Big Bones

by Laura Dockrill

‘I s’pose. ’K, let’s try somewhere else.’

  We jog-slash-die along the high street towards the express supermarket, which doesn’t even stock ice cubes. Then to the garage, which has ice coolers but not ice cubes.

  ‘No frappés today then,’ Max says as we head back.

  ‘Oh, what about in here?’

  I spot a Turkish fruit and veg shop and the heat is beating down on all the fruit displayed outside. Pomegranates, yellow mangoes, limes, lemons, oranges, peaches, apricots. There are half and whole watermelons, juicy and rich and the sweetness of strawberries, tomatoes, kiwis and bunches of black and green grapes.

  ‘It smells amazing,’ Max says. He leans forward to inhale. Ripe, natural sweetness.

  A man with a fluffy moustache steps out in front of a multi-coloured beaded curtain that rattles musically.

  ‘Hello, mate. Excuse me, I don’t suppose you have any ice for sale do you?’ HE’S SO SWEET TO EVERYBODY. I LOVE HIM. STOP LOVING HIM, YOU LOOK TERRIBLE.

  ‘Ice?’

  ‘Yeah, ice.’

  ‘How many you want? One bag?’

  ‘How much have you got?’

  ‘Come.’

  We follow the man inside and the air is immediately cool. Three fans purr excellently and the air offers us welcome relief from the chaos of a sweltering Saturday high street. The man tells us to wait as he leaves us to go out the back.

  ‘I think my friend Camille bought a pomegranate from here a while ago and she spilt it all down her front,’ I tell Max.

  ‘Pomegranates are special,’ he says. ‘You know they say there are twelve segments in each fruit, six in half … You know, like the months? AND 365 seeds in each one just like –’

  ‘The days of the year?’

  ‘Yeah, exactly. One for each day of the year. They are proper in sync with nature. Mad, isn’t it?’

  ‘How do you know that?’ I ask curiously.

  ‘My grandma told me,’ he says. ‘Although to be fair she does also have a browning branch of a Christmas tree in a vase by the window from five years ago that she waters non-stop in the hope it grows into a whole new Christmas tree so … it’s pretty dead. So … she might be making this stuff up.’

  ‘I like the sound of her.’

  ‘Yeah, you would. She has a pet crow, well, a crow that visits; his name is Colin. She feeds him crushed-up Rich Tea biscuits. He apparently has a girlfriend too called Wendy but Wendy doesn’t visit much. Too shy, apparently.’

  We browse the shelves. The shop is bigger than it seemed, with four aisles stuffed with cans and pots of spices and jars of stuff. Fresh mint and herbs line the front, with more fruit and vegetables and a fridge stocking coloured drinks. It’s hard not to lick the glass. There are spider plants and palms and rows and rows above covered in garlands of fake flowers – pinks and yellows, reds and oranges. Fake plastic fruit too, shiny red apples and grapes and bananas dangling overhead. More beads. Coloured clothes pegs. Glass teapots and decorative mugs. There are ornaments, funny water fountains and comical dustpans and brushes and candles and incense, sheets of twinkling fabric, little embroidered silk shoes and doormats. The smell is rich with star anise and vanilla and frankincense.

  ‘Well, I know where I’m doing my Christmas shopping this year,’ Max laughs in a whisper. ‘This shop has everything.’

  ‘It feels like we’re on holiday.’ I am stunned, looking around in this weird magical paradise. I feel myself cooling down.

  ‘Yeah, it does.’ We wander around, pointing and smiling, waiting for the ice. ‘So … haven’t seen you for ages, are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I’m not avoiding you.’

  ‘Sure? I mean, I get it if you are. I can see why that night has bad memories for you; I just don’t want you to … you know, associate me with bad memories.’

  ‘How do you speak so clear?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You just speak with clarity. It’s nice.’

  ‘OK?’

  ‘Sorry. I was weird. I was. But I’m better now. I don’t know. I promise I think nothing bad about you. I’ve just had things, you know … on my mind.’

  ‘You thought more about what you want to do … with your life?’

