Voices in Stone - Emily Diamand Page 0,32
by now so I can’t cancel. But you’re right as well, Cally is special.”
I thought of asking, why her? I mean, he’s had millions of girlfriends. Maybe because I was studying him I noticed the way his frown lines really carved into his forehead. And the tiny wrinkles all over his face, and his leathery skin from being outside so much. That’s when I got it – he was old. He was going to be forty next year, and Mum says men always go a bit strange when they hit forty. “Especially men like your dad.”
A thought popped in my head.
“Are you going to marry Cally?” I asked.
Dad snorted another laugh. “Get married?” Then he stopped laughing. “Well, I don’t know.”
We both thought about that for a minute, listening to the tick-tick of the indicator and the whoosh of traffic. Until I realised.
“You said, ‘they’ve left’.”
Dad gave a bit of a shrug. “Invite Cally, invite Isis. You know the score. I thought it’d be nice for you, to have a friend along.”
“You could have asked me,” I muttered.
Dad narrowed his eyes at me. “Have you two fallen out? You were as thick as thieves in the summer.”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to go into it.
Dad checked the rear-view mirror.
He flicked the indicator the other way, and we wove back into the lanes of traffic.
“We’ll do something else, I promise. Just us,” he said. “But be nice to Cally today, and Isis.” He flicked a grin at me. “Think of it this way: she could end up being your sister.”
We clattered along the road. I thought we’d go the way the coaches had, but Dad took a completely different route out of town.
“We aren’t going to the quarry entrance, are we?” I asked.
Dad shook his head. “We can’t just walk up to their front door and ask to see their dirty secrets, can we? Anyway, there’s a lot of security up there since your school trip. They’re obviously hiding something, and we’ll get to the bottom of whatever it is, don’t worry.”
I sighed. Sometimes with Dad you just have to let him get on with it. As long as we didn’t get too close.
Beyond the camper van the sky was super-blue, the day was bright and every turning leaf on the trees stood out, oranges and golds dotting the green. Dad turned up a steep lane, revving the camper van to keep us going, then pulled into a small car park.
There was a car already there. Cally’s.
They were standing by it. Isis was wearing leggings and this babyish T-shirt with a sparkly pink cat on it; Cally was in one of her floaty-witch dresses. It was warm and the ground was bone dry, but both of them had wellies on. Cally’s were black with skulls.
Cally had started waving as soon as we pulled up. Her face was lit by a smile and her eyes were on Dad. He was the same, and it was like there was a piece of elastic pulling them together.
Me and Isis were the opposite. I had to force myself to go near her, trying to tell from her eyes or by the way she was standing if it was really her or not. She looked a bit shocked to see me, arms crossed tight to her chest.
“Hi,” I said to her.
“Mum made me come on this walk,” she said. “I didn’t know you would be here too.”
And that was it, for the whole time Cally and Dad were holding hands and being in love with each other. Which was quite a while.
Eventually, Dad remembered us.
“Come on, you two. Let’s get investigating.” Like we were in Scooby Doo or something. He headed for a stile, with a footpath leading away on the other side. There was a council sign telling us to keep dogs under control. Beneath it someone had scrawled
NO OPENCAST! UK-EARTHS OUT!
Me and Isis got ourselves over the stile, but Dad made a show of helping Cally because her stupid dress was getting in the way.
“Why thank you, kind sir,” she said.
Isis made this sound, really quietly, like someone being sick.
The path headed off across the fields and we let Dad and Cally take the lead. It was narrow, and Isis was in front of me. I guess I was watching her, the way I’d done every day since school started: keeping my distance, trying to work out if it was really her. There’d been no way of telling at school, and the