The Bones of You

by Gary McMahon

  Then, as if sensing that she was being watched, she broke away from her scrutiny long enough to glance up at my window. Instinctively, I raised a hand in greeting. The girl—pale face, big dark eyes surrounded by bruise-like smudges of kohl eye makeup—smiled cautiously and returned the gesture. We stood there like fools, staring at each other, and I started to realize that she probably wasn’t going to look away unless I did. My hand was still raised. I dropped it and shrugged. The girl smiled again.

  I closed the curtains and went back to bed, then got up again because right now there was absolutely no chance that I’d get back to sleep. I put on an old T-shirt and a pair of jogging bottoms.

  Downstairs, I put on the kettle and tuned the radio to a channel that played slow, sweet songs rather than the incessant chatter of talk radio.

  While the kettle was boiling, I opened the back door and stepped outside. The air had turned cold. I could see my breath as a white mist in front of my face. I blew it out, pretending that I was smoking. It was childish, but it killed an urge.

  Purely out of nosiness, I walked around to the front of the house to see if the girl had gone. She hadn’t; she was still there, in exactly the same place, and she was staring at the house again.

  “Hi,” she said, without turning around.

  “Hello. See anything interesting?”

  “It’s just a house,” she said, as if she were trying to convince herself of something. Her breath did the same as mine, a thin white snake hanging in the air.

  “It’s cold,” I said, redundantly. “How about a nice hot cup of tea?”

  I thought she might be homeless. I’d experienced that situation myself, so felt a level of empathy toward her. I didn’t think there was any harm in being friendly. None of my new neighbors had bothered with me, so this odd, lonely girl might become my only friend.

  She moved her head, looking at me. “You serious?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Why not? You look like you could use a hot drink.”

  The girl walked over to the wall at the front of my property, sat down on it and made a face that looked like she’d tasted something she didn’t much like. “I hope you’re not planning to rape me. I have VD.”

  “That must be nice for you. I bet your parents are so proud.”

  She cracked a smile, amused by the silly middle-aged man in his Clangers T-shirt and baggy joggers. “A brew would be nice…”

  “It’s up to you. I’m not going to beg you, for Christ’s sake.” I turned away, went back inside, but left the side door open.

  In about half a minute, she followed me inside.

  “How do you take it?”

  “White, six sugars.”

  “Very healthy.” I poured the hot water over teabags in the cups, turned to face her as I waited for the tea to brew. “You can leave the door open if you like…if it makes you feel more comfortable.”

  She kicked the door shut. “You’re not going to hurt me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can tell. I’m a good judge of character.”

  She took off her heavy coat and hung it over the back of a kitchen chair. She had on a black (surprise, surprise) T-shirt that declared the name of a band I’d never heard of—Gladiatorial Snot. The shirt was at least two sizes too big for her frame, and underneath it she had on a white long-sleeved sweater.

  “Nice shirt,” I said, then turned to pull the teabags out of the cups. I added milk to mine, milk and the requisite six sugars to hers, and then handed her the drink.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Adam,” I said. “I just moved in.”

  “I’m Pru,” she said.

  “Short for Prudence?”

  “Short for mind your own fucking business,” she snapped, but a smile came with it to let me know that she was at least half kidding.

  “My, you’re a real charmer,” I said. “The youth of today: so damned rude.”

  “You invited me in.” She sipped her tea, those dark-rimmed eyes peering at me over the cup.

  Pru looked to be about seventeen or eighteen. She might have been younger; I couldn’t tell, and she was one of those semi-goth kids whose age was tough to estimate. I’d seen them everywhere, this type: her type, always wearing black, with long dyed black hair, and listening to death metal on their iPod headphones. She wasn’t homeless, as I’d first thought; she just liked to look as if she was.

  “You’re out late. Aren’t your folks worried?”

  “Don’t be silly. I’m nineteen. I live in a flat a couple of miles away, share it with a few friends.”

  “By flat, do you mean squat?”

  “Whatever.” She took another drink of her tea. “This is nice.”

  I liked her; she was pretty cool, and seemed to take no shit. I wished I’d been like that at her age.

  “So why were you out there, looking at that house?”

  She put down her cup on the table, pulled out a chair and sat down.

  “Please, make yourself at home,” I said.

  She gave a little chuckle at that one. “Do you know who used to live in that house? The empty one next door?”

  I sat down opposite her, wrapping my hands around my mug. “I just found out today that a murderer used to live on my street. So let me guess. A murderer?” I couldn’t help being flippant. The seriousness of the subject matter made me want to try and keep it at bay using cheap humor.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Katherine Moffat. She killed twelve kids that they know of, and is thought to have killed at least ten more and buried their remains in the area.”

  Pru’s type, they always seemed to idolize, or even deify, serial killers. I bet she had one of those T-shirts with “Charlie Don’t Surf” written underneath Charles Manson’s grinning face.

  “Ah…you’re one of those.”

  She looked questioningly at me, little wrinkles furrowing her brow. They were cute. “What do you mean, ‘one of those’?”

