Naming the Bones

by Mauro, Laura

  “Can they?” Alessa asked.

  The woman drew back, adopting the same slack-shouldered posture she’d had when she first sat down. She was still flushed, but there was something predatory about her expression now, a certain satisfaction; she’d baited the hook and known Alessa would bite. “We shouldn’t talk about it here,” she said. “Bit public, innit? Take my phone number. Ring me later on, when you’ve had time to calm down.” She put out her hand and Alessa found herself handing over her mobile, watching as the woman jabbed at the screen.

  Alessa looked over at the bar, wondering if it was too early for gin. She wasn’t sure about this woman. She was an unknown quantity, and Alessa had always preferred the safe and familiar. But she claimed to hold information that Alessa badly wanted to know, and her burning curiosity was fast winning out over her uncertainty.

  “Here,” she said, handing the phone back over. Alessa glanced at it. The woman’s fingers had left faint smudges on the screen. There was a mobile number and above it, in capital letters, the name ‘CASEY’.

  The woman stood abruptly. “Ring whenever,” she said. “I don’t really sleep, so you won’t be disturbing me.”

  “Right,” Alessa said, staring at the screen. “I’m Alessa, by the way.”

  Casey tipped her a nod. “A pleasure,” she said. “Ring me.” She jabbed a brief finger in the direction of Alessa’s phone and then she was gone, slipping out of the door and into the crowd with such ease that Alessa almost wondered if she’d been there at all.

  *

  I t was still light outside when Alessa got home. She grabbed her laptop from under the coffee table and booted it up. Her wallpaper was a picture Shannon had taken a few years ago during one of her frequent ‘spiritual’ sojourns to Ibiza; a surprisingly adept photograph of Es Vedra at sunset, sky and sea merged into a single bright pool of burning amber. It occurred to her just how badly she needed a holiday.

  There was a raft of unread emails in her inbox, mostly money off vouchers for restaurants she never ate at. She clicked ‘Compose Mail’ and rummaged among the lint and receipts in her pocket for the card Tom had given her earlier.

  Her hands hovered over the keyboard. What was she supposed to say? She hated emails almost as much as she hated phoning people; there was something sterile and unpleasant about communicating without the benefit of body language. Keep it simple, she told herself.

  To: kallemdjiantom@gmail.com

  CC:

  Subject:

  Hello Tom, this is Alessa Spiteri. I met you at the Healing Hearts support group earlier today and you suggested I should email you. We talked about the man we both saw that night on the Underground.

  I hope I’m not disturbing you. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me about this.

  Best,

  Alessa.

  She clicked ‘Send’ and set the laptop back on the coffee table.

  Alessa glanced around the bombsite of rubbish that constituted the living room and kitchen. She had never intended to live this way. It had crept up on her quietly, the way old age and infirmity inevitably would. For the first couple of weeks after the bomb she’d been too sore and too shell-shocked to do much more than lurk around the house like a sad, listless ghost. And the rubbish had slowly taken over. The black bags out on the balcony had resembled a Tracy Emin installation. Towels and clothes lay in sad little piles on the floor, as if their occupants had been suddenly spirited away. By the time she felt able to get back to the business of actually living, the flat was in such a pitiful state that the thought of tackling it all made her want to lie down in a dark room. The task didn’t seem so horribly insurmountable any more. She supposed that might be a sign of progress.

  Alessa rooted through the kitchen in search of something edible, realising with dismay that it had been a long time since she’d been to the supermarket. She surfaced with a slightly stale packet of cream crackers, a mostly empty tub of cheese spread and an unopened jar of green olives which, judging by the film of dust coating the glass, had been languishing in the cupboard for quite some time.

  She was assembling her meal when her mobile rang, buzzing loud on the coffee table. It was probably Shannon, calling to see how she’d got on at the support group. Alessa grabbed the phone, swiped the screen with her thumb. “Yep?” she said, hurriedly swallowing a mouthful of cheese-laden cracker.

  “Are you talking with your mouth full? That’s nasty.”

  That voice, dry as old earth. “Casey? How’d you get my number?”

