All Bones and Lies (2 page)

‘Visiting your poor mother, are you, Colin? I do hope the dear soul's feeling a little bit better.'

‘Out shopping for Norah? Splendid! I'm sure she can do with the help. And the company.'

But soon he was round the backs, and feeling a little safer, on home ground. Light years ago he used to go this way every morning, endlessly dawdling, picking bits out
of walls, inspecting insects and berries. He knew each crevice, every moss pattern, each rise and fall under his feet. This was the route of his imaginary life. At school, of course, his name had been a byword for clumsiness and failure. ‘Lost your match?' ‘Yup! Colled it up totally.' ‘Whoops! Done a Col. Spilled it.' But it was a very different Colin who scuffed his way past these overhanging hedges twice a day for years and years: a sturdy, popular Colin who led the gang, rescued the drowning toddler, and showed the firemen the only safe way out of the building. Was that why that record of Dilys's had haunted him all through his teens? Del and the Stompers. ‘Look fancy, have fun, act fearless'? Even back then he must have realized he could scarcely have fallen much further short. Not that he'd had the best start, what with their mother constantly bragging to everyone about what a monstrously ugly baby he had been, and pinning his sticky-out ears back against his head while she wondered aloud about the risks of operations. As for ‘have fun', the words were never used inside their house without a slick of sarcasm. French exam? ‘Have fun!' Unheated pool? ‘Have fun!' The very concept filled his mother with suspicion. Even when other people floated the fat, bright, ballooning prospect of it within his or Dilys's reach, she'd try to shoot it down. ‘I expect that the beach will be
heaving
.' ‘Don't you think, with this rain, it'll probably be cancelled?' ‘By the time you get there it'll be time to come home again.' Under this barrage, only someone as tough as his sister could fail to grow up fearing the worst. So Colin had hidden behind his twin, terrified of anything new – of parties, strangers, introductions even. Sometimes
it got so bad it reached the stage where every single word he knew he ought to be saying sounded so ludicrous sitting waiting in his brain that he became incapable of spitting out even the basics like ‘please' and ‘thank you' without turning as red as a radish. ‘Look fancy, have fun, act fearless!' It was so foreign to him, it was unforgettable. He would have done a whole lot better to have lit on a song more his own style. ‘Look drab, feel grey, don't risk it.' That would have done him nicely, fitted him perfectly, and maybe he could have grown up and forgotten it.

Red alert! He could hear leaf-scrabbling on the far side of the hedge.

‘Colin, dear. Is that you?'

For God's sake! How did the grizzled frumps manage it? Spectacles thick as bottle bottoms, yet they could spot him creeping past a privet hedge. He came to a halt by a balding patch of greenery and pawed the ground in his anguish, knowing there was no escape.

‘You don't happen to be popping along to Mr Stastny's, do you?'

More bloody shopping. This one had had him down for skivvy since he was five years old. Already she was rooting in her purse. What would it be this time? Cod liver oil? Sanatogen? Support stockings?

‘Rizla papers, dear. Just the one packet.'

‘
Rizla
papers?'

She gave him a reproving look. ‘For art class, dear. Snowflakes on my little collage.'

Another? She must have thousands of the things. She had been taking the same old art class for years and years.
And wearing the same green turban. (His mother called it The Bogey.)

‘Oh, and if he's got any cornplasters . . .'

Too loud. She had been heard over the other hedge.

‘Is that Colin off to the shop, Elsie? Would you mind asking him if he'd bring me back twenty Kensitas?'

‘Did you catch that, Colin?'

‘And a
Telegraph
. If it's not too much trouble.'

‘No trouble, no.'

‘And I happen to know Larry and June over the wall would appreciate a nice fresh white loaf. He was only this minute complaining that their breadbin was empty.'

Bread. Yes. ‘Anything else?'

But, orders given, the hoar-heads had happily gone back to fretting over Mr Al-Khatib's peach rot.

‘Yes,
very
nasty.'

‘Most disappointing.'

‘It does seem to me, Ahmed, that this entire back strip of yours has become little more than a grow-bag for garden diseases.'

