All Bones and Lies

by Anne Fine

  She larded her face with the usual outrage. ‘I never said any of that!’

  ‘Oh yes, you did.’ In desperation, he turned the oven up from hot to fierce. ‘Don’t forget that I heard you. I was there.’

  ‘Well, you can get boils on your bottom!’ She took to a virulent clattering of pots and dishes that lasted well past the time his supper was scorched on the top, if not heated through the middle. Forlornly, he picked at the warm clag round the edges. It was horrible. The filling tasted peculiarly metallic, and the topping could have been carpet underlay after a boiler leak. He took advantage of the fact her back was turned to twist Frampton Commercial’s letter round on the table. How had they managed to make that business of annual fire extinguisher inspections sound like a favour? ‘Nice?’ she asked over her shoulder, moving on from clashing pots to trimming a fresh metal scouring pad to ram down the mouse hole at the back of the larder. ‘Very tasty,’ he told her, pushing his plate as far away as possible. But obviously the mantle of conviction was not round his shoulders, for, swivelling round from the sink, she reached to pick up, not just his abandoned plate, but also the carton in which a huge slab of Fifine’s Celeriac and Truffle Whatsit still lay, congealing.

  Scraping the hideously expensive leftovers straight into Flossie’s bowl, her only real revenge on him for his statutory and practised defence of his sister was to announce with satisfaction: ‘I suppose I shall have to let her have it – though it will almost certainly make her sick.’

  4

  COLIN SHOWED UP at Tor house dead on time. It was Dilys who sent a series of busy-busy messages down through Security, and finally stepped out of the lift into Reception still acting as if, without her last twenty minutes of full attention, the entire glassy edifice might well have crumbled.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, dropping a last few envelopes into the tray on the front desk.

  ‘I don’t mind at all if we’re late.’

  Still puffed with office importance, she missed his mild tease. Otherwise, he might have thought that it was in retaliation that she said, glancing at her watch, ‘It’s very nearly half past. We’ll have to go the quick way, down Bridge Row.’

  ‘No!’

  But she’d already started off. He had to follow. Fine till they reached the corner, but the minute the wide expanse of street swung into view, he broke out in the usual sweat and his heart started thudding. He hated Bridge Row. He hadn’t once walked down on either side since – since that morning – without feeling faint. How could it possibly matter if the two of them were five minutes late for some stupid gallery opening? Just because Dilys’s bank had sponsored the exhibition didn’t mean that the doors couldn’t open without her. It was typical of his sister’s cast-iron self-importance that she would ride over his known susceptibility, his absolute distress, to get there on time.

  And odd that she felt nothing. Not a pang. It was, after all, she who had saved the baby. The way she walked down the street now, you would have thought all she had reached up to catch that eerie, steel-blue morning was a ball. You’d never think that while he was standing like a dummy pointing at the rainbow, and wondering slightly at that strange, isolated thwack!, she’d been the one to turn towards the ashen-faced driver stopping on a sixpence, the crumpled pram, and seen that little mound of snow-white tracery hurtling towards them out of the sky, trailing ribbons and blanket. Shouldering him aside so forcibly that he’d stumbled, she’d raised her arms as if in supplication, and, with the most flawless precision and even a little twirl on her toes to lessen the impact, accepted a pink and perfect flying baby into her hands.

  ‘Blimey!’ That’s what she’d said. ‘Blimey!’ Traffic had stopped, shoppers had frozen in their tracks, and everyone had stared at her as if she were Christ in the middle of a miracle. And she had said nothing but, ‘Blimey!’

  And that’s when it came to him first, this sickening vision of the tiny fuzzed head splatted like yolk on the pavement, the blood-streaked shawl, the chubby legs twisted like something dragged from a toy cupboard and chewed by a dog: what he’d have been looking at if this impossible sister of his hadn’t been there. What would quite definitely have happened if that extraordinary, precious moment had been left to him.

  Now, over two years later, the merest thought of it still made him so nauseous he could barely stand. Everyone else had got over it. Even the local paper’s interest in ‘The Flying Baby’ now amounted to mere anniversary reminders. His sister and the young mother were down to occasional ‘been so busy’ flowered notelets. The baby herself was now a toddler. (Last time he’d taken her out, she’d stared at a fir cone lying underneath a tree and asked it gravely, ‘Are you here all by yourself?’) And only Colin still sometimes felt as shaken and unnerved as if his world were once again listing on its axis, as it had then, with the sheer accidentalness of things, the blinding chance.