  “I rang myself from your phone. Earlier, in the café. Surprised you never noticed.” Alessa could almost hear the shrug in her voice. She was resolutely laconic, as if words were currency she didn’t want to spend. “D’you wanna hear about the Shades or not?”

  “I didn’t think you meant I should call as soon as I got home.” Alessa said. “I haven’t even had dinner yet.”

  “You’re eating right now.”

  “I’m eating cream crackers and Dairylea,” she said. “Er. With olives on. I’m not convinced that counts as ‘dinner’.”

  She heard Casey snort. “Classy,” she said. “Look, I’m loath to invite myself into the houses of strangers, but I’ve got a booklet of Domino’s vouchers, and I’m just saying, but I think if you’re gonna go for the bread-cheese-olives combo you might as well do it properly.”

  Alessa glanced at her squalid surroundings. Casey was offering two things, both of which she badly needed: company, and answers. And while she was not usually in the habit of inviting people into her flat after a five-minute conversation, there was also the fact that it would soon be dark, and she would be alone again, hiding from whatever lurked in the car park.

  “Give me an hour,” Alessa said.

  *

  W ithin forty minutes Alessa had cleared several weeks’ worth of rubbish, scrubbed most of the surfaces and loaded the washing machine. She’d even found the energy to take three lots of black bags down to the communal bins. The sky had turned a deep blue, darkening on the eastern horizon. Once her business was done, she retreated back into the safety of her well-lit flat, peering over her shoulder as she went; no trace of strange shadows, no monsters lurking in unlit corners.

  It felt faintly euphoric, this sudden energy, and for a short while she forgot about the bomb, and the light in the tunnel, and everything that had followed. The residual ache of her thigh was the only thing tethering her to that memory. It was like emerging from a thick fog and finding herself somewhere new and exciting, and she couldn’t quite believe that Casey was the catalyst. She was a stranger, and somewhat odd to boot, but she was currently the only person in the world Alessa felt she could be honest with.

  Alessa pulled all the curtains shut at seven PM. She did not glance down into the car park, or beyond it to where the imposing black outline of the Rockingham Estate stood. She would be braver when Casey was here, she told herself.

  She almost jumped out of her skin when the buzzer echoed loudly throughout the flat.

  “Pizza delivery,” came Casey’s dour voice through the intercom.

  When she arrived at the door, she was dressed in an unseasonably thick duffel coat and too-big beanie hat. Two large pizza boxes rested on the shelf of her forearms, the smell of hot grease and pepperoni drifting upwards. “You’re not a veggie, are you?” Casey asked, moving past Alessa into the hall. “’Cause there’s about six types of dead animal in here and I’m not taking it back.”

  Alessa was mildly taken aback by her brazenness, but amused too. She followed her into the living room, watching as Casey glanced briefly around the flat. “No, I’m not a vegetarian.”

  “Good. Pizza without ground beef is an abomination. You want these on the coffee table, or are you a knife-and-fork sort of person?”

  “God, no.”

  Casey smiled, revealing tiny pebble-teeth. “I think we’re going to be friends.”

  They made small talk over pizza and blackcurrant squash. Whether by accide
nt or design Casey was guarded, revealing little about herself; she lived locally, was ‘productively unemployed’, had accumulated Domino’s vouchers through ‘more custom than is healthy’. She’d been heading to the trauma group the previous day but had bottled out at the last minute, and had ended up sitting in the station for half an hour instead, watching the creatures lurking in the tunnel. That was the most Alessa had been able to prise out of Casey, and she did not begrudge her. They barely knew one another.

  “Okay, so listen,” Casey said, wiping her hands on her jeans. “What you saw in the station. You ever seen that before?”

  Alessa picked olives off her slice and popped them into her mouth. “The shadow-things? Yes,” she said. It occurred to her that this was an insane conversation, that there was a good chance Casey was some kind of paint-sniffing lunatic. “I’ve never seen them appear like that. The other times they just seemed to be there.”

