All Bones and Lies (10 page)

Then it would be a toss-up. He might get pilloried for the private view. ‘Hob-nobbing now, are we? I hope that our cat can still run up your alley.' Or it might turn personal. ‘I'd like to meet the beanbrain who'd marry
you
.' But chances were he'd be lucky. ‘That's right,' she'd tell him. ‘Fend the trollops off. Stay as you are, then you can walk in your own front door Lord, and out the back Master.'

Or he could simply put things straight by marrying Melanie. Go round and lay his cards directly on the table. ‘Someone's about to tell my mother I have a family. Would you and Tammy oblige me? If we got cracking, we could have another child by early spring.'

And he was off again. The files before him vanished, and he was on his knees on her disgusting carpet. ‘Mel,' he was saying, ‘Please, Mel—'

She'd look down, baffled. He'd take her hand in his and point to Tammy. ‘I could take you both out of here. I know I'm no great catch, but I am clean and sane, and drab as it is, my flat is nicer than this place. You could do worse.'

Except he didn't love her. Not at all. He found her rather strange indifference, her willowy passivity – really, if he were honest, her ability simply to take and take – rather off-putting. No, it was Tammy he adored. Tammy, whose life he'd saved. Who, but for him—

A call across the office fetched him back. ‘That's Cleansing again, Mr Riley. Still wanting to know if you're going to be able to fit in that landfill.'

He'd better. Forty thousand suffocated chickens. And as he ground the last available council vehicle out from behind the egregiously poorly parked Mice'n'Maggots van, he had to admit to himself that it was becoming a problem, this business of living in a dream world. Not that it hadn't started as far back as the sandpit and the swings with Stol, who lived behind the rain tub, and, inasmuch as he had any physical characteristics at all, preferred to stay standing. Stol had no family. But he did have his story, and for a long time was the most important person in Colin's life. Indeed, looking back, Colin realized he must have felt the same way about Stol as Christians feel about Christ – that he was close and vivid and utterly real, a strong and gentle presence who knew his feelings and his thoughts, with whom there were no barriers. Stol was so real, in fact, that when Miss Dassanayake showed up in school one morning with the slides of a recent class outing, for a moment Colin had been disappointed, he remembered, that his friend didn't happen to be in any of the photos.

But, he thought, braking for yet another set of Highways' homicidally ill-timed lights, his Tammy wasn't like that. She was
real
. How sad it was that, just to get a toddler, you had to have a wife. He didn't want one. The whole idea of anyone ever again spreading her tentacles over every part of him – the place he lived, his routines, his emotions – filled him with dread. And it was not the dread of the unknown. Back then when they were in the other building, he'd been as close to Helen Letherington as people seemed to think you needed to be before you got married. He'd been as astonished as anyone
the day she'd told him she wasn't going to see him any more. More so, in fact, since everyone else had probably assumed it was some incompatibility that caused the relationship to founder, and only Colin knew that there was none. The two of them had met. She'd managed his shyness skilfully enough for them to get on reasonably well in public and even better in private. He'd dared to think his future was assured. And then, in one baffling evening – ‘Colin, I am so
sorry.
But it's like living with some shell you've left behind to pretend to be a person' –
kaput!
It was over.

He never wanted that again. No. Better to stick with the daydreams. Then all that happened when the bubble burst was that he had to risk the council van's suspension along a half a mile of rutted track and pick his way past hosts of scavengers, to see what some anti-social chicken dumper had left to fester in a rancid pit.

The stench was awful, but it hadn't deterred the real professionals, two of whom seemed to be making a valiant job of lifting a full-sized wardrobe out of the stinking heaps of feathered corpses. He couldn't bring himself to offer help, although he knew that, in his virulent yellow plastic safety jacket and tough rubber boots, he was far better equipped than either of them to paddle in drifts of rotting carrion. But guilt, as ever, told on him, to the extent that, on his way back up the dirt track, he stopped to purchase a rather fine brass umbrella holder from a man with a heap of
trouvailles
at the entrance.