  “A death groupie. The black clothes, black hair, white face…I bet you read extreme horror stories and write bad poetry, too, or cute little songs, about death and stuff.”

  “Okay, I’m gone.” She stood up, pushed back the chair, and stalked toward the door. As she opened it, she turned to me, and her face had gone red beneath the sun-starved pallor. “I don’t know who you think you are, but you’re a bit of a prick.”

  “Thanks,” I said, saluting her with my mug of tea. “Please, stop by anytime. I’m always happy to help.”

  She slammed the door on her way out. I was left there staring at my tea.

  About a minute later the door opened again and she was standing there, looking sheepish, her gaze finding me through her ragged black fringe. “Okay. So you’re a funny guy. It’s cold. I haven’t finished my tea.”

  “Sorry,” I said, taking pity on her for the second time that night. “Sometimes I am a bit of a prick. Come back in. Have your drink. I was kind of enjoying your company.”

  She entered the kitchen, shut the door, and sat back down. “Thanks. I do have an ulterior motive, you know…”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “I come here a lot. I suppose you’d call it an obsession. That house…it draws me here, I just stand out there and watch it, like I’m trying to fathom its secrets.”

  The hard-edged street kid had vanished, and now she seemed like a little girl. Like an older sister or niece to my daughter, my Jess.

  “Why do you come here? What is it about that house you find so fascinating?”

  She leaned back in the chair. “Okay, I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you. My dad was a writer. He wrote a book about Katherine Moffat, and about what she did in that house.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “The book’s out of print. Even I don’t have a copy. It was called Little Miss Moffat and the Radiant Children. My dad’s name was Robert Shingley.”

  “Was?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said was, not is. Your da
d’s name was Robert Shingley.”

  “Yeah, he died.”

  “Oh…I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. He was ill for a long time. He had a heart condition. That book was the last thing he worked on before he died. The last thing that obsessed him, that took up the time he should have been spending with me and my sister. Coming here…it helps. It just helps, that’s all.”

  She didn’t have the vocabulary to express what she really meant, but I felt it anyway. The longing, the lost connection with a father who was probably never fully there even when he was around physically, his head buried in research while he wrote books about grubby little murders.

  “Yeah. I know.”

  She smiled. Her hands moved slowly on the tabletop, spreading out flat, palms down. Her nails were bitten short; the ends of her fingers were red; they looked painful. I wondered what went on inside her head, what kind of demons were housed within the small, tired shell of her body.

  “Drink your tea,” I said.

  * * *

  I sat there for a while after she’d gone, thinking about the way she’d looked so fragile, crumpled almost, when she told me about her dead father. The love I felt for my own daughter hit me hard, like a blow from deep inside. It often happened that way, when I was least expecting it. Tears threatened to come, but I wouldn’t let them. I was too strong, too tough and old-fashioned to cry.

  I rinsed out the mugs and put them away, glad that at least I was growing tired. There was still enough time to grab some sleep before I had to be at work for another shift, my last of the week.

  I switched off the kitchen light and stared at the darkness, wondering if it was a friend or a foe. I was never afraid of the dark as a child: I’d always liked it, felt safe within its folds and creases. But this darkness wasn’t mine; it was someone else’s, and its nature was difficult to judge.

  After a while, I left the darkness to its own devices and headed back upstairs to my bedroom. My footsteps were unfamiliar on these stairs, and I had to keep reminding myself that they were mine. I still wasn’t used to the house, nor was it yet accustomed to me.

  Moving up the staircase, I had the strange sensation that I was being followed—or perhaps simply watched. I felt eyes upon my back, staring hard. I imagined the gaze as a near-physical force that helped to propel me upward. When I reached the landing, I stopped and just stood there, waiting to see if the sensation would go away. It didn’t. I felt as if there were someone standing behind me, perhaps a couple of steps down, watching my back.

  Slowly, I turned and looked back down the stairs. The staircase was empty, of course, but the darkness at the bottom seemed busy, as if things were moving around, twitching in the small space; things that were far too small, or much too quick, for me to see.

  I made my way to my bedroom and shut the door behind me. I stood and listened for a few seconds, to check that there were no footsteps following me across the landing to stop outside the room. Silence. I shook my head and turned away from the door, walked across to my bed. The room was dark. The nearest streetlight was something like a hundred yards along the street outside, so I didn’t get much light in the evening. I climbed slowly into bed, pulling the sheets up over my body, seeking out their protection.

  I turned onto my belly and stuck my hands under the pillow—it was a habit from childhood; I’d always slept that way when I was feeling vulnerable.

  I opened my hands and spread out my fingers under the pillow, wriggling them around to get comfortable. When something touched my hand, I was too shocked to register the contact: small, cold fingers slowly closed around my right palm. I reacted violently by pulling my hands out from under the pillow.

  I pushed myself into a press-up position, then tucked my knees under my lower body and knelt on the mattress. After a moment’s hesitation, I grabbed the pillow and hurled it across the room. There was nothing underneath. No hands. No arms snaking up from the gap at the bottom of the cheap pine headboard.

  I was alone in my bed. Of course I was. Anything else would be silly.

