Fifteen Bones Read online

  R.J. Morgan lives and works in London. FIFTEEN BONES is her first novel.

  For Grand

  Contents

  Cover

  Half Title Page

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  When the scouring pad drew blood it became apparent the penis on my forehead was permanent. I plunged my face so deep into the bowl, the water looked black. I tried to hold my breath, but the water threw me out and forced me to look at this creature in the mirror, with blood and graffiti covering its face.

  I went to my room and lifted the loose floorboard by the window. I picked up my stash and I would have done it there and then, except I didn’t want to be a corpse with a drawing of a penis on its forehead. I replaced the pills and my floorboard and decided to wait for the ink to fade. And that’s how I ended up spending that week at home, and that’s how I became accustomed to the rants of the hunched man next door, and the skinny girl with long arms, who rattled around like a pinball to avoid him.

  I’d watch the man from the edge of my window as he stormed up to his attic. I wondered what he was up to. I wondered what the girl had to do with it, and what it must be like to fight for your life, rather than watch it melt off you piece by piece. And then I’d think it was terrible to be envious of her torment, and I would feel even worse.

  The only thing that made me feel better was my stash, and calling Isaac. This wouldn’t last. You can only push people so far, and Isaac wasn’t speaking to me much any more. With every pill I took he got further from me, and soon I would take a bite of something and he would disappear.

  We had moved so many times my stuff could fit into three battered cardboard boxes: one for clothes, one for filming and computer equipment, and another for my and Isaac’s props.

  Mother’s business was to buy Death Houses, do them up and flip them. We’d move in, then she’d start scrubbing off the filth and oil, paint the whole place magnolia and it would look like everywhere else. She didn’t care who had died and rotted in the sitting room. Your existence would be mopped up and your death would become an Ikea rug or a jaunty throw, erased from living memory.

  This Death House was more depressing than usual because the upstairs was empty whilst downstairs was stuffed to the brim with newspapers, Christmas decorations and stacked cereal boxes. Whoever died here never had visitors, and hadn’t been able to use the stairs for years.

  I spent my time searching through the clutter and getting depressed over a lifetime spent reading the Daily Express and obsessing over Jaffa Cake boxes. I was under strict instructions not to touch anything, but I picked up the things I liked and hid them from Mother’s magnolia warpath.

  I’d cheer myself up by editing the last sketches Isaac and I had made. Isaac played on a loop while I edited the fine detail. Editing is a bit like composing music. You have to time the perfect pause so everyone will laugh. I composed long into the night, poring over every line Isaac said or sang.

  “Come back to me,” he said whilst dressed as a posh onion. “Come back.”

  The shouting from next door would occasionally bring me to the window and I’d look across the rows of embattled houses. Foils scraped along the street like leaves, gathering around bins and trees and skipping over endless speed bumps that lay like dead bodies across the tarmac. The shouting seemed to still the air, and I wondered if anyone else was listening, quietly sickened by the ceaseless rant and their inability to stop it.

  The house next door sat wet in mud and looked like a giant toad. It was painted dark green and had a broken gutter that streamed rain water over black mould. A red security light blinked angrily above the door. The light from the attic was a bulbous eye, twitching whenever the hunched man paced across the room.

  Directly opposite my room was the bedroom of a teenage girl. Her window faced mine like a checkmate. Tree branches ran like veins between our houses, the garage roof a scaly skin that connected us like conjoined twins. Her room was bare except for a bed, a vanity table and a mound of clothes that hid the carpet. Every item of clothing was grey. If you squinted, the room looked like a mud slide. Pyramids of damp ran from the corners of the ceiling. Maybe that was why she didn’t have any pictures on the walls. I wondered if they knew that black mould was dangerous, and that circular mould can kill you.

  In the beginning, the yelling was more irritating than frightening. The man’s voice was a squashed, bellowing growl, raked in cigarettes and beer. He struggled to articulate himself, swearing, his anger racing ahead of his thoughts. When the thoughts caught up, he would hit and stamp on them until they weren’t thoughts any more, just more pieces of anger.

  On the third or fourth day, as I tried to edit myself out of the Apple Pie scene, the yelling progressed to a high-pitched yowling that poured cold water down my spine.

  Living in Meadow Gorge had made me immune to other people’s screams. I was accustomed to suicidal outbursts and death threats, but this was yelling like I had never heard before.

  At first I thought he was screaming at himself, or to whichever demons he could see, but as the week went on and the sky grew darker, the girl’s voice became audible.

  A scream struck the cold of my bedroom and it hit me all over again. I steadied myself on the wall. I had to call the police, but the scream had arrested my lungs and burned the pulp of my brain. I dialled. The walls became wet and dark, and I slipped further down to the cold ground. The operator asked me which service I wanted. She asked if I was all right. She said to blow into the phone. She said she could hear yelling and I needed to tell her where I was. She said she was tracing the call.

  At the bottom of a mossy pit, lights swirling in my eyes, I managed four words: Forty-Four Rancome. Hurry.

