. And very occasionally they did take notice of her, very occasionally she had to eat—but she didn’t keep the food inside for long, she’d go back up to her bedroom, cough it all up, wrap it in the old blanket and hide it in her cupboard forever.
One day she managed it—she was thin enough to climb up through the skylight. She almost wasn’t strong enough to do it, she felt so lightheaded and woozy, but she was a very determined little girl—she pulled herself out and into the moonlight, and the corners of the skylight cut into her sides as she did so, but she knew from now on it’d always be easier, she’d done it once and she could do it again, and it’d be easy, she’d just have to make herself a little bit thinner still. She sat on the tip of the roof, legs over both sides, and panted for breath, and tried to pretend that her body wasn’t hurting so much.
The sky was above her. Very close. She lifted her hand up to it, but it was still too far away. Now she could see how livid those liver spots really were. Now she could hear the sky breathing—and it wasn’t just the wind as she’d thought, that was just big puffs of breath, this was something softer and closer and private.
“Hello, sky,” she said. She didn’t know what to say, really. She didn’t like speaking to anyone very much. But the sky, of course, didn’t talk back—it couldn’t, because skies can’t talk—and that made the little girl feel a bit less self-conscious about the whole thing.
“You’re very old,” said the little girl. “Does it hurt to get so old?”
She thought about this for a while.
“I don’t want to get as old as you,” said the little girl. “To be as old and ugly as you. I don’t think that would be nice at all.”
The little girl thought about this too. And decided that maybe she’d been rude. “Sorry,” she said. “No offence.”
If the sky had taken offence, it seemed to forgive her. It wafted some light breezes at her, the little girl liked them, they were refreshing; she closed her eyes and opened her mouth and sucked them in, and she smiled. She stayed up there on the roof for a good hour or so.
“I’d better get back inside,” she said, at last, reluctantly. “I’ve got school tomorrow. You don’t have to go to school, do you? You’re lucky.” She shimmied her way back to the skylight, swung her legs over the side, hoped with all those puffs of breeze she’d inhaled she hadn’t put on too much weight to squeeze back through. She looked back up at the sky. She gave it a wave. “Night night,” she said. “I’ll see you again tomorrow.”
And, each night, the sky would be there, waiting for her.
Often she wouldn’t talk to the sky at all. She’d sit up on the roof, and pretend she was all on her own, on her own like normal—but then, once in a while, she’d look bolt upwards, and smile, as if to let the sky know that her shyness was really nothing personal. And at other times she’d chat, she’d spill her guts—that’s exactly what it would feel like too, that she was just letting rip, and everything in her head would just pour out; she wasn’t very good at expressing herself, she hadn’t much practice, so it’d all be higgledy-piggledy, her confusions, her fears—but the sky wouldn’t mind. It’d just listen patiently. It never interrupted. It never tried to walk away.
She told the sky her name. Not the name her parents called her—her real name, the one she shared with no one, the one that she carried secretly within her heart and never let out.
Sometimes she’d get angry at the sky. “You’re so big and powerful, but you won’t do anything to help me!” She wouldn’t raise her voice, she didn’t want her parents to hear, but her whispered fury was sharp and cut through the clouds. Sometimes she’d simply say, “You’re my only friend.”
She realized that for all the years she’d lived in her old house, she’d never once spoken to the sky there, or thought about it, or wondered if it were all right. It made her feel very guilty.
She’d count the liver spots day by day, and see how they’d begun to outnumber the stars.
When she was bold she tried to stand on the roof. Her feet slid upon the slates, and she knew that if she fell it’d be straight to the ground, and she’d be lost for good. But even standing, she couldn’t reach the sky. And so when she was bolder still, she tried to stand on tiptoe. These were the times when she didn’t mind much whether she fell to her death. But strain as she might, the sky was always out of her grasp.
“I love you,” she said one night, and she blushed hard at the admission, and felt so embarrassed that she had to crawl back through the skylight and she couldn’t even wave goodbye to the sky and she didn’t dare talk to it again for three whole days.
“I need you,” she said shortly after that, and that seemed so much like a greater confession.
“Help me, please,” she said one evening. And she got to her feet—wobbled a bit, because she was nervous, perhaps, or because the roof tiles were slippery after a typically sluggish spell of rainfall. She got onto her tiptoes. She raised her arms up high above her head. If only she were taller—b
ut then, to be that, she’d have to eat more, and then she wouldn’t be able to get through the skylight, would she? “Please,” she said again, and then she jumped, as high as she could—and it wasn’t that high at all, it was hard to get a stable platform to leap from—she fell back again, and her feet nearly gave way, but she was all right, she steadied herself. And so she jumped again, arms still up, her hands clasping and unclasping, trying to get a purchase on something . . . And she jumped once more, and by now she was crying, and she didn’t care how she landed, she didn’t care if she fell, “Please,” she said, “I need you, didn’t I say I need you?”
And her hand grabbed hold of the underbelly of the sky.
She was so surprised she nearly let go again.
She clung on for all she was worth. The sky had bent down for her, as far as it could go, but now it relaxed, it heaved itself back into position—and the little girl was swept up further into the air, maybe ten feet from the roof. She hung there, still crying, and she wasn’t sure whether it was out of fear, or relief, or whether they were just those tears of thwarted effort she didn’t need anymore but still had to come out.
The little girl dangled in the moonlit night. The moon didn’t shine as brightly in this patch of sky as it did in all the others. But the little girl just thought it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
She nuzzled into the sky. She was surprised to find it was furry. She began to stroke the fur with her spare hand. The sky began to purr.
She felt she could have hung like that forever. She wished she could. “I’ve got school in the morning,” she told the sky. “Double maths, and a spelling test. Bleurgh.”
So the sky lowered her back toward the roof.
And as the little girl dropped back down, oh, she couldn’t help it, she fell awkwardly, maybe it was just that she didn’t want to let go? In her fist she took a clump of sky with her, fur ripped from its skin. A gash was left in its belly. Just a little gash, but the sky was really so very old, and very weak. And the fur in the girl’s hand crumbled into flakes. And from the gash poured flakes too, raining down on her, she thought it was the sky’s lifeblood, “No, please no,” she said. But the flakes fell down anyway, and twisted gently in the breeze—and the sky was responsible for the breeze too, wasn’t she, was she sighing? was she gasping in pain? Like snow, but the flakes weren’t cold, they were warm as breath, and they weren’t white, they were the colour of twilight. “I’m sorry,” said the little girl, and she cried, “I didn’t want to hurt you, I just wanted to touch, I’ll never do it again!”
They Do the Same Things Different There Page 27