The Bones of You (12 page)

“Close your eyes.”

She closed them tight. I felt her body go tense.

I scooped water from the tub into the jug and poured it over her head, carefully shielding her closed eyes with the cup of my hand. Jess shivered; she hated the water passing over her head, touching her face.

“It’s okay. I’ll be quick.” I stared at the bruises on her upper arms. There weren’t that many, just a few on each arm, but at the same time it was impossible to deny their existence. They were roughly the same size as finger- or thumbprints.

“How’s school, sweetheart?”

I squeezed a small amount of shampoo into the palm of my hand and began to rub it into her hair, massaging the scalp.

“Okay,” she said, mumbling the word through a closed mouth.

“You studying hard?”

She nodded, squeezing her eyes shut even tighter.

“What about home…everything okay at home? I mean, you can always tell me if it isn’t. I won’t be angry. I can probably help.”

“It’s fine, Daddy.”

I was getting nowhere with this, but if I tried a more hard-line approach, I risked scaring her. If there was something going on, I had to coax the details out of her. It was the only way. She’d never been very forthcoming when it came to talking about her problems, and each time I saw her it seemed harder to get her to open up.

“You would tell me, wouldn’t you? If there was anything wrong, I mean.” I rubbed the shampoo more forcefully into her hair, lathering it quickly. Then I rinsed it off using more water from the jug. “There. All done.” I replaced the jug in its place by the sink.

“Thanks. Yes…yes, I’d tell you.” She opened her eyes. She smiled at me, and everything seemed wonderful. Then I looked again at the bruises and the word “wonderful” lost all meaning.

Her eyelids flickered. She saw where I was looking and seemed to remember the bruises were there.

I reached out and stroked her arm. The marks were dull, dark, fading. “How did you get these, Jess?”

She smiled again, but this time it was less convincing. She was hiding something, or at least preparing to.

I waited.

“I got in a fight. At school.”

A fight, just a fight… I could deal with that. Christ knows I’d been in enough of them myself growing up.

“What was it about?”

“Silly,” she said, cocking her head to one side and raking a finger in her ear to get out the water. “A girl said you were horrible and you hated me because you’d broken up with Mummy.”

I nodded. My mouth was dry. “You know we love you, sweetheart. We’ll always love you.”

“Yes. That’s what I told her. She hit me so I hit her back. I got in trouble. Mummy had to go to school and talk about it with my teacher.”

I felt relieved, but at the same time there remained an element of doubt in my mind. Jess was a child, and children lied all the time. I couldn’t be certain about any of this until I spoke to Holly—and there was another thing: Holly should have told me. I might be an absent father, but I was still a father. It was my right to be told about anything that went on in Jess’s life. At least now I could redirect my anger to a tangible target. I could rage at Holly for keeping me out of the loop. It wasn’t right to exclude me, particularly now that we were both trying to give some stability to the situation with Jess.

“Come on, now. Get yourself out and dried, and we can watch some TV. I’ll put the cartoons on for you.” I reached into the bath and pulled out the plug, stood and walked out of the room. I leaned my back against the wall next to the door and closed my eyes. My legs felt better now. They felt fine, as if they could support my weight easily. The connection between body and mind had been reestablished. I was safe. I could be in control again.

I needed to speak to Holly but I wasn’t going to ring her right then, when the information was still fresh and the blood was still hot in my veins. It would be better to wait a while and let things cool down. If the past had taught me anything, it was not to act in the moment. Wait and let everything settle. Make an informed decision when all the facts are at hand.

The past…

It always came back to the past, what I’d done and what I’d allowed to happen.

I tried not to think of it, not when my daughter was drying herself in the next room. But it was impossible. The past was never far from my mind. It was always hovering just beneath the surface, a hungry mouth waiting to be fed. I saw in my mind’s eye a thin, dark man lying on a bedroom floor, his head bleeding and the curly hair beside his right ear all knotted and thick with gore. He wasn’t moving. His face was still. He had blue lips. One of his eyes—the right one, on the side of the skull trauma—was shut tightly; the other eye was open and bulging.

The past…

How I wish none of this had happened. How long and how deeply I had wished that I could turn around and put it right, and never have to suffer in the way I’ve suffered ever since. Everybody has their own ghosts, and this was mine: a naked black man on a bedroom floor, with blue lips, one bulging eye, a halo of blood around his head. And a hole in his skull. A hole through which everything had seeped: his hopes, his dreams, his fears, his addiction.

Sometimes I’d see his face in my dreams, and wake up screaming. Other times I’d wake up in silence, and see him standing there in the shadows of the room, bleeding out into my life, staining it crimson: a bloody shadow, a leaking phantom.

That bastard. He would never leave me alone.

“Daddy!” Jess came out of the bathroom. She was smiling. There was a light blue towel wrapped around her head. She looked so grown up, a tiny version of innocence on the verge of womanhood.

“Hey, sweetheart. Let’s go and watch a movie.”

She took my hand and squeezed. I was the luckiest man alive. She was my baby girl and she loved me. That bleeding apparition could never really hurt me, not when I had this sweet, sweet talisman by my side.

ELEVEN

Sad Hours

We watched gaudy cartoons for a few hours, and then, when it was dark outside and the wind started to finger the walls and the eaves, Jess started to yawn. Her eyes were heavy and she kept twitching awake from a short, light doze.

“Come on, you. I think it’s time for bed.”

