All Bones and Lies (12 page)

She'd changed, that was the thing. Lord knows, his sister had been born with fangs, but she had always had her loyal side. Why, even after all these years, Colin still felt the occasional shaft of gratitude to her for never passing on that doctor's casual mention, during one of their school check-ups, of his ‘almost imperceptible spinal curvature'. (Christ alone knew what Mother would have made of that, if ever she'd heard of it. Probably strapped him in some sort of bodice and talked endlessly of his ‘deformity' to the neighbours.) A thousand times his sister had sailed near the wind, slapping on a grin and affecting a hunched back as she walked past. ‘And what was all
that
about?' Mother had demanded. But she'd never let on. Where was that sense of loyalty now? Just like their father, Dilys seemed to have slipped away, leaving him alone and bereft. Why, sometimes it even seemed that—

‘What's got up your back? You look like a hen hatching a grievance.'

‘I was just thinking.'

His mother's farewells were perfunctory. Did she suppose that he was coming back after dumping the bags? If so, hard cheese, because there wouldn't be a charity shop in town still open now. He'd just stop by at Mr Stastny's to pick up a bit of fruit. (Daft not to make an appearance, if only to undercut her next few disparaging dismissals of any suggestion he might have been round. ‘Seen Colin? No, not for ages. I'm sure he's far too busy with his precious cockroaches and mice droppings to bother visiting his poor old mother.') Then he'd drive back to the office. If Clarrie wasn't standing at the window, buffing her nails, he might be able to get the bags unloaded out of the van and into his own car without her noticing that he, too, wasn't busy on council business in council time.

Then he'd nip off to Mel's. He'd leave her to sort through the stuff in peace while he took Tammy for a walk round the estate. ‘Watch out for a rather nice flowery jacket,' he'd call back over his shoulder. ‘I seem to remember my sister once saying it was a good one.' He and Tammy would go down to the swings (if they'd been mended yet) or over to see the new saplings (if they'd not yet been uprooted). Or she'd just walk, arms outstretched like a pudgy little ballerina, around the low wall, while he fed their imaginary Timothy Duckling, as usual.

And suddenly a vision came to him, of leading Tammy to a patch of bright marsh marigolds. The stream ran past,
bright clouds sailed overhead, and kingfishers flashed. Laughing, she squeezed his fingers in her excitement, and he bent down to drink in her delight at these new wonders. He was about to offer her a glimpse of her first rabbit when yet another set of Highways' bloody awful lights fetched his attention back. Christ, Mel's block of flats looked dreary from this side of the station! And he had never realized quite how close some of those windows were to the vents of Chaffer's Bonemeal. He'd send someone round in the morning to do an inspection and take a few samples. No point in taking chances with the health of a toddler . . .

She met him at the door and flung her little arms around his legs. ‘Drawberries!'

Mel took more interest in the bags he dragged behind him. ‘What's all that?'

‘Clothes.'

‘Jumble?'

‘Not if I know the owner,' was the closest he dared come to implying he didn't.

Mel's eyes lit up. ‘What, take what I want? First picksies?'

He nodded, thrilled to have brought her pleasure with such ease. ‘You have a root through. I'll take Tammy round the block.'

‘In
this
?'

He turned to look. True enough, in the short time it took to drag his load up the stairs, it had started to tip down. His disappointment was intense. But Tammy saved him. Ripping the fattest bag, she tugged at something blue with strawberry-streaked fingers. Mel hauled her off.
‘Col, couldn't you just
take
her somewhere? Just for half an hour or so, while I look through.'

His heart leaped. ‘Where?'

She picked at the knot of the first bag. ‘I don't know. That café behind the station?' He watched her remembering the times he'd offered that most insalubrious eating place as his excuse for popping by. ‘They keep that mangy cat right off the counter now.'

He had a vision of parental bliss. ‘All right,' he said, though he was already envisaging accusations of kidnap from neighbouring tables. But he was rescued even from these terrors when her sublime maternal indifference spilled down in a call from her balcony to the car park:

‘And if that sodding social worker gets you, just say you're her father.'

