The Kneebone Boy

by Ellen Potter

  “Max! Max?” Casper called up the stairs. When there was no answer, Casper said, “He must be on the roof. He bolted when I told him. Lucia, go fetch him please. We’ve only twenty minutes to get out of your school clothes and get to the station.”

  Lucia ran out the door and round back, where the monstrous oak tree snuggled against the house. Grabbing the lowest branch, she pulled herself up to the first foothold, then carefully began to climb. She was quite a brave person, except when it came to heights. Consequently, the climb was slow and awkward. The worst part was when she reached the roofline. Even though the roof’s pitch was not steep, she hated making the small leap off the tree and onto the roof, and feeling that terrifying instant of being unsupported in the air. She might call to Max from the tree, but Max never answered you when you did that. He always made you walk on the main roof and then over on the adjoining roof where the chimney sat.

  Lucia made her leap, stifling a gasp of terror as she did so. She landed on the roof, wobbly and breathless. After pausing to collect herself and find her balance, she cautiously made her way towards her brother.

  Max was sitting in a lawn chair that was perched precariously across the opening of the chimney. His nose was in the pocket atlas book and he didn’t look up, not even when Lucia was right beside him.

  “It’s no good brooding about it, Max,” Lucia said, trying to keep the shakiness out of her voice. “I don’t like it either, but we haven’t got a choice in the matter. And anyway, it’s Angela, not Mrs. Carnival, and it’s London.” She paused, expecting to have to strengthen the argument, or at the worst physically drag Max off the roof, which was far too dangerous for her taste.

  “I didn’t come up here because of that,” Max said, his nose still tucked into the book. Lucia watched him for a minute.

  “Was it because of Brenda then?” Lucia asked. “Did the kids at school tell her about Mum?”

  Max sighed and looked up. He gazed off into the distance, over the stretch of houses, past the Such Fun factory’s chimneys, and to the hills beyond. “I think they must have. She was giving me that look at lunchtime. You know that look?”

  Lucia did.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucia said.

  Max shrugged. “Bound to happen, I guess.”

  That really bothered Lucia. She had always made fun of Max’s unfailing optimism about people, but she had also come to count on it.

  “Anyway, I’m not up here because of her,” he said, standing and dropping the atlas down the chimney. “We’d better go down. We have to catch the four-ten train.”

  “Then why on earth did you run off like that?” Lucia sniped, angry at having had to make the frightening climb to the roof for nothing.

  “Oh, I had some last-minute business to take care of,” Max said mysteriously.

  No one knew what Max did up on the chimney, and no one cared enough to try to find out. Which just goes to show, you should pay attention to the youngest.

  A train ride is nearly always an enjoyable thing. There are views to gaze out upon and sweets to unwrap and people to make fun of. The three Hardscrabble children were very amused by a man sitting across from them who had fallen asleep and was having a conversation with himself.

  “Chum, chum, chum, I fancy apples. Better than a kick in the pants, that’s for sure, har-har-har!” He was going on like this for some time, and the Hardscrabbles had to squash their hands against their mouths to keep their laughter from waking him up and spoiling their fun. A loud sneeze from the woman behind him startled him awake anyway, and then they had to find something else with which to amuse themselves.

  For a while they tried to take an interest in a teenage girl whose eyebrows were pierced and whose hair was dyed green and shaved on the sides.

  “You ought to take her photo,” Lucia whispered to Otto. (She had urged him to take a camera along to London in case he found curiosities he wanted to capture for his collection.) But by the time he’d gotten the old Nikon camera out of its case, they found that the girl was staring back and seemed equally amused by them, which greatly annoyed the two eldest Hardscrabbles. Lucia puffed out her nostrils and said, “What’s wrong with us?” while Otto adjusted his scarf and looked away. Max, however, smiled at her. She smiled back and tossed him half of her chocolate bar.

  “Are you mad?” Lucia whispered to him as he started to bring it to his mouth. “Don’t eat that! It’s probably poisoned. Or laced with drugs. Remember Prince Hunai.”

