If I Could Fly by Jill Hucklesby Read Free Book Online

starting to look like home. It’s amazing what you can find in skips and bins around the town. Every day, on my hunting expeditions, I’ve come back with books, clothes, small tables, a flower vase, a chair, cushions,a yoga mat, even a mattress. I have to help myself to things when there’s no one around to see me and wonder what I’m doing.
    I’m piling the books up to create makeshift rooms in my half of the ward, and so far I’ve got two pillars of paperbacks for a front door, half a bedroom and the foundations for a lounge. I’m trying to stick to a theme for each area – cookery books for the kitchen, interior design manuals for the sitting room and novels for my sleep space, which is looking quite cosy with a purple throw over the mattress and the cushions on top. Most of the books that people throw out are about gardening, but I don’t really need those. They might be good fillers, like the mortar between the bricks, if I get desperate.
    There’s a scare about growing flowers and vegetables. The government says the virus might be in the soil. Every day there are queues outside the supermarkets that stock produce from other countries. No one wants home-grown food now, just in case.Farmers are going out of business and letting their cows and sheep loose to roam through towns. Dair said he saw a bull trotting through a graveyard yesterday, but it was probably one of his tall stories. He also said cows roam around everywhere in India, because they are sacred. I asked him how he knew that – had he been there and seen the Taj Mahal? Did he think it was one of the Seven Wonders of the World? He told me to keep ‘my piggy nose’ out of his business.
    I’m working things out about Dair, now I’ve been here nearly a week. I know that his bark is worse than his bite, that he has nightmares that make him cry out in the night and that he has a child. I’ve watched him sleeping, seen him hold out his arms and whisper over and over, ‘Ma little flower.’ I also know better than to ask him about this. Questions make him sullen and silent. He disappeared for a whole day after I mentioned the tattoo of a rose on his arm. So I probably shouldn’t say anything about the small white scar on his left temple.
    ‘Do you want to hear something interesting?’ Dair asks, his eyes gleaming.
    ‘Yeah, if you stop flinching every time I cut,’ I reply.
    ‘I know where the new children’s hospital is.’
    I stop what I’m doing and look at him squarely in the mirror. ‘How long have you known?’
    He is counting on his fingers. I open and shut the scissor blades pointedly.
    ‘Ten,’ he says.
    ‘Days, hours, minutes?’ I press him.
    ‘Months. And you shouldn’t go there.’
    ‘You knew I was looking for it. Why didn’t you tell me before?’ My voice has risen at least an octave.
    ‘Lots of reasons. Because you’d have gone charging off there and you were in no fit condition,’ Dair replies, equally loudly.
    ‘It wasn’t up to YOU!’ I shriek, throwing down the scissors and storming off towards my house of books. I run inside and throw myself on my mattress. Dair has followed me and is standing outside my front door.
    ‘OK, let’s just say you could have evaded the security men with machine guns. Or mebbe navigated through the crowd outside, and climbed the wall in all the commotion of flying bottles and gas spray.’ He is pacing up and down now, but not crossing my threshold. ‘The virus is causing a lot of panic, Calypso. There aren’t enough anti-viral drugs for everyone so people are fighting for them at the hospitals and distribution centres. It’s getting ugly. And you wanted me to let you, in your sad state, get mixed up in that?’
    ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. You’re nothing to do with me. Nobody. A crazy, hair-mad hobo who talks to a kid in his sleep. You don’t know anything about me. And I’m not sad,’ I spit.
    Dair is staring at me, wounded. He looks ridiculous, with the right side of