Big Bones

by Laura Dockrill

  ‘No. Actually.’ I cut my toast; a salt crystal cracks under my tooth and for a second I think it’s eggshell but it’s not, thank goodness, because eggshell loves to get stuck in your teeth and turn to sand, which turns to chalk and ruins your day by making you think too much about what it actually is and where it actually came from, like, errr, how about a chicken’s body? Absolutely gross. ‘I’m going to work.’ And then I add, ‘Like a real-life actual person.’

  ‘Like an annoying person, more like.’

  ‘You’re annoying. Do you think people like you springing round town? You’re not the main character in a Batman film.’

  ‘That would be … Batman?’

  ‘Fine, yeah, well …’

  ‘Well, at least I’m not writing myself as the main character in some sad trashy novel that’s only going to be read by a NURSE, about some fat girl who moans about her weight all the time and … doesn’t … know what to do with her life.’

  She rushes the words out in a squeal, unable to even finish her sentence because she’s snorting and laughing so hard. I pinch her under her arm and make a cow-bite bruise. We scrap about the kitchen giggling and tussling, smiling so hard.

  ‘Ahhh, you dribbled on my head,’ I gargle. Dove is so vicious. ‘You don’t need to actually grab my hair like that.’

  I struggle and claw at her face, dragging her eyes down into her cheeks. ‘WAAAAHHH! MUM!’

  ‘Don’t shout Mum; what are you calling out Mum for?’ Dove wraps her arms behind my back and digs her strong knee into my back. For someone so tiny she sure can cause injury. The dogs begin to rally round us, barking, just to assess the situation and make sure this isn’t something more serious.

  ‘GIRLS! SHUT UP!’ Mum yells.

  We can’t stop laughing. Exhausted from giggling we continue with breakfast, elbowing each other in the ribs and winding each other up. We breathe to try to compose ourselves.

  I take another avocado and slash its alligator skin open, carving the pebble heart out of it. I roll it into my hand like an oversized walnut marble, all varnished.

  Oh my goodness grief, I very nearly forgot to tell you, somebody told me that apparently the stone of the avocado is the very best bit. You have to, like, roast it down or dehydrate it and then pound it to a dust and it’s meant to be amazing. I don’t know what you’d do with it after … sprinkle it on your cereal?

  I need to stop taking up all my brain space with ideas like this. Really I have to get thinking about my general life. Like what my existence is on the planet. Like, I don’t mean to scare myself but leaving school is like leaving the womb for the second time, and now … things are about to get really actually real.

  I wish superfoods did make you a superhuman. Then I might know what the hell I want to do with my life.

  CHOCOLATE SPREAD

  One bad habit I have is to do with spread and jars. My room is quite often filled with jars of Nutella and chocolate spread and peanut butter all over the place with a knife or teaspoon rammed in. Now as a nurse, you’re probably gonna have a problem with this but don’t worry, I’m not like a beast or anything, I don’t just sit there and polish off the whole jar like a tub of ice cream – although I probably could do if I wasn’t going to feel sick afterwards. I just like the idea of sort of reading a book or getting dressed in the morning and reaching over for a jar, unscrewing the lid and letting a blob of sweetness press onto the back of my teeth like clay and melt onto my tongue. It can actually take me weeks to get through a jar. A couple of times I’ve forgotten I have a jar on the go and begun a new one and the room becomes decorated with jars of Nutella like flower pots.

  Don’t you think Nutella is such a cute name for a baby? Like, if it wasn’t the name of a most famous hazelnut spread?

  TRIFLE

  Everything in my room orbits my bed. I believe a bedroom should be a sanctuary. A private place for peace and relaxation and comfort. And that is everything a bed is. My bed is actually a four-poster – don’t worry, I’m not posh, but it came with the house and Dad was gonna throw it out because it had all that woodworm stuff and was rickety but I begged them to keep it. We treated it and replaced the screws, even though Dad says the rivets are just ‘rot’ and ‘sawdust’ and will one day collapse under me. But it’s lasted me this long. The same as the house really, which is just as old and rickety, stuffed with all the secondhand old things that nobody else wants. The crack down the side of it is getting bigger and bigger as though the whole thing could split in two.

