Bone Lines

by Stephanie Bretherton

  As they’d picked themselves up from the grass to descend the hill she’d stumbled on the incline. Tom’s reflex to steady her soon turned into a whole body hug and it had felt like coming home. It was only as they’d unwound the natural weave of their bodies that her defences had sprung into place again. Eloise thanked him, blaming her clumsiness, but avoided eye contact as she searched in her bag for that extra bottle. Thinking she might find his offering undrinkable, she’d turned back to grab one of her own before leaving to meet him (willing herself not to think twice). Now she was glad – of every decision that had led her to this moment – and for choosing the only screw top to hand. Silencing her inner scold once more, she swigged straight from the bottle before passing it to Tom. Then they had walked away in unison from the solstice celebrations and onwards into the late-coming London night.

  When Tom had pulled her into the stairwell and manoeuvred her against the wall, Eloise had felt that for propriety’s sake she should resist, initially.

  Please, he had said. Please.

  Now, in the comforting loneliness of the after-hours laboratory, she kept her eyes closed and savoured the memory for a moment longer, breathing in the spiciness of his smell, feeling the rhythm of his hips, before fast-forwarding to another cherished episode in this sequence of recollections.

  This time Tom is naked, standing on her Indonesian dining table changing a light bulb that has been dead for months. It is perhaps the most beautiful thing she has ever seen. He turns, smiles, winks at her. Her stomach vaults.

  In the weeks that followed the solstice, Eloise could not remember having been kissed so much or so passionately since she was seventeen. They were ‘getting to know each other’ and she’d chastised herself for many of her assumptions and prejudices. For having been surprised to learn that Tom loved to read (OK, not quite her essential library list, but even so), although she recognised that part of his charm was the fluent (and yes, often colourful) way in which he expressed either an opinion or an emotion. Why had she assumed that a certain accent, attitude or aptitude for the Anglo-Saxon (and such freedom with expressing or acting on his desire for her) would indicate otherwise? For all her travel and education, for all her supposed ‘worldliness’ Eloise realised how conversely sheltered she had been about her own neighbours and compatriots. And how much pleasure there was in stripping all that away.

  The laughter! It came often and easily at the simplest and silliest of things. But their silences were never stilted and he seemed to sense when to leave her alone, never took offence at her fluctuating moods. Eloise found that she could fall asleep easily in his arms, a rare feat for such a light and irritable sleeper, and she would wake to discover that they lay together in mirrored, peaceful poses.

  Tom’s lack of sophistication unsettled her, nevertheless. Eloise had scoffed at the idea of taking him to one of the Foundation fundraisers, trussed up in a tux. The faces, the whispers. Then the sleeping scorpion awoke to raise its sting in a dusty corner of her soul, and she’d hated herself once more.

  This is insane. What am I doing? She had known that it was hopeless, pointless. She was thirteen years older and would soon be old and boring enough to disgust her young lover, as surely as she already disgusted herself.

  At twenty-five, Tom had no serious education, no discernible job, no ‘prospects.’ Yet he was exceptionally skilled in all the ways that mattered between them. No, not just skilled. Intuitive. Utterly in tune. Eloise had been unable to let go of that. Not without good enough reason.

  For a while, she had felt there were much better reasons to hold on, to keep exploring. Despite being ostensibly unemployed (beyond sources of income that Eloise was not sure she wanted to know about) Tom was not without ambition, or talent. One morning she’d found a few of his doodles in the notebook she kept by her landline, and while lacking in technique, his drawing had a distinctive style and vision. The doodles were mostly an assortment of abstract circular systems, of ‘automatic’ patterns of dots and spirals and swirls. Some of his work was more figurative, however, and engaged with the here and now. In particular, Eloise was touched by how well and with how much humour and affection his sketch of Newton had captured her cat’s inimitable character. She’d asked him to tear out and sign the portrait, thinking she might frame it one day.

  (Oh god, where is that now? I must find it.)