  I lay flat on the dusty floor and covered my ears with my hands. I heard the call over the scanner:

  Domestic dispute at 44 Rancome Road, Oscar Delta one. Over.

  Received. 44 Rancome. That’s Marcus Brigley’s house, control. Over.

  Received. Proceed with caution. Requesting back up. ETA, Oscar Delta one. Over.

  Received. Three minutes, control. Over.

  Received. Ten-four. Over.

  Mother had a police scanner to find Death Houses before estate agents could get their mitts on them. She’d know if a funny smell was coming from a dark flat, or if a neighbour had become irritated by an ongoing alarm and an elderly person hadn’t been seen in a while. When I have fits or collapse or hallucinate being buried alive, Mother stares at me blankly and can’t figure out why.

  The police car was three minutes away, but from the gathering pace of the man’s outbursts, this was too long. His voice had become looping and breathless. He was losing control of himself. I needed to distract him. I dug around in the cardboa
rd boxes and found Isaac’s firecrackers. I bunched them into a ball and tested my throw: weak. Muscle and flesh had gone into repairing my broken bones. The casts had left me shrivelled and uneven, as if my flesh had poured into the cracks of my bones like putty. My lungs burned as I hunted for my steroid pump. I was struggling to breathe. Asthma. I could do without the asthma.

  Another yell belted across the cold room. I lit the firecrackers. The flame raced up the string. I panicked and threw them with a mighty yell but they fell directly at my feet. The girl’s scream came again. I inhaled, picked up the crackers and threw them out of the window.

  They missed the Toad House and hit the mud outside. They lay silent for a while then popped with frenzy. The yelling stopped. The hunched man with shoulders the size of dogs, threw his curtains open and snarled. I ducked as I heard sirens ribbon through the air.

  My heart beat like a rabbit’s until I heard her voice again. “One day,” she said, “I’ll burn this place to the ground.”

  Mother’s car pulled into the driveway. I didn’t know where she’d been all week. I found my school uniform and arranged it on the floor. She yelled my name so loudly I imagined she already knew what I had done. I sat against my door.

  She was banging on the front door and rattling the lock. Soon she’d realize it was open and fall inside the house. I heard the stumble and the subsequent cursing. “Jake! Get your arse down here.”

  My arse didn’t go anywhere. I resumed watch of my mirror image as the girl’s shadow paced her room.

  A police car pulled up outside the Toad House and two officers climbed out. I watched them react to the sudden cold: one pulled at her jacket; the other gave himself a shake. The male officer knocked the Toad House door so loudly my window rattled. My window had glass that could break with one tap, was secured with one of those useless Valli locks they used in the sixties before they realized anybody could open them with a credit card and a magnet, and was so huge a grown man could climb through it. This was what stood between me and some enraged psychopath next door.

  The police officers stomped from foot to foot as they waited. When they stepped inside, I could no longer see them. There was a short scuffle and the window opposite mine flew open. The girl jumped out on to the garage roof. She absorbed the shock of the impact and leapt to the ground in one fluid move. “Jesus!” I cried, certain she would snap her legs, but she didn’t flounder as she bounded up the garden and leapt over the fence. I blinked, scanning the grass as if my eyes hadn’t caught up with her. I looked at the empty ground and unshaken fence, astounded. “Wow,” I said.

  “Jaaaake!”

  I jumped.

  “JAKE!”

  I stepped out of my room, glancing back at the empty garden.

  From the landing I watched Mother move like Pac-Man through the stacks of newspapers. No humans should have stepped foot in that house. There were mice and damp, and damp mice everywhere. The newspapers would make a bonfire of the place. I could name about five hundred things in a fifty yard radius that could kill you.

  “Jake! Help me with this paint stripper.”

  There’s another one.

  “JAKE, FOR GOD’S SAKE.”

  I swear she called me Jake because it rhymes with sake. “Stop announcing my name to the whole street.” I took another look out of the window at next door. “Put this street in Google and the first fifteen results are about a murder.”

  “I got a call from your school,” Mother said, her neck moving from side to side. She was barely able to speak she was so angry. “They said you haven’t been in since you was enrolled at the beginning of Ock-toooe-buur and do we still want you on the roll. They wanted to know if we had moved. I said yes we have moved again. Yes I’ve lugged these bloody boxes from Vauxhall to this side of hell and yes we still want him on roll thankyouverymuch!”

  Mother wrapped her arm around a stack of newspapers and pushed it to the ground. “You will be going to school like everyone else.”

  I’m not like everyone else.

  “Like a normal person.”

  I’m not a normal person. I walk, talk and look funny. That’s why, for me, school is like being in prison for something I didn’t do.

  “Are you coming downstairs or are you going to stand there like Liza Minnelli?”

  Mother’s eyes narrowed as she watched me struggle down the stairs. Her look sat so heavily on my chest I had to give up on my epic journey and sit down.

  “God’s sake, Jake.” Mother said. It’s a good job she didn’t call me Bart. “And what the hell have you done to your face?”