  Prince Hunai was one of their father’s clients who had smoked something strange while making a diplomatic visit with the leader of a nomadic tribe, and had refused to wash his hair ever since. Casper made it look nice in the sketches but he said it smelled like a fish-and-chip shop in mid-August.

  Max turned in his seat to face his sister squarely, then stuffed the chocolate in his mouth and smiled at her as he chewed.

  “Well, if your lips turn blue and you have a seizure, don’t come running to me,” Lucia said. She watched Max nervously for a few moments, but his lips only turned chocolaty in the corners. In the end Lucia wished that she’d asked for a bite.

  For the rest of the train ride, the children had to make do with their own brains for amusement. Otto slumped back in his seat and pulled his trousers leg up. Extracting a pen from his back pocket, he began to draw a dragon on his knee. Max stared out the window and imagined what it would be like to live in the towns that they passed, where no one had ever heard of the Hardscrabble family.

  Lucia opened the book she had brought along. It was a mystery, a type of book that she usually didn’t like on account of the fact that bodies were always being found. That reminded her of two things: one, that her mother’s body had not been found; and two, that her mother’s body might someday be found and she didn’t like the thought of that either. Still she had taken this book out of the library because she liked the author’s photo on the back, and sometimes that’s as good a reason as any.

  On page five a body was discovered in a henhouse and it was being pecked apart by the hens. Lucia promptly closed the book but marked her place with a train timetable that had been left on her seat, just in case she found herself in desperate need of reading material on the trip.

  She looked out the window and tried to think of poetic things to say about green fields and grazing cows, but the effort made her feel feverish. So instead she thought of the Sultan of Juwi, as usual. I won’t tell you all of her thoughts about the sultan because they are very personal and none of your business, not to be rude. But I can tell you about the bit in which Lucia imagines seeing the sultan standing by the edge of the Thames. His face is swollen from many beatings by Dr. Azziz and his goon squad. Though he has managed to escape from them, he is suffering from acute amnesia. Probably from all the beatings to the head. In despair, he has decided to pitch himself into the inky depths of the river. Just as he lunges forward toward his death, Lucia grabs his arm and yanks him back to safety.

  Right at this moment, a few seats in front of her on the train, Lucia has spied a head that interests her. She can only see the tiniest bit of it above the seat, just a bit of the profile with a delicate nose and a sloping cheekbone, but it’s enough for her to imagine that it might be him. Let’s leave her to her thoughts now.

  The Hardscrabbles arrived at St. Pancras station five minutes early (it turned out the sloping-cheekboned head belonged to a middle-aged woman!), so it was no cause for panic when they found that Angela was not at the station. She was a very rush-about sort of person, always arriving late and breathless. They stood around for a good ten minutes, watching all the people bustling across the platform. So many gloriously unfamiliar faces! A few people glanced at the Hardscrabbles longer than usual, noting that they were a good-looking trio, but otherwise the children were deliciously anonymous. It was like a vacation from being Hardscrabbles.

  After twenty minutes, they all sat down on their bags, and after twenty-five minutes their chins were anxiously digging into their pa
lms.

  “Do you think she’s forgotten?” Max asked.

  “How could she forget? Dad just talked to her today,” Lucia said.

  “Maybe Dr. Jekyll got sick,” Otto said. “And she had to rush him to the veterinarian’s.”

  “Maybe they’ll give him a lobotomy while he’s there,” Max said. He hated that dog and the feeling was mutual.

  “Anyway, I think I remember the way to her flat. Sort of,” Lucia said. “We might as well just meet her there. What do you say?”

  Max thought yes, but Otto said no and persuaded them to wait another ten minutes. But when Angela still didn’t appear he had to give in to their plan.

