Big Bones Page 6

  ‘Yeah! A CV palm reader.’ We laugh. Dove pushes her weight on the toastie maker; it sizzles. I wonder if anybody would know that Dove can climb buildings with her bare naked hands just by looking at her palms? Probably not. Those idiot members of the public probably think she rides one of those scooter things to school.

  ‘Do you think I’m fat, Not 2B?’

  ‘Eugh! Can you stop putting such emotional stress baggage on the dog?’

  ‘Wait, I want to see his answer. Bark for no and sit for yes.’

  ‘Not 2B, SIT!’ Dove yells.

  ‘DOVE! Stop messing with the test.’

  ‘It’s not a fair test anyway, you idiot. You’re asking a dog if you’re fat … it doesn’t get much sadder than that … Oh look, he’s sitting.’

  ‘That’s just mean for no reason.’

  ‘Oh my actual God, BB, look …’

  Warm, melted, gooey cheese gloops out of the toasted bread like a scene from Ghostbusters. Blonde, stringy, salty creaminess. Rahhhhhhh. I feel my heart beat like I’m in a romantic film and me and the cheese are the main stars.

  ‘Ummmmmmmmm.’

  ‘We should have added beans.’ Dove tuts as if we’ve made the effort to go to a party that’s ended in disaster. I knew we never should have come …

  But I don’t mind it without. The comforting thwack of savoury, salty, cheek-sucking butteriness dissolves onto my tongue. I follow Dove through to the living room where our steaming cups of tea are waiting.

  ‘Shall I go and put some beans on?’ I ask Dove.

  ‘Probably for the best,’ Dove replies.

  BAKED BEANS

  I clearly remember a person from Manchester once say I was ‘sick for beans’. As in, I was mad about beans. And they’d probably be correct because, in my mind, baked beans go with absolutely everything. I like them cold with salad, dumped into spaghetti or shepherds pie, or mounds of them on toast. I remember once reading in the newspaper about a man finding a dead mouse in his beans. I remember the photograph of the sopping wet blind mouse, dripping in bean juice and death. He got compensation – the man, not the mouse. The mouse just got to drown in bean juice. Pretty good way to die, to be fair.

  Not gonna lie though … it put me off for a bit but it wasn’t long before I was back on the bean wagon. I loved them again, with potato waffles, with melted cheese. Although my first memory of beans, really, was seeing how many I could stuff into my belly button as a kid.

  And let me tell you now, it was a lot.

  SUMMER ROLLS

  ‘I’m basically broke,’ Camille says as we slurp fresh lemonade at the Vietnamese. We like to feel like we’re so posh going out for a lunch that isn’t a horrendous sausage roll from the baker’s and this place is cheap but still has table service. The lemonade is so tangy and sweet at the exact same time and the sugar and citrus muddle together with the ice chips so gently one slurp is freezing and the next is almost warm. It’s like swimming in a pool on holiday and some areas are hot and others are cold from where the shade of a tree has leant over the water.

  ‘I shouldn’t even be in here,’ she continues. ‘If my brother sees me in here he’ll tell my dad and I’ll be grounded. This money was from my uncle. Dad doesn’t even know about it.’

  ‘I’m broke too.’

  ‘Yeah, but at least you’re an alien.’

  ‘I dunno if it’s what I want to do with my whole life though.’

  ‘To be or not to be? As your dad would say,’ Camille jokes.

  ‘THAT is the real question.’

  Cam leans on her wrist. She wears the friendship bracelet I made her. It’s brown now and tatty. ‘I really wanted to get a job for the summer, but nobody employs a teenager for six weeks. It’s too late now. It takes six bloody weeks to get to know the people and stop getting everything wrong.’

  ‘It’s true.’ I nod. ‘I wouldn’t have got Planet Coffee unless I went in there every day and pretended I knew how to use the coffee machine. Which, by the way, is really hard. Anyway, you have the Indian restaurant.’

  ‘Come on, Bluebelle, it’s flyering once a week and it’s a joke.’

  ‘Better than nothing, considering you talked them into giving you the job.’

  ‘You’re so lucky you don’t have to go back to school.’

  Am I?

  I have a feeling I’m going to regret it. I can see it now: Cam graduating in one of those excellent black capes with the square hat, going on to become a brain surgeon, and me sweltering inside a kebab shop for just enough money to buy a kebab.

  Our summer rolls are brought over. Four bulging snake-like rolls in sticky translucent rice-paper skin, stuffed with a stained-glass window mosaic of orange grated carrot, lettuce, fresh prawns and coriander and then sprigs of mint. The combination is the lightest summery bite of wholesomeness, dipped into sweet chilli sauce or a moreish peanut dip. Camille dunks hers but then talks some more. She resembles a meerkat about to munch the head off a scorpion.

  ‘They glamorise jobs for teenagers anyway; they make it feel like you can just roll up to any restaurant and just, like, get a job immediately while you’re, like, becoming an actress or whatever, but it’s not true. Actually, you need a reference. You can’t just rock up somewhere and expect to have a dishcloth thrown in your hand and begin work. That you can somehow do a day’s work and still find the time to go on to be a rock star or an actress or a prime minister. It’s all changed.’

