Dad and I suck cherry drops as we take a look at the chair.
Dad, with his crackly actor voice that read children’s audio books to earn a bit of extra cash. He’d take it really seriously, barging around the house stretching out the word ‘Ru-mmmp-el-stiltz-skin’ and ‘Rap-UNNNN-zel’. When we were small we’d play them and let his ‘actory’ voice read us fairy stories before bed. Feeling so superior to all the other kids because he was OUR dad and no one else’s. Sometimes he’d sit next to the speakers, miming to make us laugh, stories of princesses and magic, of wicked witches and evil stepmothers. It sounded like Dad’s normal voice except he’d just pronounce all the bits correctly and leave out all the swear words. Sometimes I’d get jealous that other kids went to sleep listening to his voice and he’d say, ‘Just think of all the little children without a daddy to read them a bedtime story before bed. It’s very generous of you to share your dad.’ But that only made it worse. He was OUR dad. Not the generic comforting voice of a dad for everyone.
We are on our second round of cherry drops by the time Dove stirs. My tongue is red, soft and numb.
‘What you guys eating?’
Dad nods his head towards the wrapped sweetie on her bedside. She grins.
‘Well, well, well then …’ he mutters in his Big Bad Wolf voice, ‘want to know what I think about all this?’
Dove nods.
He continues. ‘I think it’s a good thing to try jumps that are too high for us.’ Dad’s voice starts to crack; his eyes go all watery. ‘It is, it’s a good thing. You’re bloody crazy but my word, babe, are you cool.’
SOME MORE TOAST
‘BB.’ Mum knocks on my door. ‘I’ve left some toast out here for you, noodle.’
‘Thanks.’ I’m not going to be one of those bratty kids that says ‘I’m NOT hungry’ because even though I’ve lost my actual appetite for life doesn’t mean that I want to make Mum worry about me too. She has enough on her plate. Figuratively.
I take the toast, slide the plate in as the china growls on my wooden floorboards. A patch of the wood is covered in black fluff from when I spilt a whole bottle of Diet Coke over it years ago and didn’t clear it up. It went sticky. Now it’s covered in sock fluff and bobble.
I roll over on the trifle and stick my phone on charge. The screen flickers with messages.
Max: Blue, really hope you’re OK, thinking of you. xx
And then: AHHHH! Alicia is doing my head! Wish you were here. x
I don’t dare open the messages from Cam. The ones from girls at school. I think about sending a group message to everybody with some lame joke about all the things Dove can’t do now that both her legs are broken, with some great emojis, but then delete the whole thing in embarrassment like I’m pretty much the grossest most unfunny person in the universe. It’s probably better to say nothing.
The toast is hard to swallow and goes down like eating a shoe. I manage one of the four buttery triangles. Guilt runs through my whole body from doing absolutely anything. Because all I think about is all the things that Dove can’t. I have an image of finding stainless-steel silver sheets and wrapping them, cone like, around my skin, carving off the layers like those ham cutters at the deli. My flesh, thinly sliced, piling up in that waxy paper.
I can’t stop thinking about Dove and how she feels and what she’s going through, even though I know I should. If I think too hard about it, it would be like a tidal wave rushing through my mind and body and once I let the emotion in it would burst my bones and flood me until I was full to the brim and I would combust out of my body completely until my body was no longer a body and all of me would turn to absolute water without any bones at all.
I am useless. I am school-less. Max doesn’t even know I don’t go to school … so I’m uneducated too. A waste. A waste at sixteen. Who was I fooling that I was cute and cheeky and strong? I’m annoying and weak. People will see Dove in her chair and they will see me, the big sister, poring over her in my towering monstrosity and think, shame it was the little one. They will naturally resent me. Because Dove did everything with her body. And I do nothing with mine.
If I was in a chair, nobody would even notice the difference.
QUAIL
Mum’s upstairs with Dove, and Dad and I sit downstairs by the little coffee shop. I hate seeing sick kids. Worried parents.
I get a picture message from Mum. D’s getting her wounds redressed! X
Dove’s smiling in the photo but I am not and neither is Dad. ‘Zeesh!’ he winces. ‘She looks like a bloody Francis Bacon painting.’
