Bone by Bone

by Sanjida Kay

  ‘Your card’s been rejected.’

  ‘Yes. I was wondering if you can try it again. There’s nothing wrong with it. There’s money in the account.’

  The girl gave her mum a sidelong glance like she’d heard that one before. She tried the card two more times. Autumn looked at her feet. There was a queue of people building up, shuffling impatiently. The woman behind them sucked her teeth and rolled her eyes. Her mum had gone bright red.

  ‘Not going through,’ said the girl, handing it back. ‘You got another one?’

  Her mum looked through her wallet and took out a credit card. She handed it over triumphantly, like she’d won the egg and spoon race on sports day.

  Thank God, it’s worked! thought Autumn, trying to roll her eyes like the lady in the queue and not look mortally embarrassed.

  And after that everything just got worse. Her mum put the pizzas in the oven and poured herself a glass of wine and told Autumn to go to their Netflix account on the TV and look for a movie she wanted to watch, any movie, so long as it had a U rating.

  She quickly chose Pirates! An Adventure with Scientists, because that was the film Tilly’s dad had been involved with and she’d felt stupid when Tilly had mentioned it.

  I mean, who would have thought Hugh Grant could act like that! Poppy had said and Autumn had no idea what she was talking about. She’d thought it was a kind of cartoon.

  Autumn tried to download the film but nothing happened. The password had been rejected, the message on the TV said. Autumn knew the password off by heart although she was only allowed to download films her mum approved of. It was very easy. It was AutumnWild. She tried it several times. Then she tried it using all lower case and then all upper-case letters and then a mixture of the two. Her mum tried it too and the pizzas burnt.

  Amazon said it would reset the password if they clicked on the link it would email her mum. But, of course, her mum no longer had an email account.

  While her mum was trying to salvage the pizzas, Autumn put in the DVD she’d been watching every night. Her mum sighed when she came in and saw it, but she didn’t say anything. It was Deadly 60. It was all about animals that could be a bit tricky if you tried to catch one, or so Uncle Damian had said when he’d given it to her. She liked the one about Madagascar the best because that was where he worked, looking after his lemur troop. The programmes reminded her of him, and her dad and Granny and Grandad. They were all intrepid people who liked to go off into the wilderness and look at animals.

  She had no desire to search for, find or touch any large snakes or scorpions or spiders or sharks. But there was something comforting about the repetition, watching it over and over and over again. You knew what was going to happen. There were no surprises. And even though all those animals bit, squeezed, stung, spat or poisoned, they did it because they were hungry or frightened. They didn’t do it because they thought you were stupid and ugly and they wanted to hurt and humiliate you.

  Thursday 1 November

  AUTUMN

  At twenty-five past eight that morning Autumn let herself out of the kitchen door. The garden was filled with mist that rolled away from her in fat coils. She breathed out and her breath hung in front of her, like a dragon’s. Her mum hadn’t wanted her to walk to school by herself. What would Granny say? She would have wanted her to go on her own, she concluded. She was fearless. Autumn wished that she herself was.

  Her granny always said, Get back on the horse.

  She didn’t mean a real one. She meant, if you fell or were frightened by something, then you needed to pick yourself up and do it again straight away to conquer your fear. Besides, thought Autumn, it wouldn’t be so bad. She lifted her satchel over her head, so the strap was across her body, and opened the garden door. She almost never saw anyone walking to school this way. She didn’t know where Levi lived, but it wasn’t near Wolferton Place or she’d have seen him before. He’d followed her on Friday deliberately to tear up her paintings and then he’d gone back up Briar Lane towards Ashley Road.

  Sometimes people were out walking their dogs. When they saw her, they almost always grabbed hold of their dog and said, Don’t mind him, he’s friendly.

  Mum said not to talk to strangers, but she always said hello and stroked the dog’s head when people did that. She heard the chink of a stone behind her and wondered if someone was out with their dog now. She looked over her shoulder but she couldn’t see anything through the mist. She opened the swinging gate from the lane outside their house into the allotments and let herself in. The gate shut with a metallic clink.

  Most of the vegetables in the allotments had died back but one, tended by a Jamaican man, was full of squash. They lay among the dying leaves, rimmed with frost, huge, orange and alien, half hidden by the mist. They reminded her of the fairy stories she’d read as a young child, of white horses and gold carriages that turned into mice and pumpkins on the stroke of midnight. Earlier in the season the Jamaican man had grown a crop of custard whites – cucurbits, her mum had said – which looked like creamy spaceships. Behind her the gate closed softly, as if whoever had come through had held it so that it wouldn’t bang.

  Autumn left the allotments and entered the wood leading to the nature reserve. It was cold and she wrapped her scarf more tightly around herself. The mist was entwined around the trunks of the trees and she walked in her own capsule of grey space. The snap of a twig startled her. She stopped and looked around. She half expected a dog to burst through the fog towards her. Sometimes she saw a Siberian husky here, like a white wolf with blue eyes; a canine changeling.

