Fifteen Bones

“I’ve seen acid dissolve a whole car, haven’t I?” Sean yelled.

  “Yeah, good idea, Sean,” Bash said. “And while you’re up there, go and see if they’ve got any uranium next to the goggles and the Bunsen burners.”

  Sean headed off resolutely.

  “No, that was a …” Bash shook his head “… joke.”

  “We’re doomed!” Clarissa said.

  “Wait, what if we don’t leave?” Kane said.

  “Stay here all night?” Bash said.

  “Fine by me.” I shrugged.

  “We’ll be freezing and, knowing us, we’ll all starve to death or get attacked by bears. And what do we do in the morning? You know, some teachers get here at seven?”

  “Seven?” Kane said. “What are they even doing?”

  Sean reappeared, his skinny arms loaded with bottles. “Here!” he said.

  “Oh, that’s just brilliant,” Bash said. “Liquid ammonia. Watch as this slightly stronger version of piss burns through iron.” He pulled the cork out and chucked the liquid through the gap in the door. Nothing happened but I still took a step back. “Oh, look! Look at the fire door melting away like the Wicked Witch of the West. Cover your eyes, everyone! Careful it doesn’t melt your face off.”

  “Yeah, yeah, all right.” Sean curled his lip.

  Bash took another bottle. “What noxious acid is this? Dio … chloro … ethane. Ethane your arse, Sean.” He unscrewed the cap. “Let’s look at it burn through cast iron. Ooooh, everyone…” He threw the liquid. “Run for cover, Mother—”

  BANG!

  The air exploded. Clarissa screamed as we were thrown to the floor. We scrambled up and bolted down the long corridor, finally diving into an empty classroom.

  “Oh, God! Oh, God!” Clarissa yelled. “They’ll think we’re terrorists!”

  “I am not dying in this budget school!” Kane shouted.

  “We’re gonna get deported!” Bash cried. “I can’t go to India, there’s too many people! I’ll never get into university!”

  “Uni?” Kane said. “You’re worried about uni? What about me in Nigeria? I’d be sold for scrap.”

  “You’d be dead, Kane, be fair. You wouldn’t last five minutes,” Sean said.

  “Swear down,” Kane said.

  “Swear down,” Bash said, and they launched themselves at the window. It held. “You’d be executed twice. Once for being British, the next for being African.”

  “And again,” Sean said, “for being gay.”

  Clarissa grabbed a chair and smashed it into the window. The chair shattered but the window remained unscathed. The impact sent her tiny body flying to the floor. Kane laughed maniacally as he helped her up. “Is … this … life?”

  “These windows won’t smash!” Sean screeched.

  “I’m not gonna die here with you muppets, no way!” screamed Clarissa.

  “Mother!” Sean cried. “Mother Mary!”

  Kane grabbed a fire extinguisher and launched it at the pane. It bounced back and sent him sprawling across the room.

  I walked out of the room and put my hand to the floor. It was freezing cold. The fire alarms were still silent.

  I returned to the chaos.

  “Look at what you’re using!” Bash cried as Kane picked up the fire extinguisher ready to hurl it again.

  “Fumes! It’s the fumes that kill! Fuuuuuumes!” Sean said, coughing. “It’s happening! I’m dying! Tell my mother I love her.” He slumped to the floor, taking a dying breath.

  “What are you doing?!” Bash shouted at Clarissa.

  “I’m saving the books!”

  “Never mind the books!”

  Clarissa dropped the pile she was carrying. “OH, GOD! I never got a tattoo with Keisha and them!”

  “I never kissed a girl!” Bash cried.

  “Kiss Kane!” Sean shouted from the floor. “You pair of benders!”

  Kane looked at me and his face immediately calmed. We watched our dishevelled, panicking compatriots, streaking across the room, hurling themselves and anything they could find at the window. The room was destroyed. Books strewn. Chairs broken. Desks tipped over.

  Kane fell to his knees with laughter. “Sean, there’s no fire.”

