Diving Belles (12 page)

Nothing moved across the moor except the rain, which appeared as suddenly and soundlessly as a face pressed against a window. Summer was almost over. A low sheet of cloud had appeared one morning at the beginning of August and never left, its bright greys worrying at the skyline. The sun lingered behind it and didn’t break out. The muggy heat dropped and chilled at night and gathered again in the morning. People ate ice creams with the smell of bonfires in the air, fat bluebottles knocking into their bare arms.

Gog tried to curl himself up more tightly under the tarpaulin but his phantom body still sprawled out into the rain. His arms and legs felt soaking, the wispy hair on them plastered down in dark straggles. Wet grass brushed against his fingers and his calf was pressed against a stone. His real body (average height for a twelve-year-old boy according to the NHS website) was still dry, still staggeringly close to Sunshine. But he could feel the faint prickle of grass rash stippling his wrists and midges biting his ankles. Gog hated midges. He hated being in small spaces like this: it made him more aware of his phantom body than ever. This summer it had definitely become more intense – he could feel it surrounding him pretty much all the time now and it was getting difficult to ignore.

He and Sunshine had crawled into the den to escape getting drenched. At the beginning of summer, when they first started coming up here, they wouldn’t have bothered avoiding the rain. But now they were acting more quietly, more carefully. It was like all their movements had become slower and more deliberate. Gog knew something had changed but he couldn’t tell exactly what it was. All he knew was that he and Sunshine were now people who watched, rather than played in, the rain. And he also knew that however tired or bored they got hanging around together all day every day, they would carry on doing it until the summer ended, repeating the same conversations and jokes over and over without properly listening to them any more.

They couldn’t keep away from the boneyard either. They would start walking and messing around and end up out there without even thinking about it. The boneyard was on the edge of the moor. A faint trail, overgrown with gorse and heather, led out to it from town. No one knew how or why it was there, just that it had always been there and always would be. Hardly anyone came out to visit it, not even the handful of stray giants who were rumoured to wander around the wilder areas of the moors and cliffs. Kids sometimes came to loaf around but there was the skate park and the fountain, which were closer. Adults would visit, huddle dwarfed and shivering under the bones and not come back.

There were hundreds of bones, heaped and leaning like the beams and joints of an abandoned mansion. They were spread over an area of damp moorland the size of two football fields and they changed that flat landscape into a petrified forest. Tibiae, fibulas and hips tangled together. Shoulder blades sprawled like torn-off car doors. Femurs leaned out from the ground as if a giant had died standing up and collapsed around his own legs. Sternums and collarbones piled up, jaws bit at the ground like old animal traps, and kneecaps mushroomed from the grass.

Gog was afraid of it, in awe of it, drawn to it. He ran his hands along the bones, testing the size and weight of them. The NHS website said that ‘although height is inherited, there may be inconsistencies in families’. He quoted that to himself a lot while he was up there, especially when his chest went all tight and the bones seemed to stretch and grow and crowd around him. He was a pretty big inconsistency in his family: his father had been a giant and everyone was waiting for him to catch up. So far, all he’d got was a phantom body that confused him, tripped him up and sometimes made him over-arc when he went for a piss because he couldn’t tell how far away he was from the toilet. There was nothing about phantom bodies on any websites or in any books. He figured it must be the first stage in the growth process but he wasn’t entirely sure. He couldn’t ask his dad because he’d never met him and he couldn’t ask his mum because then she’d get her hopes up and he didn’t want to disappoint her any more than he could help.

The den they’d found was a piece of tarpaulin someone had draped over dry branches and two rotting fence panels. It smelled weird in there, musty and smoky and old, like someone dead had just farted. Gog said that to Sunshine. ‘It smells like a dead guy just farted in here.’

She rolled her eyes. Her cool bare arm was touching his. ‘Get over it,’ she told him, flicking hair out of her eyes. She looked up at the roof. ‘Don’t you love the sound of the rain hammering down like this?’ she asked.

‘I guess,’ he said. He moved his foot so that it touched her sandal.

‘What does it sound like to you? To me it sounds like something very sad is happening.’

