The Kneebone Boy

by Ellen Potter

  Oh, and he was wearing yellow pyjamas.

  “You’re new,” Casper said to Brenda.

  “She was Max’s idea,” Lucia muttered.

  Casper looked at Brenda’s bowl of ice cream, then at his youngest child, who was now sitting across from Brenda, pretending to be engrossed in smashing the lumps of sugar in the sugar bowl with the back of a spoon.

  “I see you’ve finished off the ice cream,” Casper said, glancing at the empty ice cream carton on the kitchen counter.

  Brenda squirmed a little.

  “Well done,” Casper said. “I was just about to throw it out to make room for the triceratops bone.”

  They all looked at him with puzzled expressions.

  “What?” he said, gazing back at them. “You have to put dinosaur bones somewhere before the museum comes to fetch them, don’t you? A freezer is the best place. Keeps them nice and fresh.”

  “You never said anything about having a dinosaur bone, Dad.” Lucia narrowed her eyes at him.

  “Not to you, maybe,” Casper said. “But I told Max all about it this morning, didn’t I?”

  Max stared at him for a moment, then nodded.

  “Really? Then why did he tell Brenda it was a brontosaurus bone?” Lucia persisted.

  “Well, that’s what I thought it was at first,” Casper said. “But I looked it up afterwards. It’s definitely triceratops.”

  “Can I see it?” Brenda asked, already making a fair-sized dent in her ice cream.

  “Oh, yes, let’s all see it,” Lucia said, throwing a dry look at Max, who had wilted in his chair.

  “All right. Wait right here. I’ll go get it.” Casper opened the kitchen door and walked out into the garden. All the kids went to the window to watch what he would do next.

  “My dad is never home at this hour,” Brenda said. “Doesn’t your dad work?”

  “Sure, he does. He just works at home,” Max explained. “And every so often he goes away.”

  “Where?” Brenda asked.

  Casper was now circling the garden in his bare feet, staring hard at the ground.

  “All different places. The Philippines, Africa, Indonesia,” Max said. “He paints portraits of kings and queens and empresses. Not the famous ones, though. The ones he paints have been booted off their thrones.”

  Brenda scrutinized him doubtfully, then turned to Lucia. “Is he lying?”

  “No, he’s actually telling the truth this time,” Lucia replied distractedly, her eyes fixed on her father. Casper was kneeling down, frog fashion, and was clawing up the earth. It flew backwards between his legs.

  “Do you get to go with him?” Brenda asked.

  Max shook his head. “He’s too busy when he’s there to look after us. And we’d miss too much school.” He added in a grim voice, “We stay with a lady in town.”

  “What about your mum?” Brenda asked, looking around suddenly as though their mum might be hiding in the room somewhere.

  “Haven’t you heard about our mum?” Lucia asked.

  Brenda shook her head.

  Max flashed a warning look at his sister, which Lucia completely ignored.

  “She’s dead,” Lucia said.

  “She’s gone missing,” said Max.

  “Dead,” Lucia said.

  “Missing,” Max said. “Dad says she’s missing.”

  “He just says that to make us feel better. She’s dead.”

  Now Brenda appeared completely confused. Her eyes darted around nervously between Lucia and Max, stopping briefly to look at Otto, who would not look back at her.

  A scurrying movement out the window made them turn their attention to Casper again. He was down on all fours, one hand pawing around the hole he’d dug in the ground. He pulled something out, something largish, and began brushing the dirt off of it. Then he hopped up very nimbly and trotted back to the house. The front of his pyjamas was filthy and there were bits of soil in his hair and on his spectacles, but when he entered the kitchen, he held up the dirt-encrusted object triumphantly.

  “Found it!” he cried. “I put it back in the ground earlier, just until I could get the freezer cleaned out.”

  He placed the thing on the kitchen table with a thump. It was definitely a bone, and a very large one.

  “Whoa,” Brenda said quietly.

  “Max believes it may be the beast’s ankle bone,” Casper said, looking at his son admiringly. Brenda did the same, and Max’s face turned bright red.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sakes, that’s just an old beef bone,” Lucia said. “One of the neighbourhood dogs probably buried it.”