  I left the pillow off the bed and forced myself to lie back down, this time on my back. As I lay there and stared at the ceiling, wondering how long it would be before the sun came up, I tried not to imagine someone lying directly beneath me, separated from me by the mattress and the bed frame. Lying on their back and staring up at the bottom of my bed, smiling.

  FIVE

  Signs of Being Eaten

  The following day at work, I gave Evans a wide berth and basically kept my own counsel. I saw Carole only briefly, during my lunch break, and she said that she was looking forward to dinner that evening before rushing off to the back office on some admin errand.

  Part of me wished that I hadn’t invited her, but another part of me—probably the part that hadn’t had sex for almost a year—was glad that she was coming around. I didn’t know why I felt the need to deprive myself of female company; it wasn’t as if that was part of the court agreement, and it wouldn’t affect the time I had with Jess. If anything, it might be good for Jess if I had another woman around the house, someone to talk to, to give me advice and make sure I didn’t get too self-absorbed.

  Perhaps I was simply trying to punish myself.

  When my shift was over, I made my way out of the warehouse and across the car park. I walked fast, not wanting to become involved in any gossip with coworkers finishing at the same time, or, worse still, receive an invite to the pub for an after-shift pint.

  I made it to my car safely. Starting the engine, I sat and stared at the dismal car park, with its dull gray surface, the tired industrial buildings, and the vehicles parked there. It felt like a metaphor for my life, but I didn’t understand the exact nature of what it was telling me.

  I pressed the CD button on the stereo, and Otis Redding started singing to me. My mood became less brittle, the edges softening. Good music nearly always helps; it’s like medicine for the soul.

  I drove to a supermarket on the way home, a large store that stocked a lot of stuff the smaller shops near my house didn’t seem to order in. I had no idea what I was going to make for dinner, but I did feel that it was necessary to make a bit of an effort. I hadn’t treated Carole as well as I should have. She’d done nothing to deserve the way I’d been ignoring her, or the fact that I’d failed to even give her a call after our last date. The only thing she was guilty of was liking me and wanting to deepen our relationship…but in my eyes, that was tantamount to a criminal offense.

  The supermarket wasn’t too busy, so I managed to get around quickly. I decided I’d fall back on the old single man’s standby and cook steaks. Not exactly adventurous, but in this economy they were still out of the ordinary enough to be classed as a treat. I bought a couple of potatoes for baking and some coleslaw from the salad counter. Then I selected three bottles of decent white wine—they were on a three-for-two offer, and I thought we might get through at least two of them.

  As I walked back along the meat aisle, I was distracted by the sight of a row of cuts of pork. As some kind of marketing campaign, a severed pig’s head had been positioned at the front of the display. I couldn’t tell if the head was real or a plastic fake. Its beady eyes seemed to watch me as I walked past, and when I turned my attention away from it, the head looked like it belonged not to a pig, but a child. I looked again, and the illusion died.

  I was tired. Last night’s weird episode in bed had left me unable to sleep properly, and I’d woken up again not long afterward. It was the first time in a very long time that I’d got to watch the sun come up. The association wasn’t a good one. Most of the regrettable acts in my life have been rubber-stamped by the onset of a sleepless dawn.

  I paid for my provisions and went back to my car. The air was cold again—this autumn cold snap was lasting longer than anyone had expected. As I put my carrier bags in the trunk of the car, I heard a distant firework from somewhere on one of the housing estates at the top of the valley in which the superma
rket was located. They were always setting off fireworks there, whatever the time of year, but the sound made me realize that Halloween was approaching. After that, it would be Bonfire Night, the old celebration when fireworks were actually meant to be set off to commemorate the burning to death of a political activist. I didn’t think many of the current generation of kids knew who Guy Fawkes was. His role in the event seemed to have been forgotten.

  But unlike Bonfire Night, Halloween was a growth industry these days: there was a whole Americanization of the day happening, to the extent that it was even called a holiday. When I was a child, it was a low-key affair: carved turnips with candles inside, a few desultory groups of kids in bad ghost costumes roaming the streets and knocking on doors to recite a poem for money—the sky is blue, the grass is green, have you got a penny for Halloween.

  It was all different now: decorations in windows, pumpkins on sale in all the shops, expensive costumes, and the call of trick or treat drifting through the towns and villages of the country.

  I drove back home with these thoughts in my head, remembering that everything changed; nothing could ever stay the same. The nature of existence was that things evolved, people moved on, took on all kinds of influences. The idea of this depressed me. I was the kind of guy who liked things the way they were: if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

  When I got home, somebody had stuffed a bunch of takeaway flyers through my letterbox. I kicked them across the floor and took my bags through to the kitchen. Despite the big push by supermarkets, I didn’t think the people in this neighborhood would make too much of a fuss out of Halloween.

  When I returned to pick up the flyers and shut the front door, I saw my favorite goth girl—Pru—was once again standing in the street outside the house next door.

  “Hey.” She said it without even looking at me.

  “You’re here early. I wasn’t expecting your habitual vigil until much later.”