Stonebird (15 page)

Matt's dad takes longer than a minute, but I'm not surprised, because no one ever means they'll be a minute when they say it.

If you think about it, it's practically impossible to do anything in a minute. Not even Usain Bolt could have got here in a minute from Matt's house.

I've just changed my T-shirt when he knocks on the door.

Daisy scrambles up and slides on the wooden floor as she runs over to bark at him.

“It's okay, Daisy.” I grab her collar to hold her back.

“Where's your Mom?” says Matt's dad. He's wearing jogging bottoms and a white tank top and has shoes but no socks on.

“In the living room,” I say, pointing back into the hall.

I take him through to where Mom's lying on her side on the sofa.

“I tried to clear up the sick, but . . .”

“Yeah,” he says, grimacing at the smell.

He walks up to Mom and kneels down and brushes the hair out of her face. He grabs a tissue and dabs at her mouth where the sick's still stuck to her. Sometimes when it's really quiet and I don't know what to say, I feel like doing something really crazy just to break the silence. You know, like bust out a really weird dance move or make random noises. Part of me wants to do something like that now, but I don't think Matt's dad will find it very funny. I want him to know I'm not a horrible person. I want him to know I'm sorry for what happened to Matt.

“I searched online for what to do,” I say to his back. “I made sure she's on her side so she doesn't drown in her sick.”

“You've done well,” he says. “You seem very good in emergencies.”

“Mr. Higgins?”

“Yes?”

My voice catches. “I'm sorry about what happened to Matt.”

He doesn't say anything to that, just turns back to Mom, so I kneel down next to Daisy and wait. When Mom opens her eyes again, she jolts up sharply, blinking. She rubs her eyes and her mouth hangs open.

“Gary . . . ,” she says.

“Shhh. You need to get some rest.”

“Oh, Gary, I'm so sorry,” she mumbles. “What are you doing here? I didn't call you, did I?”

“No. Liam did.”

Mom looks over at me, and her eyes fill with tears again. They overflow and run down the squiggly black tracks left by her makeup. “My poor boy,” she says, in this whimpering tiny voice. “Where's Jess?”

“She's gone out.”

“Oh yes, I remember.”

Her voice trails off, and she falls back on the sofa. I sit there stroking Daisy, stroking her soft, soft ears. Mom's breathing is heavy and slow.

My heart feels buried deep inside me, and my stomach too. Where they should be is just nothingness, weighing everything down.

Mom's there, but she's not Mom when she's like this.

This must be how Mom feels when she goes to visit Grandma. In my head I keep picturing a world without Mom in it, but it makes my eyes well up, so I just shift closer to Daisy and stroke her to take my mind off it.

Eventually Gary helps Mom upstairs. He rolls her onto her side and sits on the edge of the bed, and I sit next to him, and all around us is dark and silence apart from Mom's breathing, which is slow and steady now.

“It's hard,” he says. He's grimacing. He runs a hand through his hair. “It's . . .”

He's quiet for ages. The alarm clock beside Mom's bed is one of those really loud ones where you can hear it
tick-tocking
.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
And still Gary doesn't say
anything. His eyes flick across to Mom, then back to me, and his mouth opens and closes, opens and closes.

“Yeah . . .” I don't know what else to say.

“Listen, Liam. I know what your mom's going through. Probably better than anyone. I'm not sure if you know, but my wife—she's—she's got . . .”

He breaks off and throws up his hands as if to say,
I don't even know what I'm saying.

“My wife,” he says slowly again, “has got dementia, just like your Grandma. She's not the same person anymore.”

All this time I thought Matt's granddad must be the one with dementia, but that woman I saw . . . the person they go to see . . .

It's his mom.

“Is that why you've been spending so much time with Mom?” I ask.

“What? No! No, I like Sue, of course I do, but it's nothing like that.”

“Oh. It's just, I thought—”

“Oh—no,” he says, smiling. “We're not in a relationship, Liam. Honestly. I think we both just needed a friend to talk to. It's horrible, when it's someone so close to you. Isabelle looks as beautiful as the day I married her, but inside, she's . . .”