Dad’s right, her head is covered in weird shapes and muddy marks. We zoom in: there’s this one bit of sticky dried blood that looks like black beans from the Chinese, all dehydrated and gross. Like chewed-up, spat-out licorice. Her hair is all greasy from where it can’t be washed because of all of her dressings.
‘We should text back,’ Dad says, rubbing his specs on his moth-eaten jumper. ‘A joke or something.’
I wish Dad would stop using Dove’s accident as a chance to flirt with Mum. Or use me as Cupid.
‘Hungry?’ Dad asks.
‘Not after seeing that,’ I joke.
‘Could stretch our legs though, have a mooch?’ as Dad loves to call it.
We head out of the car park, past the neon ambulances and wheelchairs, the stretchers and flustered visitors hailing taxis towards the street, back to where the shops and normal people are. The people who don’t even think about the hospital until they need it.
‘Sure you don’t fancy any lunch?’ Dad suggests snooping at a menu as we pass the high street.
‘No. I’m not hungry.’ My eyes skim the bland, predictable menu. Overpriced. Ugly. Pretentious and uses weird words to mislead you.
‘You have to eat. You’ve had nothing all day.’
I say nothing.
‘The eyes are off you now with all this – you don’t have to worry about writing that diary any more, Bluebelle. Mum isn’t going to mind about that. Come on, eat something?’ he offers. ‘When am I ever offering to buy you lunch? Me – what is it you call me? Mr Tight?’ I smile. ‘Come on. Spread some gossip about me and my generosity. It’s a rare opportunity, one not to be missed!’
‘I really don’t want to eat, Dad.’
‘Well, can’t hurt to take a peek at the menu.’ He tilts his spectacles. The place he wants to eat at is one of those weird actors’ club member things, which I can’t be bothered to go to because he’ll just bitch about everyone in there stealing his roles and owing him rounds of beer and then be upset when he finds out that his signed headshot has been removed from the wall for not being famous enough.
‘Hmmm … quail.’ Dad considers it. ‘No.’
‘I’ve never tried eating a quail.’
‘Oh, don’t bother.’ He almost physically brushes the menu away. ‘You’re not missing anything; it’s the most pointless food of all the foods. It represents the ultimate food for snobby toffs.’ He blows his nose on a scraggy tissue scrumpled up from his sleeve and briskly walks on.
‘One time I went to a posh charity dinner where – honestly – thousands of pounds must have been spent on this luscious wine and complicated canapés and decorations … and the staff were impeccable – you know, first class and –’
‘That’s so weird, if it’s a charity, why don’t they just not spend all the money on the event and give it to the charity instead?’
‘Oh, to butter up the millionaires so they part with their cash. It’s giving a little to gain a lot, I suppose.’ He begins to walk away from the restaurant. ‘Or giving a lot to gain … more.’
‘But surely if they’re that rich they should just suggest not having the meal and instead giving it to the people that actually need it and give the donation regardless?’ I argue. ‘I think it’s horrible that people need to be massaged to hand money over. If you can afford it, share it.’
‘Too right! Of course. But I wasn’t one of the millionaires, don�
��t worry –’ I wasn’t. ‘I was reading a poem for the entertainment. They didn’t even listen; they talked over me.’
‘Oh, Dad. Poor you.’ I felt sorry for him.
‘I’m used to it, darling. These millionaires are used to fantastic wine and food and probably used to good theatre so they don’t care. Anyway … not my crowd. There were about eight hundred guests there, maybe even a thousand and we all, apart from the vegetarians, I suppose, were given a quail EACH. A whole bird, a whole life right there on the plate.’
‘EACH?’
‘Each.’
‘For one dinner?’ I snarl, disgusted. ‘That many lives, wasted?’
‘And let’s be honest, how tasty can anything be when a chef has had to prepare eight hundred portions of it?’
‘True! I bet EVEN eight hundred slices of toast wouldn’t taste great, so why that many birds? At least with whole chickens you can share the meat, say spread between four, so that’s, what, two hundred chickens, two hundred lives eaten – but EIGHT HUNDRED?! Were they even nice?’