He left them at it and fled along the alley towards Mr Stastny's, all hope of idle musing driven from his brain by his snowballing list. It was like being back at secondary school, when he used to mutter his way between the hedges, rehearsing the names of the elements, the virtues of vitamins, or the causes of wars and revolutions. Now it was teabags, two
Telegraphs
, butter, biscuits, bananas, candles, cornplasters, cigarettes, bread . . . What had he forgotten?

Oh, yes. Rizla papers.

Mr Stastny seemed equally taken with this part of the order. ‘You got some nice stuff, Colin?'

He toyed with the idea of getting a bit of a reputation locally, and then confessed. ‘They're for Mrs McKay's new collage.' Mr Stastny vanished into the back in search of one item or another, and Colin sank on the old person's chair and stared around glumly. How long had he been shopping in this dingy hole? Thirty-five years. Longer! And nothing had changed, except that, instead of pushing past him to the front, or speaking over him, now the rude crumble-brains simply snaffled him as he crept past their back gardens to hand in their orders. He couldn't
stand
old people. He was at the end of his tether with them. Dilys was right. The moment he got back to the house he was going to—

Mr Stastny rattled back through the bead curtain. ‘No cornplasters. Only brown bread. And here's your mother's tea.' He jammed it all in. ‘One bag will do you, won't it?'

Scarcely a question. More a restatement of the shop's policy of thrift. Colin set off, past Warburton's Funeral Emporium ‘poised to assist' on the corner, and back down the alley. There'd been no change to speak of from his note, and he knew perfectly well from long experience just what a chore it was going to be, prising the loot for his purchases out of the fuddy-duddies. And so it proved. ‘That's eighty pence I owe you, is it, Colin?' said Mr Manson, with no sign of any hand movement towards his trouser pocket. Prising the loaf from him, June Royston asked, ‘I don't suppose you have change for a twenty, dear? Shall I bring it along later?' And Mrs McKay's energetic rootings in her purse proved, as ever, quite fruitless. It
wasn't, thought Colin, as if any of them even had the excuse of being poor. As Dilys was forever pointing out with reference to their own mother, ever since old-age pensioners had been turned into sacred cows, most had been swilling in it. But try to winkle a coin or two out of them in return for a brown loaf and you'd soon see their fighting spirit. What were they planning to do with it, anyway? Buy yachts? Winter in Val d'Isère? Live for a thousand years?

In fact, the sole advantage of their seeming immortality was that they had at least all stayed alive long enough to relieve him of the shopping. Flexing his fingers to work back the blood flow, Colin crept past the last of the garden ends, dragging Flossie in his wake. His mother kept on at him. ‘You'll be old one day too, Colin. It'll happen to you.' But he didn't believe it. He couldn't imagine a world in which he was hobbling around on a Zimmer frame, frittering away his pension on new hips and peppermints, and engaging the neighbours in mad conversations. ‘I see you're escaping the worst of our couch grass epidemic, William.' ‘Indeed, yes, Edmund. You see, I live by a simple axiom. Never let it see a Saturday.'

How did they do it, he wondered. Even the ones who could barely cut up their own grub could still think of something to say – his touchstone of ability. ‘Sizeable rascals, aren't they, your chrysanthemums?' ‘Yes. They're from Manderley's. Mind you, I did get a lovely crop of thistles out of that grass seed he sold me.' What must they think of him, slinking past with his head down, desperately hoping he wouldn't be noticed?

But at least he was safe at his own gate. Well, nearly
safe. Now all he had to do was run upstairs with the paper, mutter something she couldn't quite catch, and slip out again while she was momentarily distracted with whichever idiocy of the day they had chosen to headline. She'd just assume that he was letting Flossie in, or Flossie out. So if he could get the side door unbolted without a rattle and not catch his head on the old goblin next door's windchimes, he could escape for a further few minutes and reward himself for all his good deeds with a quiet five minutes with Suzie in the woodshed.

