The Bones of You

by Gary McMahon

  A shadow crossed the area of wall I was looking at. I looked up at the sky and then back again. The shadow was gone. There had been nothing to cast it.

  I turned back to my daughter. “I’m not sure it’s a cat, Jess.”

  Then what else could it be? One of those sins escaped from its jar, or set free to roam the area, looking for a sinner to cling to?

  “It is, Daddy…it’s a pussycat.” She took another step toward the long grass. Whatever was in there darted quickly away, clearly more afraid of her than I was of it. That was good. Sins could have no fear, unless they feared the innocent. “Here, pussy, pussy…” She started to make that odd hissing noise, the one people make when they’re trying to beckon a feline. She couldn’t quite form the sound properly, so it came out all wrong. It was no surprise that the cat—if that’s in fact what it was—didn’t want to approach her. It was probably terrified.

  I thought about the box I’d found in the cellar, and turned around to look at the house. I checked that Jess was okay, and then walked toward the building. I’d been at this end of the house at the time, standing on the other side of the cellar wall. I bent down, moved some grass and weeds aside with my hand, and found a small window. It was more of a vent, really. The opening was much too small to be called a window, but had a pane of glass set into the plastic frame. It was the size of a letter box…just big enough for a small animal to enter. And, yes, when I reached out and pushed it, the vent opened inward.

  A cat…

  It must have entered the cellar through this vent and been playing with the box, moving it around the cellar floor. It made perfect sense—at least more sense than any other explanation that I could think of.

  I felt relieved, yet the fear didn’t leave me completely. I twisted my head around and looked at Jess. She was leaning forward, bent over at the waist, with her hand out…rubbing her first finger and thumb together and making that silly beckoning sound again.

  I walked over to where she was standing. “I think you’re right. It is a cat.”

  “I know, Daddy. I’ve just seen him. He popped his head out and meowed. He’s lovely…so cute.” She dropped into a low crouch. “Come on, Mr. Cat. We won’t hurt you.”

  As if obeying a direct order, the cat appeared. It slunk out of the tall grass, looking timid and uneasy. It was black, with large green eyes: a beautiful creature. The closer it came, the more I realized that the cat was uncared for. It was thin; its ribs were visible through its skinny flanks. The fur was matted, filthy, and coated with brambles and seeds. The cat wasn’t wearing a collar. Even a fool could tell it was a stray. I thought it might have belonged to some past tenant of the house I was renting, and had been living rough in the area, feeding off scraps. Perhaps it wandered by often, looking for its old owners, hoping that they might have returned to take it with them.

  I no longer felt scared; I just felt sorry for the thing.

  “Oh, Daddy,” said Jess, and in that moment I knew that we were keeping the cat. That I was keeping the cat—at least for a little while, until I could think of a way to get rid of it that wouldn’t upset my little girl. She would have it no other way, so I might as well just accept the situation and move on. Me and my new house pet.

  The cat walked right up to Jess. She dropped to her knees and held out her hands. The cat jumped up into her arms. I flinched, but it was too late to make a difference. If the cat scratched her, the damage was already done. I could do nothing but watch.

  But the cat didn’t harm her. It sat in her arms as she cradled it, singing a wordless tune. The cat shut its eyes and began to purr. The sound was absurdly loud, like a distant motorbike engine drawing closer.

  “Daddy, can we…?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, we can keep it. For a little while, anyway, until I can find out who it belongs to.”

  Gardening chores and ice cream now forgotten, we moved back into the house. I shut the kitchen door and watched as Jess delicately set down the cat on the floor. It stopped purring and watched us closely. Whenever Jess moved, the cat went with her. It trusted her, but it didn’t yet trust me. I couldn’t blame it. I’m not what you would call a trustworthy character.

  “We need a saucer of milk.” Jess had taken charge. She crossed the kitchen to the fridge, opened the door, and took out the plastic bottle of long-life milk. Then she grabbed a tea plate from the draining board beside the sink. She poured a small amount of milk onto the plate, and then gently set it down on the floor. The cat approached the dish, sniffed at it, and then started to lap at the milk. Within a few seconds, the plate was empty, so Jess poured some more milk.

  I didn’t even know if cats really drank milk, or if it was just something they did in cartoons—like mice eating nothing but that cheese with the holes.

  I got a can of tuna from the cupboard, opened it, and forked it into a shallow bowl. Instead of feeding the cat myself, I handed the bowl to Jess. This was her job; she was making things happen. The animal trusted her. A bond was forming and I didn’t want to spoil things.

  Jess stroked the cat’s head as it devoured the tuna fish. It must have been starving. After it had eaten, it lay down on the floor, flipped over onto its back, and exposed its belly. Jess tickled the cat’s belly, and once again it began to purr. Loudly.

  “He likes it here,” she announced.

  I walked over and looked down at the cat. She was right about one thing: it was a male.

  “How did you know it was a boy?”

  She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Dunno…I just knew. It looked like a boy.”

  My daughter, the Cat Whisperer, friend to abandoned felines.

  “Okay,” I said, unable to think of any other comment. “I think you’ve made a new friend, anyway.”

  “Stroke him, Daddy. He likes it. He’s friendly.”