She stretched like a cat, yawning again, and a smile broke out on her face. She looked exactly like her mother when she smiled, but in truth I hadn’t seen Holly smile like that for a long time. The smiles had been pulled out of her, slapped around a bit, and left for dead in the gutter. Addiction didn’t allow smiles, not genuine ones. It replaced them with cynical, seductive impersonations. Hollow expressions designed to get some more of whatever it was she craved.

Jess walked up the stairs ahead of me and pushed open the door of her room. The cat darted off the bed and into a corner, where it eyed us suspiciously.

“Can Magic stay in here with me?”

“Okay, baby. I’m sure that’ll be fine.”

The cat seemed to understand what we were saying. It walked slowly over to the bed and hopped back up onto the mattress, making a slow circle before dropping down onto the sheets.

Jess hugged me, kissed my cheek, and then climbed into bed. She yawned again. Her eyes were bright but empty. It wouldn’t be long before she was asleep. I tucked her in, kissed her forehead—lingering perhaps a moment too long as I did so—and then backed away toward the door. Her eyes were already closed. Her right hand was resting next to the cat.

“Good night, kidda.”

“’Night…” she murmured softly, already partway toward whatever dreams beckoned her.

“I love you.”

“…love ooh…”

“I love the bones of you.” It was something my mother had often said, a family saying. I kept the phrase only for Jess. Nobody had ever heard me say those words, not even Holly. There was something special about them; they were like an incantation, a spell to summon only the good things.

I love you. I love the bones of you.

Could there be any deeper, more desperate expression of affection from one human being to another? If one existed, I’d not encountered it. These words, ineffectual as they might eventually prove, were heart-words: they were tugged, still bleeding, from the heart’s most secret places and used only in times of great and unguarded honesty, to express the greatest truth of all.

These are the things we leave behind: the things we said, the things we did, the things we intended; the things we wrote, painted, or sculpted; the things we created out of love or out of hate; the people we knew, the connections we made. These are the things that become our shadow, our little impression on the world. And these, too, will fade. Eventually, nothing remains but the silence.

I left the room and shut the door behind me. Then I opened the door an inch, mindful that Jess had never liked to be shut in completely. Like her father, she always needed an escape route. Shadows spilled out of the gap, and for a moment I had the impression they were shifting like fog. I walked away, went downstairs, and passed through the kitchen to the side door.

I stepped outside into the night. The air was cool on my skin. The wind kept dropping and then lifting again; it sounded like someone moaning for help. I stared at the sky, at the small, spaced-out stars, and then at the house next door. There was an impression of something dark over there, and it was deeper than a natural darkness. Bad things had happened, fell deeds had occurred. I wondered if it might not be sensible to move out again, find somewhere else. I tried to remember how I’d first heard about this place, and drew a blank. Hadn’t someone told me it was available—someone at work? Perhaps I’d seen it advertised on the notice board in the back office. I’d looked at so many properties during that period, that the whole thing was a blur. I couldn’t even remember why this one had seemed so right in the first place.

As I stood there, I had the impression that somebody had walked up beside me. I sensed more than felt a presence at my side, as if it were reaching up, reaching out, to hold my hand. At first I didn’t want to turn around and look, because I thought that I might scare it away. Then I realized how stupid I was being, and I looked anyway.

There was nobody there, but I was left with the impression—like a fold or a dent in the air—of someone having stood there: a child, perhaps, certainly someone smaller and weaker than myself. Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t afraid. Whatever had been there, I knew it couldn’t hurt me.

It occurred to me then that all empty space is occupied. By thoughts, dreams, memories…or simply by the shadows of the people who’d once stood there.

“Hey.”

The voice came from the front of the house. Initially I failed to recognize it, and then her name came into my head: Pru. My new friend.

I turned, smiling. She was standing a few yards away, not smiling. Her hair was a mess. Her clothes looked grubby and rumpled, as if she’d slept in them.

“Are you okay?”

“I could use a cup of tea and a chat.”

“Come on inside. I’ll put the kettle on.” I walked back into the house, leaving her to follow. There was clearly something wrong, and I didn’t want to push too hard.

I made the tea. Pru sat down at the table. She kept picking at her nails and examining them as if there was something of interest going on.

“So.” I sat down at the table. “Are we going to sit here saying nothing all night, or are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

She bit her bottom lip. The black fringe of her hair fell across her eyes, shielding them. She made no move to push it away. “I was attacked.”

I felt myself stiffen. Violence does that to me: makes me alert, focuses my mind. “Where and when?”

She shook her head. “It’s okay. I got away. I’m just a bit shaken, that’s all.”

She was hiding something. I could tell. It was in her eyes, in the way she was sitting with her shoulders hunched.

“Come on. Spill it. Tell me everything.”

She shrugged. “I was walking through that subway tunnel—you know, the one about half a mile from here.” She waited for me to nod and then continued. “There was this tall figure. I think it was a man, but it could’ve just been a really tall woman. I’m not sure. Anyway, this figure followed me into the subway. I stopped to light a cigarette, and the figure grabbed me.”

“That was stupid,” I said. “Stopping in a dark subway tunnel, like that.”

“I know, I know…I just didn’t feel threatened, you know. I thought whoever it was had walked the other way. I only knew they’d followed me in when I felt their hands on me.”

I leaned forward, feeling tense. “So what happened then?”

“I fought. I hit out, kicked out…did everything to get away. Then I ran.”

“Good girl.”

“But something…this one thing. It scared me more than the attack.”

“What was it?”

“The figure…the person. Whatever. Whoever the fuck it was, they knew my name.”

I waited. There was more. Of course there was more; there always was.