He might have known his mother wouldn't like it. ‘Why should I want that?'

‘It's just like yours. But better.'

She stepped back smartly. ‘I like mine.'

He twisted the patterned brass cylinder full circle, to show her. ‘But, look. Rust-free!'

She played the old card. ‘No, thanks. It was your father who bought me mine.'

He dumped his on the doorstep and, scraping the last of the chicken bones off his boots onto her lobelias, went for revenge. ‘Have you thought any more about replacing that cable?'

‘If you've come to torment me, then you can turn straight round and go back to your rats and your rubbish.'

‘I was just passing by.'

‘Go on, then.
Do
that.'

Honours now even, he felt free to ask, ‘Well, aren't you even going to give me a cup of tea?'

She looked a bit shifty. Then, ‘All right,' she agreed. ‘But since you're in those workboots, could you just take a peek at that dratted drain?'

It was the conciliatory tone that made him suspicious. He set off back down the path, but the moment he sensed she'd vanished he turned and kicked off his council footwear. Chasing her silently across the stone hall into the kitchen, he caught her clearing the table of a huge swathe of paperwork.

‘So,' he confronted her sternly. ‘What's all this?'

The look she gave him would have cracked a stone. ‘None of your business, Mr Nosy Parker.'

But he had read the words Tor Grand Insurance upside down. ‘You're never switching companies
again
.'

‘I'll do what I like,' she said, disappearing into the larder with her arms full of papers.

‘But there's no
point,
' he wailed after her. ‘Wherever one lot goes on this sort of safety certificate business, the others always end up following.' Though he was speaking to the larder door, he still kept on. ‘You'll change, then, in a month or so, exactly the same thing will happen. You'll get another letter.' Out she came, glowering horribly. But he was determined to finish. ‘You might just as well give in now and let Mr Herbert's men do their worst and give you your signed piece of paper.'

She started the tuneless hum that meant, ‘Don't for a moment think I might be listening.' Should he play one last dirty card and remind her that Dilys now worked for the great octopus of Tor? No. Simply couldn't face it. Turning to Floss, he said, exasperated, ‘Walkies?' But she just spread her body flatter on the floor. Even more irritated, he strode back across the hall and snatched up his umbrella holder. ‘I'll put this in the dustbin.' Out of sheer spite, on his way down the side path he reached up to give the windchimes a hefty smack and set the war between his mother and next door straight back on track before diving in the woodshed. There, he rammed home the bolt his father had had the foresight to switch from the outside to the inside, and, in search of distraction and comfort, reached under the chisels. But before he'd even managed to give his sweet bouncing girl a fighting chance to soothe his spirits, he'd realized that it wouldn't work. He was too rattled. And anyway, the added guilt of seeing Suzie in work hours always made things so much more difficult. It wasn't worth the candle.

Candle . . .

Time for a spell. Lifting the old varnished box out from its hiding place behind the ancient mangle, he sifted through. What did he need? A few of the pretty things, more for their comfort than their efficacy. The spiral stone, perhaps. The chipped medallion. A handful of shells. And the beetles, all three of them, glossy, black and perfect, and, for all he knew, dead for a thousand years before he'd found them in that hollow stone down by the quarry. He wrote his incantation backwards with the silver-tipped pen from the spine of his father's last diary, repeating it over and over under his breath as he shoved the torn scraps of paper deep in the twisty shell. Setting the candle in the very centre of everything, he spread his hands and began as usual: ‘
Something from inside, something from outside
. . .' In moments the spell took off, the sheer word-spinning command of it startling that tiny part of him he'd had to leave alert for calls or for footsteps. When else had everything ever spun along so well? No words said wrongly, no charm water spilled, no candles tipping over. When else had that silent, watching custodian out of self had such a strong sense that, with a bit of luck, this time, this time . . .

