Fifteen Bones

  Robin climbed out of the attic to find tools. “You coming or what?” she said.

  I looked at the distance to my floor. I shook my head. I thought of scaling a fence with Isaac. After I jacked him up, he scrambled to the top, looked down, screamed and clung to the ridge like a koala bear. “I can’t! I can’t!” he yelled as I fell to my knees with laughter.

  Isaac couldn’t run, climb, punch, swim, throw. He couldn’t pass, catch, score. Every time the cricket ball or the baseball went to him, the team would groan. He’d miss, then dramatically leap around, following the ball as it trundled along the grass, his bony bum bopping in the air. He’d finally pick it up and throw it back with a massive grunt, only for it to sail high into the air above his head.

  Once, with Isaac’s oldest brother, we filled water bombs with red-liquid jelly to hurl at a store in Wimbledon that he said used sweat shops in Bangladesh. Isaac raised a jelly bomb triumphantly, gave a warrior yell, and the liquid exploded over his head. He stood covered in jelly, with a half grin, while I became useless with laughter.

  Robin reappeared beneath me, holding a mallet. “Your dad’s got every tool in the world down there. Your living room’s like Homebase,” she said. “I got this chipper thing, an actual pickaxe, and a drill too.”

  I pulled the pickaxe into the attic. “They’re my mum’s.”

  “Your mum’s?” Robin sounded impressed. “Mum the Builder,” she sang, “can she fix it? Mum the Builder… Yes, she can!” She did her enviable jump into the trap door.

  I looked at the pickaxe and felt bad for how I always argued with Mother. It was impressive that she’d flipped so many houses, despite their grisly past, and she had done this with a hospitalized son, a mentally ill husband and a baby. Not bad. I patted the pickaxe on its head.

  Robin smiled and nodded towards the wall. “Ready?”

  “Now, look…” My voice quavered. “There’s things in houses called support walls…”

  “Like support bras?”

  “Yeah, if you smash one of them then…”

  “The world ends.” Robin rolled her eyes. “Are you going to hit that wall or am I?”

  “All I’m saying is that with one false move we might just blast our way to our bloody deaths.”

  “You need a support bra, fam.”

  I tapped my bony nipples. “No, they’re like fried eggs.”

  Robin smiled. “Get on with it.”

  “All right. On three…” I braced myself, raised the mallet and closed one eye. “One … now, remember, if the roof caves in then we will have to—”

  “Get on with it!”

  “All right. Don’t rush me. All right. Here we go. One…” I repositioned myself. “One…”

  Robin snatched the mallet and swung it into the wall. “Yaaaaar!” she yelled.

  “Oh, God!” I threw my arms over my head and waited for the avalanche of brick and mortar. None came. When I looked up, Robin was covered in grey dust. We burst into laughter. She took a few more healthy swings at the wall until there was a gap big enough to crawl through.

  “Oh … my … days,” Robin said as she peered into the gap.

  “Is it bodies? Is it bodies?!” My eyes jammed shut.

  “Calm down before you break,” Robin laughed, but then she stopped laughing.

  “What?” I said.

  She pointed to a solid brown chest with a heavy lock, nestled in the middle of the darkened space. “What do you reckon’s in there?” she said.

  We climbed inside the tiny hidden room. My heart raced as she yanked the lock. It wouldn’t give. She tried to lift the box but it was too large. She paced the beams of the roof, looking for something to hit it with. She found an old saucepan in one corner and used it to smack the heel of the lock.

  “Damn,” she said, “this won’t budge.”

  “Careful! What if it’s rigged?”

  “Rigged with what?”

  “Explosives.”

  She raised the saucepan over her head and swung it like an axe.

  BOOM!

  “MERCY!” I screamed and Robin killed herself laughing. My hands flew to my heart and after a while we both laughed. She dipped momentarily to one knee she was laughing so hard, but joke was on her because you can’t go around shocking someone with my skinny old heart, it might snuff out any minute.