  “Not every day you get to witness the birth of a brand new baby Shade,” Casey said. “It’s an, uh, what do they call it? An auspicious occasion. I’ve only ever seen it a handful of times myself. Little shit’s probably lurking in the tunnels now. Why are your curtains drawn?”

  “I thought they’d stay away if they couldn’t see me,” she said, a little sheepish.

  Casey just nodded, brow furrowed and serious. “Don’t. They don’t like light. Keep your curtains open. Put your lights on when it gets dark. They’ll keep their distance.”

  “What are they?”

  “That’s the million dollar question, innit?” She paused, plucking at a pizza crust. “Here’s the thing. I’m not an expert or nothing, but I’ve been watching them. For the first week or so I only ever saw them around near where the bomb went off. A little while after that, I saw them down in the tunnels after a seriously messy suicide at St Pauls. My best guess is that they’re somehow attracted to areas of emotional trauma. I think that’s why we see them.”

  “Because of the bomb?”

  Casey nodded. “Because of the bomb. Think about how much raw emotion gets kicked up after something like that. I mean, you’ve got grief and pain and fear and all kinds of bad juju, and they’re all about that, you know, the way moths are with lights. But here’s where it gets interesting. See, from what I’ve seen, Shades prefer to stay hidden, but when they get a whiff of personal trauma they get brave. Or stupid, maybe. They seem to go after it. You get me?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What I mean is, I don’t know if you were having a shitty time beforehand or if the bomb just really took it out of you, but the Shades’ve taken an interest in whatever emotional baggage you’re carrying. That’s why you’re seeing them everywhere. You’re basically leaving a breadcrumb trail, and they’re following it.”

  Alessa sank deep into the sagging sofa cushions, staring at the gap in the curtains. The story Casey was spinning was convincing enough to Alessa, whose ‘emotional baggage’, at this point, could have comfortably filled the back of a van. But it was also insane.

  “Why tube stations, though?” She watched Casey lob a bunched-up tissue neatly into an open pizza box. “Bad things happen all over London, all the time. Do they only go above ground to follow someone?”

  “Far as I know,” Casey said. She was curled in the corner of the sofa, feet tucked beneath her. She’d taken no time at all in making herself at home. “This is all guesswork, remember, and, full disclosure, a lot of it happened at three in the morning. Insomnia’s a bitch.” She fumbled in her coat pocket – still draped across her shoulders, although she’d slipped her arms free, the sleeves hanging loose and empty – and pulled out a green pouch of Golden Virginia tobacco. “As for the Underground…there’s a guy I know, he harps on about this thing called the Stone Tape theory. They reckon that stone retains psychic trauma better than any other medium. Let’s say for a minute that he’s not a total bloody lunatic. When you consider the genesis of the Underground, all the plague pits dug up when the tunnels went in, all the people killed during construction, and then all the shit that happened after, like the stampede at Bethnal Green during the war. All that would be absorbed and stored. It’d become part of the fabric of the Underground. You ever heard any of the ghost stories they tell about the Tube?”

  “Footsteps on the platform when there’s nobody around, that sort of thing?”

  Casey nodded, extracting a roll-up from the pouch. It dangled unlit between her fingers. “Okay, so the theory goes that what we think are the souls of the dead are actually just echoes. Recordings, you get me? If someone dies a really violent or traumatic death, all that bad juju is absorbed by their surroundings and what you get is almost like a film. Those last moments of their lives, playing out on a loop for eternity. That’d be why ghosts seem to repeat the same course of action over and over.”

  Golden strands of loose tobacco speckled the newly-hoovered sofa. Alessa swallowed her dismay. “Do you actually believe that?” she asked.

  “Dunno,” Casey said. “It’s just a theory. I could be well off the mark. The only solid facts I know is that the Shades are actually real, that I started seeing them after the bomb, and that they’ve been following me about ever since. Same as you, I guess. Everything else is conjecture.”

  “Why do you keep calling them ‘Shades’? Is that what they’re really called?”

  Casey snorted. “I don’t bloody know. It’s not like you can just Google them. When you’re dealing with stuff that doesn’t officially exist, you sort of have to bring your own vocabulary to the party. The Stone Tape Theory guy came up with it. It’s some kind of nerdy Greek literature reference. He took offence to me calling them ‘lamprey bastards’. You know, ‘cos of the teeth?”