Gog could feel his arse going numb. He shifted around. Sunshine always said things like that now, that ‘something very sad was happening’. He wished she wouldn’t. It was just rain; he didn’t want rain to become more than that. ‘I bet this is a murderer’s hideout,’ he said.

‘There are no murderers up here,’ Sunshine told him.

‘Yeah, there are. That’s what this smell is, I reckon. It’s a body buried right underneath us.’ He was always trying to freak Sunshine out.

‘Actually, it would be the best place to do it,’ she said. ‘No one’s going to notice a few extra bones around here.’

Gog hadn’t thought of that. ‘Exactly,’ he said. He swallowed and checked around. Last year, there was that murdered body someone found in the reservoir, or was it a walker who’d slipped? He bumped his knee into Sunshine’s. She sighed heavily. Her breath smelled sweet and bitter and dry, like toothpaste and peanut butter.

‘There are no murderers.’ She drew up her knees and hugged them with both arms. Gog felt the warmth from her leg evaporate. He could hear his watch ticking and wondered if Sunshine could too. He was meant to meet his mum in town in an hour.

‘Your watch is righteously pissing me off,’ Sunshine said. She lifted up a flap of the tarpaulin and peered out. The rain had stopped. She crawled out and Gog followed behind. Huge bones lay all around them like windblown birches. Some were piled haphazardly; others were laid out in weird patterns. Twelve spines, the vertebrae all intact, had been pressed into the ground in circles. There was a pyramid of skulls and a warped totem pole made from interlocking pelvis bones.

Sunshine tightrope-walked across a shin, her hands outstretched. The bones were slippery after the rain and she slid off on to the grass. She looked fine and hadn’t fallen hard.

‘Are you OK?’ Gog asked, hurrying over not too quickly, not too slowly. Sometimes she liked his help and sometimes she didn’t.

‘Quit fussing,’ she said, brushing her shorts. ‘You are such a hypochondriac.’ The first time she’d said that to him she’d called him a ‘hypoallergenic’ and he’d had to correct her. Even though it was a mistake, Sunshine telling him that he was unlikely to cause an allergic reaction was probably the best compliment he’d had so far from a girl. She walked over to a skull that had fallen off the top of the pyramid. It was the smallest skull there but was still as big as a television. A hairline crack inched up its left cheek. Gog had done some research and reckoned that a normal skull as old as these, which had been continuously exposed to air, would have shattered after a fall like that. It seemed like these bones weren’t going anywhere; they were beyond breaking, erosion or decay.

‘Check this out,’ Sunshine said, sticking her fist through an eye socket and moving it around. All the skull’s hollows were smoothed, wind-polished. Sometimes the wind whistled through the gaps in the bones so that it sounded as if they were singing mournfully. It reminded Gog of his mum singing along to her Joni Mitchell CD, her voice thin and wavering as she struggled with all the high notes.

Sunshine stood up and tried to push the skull but it didn’t move. ‘Piece of crap.’ She looked at Gog then kicked at it, but not hard. She scrambled on to it and sat cross-legged on top. ‘This one could be your dad,’ she said, squinting up at him. Sometimes her laugh was small and hard. She always said something like that when they were around the bones, maybe to test him, and Gog always said the same thing back.

‘Yeah, I think it probably is him actually. He says, can you move your fat ass off?’ What he really wanted to say was that these bones were hundreds of years old and besides, his dad probably wasn’t even dead. There was hardly any evidence. He kicked at the ground below her. ‘Besides, he’s probably not even dead,’ he said quietly.

Sunshine had been humming loudly to herself but she stopped and looked up. ‘How do you know, though?’ she asked eagerly. ‘How are you so sure?’

‘I’m not sure exactly,’ he said. ‘Some things you think you just know.’

‘Huh?’

‘What I mean is, there are some things you think you just know. Do you know what I mean?’ He couldn’t describe it any better than that, the strong feeling he had. He could tell that Sunshine had been expecting him to say something else, that she didn’t understand what he meant. He had failed. He’d had his chance to talk to her about it and he’d gone and screwed it up. He should have told her about the waxed jacket his dad had left behind in the hall, how it hung down like a greasy curtain and draped over the floor, except he didn’t really know what he would have said about that either.

