Fifteen Bones Page 4

  “Don’t get emotional.”

  The great plane of his face evened out. “See you?” he said quietly. “Oi. Sideman. See you?”

  I didn’t turn.

  “See you?” he said.

  The class became a bubble of silence.

  He smacked down my face. Not across my face, down my face, right on the bridge of my nose, and it hurt. My arms went into a spasm of retaliation, but I kept them pinned to my side. He seemed sated by the slap and sat back down. If it escalated, I’d be helpless. I put my head down and let the pain glug through my stupid face. Drops of blood fell on the page. I pressed them with my fingers. The class howled.

  “Woah, woah,” Miss Price said as she came back into the room. “Only boring people have to yell to be heard.”

  She calmed them down in time for the bell to ring. I waited for everyone to leave before I got up.

  “Jake?” Miss Price said. “I read your transcript.”

  Here we go.

  Three expulsions blah blah blah, madhouse blah blah. I don’t suffer fools blah blah blah. You can’t get anything past me blah blah blah. Now your other schools may have blah bl—

  “So you’re a poet?” she said.

  My eyes darted all around. “No.”

  “You are. You wrote poems published by the … what happened to your face?”

  “I walked into a door,” I said.

  “And does this door have a name?” she asked.

  “Doreen,” I said.

  “Very funny,” she said, which is what people say when they don’t find things funny.

  I shrugged. “I wrote lyrics. I’m not a poet.”

  “You are. You won the Silver Pen Award in Year 6. The National Silver Pen Award. That’s amazing, Jake.”

  “It’s … stupid.” I looked at the floor. “I never write anything.”

  “At the end of this term we’re having a poetry reading. Some kids will be rapping, some singing. It’s called Pip-Pop day. Pip-pop,” she beamed, “like hip hop, except with poetry.”

  “I get it. It’s … catchy.”

  “So you’ll write something?”

  “Uh … no, sorry, it sounds really stupid.”

  “Well, why don’t you tell me what you really think?”

  I fussed with my bag, hoping she would go away. I thought of writing “Punch Me in the Face All Day” with Isaac at the end of summer. It was quite cold but everyone was still outside. We wrote in a spiral notebook, and we rolled backwards on to the grass because we were laughing so much.

  “Miss?” I said.

  “Yes, Jake?”

  “If you hear a family yelling at each other next door, should you call the police?”

  “It depends how you perceive the yelling. If it’s threatening and if you think someone’s in danger then, yes, you should. If it’s persistent you can call the council. Family liaison units are really effective. Well, they were before the cuts. But they’re still good.”

  “So if you really thought someone’s life was in danger, then calling … is all right?”

  “Of course it is. It’s your civic duty.”

  “And can they trace the calls? I mean, the people?”

  “The police?”

  “The people you called about?”

  “No. Why would they?”

  “And what if it went to court, would you have to go?”

  “If you want to report a crime anonymously you can call Crimestoppers. It’s free and they won’t ask you who you are or anything like that.”

  “But if you did call the police you’d have to go to court and everything?”

  “Yes, it’s your civic… Is there something you want to tell me, Jake?”

  “No, it’s all right.” I began to leave the room, unable to walk steadily.

  “Has your neighbour threatened you, Jake?”

  “Nope, nothing like that. It’s … anyway. Thanks.”

  “If you’ve been threatened you have to tell someone.”

  “Right-o,” I said. I didn’t know where I got that from.

  “Be careful. Jake.”

  It was strange that she paused before she said my name. It was as if she understood what was about to happen, and all she could do was offer me some solace before I stepped out into the corridor.

  They waited like kindling. I stopped, breathless in the vacuum. Hammerhead-shark boy was shuffling and agitated. No doubt he’d told Darscall and his minions about my egregious crime. Darscall waited, leaning into his grin. They wore grey hi-tops, matching but not the same, and had grey snapbacks in their back pockets. Their hi-tops had tongues like desert plants, thick and oily. Their snap-backs were pristine, with tags left on them.

  “Gaylord!” Sean said, bumbling through the stand-off. “Where’s your billboard gone?” He jabbed his finger to my forehead.

  I smacked his hand away.

  “Miss, miss!” he said as a teacher approached, oblivious to the unspoken threats all around her. “He’s trawling for sausage. He’s not denying it.”

  “That’s enough, Sean,” she said. “Go to where you’re supposed to be.”

  “Miss, I can’t walk around with this cruiser in my yard.”

  The boys laughed. Sean became louder. “Miss! He’s a—”

  Sean stopped hollering as a suit with a walkie-talkie came bombing towards us. His eye-roll was so dramatic he had to move his whole body to accommodate it. “Oh, alloooow it.”

  “What’s going on here?” the suit said, scowling all over the place.

  Sean walked in a little circle, bouncing, fiddling with his cap. “Don’t scrape, sir.”

  The crowd dissipated.

  “I’ve had quite enough of you for one year, Sean O’Brien, and it’s only October.” The suit shoved his beak in my face. “And you? Who are you?”

  “Jake.” I leaned back. “Charmed, I’m sure.”

