Bone by Bone

by Sanjida Kay

  LAURA

  She had that bilious feeling you get when you stand too close to the edge and you don’t want to look down at the drop below you. She was sitting in the car and she couldn’t see where the cliff ended. She leant as close to the steering wheel as she could. It must be just a metre or two away, she thought. The grass was deceptive, long and lush. It could be hiding the cliff edge. She felt dizzy just thinking about it.

  Perhaps it had been an old quarry. Now, many metres below, was a lake, artificially circular, bound by sheer-sided cliffs. The water was deep and cold and jade-green, hinting at unimagined depths. She thought of what might be at the bottom: the sharp wires of broken shopping trolleys, burnt-out cars, glutinous strands of weeds that would wrap themselves around your ankles and hold you fast as your last breath was sucked from your lungs.

  As she leant forwards, the car started to roll. She snatched at the handbrake but it was slack in her palm and didn’t stop the vehicle. She stamped on the brake and her foot went flat to the floor without hindering the progress of the car, which was now beginning to speed up. The bonnet eased out into space. She pressed the catch on her seat belt and yanked open the door. As she was falling sideways out of the car, the damp grass rushing up to meet her, she remembered.

  Autumn is in the car.

  She was sitting in the back in a pink baby seat, fastened in securely. She was two years old. She was wearing her favourite cardigan, the one with the lilac flowers on it, and she was watching her mother.

  I’ve saved myself and left my daughter in the car.

  She pushed herself upright and in slow motion held out her hand as if she could arrest the path of the car. It lurched over the edge and for a sickening couple of seconds was suspended in mid-air. Laura scrambled to her feet and rushed to the cliff edge. The car slid, nose first, into the lake and disappeared. Autumn was strapped in. She wasn’t old enough to undo the buckle of her car seat. The door was open, which meant it would fill with water and sink immediately. Laura started to scream.

  She sat up, drenched in cold sweat, the dream clinging to her still.

  How could I? How could I have left her in the car?

  She wiped her damp forehead and then shivered. She looked at her watch. It was a little after midnight. She rose and wrapped her dressing gown around her and then went to check on Autumn.

  They were both so tired. After she’d called Mrs Sibson, and the police officer who’d left her a message, she’d made Autumn a sandwich and a flask of tea for herself and then driven to A&E. It had taken over three hours for a doctor to look at Autumn’s head. By that time the bump had gone down and she claimed not to have a headache. They were allowed home – the doctor had told Laura to keep an eye on Autumn and make sure she had plenty of fluids. Someone – Autumn said she wouldn’t recognize him again – had poured red paint on her. What would the police have said or done if she’d told them the details? There was nothing substantial to say. There were no witnesses and there was nothing to link the event back to Levi, although Laura was sure he was at the bottom of it. Autumn must have been frightened, terrified even, Laura thought miserably, but she hadn’t been badly hurt.

  And then she remembered the article she’d read in The Washington Post about the parents who’d hired a teenager to attack their child’s bully. It was Aaron. It had to be. He must have hired the boy to terrorize her daughter and make it look as if Levi were not involved. If she complained about Levi now, when he’d clearly been at home with his father throughout this evening, she’d seem malicious, vengeful even.

  She pushed open Autumn’s bedroom door and looked in. The room was lit with a cold, blue light. It was coming from the clock in the corner, the one she’d bought her daughter when she was a toddler. It had a smiling star in the centre and seven stars around the sides, representing how many hours there were until morning. Autumn must have turned up the brightness, she realized.

  She might not have had the courage to go to the police and the headmaster was unlikely to support her if she went back to talk to him – particularly if Autumn said that the boy who’d thrown paint over her had not been Levi – but she had to do something. She had to do whatever it took to stop him.

  Autumn’s bed was empty, the duvet pushed back, obscuring the row of toys at the end of the bed. She felt as if a shard of ice had been lodged in her chest. Perhaps her daughter was in the bathroom, she thought. She listened for a moment but couldn’t hear anything. She was about to go downstairs and check when she saw her. Autumn had wrapped herself in the curtain and was standing staring through the window. Her legs were like thin, white sticks beneath the bunched-up fabric. She was looking at the park opposite. Through the gap in the curtains, Laura could see the steel bright shadows cast by the empty swings.

