She hasn’t given up yet, though. ‘But Dad could help,’ she says. ‘He knows more about the Beings than anybody, probably.’
‘No, Rani!’ I run my hands through my hair, tugging at the roots. ‘Sorry, but it’s not your secret to tell. Or mine, even.’
She argues, of course – Rani can never take no for an answer. Even when she realizes that I’m not going to give in this time, she doesn’t let it go. She’s like Dad that way.
‘How about this?’ she says. ‘If she can fly back before the end of the holidays, we won’t tell Dad. But if she can’t, or if anything goes wrong, we’ll ask him for help.’
Crap. I hadn’t even thought about what we’ll do when we have to go back to school. I don’t even know if Dad’s planning on taking us home – I suppose he is, seeing as he thinks his Being will have landed and made him his fortune by then. Either way, we’ll need to think of a more long-term solution for when the holidays end.
‘Fine,’ I say, just to get Rani to shut up. ‘If it comes to that, I’ll tell Dad. But not until I say so, OK?’
Reluctantly she shakes on it. I spend the rest of the morning filling her in on the little we’ve learned about Teacake, trading thoughts on where she might have come from. It actually feels good to share all this with her. Now one part of my secret has been removed, I can breathe a little easier.
By the time two o’clock comes around, Rani’s nerves around Teacake have worn off. Calum comes in for his shift to find her skidding left and right across the stone floor, giggling and trying to follow Teacake’s bursts of flight around the room. His eyebrows rise when he sees her, but he doesn’t react with the anger I’d expected.
‘What’s going on?’ he asks, his voice gruff. ‘Who’s this?’
I start to explain who Rani is, and that she’s not about to run off and tell our dad (or his – I think that’s what he’s most worried about), but Calum barely seems to listen. He looks exhausted: almost as pale as his sister, with bags under his eyes and mussed-up hair.
‘How’s Allie doing?’ I ask him, as he flops into an empty seat. He pulls A Dance with Dragons out of his backpack and shrugs.
‘You saw her yesterday,’ he says. ‘How do you think she is?’
His tone is so sharp I actually flinch. He kicks his legs up on the seat in front of him and opens his book. After a few seconds, he sighs and lets it drop to his lap.
‘Sorry. She’s OK. I think it just caught up with her. All the running around; all the stress.’ His eyes drift across the room to where Rani is now deep in a one-way conversation with Teacake. ‘In a way, it’s good your sister’s here. Allie’ll probably be out of action for a few days.’
He goes back to his book, sinking low in the seat so half of his face is hidden behind the cover. When Rani and I leave an hour later, he barely glances up. But he also hasn’t turned the page.
TWENTY
Mrs Scott doesn’t look like either of her children. Her hair is ash blonde streaked with grey, and her cheeks are plump and ruddy. When she smiles, though, she reminds me of Calum: a slight, forced smile that doesn’t quite fit with her cheery colouring. I wonder what Allie’s told her about me. Maybe her mother blames me for all her recent disappearances. It’s starting to seem like her brother does.
‘Alison’s really not well; I’m not sure if she’s up for visitors,’ Mrs Scott says when I ask if I can come in. ‘Wait here – I’ll see if she’s awake.’
She turns and goes upstairs, leaving the front door open. I creep up the steps and take a peek inside. There’s a heap of trainers by the door, and jackets piled over the banister. I can hear the TV playing somewhere in the house – an advert for car insurance – and the washing machine churning in the kitchen.
I feel a sudden pang of homesickness. It’s all so normal. Our house hasn’t looked normal since before the Beings fell. After that, it was all dirty dishes and microwave meals, sliding over Dad’s notes or tripping on stacks of books on our way out of the door.
On the wall by the stairs, family photos hang in wooden frames: holidays and birthdays and trips to the beach. In a few of them, Allie’s wearing her oxygen tube. In another, taken when she was eight or nine, she’s in a hospital bed with a plastic mask over her face. Calum’s sitting cross-legged at the foot of the mattress, and they’re playing Uno. Allie’s arms are thrown into the air; and Calum is slapping his forehead and groaning in defeat.
The choice of pictures strikes me as a bit strange at first. Allie looks so weak in some of them, and her parents appear bag-eyed and pale, their smiles lukewarm and tired. It’s quite a contrast to the posed professional photos that hung on the walls of Leah’s house, or even the Polaroids of me and Rani that Mum, a fan of anything retro, stuck on the fridge back home.
But, in a way, I like it. They haven’t tried to gloss over what’s obviously a huge part of their lives. They’re not pretending to be some perfect catalogue family, or that life’s all sun and roses. Despite the frosty reception, it makes me think a little more highly of Mrs Scott.
‘Ugh, don’t look at those.’ Skinny legs in Aztec-pattern pyjamas appear at the top of the stairs. ‘Don’t want you seeing evidence of my awkward pre-teen years.’
Allie leans over the banister, grinning. My smile wavers: she looks exhausted. She’s wheezing slightly, and she looks thinner and paler than usual.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Sorry for turning up like this—’
‘Don’t apologize! Seriously, I’ve been dying of boredom.’ She tilts her head towards the landing. ‘You want to come up to my room?’
I slip my shoes off and hurry up the stairs so she doesn’t have to walk any further. Mrs Scott lingers on the landing, her hands curled over the wooden banister.
‘Not too long, OK, Allie? You’re supposed to be taking it easy.’
‘What, are you imposing visiting hours now?’ Allie rolls her eyes. ‘Relax, Mother. I think I can handle talking for an hour or so.’
She points me towards a door at the end of the corridor. Her bedroom is a bit like her: little and noisy and really, really busy. There’s a guitar in the corner, a violin and a clarinet gathering dust on a shelf. There are watercolours and pencils scattered over her desk, ice skates lined up with her shoes, a third-place trophy from a tap-dancing competition sitting on the windowsill. There’s even a fishing rod propped up against the wardrobe.
‘Wow,’ I say. ‘It’s like the National Museum of Hobbies in here.’
Allie laughs. ‘I know. I should charge a fiver for entry.’
She climbs on to her bed, sinking back into a pile of pillows. I can’t stop gazing around me, at the tennis rackets and kites and games consoles . . . a lifetime of pastimes. I pick up a wooden artist’s model off her desk and stretch his arms out like wings.
‘How do you find the time to do all of this stuff?’
‘I don’t any more. Most of my hobbies only lasted a few weeks. I was just trying to find my “thing”.’ Allie picks a turquoise ukulele off the shelf above her bed. ‘Like Calum with his photography. Something I had a gift for. Something to make me exceptional.’
She strums a few chords. They don’t sound bad, but she stumbles a bit as her fingers move across the strings. ‘I never found it though. A lot of it was really fun, but I didn’t have a real knack for anything.’
‘You still could,’ I say, sitting on the edge of her bed. Her duvet is dark green, decorated with hundreds of tiny white roses. ‘There must be a few instruments you haven’t tried. Musical saw, maybe?’