  If it was a dog walker, she thought she’d have heard the sound of the dog’s lead or its collar, the animal panting as it trotted up the hill. But there was silence. A couple of magpies chattered in the branches and, in the distance, she could hear the traffic on the road outside school.

  Two for joy…

  She turned to start walking again and then she heard it. The definite sound of footfalls, the soft rustle of frozen leaves.

  Especially strange men, her mum had said in one of her frequent warnings about talking to people she didn’t know.

  Autumn started to walk more quickly. Her breath came in short gasps, a private fog floating around her head. At the top, as if it were a magic line, she could see where the mist ended and the nature reserve, rising above it, glowed green, dull as an uncut gem, through the stark, bare branches. She couldn’t be certain, but it sounded as if the person behind her was walking faster too.

  She was wheezing as she burst out of the wood and into the meadow. She half ran along the path and then stopped. Behind her the wood was wreathed in fog, the path a dark tunnel descending into its depths. She could see a shape emerging through the mist, moving steadily and swiftly towards her. There was no friendly rattle of a lead or the scrabble of a dog’s paws on the stones. It was someone who was on their own. She looked around. There was no one else here. The magpies arrowed across the sky and a wren broke out into a loud, chittering alarm call. In the distance, a siren blared. Should she run? Walk calmly on? Wait to see who it was?

  He was wearing something black – a coat, a hat. She half expected the man to emerge from the wood and smile.

  Sorry to have startled you.

  But what if he were not a friendly man? What if he was one of those men her mum warned her about? Could she run fast enough to get away from him? She only had a half-formed sense of what could happen if a man caught her.

  He’ll hurt me.

  But she didn’t know how or why, which made the possibility of what might happen so much worse.

  She was backing away now, half turning, ready to run, her heart pounding in her chest, when he stepped free of the mist. She couldn’t move. For a moment he simply stood at the edge of the wood and stared at her. Then he started to walk quickly towards her, not taking his eyes off her.

  It was Levi.
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  Autumn began to run. She felt an icy terror flood through her body. He must have been waiting for her in the lane. He’d followed her all the way here. To this open, empty place.

  He knows where I live.

  She could hear Levi gaining on her, jogging through the mud, the frosted surface splintering beneath his trainers; the splash as he cracked through the ice on a puddle. She was running around the edge of the meadow, sliding on wet stone. It was a slight incline and she wasn’t a fast runner. He was so much taller than she was, with longer legs, and he was built like an athlete. It would only be seconds before he would be able to reach out and grab hold of her.

  And what then? What would he do to her?

  She could hear his breath now, steady and even. Her own was loud and harsh; she was struggling to force more oxygen into her lungs. She felt as if she was running in slow motion, like you do in a dream when you run and run and can’t go any faster.

  And the monster always runs faster.

  Levi was right behind her. He was matching his steps with hers. He was barely running at all.

  She rounded the corner of the meadow. There, in the distance, was the end of the nature reserve and the bridge over to Briar Lane. If only she could reach the lane, there would be people, there were houses. She imagined running up one of the back gardens and hammering on the door. A dog suddenly bounded across the grass towards her. Brown and white, some kind of mongrel, sniffing at the rabbit holes, its tongue lolling out. She couldn’t breathe. If there was a dog, there was bound to be an adult nearby. She slowed to a walk and behind her she could hear Levi slowing too.

  Her neck prickled. She looked into a half-melted puddle and saw his reflection in the earth-brown water. He was barely inches away from her, so close he could touch her. Someone whistled and she looked over to the peak of the nature reserve where the sound had come from. The dog’s head jerked up and it raced away, over the brow of the hill. They were alone again.

  When was he going to do it? How would he do it?

  She gulped in air and walked faster, as quickly as she could without breaking into a run. They crossed the bridge together, his shadow falling over hers. There was fresh graffiti today: vermillion, purple and gold, the chunky, indecipherable calligraphy of the street. His footsteps echoed hollowly, the sound bouncing around the cage they were in, suspended above the railway line. The light, splintered by the metal bars over her head, hurt her eyes.

  It seemed to take a year of her life to reach the lane, the gravel and grit crunching beneath her shoes; an identical crunch came from directly behind her. She saw a small group of children further ahead, satchels and rucksacks slung over their shoulders, wearing black and navy, the Ashley Grove school uniform. She hurried towards them. She didn’t recognize them; they looked as if they were in the year above. She slowed.

  Was it a trick?

  If Levi’s gang were waiting at the exit to the main road she’d be trapped between them and him. She looked at the back gardens, no longer the welcoming place of safe refuge she’d imagined, but forbidding with high walls and heavy iron gates. She could be caught in one of them, pounding on the door, the owner at work. No one would be able to see her. No one could hear her.

  She looked back at the group. There were two girls and they were smaller than she’d thought. They were pupils from the other class in her year, she thought with relief. She bent her head and walked steadily towards them. In the corner of her eye she could see Levi’s arm swinging. He was still there. The other children reached the end of Briar Lane and spread out across the pavement. One of them pressed the button for the pedestrian crossing. Autumn looked up at the lights. They were green. She was behind the other children now, but still in the lane. In spite of the cars going past, Levi was so close she could feel her neck prickling.

