Big Bones Read online

  ‘You OK?’ he asks.

  And then I just say it, don’t I?

  ‘Er … have you had a haircut recently?’

  He rubs his head. ‘Yeah, went to the barbers this morning.’

  ‘It looks very … barbery.’

  ‘Barbery. OK.’ He grins and Marcel snorts. Shut up you, Marcel.

  And I have to put my whole head in the fridge to stop the blushing. My hand curled into a C-shape, frozen, from touch, recovering from THAT.

  VINEGAR

  I care a bit too much about vinegar. I completely love it. I love so much vinegar on chips that the hairs in your nostrils shrivel up, your ears block and your cheeks pop. Any kind, too.

  I have an actual physical and emotional relationship with vinegar. I love vinegar MORE than I love boys.

  And I need to remember that, should I need to put things into perspective, like I clearly do now.

  When we were younger, we used to go to this after-school club. It was basically a church hall with chairs and tables and a table-tennis table. They did supply some games and stuff but you weren’t cool if you touched the baby games, sticky with the touch of five-year-old bogey fingers. Gross. Kids NEVER wash their hands.

  There was also a little hatch shutter thing that was pulled down as in the daytime the hall doubled up as a cafe for OAPs. There were little woven baskets stuffed with sachets of sugar, ketchup, brown sauce, tartar sauce and vinegar. I never tasted the food there but I always wondered what it was like.

  Most of the boys and girls would sit in corners, thinking they were being really discreet and do first-time kissing and over-the-clothes feel-ups.

  But I just used to sit on my own, with the odd ends of fuzzy felts, making a farm or a beach scene, sucking on a sachet of tartar sauce or vinegar like it was an ice pole.

  That’s the sort of girl I am. A not-cool one.

  I like vinegar more than boys. Can somebody please make me a T-shirt with those words on it? Because I think I need reminding.

  Because maybe … MAYBE … I like a boy a little bit more than vinegar.

  COLD PASTA

  The feeling has not worn off. I know I fancy him. Max. Because I am wearing a very big baggy T-shirt. That is how I know I am in trouble – and I do NOT want vinegar. And it’s not just ANY big baggy T-shirt, it’s one that has an astronaut body on it and when you wear it, your head becomes the head of the astronaut. Yes, it is THAT bad. I am wearing skanky old leopard-print leggings and manky old espadrilles and not one single stitch of make-up. This is the ONLY way I can know if Max fancies me back.

  If he fancies me back when I look like this, then it will be genuine and our romantic love affair can begin with a road trip to somewhere great like, errr, maybe actual heaven. (I hate myself and every word that comes out of my mouth.) Or maybe I’ll just TRY for one second to play it cool and re-evaluate what to do next based on his actions.

  If not, then I can get over this messy hindrance of my personal excellence.

  But then why am I looking for Max’s name on the schedule? Why is he not in today? Why am I walking past the odd jumble of left-behind coats and jumpers on the hangers to pick up his fig smell in case one of them belongs to him, even though it’s full-blown summer. Why did I make myself fancy him? Get over it. You don’t need to stoop this low like some hideous fan girl. OK. Do something productive with yourself, write a novel in your head, make an album, learn how to be a scuba diver or make a wristwatch with your bare hands or become a calypso dancer … anything but wasting your days obsessing over a BOY. Boring. OK? OK.

  Fine.

  Over.

  No more.

  Done.

  I might just steal his number out of the staff contacts.

  No. Psycho. Absolutely not.

  I hate him. I actually hate him. I do not even like him. He’s not even funny. Goodbye. Goodnight. Adios, amigo.

  OOOOOH, what’s Spanish for ‘Will you be my boyfriend?’?

  NO! STOP IT!

  Calm the fudge down. Wish so bad I could take a nap so this nonsense could blow over.

  The day is so dry at work. Alicia insists on listening to the cruddy playlist entitled ‘Chill-Out’ or ‘Sunday Morning’ on shuffle. It’s not even relaxing: it’s just the album tracks of pop stars that you would skip, which are only decent when an actual cool band or artist performs them for an ironic unexpected cover. It’s quiet today because the weather is sunny and nobody wants to sit in Planet Coffee roasting their bums off when there’s sunshine in the park. I think it’s funny that we’re like particles that have to be charged by the sun. We are just simply plants.

