Naming the Bones

by Mauro, Laura

  She stared up at Moira. Her head was tilted ever so slightly to one side, awaiting Alessa’s answer like a patient dog.

  “I haven’t been sleeping very well,” Alessa said, finally.

  “Don’t the tablets help?”

  They did, a little too well. The problem wasn’t getting to sleep; Alessa seemed to exist in a permanent state of exhaustion, nodding off at the most inopportune moments. The problem was what happened when she fell asleep. The problem was the dreams, and the man who never came back.

  “Not really,” Alessa said.

  “I’m reluctant to give you anything stronger,” Moira said, frowning at Alessa’s notes. “Have you considered any alternative therapies? I can put you in touch with a wonderful yoga instructor. Proper relaxation techniques can do wonders for insomnia.”

  Alessa forced a smile. “That would be good, thank you,” she said, hoping she sounded more enthusiastic than she felt. Suddenly, she was desperate to get out of this room, to breathe clean air. “Maybe you could email me the details,” she said, but Moira had already unearthed a leaflet. Moira had leaflets for just about everything.

  “I think you’re making very good progress, Alessa,” Moira said, watching Alessa fold the leaflet in half without even glancing at it. “We both knew this was going to be a long, hard process, but you’re doing exceptionally well. I’m glad you were able to talk about what happened. It’s important to be able to face these things, especially if you’re called to speak at the inquest.”

  “Very important, yes,” Alessa said, nodding. That was the key to surviving these sessions, she’d learned; nodding in the right places and agreeing with the counsellor, even if you thought they were talking total nonsense.

  Perhaps there were better counsellors out there, ones who knew how best to approach the open wound of post-traumatic stress, but Moira Monaghan was not one of those counsellors. She was hopelessly out of her depth, well-meaning but largely ineffectual. It wasn’t her fault; she hadn’t had the training, had been drafted in at the last minute to cope with the sudden swell of trauma patients, and Alessa sometimes sensed that Moira was as uncomfortable with the arrangement as she was.

  Alessa’s pleas to be transferred had gone largely unheard – lost, perhaps, in the great paperwork vortex of the NHS. She was lucky to have access to a counsellor at all, her sister told her. There were people out there who’d been on the waiting list for far longer.

  Out in the car-park, the gloom of the office gave way to lukewarm spring sunshine. Alessa shielded her eyes with one hand. The Shard was a spire of white glass, painfully bright; the lumpen protrusion of Guy’s Tower shielded the worst of the glare. It was a monstrously ugly building. When she was a child, and the skyline hadn’t been half as cluttered, the hospital tower had resembled some kind of giant animal, complete with silver cylinder ears. Nestled now among bright glass and polished steel it seemed a sad old thing, diminished and decaying like so much of the London she recalled from her childhood.

  Ahead stood the railway arch, and beneath it London Bridge station. Perhaps it was a sign of progress that the familiar red-and-blue underground symbol no longer sent her heart into immediate spasm. Perhaps Moira had been good for something. But if she thought too hard about the escalators trundling down into the depths, or the platforms flanked by wide, black tunnel-mouths the breath would stick in her chest, and a sick, sour weight would form in her gut. Moira called it a ‘panic spiral’. It seemed as accurate a description as any; a dizzying descent into nausea, breathlessness so intense the world around her seemed to disappear entirely. And suddenly she would find herself back there on the tracks, holding Deborah’s hand, the stink of burnt flesh hot in her nostrils.

  Alessa studiously avoided the station, walking down the quieter back roads. It was a longer route, but it wasn’t like she had much else to do. Even before the bomb it had been months since she’d had anything like a regular job. She’d thought about reapplying to the agencies, sending her CV to the local schools. It’d be good for her to restore some semblance of normality. To be a part of the world again.

  She reached the bus stop just as the bus was pulling in. It was late April but the heaters were still on, and the air inside the bus felt unpleasantly damp, a miasma of sweat and condensation. She sat beside a window, turning her face up to the scant breeze trickling in.