  I shrug. I wander ahead. Wanting to touch everything. Suddenly, I become so overwhelmed and grateful and happy and excited. I can’t even begin to put my finger on it but it rises up through my chest and I could just cry. I say, ‘I want to do so much. I want to live, really live. I want to do all the things you’re meant to do in all the places. I want to … eat cheeseburgers and chips and milkshakes at an open-air drive-in cinema in America and laugh and wear boots and short dresses –’ Max laughs but I’m not laughing; I’m just smiling. I carry on. ‘I want to drink black coffee and red wine and eat steak and baguette in Paris and have a lovely little shiny bob and be really good at eyeliner. I want to eat tapas, standing up, in a back-street cafe in Barcelona, with a tan and loose-fitting clothes. I want a roast dinner in an old pub in the middle of nowhere in the countryside, with a watermill attached to the side and my stupid dogs to be well behaved and lie there while I look over the newspapers and let the cuff of my jumper curl over my wrists and my hair, tussled from the wind, be heavy with rain and hope. I want to eat street food in Thailand and wear those yoga pants that make you look like you’ve pooed yourself, and wear no make-up, and do a handstand in yoga. I want to go everywhere; I want to do everything. I just want to be happy. Do you know what I mean?’

  And then Max kisses me. He has to arch his neck down just a bit to do it. It’s warm and neat and not messy. He holds the back of my head, which is sweaty but I don’t care, and his other hand is on my lower back. I kiss him back. My eyes are closed and if I even open them for a second I just see the blurring rainbow of all the wonderful things behind and the beautiful things in front too. I like this. And my mind is silencing out the whole world and I think about kissing and how it’s the nicest thing I’ve ever tasted. And I feel truly beautiful, even though I am wearing no make-up. And sweating like I’ve been at spin class ten times over. My heart is hopscotching.

  ‘Ice, ICE! Lots of it.’ We jolt apart, startled by the moustached man’s enthusiasm. He rests one foot on top of the ice bags like it’s land he’s just claimed as his and with a grin on his face announces, ‘I see you kiss.’ He chuckles. ‘You want borrow a wheelbarrow?’

  And red-faced and buzzing we barrow the ice back towards Planet Coffee with smiles on our faces, each sucking a cube of ice.

  We near Planet Coffee and Max turns to me and says, ‘OK, here we are, back at Planet Hell. In case I don’t see you because the day is going to be crazy … you know I still owe you a date?’

  ‘I think I owe you a date. I was the one who ran off!’

  ‘No way, definitely not. I owe you.’

  ‘OK, so when do you want to take me on a date?’

  He looks at me cheekily. ‘What about now?’

  ‘Max! We can’t go now! The Planet is chaos, Alicia’s hormones are all over the place, it’s too busy, plus they need the ice –’

  ‘You’re right.’

  We cart the barrow to the shopfront where Max unpacks the ice bags and begins to sling them into Planet Coffee. Strong arms slinging the crush of ice, sleeting and frothing. Already melting. All the while Alicia is moaning like a whiny cat that’s been left unfed for days: ‘What took you so long, guys?’

  And I begin to explain that we had to get it from the Turkish shop as Marcel robotically uncarts and stacks up the bags of ice for Alicia.

  Max dumps down the last bag and looks up, flustered, fingertips red raw with the glassy ice. The faces of caffeine-starved customers grind into him, trying to transport him to the coffee machine with some kind of crazed telekinesis. He calmly puts his hands on his hips.

  ‘Come on then, Maxy. Chop-chop.’ Alicia claps her palms together but Max, instead, cackles, bites his lip with mischief, giggles and whacks me in the back of the
knees with the barrow, jolting me, collapsing my bum snugly into the seat of the barrow like an armchair. Max whips the barrow up onto its wheel and pushes me out of the shop.

  I scream.

  ‘MAX!’ Alicia shouts. ‘Stop jerking around, aliens. You’re very close to shooting back down to earth with a nasty bang and becoming earthlings. I mean it! Come on, snap, snap.’ Another magic phrase that doesn’t work. Max pushes ahead, steering the wheelbarrow and me. Running, running, running, running towards the common, dodging people, dogs, buses, prams, the angry snarls of Alicia. Away, away, away …

  He whizzes me around the grass, the flowers, the fountain, the picnic-makers, the bumblebees, the little birds and paddling pool. I open my arms up, I stretch my fingers out. I close my eyes. Both laughing, we slide and skid and breeze, free and wonderful. Until he tips the barrow over and I topple out and we fall onto the soft grass, laughing more, too breathless to even think about kissing. We link fingers. Giggling. The single wheel from the barrow still spinning. And then Max turns to look at me, vampire teeth and dimples and says, ‘I’ve been thinking about this for a long time; I really want you to be my girlfriend. Will you please think about being my girlfriend?’

