The Bones of You

by Debbie Howells

  I leave her muttering about how Neal doesn’t like feet on sofas. Neal, Neal, Neal . . . Without her watching me, I take in the empty vodka bottle, which I drop into her bin, then use the wrong tap to fill the kettle, before switching it on and hurrying back to check on her.

  I sit down next to her. “What happened, Jo? Why aren’t you in London?”

  The drunk smile wanes as the corners of her mouth turn down. Something happens to her face, as if she’s been slapped really hard. Then it crumples.

  “Oh my God . . .” She gasps, raising a slow-motion hand to her mouth, uttering a moaning sound as pain hits her. Her eyes slowly turn to mine, blinking, trying to focus. “He doesn’t want me.” She garbles it so quietly, I miss it the first time. When I ask her to repeat what she said, it’s like I’m asking her to rip out her heart.

  After that, she doesn’t say much, just makes small, pitiful mewling sounds, all the time holding her head in her hands, rocking slightly. I make her coffee she doesn’t drink; then, before I can help her upstairs to bed, she lies on the sofa and closes her eyes. In seconds she’s asleep. I find two of her beautiful handstitched cushions and slip them under her head, then search for a throw of some kind to drape over her. Finding nothing, I venture upstairs.

  It’s the first time I’ve been up here, and it’s like a five-star hotel, with thick, pale carpets and new, immaculate everything, interior designed to within an inch of its life, as though it’s waiting for someone—a rock legend or a Hollywood star kind of someone—to move in. Eventually, I find a blanket like no blanket I’ve ever owned—softest cream cashmere. After creeping back downstairs and covering Jo with it, I tiptoe out.

  I know the next day she won’t want to see me. I wait until nine, to give her a chance to sleep it off, before I go round there, ringing her bell several times. When there’s no answer, I open the letter box and call through it, “Jo? I won’t stay. But I do need to know you’re all right.”

  Only after I stand there several minutes longer, repeatedly ringing the bell, does she let me in.

  I close the door behind me. “How are you, Jo? Are you okay?”

  She shakes her head. “No. I don’t think I am.”

  She looks terrible. I take her arm and lead her over to the sofa, the same place it looks like she’s just got up from. It’s then that I notice the strips of green silk ripped and torn on the carpet.

  Her beautiful dress.

  “Oh, Jo . . .”

  She covers her face with her hands. “I feel a fool. Such a fool.”

  “You’re not a fool, Jo. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

  She searches for the right words, or maybe it’s the courage to speak them.

  “Neal doesn’t think so.” She whispers it.

  I can’t believe he’s upset her, not again. “What happened, sweetie?”

  “Says . . . ugly,” she mutters. “I’m . . . old. Embarrassing . . .” I strain my ears to make out her words.

  Then suddenly coherent, she sits up and says, “He didn’t want me to go to London, because he was meeting someone else, Kate. He’s having an affair.”

  “He can’t be.” What she’s saying is outrageous. She’s more unstable than I’d realized. And although they have their ups and downs, he can’t be having an affair. “Surely not.” I shake my head. “Maybe you’re misunderstanding things, Jo.”

  “Oh, Kate,” she says, looking at me sadly. “I thought you’d realized. Don’t tell me you’re another.”

  “Another what?” I’ve no idea what she means.

  “You can’t bear the thought that Neal and I are anything but a devoted couple, can you? It would be too hard, too unfair, after losing Rosanna, for us to lose each other, as well. . . .”

  I gasp. I’ve thought exactly that; of course I have, as anyone would. Told myself that at least each of them knows how the other feels, that there’s the smallest comfort to be found in sharing their pain, that being alone would be too unbearable.

  “You just want everything to be perfect,” she says, gazing out toward the garden.

  This time she’s wrong. “Believe me, Jo. I don’t do perfect. I do gardens, things that grow and evolve with all the imperfections that make them beautiful. Anyway, one person’s paradise is another’s nightmare. Each to their own. I just think, well, you and Neal, after all you’ve been through, surely he’d see you’re better off together than apart?”

