A Monster Calls (12 page)

“An entire dining hall saw you hitting Harry, Conor,” Miss Kwan said. “They saw you knocking him down. They saw you pushing him over a table. They saw you banging his head against the floor.” Miss Kwan leaned forward. “They heard you yelling about being seen. About not being invisible any more.”

Conor flexed his hands slowly. They were sore again. Just like after the destruction of his grandma’s sitting room.

“I can understand how angry you must be,” Miss Kwan said, her voice getting slightly softer. “I mean, we haven’t even been able to reach any kind of parent or guardian for you.”

“My dad flew back to America,” Conor said. “And my grandma’s started keeping her phone on silent so she won’t wake up Mum.” He scratched the back of his hand. “Grandma’ll probably call you back, though.”

The Headmistress sat back heavily in her chair. “School rules dictate immediate exclusion,” she said.

Conor felt his stomach sink, felt his whole body droop under a tonne of extra weight.

But then he realized it was drooping because the weight had been
removed
.

Understanding flooded him,
relief
did, too, so powerful it almost made him cry, right there in the Headmistress’s office.

He was going to be punished. It was finally going to happen. Everything was going to make sense again. She was going to exclude him.

Punishment was coming.

Thank God. Thank
God–

“But how could I do that?” the Headmistress said.

Conor froze.

“How could I do that and still call myself a teacher?” she said. “With all that you’re going through.” She frowned. “With all that we know about Harry.” She shook her head slightly. “There will come a day when we’ll talk about this, Conor O’Malley. And we
will
, believe me.” She started gathering the papers on her desk. “But today is not that day.” She gave him a last look. “You have bigger things to think about.”

It took Conor a moment to realize it was over. That this was it. This was all he was going to get.

“You’re not punishing me?” he said.

The Headmistress gave him a grim smile, almost kind, and then she said almost exactly the same thing his father had said. “What purpose could that possibly serve?”

– • –

Miss Kwan walked him back to his lesson. The two pupils they passed in the corridor backed up against the wall to let him go by.

His classroom fell silent when he opened the door, and no one, including the teacher, said a word as he made his way back to his desk. Lily, at the desk beside him, looked like she was going to say something. But she didn’t.

No one spoke to him for the rest of the day.

There are worse things than being invisible
, the monster had said, and it was right.

Conor was no longer invisible. They all saw him now.

But he was further away than ever.

A few days passed. Then a few more. It was hard to tell exactly how many. They all seemed to be one big, grey day to Conor. He’d get up in the morning and his grandma wouldn’t talk to him, not even about the phone call from the Headmistress. He’d go to school, and no one would talk to him there either. He’d visit his mum in hospital, and she’d be too tired to talk to him. His dad would phone, and he’d have nothing to say.

There was no sign of the monster either, not since the attack on Harry, even though it was supposed to be time for Conor to tell a story in return. Every night, Conor waited. Every night, it didn’t appear. Maybe because it knew Conor didn’t know what story to tell. Or that Conor
did
know, but would refuse.

Eventually, Conor would fall asleep, and the nightmare would come. It came every time he slept now, and worse than before, if that was possible. He’d wake up shouting three or four times a night, once so bad his grandma knocked on his door to see if he was all right.

She didn’t come in, though.

The weekend arrived and was spent at the hospital, though his mum’s new medicine was taking its time to work and meanwhile she had developed an infection in her lungs. Her pain had got worse, too, so she spent most of the time either asleep or not making a lot of sense because of the painkillers. Conor’s grandma would send him out when she was like that, and he got so familiar with wandering around the hospital he once correctly took a lost old woman to the X-ray department.

Lily and her mum came to visit on the weekend, too, but he made sure he spent the whole time they were there reading magazines in the gift shop.

Then, somehow, he was back at school again. As incredible as it seemed, time kept moving forward for the rest of the world.

The rest of the world that wasn’t waiting.

Mrs Marl was handing back the Life Writing homework. To everyone who
had
a life, anyway. Conor just sat at his desk, chin in hand, looking at the clock. It was still two and a half hours until 12.07. Not that it would probably matter. He was beginning to think the monster was gone for good.

Someone else who wouldn’t talk to him, then.

“Hey,” he heard, whispered in his general vicinity. Making fun of him no doubt. Look at Conor O’Malley, just sitting there like a lump. What a freak.

“
Hey
,” he heard again, this time more insistent.

He realized it was someone whispering to
him
.

Lily was sitting across the aisle, where she’d sat throughout all the years they’d been in school together. She kept looking up at Mrs Marl, but her fingers were slyly holding out a note.

A note for Conor.

“
Take it
,” she whispered out of the side of her mouth, gesturing with the note.

Conor looked to see if Mrs Marl was watching, but she was too busy expressing mild disappointment that Sully’s life had an awfully close resemblance to a particular insect-based superhero. Conor reached across the aisle and took the note.

It was folded what seemed like a couple of hundred times and getting it open was like untying a knot. He gave Lily an irritated look, but she was still pretending to watch the teacher.

Conor flattened the note on his desk and read it. For all the folding, it was only four lines long.

Four lines, and the world went quiet.

– • –

I’m sorry for telling everyone about your mum,
read the first line.

I miss being your friend
, read the second.

Are you okay?
read the third.

I
see you,
read the fourth, with the
I
underlined about a hundred times.

He read it again. And again.

He looked back over to Lily, who was busy receiving all kinds of praise from Mrs Marl, but he could see that she was blushing furiously and not just because of what Mrs Marl was saying.

Mrs Marl moved on, passing lightly over Conor.

When she was gone, Lily looked at him. Looked him right in the eye.

And she was right. She saw him, really
saw
him.

He had to swallow before he could speak.

