Fifteen Bones

  I baulked at the paramedic. “No,” I said.

  “You’re all right, petal,” he said with a smile. “You’ve had a bit of a spill.”

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  “When was the last time you ate, petal?”

  It was weird to be called petal by a huge West Indian man with a Croydon accent. I tried to get away, but he held me down as easily as you would a tablecloth flapping in the wind.

  “Yesterday? Today?”

  I relented. I had to appear sane so I could get the hell out of there and back to Robin. “Food’s overrated. Over … ated. Ha ha.”

  “You need food to survive. Your heart needs it. Your brain needs it. If you don’t eat you can get very confused and depressed.”

  Well, that would explain a lot. My eyes followed a pinprick swirl that patterned the ceiling and I remembered how to get out of this particular jam. “I’m in treatment,” I said.

  “Very glad to hear it, petal.” The paramedic smiled. “It’s hard to say to someone that we need help, isn’t it? But you’re doing it and I think that’s very brave.” He gave me a bottle of putrid yoghurt drink. “You have to make sure you drink this, all right?” He turned to Miss Price. “Make sure he drinks this. Don’t let him go to the toilet on his own.”

  Miss Price nodded without flinching.

  He turned back to me, “All done,” he said. “You must tell your nurse and case worker about this, all right?”

  “OK,” I said.

  He and Miss Price smiled warmly at each other and he left the room, humming. I sat there like a plum.

  “Jake,” Miss Price said, “what happened? You scared me.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. She put an arm around me. I tensed against her hard body and soft breasts. I didn’t really know what was going on. “You know you can talk to me about anything.” I liked how her voice made her body vibrate. It made me feel quite calm and I could suddenly take a lungful of breath.

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  “How’s the girl next door?”

  “She’s in trouble. I think people are after her.”

  Miss Price let me go. “What kind of people?”

  “Gangs, I think.”

  “The Met has an intervention team that deals solely with gangs. They can help vulnerable gang members, Jake.”

  “She’s all right,” I said, “she just needs to get out of it.”

  I turned to see Dad hovering by the classroom door like a murderer. When Miss Price smiled her hello, Dad looked at the floor.

  “All right, son?” he said. His voice was small. He wore a huge black cardigan and the bags beneath his eyes were so big his face looked like it was melting.

  “Yes, fine.”

  Miss Price handed Dad my coat and the yoghurt drink. “You have to make sure he drinks this and not let him go to the bathroom on his own,” she said. She waited for Dad to answer her but he just fussed with my coat. She turned back to me. “Jake? If there’s anything you want to tell us, anything at all, we’re always here.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Dad hung his head. He was too shy to speak to her, and I was so embarrassed I could have hit him. “Thanks, miss,” I said again.

  “Chen,” Dad mumbled. It’s what “cheers then” sounds like when it comes out of his mouth.

  “Dad,” I said as we walked out, “why do you have to wear that massive cloak? You look like a Sith Lord. You look mental.”

  He looked with some concern around the corridors with their warning notices and torn displays. “What happened?” he said.

  “Where’s Mum?” I said, ignoring him, my mouth as dry as crackers.

  “Did you black …” he asked, “ … like when…”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I did.”

  “That Miss Price is…”

  “Yes, she is nice,” I said.

  I went to the bathroom and Dad waited outside. On the drive home I started to feel sick.

  “Home, home,” Dad said as he pulled the car into the driveway. I got the hell out and ran inside. I went straight to my window. Dad stayed in the car for a long time. When he finally shuffled into the house, he switched on the TV and slumped on the sofa. He would stay like that until he fell asleep.

  I waited for so long for Robin to tap at my window that my legs started seizing up and I had to do these mortifying exercises to keep them awake. I stretched and curled and went into a downward-facing dog, and this was the moment Robin appeared in front of my window.

  “All right, Tiny Dancer,” she laughed, “don’t mind me.”

  We sat beneath my window with a map of London, drinking coffee, mine black and Robin’s milky. Robin produced a packet of Oreos. I ate two; the first by biting off the top layer and chewing it seventeen times before throwing away the rest; the other using the same trick but dissolving the top layer of biscuit in my mouth before eating the rest. Robin ate six Oreos, all in the same way: first the top layer, eaten in two bites, then the filling, which she scraped out with her teeth, then the bottom biscuit, which she licked clean and ate in three bites, one large and two small.

  “Mission Two,” Robin said, brushing crumbs from the map. “Bettina’s Pizza in Wimbledon.”

  “My mum buys pizza from there. It’s disgusting.”

  “It’s a front.”

  “I knew it! I knew there must be something dodgy about that place. The pizza is so watery, why would anyone buy it? And how difficult is it to make pizza? It’s bread and cheese.”

  “I know, it’s obvious,” Robin said, scanning the map.

  “Just use the map on your phone,” I said.

  She shook her head, half an Oreo sticking out of her mouth. “Traceable,” she mumbled.

  “What do they do?”

  “Fence and launder.” She shook her head. “Do you realize, if we shut it down and got everyone there in jail or deported, we’d seize more than half of the gang money in this borough?”