He trails off again and covers his face. His shoulders wobble up and down and he's still covering his eyes and part of me wants to reach out and pat him on the shoulder, but is that normal for a kid and someone else's dad? When he takes his hands away, his eyes are wet.

“She's just not there, Liam. She's not there. It's not her. It's . . .”

“Like there's a demon in her,” I say quietly, “eating her from the inside out.”

He looks up. “Yeah. Yes. Like there's a demon.”

After school the next day, Matt's waiting by the back fence.

“Why was my dad around your house last night?” he says.

“What?” I try to move past him, but he blocks me off.

“Don't play dumb. I thought I told you to make sure your mom stays away from him.” He steps closer. There's no one nearby. Most of the kids have gone home now, and the few that are left are all going out of the main entrance.

“They're not going out,” I say quickly. “They're just friends.”

“Liar!” he spits, getting right in my face now. “You and your stories. I know what you did—that night in the road. I know what you did.”

He rocks back and forth on his heels. His eyes are like Daisy's when she sees a cat in the garden, and he doesn't take them off me.

“I should kill you,” he says.

I step back automatically.
Run
—that's the only thing in my head and it's going around and around as Matt comes closer.

“Do you think I liked being in the hospital?” He can't expect an answer because he plows straight on: “A week! Lying there with a broken arm, everyone thinking I'm some kind of fool who doesn't know how to cross the road. The police came, you know. I could have turned you in. I know what you did. It was that thing. That gargoyle. I should kill you!”

Those last words come out in a snarl.

Come on, Liam. Run.
But my legs are shaking. They don't feel like mine anymore.

“I saw your mom,” I say, just to change the subject.

But it's the wrong thing to say.

It's very much the wrong thing to say, because now he's grabbing my T-shirt and shoving me back, back, back. His nose is big in my face and it wrinkles as he snarls again.

“You what?” he says.

“I—I—”

“I
heard
what you said.”

The words come out in a rush as I try to squirm away. “I was there visiting my grandma. She's got a demon in her, so I was there to see her and on the way out I saw your mom. I thought it must be your granddad in there because I thought you had to be old to get the disease and everyone in there has it, don't they? But it wasn't your granddad. It was her—I recognized her from the photo. It was your mom . . .”

“What the hell are you talking about?
Demon in her
?”

His grip loosens, and I wriggle out and run.

I don't even think about where I'm going—just as long as it's away from him.

Through the gate and across the street and down the alley toward the rec. My footsteps ring off the walls but his are right there too.

Don't look back
, I tell myself,
just don't look back
, because in the movies when they do that they always trip and fall and get caught.

Pain stabs my side and I try to ignore it, try to push on.

I'm going to get away. I think I'm going to get away.

Then Matt clips my foot and it drags on the ground and now I'm stumbling. I reach out to steady myself, but it's too late. The ground rises up, getting closer and closer to my face, and then I'm skidding across the concrete.

The rough ground gouges my skin. My arms and knees are on fire. But I don't have time to look at them because now Matt's on top of me, pinning me to the ground.

“Do
not
run away from me,” he spits. His eyes are wild. I've never seen him like this. “And if you ever,
ever
say anything about my mom again, you're dead. D'you get me? DEAD!”

I try and shrug him off, but he's too heavy.

“I just wanted to—let you know that I—I get it.”

He takes the pressure off my chest. Just a bit, but enough to breathe.

“What?” he says.

“I understand,” I wheeze, gulping in air. “Well, I don't—not really . . .”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can't remember my Grandma properly. But I've seen what it does to the people who can. The demon in her makes Mom get drunk, and it made Jess skip school. And that makes me sad. So I understand, a bit . . .”

“You don't,” says Matt, in this calm voice that's somehow even scarier than the snarling spitting one.

He climbs off my chest and stands up. At first I don't move, my back's aching too much, my arms are going numb, but he's just standing there, so eventually I sit up.

“No one understands,” he says. “No one can ever understand.”

But my mind's run off, back to the church, back to the creature I've tried to forget. Maybe Mrs. Culpepper
was
trying to tell me something. I can't undo what Stonebird did to Matt that night. But I can try and put things right . . . for him and for me.