  “Really?” Casper raised one eyebrow at Lucia, a thing that none of his children could do, though they all had practiced in front of a mirror. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Lucia said resolutely.

  “How much do you want to wager?” Casper asked.

  Lucia shrugged carelessly but she looked a little uncomfortable.

  “How about your birthday money?” Casper suggested.

  Lucia hesitated while Otto examined the bone with his free hand, as though he were trying to assess Lucia’s odds.

  “Forget it.” Lucia backed down. Her nostrils puffed out very widely and she added smirkily, “Believe what you want to believe.”

  “Well said!” Casper exclaimed and he kissed Lucia’s forehead, leaving a smudge of garden dirt on it.

  Later, Lucia watched out the window as Max walked Brenda down the front path, then stood at the edge of the front lawn and watched her walk away. Brenda turned around once to look back at him and he waved enthusiastically. She waved back. A small careless wave.

  Here’s what Max looks like: dark hair like Lucia and blue eyes like Otto. Chin slightly cleft like Lucia and nose on the snubby side like Otto. If you studied him, you would swear he looked like a perfect combination of the two, but if you looked away from him suddenly and then you looked back at him, you’d think that he didn’t look a single thing like either of them.

  “He thinks she’s going to come back,” Lucia murmured.

  Otto looked up from the robin, confused for a moment, then followed Lucia’s gaze out the window.

  “Brenda will go to school tomorrow and tell everyone about the dinosaur bone,” Lucia continued airily, “and everyone will tell her about Mum. Then Brenda won’t ever step foot in this house again.”

  Here is what happened to their mum. One day she was gone. Casper looked everywhere for her. The police looked everywhere for her. The police searched their house too, and they brought dogs to sniff through the garden, as though Casper had done something fiendish, you understand. A crowd of neighbours stood outside, watching. In the end, the dogs found exactly nothing, but you can’t have dogs sniffing through your garden to find your missing mum without there being some serious damage to your family’s reputation. Mum was never found. Soon after that, Otto started wearing his scarf all the time.

  Here is the part I hate to even mention, but since it figures into this story you’d better hear it now. An ugly rumor started going around. People whispered that Otto had strangled his mum with that very scarf in a fit of rage, and that Casper had buried his wife in the yard to cover for him. Otto had always been a strange, quiet boy. Strange, quiet boys are never popular in small towns. Kids in school started harassing Otto with questions about what he’d done to his mum and where her body was buried and did her ghost haunt him at night until, quite suddenly, Otto simply stopped talking. He’d never talked much to begin with, so it was just a stone’s throw to nothing at all. Still, that made things even worse, of course. Before long, all of Little Tunks acted as if the Hardscrabbles had the lurgies, which in case you don’t know is what kids say you have when they don’t want anything to do with you, as in “Ewww, don’t touch the Hardscrabbles, they have the lurgies!”

  “Don’t you think we should warn Max?” Otto asked. “So he won’t get his hopes up about Brenda coming back?”

  Lucia stared at her younger broth
er, who was now walking toward the huge oak tree by their house, which he would certainly climb to sit on his usual rooftop perch by the chimney. His stride was bouncy and his eyes were lost in some imagined future that was clearly much brighter than the present.

  “No. Let him believe what he wants to believe,” Lucia said. Her voice didn’t sound smirky this time. It sounded full of genuine pity. Which should make you like her even more.

  Chapter 2

  In which Otto finds something interesting, Lucia listens to nothing at all, and more stuff happens

  The little robin stayed wrapped in Otto’s scarf throughout dinner, perfectly motionless except for its tiny chest, which rose and fell with rapid breaths. Toward the end of dinner, though, the bird began to twitch. It lifted its head, then attempted to right itself, its claws scratching at the scarf to gain a grip.

  “I think it’s coming round,” Otto said, gazing down at it.

  Casper looked over at Otto through his thick round spectacles, then at Lucia.

  “What did he say?” Casper asked her.

  “He says it’s coming round,” Max interjected. He took every opportunity to show that he knew Otto’s language as well as Lucia did.

  “What is?” Casper asked.

