Bone by Bone

by Sanjida Kay

  ‘If someone comes towards you, back away. Hold out your left arm to create space, keep your left foot forward, this hand, your right, is here, ready to throw a punch. Or step forward and kick.’

  He put pads over his hands and made the two of them take turns to punch and then kick the pads. He taught them three types of kick: a heel strike – directly into the guts – one into the groin and a side kick – scorch that artery, girls, you’ll give him a dead leg. They practised moving backwards and forwards in the protective stance, keeping their right foot back, one hand protecting their face, as Jacob aimed slow slaps with the pads at them and they dodged out of the way before throwing a punch or kicking back.

  Autumn was much lighter and more nimble on her feet than Laura, easily ducking and rocking backwards and forwards on the balls of her feet.

  ‘Best thing to do is run. Don’t engage,’ said Jacob. ‘But if you have to, do maximum damage and then get the hell out.’

  Laura watched as Autumn’s punches landed, light as feathers, on Jacob’s pads. She suddenly felt terrified. She thought about what Levi had done to her daughter: taunted her, frightened her, destroyed her paintings, her confidence, her sense of self. Instead of a bright, thoughtful little girl, glowing with good health, Autumn was thin and wan with dark shadows, a pained expression in her eyes; a sickly simulacrum of her former self.

  Laura swung her weight forward onto her left leg, twisting from her right hip. As for Levi’s father, Aaron, he had effectively isolated her from her friends, cut her off from her mother, father, brother and destroyed everything she owned on her computer. Between the two of them, they had turned every day into one where Autumn dreaded going to school and Laura was terrified of what would be done to them. Her fist, curled at her waist, thumb tucked in, spiralled towards Jacob, the entire force of her body pounding through her shoulder and into the pad, as if she could punch straight through it.

  Jacob staggered slightly. ‘Good one,’ he said, looking at her with surprise.

  They stopped at lunchtime and Laura thanked Jacob.

  ‘Any time,’ he said, loading the pads and gloves back into the car.

  ‘My hands stink. That’s disgusting,’ said Autumn.

  ‘Are you okay? About this morning, I mean?’ asked Laura.

  Jacob hesitated for a moment and then said, ‘I could use a drink. What are you doing tonight?’

  Laura thought of her dead computer, the cancelled Netflix account, the likely inaccessibility of the Internet, her lost friendships, the report she’d have to give to the police about Ruth’s vandalized garden.

  ‘I could use a drink too. Come over for some supper.’

  * * *

  ‘I meant what I said,’ said Jacob, draining the last of the red wine from his glass.

  They were in the sitting room, the fire roaring next to them. Earlier that afternoon, two officers had come round to take a statement about the vandalized garden. Neither of them had seemed particularly engaged, as if they had already concluded that the perpetrator would not be caught and it was a waste of their time and effort. Laura had said Aaron Jablonski was the culprit. Neither officer bothered to hide their scepticism that an IT consultant would be involved in what they considered was clearly a random attack. One of them, PC David King, said they had found a can of spray-paint but it had no fingerprints on it, as if whoever had used it had worn gloves.

  They had, though, followed up her lead because, as they were eating risotto, PC King called back and said that they had spoken to Mr Jablonski, who had denied he’d been near the garden or even knew of Laura’s garden-design business. He’d shown PC King his time-sheets, which confirmed that he’d been working, and he claimed that he’d taken his son with him.

  Autumn had been more confident, less angry, happier, hungrier. She’d eaten lunch and all of the risotto Laura had made for their dinner. As Laura predicted, the Internet had stopped functioning. Fortunately, Jacob had brought the new Pirates DVD with him, which Autumn had been pleased about, and they’d all giggled as they watched it. Autumn had gone to bed with a smile on her face for the first time in the past ten days.

  After a glass of wine with, an ex-marine in the house, Laura had to admit she felt much safer. Jacob had quietly managed to drink more than half a bottle during the meal and the film. He crouched by the fire and pulled the cork from a new one. Even from across the room, Laura could smell the newly released aroma of black currants and leather.