  One of them was still moving.

  Saturday 3 November

  LAURA

  Laura and Autumn left early the next morning. She was frightened about what the police would do. She wondered how long it would take to complete the witness statements from the children who had seen her push Levi. Hiding in Ruth’s garden was not going to prevent the inevitable from happening. But it would stop her from thinking about it. Just for a short while.

  I just want one last morning uninterrupted by a police investigation, the threat of Social Services, Aaron and his nastiness.

  The engine coughed and spluttered. It was freezing, the pavements glassine with black ice.

  Come on, car, don’t die on me.

  The engine made a noise like a patient with tuberculosis, a dying wheeze.

  Autumn was most definitely not pleased about being woken up so early and bundled into warm clothes to sit in a garden in Clifton when it was minus two degrees outside, but it would distract her too from what had happened yesterday evening. Laura sat up and sucked in a deep breath of arctic air. She would get through this. She’d texted Jacob to say they were leaving earlier than planned but to come later, at the arranged time, if he wanted. No point getting him up at the crack of dawn too. She blew on her gloved hands and turned the key in the ignition once more. If only she could have bought a new car instead of making do with this rattling heap of junk. The engine gave an asthmatic gasp and burst into life.

  Thank God.

  They drove in silence over to Clifton. The city was shrouded in a chill mist, the sun like a blood-red yolk on the edge of the jagged skyline.Thank goodness we finished planting the grasses last week before the frost, she thought.

  Today they could concentrate on fitting part of the decking. A cool white, wintry light glazed the buildings on the highest hill: Will’s memorial, the unsightly chimney from the hospital, the modernist cathedral in Clifton. The jumble of styles and eras lent the city the semblance of a medieval Roman town. Laura drove the long way round, up past the Clifton Suspension Bridge, strung like an a engineer’s dream over a river sinking into the mud. Leigh Woods was on the far side, the trees dark, bereft of leaves, clawing at the sky.

  It was too early to call on Ruth so she parked around the back. She had the key to the padlock on the garden door. To her surprise, it wasn’t locked. She pushed it open and it sagged on its hinges, falling forwards. She held the handle and manoeuvred it enough to allow the two of them to squeeze through.

  Laura jumped. Ruth was standing in the middle of the garden. She was wearing a blue flannel dressing gown and a pair of men’s pyjamas. She had wellington boots on her feet. Her face was raw, her eyes pink-rimmed and her hair was standing on end.

  ‘Ruth!’ said Laura, reaching for Autumn, an automatic reflex at even the smallest hint of trouble.

  The ground beneath her feet felt unstable, uneven. She glanced down. She was standing on sand. And then she saw the rest of the garden. The bags of sand they’d bought to mix in with the clay had been poured out over the garden. The driftwood salvaged from Burnham Beach was blackened and shattered. The baby grasses had been pull
ed up, trampled, hacked down. The exotic acacia with its royal-purple leaves had been sawed in two. The wood for the decking was gouged and splintered. On every single surface, the walls, the floor, Ruth’s house, her bench, one word was spray-painted over and over again in bright red.

  Bitch.

  There was a screech and a groan, followed by a crack as the garden door swung completely off its hinges and crashed to the ground, just missing Laura and Autumn.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ said Jacob as he walked in. ‘I didn’t realize it was… Christ, what’s happened here?’ He paused and looked around.

  Bitch, bitch, bitch.

  The colour of the red made her feel nauseous, a visceral reminder of finding Autumn the night before.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Ruth,’ said Laura. ‘What a terrible thing to wake up to. Did you hear anything in the night?’

  Ruth shook her head, as if she didn’t trust herself to speak.

  Jacob picked up a bit of driftwood and sniffed at it. He nudged a can of spray-paint with his toe.

  ‘Do you think this is anything to do with Levi and his dad?’ Autumn asked.