  With the place empty, Marcel is on the take away coffees, so I’m, in Alicia’s words, ‘giving the place a spruce’. She so is pregnant. What the hell? I have to wash and dry tea towels, mop the floor and then clean the fridge out, which I don’t actually mind because I can just imagine that me and Max are meanwhile running away to Japan to eat those cute cakes and go to those excellent cafes where there are cats just freely around and available for you to stroke whenever your heart desires.

  The fridge inside the staffroom is way more interesting than the big fridges out the front. I like poking through the old lunch boxes and seeing what gross things people have left behind, and working out people’s personalities from that. There are two more members of staff that I don’t ever really see because they work on the days I don’t, but I guess soon I’ll get to know them more. So for now, I judge them by the stuff they’ve labelled: carrier bags shoved in the back of the fridge containing just a wilted pear, now soft. Odd crusts of half-eaten sandwiches and orange-stained Tupperware. Healthy packaged salads dressed with good intention before they’ve been sacked off for a McDonald’s instead. My favourite labels are the ones that say ‘MINE. DON’T EAT!’ ultra aggressively in black marker, as if there is some sort of feeding beast that works here that just HAS to eat ALL the homemade Tupperware packed lunches …

  There are some boxes that stink so I have no choice but to throw them away, the contents and the box. Old curdled milk, wedges of hardened cheese mottled in furry blue dots that crack like worn heels. Browning fruit and straggles of tin foil, half-sunk juice cartons. Labels wallpaper themselves on to the fridge walls but my worst is cold pasta. Pasta that cements to the fork in clumps, that snaps and rejects sauce.

  There’re no leftovers from Max. There’s no label saying ‘MAX’. How dare he leave this mysterious untraceable trail for me? What is he, extinct? Is he really that chill that he doesn’t have anxiety about spending lunch money like the rest of us?

  Doesn’t he want me to obsess over him? Doesn’t he want to go to Japan and stroke all them cats? Doesn’t he know how brilliant it would be to have a cool girl like me fancying him?

  I see what he means about ‘cocky’.

  I hold my breath and reach further into the fridge for the odd crinkled-up stalks of tomatoes and soft grapes. I run a damp cloth around as far as my arm can reach without straining too hard. I mean, I like to do a good job but I’m not gonna clean it like it’s my own fridge.

  There’s an itch on my nose but I don’t want to scratch it because I don’t want all these fresh fridge germs to touch my pure innocent face and my nails aren’t long enough to have a good scratch without any cell-on-cell action. I mean, it’s not like I’m working with a freezer here where these viruses get killed off; I reckon they thrive here in the lukewarm, puke-swarm fridge.

  ‘Hello, BUM!’ Alicia shrieks. HA-HA-HA. Slow blink. I imagine the view she must be witnessing, me face-first in the open fridge, like the back of a horse in a stable munching on a hay bale. She steps forward, bumping hips with me. ‘I’m on my lunch break, got to make a few phone calls and take some stuff to the bank … might pick up some sushi. Doesn’t this weather just make you want to get wasted?’

  ‘I … errr.’

  ‘I just want to sit in the park with a few wines and relax, you know?’ She rubs her belly. ‘I’m exhausted.’ Cracking h
er neck she grabs her purse. ‘And I meant what I said the other day … about the shifts and the weight-loss … you’re glowing, looking totally rad.’ And she heads out.

  Not again. REALLY? I don’t look ‘rad’. I look horrendous, deliberately. Just hurry up and fill out my stupid form and sign my letter so I can take it to Julian from Careers already. So my mum gets off my frigging back.

  TONGUE

  I wait for her to leave and then I poke my tongue at the back of her head and then think about sticking my fingers up at her but then wonder if perhaps she watches the security videos, so I get anxious about that and poke my tongue out again as if I have food on my chin or something I am trying to get off. Then I become conscious of that and pretend I have a tic. I figure six or seven tongue pokes over the next hour should cement the fact I have a possible tic.

  I feel like my hands need a hundred scrubs after touching all the butter-cold whiteness of the staffroom fridge. My fingers are stale and pink and prawny, ripe with bacteria. My hair smells. I go out the front, watching Alicia trip-trap down the high street, placing her Ray-Bans over her eyes. Bopping down the road like she’s some insane female detective with baggage.