  ‘I know, and the classic “Have you got any experience on your CV?” NO! Of course I don’t have any bloody experience, that’s why I need a job!’

  ‘Exactly!’ Camille bites into the roll. ‘Oh, shut the f-ront door, these are so banging. You know, the second I bite into them I just feel the need to order another plate full.’

  ‘So good, they actually taste of summer. I think more food should be named so poetically. You know, named after the feeling it gives you.’ I shake my head. ‘See, this is the only reason why I even want money, so I can eat out.’

  ‘Cheers to that!’ Camille clunks her summer roll against mine as if we are cheersing flutes of champagne. ‘I tried to make these before but you know this rice-paper stuff is im-poss-i-ble to work with; it sticks to your everything. I don’t know how they do it.’

  ‘I once tried to make fish cakes and basically ended up with a pair of salmon and mashed potato mittens.’

  Cam laughs at me and I laugh back but not too hard, I don’t want to lose any of this beautiful food to a nostril snort. I take another bite. I even like to dip the garnish in the sauce. The bush of lettuce, the strays of cabbage. I like it when they turn the vegetables, like the carrots and cucumbers, into roses and stuff, but they don’t do that here. This place is too slapdash.

  ‘I would be an amazing prime minister; I’d give out free jacket potatoes at bus stops because at least the homeless people would have something to eat.’

  ‘Oh yeah!’ Cam claps. ‘Think about how sick it would be though, coming home from a night out when you’re broke and knowing, worst comes to worst, you’re guaranteed a hot potato at the bus stop.’

  ‘Worst comes to worst? BEST you mean.’

  ‘You love up a JP, innit? Where would the potatoes get stored?’

  ‘Just like a vending machine built into the stop,’ I say, as if it’s the easiest thing to do in the world. I have a vision of every London street turfed in soggy wet mashed potato.

  ‘Great. Sounds great.’ Cam nods, completely convinced. ‘Do it!’

  PHO

  Our king prawn phos arrive. Big, steaming bowls of fragrant broth full to the top with prawns and rice noodles and then you get to dress it yourself, which is my favourite bit. Beansprouts, chilli, leaves of coriander and Thai basil and a big squeeze of lime. I shove everything on mine and every mouthful is soothing and sharp and sweet and spicy. It makes your nose run and your eyes water and gives your throat a serious massage. We slurp and spiral noodles together, splashing tails of whipping chopsticks. I am full-
blown addicted to pho. Cam rants on.

  ‘You know as well, jobs are so tight anyway these days, that you’re not even just going against people your own age any more. Like, you could be going for a job at a clothes shop that like a forty-five-year-old mum is going for too. And you don’t really actually have a choice, it’s like you can’t get work, so you go into education to then be whacked with a load of debt you can’t pay and nobody will even give you a job while you’re at college or uni because, errrr … MAYBE you’re AT COLLEGE and when you’re not there, you’re studying or, let’s face it, you’re getting drunk. It’s a trap. Then ONCE you get your qualifications all the jobs are taken or have been cut and then you’re just there, trying to get the same job you applied for all those years back, when you were sixteen, just this time you’re way too overqualified and broke. Unless your parents are loaded or you come up with some amazing idea and become a millionaire, or win the lottery … you’re screwed.’

  ‘A millionaire isn’t even a millionaire any more, Camille,’ I add. ‘You know how long a million pounds lasts in London these days? Zilcho nilcho. The flat next door to us – flat – just went for over half a million … HALF a million. And you’ve seen the state of my road. So a million is probably only gonna get you a small house. You know, when I was young and I imagined what a million-pound house looked like, straight up, I saw a castle!’ Camille laughs into her soup. I snort but I’m deadly serious. ‘Like, honestly, Camille, I saw myself in the Disney palace, you know, that one from the start of the films. Not the cruddy house split into five flats down the road. It’s a joke. My parents did well to get ours so long ago.’ I worm out a clover of coriander from behind my molar. ‘I don’t know how people even afford to live, let alone buy houses.’

  ‘It’s a harsh time to be sixteen, BB.’ Camille takes a purple flower from the glass vase in the centre of the table and puts it behind my ear. ‘But we’ll be all right.’

  Camille is right. It is a harsh time to be sixteen. But I’m going to spin this on its head. I don’t know how. But I am. I’m not going to waste this world. We WILL be all right.

  ‘And the worst isn’t even over yet.’ Cam tips the bowl up to slurp the remainders. ‘We’ve still got our exam results to come. What a way to ruin the summer holidays.’

  Oh. Fudge.

  HONEY

  I’m on the bus on the way home. The sun is beating down, making the top deck feel like a greenhouse and me, a great big fat tomato, swelling on a vine. I am still a bit red-faced from the pho too. Weird how in hot countries they eat hot things to sweat it out, like India with curry and tea.