‘Oh, of course they weren’t. Bony old things, they don’t even have any flesh on them; they’re not meant to be eaten. You feel like some wretched giant Viking when you eat them …’ He coughs. ‘Course, we all had so much wine we couldn’t even really taste it,’ Dad adds. ‘Some of the people there couldn’t even be bothered to mess around with all the bones.’
‘And I bet the people there weren’t even grateful. Or impressed. This was just another fancy meal on another day that would end up squished up in their tummies and swirl down the bowl of a toilet.’
The eggs of a quail, apparently, are as small as thumbprints, like those delicious chocolate eggs you get at Easter. You can’t dip a soldier into an egg that size – you’d need to boil twelve of them before you’d even get a yolk flow going and imagine peeling the stupid things: who’s got the time for that?
‘Why are we so barbaric?’ I ask Dad. ‘Why do we think we can just take from this planet, pluck at creatures like they belong to us – bake four and twenty blackbirds, kill a squid just to make black pasta, force-feed a duck so we can get a bit of pâté? Why can’t we be resourceful and if we take a creature, respect it, use it, all of it?’
‘We are so greedy. And picky,’ Dad says. His voice is sad, defeated. ‘We are so picky.’
I feel sick.
Food makes me feel so sick.
‘On second thoughts …’ Dad says softly. ‘I think I’ll just get a sarnie.’
BAD FATS
Max, again: Please just let me know you’re OK. That’s all. X
I go to reply but I don’t know what to say. My thumbs hover over the letters … maybe just an X? No. Always annoys me when I just get an X back. Oddly aloof. Maybe I’ll reply later.
I always used to think in films and stuff when a fat actor playing a ‘fat’ character gets called ‘fat’ in the film or whatever – does it not hurt their feelings? But it’s a fact. They know they went up for an audition to play a big person. It’s not a shock to them the same way it’s not a shock if somebody is old. Or tall.
It’s not just because I have eyes that I know I’m fat. It’s not even the fact that people think that because you’re fat you’re also gross. As if being fat means you’d eat something off the floor or have B.O. or stinky feet or are really lazy. That you keep a line of crushed, damp Doritos under the flab of your breast rolls. Sleep with a baguette in the crease of your elbow, just in case. All of that annoys me but it’s not how I know I’m fat. It’s not even the fact that the sensors of my cat-whisker hips don’t work and my bum always ends up knocking ornaments off shelves in those weird little card shops or sends china salt and pepper pots flying in restaurants as I squeeze past a table. And we all know we’ve squeezed in that little bit too far at a table to overly let the fat girl past.
It’s mostly because when I say I’m fat, people go, ‘No you’re not.’
And that means I definitely am. It’s OK. I’ve learnt that people secretly like it a bit if other people don’t like themselves because it gives other people power. It shows weakness. And I’m not going to be one of those people. EVER. Because the only person I’m not liking by doing that is me.
But right now I’m finding it hard to like myself. And it’s unusual for me. And it hurts.
COCONUT
I wake up to more missed calls from Cam and Max. Bleugh. No thank you, anyone. I let my phone run out of battery.
Bye, world.
Mum is at the hospital with Dove. Again. Mum’s stopped asking me to go. Dad has been sleeping at the house on the sofa. He LOVES it; he can’t believe that he’s been allowed. He wears matching striped pyjamas and a dressing gown to show he’s here to stay, that he’s extra relaxed so there’s no need to move him, and everything Mum asks him to do, he replies with ‘Not a problem’.
He dumps the newspapers on the side.
‘Here’s that coconut water thing you asked for. It’s crazy expensive. Coconut milk is so much cheaper – why don’t you just drink that instead?’
‘It’s not the same; it doesn’t hydrate you the same.’
‘For that price it should hydrate you all the way to a tropical island!’
I roll my eyes and open the carton. The cool, creamy water is smooth and tangy on my fluffy tongue. ‘The coconut is a perfect example of you how hard nature wants us to work for our food. You have to crack through that hairy, heavy shell to be rewarded with the sweet flesh and water. Not just take, take, take off a supermarket shelf.’