  “A bird, Dad,” Lucia said. “Otto’s got a bird in his scarf.”

  “Ah,” Casper said, and went back to his dinner. He saw so many odd things in his line of work that a bird in a scarf at dinner was fairly ordinary.

  “Oh, poor thing,” Lucia said, watching while Otto carefully disentangled the pinny little claw from the scarf. “We should put it in a box. Just until we’re sure it’s fine.”

  So off they went to search for a spare box. You always think there is an endless supply of spare boxes, but there never really is. The spare ones are nearly always smashed or else have a mouse corpse curled in the corner. There were no spare boxes to be found in the basement or in any of the closets and the poor little robin was beginning to really make a fuss.

  “We might try Dad’s studio,” Otto suggested.

  That hadn’t occurred to Lucia. Casper’s attic studio always seemed like its own separate flat that coincidentally happened to be attached to the top of their house. They opened the door at the far end of the upstairs hallway and climbed the steep, narrow stairs, right away smelling the nutty odor of linseed oil and, lurking behind that, the nostril-wincing sting of turpentine.

  They didn’t often enter Casper’s studio when he was in there. The room wasn’t off-limits exactly; it was just that Casper acted differently while he was at work in his studio. He stared at his sketch pad when he spoke to his kids. His voice grew vague, and his eyes had a faraway cast. In the studio, Casper’s children felt slightly less substantial, as though they were one of Casper’s daydreams, that might grow fuzzy around the edges and vanish without warning.

  When Casper wasn’t in the studio, though, the children did like to come in to see the sketches hanging on the wall. They were the sketches that Casper brought home from his travels abroad—sketches of princesses and sultans, barons and kings, and an occasional knight (the actual paintings were left with his clients, of course, but Casper was able to take home the preliminary sketches).

  In fairy tales, kings and princesses always look different from the everyday person. They’re better looking or taller or fatter or even uglier. You’d think that was just all nonsense in real life, since royals are just people like everyone else.

  Except, they’re not.

  They really do look different from the average person, even royalty who have been booted off the throne or have lost all their money. Casper’s sketches proved it.

  The Duchess of Hildenhausen, for instance, was a thick-jawed, middle-aged woman with long blond ringlets that were spiked with tiny cornflowers. One of her huge blue eyes went the wrong way, so that she looked just like a doll that had been rattled about by an angry child. And there was Prince Wiri, who had ruled The Sister’s Islands in the South Pacific until his family was accused of witchcraft and they were exiled to Fiji. The black-haired Prince Wiri, dressed in a white military uniform crowded with epaulets, was an exceptionally handsome young man—as handsome as any movie star—but he would not smile or even show a hint of happy in any of Casper’s sketches. Lucia enjoyed feeling sorry for him. Then there was the immensely fat Prince Andrei, whose family had once ruled a small principality south of Bulgaria. He had squinty eyes and a long, thin black beard, frayed on the ends. Perched on his shoulder was a black fox. Casper said that the fox was very clever and could bounce on a tiny trampoline that Prince Andrei had had built for him. Still, the fox didn’t like Casper and would occasionally leap off the prince’s shoulder to vomit on Casper’s shoe.

  Ex-royals were more difficult than regular people too. Casper said this was because they were frustrated. A duchess who lives in a tiny four-storey walk-up with a leaky toilet will never be a happy duchess, he said. They snipped and snapped and did strange things. While painting the Duchess of Hildenhausen—the lady with the wonky eye—Casper was interrupted dozens of times while the duchess leapt up to throw boiled potatoes at a mouse that she swore had been harassing her for months.

  Also, unlike regular people, royalty didn’t feel the need to pay their bills. Once in a great while they paid Casper what they said they were going to pay him. But more often than not Casper would come away with little more than partial payment, a box of expensive chocolates, and a promise of payment in full when their “affairs were settled” or “after the sale of a house in Spain.” Ex-royals, it turned out, were a pretty shifty lot.

  So Casper supplemented his income by doing illustrations for small kitchen appliance repair manuals and occasionally for the Journal of British Hog Farming.