  ‘If you think you’re going to be attacked, do maximum damage. If someone asks you for your phone on a dark night in an alleyway, you must retaliate with a pre-emptive strike: full intensity, all-out aggression. Kick him in the groin or the knee cap. Drive your thumb through his eye into his brain. Punch him in the throat.’

  Laura shuddered and then thought, I have to do whatever it takes to protect my daughter.

  ‘Course,’ Jacob continued, ‘you’re relying on the shock of what you’ve done to give you enough time to run for your life. If you attack someone who is used to being hit, who’s used to pain – a proper boxer or martial arts expert – he won’t be shocked and you probably won’t have hurt him that much. But your average civilian mugger is not like that.’

  Laura paused, her glass of wine half-way to her lips.

  She thought of Aaron, sitting so close to her, her leg accidentally brushing his thigh, saying, It’s a two-thousand-year-old Korean martial art. It means ‘the way of the foot and the fist’.

  It wasn’t the average civilian mugger she wanted to protect herself and Autumn from.

  Jacob smiled at her expression and shrugged. ‘Just saying.’

  They sat in silence for a while, both of them watching the fire dancing in the grate.

  After a few moments, Jacob said, ‘You definitely think it was Aaron? Who smashed up the garden?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I don’t buy it. It looks like a random, impersonal crime, unconnected to you, or even to Ruth.’

  ‘It’s too much of a coincidence. Every time I’ve acted – complaining to the school about Levi, for instance – there’s been a response. My emails have been corrupted, the hard drive on my laptop was wiped, Autumn’s bike was vandalized, the Internet is down. It has to be Aaron. I gave him my passwords when he was fixing my computer.’

  His brow furrowed. ‘It could still be a fluke. You got an email virus and that wiped your laptop. Who knows why the Internet isn’t working. That kind of technical shit happens all the time. And Autumn’s bike – another random act of vandalism.’

  ‘That’s what the police said.’

  ‘There you go. You’ve had a run of bad luck. It’s tough, having to watch a kid bully your daughter, but I can’t see some IT consultant behaving like a psycho and spray-painting “Bitch” all over a garden we’ve been landscaping.’

  Was it that simple, she wondered? Was it all a connection she’d made in her own mind? She certainly had no proof that Aaron was behind any of the malicious attacks.

  ‘You might be right. But I bought Autumn a mobile, to be on the safe side. Can I give her your number? Just in case she can’t get hold of me?’

  ‘Sure.’

  After a few moments, to change the subject, she said, ‘Why did you leave the Marines?’

  He shrugged. ‘It was the right thing to do.’

  He was still sitting on the floor near the fire, his face half turned away from her, the light from the flames flickering across his sharp features. Eventually he said, ‘I was in Northern Ireland. We were staking out a house, way out near Lough Neagh, a deserted, run-down farm house. Looked the most unlikely place, but it was meant to be the headquarters of a terrorist cell. We were waiting for the IRA to turn up.’

  As he talked, Laura could picture it: the soft, grey-green dusk in the Northern Irish countryside, the smell of cow manure, bats flitting past, clumps of nettles growing
in rank profusion in the unkempt yard. There were three of them, hiding in a ditch beneath a blackthorn hedge, water seeping into their boots, thorns pricking their necks. Jacob said that his mind had not been quite right for some time.

  ‘It’s not like going to Iraq. There they don’t speak your language, they don’t wear the same clothes as you, they don’t worship the same god, their skin colour is different from yours. You feel justified shooting someone who is shooting at you. It’s easier not to think of them as people. You know you’re on the right side. But in Ireland our targets were white, they wore Levis, they shopped at Spar, they went to church on a Sunday. I couldn’t get my head around it. I thought I might as well be taking pot shots at people in Bristol city centre.’

