The Shape of Bones
Page 13
The Clearing
No one could remember a winter that had arrived with such great force. From one day to the next, there was a thirty-five-degree drop in temperature and the wind chill that Friday night made it feel even colder than the forty-six degrees Fahrenheit predicted in the Lunchtime News, doing justice to the portentous expression ‘polar air mass’. At Hermano’s house, the fridge was powered down to the lowest setting, woollen quilts were brought down from the tops of wardrobes and placed at the foot of every bed, electric heaters were left in the bathrooms to make it easier to get out of the shower, and the aroma of his mother’s onion soup, a tradition in the cold months, wafted into every room in the house. On his bike rides to and from school, in the early morning and right before lunch, the icy wind had sandpapered Hermano’s face and now, in the afternoon, his skin was dry, sensitive and taut. People went about underdressed, many in flip-flops and T-shirts, surprised by the change of weather or still unable to assimilate the new temperature, hunched over and focused on their own discomfort.
Early in the afternoon, protected by tracksuit bottoms, a nylon jacket and a thick, striped wool scarf, Hermano walked to Walrus’s house. The door to the new and bigger garage, with its shiny coat of brown paint, was ajar. Hermano rang the doorbell and heard Walrus shout for him to come in through the garage. He no longer had to fear the dogs, because a few days earlier Armageddon and Predator had bared their teeth and turned on Skinny Face, who had whisked out his revolver and put a bullet through their skulls. The garage was completely empty inside, with paw- and footprints in the layer of dust coating the dark-red flagstones. As he entered the house, Hermano noticed that cardboard boxes were scattered everywhere, most of them open, containing all manner of domestic objects thrown in at random. The shelves were empty and the furniture looked as if it had been dragged here and there. Hermano climbed the stairs to the second floor and went into Walrus’s room. Bricky was already there. They hadn’t waited for him to arrive to start playing Stunts. It was their favourite computer game, with simple but fluid 3D graphics, realistic physics, an enormous variety of cars, a replay function, and a tool that allowed you to create new racetracks with great freedom, placing curves, ramps, drawbridges, loop-the-loops, barriers, oil slicks, and even scenic elements such as trees and buildings, wherever you wanted. Every now and then the trio would get together at Walrus’s house to create new tracks and then spend hours breaking records. When Hermano walked in, they were hunched over the monitor, adjusting the details of a new track. Without taking his eyes off the screen, Walrus said:
‘Check it out. We’re making a track that’s impossible to finish.’
Hermano pulled up a stool. The atmosphere in the room was weird. In general, events on the monitor, whatever they were, were powerful enough to be their sole focus for hours and hours. This time, however, it was as if the game were only a pretext to divert their attention from other uncommonly weighty topics. Staring intently at the screen, they didn’t need to look at one another. Discussing what kind of obstacle should be placed at the end of a series of loops, that early-winter day, they avoided talking about things that were changing their lives for ever.