  “You don’t understand.” She clasps her hands, then gets up, her voice ragged. “No one can, Kate. It’s not the first time. He does this, and I have to live with it—because I can’t leave him.”

  I spend a large part of that day shoring her up, not sure what to believe and what to dismiss as fabrications of her clearly troubled mind. But the more I learn, the more I realize I’ll never truly understand how it is to be Jo.

  Angus is wary. “Just be careful, Kate. I know you’re worried about her, but Jo’s world is about Jo. What about Delphine while all this is happening? Is she even thinking about her?”

  “Delphine’s fine. She’s with a friend this weekend. Which is just as well,” I tell him. “Neal’s a complete bastard. If you knew the half of it . . .”

  “So why does she stay with him? She doesn’t have to. She’s not stupid, Kate. No one sticks around if it’s that bad.”

  “I know,” I say, weary. And he has a point. “But don’t you think, when you’ve lost a child, that maybe there are different rules? And you’re not exactly sympathetic, Angus. God, if it was us . . . if we’d lost Grace . . .”

  He’s silent, then pulls me over, hugs me tight against him, his chin resting on the top of my head.

  “She’ll be home soon.”

  “Two weeks.”

  Two weeks . . . That’s all it is until her Christmas break starts, with the decorating, the present wrapping we always do together, the cooking, with the inevitable last-minute shopping, because no matter how organized you are, there’s always something you forget.

  Suddenly, I miss her terribly.

  I’m at Jo’s early Sunday morning, tidying the kitchen while she’s upstairs having a bath, when Neal arrives back home unexpectedly.

  “Kate?” He seems surprised to see me. “What are you doing here? Is Jo all right?”

  “Not really,” I say quite coolly. “But then, it’s hardly surprising, is it? She was really looking forward to this weekend.”

  Neal puts down his bag and stands there, looking puzzled. “Wait a moment.... What exactly are you saying?”

  I stare back at him, speechless. Astounded at his nerve.

  Then he nods. “I see,” he says softly. “She told you it was my fault.”

  I frown. Confrontation’s not my style, but after the weekend Jo’s just had, I can’t stand here and say nothing. “All she told me was what you said to her, Neal.”

  He walks over to the window and stands there, looking out, so I can’t see his face. Then he turns, and I see how weary of this he is, too.

  “Did she tell you all of it? That on Friday, before we left, she was drunk? So completely off her face, she couldn’t walk, least of all make it to a hotel and the awards dinner? Honestly, Kate, she was in no fit state to go anywhere.”

  “She told me you called her ugly. And embarrassing. God, Neal. She’s so fragile. . . .”

  He turns and walks slowly to the door through to the hallway, then quietly closes it before turning to face me. “I did call her embarrassing. And she was. It was supposed to be my big night. Our big night. Recognition for all the work we’ve done. I wanted my beautiful wife to share it with me. And what does she do? Gets smashed and bloody ruins it.” He clenches his fists. “Too right she’s bloody fragile. But believe me, Kate . . .” I see him take a breath. When he looks at me again, the anger has gone. “I love her. There’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t do to help her.”

  He’s so sincere. So utterly convincing. I apologize profusely, muttering about there being two sides to every story, and about how worr
ied about Jo I am, before crawling away, mortified. But the conversation niggles at me until days later, I put it separately to both Angus and Laura.

  “If you have two equally convincing opposing stories from two people who love each other, how do you work out what’s true?”

  “Gut instinct,” says Angus, turning the pages of his newspaper.

  “The truth is often somewhere in the middle,” says Laura.

  “It’s probably quite simple,” Angus says.

  “The thing is, one person’s truth is very often another person’s lie. There are small giveaway signs, too, which sway most of us without us really noticing,” she goes on. “Body language, for one. And eye contact. It takes a seasoned con artist to look you in the eye and lie outright.”

  “We all do it,” says Angus. “Say things that aren’t exactly the whole truth. It’s human nature.”

  “Of course, the other thing,” says Laura, “is the reason for the lie. Unless someone’s a pathological liar in the first place, they’ll have reasons of their own for twisting the truth.”