  That’s why he’d visited the first time, desperate to find another person who might understand this sense of horror of his that would not fade. Naturally he’d turned to Mel. He’d wanted to ask her, ‘Isn’t the thought of what so nearly happened to your baby driving you mad? Are you haunted, like I am?’ But as he’d stood at her door, unable to spit out even the first civilities, she’d slickly transferred the hairdryer in her hand to an armpit, her comb to between her teeth, and slipped off the safety chain. ‘Come in, then. Though you’ll have to wait till I’ve finished my hair.’

  The carrycot was in the corner. Was the flying baby inside? He didn’t dare go over to look. He just stood on the edge of the swirly green carpet till, irritated, the leaning naiad lashed to the worrisomely overloaded double plug waved him down on one end of the leaking sofa and switched off the dryer. ‘All right. I’m ready. You can start.’

  It struck him as an odd beginning to a conversation. But who was he to cavil at another’s inability to string words together in the usual way? Anyhow, it made it easier for him to stumble through his most peculiar question. ‘What I want to know is, are you still bothered by – by the sheer split-secondness of it?’

  She looked at him, not blankly, more as if wondering if she’d heard him right. He tried to struggle through it another way. ‘What I mean is, it’s almost as if she—’ He pointed to the carrycot. ‘As if she—’

  ‘Tammy,’ she said, quite sharply.

  ‘Yes, Tammy. As if she should have—’ He was really floundering now. But he so wanted to get it said, he tried again. ‘As if, really, she shouldn’t be—’ He couldn’t finish that one, either. ‘As if it was all so unlikely – that catching – that it shouldn’t really—’

  ‘Shouldn’t have happened, do you mean? That really my Tammy ought to be dead?’

  He nodded, horrified. It seemed even worse as cold words than as nightmares. But, to his astonishment, she simply drew her cheap cardigan more tightly round her shoulders and spoke slowly and clearly to the dustpan and brush that were propped against the fender.

  ‘I think we were just very, very lucky. I suppose you could say Fate smiled on us. I am so grateful that dear Dilys happened to be there, and that—’ She broke off. ‘Why aren’t you taking notes? Have you got some taperecorder running?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  And then he’d realized. She hadn’t recognized his face. She thought he was just one more reporter. ‘No!’ he said, shocked into the nearest he came to fluency with people he didn’t know. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. I’m real. I’m asking a real question.’

  ‘A real question?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do I think Tammy really should have died?’

  Again, he nodded. Again, she stared at the dustpan. But, this time, a real person answered. ‘I worried about that. I kept thinking weird things like, “I bet they try again,” though I didn’t have the faintest idea who I was thinking about, and anyway I don’t believe in—’ She stopped. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Dilys’s brother,’ he said, desperate for her not to distract herself, not to stop tryi
ng to explain. ‘You’ve met me. I was there.’ Truth compelled him to add, ‘And if it had been me, I would have dropped her.’ He sensed her terror. ‘No!’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. I meant that I’d have—’ Oh, God. How did people who hadn’t gone to the same school as him say, ‘Colled it up totally’? ‘I’d have been caught off guard.’ He risked a glance. ‘It mattered so much, and I would definitely have botched it.’

  She gave him the longest look. Then, ‘Perhaps,’ she said gently, ‘if you were to pick her up and hold her . . .?’

  And he had wondered, as he scooped the snuffling lump out of the carrycot, if this was how she’d worked her own exorcism. Or if she’d simply guessed that it might work on him, holding those solid little wool-wrapped struggles and watching the fierce sneezes that didn’t even make a dent in sleep. He was still gazing, rapt, at the veined lids that barely hid the rolling business of dreams behind, when the door opened.

  ‘Another visitor, eh, Mel?’

