Fifteen Bones Read online

  Anyway, that particular stint lasted five months and now I’m out again and we’re up to date.

  When the police had gone I used a rake key to temper the lock and the doors flew open. “This house is easier to get into than Clapham Common.”

  This is an excellent joke because, of all the open grounds parks and commons I could have chosen, Clapham Common is by far the funniest as it’s where people get caught having sex or doing drugs or whatnot. And it’s alliterative. And it has matching syllables. And it has a fulcrum. And if you want to be a comedian you have to think about these things.

  Mother barged past me through the front door, thoroughly unamused, and chucked a stack of newspapers into a skip that was stationed in the driveway.

  “It’s like Clapham Common,” I said.

  “You can get your spades around some of these bloody newspapers and help me for once,” she said.

  I looked at my massive hands and thought about how much I hate my massive hands.

  “All right, Lurch,” Dad said.

  I jumped. He’d been lurking so morbidly behind me I hadn’t distinguished him from the stacks of moulding paper.

  “Looking forward to…”

  “No.”

  “And your room is…”

  “Horrible. It looks like the Ward.”

  “Maybe you could do some of your writing … you … there’s good light out…”

  “Painters, Dad,” I said. “Painters need light.”

  Dad picked up a Santa toy from the dusty shelf and turned its stiff key. Santa’s wheezing cymbals didn’t make a sound as they ground together. Dad returned it to its shelf. He looked at it for a good while before he turned to me and said, “Oh.”

  “Eat, will you?” Mother said as she came back into the house. “There’s pizza.”

  The dining room was a cocoon of newspapers with a sunken table at the centre. On the dining table were three warm cans of cola and a greasy pizza box. I picked up the lip of a pizza slice and the mozzarella licked the box, leaving a soggy slice of mulch. The cola was full fat so I emptied it on the dry soil of a dead plant. I stuffed two pizza slices into a sheet of newspaper, wrapped the can in another newspaper, went through the kitchen and threw it all in the skip. I clapped the dust from my hands.

  “Don’t you dare go through that skip,” Mother said. “I’m not cleaning up new mess.”

  “I haven’t done anything,” I said.

  “Exactly,” she said. She sighed as if what she was about to say had taken some great effort. “How’s your room?”

  If her life was a meal, I’d be the side salad.

  “Eerie,” I said.

  “You think your nose is ear-y,” she said. She picked up a carriage clock, opened it, checked its bottom, frowned, and hurled it into the skip. “Three points, Kobe Bryan,” she said as it sailed in.

  “Bryant,” I said.

  “That’s what I said,” she said.

  Frenzied shouting erupted from the Toad House. An older woman’s voice shouted back. Mother froze.

  “Should we do something?” I said.

  “No,” Mother said, “don’t want to get mixed up with that.” She disappeared into the house and reappeared with a stack of soup bowls. “We’re going to have to listen to that day in day out, I’ll bet. Everywhere you go, everything you do, there’s always some bloody man there ruining it.”

  “Charming.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean you,” she said. “You’re not a man.”

  “Charmed, I’m sure.”

  “Get yourself upstairs, ready for that school tomorrow,” Mother said.

  “I am not going back there.”

  “You are going back there.”

  “I am not going back there.”

  “You are going back there, you mark my words. You didn’t even make it to registration!”

  “He tagged my face.”

  “It’s the Detention Centre next, that bloody social worker said. I’ll be taken to court, she said. And I’ll tell you what I told her, sunshine: if you don’t go back to that school, I will bloody well give you something to take me to court over. That clear?”

  She went back in the house.

  “God help me,” I said to myself as over the fence, beyond the green wall of the Toad House, I heard sobbing.

  When I got to my room I couldn’t breathe properly. I shook my inhaler. I looked in the mirror and winced. I lifted my shirt and breathed in. I moved from side to side, allowing my ribs to taste freedom. I poked at the gaps. It made a tut tut tut noise. My hipbones rolled under the skin.

  A spider scuttled across my bedroom floor and burrowed beneath a cardboard box. I lifted the box with my foot and the spider ran out and disappeared under my bed.

  I pushed the box under my bed and looked at it for a while. I picked up another box and tipped it over the floor. I waited. I put everything back in the box. I opened and closed my door. I turned the light on and off. I shoved everything under my bed. For the first time in five months, I went to the toilet without being watched. I went back to my room and looked at the coat lying on the floor and the stuff under the bed with some satisfaction. I tested the lamp at my bedside. Dust rained from the shade as I switched it on and off. Light beat into the room in pulses. I went faster and faster on-off on-off until I felt more than saw someone looking into my room.

  I froze.

  I saw her standing, fists to hips, at her window. She scowled and darted away, not in fear, but in haste. She shoved things into a rucksack as if trying to drown them. She was tall and quick; her long black braids swished as she dived for things to thrust into the bag. She looked at me again and I dropped to the floor. When I crept up her curtains were closed.

  I sat beneath my window, waiting for her to reappear. I traced the dots up the scar on my leg. The dots are where they screwed the bolts in. I ran my finger around the smooth puddle of skin on my knee and the faint line where they sewed on the skin they’d cut out of my back.