  “You saw it, you bell-end!” Sean’s strained neck looked like rope, popping with veins and bone. “Bash’s gan Guantanamo. You’re gan Africa to get executed. Jake’s gan back to whatever asylum he escaped out of. We’re doomed… And I can’t go prison. I’ll get buggered.”

  “No one’s buggering anyone,” Kane said, laughing.

  Sean stopped. Bash stopped.

  A temporary calm.

  “Aaaaaaa!” Clarissa yelled as she ran once again at the window with a chair. The window fought her off easily.

  Kane put his hands to his knees and laughed. I joined him. Bash started chuckling.

  “No fire,” I said.

  “But it exploded,” Sean said.

  “Everything’s fireproof,” I said. Thank you, Robin.

  “This is bait, man,” Sean said. “I saw my life flashing.”

  “You saw your dad flashing,” Bash said.

  “I can’t breathe,” Sean said, his hand flat over his chest.

  Kane shushed him. Footsteps.

  We looked at each other in horror. Our eyes flitted across the destroyed room. The footsteps were coming from the end of the long corridor but they were getting louder and louder. Knock, knock, knock.

  “Can’t stay here,” whispered Bash. “We’ll have to make a run for it.”

  We went out into the dark corridor.

  “Oi!” came a belting yell.

  “Oh, God!” Kane said.

  “Oi! You kids. I know who you are!” the voice boomed down the corridor.

  “Ohh,” Sean said, grabbing at his bony arse. “Stress poo. Oh, God, I’m going to stress poo. I ain’t even lyin’.”

  “Make it go back in,” Clarissa said, her teeth gritted.

  “How!” Sean wheezed. “How does that work?”

  “Shut up, will you,” said Kane.

  “I’m gan prison. They’ve got my number. Oh, bait, man. Oh, please, God, save me from this stress poo. Oh, my dignity.”

  “He’s turned around,” I whispered. “But he must have opened the main door to get in here.”

  “True,” Kane said. “Everyone, hoods up and run. Ready?”

  They pulled up their hoods; I pulled up my collar and cursed myself.

  “Oh, I can’t run. I swear I’m going to shit myself,” Sean said.

  “Fuck you, Sean,” Clarissa said so calmly the rest of us smothered our laughter.

  “OK,” Kane whispered, “on three. One … two …”

  “Oh, my dignity,” Sean said.

  “ … three.”

  We ran for our lives, back down the corridor, blasting through the door and out into the school yard.

  “Oi!”

  As we ran for the fence that surrounded the school, I slowed in horror. It was taller than anyone’s reach and had no bars or locks to use as footholds. If I jumped I could maybe catch the bar that ran across the top of the fence, but even if I could do that, it would be useless, as my Kit-Kat arms couldn’t lift my own weight.

  Clarissa reached the fence first and, without breaking her stride, pressed her foot to the railing and jumped to catch the top bar. She looped over the top and landed on the other side. “Jesus,” I said, my lungs weak. Kane and Sean were helping Bash pull himself over the fence.

  “Oi!” the yell came across the yard. “I know who you are!”

  “Come on, Pie and Bash. God,” Sean said, straining under Bash’s weight, “pissing me kidneys here.” Finally Bash grabbed the top bar and launched himself over, landing painfully on the other side.

  Kane hel
d his hands out for me to step up. I couldn’t even move. “Leave me here,” I said, my head swimming.

  “Come on,” Kane laughed.

  “Come on, you skinny tart!” Sean cried. “I just gave birth.”

  “Oi!” The yell was closer.

  I put my hand on Kane’s shoulder and my foot in his cupped hands. When he had lifted me to the top of the fence, he put his hand to the back of my shin to ease me over the top. I thought of when Isaac got stuck on top of that fence, and I had laughed so hard I had to lie on the ground like a starfish.

  Kane boosted Sean, then slung himself over the top and caught me as I came down on the other side. Sean jumped to the grass and we ran just as the caretaker breathlessly reached the fence.

  When we reached the end of the road, out of sight of the school, we stopped and stood in a circle with our hands to our knees, our chests heaving.

