Big Bones

by Laura Dockrill

  ‘Well, just know that we love having you here.’ Alicia suddenly burps. She thumps her chest. ‘Excuse me.’ It smells like paprika. ‘I mean, we all do. Poor Maxy is bloody crazy about ya! Hovers over you like a fly on poop!’ She’s trying to be nice, but really …

  I imagine myself being a dried-up slug of dog poo. And ‘Maxy’. I shudder.

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘All I wanted to say is, if you want me to back off, or if you need some more time at home or …’

  ‘No, we’ve just been adjusting at home and everything. Dove won’t need help for ever. It was a shock to begin with but I really do want to get this apprenticeship sorted.’

  ‘Sure. Sure. I get it. I get it.’ So … if you get it, have you done it, Alicia, OR …? I do a bit of creeping …

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve not been a hundred per cent focused or whatever or let you and the … other aliens down.’

  ‘Bluebelle, I swear to God do NOT say that. Stop that right now. You do NOT have to apologise. You couldn’t let us down. I was worried it was us that had let you down. I didn’t want your alien commitments to Planet Coffee distracting you from your … err … mothership on Planet Earth.’ NO, PLEASE MAKE IT STOP.

  ‘No … not at all.’

  ‘Phew. Great. I’ve been keeping myself up at night with worry about you, girlie.’ She sips her mocha. ‘So … there is some news.’

  Come on, please, make my day, you’ve signed the form and they’ve accepted and it’s all great. Please …

  Alicia’s face lights up. ‘I know this will come as a complete surprise …’ Trust me, it won’t. ‘But I’m pregnant!’ She squeals. ‘Don’t worry, it’s decaf. Life is so dry these days.’

  ‘Ah, Alicia, congratulations!’ I shrill. Quite good acting, I think.

  ‘Steady on! Keep your bloody voice down, I haven’t quite told everybody yet.’ Alicia looks about for paparazzi. ‘They’ll be in complete shock.’ They won’t. ‘I actually wasn’t gonna keep it but my bloody sister told my mum. Course, once that cat was out the bloody bag it was all tears and blah blah. Before you knew it I was out choosing breast pumps and buying maternity leggings.’ She thumbs her left eye, which seems to be leaking. ‘It was a one-night thing – it meant nothing – but my mum, she’s a bit of a wolf. As far as she’s concerned, if you’ve got one of her little ’uns roasting in the oven … well … you’re having it. It’s wolf pack. That kind of thing. So, long and short of it, I’m going back to Oz. It’s a better place to bring up kids; it’s sunny and green and there’s the beaches, and the people are less … you know …’

  ‘I’m really happy for you, Alicia. Australia will be an amazing place to bring a baby up.’

  ‘You think? I think London’s pretty cool too. I mean, look at you, doll face. You’re a proper girl-about-town.’

  ‘I’m sure your baby will be pretty cool too.’

  ‘Thanks, kiddo.’

  ‘When will you be leaving?’

  ‘Well, this is the dilemma. You can’t fly when you’re pregs over a certain amount of time and obviously it’s such a long flight, I’d rather get it out the way than do it on my own with a screaming newborn!’

  ‘I think you’ll be amazing at being a mum.’

  ‘I dunno. Kinda scary bringing a kid up on my own.’

  ‘You can do it.’ And I mean it.

  ‘I guess if I can manage this place I can do anything!’

  ‘Hah. Yeah.’ I smile. It’s polite, isn’t it? But I don’t have the energy to do another fake laugh.

  ‘Which brings me to what I wanted to say … They want me to find replacement management before I leave … so I’m going to speak to the powers that be and do my very best to push this apprenticeship application forward for you and make sure that the next manager takes great care of your future as an alien, because, who knows, one day you might be running the ship!’ She snorts. ‘I want to leave here knowing you’re in good hands and being looked after.’

  ‘Wait, so does that mean you’ll do it?’

  ‘Sure does.’

  I feel a weight lift off my shoulders. What a relief.

  ‘Thank you so much, Alicia.’ I smile. ‘You have no idea how much that means to me.’

  FISH FINGERS, CHIPS AND BEANS

  I LOVE chips.

  Any chips.