Strange that he'd lighted on his father's favourite. He tugged the magazine out from beneath the chisels, and it fell open, as it had from the start, at one of her pages. Suzie. Nineteen. It was her poolside party, and she'd been given one too many birthday cocktails. Suzie liked animals, her favourite colour was pink, and her hobbies were dancing and skating. There was a nice line drawing over the page of her doing a twirl on the ice rink with her skirt lifted to show everything. But (obviously like his father) Colin much preferred the drawing of her toppling tipsily into the pool. It was the way that cosy rounded bottom seemed to be quivering, as if, with some special and hitherto untried effort of will, she might be able to regain her footing – a hopeless quest dynamically, since her head, though unseen, was about to hit the water. But still, it gave him pleasure to think about how those pretty buttocks might be, first trembling in anticipation, then clenched in shock. Also, he rather liked the way the artist hadn't cared what would become of the cocktail. Off flew the glass, cherries spinning. And the way it was careering
over the water, it was bound to end up shattered in wicked splinters against the steps. But Colin wasn't bothered, certainly not now, and even less afterwards, when he was reaching behind the cans of flat white emulsion to find the rusty old tobacco tin in which (also, he suspected, like his father) he neatly burned the insalubrious evidence of his desire.

He loved the woodshed. And it wasn't just the feeling of peace afforded him by such moments. It was the place itself – dark, cobwebby and hidden. From as far back as Colin could remember, simply to lift the brambles that tumbled protectively over the blistering paintwork and step inside was to feel the world stilling around him. Part of it was the silence, obviously. But mostly what he loved about the shed was the sense that he had inside it of being himself and real, not just some person others had invented and taken to criticizing for being things like careless, or awkward, or even, more outlandishly, something like ‘heavy on his shoes'. Inside the shed he'd sit in peace, and feelings, like tiny beansprouts, would burgeon inside him. It was, for example, sitting quietly in the woodshed that he first came to realize he missed his father. (Till then, in the terror of triggering further outbursts from Dilys, any grief of his own had been totally neglected.) It was here that he wept as he burned the teenage diary that had made him the butt of such merciless teasing (though it was now a mystery to him how he could have believed that arid decoy he'd planted so carefully under the lining paper of his sock drawer would ever have fooled prying eyes).

And it was here he cast his spells.

There'd been enough of those over the years. Colin cast spells for every reason under the sun. Spells to avert attention. Spells to silence people. Even, in bad times, spells not to wake in the morning. All through his childhood he had walked around laden with pebbles and foreign coins and fragments of coloured glass. Even through adolescence he'd kept his passion for talismanic objects. He could spend hours shunting shells and feathers into significant patterns, and cobbling phrases into impressive incantatory rites. He'd have kept owls and ravens if his mother had let him. And if Dilys had not been allergic to feathers.

He blew one away now, with the pale, spectral ashes from the tobacco tin. Better get back. And, considering what his mother could be like, it hadn't been at all a bad visit. A snatch of routine grumbling about the tea, a few squawks of resentment at having, like every other homeowner on the planet, to cough up a bit more for her annual insurance. And that was about it. A doddle, really. He could have done a whole lot worse. She could have had one of her migraines. Or fallen into one of her virulent allergies against one or another of her neighbours, tiring him out with her self-righteous bleating. No, it had been a good visit. And that was an excellent joke she had told him about the Welshman on the hill. It couldn't be easy, being stuck in an armchair staring at suppurating bits of yourself. No, he'd go in and make them both a nice cup of coffee.

When he got up there, she was busy on the phone. ‘Really? No, I didn't know that . . . Well, I must say, that
does
sound better . . . Much cheaper, yes. Good heavens!
And you're quite positive that there's no trouble with the refund?' She took the cup without so much as acknowledging his presence in the room. ‘Yes. Yes, I think I will. It sounds as if it would be mad not to consider it.'

At last she hung up, and looked at him smugly.

‘What are you plotting?' he asked suspiciously.

‘Guess how much Dolly pays for house insurance. Guess!' She didn't wait for an answer. ‘She pays half what I pay.
Half!
Can you believe it?'

‘Perhaps it's some fly-by-night company.'

‘Frampton Commercial? Fly-by-night?'

That was him put in his place. Shrugging, he tried to look indifferent, but she wasn't watching. She was struggling with the phone again.

‘Who are you ringing now?'

‘Directory Inquiries.'