A Quiet Kind of Thunder(56)

A wolfish grin streaks across her face. ‘Not just at midnight, my friend.’

‘How late did you stay up?’

‘Until about four.’

‘Really?’ I make a face. ‘What’s there to do once the countdown’s over?’

She laughs. ‘Oh my dear, sweet Steffi.’

I reach over, pick up a handful of woodchips and toss them at her. They scatter over her jacket, fall into her curls. ‘It’s a totally fair question.’

Tem twists her fingers into her curls and pulls them in front of her eyes, digging through for woodchip dust. ‘We carried on drinking. Bit of dancing, bit of kissing. You know. Normal stuff.’ The slight edge in her voice surprises me. Is that a dig? Tem never makes digs at me.

‘Normal is in the eye of the beholder,’ I say.

She doesn’t laugh. ‘Is it?’

I try not to sound offended. ‘Since when do you care about doing what’s normal?’

‘For God’s sake,’ she mutters under her breath, but of course I hear her anyway, as I was probably meant to. ‘Stop being so judgemental, Steffi. It’s weirder to be the seventeen-year-old who doesn’t go out drinking on New Year’s.’

‘Ouch,’ I say quietly.

I wait for her to apologize, but she looks away from me instead, pushing her feet against the ground so she swings back and then forward again. In just a few seconds she is zipping past me, a blur of black curls and denim.

I’m more confused than hurt. I don’t understand why she’s being so defensive with me, when she knows I’m the last person in the world she’d ever need to be defensive with.

‘Steffi!’

I look up. Bell is running over the grass towards me, breathless and excited, holding something between two cupped hands. Davey is trotting along behind her, hopping after every second step.

‘Watch out, Bell –’ I start to say, but it’s too late, and of course the inevitable happens. Bell bounds across the woodchips, trips over her dangling shoelace and falls forward, directly into the path of Tem’s oncoming feet.

‘Bell!’ Tem yells, trying to twist herself out of the way. She goes flying off the swing, avoiding my little sister’s head by mere millimetres. I can tell that she intends to land on her feet, but the momentum and the twist of the swing ruins this and she lands heavily on the grass instead, cursing on impact.

Bell, splayed at my feet, immediately begins to wail. I’m already off my own swing, which was practically stationary anyway – an anxious person is a safe person – and kneeling in front of her, carefully easing her into a sitting position. Her face is a blotchy mess of blood, tears and woodchips. Davey takes one look at her and bursts into tears too.

‘Shit,’ I say, breaking my formerly unbroken promise to my mother to never swear in front of Bell. ‘Oh, Belly-Bell. Where does it hurt?’

She doesn’t actually need to answer me, because it’s clear what the problem is when she opens her mouth to let out another ear-splitting bawl. There’s a gaping hole where her two front teeth should be, and her top lip looks like it’s almost ripped in half.

‘Jesus, Bell,’ Tem is starting to say as she limps over to us, but she stops herself when she gets a good look at her. ‘Oh shit.’

My hands are shaking. ‘Bell, stop crying, darling.’ I never say ‘darling’, and the word sounds strange coming out of my mouth. I try to wipe her face, but she just howls and jerks away from me. I have no idea what I’m doing. Shit. ‘Bell,’ I say again, my volume escalating, ‘why didn’t you stop your fall?’

My beautiful idiot little sister still has her scraped and bleeding hands cupped together, still clutching whatever it was she was coming over to show me. I try to open them, but she’s too frazzled to notice, clenching her fingers even tighter together instead.

‘Bell!’ I snap. I know this won’t help anything, but I can’t help it. My nerves have clocked on to the situation and are sending ‘PANIC!’ signals across my whole body. I wrench open her fingers and a bright yellow bottle cap falls out. ‘Oh, Bell, for God’s sake!’

There’s a hand on my back, and then Tem is squatting beside us both. She keeps one hand on me as she touches her other to Bell’s face, gentle and calm. ‘You’re all right, Bell,’ she says softly. ‘You’ve just had a bit of a bang, that’s all. Steffi’s going to give your mum a ring so she can come and give you a cuddle. OK?’

Bell lets out a wrenching, hiccupy sob, then nods.

‘Don’t we need to go to hospital?’ I ask. ‘Look at her lip. Won’t it need stitches?’

This is the wrong thing to say, because Bell’s face scrunches in fresh horror. ‘Stitches?!’ she wails, her voice distorted by the shock and the blood. And the mutilated lip.

Tem gives me a look and I baulk. ‘Steffi’s going to give your mum a ring,’ she repeats to Bell, her voice even more deliberate this time.

‘Yes,’ I say, scrabbling for my phone. ‘Yes, she is. See, Belly? I’m calling Mum.’

Bell looks at me, tears dribbling down her face. She looks so sad and pathetic I almost start crying myself, but Tem gives me a surreptitious shove and I leap to my feet, tapping my phone to unlock the screen and make the call every older sibling dreads.