  ‘This has something to do with you?’ snapped Ruth.

  ‘I… I… well, I don’t know.’

  Ruth’s expression hardened.

  ‘It could be a man I know. He’s waging some kind of hate campaign against me. Autumn’s bike was wrecked – we found it in front of our house the other day, the tyres slashed, spray-paint all over the frame. The same colour as this.’

  ‘I’d like you to leave,’ said Ruth, pulling her dressing gown more tightly around herself. ‘I appreciate all the work you’ve done but I can’t take the risk. I hope you understand.’

  ‘Have you phoned the police?’ asked Jacob.

  She looked at him sharply. ‘Both of you. Please don’t come here again.’

  ‘But…’ said Laura.

  Ruth turned and went back inside, her boots crunching on the sand.

  They went to a greasy spoon just outside Clifton Village and once Jacob had ordered, he winked at Autumn and disappeared outside. The only reason Laura knew that Jacob was upset was because he smoked two cigarettes, one after the other, rolling the second one as he smoked the first.

  Laura was still reeling from the destruction of the garden. She closed her eyes and massaged her temples. The word Bitch shone in scarlet in her mind.

  ‘I said I didn’t want anything to eat,’ said Autumn as the waiter put a plate of scrambled eggs, beans and toast in front of her.

  Laura ignored her. Autumn had been looking peaky for a few days now, and when she’d bathed her to remove the red paint last night, she was convinced that the child had lost weight, which she could ill afford. A small, nasty part of her wanted to force Autumn to eat the scrambled eggs precisely because she didn’t want to. She waved at Jacob to tell him his breakfast had arrived and he stubbed out his roll-up and came inside, breathing out one last cloud of cigarette smoke.

  ‘We should at least go back and clear up,’ said Laura, taking a sip of her cappuccino.

  Jacob shrugged. ‘She made it pretty clear she doesn’t want us around.’ He rubbed his shaven head with one hand and stretched his legs out under the table. He had a sharp nose and chin and large brown eyes with thick black eyelashes; the eyes of a spaniel in the face of a weasel. Or a thug. ‘Do you want to tell me what this is about?’ He glanced from one to the other of them.

  Autumn looked away.

  ‘A boy in the year above Autumn has been bullying her. He’s called Levi. It’s become…’ she searched for the words, ‘like a revenge attack. His father – Aaron – is an IT consultant and he repaired my laptop. Since then – I mean, since I reported his son’s bullying to the school – he’s hacked into it and destroyed the hard drive. I’ve lost everything: my photos, my music, my college work, my poetry.’

  Jacob whistled.

  ‘Before he wiped the laptop, Aaron had access to all my records, including the brochure and website we were making with the photos of Ruth’s garden – and her address,’ said Laura.

  Jacob turned to Autumn. ‘Do you think the boy could have done it? I mean, he’s only ten, right? Seems a bit drastic for a ten-year-old.’

  ‘He’s twelve,’ said Autumn.

  ‘What? He can’t be. Eleven at the most,’ said Laura.

  Autumn shook her head. ‘His mum took him to live with her family in Barbados for a year and when he came back, the school made him repeat a year.’

  That explained it, thought Laura, why he was so tall and so knowing, somehow, compared to the other school children. She wondered what else Autumn knew about Levi that she hadn’t shared with her.

  ‘Still,’ said Jacob, ‘he’d have to be one pretty angry twelve-year-old.’

  ‘You provoked him,’ said Autumn, crossing her arms and sitting back in her chair.

  Jacob paused, one fork full of bacon and egg halfway to his mouth, looking at Laura to see how she would react.

  ‘Please don’t be rude,’ said Laura. ‘I’m trying to help.’

  Autumn rolled her eyes. ‘And every time you try to “help”’ – she made an exaggerated quotation mark gesture in the air – ‘it gets worse.’

  ‘Where did she get that from?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘That’s what my friend, Tilly, does.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, I know things are incredibly tough for you at the moment, but I’m doing my best.’

  ‘I didn’t know you wrote poems,’ said Jacob, attempting to change the subject.