“Lily–” he started to say, but the door to the classroom opened and the school secretary entered, beckoning to Mrs Marl and whispering something to her.

They both turned to look at Conor.

Conor’s grandma stopped outside his mum’s hospital room.

“Aren’t you coming in?” Conor asked.

She shook her head. “I’ll be down in the waiting room,” she said, and left him to enter on his own.

He had a sour feeling in his stomach at what he might find inside. They’d never pulled him out of school before, not in the middle of the day, not even when she was hospitalized last Easter.

Questions raced through his mind.

Questions he ignored.

He pushed open the door, fearing the worst.

But his mum was awake, her bed in its sitting-up position. What’s more, she was smiling, and for a second, Conor’s heart leapt. The treatment must have worked. The yew tree had healed her. The monster had done it–

Then he saw that the smile didn’t match her eyes. She was happy to see him, but she was frightened, too. And sad. And more tired than he’d ever seen her, which was saying something.

And they wouldn’t have pulled him out of school to tell him she was feeling a little bit better.

“Hi, son,” she said, and when she said it, her eyes filled and he could hear the thickness in her voice.

Conor could feel himself slowly starting to get very, very angry.

“Come here,” she said, tapping the bedcovers next to her.

He didn’t sit there, though, slumping instead in a chair next to her bed.

“How’re you doing, sweetheart?” she asked, her voice faint, her breath even shakier than it had been yesterday. There seemed to be more tubes invading her today, giving her medicines and air and who knew what else? She wasn’t wearing a scarf and her head was bare and white in the room’s fluorescent lights. Conor felt an almost irresistible urge to find something to cover it, protect it, before anyone saw how vulnerable it was.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “Why did Grandma get me out of school?”

“I wanted to
see
you,” she said, “and the way the morphine’s been sending me off to Cloud Cuckoo Land, I didn’t know if I’d have the chance later.”

Conor crossed his arms tightly in front of himself. “You’re awake in the evenings sometimes,” he said. “You could have seen me tonight.”

He knew he was asking a question. He knew she knew it, too.

And so he knew when she spoke again that she was giving him an answer.

“I wanted to see you
now
, Conor,” she said, and again her voice was thick and her eyes were wet.

“This is the talk, isn’t it?” Conor said, far more sharply than he’d wanted to. “This is…”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

“Look at me, son,” she said, because he’d been staring at the floor. Slowly, he looked back up to her. She was giving the super-tired smile, and he saw how deeply pressed into her pillows she was, like she didn’t even have the strength to raise her head. He realized that they’d raised the bed because she wouldn’t have been able to look at him otherwise.

She took a deep breath to speak, which set her off into a terrible, heavy-sounding coughing fit. It took a few long moments before she could finally talk again.

“I spoke to the doctor this morning,” she said, her voice weak. “The new treatment isn’t working, Conor.”

“The one from the yew tree?”

“Yes.”

Conor frowned. “How can it not be working?”

His mum swallowed. “Things have moved just too fast. It was a faint hope. And now there’s this infection–”

“But how can it not be
working
?” Conor said again, almost like he was asking someone else.

“I know,” his mum said, her sad smile still there. “Looking at that yew tree every day, it felt like I had a friend out there who’d help me if things got to their worst.”

Conor still had his arms crossed. “But it
didn’t
help.”

His mum shook her head slightly. She had a worried look on her face, and Conor understood that she was worried about
him
.

“So what happens now?” Conor asked. “What’s the next treatment?”

She didn’t answer. Which was an answer in itself.

Conor said it out loud anyway. “There aren’t any more treatments.”

“I’m sorry, son,” his mum said, tears sneaking out of her eyes now, even though she kept up her smile. “I’ve never been more sorry about anything in my life.”

Conor looked at the floor again. He felt like he couldn’t breathe, like the nightmare was squeezing the breath right out of him. “You said it would work,” he said, his voice catching.

“I know.”

“You
said
. You
believed
it would work.”

“I know.”

“You lied,” Conor said, looking back up at her. “You’ve been lying this whole time.”

“I
did
believe it would work,” she said. “It’s probably what’s kept me here so long, Conor. Believing it so
you
would.”

His mother reached for his hand, but he moved it away.

“You lied,” he said again.

“I think, deep in your heart, you’ve always known,” his mother said. “Haven’t you?”

Conor didn’t answer her.

“It’s okay that you’re angry, sweetheart,” she said. “It really, really is.” She gave a little laugh. “I’m pretty angry, too, to tell you the truth. But I want you to know this, Conor, it’s important that you listen to me. Are you listening?”

She reached out for him again. After a second, he let her take his hand, but her grip was so weak,
so
weak.

“You be as angry as you need to be,” she said. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Not your grandma, not your dad, no one. And if you need to break things, then by God, you break them good and hard.”

He couldn’t look at her. He just
couldn’t
.

“And if, one day,” she said, really crying now, “you look back and you feel bad for being so angry, if you feel bad for being
so
angry at me that you couldn’t even speak to me, then you have to know, Conor, you have to know that it was
okay
. It was okay. That I
knew
. I
know
, okay? I know everything you need to tell me without you having to say it out loud. All right?”

He still couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t raise his head, it felt so heavy. He was bent in two, like he was being torn right through his middle.

But he nodded.

– • –

He heard her sigh a long, wheezy breath, and he could hear the relief in it, as well as the exhaustion. “I’m sorry, son,” she said. “I’m going to need more painkillers.”

He let go of her hand. She reached over and pressed the button on the machine the hospital had given her, which administered painkillers so strong she was never able to stay awake after she took them. When she finished, she took his hand again.

“I wish I had a hundred years,” she said, very quietly. “A hundred years I could give to you.”

He didn’t answer her. A few seconds later, the medicine had sent her to sleep, but it didn’t matter.