Bone by Bone

by Sanjida Kay

  Eight children had seen her push a child. She swallowed and closed her eyes. She could feel sweat break out on her palms, the start of a blush flame across her cheeks. How should she try and explain this to Mr George?

  In an accent that spoke of Eton and Oxbridge, he said, ‘Mrs Baron-Cohen, if you thought Levi had been bullying Autumn, then you should have followed the correct procedure for dealing with it by making an appointment with Autumn’s teacher, which you did not. I gather you spoke to her before her class was about to start and she said she felt harried and did not have the time to explore the matter fully with you. You have come to see me now – but only after you confronted the child in question yourself and then physically assaulted him.’

  Laura sat back in the chair. She was shivering. ‘Physical assault is a bit strong for what actually happened. I didn’t knock him down.’

  ‘But you did push him over? He did hit his head on a stone and cut his face?’

  ‘What I did was inexcusable. I am incredibly sorry. I lost my temper. I can understand Mr Jablonski’s anger and why he hasn’t accepted my apology. But I spoke to Mrs Sibson about Levi’s behaviour. It’s not just slugs and a missing pen. It’s more than that. It’s name-calling. Intimidation.’

  It was so hard to explain how devastating the bullying was. Citing name-calling seemed trivial compared to the impact the bullying was having on her daughter. Mr George made a steeple with his fingertips and looked at her over the top of his glasses. She was transported back to being a child of ten at her boarding school in London.

  ‘Hence you thought you’d simply handle the situation yourself?’

  She held up her hands. ‘You still haven’t dealt with Levi! You need to investigate his behaviour. He ought to be disciplined, even suspended if that’s what it takes to stop him.’

  ‘Let me be clear: I am not going to discipline a child in this school on the unsubstantiated account of a parent. Particularly one who has behaved as you have done. We will monitor Levi’s behaviour closely. As you know, we do not tolerate any bullying in this school. I am, however, considering whether to ask you to remove Autumn. Your daughter has, so far, behaved in an exemplary manner, but at Ashley Grove Junior any misdemeanour towards any of our pupils or staff is taken extremely seriously. The only reason, absolutely the only reason I persuaded Mr Jablonski to try and resolve the situation with you rather than take the matter to the police is for the sake of our school’s reputation. But if he does report you, I will support him every step of the way.’

  Laura stared at him in stunned silence.

  ‘In my experience, Mrs Baron-Cohen, physical aggression does not manifest itself in isolation. I would recommend that you see a counsellor and take a course of lessons in anger-management. I will also speak to Mrs Sibson to see whether we ought to refer your daughter to Social Services for her own protection.’

  ‘That is outrageous!’ She was on her feet. ‘If you don’t start taking my claims seriously and investigating Levi’s behaviour, then I shall speak to the council about you and report you to Ofsted.’

  Before Mr George could reply, Laura strode out of his office, slamming the door behind her. She tore down the corridor and burst out of the school. By the time she reached the playground she was running, only slowing down as she neared the edge. How could the head trust Aaron instead of her? Mr George didn’t seem to believe that Levi was bullying Autumn. The thought that he could even consider she might be abusing her daughter turned her anger to shame. What if he did call Social Services?

  Outside the school gates, she stopped. She looked at her watch. Matt was still at the Buddhist village and she wouldn’t be able to reach him. Not that she wanted to talk to him about it. Vanessa and Julian were somewhere over the Atlantic, en route to Namibia. That only left her brother Damian. She’d Skype him this evening in case he was in the research station and not following his lemur troop. There was no point in going home, even though she was too early to pick Autumn up. She waited, sitting on the low stone wall surrounding the playground, growing increasingly cold.

  Rani was one of the first mums to reach Ashley Grove, striding towards the school in her fuchsia coat. Rebecca, Amy and Lily, as well as a few other mothers Laura didn’t know, gathered around her. Laura hesitated and then walked over to them.

  ‘Hi,’ she said uncertainly when she reached the group.