  Jacob and his team waited for a couple of hours. It grew dark. No one turned up. His right foot had gone to sleep and the moon was a thin silver crescent in the sky. And then something happened. The lights came on in the kitchen. To begin with they thought the terrorists had arrived. There were no curtains and through the ill-fitting windows they could see and hear everything. It was soon obvious there were still only two people in the house. The farmer started shouting at his wife. He punched her in the face. The first time he gave her a black eye. The second time he broke her nose. She fell to the floor. The farmer kicked her savagely. After the third kick, she stopped screaming.

  Jacob grew increasingly agitated. He said they had to do something. They had to stop the man before he killed the woman. The others said it was no business of theirs. They could not blow their cover. If they did, they might not intercept the cell. Jacob argued that there was no point to it, no point in being armed and highly trained, no point spending hours pumping iron to become some of the fittest men on earth, no point being on the side of the righteous, if they could not save this one woman. Ignoring the others and his orders, he climbed out of the ditch and ran across the yard.

  ‘What did you do?’ asked Laura.

  ‘I broke down the door. And I shot the farmer through the heart.’

  Laura could no longer see Jacob’s face. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was disciplined for disobedience. I went to see the farmer’s wife in hospital before I was forced to leave Ireland. She spat in my face. She told me I’d murdered the only man she’d ever loved.’

  ‘It was the right thing to do,’ said Laura, ‘to try and protect her.’

  Jacob shook his head and turned to face her. ‘No. It wasn’t. The bigger picture – the terrorist cell – was what I should have been focusing on. The IRA went undercover once they knew – thanks to me – that we were watching them. Ten days later they blew up a hotel in Belfast killing five men, two kids and maiming eleven women and children. We – I – could have saved those people. That’s when I left.’

  Jacob finished his wine and poured another glass. He ran a hand across his eyes. ‘I thought I was tough, worthy of being a Marine, but that whole incident showed me who I really was. I’m not capable of being a soldier. I haven’t got what it takes.’

  ‘It might not be a bad thing. You have compassion,’ said Laura.

  ‘It was all I ever wanted to do,’ he said, ‘since I was a little kid. And now I’m just, well, drifting. The only reason I get up in the morning is because I thought that we were going to do great things together.’

  Laura thought of Jacob’s erratic behaviour – the drinking and cigarettes, his obsessively healthy diet, the huge amount of training he continued to do, his wild and impractical ideas for gardens. The one thing that kept him anchored had been their project. Ruth’s garden. And she’d ruined that for him.

  Jacob grew increasingly drunk and maudlin. Laura was exhausted, physically and emotionally drained. She rubbed her eyes and stood up. ‘Come on, Jacob, you should stay here tonight. The spare bed is made up.’

  Not by her, she thought. Vanessa had stripped the sheets and remade it while she was at her first British Military Fitness class. Jacob, who was sitting on the floor leaning against the arm chair, clutching his empty wine glass, looked up at her. His lips were cracked and stained burgundy. She realized she’d never gone out drinking with Jacob; she’d no idea what kind of drunk he was. Would he become aggressive, or try it on with her, or simply pass out peacefully? She expected him to protest, to say he could find his own way home, or ask for more wine, but he stood up meekly enough and followed her upstairs, stumbling a little. She held the door of the spare room open for him and went to find a clean towel. When she’d returned, he was lying face down on the bed. She watched him for a moment. He didn’t move so she unlaced his boots and slid them off his feet. She folded part of the quilt over him. As she shut the door, she thought of him saying softly, You feel justified shooting someone who is shooting at you.

  Sunday 4 November

  AUTUMN

  She raced downstairs but there was no one in the kitchen. She ran back up the stairs again. The door to the spare room was ajar. She stood in the entrance and peeped inside. One window was open. The room smelt of frost and fresh air; it didn’t smell as if a man had slept here. The bed had been made and the corners were folded unexpectedly tidily and tightly. Without Jacob, the house felt empty and lonely. Autumn lent against the doorjamb and felt the full weight of her dad’s absence from her life.

