Diving Belles

by Lucy Wood

  ‘Maybe I am a ghost.’

  ‘You’re no ghost,’ she told him.

  He concentrated really hard on his phantom right arm, then he slipped it under Sunshine’s shoulders and held her carefully. She felt very fragile, very narrow. Her warm weight pressed on to his arm and he could feel a damp smudge under her armpit. He didn’t want to move or breathe. Sunshine turned her head round to look at him, then she rested it back down on the grass and closed her eyes. Neither of them moved. A seagull glided over. The clouds stretched and broke and merged into each other like waves hurrying towards the beach.

  ‘I miss the summer,’ Sunshine said. She sounded sleepy.

  ‘It is the summer,’ Gog said.

  ‘But I miss it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Gog said. ‘We should have done some stuff.’

  ‘I suppose we should have.’ She opened her eyes. ‘When I look back on it now, I suppose we should have done lots of things.’ She sighed and Gog held her more tightly. He cradled and cradled her without her knowing anything about it. Then he moved his phantom hand up and stroked the top of her arm. Her shoulder was thin and bony. He stroked her shoulder with his huge thumb. ‘Maybe something will happen, though, before school starts,’ she said.

  ‘Like what?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She turned over to face him. He could see dry cracks in her lips. He had to go cross-eyed to look at them because she was so close. She ran her tongue over them. They looked sore.

  ‘You should use Vaseline on your lips,’ he said. ‘Else they’ll split.’

  ‘What? No they won’t.’

  ‘They might.’

  ‘I don’t need to use any of that crap,’ she said. She rolled over and stood up, leaving Gog’s phantom arm sprawled out on the ground. She walked away and kicked at some finger bones. In the first week of the holidays they’d been addicted to playing pick-up-sticks with them and the remains of their last game were still there.

  It looked like it was going to rain again. Gog thought that he’d better start walking into town but he couldn’t leave now because Sunshine was annoyed at him. He knew better than to leave when someone was still annoyed. He hoped his mum had an umbrella with her.

  Everything was quiet except for the clacking of bones against bones. He propped himself up on his arm and watched Sunshine. Maybe he should ask her if she wanted to go and take a look at the ribcage. The ribcage was Sunshine’s favourite thing in the whole boneyard but Gog hated it. It creeped him out. He didn’t know why she liked it so much.

  ‘Hey, did you watch that programme about America last night?’ he asked instead.

  Sunshine’s new plan was to move out there as soon as possible and work in marketing or PR. She stopped kicking and looked around. ‘Yeah. It was only OK.’

  ‘When you move out there you’ll have to get health insurance. You can’t get healthcare free like here.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘What if I can’t afford it and I die?’

  Gog shrugged. ‘I dunno. Everything’s different out there.’

  ‘I know. Everyone looks like a movie star. Don’t you think that everyone out there looks like a movie star?’

  ‘Maybe not everyone.’

  ‘I’m probably not even going now. The presenter looked like a movie star, didn’t she?’ She slumped down on to the grass and started picking at it.

  ‘I thought she looked like that man from the chip shop. They have the same nose.’

  ‘Really? Do they?’

  He nodded and she grinned up at him. He kept nodding and then he launched into a stuck-in-a-box mime. He didn’t have it exactly right yet but that didn’t matter. He pushed his hands flat against an invisible barrier over his head. His phantom body stuck out of it at all sides but he tried to ignore it. Sunshine watched him and clapped, but she didn’t clap like she meant it. She clapped like she thought it was what she was supposed to do. He dropped his arms.

  ‘We should do something,’ Sunshine said. She snapped off a few blades of grass. ‘We never do anything.’

  Gog looked at his watch. He was definitely late now and his mum didn’t like being left on her own. ‘I’ve got to go in a minute.’

  She looked up quickly. ‘What for?’

  ‘I’m sort of meant to meet Mum in town.’

  ‘Oh. Well in that case I guess you’d better run along.’ She yanked up a whole dandelion plant, roots and everything.

  ‘I thought we could go and see the ribcage first,’ he said.

  She stared up at him, deciding, then nodded and jumped up.