Was it the first time she'd ever sat in a highchair? Having no faith in Mel, he drove straight by the chip shop beside the station (‘There's Pussy!' shrieked Tammy, pointing) and chose instead the ice-cream parlour on Skelton Road. Tam's short legs strained, pointy-toed, as he swung her up and held her, poised, over the seat. Then she slid in and sat, all eyes, all attention, accepting with her usual gravity the spoon he offered, and formally copying each of his movements as, equally gravely, he spooned his own knickerbocker glory into his mouth.

‘Banana,' she informed him – the first word she'd spoken since he'd unstrapped her from the car.

‘Banana,' he agreed.

‘And drawberry.'

‘That's right.'

While she was working her way through the litany of ingredients, he dressed her in a sober navy-blue tunic and Start-Rite shoes, and packed her off to her first private nursery. He was about to start her on Suzuki violin lessons when she broke off from listing the more tooth-rotting foodstuffs to tell him conversationally, ‘There do be a ghost under my bed at home.'

He felt a rush of panic. He wanted to be accessible and cordial. But surely he shouldn't be colluding in the notion of the existence of spirits? They weren't, after all, like bananas or strawberries.

But she was staring at him with such trust. He'd have to fudge it.

‘Really? A ghost?'

She nodded, solemnly raising a pointy finger.

‘One?'

She gave this quite a bit of thought and then, presumably in answer, laid her spoon carefully on the glass table top and raised the matching finger on the other hand.

‘Two?'

Again, she nodded.

Totally abandoning his very first principled parental stand, he asked her, curious, ‘So what are these ghosts of yours called?'

‘Lavender.'

‘What,
both
of them?'

With crystal calm she nodded once again, and he could feel his heart bursting with tenderness at this short peep into the untamed landscape of her mind. Without a blink (except when a lump of ice-cream slithered from her spoon onto the table top) she told him, first, how
Lavender could already swing upside down, and then about Lavender's shiny red cotton. Much of the rest of her conversation centred on this cotton, whose arcane attractions proved so lost on Colin that he indulged himself, in between encouraging noises and questions, in sending her, first to a fine secondary school with a host of enriching extra-curricular activities, and then, with a sheaf of impressive examination successes, to a bright modern university to enjoy herself thoroughly whilst still studying enough to earn a creditable degree. He was just walking her up the aisle to her future husband when the solemn little face in front of him crumpled without warning.

At once he panicked. ‘Do you want to go home?'

She cheered immediately. ‘Go and see the frocks.'

He glanced at his watch. They'd hardly been gone half an hour. But he could drive about a bit on their way back. She wouldn't know the difference. He set off down Tanner Street, determined to avoid the Pickforth Avenue snarl-up, in which he couldn't help envisaging perfect strangers tapping on the car windows and asking him, ‘Is that child
yours
?' At the turn to the tyre factory, he was forced into merciless braking by yet another set of Highways' tiresome lights, and, in the distraction of raising himself to check Tam in the mirror, fudged the lane change on Mount Oval and found himself headed straight into West Priding.

And that's when she broke off chatting about the two Lavenders and their beguiling cottons, and told him firmly, ‘Need to go.'

He turned off as soon as he could. But in his eagerness
to avoid the streets round his mother's, he clean forgot that George and his men had yet again torn up the corner at Barnham Avenue, sending the traffic back down endless, winding Green Lane instead, past Mr Stastny's.

And it was here that she insisted, ‘Need to go
now
.'

Again he levitated in his seat to try to gauge if she were desperate, and saw her worriedly plucking at her knickers between her chubby little stuck-out legs. How could he take her home with panties soaking? She'd be upset, and his credibility as a competent man would hit rock bottom. For heaven's sake, he told himself. The child is
three
. Do what everyone else in the world does. Pull to the side and hold her over the gutter.

Now fully as anxious as she was, he drew up in front of Warburton's Funeral Emporium. ‘Poised to assist'.

And why on earth not? Here, after all, was where his mother went whenever she felt the call on her way to Mr Stastny's. She'd bragged to him often enough about her system: look solemn, pretend to sign whichever Book of Condolence was lying open, nip in the Ladies', and then scarper. Slipping the car back in gear, he pulled in through the pillared entrance onto the gravel of the forecourt and, sweeping Tammy into his arms, rushed up the wide faux-marble steps. ‘Nearly there, Sweet Pea.' If he'd been in less of a panic, he would, he realized almost instantly, have wasted time agonizing in the foyer; but, as things were, he automatically pushed at the door labelled Gentlemen, and, in the privacy of unaccustomedly scented graciousness, sat Tammy on the spanking clean seat.