  Alessa had never liked buses much. They moved ponderously, trundling through traffic and pausing at red lights. Perhaps it was some unconscious snobbery but buses seemed like mobile havens for strange behaviour. People talked on the bus, to one another and their phones and sometimes to complete strangers. She’d always appreciated the comparative quiet of the Tube, where eye contact was forbidden, and people spoke in hushed tones, if at all.

  And there she was again, thinking of the Underground as though she’d ever be able to set foot on it again without panicking. Remembering the sardine-tin crush of commuter bodies made her acutely aware of her own heart, and the way it beat just a little too hard against her ribcage. ‘This is the start of your panic-spiral,’ she heard Moira say. She closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath and, in her head, began naming the bones: Occipital, parietal, frontal, temporal, sphenoid…

  It had seemed ridiculous when Moira had first proposed it. She’d suggested counting backwards from fifty, or reciting something simple – the Lord’s Prayer, perhaps. (Alessa had rejected that one outright, not least because her joyless Protestant mother might have approved). Later, when the panic attacks wouldn’t stop coming and Alessa was desperate enough to try anything, it’d been her sister Shannon – paediatric nurse and know-it-all - who had suggested she memorise the individual bones of the human body. It was a game they’d played as girls, asserting intellectual superiority through memorising trivia – an ultra-competitive ‘bet-you-can’t’ which had endured into adulthood.

  …ethmoid, nasal, maxillae, lacrimal…

  Alessa cracked open an eye. Nobody was watching her. Outside, the bus eased through the traffic, slipping beneath the railway bridge onto Bermondsey Street. The bright spring sunshine gave way temporarily to dank gloom.

  …zygomatic, palatine…

  Three men in grubby overalls got on, moving upstairs in a close-knit cluster. A harried-looking woman struggled on board with a pram piled high with Tesco bags, followed closely by a thin man with skin the colour of spoiled milk, toothpick arms protruding from a baggy Motorhead t-shirt. He smelled of unwashed skin and worn leather, and a faint undertone of day-old skunk. She turned her face to the window, hoping the breeze might help dilute the odour.

  In the window, a face stared back.

  Alessa’s limbs jolted sharply. Her heart seemed to seize for a few seconds, squeezing like a clenched fist in her chest. An empty black face save for pale grey pinhole eyes, staring up at her, meeting her wide-eyed gaze with utter impunity. A smudged charcoal sketch of something vaguely humanoid, limbs long and spider-thin. It sat there for a moment, boneless in the seat beside her; it blinked languidly, lids like shutters sliding over those hard grey eyes. A shadow, she thought, swallowing down the bilious panic burning at her throat. Just a shadow. She held her breath as she turned to look at the seat beside her.

  It was empty. Nothing there but worn upholstery. One hand clutched unconsciously at her throat, pulse rapid beneath her fingers. The thin man across the aisle side-eyed Alessa and shuffled further along in his seat, staring pointedly at his mobile.

  By the time she found the courage to look back to the window, the bus had veered out into the sunlit street once more, and the shadow – if it had ever been there at all – was gone.

  She wanted to feel stupid. Alessa Spiteri, twenty-seven years old and literally jumping at shadows. But all she felt was a strange pressure on her chest, like strong hands pushing down, and she found herself hurriedly leaving her seat, thumb pressing repeatedly on the bell as she slipped into the aisle.

  At the next stop the doors slid open with a tired hiss; she scrambled
onto the pavement, gulping in diesel fumes like she might never get to breathe again. As the bus pulled off she saw a woman and her little girl settling into the seat where the shadow had been, blissfully unaware that anything strange had ever happened.

  She stood in the sunlight, propped woozily against the bus shelter. Her heart beat with the staccato haste of a frightened animal.

  “Are you unwell?”

  Alessa turned sharply, startling the little Asian woman who’d questioned her. She had pebbly little glasses and long a black braid shot through with bright streaks of white. She approached Alessa with slow caution. “You don’t look very well,” the woman said. “You should sit down.”