  The words come out before I even hear them in my head. ‘Thought about it. A hundred per cent.’

  PIE

  Dove is throwing leek trimmings at the dogs. Mum’s making her famous, delicious cheese and leek pie; we’ll eat it later, slightly warm with salad.

  The house smells like a cuddle.

  ‘Gym again?’ Mum asks as I scoop my hair up into a topknot.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Sure you’re not overdoing it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve been every day this week.’

  ‘Yeah, but I mix it up. I don’t do the same thing every day. Some times I just go to stretch.’

  ‘I used to know somebody at the theatre who had a gym membership with three different gyms because she wanted to go so often and so the staff didn’t talk, JUST so she could work out three times a day.’

  ‘Well, I’m not like that.’

  ‘OK, just be careful. I know what an addictive personality you have.’

  She is referring to the one time I got addicted to the blackcurrant powder dilute drink that I used to get from the vending machine at the library when I was eight. The sugar used to make my heart beat fast.

  I like to feel my heart beat at the gym. I like to feel the sweat trickle down my head. Now I walk past reception and swipe my membership card and they don’t take a second glance at me and I don’t at them. It’s just normal.

  Changing, I feel happy. I’m just so glad I decided to get fit now and not later in life. It’s only going to get harder to make a big life change like that. I mean, look at my dad. And if I want to eat everything I want, I guess it’s good to have balance; in fact, my happiness and enjoyment of food is basically why I work out.

  I think about food when I’m working out. When I’m standing in front of the mirror lifting a dumbbell, pushing a medicine ball, squatting and pressing, I’m imagining I’m a mushroom bubbling in a sauce. I imagine I’m a hot skewer of kebab being carved off a knife. Today, I’ll think about Mum’s pie. I love pastry. Pastry that is thick, wet, water-based … flaky pastry, puff pastry. I like all pies too. I wish we had sweet pie shops here like they do in America. Cherry pie and an iced tea and red shiny lips and red nails.

  I like to feel my legs. I like to pound. I like to pace. I like to race myself and see if I can go harder. I like to grunt sometimes and snarl as my muscles flex and flip and turn inside my skin. Even though I can’t see them, I feel them, building, bulging, bursting, clenching. And with every bad, tired moment comes a newfound wave of power. And when I attempt to do sit-ups at the gym my fat sticks to the mat and makes flumpy fart noises. Air presses out as my skin suckers my back. People stare but I just put my headphones in and smile. And if I still feel self-conscious or weak –

  – all it takes is another woman from across the room to smile back and I keep at it.

  And if there’s no woman to smile at, well, then I just have to smile at my own sweaty cherry-faced tomato dummy grin smiling right back in the mirror.

  When I get home Mum, Dove and I eat the pie at the kitchen counter. We forget about the salad and just eat it out of the pie tin, taking turns to scratch the hardened molten lava of cheesy, creamy sauce that’s got stuck around the outside of the pan. Sword-fighting our forks like tusks.

  Mum and I wash Dove and sing Christmas songs, even though it isn’t Christmas and Dove says we are gonna get bad luck but we don’t care.

  And we sleep well.

  BBQ

  Dad’s turned up, uninvited, with BBQ food. Bags bursting with sausages, burgers, buns and posh crisps.

  ‘Bill, what’s all this?’

  ‘Food! For a BBQ!’ Dad opens up his hands, delighted.

  ‘We don’t even have BBQ coals. The thing hasn’t been washed for months; it’s probably all rusty and covered in black bits.’

  ‘I’ll clean it up in no time. Come on, Lucy, it’ll be nice.’

  Mum rolls her eyes and Dad nudges me in the side. He’s obviously delegated me as his win-back-Mum wing(wo)man.

  ‘You should have worn the sausages round your neck, like a Tony Soprano necklace, then she would have found you irresistible.’

  ‘You’re right; it’s too late now, isn’t it? Too obvious? Bit try-hard?’

  ‘A bit, yeah.’ I nod.

  ‘What’s all this then?’ Dove comes into the garden. ‘You all right, Dad?’