  They examined a tube map hanging on the wall and, mostly through Max’s excellent sense of direction, they managed to make their way to Camden Town. There was the moment of triumph when they found themselves on Fishtail Lane, Angela’s cramped side street. The sooty brick houses were pressed together, shoulder to shoulder, and Angela’s building was the narrowest of them all. As they entered the building, the Hardscrabbles felt the thrill of a quest successfully completed and the budding sense that their street savvy was equal to any native Londoner’s. They also felt more kindly towards Angela. Back when they had been fumbling through the tube station, their bags pummeling their thighs, they were saying things like “Angela is such a featherbrain!” “She’d forget her own ears if they weren’t fastened to her head.” But now they were saying, “Won’t Angela be amazed that we found her place so easily!” “I can’t wait to see her again, silly old thing!”

  They walked up the three flights of stairs and Lucia rapped on Angela’s door. Instantly, they heard Dr. Jekyll explode with frenzied barking.

  “It’s okay, Dr. Jekyll! It’s only us!” Max yelled back at him. That only made the barking more furious.

  “He hates you the most, you know,” Otto said.

  They waited for the sound of Angela’s footsteps, but the only thing they heard was Dr. Jekyll’s toenails clicking against the floor as he paced in front of the door. They knocked again, sending the dog into a new fit of rage. But still no Angela.

  “Well, this rots,” said Lucia.

  “Maybe she’s waiting for us at St. Pancras,” Max suggested. “Maybe we’ve crisscrossed.”

  “We’re not going back there,” Otto declared. He’d been a good sport about traipsing through London thus far, but he’d had enough of adventure for the day. “We’ll just stay put and wait.”

  He dropped his bag down and sat on it. Lucia and Max, seeing that he would not be budged, relented and did the same. There they waited, in the dingy little hallway, listening to Dr. Jekyll’s pacing and nodding a sheepish hello to a red-faced man who passed them on his way upstairs. They nodded hello again when he went back down the stairs a while later, then again when he came back up with a bag of groceries.

  “Who are you wanting, then?” he demanded in the tone of someone who had had enough monkey business.

  “Well, seeing as how we’ve been sitting in front of Angela Winger’s door for the past half hour, I’d say it’s a safe bet we’re wanting Angela Winger,” Lucia said without even looking at him. She was sometimes rude to people who asked dumb things.

  “Angela’s on holiday,” the man spat back. “Piss off!” He jabbed his thumb at the stairs.

  “What do you mean she’s on holiday?” Lucia said, looking up at the man.

  “Oh, the little snit is interested now, is she?” The man smirked and cocked his head in a taunting way.

  “Excuse me, sir”—Max tried to be as polite as possible to make up for Lucia—“but where is Angela?”

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” he said, “but she happens to be in Berlin. As in Germany.”

  “But our dad talked to her today and she said she’d meet us at the station,” Lucia said.

  “And did she meet you at the station?” the man asked in a mocking tone.

  “No,” Lucia admitted. “But . . . but she can’t be in Berlin!”

  “Can be and is, Sunshine. Can be and is.” The man was enjoying himself so much now that he put his bag of groceries on the floor and seemed prepared to stay and watch the panic unfold.

  It did.

  “What do we do now?”

  “How could Dad have sent us if Angela’s away?”

  But Max had the wherewithal to ask the man, “What about Dr. Jekyll then? She wouldn’t just leave him behind.”

  “Ever heard of a dog walker? She was here this afternoon. Dr. Jekyll would have took her fingers off for her if I hadn’t gone in first and gave him what for. And did that sullen little minger even say thanks for my trouble?” He frowned remembering this snub afresh. “Now, clear out! The building don’t allow loitering in the hallways.”

  There was nothing to do but to gather up their bags once more and trudge back down the stairs and out onto the street.

  “What are we supposed to do now?” Otto said. They were silent for a bit, considering.

  “I might try climbing up,” Max suggested, eyeing the gate in front of the building and the tiers of balconies above. “I could try Angela’s window and see if I can get in that way.”

  “Yes, and then we’ll all spend a lovely night in jail. Brilliant, Max,” Lucia said.

  In truth, she was slightly jealous of the idea, because though it involved risk and danger, of which she very much approved, it also involved heights, which as you already know she is not fond of.