There was the sweetest tinkle. Then, in her mother's
voice, she said, ‘
That's
better!' and pushed him away so she could reassert her dignity by sliding off the seat without his help and pulling up her own knickers.

‘Right,' he said, filled with pride at his own resourcefulness. ‘And now we'll just take a peek in their little book to say thank you. And then go home.'

The book wasn't little at all. The huge mock leather-lined spread of it lay, lectern-fashion, across the wings of a dispirited-looking fake brass eagle. Colin and Tammy approached hand in hand, both nervous in their own way. It was Tammy who recovered first, lifting both arms to Colin, who obediently swung her up to sit in the crook of his elbow, where she could reach to pat the eagle's bowed head and tell it sadly, ‘Never mind.' It appalled him to think she might be worrying that the book was too heavy for the drooping wings. Freshly alive to the horrors of anthropomorphical thinking, he reached for the sham-jewelled pen, and, stretching its imitation gold chain to the limit, leaned over the Book of Condolence, aware of a shadow moving restlessly in the corner, and ready to make a pretence of signing his name and getting on with the bit that appealed to him – the scarper.

But it wasn't the book itself that was laid open to be signed. As he peered closer, he saw, discreetly pinned over it, a sheet of simulated parchment. Across the top, in flowing script, was written
George Henry Besterton
.

And nothing else.

He stared, appalled. Could he be
first
? Had George Henry Besterton only just died, for God's sake? Could that stooped, lurking shade be some close family member already wondering how this presumptuous interloper had
had the nerve to stride in the funeral parlour before the beloved body was even cold, and, along with his cheaply dressed, knicker-plucking toddler, muscle his way to the top of the list of legitimate mourners? But surely in that case the forecourt would be busier. This shadow wouldn't be alone. No, he told himself firmly as sense reasserted itself, this can't be the first page. It must be some freshly pinned replacement: the third or fourth, perhaps; even the tenth. It was just his rotten luck that there was someone watching who might draw closer after he had gone and notice that, though he'd been wielding the pen so convincingly over the simulated parchment, in such a formidably illusive environment, even the act of signing could prove false.

He'd have to write something, it was as simple as that. If only they'd left out another sheet as a guide for the unseasoned mourner. Were the bereaved supposed to scrawl a signature? Or was it more usual, as in forms, to use capital letters? And what was supposed to go on the right-hand side? More names? One's role? Friend, father, milkman. Perhaps a home address? Or even, as in war cemeteries and small hotels, some bland but pleasant comment: ‘Excellent lavatories.' ‘A most imposing eagle.' ‘We shall most certainly try to come again.'

While he was standing worrying, Tammy grabbed the pen. He tried to snatch it back, but she gripped tighter, assuming that look he had come to associate with battles with Mel about bedtime and sweeties. And he had seen and heard enough of those over the last few months to know that only the most proficient derailing of her desires would get them out of this impasse now in a decorous fashion.

‘That's right,' he whispered. ‘There's a clever girl. You hold the pen, and together we'll write your name in the air over the nice paper.'

She hadn't been born yesterday. She was
three
. Down came the pen with a jerk, making a black line on the paper at least half an inch long. ‘Oh, Christ!' he muttered, though he had told himself a hundred times that if this angel in his arms belonged to him, he'd never swear in front of her the way that Mel did. To make things worse, the apparition hovering in the shadows was drawing closer, obviously curious. Don't Col this up, he told himself. Stay calm. Act sensibly. Folding his own hand round Tammy's chubby fingers, he stemmed her petulance by guiding the pen across the paper. Tam, they wrote neatly together, using her black line as the upright for the first letter. On the pinned sheet it looked horribly wrong: pert, bare and unfinished. And so, since Tammy was clearly very keen indeed to carry on, and the shade was still watching, Colin once again tightened his hand round the wriggling fingers and pressed on to the end.