  ‘Dad’s making an impromptu BBQ.’

  ‘Trying,’ Dad says as he looks at the trays of the BBQ as if looking under a car.

  ‘You better have got those yellow Post-it note cheese squares.’

  ‘Course I didn’t. I’m trying to make it up to your mum, not put her off me forever. I got proper cheese. Expensive cheese.’

  Dove rolls her eyes. I can see why. It doesn’t melt the same as the cheap stuff.

  Two hours later and we have a roaring fire and equally roaring bellies. We weren’t even hungry until the idea of the BBQ was planted in our brains; now we’re starving and we have to wait until the coals go all silver and ashy until we can cook anything.

  ‘Isn’t this the life?’ Dad says from his chair. He has sunglasses on even though the sun is going down and it’s getting a bit chilly. His legs are way too spread, his hairy chicken drumstick thighs bouncing open and shut, his stupid sandals showing off his bruised big toes. He is sipping a beer. The fire does smell good. Popping and cracking into the sky.

  Mum comes out with a tray of chicken she’s cooked in the oven, with the dogs slobbering after her. She’s also made coleslaw with apple instead of cabbage and even knocked up a potato salad.

  ‘Finally!’ Dove zombie huffs. ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘Don’t eat too much; you’re gonna want some real BBQ action in a minute!’ Dad grunts in a ‘Texan’ accent.

  ‘I wanted it two hours ago,’ Dove says, biting into a piece of chicken. ‘And this one doesn’t give you all black bits on your teeth.’

  We finish eating. The plates pile up, smears of oil harden; the coal from the fire is now snowflake white and crumbling under the breeze.

  ‘So have you told Dad your news?’ Mum asks, picking at some cold chicken.

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘Go on … what news?’ Dad’s interested, even though I know he’s trying hard not to take it personally that he’s always the last to find out about everything.

  ‘That BB’s got a BOY—’ I launch up, chicken bone rolling to the ground to be snuffled up by one of the dogs, and slam Dove’s ginormous mouth shut with my hand.

  ‘That Planet Coffee are going to take me on as an apprentice.’

  ‘So what does that mean?’

  ‘It’s twelve months. I get paid. Not much, but still … and I can still do my other shifts too. It’s a barista apprenticeship.�
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  Dad looks for Mum’s reaction. Mum looks at me proudly, smiles and says, ‘She sorted it herself … and she’s been keeping the diary from the doctors. And going to the gym … so … I can’t really argue with that.’

  ‘That’s very good, Bluebelle, very good indeed.’ Dad nods. ‘And your A-star in art.’ Dad shakes his head, like he’s about to cry. ‘My baby girl, all grown up. I remember when you only just started nursery and now you’re finishing school. I can’t believe how proud I am of you girls.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too proud, Dad,’ Dove says. ‘One of us has broken both her legs jumping off a building and the other is leaving school to learn how to make cappuccinos.’

  And we all crack up laughing.

  Dad finishes his beer and is feeling rather pleased with himself. To impress Mum, he shows us some of the stage fighting he’s been teaching the students at his summer school. He teaches Dove and I how to slap and punch each other around the face without actually making contact. I have to stomp my foot at the same time to look like I’ve broken Dove’s nose. It’s funny. Especially as Dad is well drunk and keeps slurring his words and tripping up when his sandal slides off. Mum is laughing, beer in hand. Dad does some karate for us and some other really strange physical theatre.

  ‘Do a roundhouse kick, Dad!’ Dove orders and Dad begins spinning around in a circle and flapping his feet out. Dad is wobbling drunkenly all over the place on the decking. Knocking over the plants and falling into a thorny bush.

  ‘Watch my lavender!’ Mum warns.

  ‘You try now, BB!’ Dove says.

  ‘I can’t!’ I say, ‘But I can show you some of the yoga I’ve been learning?’

  ‘Ahhh, yoga. Namaste. I have an inner yogi in me,’ Dad says wistfully. ‘The lovely relaxing bit after all that action – what a perfect way to end a blissful evening in paradise.’ He looks at Mum for a sign of romantic gesture. He gets a side smile and a raise of the brows. I wouldn’t start counting his hens too soon if I were him. The dog farts to add to the mood.

  ‘So this is Warrior.’ I show him.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know all about Warrior.’