  ‘Yes. They’re rubbish,’ said Autumn, folding her arms again. ‘And anyway, it’s only one gardening job. I mean, that’s so lame. It’s like Poppy says, you can’t have a business with one client.’

  Laura tried not to think of their fledgling company – destroyed before it had even got off the ground. And since when had her daughter started quoting Tilly and Poppy? She looked at Jacob.

  He shrugged again, grinned and picked up his coffee cup. ‘I like this new Autumn. You should talk like that to Levi. That would show him.’

  ‘I don’t think it was Levi,’ said Laura quietly. ‘Jacob’s right. It’s not something a child would do.’

  She noticed that Jacob’s coffee cup trembled against the saucer as he put it back. Too much caffeine, nicotine and unprocessed emotion. Autumn slumped in her chair, a sulky expression on her face. She was about to tell her daughter to eat her eggs, but instead found herself saying something quite different.

  ‘You know, you really should try and stand up for yourself. I know it’s hard, I’m shy too, but we could both learn to be more assertive.’

  ‘An eye for an eye,’ said Jacob, and waved at the waiter, miming that he wanted another black coffee.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Autumn, sounding a bit more like her normal self.

  Laura suddenly flushed and turned away, ashamed. She hadn’t told Jacob what she’d done to Levi.

  ‘I’m not a big guy, right?’ continued Jacob. ‘I mean, for a soldier. I’m smaller than average and some of those men, they’re built like a brick… They’re quite broad, is what I’m saying. But I had a reputation for being hard.’ He put his cup of cold coffee to one side. ‘It happened when I started out in the Marines. Some of the older guys were pushing me about, you know, new boy, thought they could intimidate me. And one day, I lost it. I gave one of them a beating he’d never forget and after that it was all cool. No one messed with me.’

  ‘Are you telling me to beat Levi up?’ said Autumn.

  ‘That’s not what Jacob is saying, is it?’ Laura poked his shin under the table with her foot. She didn’t believe Jacob’s story. It sounded far too sanitized.

  He held up his hands and the tattoos on his forearms flexed. ‘I’m just saying.’

  The waiter handed him another coffee.

&nb
sp; ‘What we need are some skills. For self-defence,’ stressed Laura. ‘Not for beating anyone up. Just so you can protect yourself if someone attacks you first.’

  She and Autumn both looked at Jacob. He glanced from one to the other of them and put down his cup.

  ‘Right, girls, eat up those eggs and beans. You’re going to need the energy.’

  ‘What for?’ asked Autumn, sitting up straighter.

  Jacob smiled and winked at Autumn. ‘We’re going up on The Downs to teach you some self-defence.’

  When they reached The Downs, the frost was beginning to melt, the grass poking, livid green, through its casing of ice. It was still bitterly cold. Jackdaws cawed and squabbled, falling like flakes of soot above black trees strangled by knots of dark ivy.

  Jacob opened the back of his Land Rover, which had his gardening tools and a couple of boxes of kit for British Military Fitness. He took out some pads and boxing gloves. The simple act of handling the equipment seemed to change Jacob. He switched into his teaching-soldier mode. He threw the gloves at Autumn and Laura, who put them on slowly, making faces. They stank.

  ‘Right,’ he barked, jumping into a semi-crouched stance, the muscles in his thighs raised, his fists by his face. ‘Your six senses are here’ – he circled a hand around his head, – ‘sight, sound, speech, taste, smell.’

  ‘Six senses?’ said Laura, teasing him.

  He scowled back. ‘You’ve got to protect your face, is the point. Even more important, you’ve got to take care of your brain. It’s encased in a thick layer of bone –’ He wrapped a knuckle on his shaven head ‘– but your brain itself is like jelly. If you allow yourself to be hit, your brain will shunt into your skull and that’s not good. More than likely, you’ll fall backwards, prang your head on the ground, and your brain will smack into the bone again. Not good. So always, always keep a fist up to protect your face.’

  He showed them how to stand in the same stance as himself, a bunched fist at his hip.