  My bed is a heap of cushions and blankets and I nickname it ‘the trifle’ because it’s layer upon layer of excellent lux squidge that just keeps giving and giving. There’s so many blankets that I rarely get to the sheet of the bed itself, I usually just find a soft spot and burrow myself into the comfort. Kind of like a cat would do, I guess. It really is the best. And yes, it still is rickety, but I find the creaks are now reassuring and soothing. Lullabying me to sleep each night. I like to lie in the trifle and look over and above, where I have made a canopy of blankets and fabric. Stitched waves of flowers and stars, palm trees, cartoons and curtain rags, flops of sari material from the market and off-cuts of tablecloth. I often forget to turn off the fairy lights that hang behind me, and let their warm glow nestle me into a magical grottoland where the minutes never matter and the harmony of the world only exists within the four walls of my four-poster bed within the four walls of my bedroom.

  It’s so hot today, I wish I could flop face-down on top of it but I can’t. I put on my aqua-blue denim dungaree dress with the high-neck vest top, which has a print of these cool little colourful fish all over it. It’s a belly top so my side fat rolls crinkle out in the gap of the dress. I scoop my hair into a topknot, take a finger-full of chocolate spread and leave for work. God, this so is a trashy diary about a moaning fat girl. Dove is SO right about me. Tragic.

  PLANET COFFEE

  Is the place where I work. We sell coffee. I don’t really like coffee. It’s bitter and makes my brain go too fast if I drink it. We are located opposite the park so we’re usually constantly full of babbling prams or work people in suits darting in and out. But people come to us for first dates too; old school friends catching up; interviews for new jobs; and too many of our napkins have seen the tears of a whispered break-up.

  I don’t hate it at Planet Coffee except for the fact that they don’t sell my ultimate favourite, millionaire’s shortbread: a dense little piece of architecture – a foundation of crumbling Aztec sandy base, slathered in salty caramel, with a shiny tiled roof of chocolate insulation to top it off. But it’s all right because we don’t have to wear a uniform or a hair net or anything bizarre, but on my first day the manager, Alicia, did say this to me (to be said in Australian accent):

  ‘You’ll love it here, BB. We have a nursery across the road and some of the nannies that come in are so fat, they’d make you look anorexic.’

  As though it was a compliment, something to look forward to. But that was brilliant. Really. When somebody says something like that to me I am usually elated. I know that sounds odd but let me explain: meanness is a sign of weakness. You have to truly loathe yourself to be so horrid. Alicia is NOT my species. Camille thinks it’s because I’m allergic to Australian accents but it’s not. I’m just allergic to rude people who also wear toe rings. People say sometimes that boys are the ones we need to worry about when it comes to people aesthetically judging girls’ sizes, but I go to a girls’ school and TRUST ME I find more of this sneering actually comes from girls and Alicia is one of the worst. I hate girls who don’t love girls. Girls who aren’t Team Girl. Boys will just say ‘you’re fat’ to me, which is a fact. I can accept that. Girls at school tell me I’m ‘hot’ or ‘beautiful’ and compliment my figure – ‘oh, I wish I had your big bum’ – but in real life if they had an actual chance to swap bums with me they’d sooner swap bums with a rabid baboon that’s just fallen into a cluster of snarling cacti.

  Alicia is someb
ody who would describe me as ‘bubbly’. Bubbly is a secret code word for fat. It doesn’t even mean funny or sparky or eccentric or confident, like the word was invented for. If somebody says, ‘I met a lovely girl the other day; she was so bubbly.’ They mean to say that girl was fat with a smile on her face.

  GROSS.

  It’s not fair. Some grumpy people are described as ‘bubbly’ when they’re obviously miserable as sin, but they’re fat so the word ‘bubbly’ becomes them too and we all hang out as chubby bubbles in the Bubbly Bubble Gang. It’s so lazy.

  I actually think Alicia’s quite ‘lonely’ but I don’t go around calling her that … Have you met Alicia? She’s so lonely, isn’t she?

  Then again this is my diary not Alicia’s. Bye, Alicia!