‘I saw bananas wrapped in clingfilm once,’ Dad says as he unpacks the breakfast shopping, trying to act like everything’s normal. I say ‘breakfast’ but it’s closer to lunchtime. Dad thinks that us talking like this will distract us from everything – from Dove, but also maybe the fact he’s trying to move back in right under our noses. ‘Errr, … HELLOO … that’s why nature gave them a skin,’ he adds, pretending to be a girl my age.
‘Did you walk to the shops in your pyjamas?’ I ask him.
‘No, course not,’ he says as if I’m crazy. ‘I rode my bicycle.’
I wonder if Dad too has become really conscious of his legs and what they do? How they work and how they feel? Does he feel like he’s walking in space, like me? Then other times like he’s underwater, wearing one of those oversized old-school metal diving suits, like me? Drowning? Short of breath in either scenario.
I reach for my inhaler.
He makes a cafetiere of coffee. I still have no appetite.
‘Come on then, Super Girl, what you eating?’
‘I don’t feel like anything.’
‘Come on, look, I got avocado – you love avocado. Bloody things cost me a fortune,’ he jokes. ‘Expensive rascals, aren’t you?’ he mutters to the fruit. ‘So trendy, aren’t they? Bet these things are cheap as chips wherever they’re grown. They say ripen in the bowl but half of them look like meteorites and the other half look like they’ve been involved in a pub brawl.’
‘I know Mum made you go to the shops so I’d eat.’
‘Come on, at least a bit of toast?’
My brain finds an image of Dove’s dirty hands, her bruised knuckles, her fingernails jammed with gammy dried-up blood.
‘Why do we eat meat? We aren’t meant to eat meat.’
‘Cavemen ate meat.’
‘Yeah, but they had to work for it; there was nothing else. And I bet when they killed something, like a wild boar or whatever, they made it last. It probably fed a whole family for a week.’
‘True. We are a greedy country of consumers. Why are you so interested in the economics and politics of food at the moment?’
I ignore him. But it’s because I feel like I’ve had too much of it. I’ve robbed the planet.
‘But why do we eat it?’ I continue. ‘If we’re descended from monkeys then surely we should eat what monkeys eat? They eat soft fruit and vegetables. Nuts.’
‘Some monkeys eat meat.’ Dad plays devil’s advocate.<
br />
‘Some humans murder other humans.’
‘This is a bit of a deep conversation for this time of the morning but I have to say I’m rather enjoying it.’
He’d love me to be vegetarian – that would be another thing he could sling across the plates at a dinner-table debate. ‘Well, MY daughter’s vegetarian so …’ And then I think about Dove. He’s got THAT to use now. I shake the ugly thought out of my head. Go away.
‘Monkeys have short nails like us and flat teeth, molars, like us. They climb; their hands and feet are for climbing. We can’t outrun an antelope like a lion or kill it with claws or sharp teeth. We aren’t that kind of animal.’
‘True.’ Dad nods. He feeds Not 2B some raw bacon fat.
‘And we can’t even digest raw meat; in fact, it makes us sick.’
‘Steak tartare?’
‘Oh yeah, cos I eat THAT everyday.’ I’m being difficult.
‘We can’t actually really digest cooked meat that well.’
‘See?’
‘Although that is why man made fire. We made fire … we made traps to catch food, spears to catch fish. That’s what makes our kind top of the food chain. Put a man in a cage with any beast and the beast wins … but throw a rifle in the cage, the beast wouldn’t know what to do. It’s evolution, Bluebelle. We need meat to live.’
I hear the key in the door, which means Mum’s back.
‘SURPRISE!’ she squeals. ‘Guess who’s home?’
And I hear metal clanking against the step. Dove.
Dad leaps up excitedly. ‘Well, that is a surprise! We weren’t expecting you back yet, my darling!’
And I don’t know why, but I feel scared. I run upstairs to my room – like I said, I don’t know why. I find all the Nutella jars and sling them out, even if they have knives and spoons in them. The sound of glass and metal. Clank. Clunk. Everything goes in the bin.
Big Bones Page 17