  “What we need to do is to ring Dad,” Otto said. This was so plainly obvious that no one could argue against it. They found a phone booth on the next block and Max dialed up their home number. He held the phone to his ear for a distressingly long time before he hung up.

  “He must have already left,” he said.

  They had no other phone number for him. When he went away on his trips, he always called them and gave Mrs. Carnival a number in case of emergencies.

  “Maybe that man in Angela’s building was wrong,” Max said. “Or maybe he was just having us on, and Angela will be back later.”

  There was hope in that thought and they didn’t have much else at the moment. Otto was for planting themselves outside Angela’s building and waiting for her to return. But Lucia argued that since they were in the middle of London and free to do what they liked, they might as well try to have an adventure. Max agreed and so that was that.

  It wasn’t long, though, before Otto began to think it was a good idea as well. The whole of Camden was crawling with oddities, and there was nothing that Otto liked better than an oddity. People with pink hair, blue hair, black lipstick (on men!), ears that were stretched wide with huge disk earrings, and every available patch of skin pierced or tattooed. The children stared at them in much the same way that people in Little Tunks stared at the Hardscrabbles—with a mixture of curiosity and uneasiness.

  “Do you think they’re dangerous?” Otto asked, which ironically is something people often asked about him.

  “Very, I’m sure,” Lucia said. It was a waste of everyone’s time to have an adventure without the element of danger.

  “Rubbish,” Max said. “Anyone can put on clumpy black boots and pierce themselves silly. A truly dangerous person would be someone you’d never even look at twice.”

  They wandered through the outdoor markets, a jungle of circus-coloured clothing and shoes and wild wigs and everything else you could imagine. They saw boots that had plastic heels with tiny plastic goldfish swimming in them, necklaces made out of old typewriter keys, and shirts made out of mice bones. The children were so fascinated that they forgot to mind about lugging their bags around. They even nearly forgot their messy predicament. They ambled through the streets, gazing into shop windows, their healthy pink Little Tunks lungs eagerly pulling in the stink of coach fumes and Indian curry and occasionally some really impressive body odor.

  Then suddenly, without realizing it, they found a secret opening into the Perilous-World-at-Large. There are lots of these
openings scattered about at certain longitudes and latitudes. There is one, for instance, right outside El Djem, Tunisia, and another to the left of a raspberry bush on Mr. DiMorelli’s dairy farm in Stone Mills, New York. Most people pass through one or two at some point in their lives without realizing it. But if they were paying attention they’d notice that far more perilous things begin to happen to them almost immediately. The Hardscrabbles certainly had no idea that anything unusual had occurred when they entered the portal on Camden High Street although Lucia swears that she felt dizzy, but Max says that was due to the coach fumes.

  Otto stopped short quite suddenly.

  He was staring at a man perched on a parked car. The man’s head was shaved and he wore no shirt. Every inch of exposed skin was tattooed, even his scalp and face, which had fierce-looking swirls covering it. His lips were blue. It took a moment to see that the blue was not lipstick, but a tattoo that stained his lips and covered his chin. It looked as though he’d eaten blue ice cream and it had dribbled down his chin in curling rivulets.

  “And I suppose he’s not dangerous either?” Lucia said to Max.

  Max didn’t answer. He was looking at the man thoughtfully. Actually he was looking at the man with a stupid expression on his face, but he always looked stupid when he was doing his best thinking. The man was obviously used to being looked at and he ignored them.

  “There’s one for your collection.” Lucia nudged her elbow into Otto’s side.

  That’s all she said. It was completely innocent, but of course they all blamed her later for what happened.

  Otto whipped his camera off his shoulder and began to fumble with the case, and then with the lens cap.

  “I wonder,” Max said, the stupid expression now gone from his face, “if that man knows he’s wearing a woman’s tattoo on his face?”

  “What do you mean?” Lucia asked.

  “Well, the Maori people in New Zealand tattoo their faces just like that, only the men have one sort of tattoo and the women have another. That bloke has a lady’s tattoo on his face.”