  “Wait! I’ll try to pick it.”

  “Yeah, but we wannit before Christmas.”

  “I can pick Chubb locks.”

  “Chubb off,” Robin said, giving the lock another smack. “I’ve seen you picking locks, bruv, we’d have to get camping gear.”

  Isaac would love this drama. He wouldn’t be jumping around taking charge. He’d let me do it. Then again, him and me, we would be up here for months trying to chip a brick out of that wall. Then we would spend hours fretting about ghosts and curses and support beams and everything. The two-stone twins, as Rabbi Kaufman would say, weak as seven days.

  Robin opened the chest and I didn’t have to look at what was in there for more than a second to know what it was. Stacks and stacks of medical records, lawsuits and finally, discharge papers. “He wasn’t in prison,” I said. “He was in a madhouse.” I would have cried if I wasn’t so exhausted. “Poor, poor man.”

  “And that’s when his missus left him,” Robin said, sifting through the papers.

  “Worst. Treasure haul. Ever.”

  We piled the papers back into the chest. As I bent over towards it, I noticed a name. I blinked. I licked my thumb and rubbed away the dust.

  JAKE.

  “Why does it say my name? Why would he leave this for me?”

  “Jake.” Robin rubbed dust out of the crevices that formed the letters. “Look at it, it’s old. Older than you.”

  I hung my head. No one gets named after a packet of crackers.

  “Don’t let me end up like this,” I said.

  “Like what?” Robin said gently.

  “Like this,” I said. “Scared.”

  “All right,” Robin said, as if she had seen this all before.

  “Oh my God,” I said. I dragged out a copy of the English textbook that had some of my poems printed in it. “He had this.”

  “Look, it’s you.” Robin handed me a newspaper clipping of my Silver Pen Award win. “And, look.” She held up a spider broach, with boggly eyes and long, gangly legs. “He made you this.”

  I sighed and recognized the jittery line of a hot glue gun. “They make you do crafts in hospital to stave off the suicide.” I couldn’t bear to look at it.

  “Don’t you love it though?” Robin said. “It’s like he’s a funny spider.”

  “He looks mental.”

  “He looks cheeky. I love it. Don’t you love it?”

  “No.” I gave it a closer look. It was plastic and stick-on crystals. “You can have it.”

  “No. You should have it. He left it for you.”

  “Robin, have it.”

  She looked at it admiringly and pinned it on her collar.

  A light came on in the glaring eye of the Toad. Robin cowered. We shouldn’t have made so much noise. She pointed to the hidden light on the camera. It had turned green.

  Robin slapped the dust from her legs and climbed into my bed. She held up the quilt for me to get in next to her. “Come on, go sleep,” she said.

  I lay down and liked how warm it felt. I knew I wouldn’t fall asleep all night for fear of one of my mad night terrors. I worried about how I should feel all emotional about having a girl in my bed, and how it was supposed to send you insane or something, but I didn’t feel anything. I just felt sorry for her.

  “Where would you go?” Robin asked, her voice slow and sleepy. “If you could go anywhere in the world?”

  “Edinburgh,” I said.

  “No,
I mean, anywhere.”

  I turned to face her. “Edinburgh.”

  “No.” Robin propped herself up on her elbow and looked down at me. “Like anywhere in the world.”

  “… Edinburgh.”

  “No, like, in the world … if you had all the money in the world.”

  I looked at her. “Edinburgh.”

  Robin laughed and flopped back on to the pillow. “What kind of bullshit answer is that? You could go there now.”

  “No.” I laughed with her. “I’d like to live there and prepare this, like, amazing show for the Fringe Festival.”

  “That’s dead.”

  “Nah,” I said, copying her accent, “that’s calm.”

  She laughed despite herself.

  “We’re going to go there, get five-star reviews and then get our own TV show down here.”

  “What would it be called?”

  “The Isaac and Jacob Collection.”