  Fat, soggy chips from the chip shop that smush into each other like hot clay. Drenched in salt and vinegar. Onion vinegar. Ummmmm. I like skinny fries that come with burgers – crisp slants that crack under the teeth – and the softer ones too, floppier fast food fries that you can pinch up in claws, grabbing several at a time like peanuts, and squash them into your mouth. I like posh chips, proper chips, with sea salt and rosemary, chips where you can see the potato skin on the edges. I like the proud golden ones that stand militant like a boy scout wearing a sash dotted with badges.

  But, secretly, one of my favourite ways to have chips is when it’s just me and Dove and whole bag of frozen chips. We whack the oven up really high, fill a baking tray with a WHOLE BAG OF HOME FRIES and leave them for over half an hour to sun-tan and crisp up in the oven. It says on the bag to leave them for twenty minutes but that isn’t long enough – they’re still too pasty; I like my oven chips to catch a little on the corners and the centres to get soggy when they absorb the vinegar. We like to put a box of fish fingers in too. We like our fish fingers really over-cooked so that the middle is almost dehydrated and the cod is basically a puff of white dust that crumbles out like old toothpaste. The outside is golden brown. We like peeling off the lid of the fish finger, like opening a treasure chest. There’s not much worse than a soggy fish finger. We like to pretend that we’re on a cooking show while we make it, pretending we’re making the most luxurious gourmet meal. We dump the chips in a huge tin bowl filled to the top and we take turns to rake our hands in like those arcade machines with the claws that reach for the teddy bears. We like it with beans, obviously, and a huge splodge of ketchup.

  It seems a good time to make this. I’m hoping it stirs some crazy hunger up in me that makes me able to eat. Dove directs me with the oven, bossing me about from her throne like some queen.

  I don’t tell Dove about Alicia agreeing to take me on as an apprentice because I don’t want it to seem like anything is going on in my life. I don’t want to feel like I am flourishing in anything. Even though I know Dove would be happy for me, I don’t want to rub salt in her wounds. Instead, I want salt on chips and to melt away like a pack of butter and do nothing except make Dove feel good.

  But the chips sit in my throat like leather bootlaces.

  Dove tumbles out a mountain of chips onto her plate.

  ‘B,’ she says all of a sudden. ‘Can you do me a favour?’

  ‘Yeah, course.’

  ‘Whatever happens, can you just be normal with me from now on?’

  ‘I am, aren’t I?’

  ‘You are now, yeah, but I think you maybe weren’t before and I hated it and I just don’t know what I’ll do if things don’t go back to how they were before all of this. I want you to still make fun of me and push me around and stuff.’

  ‘I think I’ll be pushing you around for a while,’ I joke. ‘I don’t think I have a choice in the matter.’

  Dove looks upset. ‘That actually really hurt me, BB.’

  ‘Dove, I’m so sorry. I was only joking. Honestly, I didn’t mean to … I thought you’d find it –’

  ‘Don’t worry, I suppose I deserve it. I always called you fat.’ She puffs her cheeks out.

  ‘You don’t deserve this. I’m sorry.’

  I look at Dove. Even trapped in a chair she’s more free than I am. I keep seeing her over and over again, launching off into the air, letting go of everything like she had nothing to lose. She shovels a few chips in her mouth through a brave smile. But I know she’s pretending to be strong about all of this. She doesn’t need to be a hero.

  ‘I do love you, Dove. I think you’re
so amazing.’

  ‘I love you too,’ she says. ‘But seriously, don’t treat me any differently, will you?’

  She lets a tear run down her soft face, her eyes watery and thick, blurred in the confusion of this challenge that she has to conquer in her own gentle way. ‘I’m sorry for crying,’ she says. ‘I just love how we were.’

  Dropping my fork with a clang, I hold her hand tightly, wiping my own tears away. ‘We weren’t anything, Dove,’ I say. ‘I love how we are.’

  Where THE HELL have I been?

  ‘Wanna go get some air?’ I ask.

  CREAM CRACKERS

  ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘I think we’re the last ones here.’

  ‘So you didn’t need to wear those sunglasses that make you look like a rich woman who just found out her movie star husband has died.’

  ‘Guess not.’ I take the sunglasses off.

  ‘I thought you didn’t care about your exam results anyway?’ Dove opens up the packet of crackers we’ve just got from the newsagents, along with the ice poles, but we already ate them.

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Well, why are we here then?’

  ‘I just wanted to find out. Curiosity. That’s all.’

  ‘Do you want a cracker?’

  ‘Yeah, ’K.’

  Dove places one in my hand. The sun is beating down on our bare shoulders.

  ‘God, they’re so dry, they’re making me thirsty.’ My tongue feels like sand.