  “Why don’t you just paint regular people, Dad?” Max had once asked him. “At least they’d pay their bill.”

  “Probably,” Casper said. “But there is something extraordinary about the face of a person who has fallen from greatness. They remind me of angels tossed out of heaven who are now struggling to manage the coin-operated washing machine at the Scrubbly-Bubbly Laundromat.”

  You must make allowances for artists like Casper. They get romantic ideas about things.

  There were plenty of boxes in the studio crowded into the low corner of the attic, but they were all filled. Some contained bundles of old sketch pads and others had loose drawings and still others held copies of toaster repair manuals that Casper had illustrated or back issues of the Journal of British Hog Farming.

  “Here,” Lucia said, picking out a small carton from the back and handing it to Otto. “This one’s not full yet. We could just shift some of the papers inside to another box and free it up.”

  Otto put the box down and looked inside. “I think it’s just garbage in here. See, most of it’s crumpled.”

  “Well, no wonder,” Lucia said, walking over to Casper’s dustbin. The dustbin was heaped up high with papers. Bits of pencil shavings were spilling off the top of the heap and had pooled around it on the floor. Lucia scooped up the shavings and tucked them in the corner of the dustbin, then shoved the rubbish down with the heel of her hand.

  “Honestly, this place is beginning to look as wild as the garden,” she said, lifting up the dustbin. “I’ll go empty this downstairs.”

  And while she did, Otto found something interesting in the box of crumpled things.

  This isn’t surprising. Otto was very good at finding things that were not meant to be found. He often found birds’ nests tucked in bushes. Once he found a litter of kittens that Esmeralda had stashed beneath a loose floorboard in the garden shed—two white ones and a little black one. Last year he found a bunch of love letters that Casper had written to their mum. They were shoved in the pocket of her dressing gown, which was shoved in the back of Casper’s closet, along with all her other clothes. The clothes still smelled of peppermint from the Such Fun Chewing Gum factory.

  What is surprising, however, is that O
tto didn’t tell Lucia he had found the interesting thing in the box. He usually told Lucia everything. By the time she returned he had tucked the interesting thing in his back pocket, and all Lucia saw was a robin standing upright in an empty carton and Otto looking slightly paler than usual.

  (I hope you don’t think I’m teasing by not telling you what Otto found. I will, I promise. It’s just that there is a right time and place for everything, and 7:19 p.m. on a Thursday in Casper’s attic studio is simply not the right time and place.)

  That night, Lucia lay in her bed, listening to nothing. The sound of nothing is the most ominous sound in the world. It’s the sound a cat makes a second before it lunges for a mouse and sinks its arrow-tippy teeth into the poor thing’s neck. The sound of nothing was also the sound that Casper made right before he was about to leave them.

  Usually, Casper was a night owl. The darker it grew, the busier he became. He cooked at night, he painted at night. His children went to sleep to the lullaby of the radio that he played in his studio or his quick footsteps creaking through the house until the wee hours of morning. But right before Casper was to leave for a job, he slept. Perhaps it was anxiety that tired him out. Or excitement.

  But he hadn’t mentioned a new job, Lucia thought. And he’d been away just two months before. Surely he wouldn’t make them stay with Mrs. Carnival again so soon?

  To take her mind off the sound of nothing, Lucia did what she always did when she felt troubled. She stared at the Sultan of Juwi. She had strategically hung him above her dresser, directly across from her bed, so she could gaze at his face before she went to sleep and wake up to the sight of it in the morning. The white-robed sultan sat in the center of a fountain, on the head of a stone cherub that poured water out of a jug. The sultan held an egg in one hand and a silver demitasse in the other while he looked directly out at Lucia. She knew his face by heart: the creamy skin, the flat disk of cheekbone, the amused wide-set dark eyes that seemed to see all her worst qualities and like her even more because of them. Perched on his head was a crown that looked like a large bejewelled mustard lid, and his white robe was cinched around the middle with a black sash. The left ear had a small hoop earring in it, and the right ear was a bit mangled looking. A mischievous half smile curled one side of his mouth. It was the smile of someone who has recently made a prank phone call. When Lucia told her father that, Casper nodded.