  The ribcage was set back from the other bones. It was the only ribcage in the entire place. There should have been more. Gog had found some snapped ribs in among a pile of other bones but that was it. He didn’t get that ribcage at all. It was so big, for one thing, way bigger proportionally than any other bone in the yard. It also looked about a million years older. It was gnarled and knotted and stained with yellow and grey. Unlike the other bones, the ribcage had thick clumps of lichen creeping all over it so that it looked half-alive and teeming with furry stars. That’s what Gog hated about it. It should be the deadest thing there, deader than anything else, but instead it looked like it was trying to grow back its own skin. He never touched it, but he couldn’t take his eyes off it either. Whenever he stood next to it, he felt as if the whole world had been eclipsed by that huge, immobile weave of bones.

  Sunshine paced around the ribcage. It towered above her head. She dragged her hand across the ribs as she moved so that her arm dipped between the gaps and slapped against the bones. Each rib was as wide as her handspan.

  ‘Why do you like this thing so much, anyway?’ he asked. He stood back and folded his arms.

  ‘Imagine the size of the lungs that would go in here. They’d be so gross. The grossest lungs.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. He’d never thought of it like that before. Imagine those lungs! Two massive, heaving slabs made up of mottled purple and white and red. They would look like slippery beds. They would loll around like skinned whales on a beach. And yet, what about the power of them? What about the weight and strength that would go behind each breath – the sheer, greedy volumes of air that would circulate and bubble in them? Gog could barely imagine the pressure of all that oxygen, all that life they would trap inside.

  ‘Hey, what’s this blue stuff?’ Sunshine asked. She was round the other side of the ribcage.

  Gog started, thinking about huge distances covered in one stride, how easy it would be to leave everything behind. He walked over to her.

  She was laughing. ‘Gog, look at this!’ There were criss-crossed lines of graffiti sprayed over the bones. The paint was fresh: Gog could smell the chemicals tanging the air. The graffiti looked like it was meant to say something but the bones were too far apart for the word to be legible. Sunshine was laughing about it and asking him what he thought it said. She guessed ‘boner’. Gog didn’t answer. He touched the paint and traced the marks with his fingers. He couldn’t believe someone had done it. He spat on his hand and tried to rub it off. The paint stained his palm turquoise but it stayed on the bones. Sunshine watched but didn’t help. Gog rubbed and rubbed at the paint. His heart was thumping hard in his chest. Shreds of blue lichen broke off and crumbled like dry skin.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ Sunshine asked.

  He shrugged and stopped. None of the paint had come off. She was looking at him in a strange way. She wanted him to laugh about it, make some joke, say he thought it said ‘dick’. Then she would say, ‘Maybe this is your dad, then.’ And even though that’s what he had said to her countless times, that his dad was a dick, he would hate her a little bit for saying it back. But he couldn’t laugh about it anyway, and that strange tightness between them grew so that something needed to snap. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said. ‘I’m bored. Let’s go to the fountain.’

  ‘The fountain?’ Gog said slowly.

  ‘Why are you being weird? You’re being really
weird. Let’s go to the fountain.’ She turned to leave.

  ‘What will we do?’

  ‘I don’t know. There’ll be something good to do there, though,’ she said.

  ‘There might not be,’ he said. ‘There might not be, though.’ The gaps between each rib were as broad as Gog’s body. He wondered what it would be like to walk in between them. ‘How much do you bet me to get inside this?’ he said. He turned round but Sunshine was walking away towards the track that led into town. He watched her for a few moments then leaned his head and shoulders into one of the gaps and stepped in. It was like stepping into a cathedral. The ribcage seemed to cut off all sound from outside it. All he could hear was his own breathing. The air it encased seemed thinner and dryer, full of trapped whispers. His mouth went dry. He lay down along the gap where the backbone would have been. The domed roof striped the sky with bones.