  Even though I’m just sixteen I’ll be running this place in no time. Because Alicia doesn’t see me as a threat I can skulk around pretending to be stereotypically ‘bubbly’ and stereotypically distracted by the cakes when secretly, really and truly, I’m crowbarring myself up the ranks through the sneaky guise of an innocent apprenticeship to really then be the only reliable person who knows what’s actually going on. Meaning I’d be trusted to make all the decisions. Which would be a good thing because I hate the cold, stark, white-washed, art gallery walls, the try-hard ‘exposed’ faux east London brickwork, so EXTRA and cheap halogen lanterns. If I were going to run a coffee shop I would do it properly, and that means cake that isn’t dry because it is pre-sliced, making sure that cream cheese frosting is on pretty much everything and that we sell good-quality chocolate chip cookies the size of dinner plates.

  AND MILLIONAIRE’S BLOODY SHORTBREAD. Even … I dunno … thousandaire’s shortbread would do.

  But I’m not quite there yet.

  SICK

  ‘Move, move, move, move, I’m gonna be sick, I’m gonna be sick.’

  It’s Alicia, running towards me, holding her hand over her mouth. Wish she didn’t have to be doing being sick right now because I need to ask her to apply for my apprenticeship. Jeez.

  I try to suck my belly in as she wrangles past me to get to the backstage toilets. I call them backstage toilets because sometimes I think it’s funny to pretend the coffee shop is the stage and the staffroom etc. is backstage but now I’ve said it out loud, and then also tried to explain it, I realise it’s really not that funny at all.

  She misses. Splashes of custard-sick fog the floor, bubble like melted butter, pop. Gross. It stinks too. Alicia is always very dehydrated; her lips are always crusty and look like shrinking fried cod. Maybe that’s why she’s always a moody cow, cos she’s so thirsty? Flecks splatter my Converse. I’m kind of glad. I needed an excuse to test out my more comfortable and less flattering collection of old-lady orthopaedic sandals that I found for a fiver in the Salvation Army charity shop all strung together with elastic bands – this can be that excuse. They are in my locker; I’ll go get them in a sec.

  ‘Oh, Alicia, are you OK?’ I bend down next to her, talking like a ventriloquist so I can hold my breath at the same time so the sick smell doesn’t creep up my nostrils. I hold her hair up like how you’re meant to do for a friend but Alicia’s hair is really thin and childish and there isn’t much to grab and plus she’s not my friend. Would this be the right time to ask her if she can sort out all this paperwork to say I’m a legit apprentice or …?

  ‘Get the mop, get the mop,’ she cries. I get the feeling everything she is about to say is going to come in sets of two. ‘Don’t let anybody come in, don’t let anybody come in!’ she adds. Thought so. OK, so not the time.

  ‘I won’t. I won’t!’ I reply, to see if I want to play this game too, except it makes me feel like I’m maybe just trapped in a horrible musical.

  ‘Alicia, do you want me to call somebody?’

  ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’ She wipes her mouth.

  ‘What about your mum?’

  ‘No, no, I don’t want my mum, BB.’ She winces. ‘Plus, it’s very expensive to call Oz.’ I literally would be calling Australia every day on the work phone if I was the manager of a coffee shop with a landline. ‘I’m fine, I’m fine, just get the mop, hurry, hurry, don’t let anybody come in.’

  ‘Do you want anything? Some water maybe?’

  ‘Yes please,’ she whines.

  ‘OK, let me get you some water.’ I fill my chipped 101 Dalmatians mug (when you have Dalmatians everybody seems to get you stuff to do with Dalmatians) with tap water from the industrial artist sink that we have backstage from the toilet that the customers aren’t allowed to come into. It’s a big copper tap that hisses out water.

  ‘Eugh, no, no, not government juice!’ she squeals, batting the cup away. No wonder she’s sick. No immune system, I suspect, from snobbery.

  ‘What’s wrong with this?’

  ‘I just … I just …’ she cries. ‘Maybe a Coca-Cola?’ Ah, I see, her job perks are stealing the refrigerated drinks from the main stage of Planet Coffee, not calling Australia on the Planet’s landline. She’s still on the floor. She’s wearing tight jeans, little black kitten heels, a stripy T-shirt. Kind of high-street trying to be French but mostly looking a bit like you work at Pizza Express. The thread’s so cheap it’s already worn on the bust showing the print of her dotty bra.