  I took my pills. I looked at Isaac’s picture on my phone. He’s smiling, I’m laughing. I scrolled through to his number. On his number is the same picture I have as my screen saver. I looked at the call button until the screen went black.

  Reep! Reep!

  A mechanical screech woke me the next morning. I pressed my hands to my burning eyes. The noise was tangled up with a disturbing dream I’d been having. I couldn’t wrestle them apart.

  My bedclothes were rumpled and soaked with an alarming amount of sweat. The sheets were bunched into a corner as if bullied during the night.

  Reep! Reep!

  Reep! Reep! “This vehicle … is … reversing!”

  I got out of bed and went to my window. A digger bouldered down our long road, its huge metal arse pressing away bins and narrowly skimming the parked cars.

  Reep! Reep! Reep!

  Bleary neighbours yanked open their curtains and peered out of their front doors. I prayed the truck wasn’t headed for the Death House, but as I looked down, I saw Mother in the epicentre, her dressing gown gaping at the arms, guiding the diggers like a mad wizard.

  “Bloody hell.”

  “God.”

  “Bloody hell!” said the neighbours.

  I went back to bed and pulled the covers over my head. I tested the hollow groove under my collar bone. I wrapped my hand around my bicep, my thumb easily looping over my fingers.

  My alarm sounded and I didn’t risk having a shower. I’d wait until the Death House funk was gone and there was less chance of inhaling the dead man’s grime. I put on my stupid uniform and stood in front of the mirror.

  The stiff tie nagged my gag reflex. I drew it over my head like a noose and made a choking sound. My shoulders hung. The bright white shirt was too big. I looked like a cocktail umbrella. A lanky, sick cocktail umbrella. “You
,” I said to my reflection, “are going … to … die.”

  I made my way through the circus outside our house. Mother put a grip on my bony shoulder. “Last chance,” she said as she spun me around and rammed my tie against my throat.

  “It chokes—”

  “I do not want to see that bloody social worker again, you understand? We are not those people.”

  I had apologized a million times. I didn’t know what else I could do.

  “Says on the Internet a kid was murdered on this street,” I said.

  “Black, wasn’t he?” Mother said, distracted by an orange extension cord.

  A weight pulled on my stomach as I watched her untangle the cord. I wanted to make her explain but the chances of a row increases by the syllable so I had to ration my words like war biscuits. She sensed me hesitate. “All you have to do,” she said, “is not get involved with anyone.”

  “Or anything,” I said.

  “Quite right.”

  For the second time I set out towards the only school in London that would take me. A school with four towers, police cordons, and a curfew.

  Our long road led to a handful of besieged shops and offices, many with their shutters down and doors open. Outside the post office, there was a yellow police notice with ARMED ROBBERY in big black letters. A security van had been robbed at gunpoint and if anyone had information they should contact the police, although someone had drawn a line through “Contact the police” and replaced it with “Use money to get high”.

  At the bus stop, a pack of kids in black hoodies harassed a bus driver whilst another swarm of black uniforms stopped cars and tormented cyclists. I kept walking. Kids clattered out of flats and behind them came the screams of gravel-mouthed mothers.

  I walked on. The long road was flanked by grey trees, dirtied by the constant spit of pollution. Their suffocated roots bubbled beneath the pavement. A urinated underpass led to the school gates. On the walls was a tag that looked like this:

  $$☠

  It had been sprayed with a stencil, which meant someone has staked their territory. No one else had tagged the wall, so $$☠ had some clout.

  I emerged from the underpass and there it was: Cattle Rise High School. Four grey towers spiked from the ground. The wet walls surged up like a cantankerous sea monster, so old its eyes had turned to glue.

  The sign for Cattle Rise High School had been sprayed to read “BATTLE CRISE” and “I am” was written above the “High”.

  A line of kids in black uniforms was waiting outside the main gate to go through the knife arch. They lobbed their rucksacks into the plastic trays in competitive carelessness and kissed their teeth at the guards as they walked beneath a metal detector. I looked back down the road. I thought of all the places I could go other than this hormonal cauldron. I thought of the Southbank and London Bridge, and Shoreditch and the comedy clubs you can sneak into in Leicester Square.

  It’s the Detention Centre next, that bloody social worker said.

  Once inside the gate, my lungs shrank. I took a puff of my inhaler.

  I stepped towards the entrance and the very same penis-graffiti goons barrelled towards me. There were three of them: two were pale minions with bad teeth and filthy hair, and the leader was a boy-mountain, with a beard of acne, who smiled in delight at my reappearance.

  “Who said you could come back here?” he said.

  I lowered my head and tried to back away. I held the strap of my bag so tightly it was cutting into my hands.

  A thin boy peeled out of his shadow and blocked my way. He looked back to the boy-mountain. The boy-mountain lurched and snarled. His groaning body obscured my sight. His neck was spackled red with razor rash and angry ingrown hairs. His face was scabbed with crystallized acne. He wore a bright white hoodie draped across his shoulders in a curve that suggested they were not only massive, but made of muscle.