  Sunshine would almost be in town by now. He could see her walking along: she would be humming; maybe she would hold out her arms and run down the last slope. She might even do a one-handed cartwheel, which she wouldn’t do in front of him any more. There was something else he should have said to her but it didn’t matter; she’d be outside his house again in the morning. The whole moor was still and the clouds were still. His mum would have given up waiting for him by now. He sighed, and he thought he heard the bones sigh too. He’d go back in a minute; he just wanted to lie in there a bit longer. The ribcage dwarfed him so completely that he couldn’t even feel his phantom body any more. He breathed in and out very deeply and, as he did so, he could almost feel the ribcage moving – expanding and contracting with each heave of his chest.

  Beachcombing

  A Knife and Fork

  The thing was, did Grandma have any teeth left? Oscar hadn’t thought about it before. He had never paid much attention to what she ate or anything like that. He touched the rusty knife and fork they had found at the tideline. They were very heavy and beautiful. One of the fork’s prongs was bent inwards, a bit like Oscar’s own bottom tooth. He looked up at Grandma, who was sitting next to him on a blue camping chair. ‘What do you eat?’ he asked her. She was sewing up the part of her mattress where all the stuffing was falling out.

  ‘This and that,’ she said. She had the needle in her mouth with the thread trailing out. ‘Fish and fat’ is what it sounded like. But Grandma definitely didn’t eat fish any more – everyone knew that. She didn’t even like to talk about it. ‘And sometimes that ridiculous lady comes round with meals.’ That was where she got all those plastic pots that caught the drips around her bed. With the needle pursed in her mouth like that, it looked like Grandma didn’t have any teeth. But when she took it out, he remembered that she did have all of them, just like everyone else, although hers were browner than his own. It was because she used to clean her teeth with a toothpick and eat Marmite straight out of the jar and drink nothing but strong coffee. She wasn’t meant to drink so much coffee any more, but she did, which he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone.

  ‘Your teeth are all brown,’ he told her. The knife and fork had raised patterns on them. Grandma had given him a bit of sandpaper and he’d managed to rub away most of the rust and dirt. The metal underneath was a dark, silvery colour and there were leaves and swirls. He wanted to eat dinner with them but Grandma said no. ‘Who lost these?’ he asked suddenly. His bare toes, hanging over the chair, just grazed the cold, damp sand. ‘Someone must have lost them.’

  ‘People are careless,’ Grandma said. ‘Anyone could have lost them.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s an accident, though,’ Oscar said. He had lost his favourite saucepan because he’d left it on the bus, so he was very sympathetic about other people’s losses. ‘It’s an accident sometimes. It was probably a picnic and then a shipwreck. And everything sank right to the bottom except these.’ Grandma nodded but didn’t say anything. Her hands fiddled with the thread but didn’t do anything with it. She was good at fixing things and didn’t even feel the cold. You could tell she didn’t feel the cold because of the fact that she lived outside all the time, on the beach. She was very old and old people did die, Oscar knew, and some that were younger, but he didn’t think Grandma had even been ill before and usually you were ill before you died, although sometimes it was sudden. The knife and fork felt very heavy. ‘I think they’re made of silver,’ he said. Grandma broke some thread with her teeth. She was strong. She could crush a whole apple in her fist. Oscar got out of the chair and crouched down to poke at some shells and pebbles with his fork. The beach was empty and quiet. It was a long, pale stretch of sand, with high cliffs behind it that curved inwards like the bit of the spoon you ate with, and they sheltered quieter, crescent moons of sand like this one, where Grandma lived. Dark drifts of bladderwrack had heaped up at the tideline and were drying in the air and the wind.

  Grandma watched Oscar while she stitched. He looked like a little owl crouched over like that, with his feathery hair tufting up behind his ears. His ears stuck out like his mother’s, which was a pity. She could tell he was cold but he didn’t like to admit it.

  ‘I think I’ll get a jumper on,’ she said. He turned round and followed her into the cave, where she kept all her things. He had a spare set of everything there because he visited so often.

  ‘Well, if you are, I suppose I might as well,’ he said. He was still clutching the knife and fork, and they poked through a loose part of the wool so that one arm got trapped and Grandma had to get it out. ‘What about that cow that fell on the beach?’ he said. ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘I told you I didn’t see it.’