  “That’s not just the worst name I’ve ever heard, that’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard. That’s worse than someone’s dream being going to Edinburgh, which is just up the road.”

  “No, it’s clever. It’s like a fashion collection. Our book would be called The Book of Isaac and The Book of Jacob.”

  “All right, Posh Spice, you should hire me along so you don’t disgrace yourselves with dumb names like that.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “That ain’t my job,” Robin said so indignantly that we both started giggling. “I’ll just tell you what ideas are an embarrassment.”

  “What about you?” I said. “Where would you go in the world?”

  “Paris.” Robin leaned forward, her eyes bright. “I’d go to see the Mona Lisa and I’d go see a ballet. I’d love to see a proper ballet. The Royal Ballet.”

  “You can see them in London.”

  “You can see them in London.”

  “Paris is closer to here than Edinburgh.”

  “Is it balls.”

  “It is!”

  “Balls.”

  “You could go to Paris any time.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Fine,” she said. “And you’ll come with me. But you can’t ruin it by being a maudlin monosyllabic nob.”

  “Fine, we’ll go,” I said.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.” I fidgeted. “I didn’t know you liked ballet.”

  “I used to eat, sleep and breathe ballet.”

  “That’s why you’re so…”

  “What?”

  “Grace— Beau— That’s … you know.” I shook my head. “You should do it. You should do whatever you want. You live in the capital of the world. After New York and several other places. The Capital of the World! They have that ballet company in Croydon now. You could just go to that.”

  “They have Fringe Comedy in Camden now. You could just go to that.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. She fiddled with her plastic broach with the long-legged spider that glittered in the moonlight.

  “Put that away.”

  “No, I love it.”

  “I hate it, it’s embarrassing.”

  “I love it,” Robin said. “It’s all right to be out of it every now and again.” She looked at me. “And he done this ’cos he wanted to get better.” She smiled. “God,” she said, “he really loved you.”

  The next morning Robin wasn’t in bed with me. I felt like I hadn’t slept, but I didn’t remember seeing her leave.

  The pavements were sponge today and I stretched into every step without a jolt of pain through my bolts and hinges. I felt like a proper person. A real boy. I thought of having our photograph taken by the Eiffel Tower. I could put that photograph on Facebook, or on a collage that I would stick on my mirror. Those photographs people have always upset me, but now I would have one of my own and it made me weak with happiness. A girl had asked me to go to Paris. A girl. And not just any girl: a cool girl. A cool girl who doesn’t go to my school. It was a trifecta.

  At Cattle Rise the teacher-less classroom was a wall of noise. I spotted Sean decked in his Yankees cap, and despite my need to be alone and my general dislike of him, I took the empty seat on his table.

  “How do you like Rodriguez this season?” I said.

  “Eh?”

  “Alex Rodriguez? A-Rod? How do you like him this season?”

  “Who?” Sean adjusted his cap.

  The teacher waded into the noise holding a silver flask, the redness of his face seeping into his neck. He sighed with exhaustion as he looked at the class. “What am I about to say to you, Sean?”

  “You love gay guys?”

  The class laughed.

  “Sean?” he said calmly. Sean took off his cap and the teacher relaxed. “Right, nobody move. I’ve forgotten my memory stick.”

  “Tell ’im you love ’im!” Sean called and everyone laughed. I scratched my neck.

  Clarissa rushed to our table. “Jake! You are never going to guess who that girl is.” She produced a photograph of the Insain Bolts. “This her?”

  “Yes,” I said, picking up the picture.

  “You don’t know who that is?” Clarissa beamed.

  “That’s Robin,” I said.

  “Yeah, but do you know who she is?”

  “No.”

  “Robin Carter.” She waited for a reaction but I remained blank. “Robin Carter. Jake, she’s criminally insane! Those blokes weren’t threatening her, they were answering to her.”

  “No way.”

  “Jake. She’s a boss. She burned down the whole bloody school!”

