I hold back a smile at the ‘we’. This isn’t just my secret any more, and it’s not only my problem. It’s ours. She’s our responsibility. If this were a superhero movie, this would be our origins moment – we’d be on the brink of a high-power training montage set to ‘Eye of the Tiger’.
‘I’m not handing you over,’ I tell Teacake, folding my arms. ‘I don’t trust anyone else. All the adults I know would trade you for a reward. I mean, look at the crowds outside,’ I say, turning to Allie and Calum. ‘No one cares about the Beings. Not really.’
The twins nod. Even Calum, who half an hour ago sounded like he was ready to ship her off to the nearest lab for a few shiny pound coins. It’s harder to betray something with a name.
There’s a heavy silence as each of us thinks. Finally, Allie puts her hands on her hips and nods.
‘You’re right. We can’t trust anyone else.’ She pushes her hair behind her ears, suddenly business-like, and looks at Calum and me. ‘There’s really only one thing we can do.’
‘What?’ I say dumbly.
‘If there’s nowhere safe for her here on Earth –’ she turns back to Teacake and gives her a nod – ‘we’re going to have to get you back home again.’
ELEVEN
Calum and Allie are already waiting on Shona’s front step when I sneak downstairs the next morning. For two people who look so alike, their moods couldn’t be more different: Calum has bedhead and blurry eyes, while Allie is already bouncing on the balls of her feet.
‘I’ve got a plan! Well, kind of.’ She waves her purple notebook at me as I come downstairs. ‘It’s more of a rough sketch than a proper blueprint, but it’s a start.’
‘You don’t waste any time, do you?’ I say, as I unlock the door. ‘It’s not even nine o’clock yet.’
Calum lets out a long, slow yawn. ‘Allie’s a morning person,’ he says. ‘And an afternoon person. And an evening person. It’s annoying as hell.’
Inside, the radio is blasting pop music from the living room. I start to say hello, but the words fizzle out on my tongue. Teacake is sitting cross-legged on the dining table, her head bent and her hands resting on her knees. The bandages that I wrapped around her have fallen to the floor, grubby and golden, and her wings have unfolded.
They look bigger here than they did on Arthur’s Seat: so tall they curve at the ceiling, so wide they brush the walls that cage her. The edges of the feathers glow in the morning light, deep fuchsia and hot coral. Beneath my nerves and excitement, I feel an ache of sadness. There’s something overwhelming about it, seeing this sparkling, ethereal creature trapped in some pokey wee living room. An eagle in a budgie’s cage.
The others feel it too. There’s a long moment of silence, and then Allie lets out a cough. Teacake looks up and twitches her wings together – something I’m starting to recognize as a greeting. Only the left one moves; the right still drags downwards, hanging about fifteen centimetres lower than the other.
‘Morning, Teacake,’ Allie says, suddenly shy. ‘Here, got you some breakfast.’
She reaches into her tote bag and pulls out a packet of Jaffa Cakes. Teacake’s eyes brighten, and the atmosphere with it, as she sees the pictures on the packet. Still coughing, Allie passes a second box to me.
‘Have you eaten? I’m starving,’ she says. ‘Make us a cup of tea, Calabash?’
Her brother mutters something about not being her intern, but goes to put the kettle on anyway. Allie disappears to the bathroom; I can hear her coughing through the walls as Calum potters about in the kitchen. Remembering what she said about not talking about Teacake as if she wasn’t there, I start to tell her that we’re going to try to help her get home, that Allie has a plan.
‘Home,’ I say. ‘Up there, where you came from.’
I point to the ceiling. Teacake licks a spot of chocolate from her lower lip and follows my finger with her eyes. I realize that, beyond the layer of plaster and timber, my dad is probably sitting directly above her, trying to work out when she’ll fall. I brush the thought away. We’re doing the right thing.
After a minute, Allie comes back into the living room, wiping her mouth on a tissue. Her face is even paler than usual. Calum passes her a mug of tea; she takes a long gulp, finishing half in one go.
‘Are you all right?’ I ask. ‘That sounded bad.’
‘Yeah, fine. Just got something stuck in my throat.’ Her voice is still hoarse. ‘Anyway, let me tell you what I was thinking.’
She goes towards the table and, using a mixture of words and hand gestures, asks Teacake to turn around. Teacake eventually understands and swivels towards the window, showing us the outer edge of her wings. The damage is much more obvious from this angle: the feathers of the right wing are greasy and matted with blood, like those of a bird caught in an oil spill.
‘We need to fix this,’ Allie says, ‘so she can fly home again.’
Moving her hands over the bloody area, taking care not to actually touch the feathers, she explains her idea: birds. She’ll move the wing back into place with a sort of splint, and then we’ll use bird feathers to replace the ones she lost when she fell – a sort of feathery skin graft, to help the healing process along and allow her wing the movement it needs.
‘Our dad’s a total bird nerd. He’s the one who got me into ornithology,’ she says. ‘I found a ton of books at home to help us out, and we can look up the rest online.’
Calum unzips his backpack and tips the contents on to the floor. Hardbacks and textbooks fall to the carpet: The Big Book of British Birds, Introduction to Veterinary Anatomy, Integrated Principles of Zoology, even Inventions of Leonardo da Vinci . . . a dozen or so in total. Allie starts flicking through Eagles and Birds of Prey, pausing at a detailed illustration of a hawk’s wing.
‘It’s just a case of working out what type or size of feathers will be best,’ she says. ‘And I . . . Well, I’ll try to attach them somehow. I want to be a surgeon, so it’d be good practice.’
‘Yeah?’ I say, glancing up from the page. ‘What kind of surgery?’
‘Transplants,’ Allie says. ‘I like the idea of creating a positive outcome from something negative, you know? Like, when people die in accidents – it’s tragic, of course, and nothing can make up for it, but their death can give someone else a second shot. I really like that.’
My smile wavers. Mum’s organs were donated after she died. Her kidneys, her liver, her pancreas. Sometimes, afterwards, I’d think about the people out there, alive thanks to some tiny part of her tucked inside their body, and it made me feel sort of better. Other times it made no difference at all.
‘That’s really cool,’ I say. I wish I had my future mapped out like that. I have no idea what I’ll do when school ends. Between the accident and Leah disappearing, the Higher exams I sat back in May were a total write-off.
‘Well, we’ll see,’ Allie says. ‘It’s a lot of studying. Might not happen. How good would “angel surgery” look on my UCAS applications, though?’
We start brainstorming places where we might be able to find bird feathers: parks, gardens, the beach. As we talk, Teacake clambers over the back of the sofa and on to the coffee table. Her wings slide against the walls, dislodging photo frames and pushing ornaments to the carpet. The right one catches the edge of the door frame, making her grimace with pain. It seems unlikely that we’ll be able to fix it before Shona gets back, so we only have ten days to come up with an alternative hiding place.
Allie opens her mysterious purple notebook and begins jotting down ideas. I pull one of the books on birds towards me and flick through it. Teacake, who has landed back on the dining table, leans forward to look at the illustrations, knocking a china elephant off the mantelpiece in the process.
‘Did you sleep up there, Teacake? On the table?’ Allie looks at me. ‘Did you not show her the bedroom?’
‘Of course I did,’ I say, bristling a little. ‘She just prefers being up there.’