  The women fell silent. A couple of the mothers glanced at her and then looked away.

  A woman with a hard face and deep lines across her forehead said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  ‘Is disgusting what you did,’ agreed a girl, barely in her twenties, her bleached-blonde hair scraped into a pony tail.

  Laura looked at Rebecca, hoping she would say something to defend her. Rebecca was facing towards the school, resolutely ignoring her. She swung around sharply as if she could feel Laura’s gaze.

  ‘I can’t even begin to describe how shocked I am, we all are,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to discuss it now. It’s hardly appropriate with children around. And it’s nowhere near as important, but I wanted to make you aware, in case you are not, that you’ve been sending Trojan viruses to all of us.’

  ‘What?’ said Laura.

  She didn’t even know what a Trojan was apart from a mythical horse in a Greek legend.

  ‘I advise all of you to check your emails and delete any that have come from Laura, regardless of what they say or what the header is,’ said Rebecca, her voice carrying loudly and clearly across the playground.

  ‘But I haven’t even emailed any of you – I haven’t emailed anyone at all for the past few days,’ said Laura.

  Rani looked at her and Laura automatically smiled back. After Rebecca, Rani was the person she most liked to talk to at the school gates. She was a voluptuous British Sri Lankan with skin the colour of polished bronze. She had a large nose with a bulbous tip, wide lips and her wavy hair was cut in a thick, glossy bob. She had a wickedly sarcastic sense of humour and, of all the mothers Laura knew in Bristol, Rani had always seemed to be the person having the most fun. Rani did not return her smile.

  ‘I opened one of your emails and stupidly clicked on the attachment, thinking you were sending me a document,’ said Rani. ‘It wiped several of my files and some programs. I’ve called Aaron to see if he can fix my laptop but I’m going to send you the bill.’

  Laura stared at her, aghast. At that moment, the doors opened and children began to pour into the playground.

  Amy started to speak. Laura cringed, expecting her to describe a computer malfunction or make some damning pronouncement about how Aaron should go to the police. Or add that she was going to send Laura the bill for her IT repair work too. Amy was Autumn’s friend Molly’s mother and Laura had always found her cold and distant. She looked like a doll, small and fragile, with a strangely expressionless face and flawless, apricot-coloured skin. Amy had a thin, reedy voice, which was all but drowned by the shouts of the children rushing towards them. Laura just caught the tail end of her sentence.

  ‘… hear Laura’s side of it.’

  Autumn slipped her cold hand inside Laura’s and gave a quick tug before breaking away. Laura followed her out of the playground, feeling stunned. She had no idea how to put a stop to a malicious virus, if that was what a Trojan was.

  ‘How was your day?’ she asked Autumn, who was walking so fast she was almost running.

  Autumn did not reply.

  ‘Sweetheart, I asked you a question.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Did something happen? Did Levi say anything to you?’ She felt a surge of panic rise within her. When Autumn remained silent, she said, ‘Come on, Autumn, please speak to me. If you don’t tell me, I’m only going to imagine the worst.’

  Autumn stopped and swung around to face her. She was furious. ‘You promised not to talk to the headma
ster. And you did. I saw you – and so did everyone in my class.’

  ‘I know you asked me not to speak to Mr George, but I had to. How else can we stop Levi from bullying you? I told him to take Levi out of the school.’

  ‘You mean expel him?’ said Autumn, looking hopeful.

  ‘More like suspended,’ said Laura uncertainly.

  ‘So will he be suspended, Mum?’

  Laura sighed. ‘No, love. I’m afraid he won’t be.’

  Autumn looked crestfallen and then, to Laura’s consternation, resigned, as if she had known all along that Laura would not be able to protect her.

  ‘Because you pushed him,’ she said. ‘That’s all anyone will think about.’