  ‘Let’s get this music off!’ I say to Marcel. ‘Quick, change it.’

  ‘Hallelujah!’ He rushes to the laptop.

  ‘That doesn’t mean that you can put something on,’ I warn him.

  He listens to house.

  ‘What about a movie soundtrack?’ he suggests.

  ‘Sure.’

  I stretch. I crick my neck; it cracks like a walking stick being dragged along a set of railings. Not ideal.

  ‘Can you please make me an icy hot chocolate?’ Which is exactly as it sounds.

  ‘Anything for you, my darling.’ Marcel is in a good mood.

  ‘Thanks.’

  I think Marcel could make a good feeder, like if someone was into that. He always puts extras on everybody’s everything. My icy hot chocolate is going to have cream and sprinkles, I can already tell. I don’t ask him to not put the cream on though, because I don’t want him to make a comment like ‘watching your figure, are you?’ I just don’t like cream on my hot chocolate. I scrape it off with a tissue and flush it down the toilet.

  I watch the boys and girls flutter about in the summer sun. Vests and skirts, shorts and sunglasses, box-fresh trainers and new fold-lined T-shirts. Girls suffer in new sandals that rub and blister the backs of their heels and squeeze their toes in to reveal varnish-chipped stubby, hang-nail trotters. Pale legs or sunburn, red-raw dots of fresh-shaven skin. The soft touch of inner thighs. Dry skin on knees. Dark patches. And kids, melting lolly chins and hats and premature freckles, ice cream spilling into fatty folds on joints. There’s always one in a car too fast, music too loud, the roof down, top off like we’re on Venice Beach.

  And then it’s a bit like staring at a painting, I suppose, say of a river … and suddenly the river begins to glisten and move. Tall, white T-shirt, tanned skin, green eyes, big smile. He is eating one of them Calippo lollies, the classic orange, a cool ice pole.

  ‘Hey, Maxy!’ Marcel jumps up and fist-bumps with him. He smiles, all dimples and scrunched nose. ‘What you doing here on your day off, man?’

  ‘I was just passing through.’ And then our eyes lock.

  And I am fat.

  And hot.

  And flustered.

  And I smell of cheese.

  And I’m wearing that stupid astronaut T-shirt. I mean, I knew I wanted to look normal today but not Normal Minus.

  ‘Hi, Bluebelle.’ Max licks his lolly. Oh to be that lolly for a day. Jealousy rattles my big bones.

  ‘I’ve been cleaning the fridge out,’ I say. Grinning, breathlessly proud, weirdly. He smiles back. With those teeth. ‘What you up to?’ He rubs his shaved head and I say, ‘You off somewhere nice? You look nice.’

  OH HOLD ON WHILE I JUST CUT OUT MY TONGUE AND SWALLOW IT SO IT CAN’T SPEAK AGAIN.

  ‘So do you,’ he says-SLASH-lies, ‘… two both.’

  TWO. BOTH. TWO BOTH? I look at Marcel, who probably looks better than me actually, but the pair of sad rejects that we are stuns me. Marcel’s eyes are caffeine crazed like a wild hyena and I look like I’ve just given birth to a titan without losing the tummy fat after. And I dwarf Marcel with my grand height. I honestly am like a cathedral standing next to him. Hardly looking nice like Max the hot … god. God of … hotness.

  Hold on. No. Why is my voice in my own head that I’m not even saying out loud now sounding like my mum: god of hotness? Oh, sorry, did I forget to give myself the memo that I am so cringe? This is cringe. Clichéd. Ugly. Put the book down. It’s terrible. Still, I can’t help myself, eyelashes up, pupils pop and …

  ‘Then I’m going to a gallery. My favourite artist, Elouise VuMart, has an exhibition … do you know her work?’

  I shake my head in a no because I’ve had far too much experience of people asking me if I’ve heard of someone cool and me saying yes to only find out it’s a made-up person to trick me into looking like a try-hard IDIOT.

  ‘I think you’d really like her paintings, Bluebelle. They are special.’ You are. Gulp. Gag. ‘Plus, the gallery will be air-conditioned. It’s so close out there today.’

  He nudges his head backstage.

  ‘Alicia around?’

  ‘Nope, break,’ Marcel answers. ‘At last.’

  ‘I need to change my schedule around.’ To work more shifts with me, he means to add. ‘S’OK, I’ll give her a bell.’