  ‘I’ll get you some water,’ I reassure her.

  I head out front. It’s a busy day. It’s always a busy day. A busy day stuffed with ‘earthlings’ as Alicia calls them (that means customers, or sometimes she calls us earthlings if we aren’t working hard enough, to try to threaten our jobs as aliens and somehow demote us to the level of real humans).

  ‘Is she all right?’ That’s Max. Another alien from Planet Coffee. Except he is a quite beautiful alien but that’s not for now, obvs. I’ll just park that there nicely.

  ‘Yeah, think so.’ I steal a bottle of water from the front fridge and can’t help but smile. Because I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that Alicia is pregnant. Preggers Mcsmeggers. God, that’s annoying. Is it too late to cross that out?

  And you know what that will mean, don’t you?

  That Planet Coffee is going to have to find itself a new manager. I’m going to aim much higher than a silly apprenticeship – that will give Julian from Careers a shock.

  I slip on my orthopaedic slippers and they feel like the squidge of success.

  POMEGRANATE

  Camille meets me on the common during my lunch break. She has a giant red stain down her front like she’s gouged someone’s heart out.

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘I tried to have a picnic by myself so I could get on with my bikini designs and an accident happened.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘My picnic. I was trying to be healthy and have a salad, which I made at home –’

  ‘What flavour?’

  ‘Like, an exotic mix-up.’

  ‘’K.’

  ‘Then I walked past a fruit and veg shop and they had all these amazing slices of watermelon that really caught my eye but they also had pomegranates and just recently I’ve been noticing they’ve been putting pomegranate in all the salads at the supermarket so I thought, Oooh that might be nice, so I bought it.’

  ‘For some reason I don’t think that’s the end to this story, is it?’

  ‘OK, so … I couldn’t get into it. Its skin’s really hard; I guess to protect all them gems – have you seen pomegranate seeds?’

  ‘Beautiful, aren’t they? Like little alien pods.’

  ‘My gosh, they are … they are like treasure, gems like costume jewellery. Anyway, I tried stepping on it and using my teeth but … nah … so I went over to a tree and pressed the pomegranate in between my chest and the trunk and sort of squeezed the –’

  ‘You hugged a tree?’

  ‘Yeah, well, I can see how it would seem like I did.’

  ‘And it burst on your top?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s dry now though. Salad is such effort, and they
wonder why people don’t eat enough of it.’

  ‘It’s goddess food, apparently, pomegranate.’

  ‘Really. Knew there was a reason I was attracted to it.’ Cam scrunches her nose up at me and pokes out her tongue, posing for a second like a goddess before failing miserably and shaking her head in dismay. I wrap my arm round her neck.

  ‘Come up with any good bikini designs?’

  ‘Yeah, bikinis with tassels, and ones that go right up your bum so you can get a tan on your bum cheeks.’

  ‘Who wants a tan on their bum cheeks?’

  ‘Oh trust me, there’s a market for it. Then in, like, five years I’m gonna go to fashion week. Paris, New York, Milan … that’s the plan anyway … and Dubai too. Have you ever been there? It’s mental. It’s like futuristic and caveman at the same time … like all these crazy metal fancy shiny buildings just built on a desert.’

  ‘Sounds like Flintstones mixed with The Matrix.’

  ‘Yeah. That is kind of it. You feel like the birds are clockwork and you could unscrew the sun.’ Camille lies on her back. She’s already caught the sun, flecks of fishfood-like freckles dot her nose, speckles of neon pollen crown her afro.

  ‘So guess what?’

  ‘What?’ She bolts up.

  ‘Mum’s agreed.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘I don’t have to go back after the summer.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yep. I don’t have to go back to school.’

  ‘SHUT THE FRONT DOOR!’

  ‘No. Serious.’

  ‘Flip! B! That’s huge. WOW!’

  ‘I know. Hasn’t quite sunk in yet.’

  ‘Have you told school?’

  ‘Mum’s dealing with it.’

  ‘What’d your dad say?’

  ‘Not much. Not much he can say, is there?’

  ‘Whoa, Bluebelle, this is mad. So what you gonna do?’

  ‘I actually don’t know. I have to technically do an apprenticeship cos I’m sixteen, like, make up the hours doing a skill …’