  ‘Who did see?’

  ‘I don’t know. All the people on the beach, I suppose.’ Last summer, a cow had fallen off the cliff and on to the beach and Oscar wished that he had seen it. He didn’t know anyone who had. He looked at his knife and fork. He didn’t let go of them all afternoon, then later, before he went home, he laid them carefully down in the corner next to his other precious things.

  Bucca Trails

  Grandma showed him how to spot bucca trails. It was important information to know. Buccas had been during the night, Grandma said, although it was calm now and still. It was mid-morning and the tide was right out. There were bucca trails everywhere. ‘Did you hear them, in the night?’ Oscar asked. Grandma nodded. In fact, they had poked their heads right inside the cave to take a look at her. Now that they had gone, you could see exactly where they’d come from and which direction they had left in. The sand was covered in the wide, arcing imprints of their movements. It looked like someone had swept a huge broom in a curve from the sea up to the cliffs and then back again, or someone had rushed across the sand wearing a long, heavy skirt.

  Grandma showed him how the disturbed sand was sitting loosely on top, waiting to be packed back in. She bent down slowly and poked at it and said a few things to herself. ‘South-westerly,’ she said. ‘Force four.’ Oscar nodded. He knew about south-westerly and force four. Grandma straightened up and then stared out at the sea. She was very still. Oscar found a stick and started to draw a pattern. Grandma stared out to sea. Her back was very straight and aching down at the bottom.

  ‘Why can’t we ever see them?’ Oscar asked. This is what he knew about buccas: you can’t actually see them; you can only see what they do to other things. So, if the sand is whirling around and the waves are white and choppy and your hair is whipped up and around then there is probably a bucca. And if the rain is pushed one way or the other, like curtains. And they like to eat fish, and if you leave a fish on the beach the buccas will leave your boats alone, but if you don’t they get very angry. And sometimes you can hear them, especially when there are hundreds of them rushing in off the sea so that their bodies brush against the waves and the sand and the air rushes through their open mouths. But still, he wasn’t exactly sure why you couldn’t see them. This is what he wanted to know: were they invisible?

  ‘Not invisible,’ Grandma said.

  ‘But how come
we can’t see them, then?’

  ‘They don’t have bodies like us. You have to see them in other ways.’ Grandma looked down at Oscar, who had started to scratch around with his stick again. ‘We talked about that before.’

  He shrugged and carried on scratching. He was hungry. They sounded invisible to him. And if they weren’t invisible, how come that thing about Grandpa and Uncle Jack?

  ‘It’s important to be able to see the signs,’ Grandma carried on. She coughed a few times, loudly and hard and with a wheeze at the end. She really did need to teach him all the signs. She started to explain about the direction of the tracks and what they meant, and if the sea is very calm but there’s a sickly green light then you have to be particularly careful. Oscar was humming to himself. ‘You’re not even listening, are you?’ Grandma said.

  Oscar jumped up. ‘You’re not listening to me!’ he said. ‘It’s you who isn’t listening to me.’ He ran crazily around her legs, flinging sand on to his jeans.

  Grandma didn’t watch him running. ‘You can go if you want,’ she said. He was boring when he was like this. Oscar stopped running and leaned against her legs. He wouldn’t go yet. They ought to follow the trails right down to the tideline and see what happened. But first, Grandma had to cough some more, and she rubbed the bottom of her back and bent her back down and coughed so hard it sounded like she was going to be sick. Then she spat something out.

  ‘Gross,’ Oscar said.

  ‘Don’t be wet,’ Grandma told him. She covered the thing over with sand and they followed a line of shells and seaweed and sticks that the buccas had bowled along the beach. Oscar kept stopping and poking, stopping and poking, and Grandma waited for him. The beach leading up to the tideline was covered in purple and grey pebbles, and as the sea pulled back from them, it sounded like a million people were popping bubble wrap all at once. There was sea foam floating at the edge and it looked like bits of old omelette. Oscar thought about throwing some at Grandma but decided not to. She hadn’t liked it before and then she had thrown some back and it smelled like drains.