One more story . . .

“I thought only old people got demons inside them,” I say, snapping back to Matt's glare. He didn't say anything when I sat up, so I slowly get to my feet. “I didn't realize you could get one as young as your mom.”

“It's
dementia
,” he says. “She's not got a demon in her.”

“Well, my sister says Grandma's got a demon inside her, eating her from the inside out. And it's true. I know it's true. I've seen it.”

Matt sighs.

He rests back on the wall, eyes glinting.

“It does look a bit like that, I guess.
Demon in her
.”

“I get what it's like.”

He stands there in silence, head hanging.

“It was her own fault,” he says eventually, in such a tiny voice I barely hear it. “It was her fault. It was all her fault. She wouldn't. I told her to let go and she wouldn't . . .”

What?

I'm bursting to know more, but I don't dare say anything in case he stops.

So I just stand there waiting, looking at the top of Matt's head because he's still staring at the ground. People are walking past us now, on their way to or from the high street, but I ignore them.

“It was a year ago,” he says. “I bought some water bombs to throw at cars from the tree house, but when she saw them she tried to take them off me. So I snatched them away. She yelled, so I yelled louder, and she yelled even louder, and then she just stopped. She held her heart. She said,
Oh . . .
That's all, just
Oh
 . . . and crumpled to the ground. I think it was her heart that did it. Something to do with her heart. But she hit her head. She hit her head and she didn't wake up.”

My mouth is hanging open in the World's Biggest
O
, and it's in capitals because I can't believe what I'm hearing.

“But in the retirement home, I saw—”

“She's awake now,” he says, reading my mind. “She woke up after three days. But her memory just got worse and worse. At first she remembered everything, except what had happened to her. But then she started to forget things we'd just told her. Now she tries to give me pocket
money a hundred times every visit, even if she's already given me something, even if I show it to her. Sometimes she can't even remember my name.”

After that, the silence is a heavy blanket over the alley. He's just standing there and I'm standing opposite him and I don't know what to do, so I just wait.

“It
was
her fault,” he says, but his voice is weaker this time.

His eyes flare open, stabbing right into me, asking for help.

“It was her fault,” he says again. “It
was
her fault. It
was
!”

He falls to his knees, looking up at me.

Matt. The hard nut. The same boy who's made my life at this school a living hell.

“But Dad said it was me. He said if I hadn't bought the water bombs, then none of this would have happened. He said it was my fault. He said I put her in the retirement home, that she had a stroke because of me, that she's got dementia because of me.”

“That doesn't sound like him,” I say.

“It was just once, right at the beginning. He was raging. He said sorry for it after, apologized for days, but I can't forget it. He said I stole his wife from him. And I did, didn't I?”

He crawls closer until he's at my feet.

I try and back up, but he keeps coming.

His voice is a slow whine. He's shaking his head, mouth working in silence, and even after everything, even after all I've been through, my gut is squirming.

How can I be feeling sorry for him? For Matt!

He grips my shoes, looking up into my eyes, head shaking.

“I did . . . ,” he says, over and over. “I did . . .”

I can't move any farther. My back's against the wall.

A million thoughts crash around in my head, but one pops up bigger than the rest.

Matt's like Mom. The only difference is he doesn't have anything to take his mind off the demon eating his own mom. That's probably why he's been so angry all this time. It's all bottled up, all the questions and the hatred and the love that's never going to be the same again. All the memories and dreams. All of it is bottled up inside him and shaken up like a can of Coke, fizzing and foaming and desperate to burst.

I crouch down too, ignoring my stinging knees. I stare straight into his eyes.

“It wasn't your fault,” I say. Part of me thinks that's a lie. But the other part of me says,
Imagine if you were in his shoes
. So I do imagine it, and I don't get it, don't get how he can still be human and go to school and do all that normal stuff when his Mom's been taken away from him.

“It was,” he says, sniffing. “It was. It was.”

He's quiet after that.

So I say them. I say the words that are burning in the back of my mind.

“I think I know something that can help.”