  I knelt down and reached out, stroking the cat’s ear. After an initial moment of hesitation, when the cat twisted its head out of reach, it allowed me to pet it. I stroked its head, rubbed its belly, and realized that I actually enjoyed the purring sound. It was a comfort.

  “I wonder what his name is.”

  “Magic,” said Jess, without even the slightest pause. “His name’s Magic.”

  I didn’t even bother to ask how she knew. I just took it on trust. It was turning into that kind of day. The kind where weird things happened, and all you could do was shrug and accept them and hope they didn’t get too weird.

  “Magic,” I said, remembering how the box in the cellar had seemed to move on its own, or as if pushed by a ghostly hand. Was this thing even big enough, or strong enough, to move a cardboard box across a concrete floor?

  Magic. By name and by nature.

  TEN

  Bruising

  We cleaned the cat up as best we could and fed him more milk. He seemed to take to us quickly, trusting us not to hurt him. But he kept most of his affection for Jess; he loved being cradled in her arms. It was nice to see, that kind of unconditional love of one being for another. It was something I hadn’t experienced in my own life, so I found it as much puzzling as I did fascinating.

  “Come on, let Magic rest.” The cat looked tired. He was curled up on the floor at Jess’s feet. “He needs his naps.”

  “Where will he sleep?”

  “We can put him in your room, if you like.”

  “Yes, please!”

  She picked up the cat and walked toward the stairs, then headed up to her room. By the time I got there, she’d set down Magic on her bed and was fussing over him. I experienced a moment of doubt, but then pushed it away. This wasn’t the time to worry about old wives’ tales where cats sat on children’s chests and stole away their breath. That would be stupid.

  I watched Jess stroking the cat for a little while and then we went downstairs.

  “How about some karate practice?” I pushed the sofa back against the wall, making space at the center of the room. “It’s been a while since you showed me your moves.”
r />   “Okay, Daddy.” Jess took off her shoes and assumed a relaxed stance. She was a natural; she didn’t even have to think about her body position.

  “Just do some punches and kicks. Three times, followed by a turn. You choose which techniques.”

  I watched her as she performed some basic moves: stepping punches, snap kicks, then a sequence of roundhouse kicks that looked pretty spectacular for someone her age. I’d been teaching her karate since she was a toddler, and she possessed a large amount of natural grace that was difficult to replicate. She had not achieved any belts, but she was black belt standard in any commercial dojo. She knew all her kata. Her moves were precise and delivered with power. Her form was perfect.

  She practiced for twenty minutes and then stopped. “I’m tired.”

  “You’ve worked hard today. You should be tired. How about some dinner?”

  “Pasta?”

  “Okay. You sit down and watch some TV while I make it.”

  I boiled some water in the kettle, put some dried pasta in a pan, and then poured the water over the pasta. I put the pan on the stove and stood there waiting for it to come back to the boil, wondering what the hell we might have with it. I’d forgotten to get in any decent food for her visit. My shelves were stacked with bachelor food—baked beans, noodles, tinned meats.

  “Daddy?”

  I twitched in fright. I hadn’t realized that Jess had followed me through into the kitchen. I thought she was still in the other room. “Yes, sweetheart?” I turned toward her, trying to act casual, pretending that she hadn’t given me a shock.

  “What happens to cats when they don’t have a proper home?”

  I crouched down, lowering myself to her level. I reached out and put one of my hands on each of her shoulders. “What do you mean?”

  “Well…say you find a bunch of kittens. Bobby Tate at school, his mother found some. They took them to the SPCA, and they put them in a cage.”

  “You mean the RSPCA, baby. They look after abandoned animals. They try to find them homes.”

  She nodded. Her face was somber. She was mulling this over, trying to get all the pieces in the right place.

  Behind me, I could hear the water in the pan. It was coming back to the boil.

  “But what about the ones nobody wants…the old ones, the ugly ones. All the ones that don’t get a new home. What happens to them?”

  I couldn’t lie to her. She was too old for fantasies, yet at the same time the truth might upset her. “They get put to sleep.” You can always rely on the old euphemisms. They never fail.

  “What, like I go to sleep at night?”

  Shit.

  “Not exactly…it’s more like, well…okay. They get put to sleep forever, sweetheart. They never wake up.” My emotions were all over the place. I felt angry, but I wanted to break down and cry. Jess couldn’t remain innocent for the rest of her life, but why did it have to be me to tell her these things? I didn’t want to show her the face of her own mortality; it wasn’t my job to reveal to her the bitter truth of this life: that it always, always ended in death.

  But that was just another lie—one of the big ones. Of course it was my job. Wasn’t I a parent, a father? That’s what we did, we parents. We revealed the truth, skimmed off the sugar coating we’d been cultivating for years and finally showed our children the rot beneath the surface.

  “I don’t get it, Daddy.”

  “They die, Jess. They’re injected with something that puts them to sleep, and they never wake up.”

  For a moment I thought she might cry, but she didn’t. She stared at me with an unwavering gaze, her eyes locked onto my face. “Does it hurt? Are they in pain?”

  I shook my head. “No, baby. They don’t hurt. It’s painless. They really do just fall asleep forever.”