  Colin, the target of a thousand playground tauntings, couldn’t be fooled by the easy way the young man chose to lean against the frame of the door he’d rather insolently left open wide. What was the accent? Czech? Romanian? He wasn’t sure which was the stranger’s more intimidating feature: the powerful, almost oiled shoulders, or the dark, brooding eyes. But Colin had played his bit part in this scene often enough to get his lines out pat. ‘I’m from Environmental Health.’ He reached for his card, the gesture, as always, designed more to reassure the suspicious third party than encourage any contact in the future. ‘There’s a bit of a problem elsewhere in the building, so I’m just checking round.’

  The scowl was instant, the tone bellicose. ‘Who is bloody complaining?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say.’

  ‘Well, what they bloody complaining about?’

  ‘It isn’t a problem with this flat,’ Colin said hastily. And then his eye fell on the gas fire. No point in going through the proper channels. The baby could be dead before morning. ‘Except that we will, of course, be fitting you with a brand new gas fire, at no expense at all to yourselves, later this afternoon.’ Now he would have to go all the way back to the office to beg Old Hetherley to take a couple of his men off Tanner Street and send them round here. And then he’d have to fiddle the paperwork – and probably end up paying for the whole damn thing himself.

  Never mind. He might not be able to catch infants in flight, but he could save them from carbon monoxide poisoning. Sagely, he stuffed his card back in his pocket before shifting the baby round on his lap, then handing her back. ‘Thank you,’ said Mel, though whether it was because he’d given her back her baby or promised her a gas fire, he couldn’t tell.

  And it still wasn’t clear as he watched her face later. She sat impassively, cross-legged on the sofa while Hetherley’s crack force tutted and grumbled their way through a simple replacement fitting and reline of flue. ‘Where’s your “unfit” tape, then?’ Tubs Arnold kept demanding. ‘You didn’t ought to have peeled that off. That’s quite illegal.’ At first he thought that Mel was simply being smart, keeping her mouth shut. (As one of the council’s tenants, she could hardly, thought Colin with a stab of embarrassment, have thought this prompt service was standard.) But then he realized she was barely listening. Men could peel back her threadbare carpet, chip at her fire surround to make it bigger, and even spill grease on her tired little fire stool, and she, in some whole other world, paid no attention. She was hardly there.

  At least by the time they’d checked the sealant and packed up their mess, she had come back to earth enough to agree he could come round next day with the last of the paperwork. Tubs Arnold pounced. ‘What paperwork? We had it straight from Mr Hetherley that this was a Special that got lost in pro forma. He said all the rest of the inkslinging’s been signed, sealed and knotted.’

  But evil sprites of billing had not prevailed. Mel had her gas fire. Tammy had her life. And Colin was soon in the habit of popping in every now and again to see the child he now considered that he, too, had saved. He’d have his excuses at the ready. ‘Bit of an on-going noise problem in your block. I thought I’d just—’ But she’d simply step back to let him in, and make him a coffee while he cuddled the baby. There’d been no sightings of the challenging young man, and Mel’s indifference to footsteps outside on the walkway, and even the odd drunken rattling at her door, gave him to understand there was no need to assume he’d be back in a hurry. Over the last few months it had become a friendship, of a sort. Comforting (though it hadn’t helped at all with this business of going down Bridge Row). But he hadn’t told Dilys, for fear of the teasing he knew would follow. ‘Found a tart with a heart, have you, Colin?’ And neither, he couldn’t help noticing, could Mel herself have got round to mentioning his visits to Dilys. Otherwise, why would his sister keep trying to bring him up to date with snippets from the flowered notelets, as she was doing now? ‘Did I tell you little Tammy has started at playgroup?’

  In the wash of relief from getting round the corner into Stemple Street, he put a foot wrong. ‘It isn’t playgroup, exactly. More a supervised Mother and Toddler session.’

  She broke her stride. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Council,’ he said hastily, and, when her look of astonishment didn’t fade, improvised, ‘Cooper was inspecting them last week for “sufficient parking”, and they pointed The Flying Baby out to him.’

  ‘Really?’ She seemed quite proud. ‘That’s splendid. Absolutely splendid. Excellent!’ Her enthusiasm for the notion of little Tammy at Mother and Toddler sessions seemed only to grow, until he realized she’d lost interest in that and was speaking of the display in the Stemple Street Gallery. There, staring at them through the freshly washed window, was a giant gold and blue crotch, fashioned from patchwork. ‘Oh, that is striking. Very, very striking.’