  ‘Have you thought about going to art school?’ she asked him at the time, ‘or maybe doing a graphic design course?’

  Tom had looked at her as though she’d suggested that he apply to NASA, and said, ‘Yeah. Right.’

  She decided not to push it. But it was clear that Tom had a facility with numbers, too, and he’d picked up backgammon as if he was born to it (soon learning how to beat her, as she’d hoped) which made Eloise wonder if he might be musical. Did he play any instruments? ‘No,’ he’d claimed (beyond being able to whistle with perfect pitch or memorise a rap) but she imagined this denial was more about a lack of opportunity than a lack of gifts. The way he looked at her when she showed any belief in him, in any such potential, suggested a hunger not only for her admiration but for so much… more.

  Then (of course, of course, she had been expecting it) the mortal blow. Tom had scraped up the courage one day to tell her that a former, occasional ‘girlfriend’ was pregnant. He did not want her to be, but she was – and she was swearing that it was his.

  Five months pregnant, Eloise had been horrified to learn on further interrogation (if relieved that conception would have been well before they’d met). The discovery had come several weeks into their tryst, after countless frenzied couplings and when it was far, far too late to stop. Or rather, to stop feeling. But it was the beginning of the end for Eloise. She could not, would not interfere with fatherhood.

  One afternoon they had glanced at each other and it had held. Then it was clear. This fever of unfettered lust, for both of them, had become love. He knew and she knew. Profound, authentic, simple. Nothing like the theatre of war it had been with Darius. Impossible. This madness could go no further. She would deny him.

  *

  She is pleased with her work. Some of the creatures have not been captured so well. This is a difficult thing to achieve, she has learned. The heads are too big, or the legs are too small, and yet they live on in new form across the walls of this cave.

  The symbols had come easier. Sun, water, tracks, spear, fire, moon. There had been some sadness as she drew the semi-circles of two men at a fire, or four women sitting together to talk, or to trance. Those marks now inhabit the beginning of her handiwork. Towards the end of this progression, the marks show only one woman. But not quite alone, there is the cup of her own semi-circle and also a smaller cup at her back. Within the curve of her own symbol there sits a cross. Only she can understand what it represents. The promise she has made.

  She wonders if it would have been right to also honour the thing that had died here with some kind of mark. It had been here first, after all, and this was its tomb. And it had suffered here, that much she felt. She pulls a charred bone from the base of the fire. She still cannot name this thing. She thinks it is better to leave it in the fire. Let it turn to ash. Something else of it seems barely touched by the fire, but it is not a bone.

  There has been little in her life that she has not wished to know more about, to look at, to touch and to learn from. But not this. She feels it is best to leave this thing where it is.

  17

  Eloise worked a while longer, but sorrow was scratching at her focus and soon she struggled to see through the microscope or take in its magnified images on screen. Leaning, back, closing her eyelids and stretching out the creaks and knots, she selected a memory, the way an old-fashioned jukebox finds and plays a record.

  That crooked incisor, revealed whenever he smiled, and he smiled often. The soft husk in his voice, the subtle rasp that grew deeper whenever he was aroused. The way he called her ‘Girl’. How he pronounced it in his north London acc
ent so that, somehow, it did not seem absurd.

  ‘Alright, Gell?’

  Yes, she had been alright, for three short months.

  Working late and alone was no longer enough to divert her, to keep the barking hounds of loss at bay or to distract her from all the potential for pain. Eloise decided to shut down for the day and face the dismal journey back to her pet-less home. She knew she couldn’t handle the Tube so decided to walk all the way, aware that as the evening lost its length any lingering autumnal warmth would soon recede into the dusk. She was lightly dressed but didn’t mind the chill, it meant she could pick up a brisk pace. Even so, by impulse she decided on a short cut through a soulless, if well-lit estate.