  “Anyone got pants?” Sean said.

  “Pants?” Kane said. “As in out of breath?”

  “No, pants as in pants,” Sean said, “because I’ve shit myself.”

  We laughed.

  I took the phone out of my back pocket and looked at the blank screen in disbelief.

  “Has anyone replied?” Bash said quietly.

  “I got the text,” Clarissa said, checking her phone.

  “Yeah,” Sean said, “but we’re closer to the computer.”

  The three of them fought to slap Sean’s head. As the circle broke up, I turned to Kane. “Thanks for that,” I said. “For that … for…”

  “It’s all right. You weigh nothing,” Kane said. “You all right walking home?”

  “No. Yeah,” I said.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Rancome Road,” I said.

  “Ransom Road? That’s rough, man. You sure? I don’t mind walking that way. It cuts through my estate. And I am the right colour.” He pointed his two thumbs at himself. He must have meant the Brackley Estate. I didn’t realize he lived there. It was so strange for a boy to be offering to walk me home.

  “Kane?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s CPR?”

  “Oh.” He kissed his teeth. “Child Protection Register.”

  “Oh.” I tried to stitch together everything Sean had said over the last few days. “Oh. Is Sean’s dad … weird?”

  “No, his mum’s just a bit out of it. Forgets who he is and shit like that.”

  “God.”

  “Innit, though.”

  I kicked a tiny stone ahead of us. Kane caught it with the side of his foot and kicked it ahead of me. “Did we do the right thing?”

  “We did something,” Kane said.

  Even after we said goodbye and I walked off, I felt like he was watching me.

  When I got home I called out to my parents, but there was no answer. I went to my window. Robin’s things were in the same place. Kane’s phone rang and rang, but I let it go to voicemail. All night I read the incoming texts and listened to voice messages, writing them all down. I went downstairs and fetched some of Mother’s blueprint paper, drew a giant grid and began cross-referencing the calls and texts. Most were infuriating texts of support that offered no information. I switched on Mother’s police scanner. After a while, I went back downstairs and used the house phone to check the hospitals again. Perhaps she had run away to safety. Perhaps she was already dead. Perhaps she was being tortured. No one recognized her even though she went to Cattle Rise for two years and ran in the track team and won gold at Crystal Palace.

  How could someone just disappear?

  I found the scrap of cardboard where her number with its funny sevens was written and used Kane’s phone to call her. Each time the small light came on in her room. I thought maybe her parents would hear it and realize she was missing. I scrolled down the call list, alarmed at the number of times I had called her.

  ROBIN

  ROBIN

  ROBIN

  Wait.

  A nervous prickle of energy brushed against me, like the tail of a cat. I stood up.

  Why the hell was her name in Kane’s phone?

  I went to my dad’s cupboard and dragged out his cardboard boxes. I ripped the tape from them with my keys. The boxes were crammed with old, battered clothes, unread books and discarded astronomy tools. I started pulling out the clothes. They smelt of lemon and vinegar.

  I had always got annoyed when Mother called Dad the Portuguese Widow, but she did have a point. He always wore black. In the sixth box there were flashes of colour: orange, white, some grey. The clothes were dusty and damp to the touch, but they didn’t smell. I rifled through, throwing clothes over the floor until I found it: Dad’s old snap-back. The Boston Red Sox, the logo had faded, but it was better tended than the other clothes, the peak still curved after two decades. I fixed it over my eyes, threw on a hoodie, and ran out of the house.

  Rancome Road fed through three estates. The last, the Brackley Estate, was the only one hidden from view of the main road. It sat at the apex of Ransom Road and Cattle Rise Road, like a nut waiting to be cracked. The neat brick wall running along the side of the road deceptively swept you into the gaping shark’s mouth of the estate.

  I didn’t allow myself any time to think as I pushed open the heavy door into the first block. The window of a ground floor flat was plastered with pictures of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Faded stencils were on the door, stuck inside the windows and on a greying towel which hung below the window box outside.

  We were always told that you never, ever go near flats that have cartoon characters plastered over them.