  “Shut it down?”

  “Yeah, if I get jumped out, I’m taking everyone down with me.”

  I looked her and imagined this was a sketch. I’m taking everyone down with me is exactly what a crazed gangster would say.

  Robin pulled a small black box of her duffel bag. It had a sucker attached to it, like one of those things they stick to your chest to monitor your heart.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “It’s a transmitter,” she said. “We can record everything they say. We need to plant it at Bettina’s. In the back room.”

  “How are you getting in?”

  “You can only get in through the restaurant.” She showed me a picture of the restaurant, painted in watery green, on her phone. “The slaves they have working for them are no problem, but anyone skulking around the back is dangerous. Breaking in is a big risk.”

  “Breaking in?” I rubbed my arm. “But this thing is tiny, why don’t you just walk in there?”

  “That’s your big plan, is it, Danny Ocean? Just walk in there?”

  “There must be a way. What if we got invited in there? Say if we became ill or lost, or if we nicked something?”

  “Way too risky.”

  “We could deliver something, say we lost something.”

  “Are you living in this dimension?”

  “What if I fainted?”

  “You can faint on command?”

  “It isn’t hard,” I said.

  Without thinking, I opened my C box. Our stuff was still there after all these years: costumes, scripts, fake blood, fake spiders, wigs, make-up. I dug around and found our blood capsules. “It could be something more dramatic, something that will stir them up, make them panic. Something that will get one of us station
ed in their back office. We could start up an argument. You attack me. Then they have to look after me and try to persuade me not to call the police. When I’m alone I’ll plant it somewhere.”

  I took out Isaac’s battered old sketchbook from my box and found the notes we’d made about stage-fighting. “Here,” I said, “we can practise. All you have to do to make it look real is let the victim control everything.”

  We spent the rest of the evening practising fake punches and falls. Robin learnt to hold my clothes with open hands to make it look like she was grabbing my body. She held my wrists and I yanked her, making it look like she was attacking me. Finally, she practised throwing me against the desk to make it look like she had broken my nose. On the final practice, Robin pretended to throw me, and I hit the desk with my hands. I staggered backwards and cried as I broke a blood capsule over my face.

  “Oh, my life!” she cried as I straightened up. Finally she laughed with relief. “That looked properly real.”

  “Yeah,” I said, wiping away the blood, “I used to be quite good at this.”

  “You should be on TV or sammink. I mean, not prime time or any of the good channels or anything, but you know, TV.”

  Once again, she climbed into my bed without taking her clothes off. She patted the mattress and I sat beside her.

  “Tomorrow,” she said, “is going to be fun.”

  I woke to the sound of rummaging. A half-naked Robin was delving into my C box. She wore a purple bra and a pair of my boxers. If that wasn’t horrifying enough, she had my old notebook open on her bare legs.

  My voice disappeared into the stretch of my mouth. “What are you doing?”

  “This is really good, you know.”

  “It’s private!”

  I grabbed my jeans and tried to pull them on from under the sheet, but it was impossible. I was desperate to grab the notebook from her, but it would mean getting out of bed in my flimsy pyjamas and her seeing my abnormal nipples, my razor-sharp shoulder blades, my twisted collarbone, my endless list of horrors. I broke into a fresh sweat. “Put it back!”

  “C…” She smiled with her tiny teeth. “‘C’ stands for ‘comedy’, doesn’t it?”

  “Get off it!”

  “Why don’t you do this any more?”

  “Robin!”

  “You and Isaac. You could be sitting on a fortune here. Real Fly Rabbi, this is well funny. I like your Croydon rude boy characters too. Well funny.”

  “Get off it!” I croaked. I could barely speak.

  She flicked through the pages. “Look, this Mr Reacher sketch is really funny.”

  “Put … it … back.”

  “You never said you wrote the stuff yourself.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Jesus, all right.” She picked up her clothes from the floor and shook them. Out fell one of those stomach wraps weightlifters use to protect their backs, and she strapped it brutally around her chest, flattening her breasts. I didn’t know where to look.

  She tore a strip off the lid of my C box and scribbled down her mobile number. She flung it in my direction. I stopped being so angry with her. She wrote her sevens funny, with a line through the tail.

  Then she flattened out her map and started studying it again.

  “We’ll have to walk there,” she said, pulling at the logo on her grey hoodie.

  “To Wimbledon Village? From here?” I scratched the back of my neck. “What about the District line?”

  “No,” she said. “We can’t take the tube.”

  “Or a taxi?”

  “No. Taxis is suspect. They know everyone.” Robin clicked off her phone.

  “It’ll take all day!” I thought about my poor knees.

  “It ain’t far. And we can’t go through the park.”

  Before I had time to think, she was climbing out through the bloody window. “Robin! Go out the door. It’s dangerous!”

  “What’s dangerous?”

  “The glass? The drop? The roof?”

  “What you on about?” she said, her bum dangling over the ledge.

  “Someone might see you,” I said.

  This worked and she climbed down.