  Social Housing. This struck her as perhaps a tragic misnomer, as she passed by a tiny apron of grass hemmed in by chipped and bent railings. It bore a forlorn yet ridiculous notice forbidding all ball games or the exercising of dogs. It was beyond her own experience, but she wondered how much fun, how much freedom any creature (human or canine) might have growing up here? But then again, she had seen children come together creatively to make their own joy in even the most deprived of circumstances. It was among the deepest of instincts.

  Certainly there had been attempts here to create a community spirit, to take pride. A couple of balconies bore flowering window boxes. A mural of ‘permissible’ graffiti stretched across some garage doors and tried very hard to be upbeat, resisting the art form’s roots in political protest. The only protest here now, Eloise lamented, was to spit back at the privileged by overcharging them for their drugs when they came slumming, or to snatch whatever opportunities might arise to misappropriate from the careless.

  No, not fair, Eloise, not fair, she admonished herself. She knew that such dismissive cynicism was part of the problem – and she knew that many here, in this cradle of concrete, would be the first to step up in a crisis. That most here were capable of anything given the right conditions. She knew that the genetic differences between rich and poor were negligible and not the key-holders of the poverty trap that were once theorised. Eloise understood that it was environment – from proper nutrition to the encouragement of a support network and, crucially, the right kind of stimulation as young brains were developing – that mattered most.

  It was all about the opportunities for intelligence, innovation and curiosity to be expressed. Whether a cerebral withering or flourishing might condemn you to deprivation or propel you to the realisation of innate potential. A potential that would then run headlong into the web with which the wealthy insulated themselves. Into an austerity economy with two sets of rules and a beautifully spun lie of trickle-down rewards.

  Eloise knew of one from such a place who would and could flourish. One who, with the benefit of a mother who had read to him and a father who had been lovingly present, had bloomed amongst those rationed patches of green. Then she immediately regretted thinking about him. But with these memories of Tom also came the recognition of why she’d chosen this seemingly random route (other than getting home any sooner) and of the hidden hopes that had pushed her in this direction. She wasn’t sure whether this was Tom’s estate, but it might have been.

  As she came closer to home Eloise doubled back, deciding on a detour via her local shop but noticing the round-shouldered, darkly-clad youth a few metres behind her only once she had turned. She walked back past him without displaying any concern, despite the fact that, unusually, she felt some. But she needed to make that pit stop. No wine left at home. But also, as she realised when she got to the till, no cash in her purse either. Mehmet, the shopkeeper, knew her well and would have put it on a tab but she pulled out her debit card regardless. Eloise did not want to impose, preferred to save any favours for when she might really need them.

  ‘When you gonna go contactless?’ Mehmet asked with a smile.

  ‘Whenever I am forced to,’ Eloise replied, smiling back, still mistrustful of the supposed safety net of that technology.

  She did not like the closeness of the other person behind her as she punched in 1953, but as ever, she allowed the benefit of the doubt. Before she could fully turn and fasten her purse she was shoved into the counter, the bag wrenched along with her shoulder, and he was gone. Mehmet was ashen.

  ‘Hey!!! Hey!!! You bastard! My God, are you OK?’

  Ribs bruised but no great harm, she could speak.

  ‘Yes, I’m alright, thank you. Did you get a good look at him?’

  ‘No, no, not really. We were chatting. Oh, Dr Kluft, I am so sorry, are you sure you’re OK?’

  She had been using this corner shop for so many years, she knew three generations of the family, had looked over his daughter’s application for medical school.

  ‘Eloise,’ she said, ‘Please, Mehmet, how long how have I been asking you to call me Eloise?’

  He tried to smile but was mortified.

  ‘CCTV! That should have got the bastard! I’m calling 999…’

  ‘Yes, and then let me use your phone, please, mine’s in the bag. I need to cancel the cards. No, actually, forget the police for now, let me do that first. Probably more useful.’

  As she waited for an answer from the hotline that Mehmet had looked up, Eloise felt the weight of lifetimes of human absurdity dragging at her feet. Had she somehow manifested this mugging by, however briefly, having unkind or patronising thoughts about her urban neighbours? Those inhabiting a world so near and yet so far. A stupid notion, of course. Even so, she found herself suffering from the persistence of her current misfortunes far too sharply.