  They walked the rest of the way home in silence. Laura was wondering what to do now. Mrs Sibson clearly didn’t believe them, particularly since Autumn’s pen had not actually been stolen. Levi must be angry: presumably his class teacher would have given him a grilling about the cut on his face. Dileep George believed Aaron’s account – that Levi was innocent of any wrongdoing – and Laura hadn’t managed to explain herself convincingly.

  Had she tried hard enough, she wondered? She’d left his office so abruptly and no doubt he considered her Ofsted threat vacuous. She should have stayed and argued. But what else could she have said? What she’d done was so wrong, so shocking, it would have made no difference to Mr George’s reaction.

  What if Aaron did go to the police? She wondered what the charge would be. There was no one to turn to, no one who could stop what was happening to her and Autumn. Rebecca wasn’t talking to her. She should call Rebecca when they reached the house and try and explain herself. There must be something she could say to convince her – but the thought of trying to persuade Rebecca not to hate her made her wilt inside.

  Rani was about to invoice her for destroying the hard drive on her computer. The other parents at the school appeared equally angry and would continue to be enraged if they received the virus from her. At least she only had Rebecca, Amy, Rani and Lily’s email addresses, she thought with relief. And then she remembered with a jolt that Rebecca ran the Parents and Teachers’ Association at Ashley Grove and had created an email group for it. She’d recently put Laura on the mailing list. Which meant, thought Laura, that the virus could have been sent to everyone on the PTA, including all the teachers, the reception staff and the governors of the school.

  She was so lost in thought that at first she didn’t notice Autumn had stopped. They’d reached Wolferton Place and were almost opposite their house. She turned and held out her hand to Autumn to cross the road with her. Autumn was staring silently at the house. Laura swung around to see what she was looking at. Everything appeared normal: there was their chipped blue front door, the bins on the pavement, which she should have pulled back to the house wall, a large terracotta pot she’d planted with a fig tree and lavender around the base of the trunk. No one had broken in or smashed a window, no one was waiting on the doorstep for them.

  And then she saw it.

  AUTUMN

  She didn’t understand it at first. It was almost like a sculpture, not a recognizable object. It was a child’s bicycle, leaning up against the bins outside their house. No other children lived on their street and so the bike looked even more out of place than it might have on another road. Why was it there? There was something wrong with it, it was crooked, like a maimed creature. And then she understood. It was her bike.

  She’d got it for her eighth birthday. Autumn loved her bike: it was metallic pink with a fat white seat and had a shopping basket hung between the handlebars decorated with red and orange artificial flowers.

  She’d gone for a cycle ride on Sunday and her Mum had said the bike was too muddy to bring in. She’d left it in the garden and her mum had said she’d hose it down and put it in the dining room, but she must have forgotten. How had it got here, to their front door on Wolferton Place?

  Someone had slashed the chunky tyres. The bubblegum-pink frame had been spray-painted scarlet red. The basket was bent, a broken tangle of wire like a smashed lobster pot. The final touch was the flowers: the garish fabric petals were scattered across the pavement like the ones at her great-gran’s funeral.

  ‘Oh no, your bike!’ Her mum spotted it and ran over towards the mangled frame. ‘It’s been vandalized. Someone must have got into our back garden.’

  She remembered the summer before last, the summer she turned eight and they were all in the park – all the mothers and their children. Once a month they met up, the mums who’d been pregnant at the same time; usually someone was missing but that day everyone was there. It was Maya’s birthday and they were having a picnic. She and Cleo had cycled there. Her happiness had fizzed along her limbs like sherbet; she’d dropped her new bike in the grass and started to turn cartwheels, the sun and the sky and the trees all spinning, green and blue and gold. And when she’d stopped and stood still, out of breath and dizzy, all the mums had clapped and looked at her like they loved her every bit as much as her own mum did.

  She felt the hot trickle of tears on her cheeks.

  ‘Oh, love, I’m so sorry. I should have brought it in. I thought… I was sure no one could break into our garden.’