  She nodded, satisfied. Then she slowly turned and walked away, retreating into the living room.

  “Can I put the TV on?”

  The sudden change of subject threw me for a moment, but I recovered quickly. That’s another thing we do as parents: we roll with the punches. “Yes, that’s fine. Just keep the volume low. I don’t want the whole street to hear what you’re watching.”

  When I turned back to the stove, the water was bubbling over. I turned down the gas and waited for the level to drop, then turned it back up a little.

  “Beans,” I said. “We’ll have beans with it.” Then louder: “Baked beans okay with your pasta, Jess?”

  “Yes, Daddy! I love beans!”

  Baked beans and pasta: the dinner of champions. I promised myself that I’d buy some decent provisions tomorrow. I wouldn’t feed my daughter junk all weekend. That’s what she got at home—a nasty diet of takeaway food and broken promises. I surprised myself with the venom in that thought: it seemed that cats weren’t the only ones with claws.

  * * *

  After we’d eaten, Jess said that she wanted a bath. She said that she felt dirty, that she wanted to get the “garden mucky” off her skin.

  “Okay, baby. I’ll go and run it for you while you go and get your things from your room. No playing with the cat, though. We don’t want the water to get cold.”

  I followed her upstairs and watched as she went into her room. As I watched her vanish through the door frame, my heart flexed like the muscle it is. It felt like a little fist. I wondered what had made it react in that way. But this was what my daughter did to me: she messed up my emotions, making them behave in cruel and unusual ways.

  I went into the bathroom, put in the plug, and turned on the taps. I waggled my fingers under the water to make sure I got the temperature correct. I remembered almost scalding her once when she was a baby because I’d misjudged how hot the bathwater was.

  “Is it ready yet?”

  I turned to face her. She was wearing a long towel. It was wrapped around her thin little frame like a robe. The bruises on her arms were visible, but I could see immediately that they weren’t fresh. They were old marks; damage that was healing now.

  Rage stirred within me like a beast getting ready to pounce. My eyes began to hurt and I felt water building behind them, a great pressure that I could not allow to be released.

  “Almost, sweetheart…”

  I turned away, splashed my hand in the bathwater. I gritted my teeth, felt the muscles in my jaw begin to ache.

  When the bath was ready, I turned off the taps. “There you go. I’ll wait for you downstairs. Shout for me when you want me to wash your hair.” She hated washing her hair. The only way she would allow it to be washed was if it was done for her. As a baby, she’d screamed whenever water had splashed on her head. She still disliked the feeling intensely.

  I walked out of the bathroom like a man whose legs had turned to stone. I struggled to get them moving. My mind was detached from my body, and the latter simply wanted to start smashing things up until I found out who had hurt my daughter.

  I went downstairs and paced across the living room, back and forth between window and wall. I tried to tell myself that every child gets bruised; they were just play injuries, caused by messing about with her friends at school. There was no real problem here. She was fine; she was okay; she was normal in every way.

  Then I thought about how much my relationship with Holly had deteriorated, and what kind of harm that might be doing to our kid. I mused over the possibility that Jess’s addict of a mother and that habitual loser William Pace might be abusing her…then I put that thought out of mind. Holly would never hurt Jess, and that prick was too scared to do anything wrong now that I’d marked him.

  Or was he?

  Could this be some kind of drawn-out revenge for that time I’d laid him out? Was he hurting my daughter because he was too soft to get at me? It was a possibility, one that I at least had to consider.

  I looked down and saw that my hands were curled into tight fists. The knuckles were white, like exposed bone. It looked painful, but I couldn’t feel a thing. If I hit a brick wall with those fists, I
thought they’d pass right through, shattering any obstacle in their way, vaporizing the bricks and mortar.

  “Daddy!”

  I heard her calling me and wondered how many times she had done so before her voice had finally penetrated the developing red mist. I unclenched my teeth and started taking long, deep breaths. The mist cleared. I left the room and climbed the stairs.

  “You ready?”

  She nodded. She was sitting in the bathtub with her knees drawn up in front of her, arms wrapped loosely around her shins.

  “Are you cold?”

  “No. It’s nice and warm.”

  I knelt down beside her and stroked the hair out of her face. With my free hand, I picked up the plastic jug that was beside the sink.

  “Close your eyes.”

  She closed them tight. I felt her body go tense.

  I scooped water from the tub into the jug and poured it over her head, carefully shielding her closed eyes with the cup of my hand. Jess shivered; she hated the water passing over her head, touching her face.

  “It’s okay. I’ll be quick.” I stared at the bruises on her upper arms. There weren’t that many, just a few on each arm, but at the same time it was impossible to deny their existence. They were roughly the same size as finger- or thumbprints.

  “How’s school, sweetheart?”

  I squeezed a small amount of shampoo into the palm of my hand and began to rub it into her hair, massaging the scalp.

  “Okay,” she said, mumbling the word through a closed mouth.

  “You studying hard?”

  She nodded, squeezing her eyes shut even tighter.

  “What about home…everything okay at home? I mean, you can always tell me if it isn’t. I won’t be angry. I can probably help.”