  What is this? What have I done, she demanded of an unresponsive universe. Why am I having to wade through knee-high crap right now?

  The police came, surprisingly quickly. Perhaps, Eloise thought, she should have called them first after all. They took a statement, radios stuttering. Mehmet had given her a miniature of brandy but the shakes were coming on regardless. The camera was most likely at too high an angle to have seen under her assailant’s cap and hood, but Eloise hoped that they would get him. A fingerprint on a discarded card, a quick lead on where he’d tried to use it, a conveniently passing patrol car. Not to see him punished or processed through the crime academies but because she wanted the opportunity to sit across from him, to look into his eyes (to take a swab from his cheek) to talk to him. To tell him that yes, she was angry (very fucking angry) but that she was not afraid and she did not hate him. That she automatically respected people – or at least tried to – until they gave her a reason not to and would have respected him, too, if he’d have given her a chance. Might even have given him the money if he’d asked for it, if he’d needed it that badly.

  And then in a moment of clarity Eloise was forced to ask whether that truly would have been the case. Perhaps this was simply wishful thinking as to her own social merit? Maybe so, but hypocrisy or complacency aside, she wanted the chance to tell her young assailant that this was all so unworthy of him, and of all that he could be. That whatever bars he already felt caged by might be lifted, with time, help, and a little cognitive will. She had read the studies, seen the transformative effects that an enriched environment, physical, emotional and mental could have, reversing the damage of trauma and neglect. Or at least preventing them from being passed on.

  But how willing might she be personally to offer such help, to give of her own time and resources – real action instead of theory and good intent? Or was it all as it ever had been and was the desire of the more advantaged to lift the luckless out of their misfortunes no more than a ‘bleeding heart’ pipe dream? Even if that were the case, Eloise hoped that she might one day have the opportunity to at least try to make a difference, to intervene at the right time. Professionally or personally. Surely it would be worth the effort?

  Once home (relieved that her keys had been in her jacket pocket and not her handbag) she knew that she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Not without assistance. Eloise poured herself a glass from the bottle she’d bought from Mehmet right before the
mugging, and sat down to read. But the lightweight Pinot wasn’t up to the job. She broke the wax seal on a 12-year-old port and served herself a healthy tot of that instead. She was about to put on a medley of soothing piano music before realising that her phone was now in the hands of her thief, and with it her playlists. She wondered whether perhaps she could find all that again somewhere in the cloud? But it felt like too much effort for this evening. She’d had enough of screens and blue light and software for one day.

  Then she remembered that she’d held on to her father’s old portable record player and a few of his best-loved vinyls, still there in a nook in his study in the basement. It occupied the sky-lit end of the old coal cellar, the other end having been boxed in and converted to her mother’s darkroom. As she switched on the light, which did nothing to dispel the smell of damp (Eloise did not know why she had expected it to) and walked down into that little shrine, the floorboards creaked with unfamiliar weight.

  On flicking through the shelf above the turntable-in-a-suitcase (a collector’s item that had been one of her father’s prized possessions) Eloise found a dusty old Peggy Lee album, gave it a wipe with her sleeve and put it on. She let it crackle and hiss as it played ‘Is that all there is’ and let it soothe her. Yes, ‘vintage’ seemed to be absolutely the right prescription for tonight. She sat at her father’s roll-top oak desk, which itself had been left behind by its former owner when her parents had bought the house. It bore a brass plaque inscribed to Father Mortimer from his grateful parish. No children to leave it too, clearly, and too bulky to bother moving.

  Knowing where to look, Eloise pulled out a yellow foolscap pad from a reluctant drawer. She found her father’s old Parker pen in there too. (A gift from her, one Christmas, a tradition acknowledged by her family as a necessary celebration to brighten up the cold, dark northern winter) She scribbled a while to get the ink rolling and then let her scrawling longhand flow.