  Autumn wiped her tears away quickly. She didn’t want her mum to make a fuss and start dabbing at her face with a tissue in the middle of the street. She thought about riding the bike on Hampstead Heath, that same summer, on her actual birthday, the wind in her hair, sticking her feet out and screaming with laughter. She hadn’t considered happiness then, or thought about the fizz in her fingertips. She’d just been happy.

  ‘I’m sure we can fix it, Autumn,’ said her mum, opening the front door. She dragged the damaged bike over the threshold.

  They both looked at it, a crimson riot of mangled metal and broken spokes.

  No one could fix that, thought Autumn. She stepped over the bike and went straight upstairs to her room without even taking her coat off. It was her mum’s fault. If she hadn’t gone to see Mr George, Levi wouldn’t have gotten into their garden and trashed her bike – and then left it on the front door step like some kind of signal. It was a message. Autumn understood that. Her mum wanted to help but she just made everything worse.

  She couldn’t face her homework. Instead, she decided to write a letter to her real best friend, Cleo. She couldn’t remember writing a letter before. Usually she made thank-you cards and wrote inside them or sent an email. She chose yellow paper because that was Cleo’s favourite colour and she drew squirrels in the margins because they were Cleo’s favourite animal. She kept having to start again. She wasn’t very good at drawing squirrels. And the letter kept going wrong, as if the words on the page deliberately turned into different words than the ones she meant.

  It was an invitation to Cleo to come and stay and it was supposed to be full of descriptions of nice things, of her new school and her new house to make Cleo want to visit. But every time she started telling Cleo something that had happened, she’d remember the other bit, the bit that wasn’t so nice.

  When her mum told her it was time for dinner, she threw all the butter-coloured sheets of messed-up squirrels in the bin. Later that evening, after her mother kissed her goodnight, Autumn retrieved her toys and tucked them in with her. They were much too far away at the other end of the bed; she couldn’t even reach them with her toes. She pressed her hand against her forehead. She’d had a headache since the night before.

  She tried not to think about her bike. Instead, she remembered going to gymnastics. She hated it there. Her old gym class in London had been in a brand-new sports centre. It was a proper gymnasium with a sprung floor and beautiful shiny hoops and a vaulting horse made of soft suede and gleaming wood. This one was in an old church. There were statues – white marble saints boxed into Perspex coffins that stared at you, or rolled their eyes towards heaven, palms pressed piously in pr
ayer, and grotesque stone gargoyles leered down where the joints in the roof arced into a pointed dome.

  She remembered the horrid feeling of falling, the dread that had engulfed her. It was going to hurt, she felt sure of it. And then, as she was twisting and spinning, she’d seen her mum, running towards her, arms outstretched. Her mum hadn’t caught her exactly, she’d broken her fall, and they’d both landed on the mat, winded. As they lay there, a jumble of limbs and beating hearts, all she’d noticed had been the stone arches high overhead making a pattern like a pointed lily, the dull glitter of one of the stained-glass windows, a stone saint’s ghostly white face. That was when the throbbing in her arm started and she realized she’d banged it on the beam. Jack had appeared and he’d smiled and helped her up and she’d felt mortified. All the other girls would be thinking how clumsy she was.

  If her granny had been there she’d have agreed with Tess and made her climb back on the beam. Her mum had been more sympathetic but now Autumn knew that she never would be able to get back on the horse; she’d never walk along that narrow thread with pointed toes and lift and spin effortlessly in the air again.

  LAURA

  As soon as Autumn was in bed, she called the number for the local police to report the vandalism of Autumn’s bike. She’d checked the garden, but there were no signs of a break-in, and she’d taken pictures. The call-taker she spoke to didn’t seem to be that interested.

  ‘Bikes go missing or get vandalized all the time, love,’ he said. ‘We don’t have the resource to go chasing after the culprits. And if you leave one right outside your house, it’s asking for trouble. Let me take some details though, and I’ll make a note of it on our system.’

  She hung up, angry he wasn’t going to send a police officer round, and turned to her laptop. She’d try Damian first, she thought. Her older brother by two years, he’d always been benignly protective of her.