Fifteen Bones

  Kane laughed and dodged past him, out of the room. He was so good-looking he could do stuff like that.

  The deputy principal turned to me. “Now, please, there’s a good lad.”

  “Oh, fuck off, will you?” I said.

  I stormed past him and into the corridor.

  “Jones,” he called, thundering after me.

  “Hang on.” I turned and pointed at him calmly. “I thought I told you to fuck off?”

  “Get up those stairs right now.”

  “You’d have to buy me dinner first.”

  “Jones!” he screamed, his veins swollen to maximum capacity. “You will go and see Mrs Anderson right now!”

  I went up the stairs, fuming, I threw myself on the chair and the half paperclip stuck right in my arse cheek. “SWEET JESUS!” I cried. I jumped up and grabbed my bony arse.

  “What on Earth are you doing?” the principal yelled.

  “My bloody life!” I cried. “My poor arse!”

  “Are you on drugs?”

  “No, have you got any?”

  “Go and stand outside my office.”

  I paced outside the office. The vom-dot secretary shifted to tell me she was uncomfortable with me walking about. As she typed I looked at her poor red hands. They were tiny and ravaged, but not with bad circulation like mine, with anti-bacterial wash.

  “Miss,” I said softly, holding my stomach and staggering. She pushed backwards in her chair as I came towards her. “I feel really sick.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to go outside.”

  “Miss…” I staggered and she instinctively put out her hand to catch my fall. I caught it and my massive hand wrapped hers like chip paper. She leapt from her chair and I fell into it and made sure my head touched the fabric. “I’ll be all right,” I wailed. “I just need to sit down for a bit. God. I’m sweating.” I sniffed and dragged my hand beneath my nose.

  “You – you – you need to go outside.”

  “Just give me five minutes, miss, I’ll be all right.”

  She hovered, her little red fingers twisting.

  “Could I have some water … please? Some … water…”

  She hurried off to the bathroom and I went on her computer, found the minions’ profiles again and hit print. Nothing happened. “Come on.” I checked the wires were connected to the printer and that the printer was on. I opened the tray: no paper. I looked about. The office was immaculate and there was no paper to be seen. I opened the top drawer and there was just a purse, a packet of Dettol wipes and a bottle of anti-bac gel. I tested the bottom drawer. Locked. I reached under the drawer, lifted the base with my left hand and hit the lock with the side of my right hand. The drawer dropped open. I took out the paper and fed it into the machine.

  “Stupid drawer,” I said to the drawer.

  The printer munched the paper. I snatched the printouts just as the secretary arrived back. As she walked towards me I put my hand to my head. “Can you wet the tissue?” I said, putting my paddle-sized hand flat on her desk while the other held my head. She turned and hurried off. I felt bad about contaminating her imaginarily clean keyboard, so I took one of her Dettol wipes and cleaned everything I had touched.

  The principal came out. “All right, you can come in now,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, you’re going to have to wait.”

  She stopped in shock. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Just wait,” I said, scrubbing the desk. “I’ll be with you in a second.”

  “Ibegyourpardon.”

  They do a lot of begging here.

  “You are on a very slippery slope, young man, a very slippery slope. If I put you on report, I will have to tell your social worker, did you know that?”

  I wiped the pack of Dettol wipes with a Dettol wipe, then I put it in the bin and stormed off down the corridor. I heard the principal follow me so I started to run. Stairs jumbled beneath my feet.

  “Jake!” she called. “Come back!”

  Darscall walked past and gave me the slightest raise of his chin.

  I kicked the door. The crack made a spider’s web across the glass. A scrawny Year 7 stopped in her tracks and gawked at the smashed glass. “Wasn’t me.” I said, and she laughed guiltily. I walked away, happy that I’d made her laugh.

  I waited for Robin all afternoon and evening. I fell into a fitful sleep and in the dead of night I woke from a dream where a woodpecker was tapping through my skull and picking out strings from my brain to feed to its young. When I opened my eyes I was still in bed but my head was where my feet had been and I had managed to tie my sheet into a nappy. I looked like a baby, or a sumo wrestler. Let’s go with sumo wrestler. The world’s worst sumo wrestler. The woodpecker tapping from my dream persisted through the sumo nappy drama until, to my horror, I saw Robin rapping at the window with a full view of my horrific body.

  “Open up, you monk.”

  I grabbed the sheet in mortal panic and tried to cover myself with it. I was one breeze away from being naked and fulfilling my actual worst nightmare. I angled myself so she couldn’t see my scars. “I have night terrors,” I said. “I did this in my sleep.”

  “Sexy,” Robin said as she climbed in. “You look like a week-old balloon.” She was holding an expensive camera and a black rag. She stood with her back to the wall, out of view of the window.

  I struggled with the sheet and prayed she would turn around or go away, but then I worried that if I sent her away she wouldn’t come back.

  “Love what you’ve done with the place.” She looked around the bare walls. “You know not having photos up is a sign of a psychopath? The police look for that when they search people’s houses.”