  ROSIE

  There are always two camps. Good and evil. Beautiful and ugly. Winners and losers. Andersons are never losers, just as they’re never anything less than perfect.

  It’s why I’m drawn to Kate, in her old jeans or patched jodhpurs, dusty boots, and shapeless T-shirts. Ask her horses, because they know, too. What matters is the part of you inside.

  Did you know that a horse reads your tension, your unease, your every mood? That it doesn’t care how old your clothes are, but hears that thing in your head that’s really irritating you? That if you empty your mind and fill it with love, the horse will feel its undulating wave ripple the air between you?

  When I’m twelve, I’m shopping with Mummy for new clothes for the body I don’t want, with the breasts and curves that weren’t there before, feeling the self-consciousness that comes with them. I want to hide in jeans, rock-star T-shirts, and tiny shorts, the same as other girls wear, to blend in and be just another teenager, but Mummy won’t let me.

  “Appearance is everything, Rosanna,” she tells me. “In the first few seconds when someone meets you, they decide what kind of person you are just by looking at you. That sort of person”—she glances across the mall at some girls, brash, quite loud, a little overweight in their too-tight stretchy dresses, with long hair extensions and layers of make-up—“or like us.”

  I look at the girls, then at Mummy, beautifully dressed in pale, pressed linen, her hair soft and styled, and my own baby-pink jeans. Look at the girls again—chattering and laughing loudly, arm in arm, sharing a joke. Secrets, even. At Mummy again, who looks perfect and does not smile. And I know which I want.

  Over time I gather a few items no one knows about, hiding them. A black high-rise T-shirt. Denim shorts. Fun clothes that make me feel good, sneaking them on when my parents are out, wishing I could keep the feeling even when I take them off. And I’m smart about it. Every so often I change the hiding place, but even so, she finds them. Takes them away, telling me they’re vile and cheap. “Slutty,” she says, spitting out the word.

  It doesn’t end there. Not with my clothes.

  When I’m fourteen, Della and I are sitting at the dining table. We have a roast Sunday lunch every week like clockwork. Only this time, when Mummy puts my plate in front of me, I stare at it, thinking there’s been a mistake, because apart from a sliver of meat and some vegetables, it’s almost empty.

  I say nothing, just eat it, waiting for the dessert that follows, ravenously hungry. But when it arrives, I don’t get offered any, just feel my father’s sideways look at me as I open my mouth.

  Della stares, too. “Why isn’t Rosie eating?”

  “Don’t call her that,” snaps my father.

  “Sometimes it’s good to eat less,” says Mummy. “Rosanna needs to lose weight.”

  Her words shock me. I’ve never thought of myself as fat. I glance at my hands, still a child’s hands and wrists, the same as they’ve always looked. Then my mother reaches for the water jug. As her hand closes round the handle, I see skin stretched over sinew, bone, hard lines. No softness.

  It’s the day I first notice she doesn’t eat.

  I can’t help think the question, Am I ugly?

  The less food I’m given and the tighter my body becomes, the tauter inside I get, a stretched wire that I know with certainty will one day snap. And as my body shrinks, the question grows in obesity, taking over my head as I try to answer it. Am I fat? In the full-length mirror, is the softness not in fact softness, but grotesque bulges that shouldn’t be there? Needing to be starved out of existence?

  Looking now, I see only the flawless, slender body of an adolescent, one who still has a child’s innocence, who under my mother’s endless quest for perfection is malleable. It’s when I see, too, that all those weeks she’d go away, “visiting friends,” it was always the same friend. The surgeon’s knife, carving, whittling her away, to expose the perfect woman buried beneath.

  Far from being naturally beautiful, my surgically enhanced mother has created a vocation out of perfecting herself. One of such importance to her, she just has to pass it on to her daughters.

  But even now, as I watch, I don’t see why, because the more perfect she becomes, the more her soul and mind go unnourished, shriveling and dying like the fallen leaves in the woods, withering, decaying to nothing.