  “What did you just say? Who do you think you are? What do you find so funny?” The questions came like bullets. “Well?”

  “I—”

  “What on Earth have you done to your face?”

  “What did God do to his face?” Sean said.

  “Quiet, Sean.” He pointed at my forehead. “It’s red.”

  “As if I did this to myself,” I said, my voice quavering. “What are you on?”

  “What am I what?”

  “What kind of hallucinogenic drugs are you on?”

  The suit’s eyes widened. “Go to Mrs Anderson right now.”

  “Who the fuck is Mrs Anderson?” I threw my arms out wide.

  He blinked, once, twice. “The principal,” he seethed as he pointed up a flight of stairs. “Go, now. And don’t you dare swear.”

  “I didn’t bloody swear,” I said.

  Sean laughed.

  The suit steamed. “NOW.”

  I dragged my bones to the principal’s office, my moon head rolling all over the place. I pressed the heel of my hand to my chest. The pain in my stomach was acids attacking the lining. The stomach eating itself. I stopped before the last stair and caught my breath. I couldn’t make it through the day without being beaten up, sent to the nurse’s room and the principal’s office, but at least I had learnt that the girl next door was most likely in the CRK, and that the CRK are extremely dangerous, and I wished I had never thrown those firecrackers.

  The secretary was bone-skinny and had all her pencils arranged in a row on her desk. She had vom dots above her eyes so I liked her immediately. Vom dots are little red dots you get when blood vessels burst from the strain of throwing up.

  “You can go in now,” she said. I felt like talking to her but I couldn’t so I stepped into principal’s office instead. My stomach was rattling around a space so cavernous it made a high-pitched Ahoo sound.

&
nbsp; “Well,” the principal said brightly, “who do we have here?”

  Ahoo, said my stomach, chewing on itself like a confused vampire. Ahoooo! My head swam and smacked me down to the chair. I turned the chair around and put my back to this so-called principal. Schools like to rename things, like we’re in Beverly Hills or whatever. Because their school is a nightmare, they think that changing it from “head teacher” to “principal” will make some sort of difference. I have no time for people who call themselves principals. None whatsoever.

  I folded my arms.

  “Turn around,” she said.

  The wall opposite the desk was dominated by an aquarium. I followed the endeavours of a lone clown fish that burrowed furiously against the glass. I could have cried for that stupid fish. I wondered who looked after them over the holidays.

  “Turn around.”

  The fish struggled against the glass and I leaned towards him.

  “Turn around.”

  “Bright eyes,” I sang.

  “I begyourpardon?”

  I turned around.

  “You were supposed to start last week,” she said as she flicked through the stupid file, “but you started today.”

  “All right, Sherlock,” I said under my breath.

  She shifted towards me and I told myself to shut up. It’s the Detention Centre next, that bloody social worker said. No way was I going to a Detention Centre. The boys would take one look at my skinny arse, recognize me from whatever school I’d been kicked out of and go for me.

  I hung my head.

  “You ended Year 6 with across-the-board 7s,” the principal said in a faraway voice, reading the file, “and in Brixton.”

  I shrugged even though I wanted to tell her where to shove it.

  “How did you go from that, to this?”

  I shrugged again.

  “You were expelled from your last school?”

  I shrugged.

  “And the one before that?”

  I shrugged again.

  “You’ve been in a Mental Health Referral Unit.”

  “I prefer the term ‘madhouse’,” I said.

  “Why were you there?”

  “In the madhouse?”

  “In the Mental Health Referral Unit.”

  “On account of my being mental.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Elephant days. Wobble months. Jam,” I said.

  “Pardon?”

  “That was a joke.”

  “I said, how long was your … referral … at the mad … the mental house … I mean, Mental Health Referral Unit?”

  It was none of her business, but it wouldn’t matter if I protested. Everything was there in my file and there was nothing I could do about it. This made me need my inhaler. The whale sounds from my stomach started to go up at the end, like questions: Ahooo? Ahoooo? Ahoooooooo?

  The principal raised an eyebrow and looked down at my stomach.

  “We do apologize,” I said, knuckling my guts.

  In a flurry of disgust, she snapped the file shut and glared at me. “How are you finding mainstream education?”

  “Fantastic. Maybe later someone will punch me so hard I’ll shit myself.”

  Her eyes levelled with mine. Her sleepy eyelids made her eyes look like reading lamps. I shrugged again and let her glare. My mugged moon face and bony arse answered any questions she might have. I put my reddened twig fingers to the table and let her look at them in all their battered, skeletal glory.

  “I see,” she said eventually. “Mr McMurray says there was an incident in the halls. That you lost your temper.”

  “I didn’t lose my temper.”

  “You didn’t lose your temper what?”

  “I didn’t lose my temper, miss.” I rolled my eyes. “I was threatened by—”

  “Do not roll your eyes at me.”

  “Godsake,” I grumbled. “I was threatened.”

  “What did you just say?”

  “I said I was threatened.”

  “Before that.”

  “I was threat—”

  “No. Before that.”

