Flight of a Starling. Lisa Heathfield

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СКАЧАТЬ I say, as Ma squeezes in beside me, making too many of us in the small space.

      ‘Don’t go thinking you can go out in it,’ she laughs.

      ‘I won’t be long,’ I say, turning from her and running back down the tunnel.

      ‘Lo,’ she says, but she doesn’t try to stop me. Through the gap to the outside, the sky is clogged heavy with clouds. The rain batters the ground and even though I’m still dressed as a changeling, I run into it. Already the grass has caught puddles.

      ‘Rita!’ I call out, although I know she’s not close by. But I wish she were here with me, holding hands as children again, when there was nothing more important than the rain hitting our arms and our eyelashes and spreading under our feet.

      I glance around, wanting to see Dean, this boy I barely know, a stranger whose life stays still. I want him to look at me in that way again. Even though I shouldn’t, as we’ve always been told that flatties only bring trouble.

      ‘Lo! Get inside!’ The voice is muffled through the stamping water, but I know it’s Tricks.

      I spin one more time, close my eyes to the dripped-down sky, before I run into the dry. ‘What the hell are you doing? There could be punters still around.’ His clown face has gone and a scowl is in its place.

      ‘I was dancing in the rain.’ My fringe clings to my forehead as I smile at him, but I know charm won’t work when he’s this angry.

      ‘Your clothes are soaked through.’

      ‘But they’ll dry.’

      Ma appears at the end of the tunnel and she runs to us.

      ‘You’ll catch your death,’ she says, holding out a towel, which she curls round my shoulders.

      ‘I’d best get warm then,’ I laugh.

      ‘Sorry, Tricks,’ I hear her say as I dart back towards the costume tent.

      Carla has Baby Stan balanced on her lap as she scrubs her face clean.

      ‘What are we going to do with you, Lo?’ she says, watching me through her little mirror.

      ‘We should’ve done the whole performance out in the rain,’ I say, as I peel back my changeling feathers, careful not to snap them. The white ponytail unclips easy from the back of my head, leaving me shorter-haired again.

      ‘Don’t hang your stuff there,’ Carla says. ‘You’ll have to dry it in Terini.’

      Baby Stan holds out the hairbrush for me, with his smile that could stop a river.

      ‘Look,’ I say, as I gently knock the brush against a bottle on the table. ‘Fairy music.’

      ‘Don’t be filling his head with your nonsense,’ she smiles.

      ‘You hear it, don’t you?’ I whisper close to him and his laugh floats in wings from him.

RITA

      Lo sweeps quickly between the seats, collecting piles of dropped popcorn and ripped tickets. I follow behind her, tipping it all into rubbish bags to tie and throw away. I wonder how many sticky fingers leave their prints on it all. How their skin dust leaves them and becomes a part of us.

      ‘Do you think he watched it?’ Lo asks quietly.

      ‘Dean?’ I shouldn’t even say his name with Ma so close by.

      ‘Who else?’ she smiles.

      ‘I’m sure he did.’

      ‘Maybe he didn’t like it’ Lo says. ‘He didn’t stick around.’ She stops and looks at me. ‘We could go and find him,’ she whispers. ‘It’s stopped raining. We can go after this clear-up.’

      ‘Just us?’

      ‘Yes,’ she says quietly. ‘We’re old enough. Just us.’

      I feel torn, because I know we shouldn’t, but part of me wants to see her heart shine bright. ‘OK,’ I say, before I think any more.

      ‘You will? Even after Newport?’ She smiles slightly.

      ‘You won’t do that again.’ In just one night Lo kissed two flattie boys whose names she barely knew. She was sick from the drink when she got home and woke up with her head filled with lightning and regret. Then one came knocking on Terini’s door and she hid in the bathroom while I said I didn’t know her.

      The fountain boy seems different, though. And something about Lo is different too. Something on the edge of her skin lights up when she talks about him.

      We’ve barely finished cleaning up when we walk off, the candy stripe of our big top growing smaller behind us. Lo’s bottle-white hair shines messy in the night’s darkness. She’ll be cold without a coat, but there’s no point me saying. I’ve told her that Lil knows more rain is coming, but she might as well not have heard.

      ‘Will Spides and Ash mind that they’re not with us?’ she asks, linking her arm through mine.

      ‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘But I think they’ll mind even more that we’re looking for a flattie, so I’m not going to tell them.’

      There are three figures ahead of us, on the edge of our site, lit by one of the street lights.

      ‘He’s there,’ Lo says, without looking at me.

      ‘Are you sure?’

      They’re standing, all with their hands in their pockets. Two have got their hoods up, almost covering their faces, but the other one turns to us, as though he senses that we’re near. It’s Lo’s boy from the fountain.

      ‘Do we just walk by them?’ I ask.

      ‘No. We stop and talk,’ Lo says.

      ‘What if they’re waiting for someone else?’

      She looks at me. ‘He’s waiting for me,’ she says. It’s there, in her eyes, and it makes me feel I’ve made a mistake. We shouldn’t have come.

      The fountain boy raises his hand and waves at us, at Lo.

      ‘I think maybe Ash and Spider should be here,’ I say, slowing down so much that I’m barely moving. Lo doesn’t stop; she unhooks her arm from mine and just looks back at me and smiles.

      ‘They’re fine, Rita,’ she says. ‘They’re good ones.’

      ‘How do you know?’ I’m walking to catch up with her, because she can’t go on her own.

      ‘I just do.’

      ‘Hey,’ Dean says as we get close.

      ‘Hey back,’ Lo smiles. A strange silence sits in the middle of us all. The boys in hoods look at us as though we’re СКАЧАТЬ