  The lights turned red and the green man lit up. Autumn leapt forward and, as she reached the pavement, she turned to see what Levi was going to do.

  He was motionless, watching her. He held up one arm. Between his thumb and forefinger he held a scrap of paper. It was washed a cerulean blue. It was part of a painting: a single segment of a harebell. He opened his hand and the paper drifted upwards and away in the wind.

  LAURA

  That evening she felt jittery with nerves. She thought about the pile of laundry that needed to be done, the mountain of clothes that were clean and dry but hadn’t been folded and put away, the radiators that needed to be bled, the online shop she had to arrange, the essay that was due in for her course, the To Do list for the garden-design company, which included applying for a start-up grant and finishing off their business plan.

  She opened her laptop, determined to make Skype work before the weekend so that she could contact Vanessa when she returned to Windhoek and Autumn could speak to Matt when he descended the mountain to the nearest village. She couldn’t find the program on her hard drive and when she tried to download it, she kept receiving error messages. She didn’t want to risk opening her email account, so she clicked on Facebook instead.

  As she browsed through status updates, she saw that one of the mothers from her NCT group had posted a link to an article in The Washington Post. The word Bully was in the headline. It’s just a coincidence, she thought, but she had an oily feeling in her stomach as she selected the website and opened up the article. It was about a man who had hired a teenager to beat up his daughter’s bully. The teenager ended up being badly assaulted by the bully. Even so, the bully’s parents successfully sued the girl’s father.

  Laura shut down the article before she could read further. She paced around the landing outside her office. Autumn had ignored her this morning. She’d gone to bed early too, without being prompted. She’d turned her face away when Laura had tried to kiss her. Laura had heard her footsteps though, as her daughter paced in her bedroom during the night. She thought about the previous morning, the dreadful sight of Autumn as caked in make-up as a child beauty queen, followed by her sobs because she believed she was ugly.

  Laura sat down and clicked on her folder of pictures. Since Autumn had been born, she’d mainly only taken pictures of her daughter – there were hardly any of her. She would make a montage, she thought, of all the best photos of Autumn, to show her that she was beautiful.

  She opened up Photoshop and created a blank document to cut and paste the photos into and then she returned to her files to choose the pictures. She’d always meant to put them in order but they were jumbled together, photos of Autumn as a baby alongside the latest ones of her aged nine. She hadn’t taken any since they’d moved to Bristol, she noticed.

  She chose one that made her smile: Autumn dressed up as a pumpkin for Halloween. She was wearing an orange costume with a green frill around her neck and she had orange face-paint on. She was laughing so hard she had her eyes shut. Cleo had her arm around her shoulder and was wearing a black lace curtain over the top of a pair of dungarees and a pointy hat. She must have been about six, she recalled. Autumn had wanted to make ghoulish buns: they’d divided the cake mixture up and baked lime-green, blue and Fanta-orange-coloured cupcakes topped with sickly sweet swirls of buttercream and stuck plastic spiders in the icing. Autumn had laughed and shuddered at the same time and wouldn’t eat a single one. Laura copied the photo and clicked Paste on the document. Nothing happened. She tried again.

  She returned to the original photo and tried to copy it, but as she highlighted it, it disappeared. She felt the same anxiety she had when she’d tried to restore Skype. She was so dreadful at anything technical.

  This should be simple, she thought, hating her ineptitude.

  She opened another picture. It was of Autumn on her seventh birthday. She was smiling straight at Laura; her large, grey eyes glowed in the light from the candles on her cake. She could see the cute gap in her teeth that Autumn hated. The cake had raspberries and white chocolate chips in it, Laura remembered, just a
s Autumn had requested. The raspberries had been frozen ones and their dampness had made the cake sag in the middle.

  The picture disappeared. Laura blinked. She clicked back on the folder of photos. It was no longer there. She scrolled up and down searching for the picture. How could it have vanished like that? As she was looking, other photos started to disappear, slowly at first and then more rapidly. Spaces appeared between the photos and the white screen predominated as the number of pictures diminished. Not all the pictures were being wiped, she realized. To her horror, she saw that it was only the ones with Autumn in.

  There was one of her and Matt at Autumn’s eighth birthday party – probably the last one taken of the two of them together. They looked frazzled; they were both clutching half-empty glasses of fizzy wine and looking away from each other. She hadn’t noticed that before – that they were staring in opposite directions. She did a quick calculation – yes, he must have already been having an affair with Leah then. She didn’t want to dwell on that now – she’d only get angry, she thought. She looked back at the picture folder and found it was almost empty. Even the ones of her. She started pressing buttons, to try and close the folder and shut down the computer, as if that would help, and when the laptop didn’t respond, she jabbed randomly at the keys.

  As the last photo of Autumn winked and disappeared – one of her aged two wearing a dinosaur mask with felt teeth and a pink princess dress – a window appeared in the middle of her screen and grew until it filled the monitor. It flickered into life. She wasn’t sure what she was looking at until the camera started to zoom back.