  “No,” Alessa said. There were others at the bus stop and every one of them was gawking at her, though some at least had the courtesy to pretend they weren’t. She did feel stupid then; her fingers ached as she peeled her hands from the frame of the bus shelter. “No, thank you. I’m okay now. I’m fine.”

  The look on the woman’s face suggested Alessa did not look fine, but she didn’t attempt to stop Alessa scurrying away from the bus stop, cheeks flushed in embarrassment, her pulse still thundering in her throat.

  TWO

  A lessa hadn’t been far from home but she backtracked all the same, heading for her sister’s flat in Blackfriars. She wound through backstreets she knew with intimate familiarity, past off-licences and launderettes and trees frothing with pale pink blossom, plastic bags caught and billowing in their boughs. The streets were bathed in sunshine and shadows were few and far between, but Alessa found herself studiously avoiding windows, gaze fixed only on the distance ahead.

  Shadow-ghosts in the bus window. “Straight out of the bloody Twilight Zone,” she muttered to herself. “Shannon’s going to laugh herself sick.”

  Alessa huddled deep into her jacket as she walked. Despite the clear blue sky and bright, high sun, the air still smelled faintly of winter; a cold, pervasive dampness, lingering even as the dew dried from the grass. She felt like she’d been in hibernation for a long time; all those numb hours on the sofa, awakening as if from a dream only to realise she’d been staring at the wall for the better part of three hours. She felt as though she was only barely a part of the world sometimes, existing on some strange margin inhabited by the anxious and the scared and the mad. Her hair hung in tangles, her skin sallow. Sometimes, she’d catch herself in a mirror, staring in horror at the smudges beneath her eyes, deep as bruises, and wonder just how she’d let herself slip so badly.

  It was a sentiment Shannon echoed when she opened the door, eyes widening first in surprise, then in mild horror. “Wow, what underpass did you wake up in?” she asked, pulling momentarily away from the phone she was holding. Alessa squeezed past her into the narrow hallway, made narrower still by the abundance of mismatched artwork lining the walls: a replica canvas of Van Gogh’s Starry Night sat egregiously beside a gaudy Sex Pistols poster Shannon had bought specifically to irritate their mother.

  “Thanks.”

  “Be right with you. Got mum on the phone.” Offhanded, but Alessa caught the roll of her eyes as she sidled off into the kitchen.

  Alessa went into the living room and put her coat and bag on the dining table - a small square of glass which might seat two at a push. She sat in the armchair, taking care to turn her back to the window. The flat was only just big enough to accommodate people, let alone furniture, and the communal areas were usually in want of a good deep clean, but Shannon always said the river view made up for everything else.

  Shannon came in from the kitchen with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. “I can’t…” Alessa began, but the glass appeared in her hand, and Shannon poured until it threatened to overflow.

  “You can,” Shannon replied, pouring herself an equally voluminous glass. “You will. Because I sure as hell need a drink after speaking to mum, and you look like you could do with one too.”

  Alessa wriggled forward in her chair, placing the glass on the coffee table. “You’re not supposed to mix antidepressants and alcohol.”

  Shannon made a face. “We both know you’re not taking the antidepressants,” she said. “It’s good wine, and expensive, and I’m not going to let you waste it, so just bloody drink it.” She led by example, draining half her glass in one go. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Jesus, she’s hard work.”

  “What did she want?” The wine tasted pleasantly dry, clearing some of the fog from her brain. Shannon looked utterly frazzled, barely recovered from the night shift; her blonde hair was scraped back into a stringy ponytail, her face scrubbed and shiny.

  “Oh, she thinks she’s dying. Again.” A wave of the hand. “She’s been feeling faint. She wanted me to check her blood pressure. It has been a little high lately, but that’s because she drinks about thirty cups of coffee a day. I told her to cut down on the caffeine and try eating proper food for once. Have you seen the size of her?” Shannon shook her head and refilled her glass. “She’s just skin, bone and dust at this point. No wonder she’s been feeling faint. I’d send her for bloods, but I’m not sure she’s got any.”

  Alessa let out a little snort of laughter. “You’re cruel.”

