The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [36]
Since Miriam had moved to Form I, I seldom saw her, and when I did her face was pale and her leg seemed to drag more heavily. At lunch or supper we would exchange looks as I set down her plate. I miss you, I would think. Her eyes said the same thing. In one of our conversations during the holidays I had told her about my parents, gazing at the North Star and sending messages back and forth across the ocean. Maybe we could do that, she had said. In maths, you could send me the right answer. We had tried it one Sunday. During the first quarter-hour of Mr. Waugh’s sermon I had thought about Sulis, the goddess of the hot springs at Bath. When the clock chimed I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself inside Miriam’s head. At first there was only the fuzzy dimness of my eyelids. Then I caught a glimpse of a black and white dog: Spencer, I thought. But that evening, while the other girls played Ping-Pong, she told me she’d been remembering the afternoon we visited the pigs, and she’d pictured me thinking about Iceland. Maybe it’s like tennis or poetry, she had said, we have to practise.
Now each night I fell asleep trying to send her a message: ask me home for the summer holidays. If only her father would invite me, I was sure Miss Bryant would agree. One less mouth to feed. Miriam and I would be together, and during the long hours while her father was at work, I could track down Mr. Donaldson.
One Saturday, when instead of cleaning the Form I classroom I was standing, broom in hand, before the map, a voice behind me said, “Lost your fancy friend, haven’t you?”
Arms akimbo, Ross stood a few feet away, dressed in the ugly overalls we wore for cleaning. It was easy to picture her ten years from now, washing some office floor. “I was trying to find the school,” I said.
“Here, moron.” As she raised her hand, I smelled the cleaning fluid we used in the toilets. “Here’s Hawick, and Denholm. Minto is too small.”
“I was looking too far west. Where did you used to live?”
She pointed to the large, dark circle of Glasgow. “When I first came here I couldn’t stand the quiet. I thought some animal was going to jump out and eat me.”
“What kind of animal?”
“A fox? A wolf? Whatever lives in the woods and eats girls. So where’s the cripple from?”
“The cripple?”
Even as I asked, the word twisted inside me and found its meaning, but before either of us could speak again, Mrs. Bryant stepped into the room, smiling. “Ross, you’re needed in the upper corridor. Hardy, you’ve got five minutes to finish this room.”
Two days later, when I climbed into bed, my bare feet encountered something cold and feathery. As I jumped out, screaming, everyone in the room burst into gleeful shouts.
“Look what the cat’s brought in,” said Findlayson.
“Cry-baby,” called Smith.
They were still laughing and shouting comments when Matron appeared. “Girls, if you . . .” The light went out.
I fetched some toilet paper, retrieved the sparrow, and threw it out of the bathroom window. Since I had shown her the magpie, Ross had several times asked me the names of birds. With the help of Miriam’s book I had taught her to distinguish a swallow from a swift, a rook from a crow. Over Easter a pair of blackbirds had built a nest in a flowering currant bush near the back door, and often she followed me when I slipped out of the kitchen to check on their progress. She might have allowed this to happen, I told myself, but she was not the executioner. Findlayson, I guessed, or Drummond. As I lay under the counterpane, I thought, Invite me for the summer. Invite me for the summer.
It