  ‘Do what I do,’ Dove suggests.

  ‘What do you do? Do I even want to know?’

  ‘Eat a cracker, chew it up and everything like normal, leave it in the back of your throat, then you can make a pâté type thing by regurgitating the sick bit onto the next cracker, like how a bird would feed its baby, like a little hors d’oeuvre …?’

  ‘You are a frigging gross genius. But I’m not gonna do it.’

  I crumble up my cracker and leave it for the pigeons. Dove’s made me feel sick. She happily munches away and says, ‘Imagine if you’ve done really well in like maths or something and then you decide to become a … wait … why do people need to learn maths? Like, what job does being good at maths get you?’

  ‘Accountant? Errr … newsreader?’

  ‘You don’t need maths for reading the news.’

  ‘Maybe if you want to be a maths teacher?’

  ‘Why would you ever?’

  We take our time. London in the summertime offers us a man hosing his front garden, two toddlers plonked in a paddling pool by his feet, giggling and splashing. A guy a bit older than me clearly scrubbing his first-ever brand-new car. There are two twelve-year-olds linking arms, sharing headphones; they look at Dove and then look away. There’s a couple with a white fluffy dog taking photographs of the trees in the sun and two men with loads of dangerous-looking chopped-up wood strapped rather unsafely to the roof of their dad-car, blaring guitar music out of the window and singing along.

  And there it is. School.

  ‘Go on, then … Let’s see if you’d secretly make a great newsreader …’

  GUM SHIELD

  That night, my thirteen-year-old self haunts me. I’m angry at her for being immature. She wasn’t like Dove. She was so insecure it went full circle and made her vain. Always looking in. Always comparing. Self-conscious. Unconfident. She remembers an older, pretty girl with skin the colour of a leather handbag, called Charlene, scaring her and a group of her friends in the toilets with the thrilling advantages of sticking her fingers down her throat. How good it felt to see screwed-up little Zs of pasta bows floating in the toilet bowl. She said the trick wasn’t just to ram your fingers down; you had to moonwalk them on your tonsils – that would trigger the vomit in a second. All the girls thought Charlene was so cool. We loved her nose piercing and the way she ate chocolate bars and cheese melts all day. We all promised that after school we’d go home and try it.

  I remember eating everything I could find at dinner. I had chicken and mushroom pie: a crusty, flaky top with buttery, golden sides that cascaded over the pie dish like Sleeping Beauty’s hair. Crimped by Dad with a fork. The inside was silky, creamy, shiny, perfectly seasoned. It erupted out of the hole in the top of the pie, volcanic, whispering secrets of a warm winter’s comfort. The chicken was so tender it would fall apart into shreds when you tagged it with your tongue. The mushrooms were woody and smoky. Little bombs of forest forage. Dad whips egg into our mash, butter, pepper, milk and snowflakes of salty crystals. The sauce floods the mashed potato Mountain of Dreams. And, of course, peas.

  After that I ate anything I could find in the hatter-mad house that I live in. Half a tub of old (not even enjoyable) strawberry shortcake ice cream, a bowl of stale Shreddies, some ham that was meant for the dogs, crackers and cheese, a bag of Wotsits for Dove’s packed lunch, toast with peanut butter and butter, cashew nuts, some tuna and mayonnaise in a bowl, a luxurious cherry yoghurt and some old Halloween pumpkin chocolates that I remembered being in a drawer in Dove’s room. They tasted like hard dust. Still, I sat, and de-shelled all twelve of those smiling pumpkin moons. Just cos. Just cos it was eating everything day and soon I’d be sicking it all up. I was like the Very Hungry Caterpillar leaving a stream of food-shaped watercolour holes in my wake. I had a new skill that meant I could eat everything and nothing mattered. I was Binge-Girl, the all-time favourite eating disorder superhero. I was so full I couldn’t even remember the swelling loveliness of Dad’s wonderful pie any more. It was just temporararily filling another hole on my scaled tongue. That would all go to waste.

  When my family were snuggled down watching a TV programme I ran upstairs to the bathroom. I sprayed the room with a cheap girly deodorant Mum had recently left by my door with some sanitary towels and tampons, just in case. I think I’d only ever been sick four times in my whole life. Once on a ferry from seasickness, once from bad chicken kievs, once from bad lasagne and then the first time I smelt smoked haddock. I wasn’t a sickly girl. Sick smelt disgusting and had to be masked. Or maybe it was my shame that reeked so bad this time.

