The Bones of You (14 page)

“Fuck,” I said. Angry, I threw off the duvet and reached out, groping blindly at my side. My fingers grabbed the lamp cord and I followed it down until I felt the little switch, and then turned on the light. In the instant before the darkness was banished, I had a mental image of something large and foul with its face hanging in the air before me, its mouth pulled wide open; noxious vapors roiling from within the thing’s deep throat. The teeth were like those of a lion. There were no eyes in its head, just big carved holes, deep spaces that held only blackness. It was screaming, but no sound came out of its straining, motionless rictus.

Then the room was no longer dark, and I was in familiar territory once more.

I couldn’t see the cat anywhere. “Magic? Come here, you stupid cat…”

Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound. I made a quick circuit of the room but couldn’t find a thing. I even checked under the bed, feeling like a frightened kid looking for monsters in the dust and the shadows.

Magic wasn’t in there with me.

I lay back down on top of the duvet, and left the light on.

PART TWO

“It’s the thing that every parent fears most; the thing you’ve been rehearsing in your head for years without even knowing it. That single dreaded moment when all your imaginary terrors become real.”

—Robert Shingley,
Little Miss Moffatt and the Radiant Children

TWELVE

All These Images

Saturday was over before I could even savor the time I had with Jess. It was always the same. We rushed around doing things, having fun, and by the time we stopped to catch a breath, it was time for her to go home.

We went into town, visited the library and the museum, ate street food from a vendor, and did some window shopping. Jess liked to pick clothes out for me that I’d never buy. It amused her. We liked to argue over which color suited me and which one didn’t. Bickering like that, it made me feel as if we were a normal family; it made me feel real.

Late in the afternoon, as the shadows shifted across the roads and the shopping plazas, we stopped for a rest at a little island in the center of a pedestrianized zone. The town center wasn’t much, but it did have a few pockets of urban beauty: a couple of Victorian shopping arcades, old stone bank buildings that had been turned into chain pubs, narrow back alleys leading to odd little shops selling retro fashions and trinkets.

I watched the weekend shoppers milling back and forth, their slow, easy steps, the way they talked or peered at mobile phones as they moved casually and carelessly through the streets. Normal people. Real people. I could, I really could be one of them, if I tried hard enough.

An old man caught my eye. He was small and stooped, but still looked strong. He had the sleeves of his jacket rolled up to show his hard, muscled forearms. They were decorated with cheap, ugly prison tattoos. He caught my eye as he passed us, nodded at me, winked at Jess.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Why do old people have to die?”

We’d covered this ground before. She was at an age where death was becoming a confusing reality rather than some abstract notion she didn’t have to worry about.

“It isn’t just old people. Young people die, too. They die all the time.”

She looked up at me. Her eyes were dark. There was chocolate smeared at one corner of her mouth. “Why? Why do people have to die?”

I wanted to put this off, but I couldn’t. It would have been wrong of me to brush off her question and change the subject. Also, she would have seen right through any ploy to do so. When she was in the mood for answers, Jess was not easily put off.

I took a deep breath. “Everybody dies, baby. We all die. Someday I’ll die. Mummy will, too. Then, hopefully when you’re very old and very frail and after you’ve lived a great life, you’ll die. But we leave part of ourselves behind in the family we have: our children, our grandchildren. They keep small pieces of us in their hearts, and they pass those pieces on to their own children and their children’s children. That’s how life works. It’s how we’re remembered when we’re gone.”

She took a moment to digest all that, and then she licked her lips. “I don’t want you and Mummy to die. I want you to live forever.”

“Nobody lives forever.” The anger I felt as I made that statement shocked me. I wasn’t angry at Jess; I was angry at the world, the universe. Because the rules of the universe dictated that someday my beautiful daughter would die. She’d be put in the ground to rot, or incinerated in a narrow coffin.

“Do we go to heaven when we die?”

This was the question I hated most. “Some people believe that. They think we have a soul, and the soul is eternal—that means it never dies, it lives forever, in some other form.”

“But…but you don’t believe that?” She was clever, sometimes too clever for her own good.

“That’s right, sweetheart. Daddy doesn’t believe in that stuff. I think it’s just a story. As stories go, it’s a good one—one that can give a lot of people comfort. But not me…I believe that once we’re dead, we’re gone. Apart from those small bits and pieces I mentioned, the ones we leave behind with the people who loved us most.”

She stared into the middle distance, thinking about my words. I hoped they were good enough. They were the only ones I had. The last thing I wanted to do was infect my daughter with the kind of fatalism that had dogged me my entire life, but I didn’t want to fill her with bullshit, either. I wanted her to make up her own mind about things. It was my duty to give her the tools to do that—my duty as a father.

“Okay,” she said, her focus snapping back to me. “That
is
a good story…but I’ll have to think about it a bit more. I bet there are better stories. Like the one about the little girl in my room last night. She’s dead, but she’s still here.” She smiled. My heart shivered.

We walked slowly back to where I’d parked the car, in a space outside a Pizza Express at the north end of town. The traffic was always quiet there, and I was usually able to get a space. I didn’t mention what I’d seen last night, how I’d interrupted her conversation with what she claimed was a dead girl. I didn’t have the energy to take the subject any further.

I stopped outside the pizza restaurant. “Are you hungry?”

She nodded.

I glanced at the diners through the big picture window. “Pizza?”

“Yay!”