‘Yeah,’ Sunshine said, picking at a toenail. ‘He probably just got sick of your mum.’

Something dropped into Gog’s stomach. The sky was hard and bright and grey. The wet grass seeped into his canvas shoes. Sunshine didn’t like his mum. She said that she had weird Freudian abandonment issues, whatever those were. He supposed it was fair to say that his mum was a little bit intense but it was only because she wanted the best for him. It wasn’t like she did anything for herself. She never did anything for herself. She had always made sacrifices, a word which, to Gog, was tangled up with images of lambs and blood and crosses, and he couldn’t untangle it now. She bought him protein shakes that were meant to increase his muscle mass. They tasted like strawberries and metal. He had a really fast metabolism, though, so they didn’t help much; he stayed as scrawny as ever. She’d sent him on a caving holiday but he came back diagnosed with mild claustrophobia and still dreamed of rocks and dripping water. And she’d devised an exercise regime for him: ten minutes of hanging from a bar above his door to stretch out his spine plus another ten minutes of lifts and curls. He even stuck to it most of the time.

‘Do you often just feel like breaking something?’ she would ask, always on the lookout for flashes of anger, for the blank eyes and tension that come before violence.

‘Sometimes,’ he’d reply. ‘But not that often.’

Then she would nod slowly and thoughtfully, a cup of tea going cold at her elbow.

Sunshine scrambled on to her feet and balanced on the skull’s crown. ‘Hey, give me a piggyback off here,’ she said.

As Gog stood there, waiting for her to climb on to his back, he lurched forcefully back into his phantom body. His back felt about three feet higher than it actually was and he had to resist the urge to curl right over so that Sunshine could reach his shoulders. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked him.

‘Nothing. Waiting for you.’

‘You’re hunching. Stop hunching.’

He straightened up and concentrated as hard as he could on his real body. Sunshine climbed on, wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his stomach. Gog stood there. He wasn’t sure what he was meant to do now. Should he walk or run? Would he have to do that thing where you jig up and down, or was that just for little kids? Sunshine’s warm chest was pressing into his back. He knew he had to keep concentrating as hard as he could so that he didn’t do anything stupid like fall over or drop her. If he was standing on his phantom legs it meant that, logically, his real legs must be dangling in the air. It made him dizzy just thinking about it. Plus, Sunshine was actually a lot heavier than she looked. She seemed all slim and light when you saw her, but once she was on your back it was a completely different story. He locked his knees. Her hair was draped over his ears and cheeks and he had to keep blinking a strand out of his eye. He stood there stiffly and she clung on. A crow barked in the distance. Something rustled in the gorse. Sunshine shifted her weight. ‘I think I’ll get down now,’ she said eventually, dropping a leg towards the floor. Her feet crunched down on teeth that were embedded in the soil like old confetti.

They looked down and scuffed at them with their shoes. There was the oniony smell of sweat. Nothing was ever as Gog expected it. The only party he’d ever been to was a let-down: half a flat beer and watching other people play computer games. He really ought to think about leaving soon. It would take fifteen minutes to walk back and his mum would definitely be on time; she would probably be early, looking disappointed that he’d kept her waiting. They were going to meet outside the church and then buy Gog’s school stuff. They did the same thing every year. His mum called it their date and they had to go to the café for lunch and order things like croque monsieurs and bruschettas, his mum dabbing at the corners of her lips with a napkin even when there was nothing on them. And, shoved under the table, there would be bags of Aertex polo shirts and navy jumpers, all about three sizes too big, that he would have to try to swap with someone as soon as term started.

Sunshine picked up a bumpy knucklebone and cupped it in her palm. ‘Hey Gog, go long,’ she said, raising her arm. He started running backwards just as she dropped her hand and laughed at him. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and tried to turn his run into something else, a leap maybe, or a feint, as if he knew she was going to do that. It was so humid. It brought out the stinging feeling in the skin under his nose that would probably turn into more blackheads. ‘You’re such a retard,’ Sunshine told him. But she said it affectionately; at least he thought she did. So he made a magnifying glass out of his hand, ran up to her and bent down over her shoes in his best Sherlock Holmes impression. Her toes were tiny. She’d painted the nails a deep purple.