  “Are you giving home improvement advice? Because your room looks like the one they shot Bin Laden in.”

  Robin laughed. She snatched the profiles from my desk. “Good lad,” she said. I liked that she said that. Robin had an athlete’s energy. It filled the room.

  She folded the profiles and put them in her pocket. “Next thing,” she began.

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “So I don’t wake your parents.”

  “They’re not here.”

  “They ain’t here?”

  “No. You’re still whispering.”

  Robin swept out of the room and came back so quickly the door slammed without being touched. “They just left you ’ere on your jack?”

  “Yeah. What do you need?”

  “Just a favour. But you have to keep your hands clean with this one.”

  “OK?”

  “And you have to keep your mouth shut about it.”

  “You’ve got funny way of asking for favours.”

  Robin looked up at the hatch in my ceiling. “I need to get up in your attic.”

  “All right.”

  “And I need to plant this.” She handed me her camera.

  “OK.” I looked at it. “Why don’t you use a camcorder with a motion sensor?” I said. “You could keep it running for days.”

  “You’ve got one of them lying around?”

  “I do. Me and Isaac used to use it to film our sketches.”

  “All right,” Robin said. “And I need to find whatever the Beast has stashed up there.”

  “Stashed?”

  “Yeah, hide your stash in a neighbour’s house. Some older person you can intimidate.”

  “Charming.”

  “Isn’t it charming. Charming. Where are you even from?”

  I shuffled, struggling with my sheet. “I grew up in B…” The word made me sick. “Brixton.”

  She looked me up and down. “What are you so panicky about? Am I frightening you or something?”

  “No.” My mouth had turned to cotton. “I just want to get dressed.”

 
“Ah. Rest, mon,” Robin said as she went to the door. Then her eyes widened as she caught sight of my leg.

  “Oh … my … days, bruv. Look at the size of that scar!”

  I panicked and tried to cover it up with the sheet.

  “It’s two feet long! Let me look at it.” She came closer and I flinched.

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  “Nothing? What happened?” There was delight in her voice.

  “Nothing, it was an accident.” I sank to the floor, trying to put my scarred arms and toast-rack chest and the rest of the horror show out of view. “I don’t like talking about it.”

  “How do you get a cut that big? Weren’t no operation, it’s all jaggedy. God, what happened?”

  “I broke my leg.”

  “With what? A chainsaw?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t like talkingaboutit.”

  “Why are you sweating?”

  “It’s very stressfulforme.”

  “All right, Black Swan, I’ll leave you to it.” Robin laughed at her own joke. When she was out of my door I realized she was right. I was folded on the floor like a ballet dancer.

  I picked up her camera to look at her photographs. But I couldn’t invade her privacy like that. Besides, I heard clattering coming from the kitchen and I had more pressing concerns than expensive cameras: she was hunting for food.

  “You want a sandwich or what?” she yelled.

  I wiped the sweat from under my arms with my nappy sheet. “No, thanks, I’ve eaten.”

  “When?” she called. “I’ll make you a sandwich anyway.”

  Sandwiches are one of my all-time most hated things in the world. I can’t even look at sandwiches. It’s cake, basically. Two bits of cake with hormonal meat stuffed into it. I tried to console myself: she cannot make me eat it. I repeated this over and over until she bounded up to the room.

  I had been so distracted I had only pulled my jeans halfway up my legs. “Jesus, Robin!” I grabbed myself.

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “No one.”

  “I talk to myself, no shame in it.” She shrugged, shoving half a cheese sandwich into her mouth. “Only way to get a decent conversation.” She picked up the hair gel on my desk and replaced it, then she picked up my pen and replaced it, then she picked up my notebook and put that down. Her eyes fell on my unopened C box. “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why’s it got tape on it?”

  “I haven’t opened it yet.”

  “That tape’s old.”

  Smart.

  “What’s ‘C’ stand for?”

  “Crap,” I said.

  “Charming.”

  She opened and closed the empty drawers in my desk, then ran her hand along the base of it, as if looking for hidden keys or trap doors. She kicked the skirting boards and stamped on each floorboard.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” she said. She picked up her camera and her eyes settled on the faint line of the hatch in the ceiling. She seemed to be taking measurements. Then she dragged my chair beneath the hatch and balanced on it as she pushed the door open. Dust fell on us. She gripped my arm and it burned right down to the bone. With one foot on my headboard and one teetering on the back of the chair, she pulled herself up into the icy darkness.

  “Woah!” I said involuntarily.

  “Come on,” she said, as she lowered her hand out of the hatch.

  “You won’t be able to lift me.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  I looked at her outstretched hand. Be lifted and prove you’re weak; fall and break your ankles. Lose, lose.

  I dragged the chair on my bed and balanced on it as I hooked my hands into the hatch. I couldn’t lift myself up. I stretched again and the chair teetered and fell to the floor. I scraped the floorboards.

  “Come on, Spider-Man,” Robin laughed. She wrapped her hands around my arms and pulled me into the darkness. She dragged me on top of her and for a moment I felt her soft body against my bones.