I’d messed up on my promise to feed her healthily this weekend, but for the moment I didn’t care about that. She jumped up and threw her arms around me, and when I hauled her up into a tight embrace, she covered my face in sweet, chocolate-smelling kisses.

We went inside and got a table by the window. It was still early, so we’d just beaten the dinner crowd. The place started to fill up as we ordered our meal—I had an American Hot with extra peppers; Jess went for a plain Margarita on a thin base, her favorite. We ate slowly; there was no reason to rush. Jess chatted to me about anything and everything under the sun, and I simply sat there enjoying the sound of her voice as the sun tilted down over the horizon. She didn’t give anything away about those bruises, and I managed not to pursue the issue. She seemed fine to me; there was nothing different about her attitude or in the way she carried herself. Despite the constant shit-storm around her, she was a well-adjusted little girl.

She fell asleep in the passenger seat as I drove home through the early evening traffic. I played a Radiohead CD—one of the later, moodier ones—and allowed my mind to drift. The streetlights were coming on; their illumination smeared the night like oil paint. Early revellers were taking to the streets, jumping out of taxis, making their way toward the center of town, where the noisier pubs were located. I didn’t feel any kind of bond with them. They were not my people; I didn’t understand how they operated. I’d worked on a lot of pub doors in my time, stopping drunken fights in some rough places. I didn’t miss that life, those characters. The memories made me feel dirty.

These days I was trying to be a better man.

Jess was still sleeping when we arrived home. I parked the car and carried her into the house, setting her down on the sofa. When still she failed to stir, I took her upstairs and put her into bed fully clothed. She’d had an exciting day. She needed her rest. Part of me—the selfish side—wanted to wake her up so that I could spend more time with her. The rest of me was content to bring a close to a near-perfect day.

Downstairs, I poured myself a large whiskey. It tasted good, like I’d earned it. I no longer used alcohol as a crutch, and could now take simple pleasure from drinking it. I love the taste of whiskey, the burn of it on my lips, in my mouth, along my throat.

I thought about calling Carole, but then thought better of it. Our last meeting had ended abruptly, and things had felt strained. I didn’t want to push too hard in case I scared her away. I still wasn’t certain what I wanted from the relationship, or even if I was keen on it being a relationship.
Take things slowly, see how they develop.
These were probably the thoughts of an emotional coward, but they seemed sensible at the time.

I found myself wandering through the house, feeling ill at ease. Nervous energy buzzed through me. I thought about practicing
kata
, or going through some basic drills, but I was too tired for karate. I intended to take a class at the dojo the following evening, if only to fill the gap Jess left behind when she went back to her mother.

Just then, thinking about my plans for the immediate future, I heard a sound from behind the cellar door. I stopped, listened, but the sound failed to repeat. I walked slowly over to the door, placed the fingertips of one steepled hand against it, and waited.

Still the sound didn’t come again, but there was a sense of someone standing directly on the other side, waiting, just like me. I resisted the urge to speak, to say, “Hello,” or ask what it was this person wanted. Because I knew that, in reality, there was nobody there. Jess and I were the only two people inside the house, and she was asleep upstairs, hopefully lost in her dreams.

Impatient with myself, I opened the cellar door. I reached around and switched on the light. I walked down into the space and immediately my gaze fell upon the cardboard box in which I’d found the copy of
Little Miss Moffat and the Radiant Children
—the book with blank pages; the volume that had unnerved me so much I had to get it out of the house.

Without hesitating, I walked over and crouched down beside the box. The flaps were closed but not sealed. I looked around me, into the corners of the cellar, just to confirm that the cat wasn’t down there. I’m not sure why that should have been an issue, but at least it felt like I was being proactive and not just going along with whatever was thrown at me.

I looked again at the box.

I’d never believed in ghosts or the afterlife, but this situation was starting to get weird. Was I being haunted by the victims of the killer next door? Were Katherine Moffat’s Radiant Children trying to tell me something, attempting to pass on a message?

I thought about Jess asleep upstairs, and whether she might be in some kind of danger. But, no, the killer was dead; her victims were buried; the story was over.

I set down my whiskey glass on the floor, reached out and opened the flaps on the box. Before, the box had been empty. I’d taken out what had been inside. This time, it was filled with photographs.

I grabbed a few and brought them out of the box. They were photographs of children—some of them taken with a Polaroid camera, others printed from digital images. They all shared a common subject—young children—and each one depicted that subject caught in an ordinary, even banal, moment. As I leafed through more of the photographs, I saw that some of them were school portraits, with forced smiles and neat uniforms, while others were of unguarded scenes in the park, on the street, or on playing fields.

There was nothing extraordinary about any of these shots, yet they filled me with a growing sense of dread and an odd yearning. I knew nothing about any of the children in the photographs, but something told me that I was looking at the Radiant Children, before they’d come into contact with their killer. Before they’d become Radiant…

I went through every image in that box, fully expecting to find a picture of my own daughter. But life isn’t like a story; I found no photograph of Jess, or of anyone else I recognized. This was just a box of old snapshots. It might even be a different box from the one I’d seen before. My rational mind was constructing a plot around these disparate elements, piecing together a narrative that might not even be true.

The human need to tell a story can be powerful, and it can be dangerous. Robert Shingley knew that perhaps better than anyone. That desire had made him neglect his family, and it probably killed him.

I put the photographs back in the box and took it upstairs.

THIRTEEN