  Come in, come in, little children…

  I grimaced and forged on, ignoring the hastily repaired iron doors and the smell of piss. In the stairwell there were buzzers for more than one hundred different flats. All the name boxes next to the buzzers were empty. I checked it was safe to bring out Kane’s smartphone and scrolled through his Doomsday Book of contacts. I wondered who I could call. Bash might not know. Sean would ask too many questions. That only left Clarissa. I looked at the green phone icon beside her name and hesitated before I pressed it. It would be the first time I had ever called a girl. I looked around again, checking no one was watching me. I thought of Robin, and pressed call.

  “Shaka Kane!” Clarissa said before I could interrupt her. “Sugar Kane! Kane Austen. Oh my days, what did we do? That was gas! I’ve been beakin’ ever since, I’m so—”

  “Clar—”

  “Who’s this? Oh, Jake. Jake, Jake, Jake. Oh, shame.” She laughed. “Did anyone call? Has anyone seen her?”

  “No, Clarissa, listen. I need to give Kane his phone back.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said.

  How I hated that people always asked me that. They’d look at my dumb face and think something was wrong. It was as if my misery was so epic, it had seeped into my face and was sitting there like water in a potato, immovable even at times when I felt sane. I didn’t know my voice had the same problem.

  I pressed my hands to my eyes. “Nothing,” I said irritably. “I just need to know Kane’s door number.”

  “He lives in Brack, you can’t go there. Just wait until tomorrow. He won’t mind.”

  “No, I need to see him now. I’m already here.”

  “Jake, you’ve got to be careful.” Her voice was measured.

  “Clarissa, will you just tell me, please? And I mean, please?”

  “No, I’ll call him and he’ll call you if he wants to see you.” She paused. “You’re standing in the middle of Brack with a phone out? In the dark? Are you dumb?” She spoke the questions backwards, the inflection at the beginning, indicating they were not just rhetorical, but a certainty.

  “There’s no one out.”

  “Eastenders is on,” Clarissa said. I could hear tapping.


  “Are you calling him?”

  “Yeah? Are you mad? That place is bait.”

  “God, the paranoia. So stupid.” I looked at the phone in my hand, my long thumb over the screen as it went to black. There I was in a stairwell, talking on a phone to a girl. Like a proper person. “Tell him I’ll walk around this whole place looking for him if you won’t tell me.”

  “What’s wrong with you? What’s happened?”

  “I’ll yell out his name if I have to.”

  “Jake, what’s happened?”

  “Clarissa!”

  “Three five seven. Is this life?”

  I hung up.

  When I reached the flat, the front door was open an inch, and Kane’s darkened face was pressed through the gap. “Are you mad?” he said quietly. “Are you mad?”

  I thought of the sweat stains on my grandfather’s net curtains and wondered what it must be like to have your door in view of hundreds of beady eyes. I looked back around the estate. Iron security grills that covered every front door. In the courtyard, a motionless car had its headlights shining.

  I lit up the phone and waved it in front of his face. “Let me in or I’ll make a scene.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have a certificate.”

  He unhooked the chain and shouldered me into the flat.

  “You’re a rack of bones, man. What are you doing here?”

  His room was barely bigger than the bunk bed within it, which was strewn with clothes and school books. I could stand in the gap between the bed and the wall, but Kane had to twist his body and lean on the top bunk. “Do you think this is a game? You’re a tourist, fam.”

  A small version of Kane wandered into the room wired into his PSP.

  “GET OUT!” Kane yelled and the little one jumped at the sudden rush into reality. He gave me a filthy look, checked Kane, then ran out and slammed the door.

  Kane squinted at my cap. “Red … sex?”

  “Red Sox. Boston.”

  Kane kissed his teeth and checked the window. “You’re bait, man.”

  I shoved him against the wall. He pushed me away easily. “What the hell?”

  He turned and I flew at him. I went for his face with the flat of my hand. He didn’t move. His expression didn’t alter. “Are you serious?” he said as he held my wrist.