  In the kitchen she poured some Shreddies into a bowl. There was no milk so she picked them up and ate them with her fingers, staring out into the silent garden.

  Her mum came down a bit later and made a lot of unnecessary noise, banging and bustling around. As if she was making up for Jacob leaving before breakfast. Her mum said they should do something together and it would be fun. She suggested going to the zoo, like Autumn was a little kid and not nine and a half. Autumn thought about walking past the icy cages and glass houses opaque with condensation, the animals huddled inside, the ring-tailed lemurs all in a shivery burr. Lemurs were meant to live in Madagascar with Uncle Damian, not in chilly Bristol. She shook her head.

  She put her bowl in the dishwasher and went back upstairs to her bedroom. As she dressed, she looked at all her pictures on the walls. Levi was right. They were rubbish. Hobbling around, with her tights half on, she tore them down and screwed them up into paper balls and threw them in the bin. She started feeling small and stupid and ugly again and then she remembered what Jacob had said. He said she was strong and beautiful and talented. She would paint new pictures, she decided. Better ones.

  Her mum came in as she was getting out her brushes and some paper and said since she didn’t want to go out, she’d make a start on assembling her wardrobe. When they’d first moved to Bristol, her mum had bought a whole load of new furniture from Ikea but so far she hadn’t got around to putting it together. You can pay someone to do it, but her mum said that was expensive and she was going to do it herself.

  It was actually kind of comforting working sort-of together. The day passed so quickly; she felt as if she was bursting with ideas. Her mum, though, did quite a lot of swearing and apologizing and nearly crying and going back to read the instructions again and again and searching for little bits and pieces and getting Autumn to hold things, which she found annoying, but she supposed it was okay because the wardrobe was for her.

  Eventually it was finished and they both gave a big cheer and hung all of Autumn’s clothes in it. One door didn’t quite close properly, but her mum said it will have to do. Then she cleared all the cardboard up and carried it and her tools downstairs and said she was going to make a start on the bookshelves for the sitting room. When Autumn went to get a snack in the afternoon, all the tools were lying in the hall and the wood for the bookcases was in the sitting room and all the books were still in boxes.

  Autumn looked through all the pictures she’d done that day: a woman carrying a custard white squash like a soup tureen, another waving a maple leaf, a child playing with a conker, shiny mahogany brown, as big as a ball. They were all tiny and precise,
smaller than her pictures normally were; they looked like the miniatures in Tilly’s house. But it wasn’t only that they were so little, she realized when it was time to pack away her paints: the colours were much darker too and everyone had a little black line for a mouth. No one was smiling.

  The one she liked best, though, was a self-portrait. It didn’t look much like her, but sitting on her lap was her imaginary baby sister. The one she thought of often, the one she couldn’t talk to her mum about because, if she did, her mum became upset. Maybe it was her dad’s fault: he didn’t want another baby so he and mum got divorced. And now there wouldn’t be another baby. Ever.

  Autumn’s imaginary sister was called Emily. Sometimes Emily was a little girl with dark hair and sometimes she was blonde. At other times she imagined her as a small bird, a lost baby soul, fluttering nearby, her downy feathers tickling Autumn’s cheeks. Today she drew Emily with light-brown hair and grey eyes, just like her big sister. She pinned the picture to her wall, right in the middle.

  Monday 5 November

  AUTUMN

  They drove to school that morning and, as she walked from the car to the playground, she felt as if she were one of the girls in her pictures, tall and thin, holding a sweet chestnut like a giant grenade, spiky and green, ready to hurl it. Her mum kept trying to talk to her but she didn’t want to speak to her. She interfered and interfered and made everything worse. And all she went on about was Levi, Levi, Levi.

  They were late and when they reached the playground, it was empty, like there had been a calamity and all the people had died. Mrs Sibson was standing at the classroom window and when she saw them, she disappeared. A moment later, she opened the front door and walked towards them.

  ‘Is she okay?’ she called from a distance of a few metres, as if Autumn had no voice of her own.