A loud bang comes from a truck outside, and Teacake wakes with a start and a scream. She leaps on to all fours and spins around, blinking wildly. I scramble to my feet, babbling that it’s all right. Her eyes are still wild, but she takes a breath and sits back. She pushes her tousled hair out of her face and rolls back her shoulders, making her wings ripple like pink-dappled waves.
‘Morning,’ I say, holding my palms up. ‘Did you sleep OK? You looked like you were having a nightmare.’ I try to mime sleep, closing my eyes and resting my head on my hands.
Teacake opens her mouth. Her lips move silently and she puts her fingers to them, as if tracing the shapes they’re making. For one breathtaking moment, I think she’s going to speak – but instead, she just tilts her head back to look at the ceiling, at the dull white plaster hiding the sky.
‘You must be so homesick,’ I say quietly. ‘There must be people waiting for you. People you’re missing too.’
As if on cue, the radio starts to play some wistful Gaelic tune. Teacake turns towards it, drawn in by the emotion of the song. I try to picture what she’s thinking about: what her home might be like, the friends and family she might have left behind. Soon, I find myself thinking about Leah’s dad.
He flits into my mind a lot these days. I think about him alone in that house, where his wife and Leah used to be. I think about the empty chair at their kitchen table, the silence behind the bedroom doors. Loss is mathematical: two-thirds less laundry, two-thirds less washing-up, two-thirds fewer footsteps thundering down the stairs. Subtract music blaring through the walls. Subtract eyeliner smudges on the towels. Add silence. Add more silence.
I’ve done those sums. The results are always greater than you think they’ll be.
Teacake turns to look at me. She puts her fingers to her mouth again and murmurs something I can’t make out. Even if we can’t communicate, I feel like there’s something we have in common: loss. I have some faint idea of how she’s feeling, at least.
I start laying the feathers out on the carpet for when Allie and Calum arrive: soft downy ones and semi-plumes on the left; long, elegant flight feathers on the right. A few minutes later, there’s a knock at the door. I open up to find Calum standing on the step, red-faced and panting, with Allie on his back. Her skinny arms are wrapped around his neck, her trainers dangling in mid-air, and she has a tube sticking up her nose.
‘Oh my god, are you OK?’ I ask. ‘What happened?’
Allie gives a weak smile. She’s wearing pyjamas: baby-blue trousers decorated with clouds, paired with chunky hi-tops, a navy duffle coat and a striped blue-and-white scarf. Calum is dressed in jeans and a hoody, but his hair is sticking up on one side and there are deep bluish bags under his eyes.
‘I’m fine,’ Allie says. ‘Had a bit of a bad night, that’s all.’
‘Mind if we chat inside?’ Calum asks in a strained voice. ‘You’ve got about three seconds before I drop you.’
I move back to let them in. As Calum shuffles past, I notice he’s holding Allie up with one hand and dragging something with the other: a small green cylinder on a sort of metal trolley. He hurries into the living room and gently lowers Allie on to the sofa. She looks exhausted: her face has gone from its usual chalky colour to a sickly grey-white, and her normally neat hair is pulled into a scruffy ponytail.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says, letting out a cough. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’
I have about a hundred questions, but before I can ask any of them Teacake leaps on to the coffee table. She bounds towards the kitchen, ruffling my hair up with her good wing, and begins rummaging through the cupboards and drawers for biscuits. She comes back chewing on a Ryvita, but it doesn’t go down well: she pulls a face, makes a sound like a plug draining and spits it out. I get up to check the cupboards, but Shona’s supply of sweets has finally run out.
‘Maybe you should try some vegetables or something, Tea,’ I say, picking through the tins in the back of the cupboard. ‘I’d feel pretty bad if we gave the world’s only living Being type 2 diabetes.’
Calum scoffs. ‘Well, I’m not having mushy peas for breakfast. I’ll go to Tesco and get us something, Tea.’
He heads back out, leaving me alone with Teacake and Allie. I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m acutely aware of the tube up her nose. Before I have a chance to say anything, Teacake leans across the table and tugs it out to examine it. Allie laughs and prises it out of her fingers.
‘See, you should be more like her. It’s just an oxygen tube,’ she says as she fits it back into place. ‘Why are people always so terrified of bringing it up? I am aware it’s there. You’d have to be pretty stealthy to get one of these up somebody’s nose without them noticing.’
I realize I’m gawping and close my mouth. ‘Um, can I ask . . . ?’
‘I have cystic fibrosis.’ Seeing my blank expression, she explains. ‘It’s a chronic genetic disease. My lungs and pancreas produce this thick, sticky mucus that clogs my airways, so it’s hard for me to breathe. I had a double lung transplant for it when I was fourteen though, so I’m a lot better now.’
She says this like she just got a tooth pulled out. It takes a moment for the words to sink in. A double lung transplant. The scope of that knocks the words out of me. I have no vocabulary for something that big.
‘Wow. I’m really sorry,’ I say, finally, and it sounds even more inadequate than it felt in my head. ‘Is it still serious?’
As soon as I’ve asked, I realized what a stupid question that is, but my knowledge of cystic fibrosis ends at . . . well, it started about thirty seconds ago. Allie pulls something from her bag: a yellow plastic pillbox, the kind Ammamma has in her bathroom. Behind the cover are dozens of tablets, red and white and green.
‘This is cyclosporine, it’s an anti-rejection drug. Voriconazole, that helps with infections. That’s a painkiller for my spine, these are protein supplement pills – I can’t process food properly, that’s why I have to eat so much. That one’s just a vitamin . . .’
She introduces them like they’re old friends. There are antibiotics, anti-ulcer medications, pills for pancreatic enzyme replacement therapy. Pills for problems that I didn’t know existed. Teacake picks up a small green capsule and holds it to the window, watching the light shine through the plastic.
‘Wow,’ I murmur, prising it out of her hand before she eats it. ‘So, all that’s for one week?’
Allie bursts out laughing. ‘A week? That’s for one day. I’m like one of those coin-operated attractions the Victorians used to have. I don’t usually need the oxygen these days – it’s just because I’ve got some crappy infection. But, without all this, I’d just shut down.’ She pretends to collapse, like a robot going into meltdown.
There are dozens of thoughts swirling around my head, but I can’t find any form for them. The image in my head that I have of Sick People doesn’t fit with the loud, opinionated, bossy girl I’ve got to know over the past week.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I say. ‘That must suck.’ I cringe as soon as the words leave my mouth: it sounds so half-assed, so flippant.
Allie just shrugs. ‘It is what it is. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s not exactly a day out at Disneyland. All the side-effects suck. Missing school sucks. The fact I can never, ever forget about it sucks – I have to do about a billion tests every day.’ She pulls one of her energy bars from her bag, unpeels the wrapper. ‘But my life is so much better than it was before the operation. The main threat now is infections. I’ve got basically no immune system: I need to be really careful around pets, and I can’t even eat sushi. But most days I feel like a superhero compared to what it was like before.’
I rummage around for something to say, something meaningful, but my mind has gone blank. For the first time since I met Allie, there’s an awkward silence, broken only by the rustling of Teacake’s wings and a lively cèilidh tune on the radio. Allie curls up on Shona’s sofa, her hands deep in the pockets of her duffle coat, and gives a world-weary sigh.