  My mouth hung. I wanted to defend her but I found myself unable to speak.

  “Shit, Jake,” Sean laughed. “You’re gonna get clapped.”

  “Don’t believe anything she tells you.” Clarissa said. “She’s a boss in the CRK.”

  “Yeah, what is the CRK?”

  “The Castle Rise Kingz.”

  I rolled my eyes at the name. “She left them.”

  “Bollocks,” Sean said. “No such thing as leaving them.” He laughed. “First person you annoyed inside was Darscall. First person you meet outside is Carter. You must have the luck of fuckin’ Adam. You’re gunna get shot in the…” He couldn’t speak for laughing. “Face.”

  Kane folded his hands and said calmly, “What aren’t you telling us?”

  They sat in a tiny congress around me, real humans with real ears and eyes and everything. They had straight backs and even shoulders and clean hair. These were people whose parents bothered raising them, and they were listening to me.

  Kind Dr Kahn always said that if you can’t tell someone what you’re doing, then you shouldn’t do it.

  “Well, we had to look up in my attic for stuff the … CRK had stashed up there. But we didn’t find anything.”

  They paused for just long enough for me to admire how pretty they all were, how animated their expressions were. Even Sean had his wiry appeal.

  And then they stretched into ghoul faces and bawled with laughter.

  “Green!”

  “Wet!”

  “Sideman. Side … man!”

  They all said this for quite a while.

  “You are going to get murdered,” Sean said.

  “You’re getting Kansas-Citied, son,” Kane said.

  “What’s that?” I asked and they all laughed again.

  “Kansas City Shuffle,” Kane said.

  “Is that rhyming slang?”

  “Rhyming slang!” Sean laughed louder than war. “Look at this Doris Day, it ain’t the Fifties.”

  “What’s a Kansas City Shuffle?” I said. My need to help Robin drove me past their contorted f
aces, their laughter, the pain in my sorry excuse for an arse and the alarming shakes racking up my legs.

  “It’s like when…” Clarissa began. She stopped and put her hands to her slim hips.

  “It’s when you’re, like…” Sean rolled his hand. “It’s like when someone is, like…”

  Kane scratched his baby stubble and looked at Bash. Bash took a breath. “Say you wanna do someone over, yeah? And you tell them you’re doing someone other than them over, so then they go along with it.”

  “She told you you have to look for this stuff, so you let her, get it?” Clarissa said, her arms flying. “If she hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t be letting her do you over … you know?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s like when you…” They all spoke at once, the words crunching in their mouths, their eyes to the ceiling, trying desperately to find an explanation. A small smile grew on my face. I liked the way their voices crackled, so fast and alive. Clarissa’s voice moved her whole body.

  “It’s like…”

  “It’s like you’re…”

  “It’s like you’re a mug,” Sean said finally, slamming his hand to the table. They all laughed.

  Another table was following our conversation. I watched Bash take his pen and notebook from his pocket and pull Kane’s textbook in front of him. Once the noise level rose again the group turned back to me.

  “Jake, you can’t leave the ends with her. It’s really, really dangerous,” Clarissa said.

  “You can’t trust people, Jake,” Kane said. “Don’t be a mug.”

  “She’s probably setting you up for something,” Sean said.

  “Are you all right, Jake?” Bash said.

  I blinked. Thinking of Paris and thinking I might throw up. “Yeah?”

  “Have you … eaten?”

  I got up from the table. The pain in my joints had lifted. I saw flashing lights.

  The lights are a warning.

  Fading brake lights. Blood with pieces in it. Isaac’s face. Black smoke swam the edges of my vision. I was out in the corridor. I pressed my hand to Miss Price’s door, and I remember falling.

  “Jake?” Miss Price said as I woke. I checked my crotch to make sure I hadn’t done anything horrifying. I saw it all over again. The flashing lights. Blood with pieces in it. My shin bone spiking from the flesh. Skin, clothing. “You’re awake,” she smiled.