  I laid a towel down. I used my school swimming towel because I didn’t want to involve anybody else in this horror. Dove would have been ten. I didn’t want her getting out of the bath and wrapping herself in something that had seen what I’d done to myself.

  Then I tied my long thick dark hair into a hairband.

  The bathroom felt echoey. All my actions were clanging and loud. Muffled by the churn of my own guts, twisting.

  I stooped over the toilet bowl and tried the moonwalking thing. No good. I tried again. Gagging. I panicked. Flushed the toilet really quick to drown the sound. Coughing, spitting. I tried again. Walk, walk, walk, tickle, tickle, come on, come on, just like Charlene said … More retching, some rice from lunch maybe but … nothing.

  I could hear the wretched stupid girls from school. I knew they were talking rubbish but it didn’t stop me from wanting to push a little harder.

  And then I hear it, the ugly mean loud voice in my head that interrupts me when I’m at my most weak. The one that prods me in the belly, barking in its evil voice like some wretched twisted mantra:

  YOU HAVE ASTHMA BECAUSE YOU ARE FAT.

  YOU HAVE ASTHMA BECAUSE YOU ARE FAT.

  THAT IS WHY YOU CAN’T BORROW OUR CLOTHES OR COME ON HOLIDAY WITH US IN THE FUTURE. BECAUSE YOU ARE FAT. AND WE CAN’T HAVE ANYBODY THAT LOOKS LIKE YOU IN OUR PHOTOGRAPHS. YOU WILL RUIN THEM. YOU WILL BRING OUR FRIENDSHIP GROUP BEAUTY STATUS DOWN. WE CAN’T BE HAVING THAT. YOU ARE FAT. AND THAT MEANS YOU HAVE NO SELF-CONTROL. AND THAT MEANS YOU HAVE NO SELF-WORTH. AND THAT MEANS YOU HAVE NO SELF-RESPECT. AND THAT MEANS NOBODY WILL EVER LOOK UP TO YOU AND RESPECT YOU BACK. AND THAT MEANS NOBODY WILL EVER CARE WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY IN PUBLIC. OR THINK OF YOU. OR TRULY LOVE YOU.

  AND THAT MAKES YOU DISGUSTING.

  I turn the volume down on it. It’s not real. It’s trying to trip me up.

  And then I remember the last time I kept a diar
y. And why it ended so badly.

  My eyes begin to water. I’m panicking now. Charlene said this would be easy, but it’s not; it’s terrible. More tears. Sweat. I’m so clammy. My knees hurt from being on the towel, little wormy imprints on my chubby kneecaps. I can’t do it. I’m a failure. I can’t even be sick. I’m not a proper, real girl. Real girls have control of their bodies. Discipline. And now I’ve gone and eaten all this crap that I didn’t even want for no good reason whatsoever. It will stick to me, the new fat, calories clinging to my face like hamster cheeks. I have to get it out. I flush the toilet again, to seem convincing, on the off-chance any member of my family is sad enough to think, ‘Oh, let’s listen out for Bluebelle making herself sick.’

  And I leap into my room with an idea. I have to get this vomit out, NOW. I can’t sit there in front of my friends and Charlene at break time tomorrow and listen to them all purr on, grey-toothed and greasy-eyed, exhausted from their icky evening of triumph, while I sit there, a plump embarrassment. Chewing my hair.

  Even if I lie. It isn’t the real thing. I know. I can feel the weight in my rolls of fat that I pinch sometimes until it bruises.

  I reach for a coat hanger. In my wardrobe. It has to be the metal one, from the dry cleaners, not the posh wooden ones. We only get those ones by accident anyway, when clothes swap around; they are really for Mum’s and Dad’s clothes. Then I bend the hanger, turning it into a boomerang shape, twisting the hook bit down. It is the shape of a gun. Then I lock myself in the bathroom again, run towards the toilet, urgently shoving the hanger down my throat so fast I don’t even notice how it feels.

  Except for cold. Mean. Not right. An intruder. Painful.

  The sick was disappointing. A few Wotsits. Some little squares of Shreddies. Brown smudges from un-chewed chocolate. I’d violated myself. I just cried so hard. I couldn’t even tell Mum because she’d just cry too. Or Dad because he’d cry even more. My teeth touched the basin with a clink. Never had I wished I could undo an action so quickly. It was like blurting out a secret at a sleepover.