  We felt our way along the floorboards. Robin flicked on the light, giving a burst of orange. We held our breath, blinking as our eyes adjusted to the spectacle. It was a cove of dresses and framed photographs, with shelves of high-heeled shoes and delicate hats. The young face of my grandfather beamed from all the pictures, his arm proudly around a beautiful woman with bright orange hair and a look of mischief about her.

  We opened box upon box of photographs. In each one he looked more and more like me. His dipped cheekbones, his big eyes, his apologetic crop of blond hair, his miserable mouth, his sparkling eyes.

  “I feel like I’ve been here before,” I said.

  “Of course – you would have.”

  “No, my mum said I never visited them.”

  “Maybe it was a past life,” Robin said. “Maybe you killed yourself. They say you have to repeat your life.”

  “Who says that?” I demanded, horrified.

  “Buddha.”

  “God,” I rubbed my arm, “I hope that’s not true.”

  “It’s a shrine.” Robin ran her hand through the bejewelled coats and capes. Robin ran her finger along the floorboards and inspected its tip. “The dust is blackening,” she said. “It’s old and undisturbed. I saw it on CSI.” She brushed off the dust then reached out to touch an ivory silk dress that hung on a hand-crafted rack. “No one’s been up here for years. We might get rich.”

  “Or asbestos poisoning.”

  Robin went over to the corner where there were wavering stacks of paper. “More newspapers?”

  “Yeah.” I lifted one to the light. “Some of these are from the Sixties.”

  “He’s like a mad hamster.”

  Robin pulled an orange micro-dress over her head. “Oh, beee-have,” she said. “Grooooovy, BABY!”

  I held up one of my grandfather’s old tweed jackets and thought of putting it on. I could pucker my face and wag my finger and say, “Youth of today don’t know they’re born,” or something like that, and Robin would laugh.

  But then she might not laugh and I’d have to make an excuse about why I did it. I worried she was getting bored. Maybe I would forever be a boring character, someone who can’t make a joke in a room full of costumes. I hadn’t worried about being boring before. I mostly worried about being lonely, but maybe lonely was the best thing for me.

  Robin smiled. “I like this dress.” She swished it around.

  “Have it. It looks good on you.”

  She pulled the dress back over her head. “I could never wear it,” she said, the smallest rush of pain on her face. “God, this is Chanel.” She ran her thumb over the label. “All this stuff is designer.”

  I checked the labels: Dior, Chanel, Biba. Robin giggled with delight, but I noticed the stitching. “They’re fake,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You can tell because the top layer is stitched but the lining isn’t.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know a lot about costumes.”

  “Why?”

  “Costumes get the first laugh.” I looked away from her so she wouldn’t see how miserable I was getting. I could feel the heaviness of it in my mouth, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to shake the melting feeling for days.

  We had forgotten about the window. The sun began to rise and we looked up, surprised to see streaks of light. Robin’s face fell.

  “Are you sure he isn’t there?”

  “Very sure,” she said, checking her phone. I detached the flash and LED from Isaac’s camera and placed them under a few newspapers, then I patched dust around the lens.

  “You look like you’ve done this before.”

  “I have, ac
tually,” I said, smiling. “This one time, my friend Isaac was convinced he had a poltergeist because his stuff kept moving around, and we set up the camera to try and catch it in action, and—”

  “Got a sister, has he?” Robin deadpanned, killing the story. I thought of Isaac and me watching the tape and when we saw the door moving we howled with terror. After we’d had a Twix and a Red Bull we built up enough courage to play the rest of the tape and saw his sister and her friend, dressed up in Isaac’s clothes, almost incontinent with laughter as they imitated the way boys walk. When they were changing clothes you could momentarily see them in their underwear, and Isaac feigned being violently sick. Between that and the two girls playing I laughed so hard I fell backwards on to the floor.

  “Do you want to see him?” I asked.

  Robin nodded reluctantly.

  I used the camcorder to show her a sketch we made about a teacher who throws hissy fits and behaves like a stroppy teenager. She didn’t laugh but she was smiling. “You two look really close.”

  “We lived together once.”

  “Really?”

  “When my dad got really bad and Mum went to her Travelodge, I lived with them. It was the best time ever.” I clicked the camera into place in front of the window.

  “Have you got enough memory?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I’ve got tonnes of blank discs.”

  Robin looked around the room. “Well, I don’t think we’ll find any treasure?”

  “Treasure?”

  “I mean, stuff they stashed here.”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “Where are your mum and dad anyway?” she said, her pink tongue working its way around her tiny teeth. “I wish mine would leave me to it.”

  “Who knows?” I said.

  And then I saw it. “What the hell’s that?”

  Robin came over without making a sound, easily negotiating the beams. “What?”

  “Can’t you see?”

  She went to the hatch and dangled down, lifting herself in and out of the hatch, looking at my ceiling, then at the wall of the attic.

  “That,” I said, tracing the brick as its colour faded from dirty grey to a lighter grey, “is a fake wall.”