Red Sky in the Morning. Elizabeth Laird

      © Elizabeth Laird 1988

      First published in 1988 by William Heinemann Limited

      Published in 2006 by Macmillan Children’s Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

      This edition published in 2012 by Haymarket Books

      PO Box 180165

      Chicago, IL 60618

      www.haymarketbooks.org

      773-583-7884

      ISBN: 978-1-60846-159-2

      Trade distribution:

      In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

      In Australia, Palgrave Macmillan, www.palgravemacmillan.com.au

      All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com

      Published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and the Wallace Global Fund.

      Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data is available.

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      About the Author

      Elizabeth Laird was born in New Zealand and moved to England with her family when she was three. She went to school in Croydon, studied languages at Bristol and then Edinburgh University, and taught English in Malaysia, Ethiopia, and India. She has written many books for children, including Jake’s Tower, the Wild Things series, Kiss the Dust (winner of the Children’s Book Award), and Secret Friends (nominated for the Carnegie Medal). Red Sky in the Morning was highly commended for the Carnegie Medal and shortlisted for the 1989 Children’s Book Award. She lives with her husband in Surrey.

      Praise for Red Sky in the Morning

      “Red Sky in the Morning is, quite simply, a wonderfully moving story about the power of love which unfolds through Anna’s wryly unsentimental first-person narrative. Almost certainly, family responsibilities in the context of [disability] have never been treated more perceptively in a children’s story.” —TES

      For Graham, Margaret, and Janet

      Preface

      I was four years old when my little brother Alistair was born. I can remember the first time I saw him, lying in a crib by my mother’s bed, thin wisps of hair on his large head. I lifted the corner of his blanket and saw his little feet. I was amazed that feet could be so tiny.

      I was too young to understand Alistair’s many disabilities, or what it might feel like to be him, but I knew how to make him laugh, by pushing my face up against the bars of his crib and sticking my tongue out, or dancing around and waving the skirt of my dress. I knew how to make him cry too, and I regret to say that I did that sometimes, when I felt jealous of all the attention he was getting.

      People often ask me if I put real people into my stories. The answer is no. I might borrow a bit here and there—the way someone speaks, or a particular little habit, or a real incident that I remember. But my characters are themselves, made up, with lives of their own. The family in Red Sky in the Morning is nothing like my family, and I don’t think that either Anna or Katy is much like me. They’re just themselves.

      But there’s one exception to my usual rule. The character of Ben in this book is my brother Alistair.

      One

      As long as I live, I shall never forget the night my brother was born. For one thing, I didn’t get a wink of sleep. I’d only been in bed a few minutes when I heard Dad talking on the telephone. My bedroom’s pretty small, and if I lean out of bed far enough I can open the door without actually getting out of bed, so I did, and I heard Dad say,

      “That’s right, the second house on the left past the shops. And please hurry.”

      His voice sounded so urgent I guessed at once he must be calling the ambulance, and I knew my time had come. Well, it was Mom’s time really, but mine too, in a way, because I was going to be in charge while she was away. I’d practiced everything in my mind, so I just got calmly out of bed, and put on my dressing gown, and groped around for my glasses. Then I went calmly out of the room and walked down the hall to Mom and Dad’s bedroom. I didn’t even run.

      “Now just relax, Mom,” I said. “Everything’s under control.” I must have said it too calmly because no one took any notice. Mom’s face was screwed up, and Dad was looking at her, standing quite still, with one leg in his trousers and the other out. He looked perfectly ridiculous. Then Mom’s face went ordinary again, and she turned her head and saw me, and she looked quite normal. In fact, she gave me a smile. Then Dad started pulling on his trousers again. It was like starting up a video again after a freeze-frame.

      After that, everything I’d planned to say was swept out of my head, because things happened too fast. Mom’s face screwed up again, and she started taking loud, rasping breaths. I’ve never seen such an awful look in anyone’s eyes, not even in a war film.

      Dad grabbed his jacket and pushed past me out of the room. Then I suppose he must have realized it was me, because he came back and ruffled my hair the way he does when he wants to be nice to me. I hate it, but I don’t like hurting his feelings, so I just suffer in silence.

      “Be a nice girl,” he said. “Go and get me a cup of tea. The ambulance won’t be here for another five minutes. I’ve got to go and phone your grandma.”

      I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never heard anything so callous in all my life. There was his wife, probably dying, in the most awful agony, trying to give birth to his own child, and all he could think of were his own selfish pleasures. I realized how woman has suffered from man’s selfishness since time began.

      “Sorry, Dad,” I said with dignity. “I expect Mom needs me. You’ll find the tea in the usual place.”

      But then Mom gave an awful scream, and Dad rushed back into the bedroom and shut the door in my face. I didn’t dare go in. I didn’t even want to anymore. I felt too small and helpless. Frightful thoughts rushed through my mind, like what would happen if Mom died, and I had to sacrifice my youth to looking after Dad and bringing up Katy, who was seven, and absolutely horrible.

      The minute I thought of Katy, I remembered my responsibilities. It was my job to run the house and family while Mom was otherwise engaged, and I decided I had better start by running Katy. I went back down the corridor to her room.

      Katy is an unusually irritating child. Even Mom admits that she’s a nuisance. She says it’s because Katy’s going through a stage, but either Mom’s wrong, or else it’s a very long stage, because Katy seems to have been in it since she was born. One of the worst things about her is that you can never get her to go to sleep. We all have to creep around the house once she’s gone to bed, and I can’t even play my own music in my own room, which I feel, quite frankly, is a violation of my human rights. And she wakes up in the middle of the night if a moth so much as brushes its wings against her bedroom window. I never would have thought she’d sleep through the noise Mom was making, but that’s the maddening thing about Katy. She’s so unpredictable. There wasn’t a sound coming from her room. I knelt down, and looked through the keyhole. She always has a nightlight on because she thinks she’s so delicious that witches are just dying to come and eat her in the night, so I could see clearly enough that she was fast asleep.

      “Well,” I thought, “that gives me one less thing to worry about,” but at the same time I almost wished Katy had been awake, because I didn’t have anything to do. I certainly wasn’t intending to betray Mom by making Dad a cup of tea.

      Then I realized that I could at least phone Grandma, which Dad seemed to have forgotten about, so I went downstairs to the phone in the hall, and was just beginning to dial when the front doorbell went. The ambulance had come.

      There were only two ambulancemen but they filled up our small downstairs hall completely.