So what went wrong? Was it the rustle in the ivy outside? That, after all, could have been Floss, nosing around in repentance. Or the way that the candlelight swam in the shadows? Perhaps, he thought after, it was simply the nastiness of what he was wishing another poor soul on the planet that made him, at the very last – and he could sense it, it was about to be the
perfect spell
– lose his nerve utterly, and let that shadow vigilant who watched for
danger break in to stop things in their tracks, and twist the force of magic round.

‘Blimey!'

This echo of his sister brought Tammy instantly to mind. And he felt shame. How could he go and shuffle in Mel's doorway, holding the indispensable bag of fruit and this week's excuse, the lovely bright alphabet letters, when scarcely an hour before he'd been hunched over a trestle top, playing at wizards? What on earth was the matter with him? Raw with the sense of his own lack of dignity, he raised the candle to the twisty shell and punished himself with its heat on his fingers. The spell words floated down, spluttering ashes, and, still disquieted, he stirred the mess into his father's work bench. Had it been haste? Or panic? Hard to tell. But still it had been a very strange thing to end up wishing his mother.

Light and Life.

Still in his socks, he took the opportunity to climb in the larder window and examine the paperwork she'd stuffed in the breadbin. You had to hand it to her generation, he decided; they'd had a proper education. None of the botch-alike Clarries in the office could have made nearly so good a job of jotting notes on the application forms he found himself holding. At the bottom of Prudent Secure's notes, she'd summarized: ‘practices in review'. (Clarrie would have spelt it ‘practises'.) On Heft Insurance, ‘nothing definite – changes in pipeline – girl
very
shifty'. And on good old Tor Grand's, it was ‘no plans at present – but no guarantee'. Inspecting the envelopes, he noticed with interest that she'd been more efficient than Clarrie ever would at getting
the forms sent to her first class. Even playing the Old Lady card, that was impressive.

She'd only filled in one. Tor Grand. He ran his eyes over the printed name that, in as much as it mirrored his own, still echoed of catcalls down drab school corridors. He almost heard the snort she'd have given as her pen sailed over the contemptible Ms to circle the full-bodied Mrs. He read the old address that still, at heart, he felt belonged to him as well. If there had been a section labelled Medical, he probably would have read that too, but Tor Grand's only interest was in the house: its age, its size, proximity to the neighbours. On it went, all filled in perfectly, over the page to details of claims under previous dispensations, where she gave the lie to his fears of her gathering vagueness by recalling some pre-neolithic disaster with the boiler. Here, in fact, was the ideal application form. No sections hopelessly left blank. No crossings-out. No claggy contoured heaps of whitener over which the poorly schooled likes of Clarrie hauled their pens time and again, leaving errors like spoor. If only all those halfwits in Personnel – whoops! ‘Human Resources' – had had the sense to let department heads like his own recruit from the elderly, then his out-tray would be empty now, not threatening avalanche.

And then he saw it, nestling so innocently amongst the Have You Evers:
Have special conditions of any sort, or any form of specific certification, ever been requested in respect of insurance for this property?

She'd answered,
No
.

No need to panic. Maybe she wouldn't even send the application in. After all, unless Frampton Commercial
shared her first company's easy-going attitude towards the refund, she might decide she'd prefer to get the cable entry done.

Then, fat chance, he told himself, and sank, exhausted, on the breadbin. Ranked jars of pickled onions eyed him mournfully. What should he do? Carry on battling? Or simply let the whole thing go, and pray that, out of the gamut of ills a house was heir to, it was a jet plane through the roof that got it first. Anything else would almost certainly provoke the usual suspicious investigation of a Johnny-come-lately. One routine phone call to the last insurer and, sure as he never saw a banker on a bike, her claim would come back stamped ‘Invalid'.

So it was into battle. Christ! Old people were
exhausting.
Look at him. This visit alone he'd played four roles already – recycler, spurned benefactor, sorcerer, spy. And now he had to turn insurance adviser yet again. Sighing, he slid the application form back in its envelope and dropped it into its hiding place, along with the others. Then he climbed out of the window, and, slapping the windchimes again purely for the hell of it, walked in to accuse her of concealment and criminal misrepresentation.