  She went downstairs and I heard the front door open. My door opened at the same time and closed itself as the front door slammed shut. The ghost at the door. I shut my window, got dressed, and caught myself smiling in the mirror. I looked out at the gate and felt pleased that she would meet me in full view of everyone in the street.

  She had changed into silver leggings, a tight grey tank top, Chuck Taylors and a grey hoodie. I smiled when I saw the spider broach pinned to her tank top. Her hoodie was so big, and her legs so long and thin, she looked like the Tin Man. She saw me approach and hared off down the road, her braids jumping from shoulder to shoulder. I had to run to keep up with her.

  We walked to Wimbledon through a maze of back streets that led eventually to the main road. A group of kids was milling outside the shopping centre. They looked at us and hung their heads. “You’re sort of big news then?” I said.

  “Wait till I get jumped out,” she said, “then you’ll see big news.”

  “What is ‘jumped out’?” I said, but she was too far ahead of me to hear.

  We walked up the steep hill to Wimbledon Village and I had to remind my calf muscles to keep up with my knees. Robin looked in every direction, like a soldier out on reconnaissance. It seemed weird to be nervous in a place where three different shops sell organic honey.

  Bettina’s was hidden on a road that led to Wimbledon Common. Its green lettering had faded into the white paint and the two plastic tables outside were empty, as was the counter inside. There was a single menu on the wall, next to a food hygiene certificate that looked like it had been created in Microsoft Paint.

  I had decided my character would be a timid, privately educated loner, who had been sent on a make-or-break errand by his mother, who was testing whether he could be trusted with money. Robin’s character would be a Southside chatterbox, one of those girls who could talk for ever on a vocabulary of about three hundred words.

  A man appeared from the back. He gave Robin a look of suspicion as she leaned over the counter.

  “Can I have, like, a pizza, but not the one I had last Friday. I want the one with, like, the stuff on it that I had when I was round Shannon’s house that one time for her birthday?”

  “Sorry?” the man said, struggling to keep up.

  “No,” Robin said, “can I have … one of those ones with the chicken but it tastes like that sauce you get in Tescos from that Jamaican guy who was on Dragons’ Den?”

  “Dragon Den?” the man said. “What is ‘Dragon Den’?”

  “Boss, you don’t know Dragons’ Den? Dragons’ Den? Are you mad? Dragons’ Den! You go on with, like, ideas and that, and get bare money for it. But, like, sometimes you, like, don’t get money for it, you get … cussed … out by millionaires who are, like, ‘This is not a business, this is a cloud cuckoo land!’”

  I put my rucksack on both shoulders and shuffled closer to the counter. “Excuse me, could I make my order if you’re still deciding?”

  Robin turned to me and looked at me so sternly I didn’t have to act. I was scared.

  “Are you dumb?”

  “Sorry … I just need to order. My – my – my mum is ill and needs a pizza otherwise her blood sugar level will—”

  “Are you dumb?” Robin shoved me. “Interrupting me while I’m talking about Dragons’ Den?”

  “Everyone, calm!” The man disappeared and reappeared with a podgy clone. “Calm down.”

  “You better apologize, son!” She shoved me again, and I had to concentrate not to lose my footing.

  “But you hadn’t decided,” I said.

  “I’ll decide what to do with your fa
ce.”

  “It’s polite to let people who have decided—”

  “Are you still talking?” Robin grabbed me and I forgot to match her footing. I stumbled, and she dashed my head against the counter so hard it nearly broke my goddamn face.

  I caught hot blood in my hands and howled. After some delay, the capsule cracked over my jeans.

  “No, no, no! You – out!” one of the men shouted.

  Robin flung open the door. “Watch Dragons’ Den!” she yelled. “It’s sick!”

  To my shame, that’s all I remember. When I woke up, I was in a windowless office with a packet of frozen chips on my face.

  Whether he was Italian or Kenyan or Eritrean I didn’t know. He was one of those shaven-headed men who are so tall and beautiful and tall you can’t concentrate on what you’re thinking.

  “How are we feeling?”

  “Where … am I?” I said, taking care to look around, all wide-eyed and terrified.

  “What’s brought you here?”

  “I’m supposed to get a pizza for my mum from Papa John’s.”

  “Ah.” He relaxed as he fell for my excellent ruse. “You came to the wrong place.” He smiled and sat beside me. “Now, mate, what happened outside was unfortunate. What’s your name again?”

  “Hugh.”

  “Hugh?”

  “Hugo.”

  “Hugh or Hugo?”

  “Hugo,” I decided. I was out of practice.

  “Now, Hugo, we could call the police. We could definitely call the police for you, that’s no problem, but what the police will be askin’ is stuff like, did you threaten her? And, what did you do to her? And how did you end up being beaten up by a girl? I mean, girls don’t attack people for no reason, do they? Especially blokes. Big strong blokes like you!” He nudged my shoulder and I almost fell off the chair. “And then you’re in trouble and we don’t want that, do we?”

  I nodded.

  “So, I think, for your sake, we’ll leave them out of this and let you get off home with a nice free pizza, whichever one you want. On the house.”