  Alessa thought of the shadow-thing she’d seen in the car park. The black hole of its mouth, crammed with teeth like shards of shattered glass. She wondered how easily they might pierce flesh. Whether they could crunch through bone. “Yeah,” she said. Her skin prickled with sudden gooseflesh. “They look nasty.”

  “Nasty,” Casey repeated, with some satisfaction. She produced a lighter from her coat pocket. “You mind?” she asked, waving her roll-up. When Alessa shook her head, she lit up, pulling the empty pizza box towards her to use as an ashtray. “Fucking horrifying is more like it,” she said, through a mouthful of cigarette. “First time I saw them I was insensible for a week. Second time was better. I’ve got a high tolerance for weird shit.” She smoked silently for a moment, puffing out misshapen smoke rings. They dissipated slowly as they rose to the ceiling. “But it’s normal to be freaked out by all this, you know? It feels your mind has suddenly checked out, especially the first time you see one.”

  “I was on the bus.” Alessa said. Her stomach suddenly felt uncomfortably full, the room too small. She forced herself to breathe, slow and steady. “In the window. I thought it was a shadow but it had eyes, and they were looking right at me. And I panicked. I shut my eyes and told myself it was all in my head, and when I opened them again it was gone. And then…I felt ridiculous.”

  “It’s all right to panic,” Casey said, so suddenly that Alessa was startled despite the softness of her voice. “I think that actually proves you’re still sane.”

  “I assumed it was stress,” Alessa said. Her fingers were an awkward bundle of bones in her lap; she focused on the interplay of muscle and tendon, anything to stop her from bursting into tears. “I just couldn’t reconcile what I’d seen in any other way. It couldn’t possibly be real, so it must have been PTSD, right? But the second time I saw one, it didn’t disappear. I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing, but it was right there, just…just sort of standing. And it wasn’t frightened of me. That was the worst part. It looked right up at me and I knew I was the only one of us that was afraid.”

  She felt the gentle pressure of Casey’s hand on her arm; a brief, reassuring squeeze.

  “But you’re not on your own anymore,” Casey said. Her eyes were dark in the lamplight. There was a awful loneliness
behind them, a sort of earnest desperation in the way she held Alessa’s arm. It seemed to Alessa that Casey probably didn’t have anybody, and Alessa was her sole, tenuous link to the rest of the world. “You and me, we’re gonna sort this out. We’ll be okay. And I don’t know how, but I promise you this: I’m gonna work out how to get rid of the bastards forever.”

  *

  C asey left at eleven. Alessa wasn’t sure she liked the idea of someone so small and fragile-looking walking home by herself that late at night, but Casey waved away her concerns, cigarette smoke pluming out from her grin-split mouth. “Anyone jumps me, I’ll knock their teeth so far down their throat they’ll be shitting enamel for a week,” Casey said, and Alessa believed her. She’d always thought she was tough and self-reliant, that she could cope with all number of hardships without anyone’s help, but watching Casey – the way she held herself, straight-shouldered, no small amount of swagger despite her diminutive frame – she realised she’d been dead wrong.

  When Casey was gone, Alessa scooped up her mobile. The screen indicated a new message; she swiped with her thumb to open it. It was from Shannon.

  Jst saw 3 kids on Boris bikes doin wheelies up Tooley Street. Knobheads. How r u? Support grp ok?

  She’d sent the message at 8.14pm, which was shortly after Casey had arrived. Alessa unbuttoned her trousers with one hand and kicked them off as she walked into the bedroom, texting Shannon back with her free hand. Her thumb worked clumsily over the keyboard:

  Wasn’t my thing. Not going back. Met a couple of interesting people though, might know something about the man in the tunnel, so not a complete waste of time.

  Shannon would be disappointed. She always was when one of her suggestions fell flat, like the time she’d suggested they both try a ‘juice detox’ and by the end of the first day Alessa had been so ravenously hungry she would have happily eaten the sofa.