  15

  December

  I tread carefully with Jo in the days leading up to Christmas, seeming to come so soon after Rosie’s death. It’s a time of year I’ve always loved, appealing to my homemaking side, as I make our house pretty, invite friends, gather treats and presents for my family. This year in particular, Grace’s first since starting university, and because Rosie’s death still hangs over us, is far more precious.

  “Oh, we have an artificial one, thank God,” Jo says when I offer to get her a tree. “They make such a mess. It looks quite real. You’d never know.”

  If I didn’t know Jo was a clean freak, I’d have wondered if it was a put-down. I think of the hint of plastic-paint smell, instead of the resinous wafts of pine that I love, or the absence of needles, which are still appearing six months later, but if they weren’t, in a bizarre way, I’d miss them.

  “You must all come over. For a drink,” I say on impulse. Only after the words are out questioning whether it’s wise, in the light of what happened a couple of weeks back. “Bring Delphine, too, if she’d like to come.”

  Just days later, in the midst of flickering Christmas lights, the warm glow of candles lighting the windows, I find myself somewhere much darker.

  Laura’s phone call one evening comes as I wrap presents and write a few last-minute cards. “I won’t keep you, Kate. I know you’re busy, but I thought you’d want to know. The police have taken Alex in for questioning.”

  “God.” Feeling my legs suddenly weak, I sit down. “Are you sure?”

  “Completely. It seems the friend who gave him an alibi has since retracted it. Seems it was a lie and they’ve fallen out. Kate? Are you there?”

  But I’m not listening, images drifting through my mind of Alex, at the garden center, silently working; in the clearing in the woods where Rosie died; zooming in as angrily, bitterly, he tells me about Neal, words weighted with menace, implied threats, and veiled warnings. Even so. I’m shocked.

  “Kate?”

  “Sorry. I was just thinking. I can’t believe it—that Rosie would be with someone who could do that. . . .”

  “Well, at least they’ve got him. You know what this means? Obviously, there’ll be a trial, but at last you can all get on with your lives.”

  Slowly, it starts to sink in, that it’s not so much a weight lifting as a relief, just to know. For all of us—except Jo and Neal. Delphine.

  “There was something else, too.” Laura’s voice is serious. “Only, Alex was done for assault—a couple of years ago. He beat up this guy who was stalking his th
en girlfriend.”

  “But surely that’s just teenage emotional stuff?” I say to her. “It must happen all the time. Boys punching boys . . .”

  “Not on this occasion,” she says quietly. “This guy ended up on a life-support machine. Alex very nearly killed him.”

  Jo and Neal come over that evening to a house that’s cinnamon scented from the mulled wine Angus has made, the kitchen warm from the Aga’s cosy heat, the needles already dropping from the tree, which I’ve brought in early just for this evening. I’ve decorated the fireplace with ivy and larch from the garden and lit candles. It’s as it always looks in here just before Christmas. Untidy. Homely. Welcoming.

  For drinks, which is just that, drinks plus a few mince pies, I’d usually pull on clean jeans and my velvet and chiffon top. A little more makeup than for every day, maybe even nail polish. Festive, but not over the top, but knowing Jo will be glammed up to the nines, I’ve made an effort.

  “A dress?” Angus looks shocked, then disconcerted, because he knows the code, too, and I’m breaking it. “I thought this was just drinks?”

  “It is,” I reassure him. “But there’s nothing wrong with dressing up a bit, is there?”

  My bemused husband shakes his head, then glances down at his chinos, as if wondering if he ought to wear a suit.

  I catch his eye. “You look great.”

  I wish Grace was here with us, but she’s not due home until tomorrow, and, anyway, being Grace, she’d have her own plans. We’ve invited Rachael and Alan, and our neighbors, too. Ella and David, both arty types and gentle people, sensitive to what’s happened to Jo and Neal—and being childless, a little removed from what’s happened. David’s an architect, and Ella paints, mostly fine art, and though we’re not of their world, we get on well enough. They arrive early, Ella picking my brains on her garden, while David brainstorms the conservatory Angus yearns for and can’t afford.