  “She looks ancient,” Shannon said, with something approaching horror. “Jesus, I hope I take after dad. He didn’t look like a dried-out old mummy at sixty.”

  “He was seventeen stone. How many fat mummies have you ever seen?” In their wedding pictures her parents had appeared comically mismatched – Eleanor, small and dainty as the iced flowers on their wedding-cake, and Marco, six foot one and built like a barrel, big and round and solid. In the last few months of his life his weight had plummeted with alarming speed, revealing the surprisingly delicate bones of him beneath like a frame upon which her father had been built, layer by layer. The first thing the cancer had robbed him of was his appetite. That had always seemed especially cruel to Alessa. Food had been her father’s greatest joy in life, surpassed only by his daughters.

  Alessa looked down at her own layer of flab spilling over the waistband of her jeans – diminished since the bomb, because constant gut-wrenching anxiety and food had proven to be largely incompatible, but persistent all the same.

  Shannon smiled, a little sadly. “But anyway. Never mind mum. Why are you here?”

  Right up until Shannon opened the front door, she’d been ready to tell her everything: the nightmares about the disappearing man, and the thing in the window, the black shadow staring intently at her with pale pinprick eyes. Shannon would listen, and she would not laugh, not really; she was a paediatric nurse, it was her job to entertain all manner of fears and phobias and concerns, even monsters under the bed. But she wouldn’t understand it. How could she?

  I saw a monster in the window and I’m fixated on a man I never even saw properly, Alessa thought, taking a gulp of wine for courage. How do I expect anyone to understand a thing like that?

  “I had a panic attack on the bus,” Alessa said. “It’s not the first time it’s happened, but this was different to anything I’ve experienced before. The bus went under a bridge, and it was dark, and - well, this is going to sound mental, but I think I sort of…hallucinated.”

  “Hallucinated?” Shannon frowned. “How do you mean? Has it happened before?”

  “Well, I mean, it wasn’t a hallucination exactly,” Alessa backtracked, aware of the suspicion in Shannon’s eyes. “It was…I was fine. Even when the bus went under the bridge, I was fine. But then I looked at the window, and…” She stopped short. The words remained stuck stubbornly to the roof her mouth: I saw a monster. It stared at me, and then it disappeared. “I don’t know,” Alessa finished lamely. She pressed her fingers to her forehead; her brain had begun to throb. It must have been the wine. “I don’t know what it was. Shadows playing tricks on my eyes, I suppose. I just panicked. I had to get off the bus before my head exploded.” She exhaled. It sounded like a sigh. “Maybe I’m going mad.”

  She felt Shann
on’s hand on her shoulder. Somehow, she’d crossed the room and perched on the arm of the chair without Alessa noticing. “You’re being hard on yourself,” she said. In the full light of the window she looked tired; the skin beneath her eyes was thin and papery, revealing a delta of blue-green veins. “You expect too much, too soon. I know how much you want to get back to work, but you need to give yourself time. Why don’t you mention it to Moira at your next session?”

  “Moira’s full of shit,” Alessa said.

  “Oh, whatever.” Shannon’s smug, lopsided smirk hadn’t changed since childhood. “You’re not letting her help you, that’s the problem. She’s not offering you easy answers and you can’t stand it, so you’ve decided she’s no good to you. You can’t go through life assuming you can do everything by yourself. That’s always been your problem. That’s why you’re still having trouble coping.”

  Alessa’s hackles rose instinctively, but Shannon had hit close to the mark. She rubbed absently at her arms, shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

  “Speaking of Moira,” Shannon said. “There’s a trauma support group who meet every couple of weeks at the hospital. It was set up by survivors of the London Bridge bombing. They’ve got a meeting tomorrow afternoon sometime. You’re always saying how Moira doesn’t understand what you went through, and I get that, but these people shared your experiences. They saw the things you did. I think it would be good for you, talking with people who get it.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Alessa said, though the mere thought of it made her itch somewhere deep beneath the skin; it was too much like exposure, a display of emotional nakedness in front of complete strangers.