  “This,” I said, “is the fading remnants of a penis.”

  “The what of a what?”

  “I’m a Daily Mail scare story.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Mother stomped off.

  I looked down into the carrier cot Mum had dumped by the front door. I’d expected Squirm to be asleep, but she was staring with bewilderment at her hands. “Is the baby all right?”

  Mother pointed to the French doors that led to the garden. “Make yourself useful and open them doors.”

  Death Houses never have keys. My role in this morbid game was to pick all the locks and deactivate the alarms, then to change all the locks and reactivate the alarms.

  I looked up the stairs and wanted to cry. Stairs mean moving all your bones and a million muscles in a very specific and painful sequence. You have to grind cartilage and skewer bone into the fleshy nerves of your ankles and knees. You have to move about thirty muscles just to flex your leg. Just to flex it. Actual propulsion is another world of pain. Don’t get me started on the Herculean task of getting back down.

  “Now,” Mother said.

  I dragged my breezeblock feet up the stairs to fetch my tools, moaning and wailing all the way. “I can’t. Oh, God.”

  “Walk with your feet not your mouth.”

  Each step was like giving birth. I concentrated on extending my ankle to move my left leg. This is called “plantarflexion”. Moving the ankle is called “dorsiflexion”. I know this because I’ve had to learn to walk twice.

  I took my tools all the way downstairs, feeling as though I could fall down and cry at the amount of effort I had to put into everything.

  “Well? What are you waiting for?”

  “Another part of my soul to die,” I said.

  “Jesus,” Mother said. “The police are next door.” She pointed at my tool pouch. “Hide the skeleton keys.”

  I tried to put the keys back in their little pouches but my huge hands had gone red and wouldn’t grip anything. I put them under my armpits to warm them up, but they weren’t really cold, they were starved of oxygen. I hung my head at the thought of a creature so pathetic it didn’t have the strength to circulate its own blood.

  I’m not going to go on about it or anything, but I’ll tell you something about the accident I had. Of the many bones I broke, one was my coccyx. My arse, basically. I broke my arse. Not only is this so incapacitating you can’t even use a wheelchair, it also nicks a nerve in your lumbar so every now and again your own arse electrocutes your leg, just for the hell of it, and you howl like a wolf. There’s nothing you can do about it because it’s your arse that’s out of control and your poor legs are just these useless slabs that have to dangle there and take it.

  Anyway, when I broke my arse I had to lie face down in hospital, so I couldn’t see what was going on, and people gathered around my bum and spoke over it like it was a campfire. Eventually, they flipped me over and I lay there like an upturned turtle while doctors asked me why I looked so peaky. Worse than that, both my elbows were broken, and they had to put the plaster on at right angles otherwise they wouldn’t heal properly. If you have both arms at right angles then they stick out so you look like you’re about to row a boat, and you have to have sticks that go from an iron circle aro
und your waist to the encased wrists, and the nurse was like, You won’t be able to feed yourself for six months and I said, Never mind that, how am I going to wipemyarse? And he was like, Sorry, mate, your mum’s going to have to do it. And his eyes widened as they followed the horror drawing through my face, and he said, Or your dad? As if that was some kind of great alternative.

  I craned my neck so far back I could see the whole ceiling, and then my mouth stretched wide and I wailed like a baby so loudly that another nurse came in, and my nurse was like, His mum’s gunna have to wipe his bum for him, and the other nurse was like, Oh, and then walked out. I wailed still: Woe is me, God strike me dead, and then I said to him to call Dignitas and he laughed because he thought I was joking, and then he wheeled me out like a shop mannequin to our Death House in Vauxhall.

  The only good thing about being incapacitated is that no one made me go to school. And then when they finally took the plaster off, they saw I had withered like a prune and that’s when they noticed all the cuts and burns and I had to go to the mad house.

  The first time I got released Mother picked me up late. She sat in her van, her chin jutting out like a coin slot, and yelled at the nurse for bringing me out without my coat. She couldn’t move properly after having the baby. “They done an autopsy on me down there,” she said. “It’s a wonder I’m still alive.”

  We took a strange road past Battersea Dogs and away from our house in Putney, and I peeled my spade of a hand away from my face. “Where are we going?”

  “We moved,” she said.

  “You moved?”

  It was bad enough she would never visit, but the thought of them going through all my stuff and shoving it in boxes, probably inspecting it, opening it, reading it as they went along was too much for my skinny heart. I wanted to go straight back to the hospital, to the girls who looked like baby birds and kind Dr Kahn who always told me I was hiding something.

  When we got to that Death House in Vauxhall, where a thirty-year-old student from Guam had died of anaphylactic shock on the kitchen floor and hadn’t been found for three months, I used a paring knife to cut my arm nine times from the shoulder to the armpit. All in a row like a crazy person. I bled through the mattress, and I was still bleeding when I woke up, and they sent me back to Meadow Gorge before they had changed my bed.