  There was a tap on my shoulder and I turned, as you always do, the wrong way.

  The school nurse turned and knocked a jar of cotton tips to the floor. She bent to collect them and her hair spilled from its bun.

  The locked medical cabinet contained seven first-aid kits, a shelf of gauze, a bottle of tuberculocidal bleach and a bag of cat litter. They use gauze to cover cuts and burns and stuff like that. Bleach and cat litter is for blood. It’s a special kind of school that has plenty of cat litter.

  On the ceiling was an industrial fire alarm and if you looked hard enough you could see faint grey swirls in the paint. White paint had smudged over black ash and the paint had dried into this strange pattern. This meant fire damage. Recent fire damage. It happened once when we got a Death House from an old lady who had fallen asleep smoking a cigar.

  A short man with torrential acne scars burst in. “What’s happened here?” he said. He put his nose so close to mine I could see into his cavernous pores. “Dear me,” he said, “you didn’t even make it through the door.”

  He flung a finger at the nurse. “Clean that off his face, will you. Clearly it’s going to be one of those days.”

  Clean what off my face?

  He stormed off and the nurse approached me with a cloth that smelled like bleach.

  “What’s on my face?”

  “You don’t want to know,” she said.

  “Whatsonmyface?”

  “It’ll be all right,” she said, wincing.

  I took my phone out of my pocket and looked in the black screen. Scrawled across my forehead was the word “GAY”.

  The nurse straightened up. She twisted her mouth anxiously. “I don’t think this is going to come off.”

  “Great,” I said, careful not to swallow any of the acid or whatever it was running down my stupid face. “Don’t call my parents. I can get home on my own.”

  “Your mum has said you have to go in,” she said, flicking through a large grey file. “I’ve already spoken to her.”

  I sat up. “You are joking.”

  “It’s for the best,” she smiled. “You can’t miss another day in your first month. Your attendance percentage will be so bad you could get excluded.”

  “She’s just worried about Social Services. She doesn’t actually mean­—”

  “If you’re absent they automatically send your parents a text. So, no way out of it, I’m afraid.”

  “You are joking though?”

  “Just go to registration. It’s only the morning and the afternoon reg that goes into SIMS,” she whispered with a little smile, “then try and sneak out.”

  She said this as if it was some big secret.

  She ruffled my sticky-up-y hair and tried to smooth it over the effigy on my forehead, but my hair won’t be pulled down, it defies gravity, and that’s why I look like an electrocuted scientist. “You can barely notice it,” she said. Her fingers felt funny on my hairline.

  “Miss, ‘gay’ is written in black ink on my IMAX forehead. I look like a light bulb. I can’t go anywhere like this. I’ll get hate-crimed.”

  She nodded and then shook her head to try to cover up the nodding. “I’ll see if there are any hats in lost property.”

  She hurried out and left her computer open on my photo-less file. I thought about the girl next door. I checked the door and reached over to type her address. I might at least learn her name.

  The computer whirred and presented the world’s slowest pinwheel. “Come on,” I said, as it managed one more bar. I heard the nurse padding back to the room. The door rattled and I hit escape just as the computer flashed: NOT FOUND.

  The nurse was holding two rancid beanie hats and a white baseball cap.

  “Lice or scabies?” she smiled. She placed the black beanie over my head. I liked how freckles were dotted over her cheeks and under her eyes, and how her hair was fine like a baby’s. She had white all across her nails and her skin was so fine I
could see her capillaries. I wondered if she became a nurse because she spent her childhood staying inside when everyone was allowed to play. I wanted to ask her things like why I sometimes can’t take in a full lungful of breath, and why, when I finally do, I feel dizzy. And why is there this ringing in my left ear? And why am I so unsymmetrical? Is it God’s way of telling me to get out of the gene pool? And don’t get me started on my skin and bones, or the horror show of waking up every day.

  I got up and shuffled out of the nurse’s room. I turned to smile at her and she looked back at me with concern. The door closed between us and I stood behind it for a good while.

  I slid out to the long corridor, and kept my back against the wall.

  Last chance, Mother said.

  It’s the Detention Centre next.

  A group of kids headed towards me. The front-runner pointed. “Gay!”

  I scratched the back of my head.

  “Battyman,” a girl screeched and her friends howled laughing. Slow news day.

  The bell rang and the corridor filled with kids. “Gay,” people said as they passed me. I hung my head and kept walking.

  “Gay, gay, gay.”

  A swell of people pushed past me and I felt a small object being pressed into my hand. I waited until they had gone before I looked at it. It was a tiny bottle of nail polish remover. That’s a new one. I wondered what the insult was. Girl? Emo? Drag queen? I put it in my pocket.

  “Gay!”

  I binned the scabies hat and went to registration.

  I found my form room and lingered outside. The knot of my tie felt like a fist. I looked through the reinforced glass and loosened my tie.

  The noise was painful. The kids were gathered in groups, stretching and squawking, swarming about like insects. One girl had dyed her shirt black and wore it over bumblebee leggings. Another girl had bright pink hair, standing on end. The pink had drained into her shirt and the reddening mess swam around her neck like a grim execution.