  Turning to seek out acquaintances, she caught him making one of his ‘I-can’t-see-people-wanting-something-like-that-on-the-walls-of-their-living-room’ faces, and told him sharply, ‘I hope you’re not going to start acting like Mother in front of my colleagues,’ before abandoning him to hurry up the steps after a couple who were vanishing through the swing doors. Too dispirited even to consider legging it, he trailed up after her into a world in which he knew no one, and was quite sure he wouldn’t like the artwork. If you could call it that. At times like these, their mother shot unnervingly high in his esteem. For years she’d been saying it: ‘The whole lot’s rubbish – though I don’t suppose they could do better if they tried.’ He’d put his time in, trying to dismiss her views, dogging strangers round galleries as they gave each exhibit a fair shot. ‘That’s interesting.’ ‘It’s very clever, isn’t it?’ ‘I like the colours.’ Sometimes he eavesdropped on the Know-It-Alls. ‘See how the blues speak to the greens!’ ‘I’m getting Modigliani through these brush-strokes.’ ‘Now talk to me about the curse of line!’ No luck there, either. He’d even had a stab at seeking revelation out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. But whenever he’d managed to inch close enough to those small milling herds of arm-punchers and hair-pullers, all that he’d ever heard were squawks of things like, ‘Give me back my Mars bar!’ Or sniggering whispers: ‘Didn’t one of Gary’s old dads have a beard like that snatch hair?’

  No, there would have to be a second great Enlightenment before he’d come to think that this display of giant patchwork crotches was any more than money thrown away by Dilys’s bank. And if it came from Tor Bank’s fund for Goodwill in the Community, they would, in his opinion, have done a whole lot better to have invested in a serious upgrading of the Market Street lavatories. Surely the people of Priding would far rather have a nice clean plaque staring down at them from a tiled wall as they reached for their own private parts than some grubby knitted crotch staring at them as—

  ‘Colin?’

  He swung round. Perdita!

  She wasted no effort on any greeting for him. ‘Is your sister here?’

/>   He nodded.

  ‘With – Marjorie?’

  She didn’t say it nicely, so he kept his expression blank. All he dared offer was, ‘She left me on the steps,’ and burnished as this might have been with the virtue of neutrality, even to him it sounded pathetic. More to ratchet himself up in his own esteem than to try to raise himself in Perdita’s, he forced himself to nod towards the nearest greying crotch. ‘I don’t think much of that.’

  Perdita sighed. ‘Oh, haven’t we seen it all far, far too often? But there’s your sister for you. The world moves on, but she still gets excited by a few dregs of Reservation Art and a free drink for every no-hoper in Priding.’

  Did she mean him? Bitch. And what on earth was bloody Reservation Art? He turned to squint at the bedraggled knotted thing. Could he have misunderstood? Was it a wigwam? Oh, how he loathed these ghastly events of Dilys’s. The trouble with the arts was that they were forever knocking you sideways and taking your breath away. Look at that exhibition Tor had sponsored called Shapes of the Century. He’d stood in front of all those brightly patterned eggs, and – whoomph! – out of the past like a swipe from a sock stuffed with wet sand had come this memory of his Easter gift to his mother – the eggshell he’d wax-stippled and dipped, and dipped and wax-stippled, along with the daintiest of them for an hour each Friday, before the bell rang. Miss Dassanayake had teased his grim determination and his rigidly protruding tongue.

  ‘Stop fretting, Colin. Eggshells are tougher than you think. You’re not going to break it.’

  And, miracle! He hadn’t. No, he had carried it home, wrapped carefully in cotton wool in its box, and on Easter morning he had held it out to her.

  Even to a child primed to think that absence of criticism is a positive response, she’d seemed lukewarm. At first he’d put it down to the possibility she hadn’t realized he’d decorated the egg himself. Then he’d wondered if, as so often, he’d somehow picked up the wrong end of the stick, and (though his classmates had sat with almost equally furrowed brows and fixed concentration) decorating eggs was really easy. It only became clear just how indifferent to his gift his mother had been when Dilys’s failure to produce so much as a home-made card for the occasion had triggered, not wrath, but the infinitely more dangerous dark grievance: ‘Oh, I can see your sister doesn’t care any more than this for my feelings!’