  I WANT A BELL, MAX. GIVE ME A BELL.

  Our eyes meet again.

  ‘See you guys soon … sorry you’re inside on a day like today.’

  … and he vanishes, looking left and right onto the oncoming traffic of shiny happy people, before folding himself into the stream of humans as simple as egg whites into cake mix.

  … and before I know it, I am back here, scribbling everything down in my book, frantically raiding the schedule …

  I have to take Alicia up on those shifts. I need to work every day to make our shifts chime so that we work together every day, EVERY day. Every single day, boy.

  TACOS

  Camille picks me up from Planet at the end of the day. I’m not gonna tell her about being morbidly obsessed with Max. He’s a boy. We don’t really DO boys. I find myself snapping back to us. We survive on the triumphs in the pleasures around us like music and eating and TV and talking and films and clothes and each other. We don’t need any boy sucking us into the endless timeless vortex of insecurity and doubt and wasting endless hours on falling in love and … feeling special and happy and … euphoric weightlessness. OH WHAT THE … WHO AM I?

  ‘Greetings, earthling!’ Alicia jokes. ‘You know this could’ve been you, Cam!’ She presents me to my friend with a back-slapping like I’m an exhausted unwanted prize on a game show, mocking the fact that Camille had a one-day trial at Planet Coffee and wasn’t asked to come back because she drank A LOT of coffee and when somebody asked for an extra hot, decaf soya latte with no foam she laughed in their face and pointed to the jug of tap water instead.

  ‘Greetings.’ Camille LOVES to take the micky out of Alicia’s alien chat.

  ‘Where you girls off to then?’

  Don’t tell her, I mouth to Camille, slicing my neck with my fingertips and widening my eyes.

  ‘To a really … boring … place.’

  ‘Well, let Bluebelle treat you, babes! She’s gonna be working around the place a little more, ain’t you, doll face?’ She squeezes my cheeks in her spiky hand. HOW ABOUT FILL IN MY FORM THEN? I swear she’s holding this apprentice application over me like some kind of power. ‘And doesn’t she look so great?’

  Camille tries not to laugh. ‘She looks like she needs a taco.’

  ‘You GIRLS!’ Alicia snorts. ‘You kill me. You’ve got to be a good supportive friend, Cam!’ Cam IS a good supportive friend. ‘You’ve got to help BB get that bikini body.’

  ‘She has a bikini bod
y!’ Cam fires back. ‘She owns a body AND a number of bikinis.’ Alicia crinkles her nose in disgust at this. It’s probably the idea of me flobbering around in a bikini making her feel sick.

  ‘Alicia, I see a beach once a year for two weeks, if I’m lucky. What’s the point? Forget my bikini body, I’m working on my jumper body!’

  Cam laughs. ‘Same! Although, you know I read this article on how to look good on a beach? It said to get to the beach before everybody else, dig a hole and place your towel into it so you only look half the size.’

  ‘That would never work because what about when you got up to have a swim; it would just be a nasty shock for everybody.’ Alicia argues as if she’s ACTUALLY considering it. ‘It’s a good idea but it just ain’t practical. Soz, beb.’

  ‘Alicia, it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,’ Cam snaps. ‘I wasn’t taking the article seriously.’

  ‘Yeah, just no carbs, I’d say! But plenty of wine! Laters, girls, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

  FAT CHANCE OF THAT.

  Alicia then wrestles with her bicycle, pedalling away with her heels rattling over the sides, wobbling maniacally down the road, cars beeping and honking her.

  ‘She’s mental.’

  ‘Annoying is what she is. She drives me mad.’

  ‘Is she telling you you’ve lost weight again?’

  ‘She thinks it makes me feel good. It’s so insulting, it’s her banter apparently.’

  ‘Oh, she’s vile.’ Camille laughs.

  The Mexican is nice. We like it. Turquoise walls covered in Mexican art, plastic flowers and painted clay skulls. Red waxy floral tablecloths loaded with hot sauces and a candle in a mottled red jar. And fun music. You could almost pretend you were on holiday.

  ‘I’ve got NO money,’ Camille says. ‘Why am I here again, remind me?’ she asks one of the skull head ornaments. She makes the skull talk back to her: ‘Because you live in a dream world where you think you are a millionaire and a basketball player is your boyfriend.’