  “I said I was—”

  “Before that.”

  “God’s sake. I said God’s sake, all right?” I looked down at my knees.

  “Finished?” she said.

  I scrunched up my fairy-tale fingers and put my fists to the sides of the chair.

  “Have you got anything to say for yourself?”

  Ahooooooo!

  The principal looked at my warbling stomach. “When’s the last time you ate?”

  “…pardon?”

  “When was the last time you ate?”

  I sprang to my feet and kicked the chair. It flew across the small room and hit the stupid fish tank. Who knew chairs bounced?

  I woke up to myself. The principal’s face was drawn with horror. I turned to see what she was looking at. The fish tank. And a chink. A chink in the glass. It grew before my eyes. A cobweb blistered across the glass. The principal rose in horror. There was a second of nothing, then crash! Water flooded the office and helpless fish flapped over the needle-sharp carpet.

  “OLIVIA!” the principal screeched.

  The vom-dot secretary burst into the room. They danced around finding Nemo and I retreated to the corner and rubbed the scars on my arm.

  Congratulations, Jake Jones, you’re about to be expelled from the Worst School in the World. Where will they send me next? Baghdad in my underpants? The dark side of the moon? Croydon on a Saturday?

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

  “Get out,” the principal said.

  Ahoo, said my stomach as I bent to help them pick up the floundering fish.

  “Get out!”

  I went out into the corridor and smacked a display off the wall. I looked back to the office and realized the vom-dot secretary had left her computer open. I clicked on my file and changed my mother’s mobile number to my mobile number and our address to my old house in Brixton. Then I headed out into the swarm.

  “Gay,” said one kid as he shoulder-checked me. “Gay,” said another who I’d never seen before. “Die,” someone else said so I went home, but not before I got another glimpse of the Insain Bolts, and the green-eyed girl with long arms and a lopsided smile.

  When I arrived home, Squirm was crying. I picked her up and she stopped crying. She grabbed my shirt collar and shoved it in her gummy mouth, then she took it out and laughed, put it back again and was repulsed to find it was wet. “Ug!” she said and I laughed.

  Mum was ripping up the carpet in the gutted front room. She didn’t lift her head when I walked in.

  I put Squirm back in her cot and helped Mother roll the carpet.

  “Mum?” I chanced, starting a conversation. “Why am I called Jake?”

  Mother’s face brimmed with laughter. I’d forgotten how her eyes creased at the sides when she laughed. The laughter shocked her lungs and she coughed.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  I shrugged.

  “When I was pregnant with you,” she said as she ripped a sheet of dust, “I was in agony and I was craving cheese. One night your dad came home and he’d bought me a packet of Jacob’s crackers and some cheese and he cut it up for me and…” She looked to the ceiling and a smile warmed her face. “It was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me, and I thought, if I have a boy I’ll call him Jacob.” A tear shone in her eye.

  I looked at her for a second. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for you?”

  She didn’t reply. I held the dusty old roll as she swept the floorboards. The funk of the ancient rug made my nose itch and the murky underlay lit alive with panicking spiders. I dropped it, and sent plu
mes of dust across the room.

  “Bloody hell, Lurch, what did you do that for?!”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose, did I.”

  “Christ! Go on, get out. I’ll do it all myself, as per bloody usual.”

  I sloped off, hitting my trousers against my ankles, certain the spiders had climbed up my stick legs. I needed to get to my room before I started to cry or something.

  The Toad House was asleep. I thought of the girl over there in the trenches. I thought that if the police had been concerned, they would have taken her out of the house.

  I reached for my phone to see the photograph of Isaac. He’s smiling, I’m laughing. My head is craned right back, so you can see my neck and my wide-open mouth. Isaac is looking directly into the camera, his eyes lit up, his hand on my shoulder.

  “Get down here and eat your tea before I blender it!” Mother yelled.

  She always got the word wrong. It was to remind me of being force-fed at the hospital. I went downstairs.

  “Eat,” she said, pointing to the cola and more of the awful pizza. It was full-fat Coke again. I hate fat Coke. I always have. I hate full-fat Coke almost as much as I hate watery pizza. “You got fat Coke,” I said.

  “Gratitude!” she said to an imaginary audience. She picked up a Santa, checked his base, then chucked him to the corner of the room, where he hit a pile of his broken friends.

  I picked up a pizza slice. Pink water ran from the cheese. “This is the worst pizza in the history of ever,” I said, but she had disappeared into the kitchen.

  I put two slices into a piece of old newspaper, walked out to the garden and tucked them beneath the smashed dinner plates in the skip.

  “DUCK!” Mother yelled. I ducked, and Rudolf sailed over my head and into the skip. “Three points!” she hollered before she bombed back into the house.

  As the plates crumbled beneath Rudolf, the light from the kitchen window hit something shiny within the rubble. I tried to reach it, but I couldn’t lift my weight over the side of the skip. I stretched my pumpkin fingers and got a small touch on the shiny object, enough to pull it a fraction closer. It was a photograph frame. I picked it up and blew off the dust.