  I always, ALWAYS sit on the top deck and that is because the top deck is the deck that frightens me the most. You should, especially when you know people sometimes poke fun at you, sit downstairs where you can avoid eye contact and confrontation and be all cosy with the bag ladies and babies. But I like to face my fears. Once a girl threw a chip at me on the top deck of the bus and sniggered, ‘Eat it, fatty.’ I just ignored the hot offensive stick of oily potato as it miserably flopped off my school blazer, and looked out of the window, holding myself together until I got off and cried so hard I nearly died. Every day I hate myself for not picking that chip up and throwing it back or her … or better yet, taking it, going over to her ketchup and dipping the chip in it. Lovely.

  So, to challenge my fears, it’s ALWAYS the top deck.

  It’s pretty much empty on the top deck because it’s early afternoon and the summer holidays. There is a man in full leather reading a book called The Dark Art of Street Magic. He must be boiling hot.

  All of the windows are open.

  A boy, a bit older than me, gets on. He’s wearing a cap and crisp white trainers. He has a hard face with sharp features, like an open toolbox.

  I sit and put my headphones in and look out of the window to the street below. I watch kids playing on the pavement, bikes and skates. Dogs pulling on their leads. Men arguing over a car. A dad pushing a pushchair with twins inside. I see grannies hobbling. A woman in a purple hijab telling a story to a woman in a mint green supermarket uniform on her break, smoking a cigarette. A road sweeper. A sweaty postman. A boy laughing with his friends.

  Then I think I hear a voice behind me.

  I ignore it. It’s that boy; he’s probably saying something rude.

  He goes again.

  Oh, maybe he’s trying it on with me.

  I suppose I do look quite hot today, and, if I’m honest, I am flourishing in my young-adult age, curling out from my cocoon like some wonderful butterfly. I’m wearing my baby blue maybe I work in a garage in America in the 1950s two-piece that shows off my stomach.

  I don’t turn around though. I’m not interested in being wife-d off when I have a world to overtake. Becoming somebody’s baby-mama with kids right now is NOT the plan.

  Then, obviously sick of being ignored, he taps me on the shoulder.

  I snatch my headphones out and turn to face him. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘I’m very flattered but I’m not interes—’

  But he jumps in there before I can finish with his rude boy south London drone – ‘Derz a bee dyin’ on yr hed.’

  ‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’

  He kisses his teeth. ‘I said –’ he gets louder – ‘THERE’S A BEE DYING ON YOUR HEAD!’

  WHAT? The flower! It must have attracted a bee! I bat my head: he’s right, tangled in my hair, caught in the strands is the biggest, most fluffiest bumblebee, wings fluttering, dying, struggling.

  WAAHHHHHHHH!!!! AHHHHHHH!!!!! ‘Is it out? Is it out?’ I panic, elbows flapping.

  ‘Stay still,’ he says and begins to rake my hair.

  ‘Sorry, my hair is quite knotty.’

  He doesn’t reply.

  I really don’t feel like getting my scalp stung today. NO THANKS. My head becoming some tortuous warzone/makeshift ambulance bed for dying insects.

  ‘There we go.’ The boy has the bee’s wings in a pincer grasp. The bee zzzzzes and eventually falls dumbly drunk on heat and, full from city pollen, purrs and sinks out of the window, looping sideways Os into the summer day.

  ‘Thanks.’ I smile. ‘My friend put a flower in my hair so … maybe it was …’ I begin to explain but he plugs his headphones in and starts texting on his phone. He doesn’t care.

  I can already imagine the message he’s writing. And cringe. So I make up my own version of the text I’d write:

  You can’t blame them bees for loving honey I guess …

  That’s even worse.

  I REALLY AM NOT SURE ABOUT MY OWN PERSONALITY.

  Honey is amazing. If you eat local honey, it can protect you from illnesses and hay fever; it’s really good for your immune system.

  You know, bees work so hard. There are worker bees and the queen bee that bosses all the other bees about and then there’s this big bloke bee whose only job is to impregnate the queen bee. I always wonder if the other worker bees ever dare knock him off his pedestal and steal the queen for themselves, like, make a riot in bee land? Do you think there are ever scandalous affairs in Bee Town? Or gay bees?

  Bees don’t mean to sting you; quite amazing if you think they only have one chance to use their sting and they use it on you. If you’re stung, that’s quite an honour really.

  It’s pretty cool that honey tastes of the flowers and plants near it, like blossom or eucalyptus. So you know when they build all those tall blocks of flats for all the office people in London, they say (I don’t know if they actually do it) that to give back to the environment they put beehives on top of all of them, to make local honey, because you know that honey bees are an endangered species? But basically the hives are so high up that by the time the bee travels all the way down to the flowers on the ground it will be so exhausted that it won’t be able to make it back up anyway to make the honey. So it’s horrible. And cruel. And they can’t put flowers on top of the high-rise buildings because no flowers even grow in conditions that high.

  Stu
pid idiots.

  SCONES

  Scon. Sc-o-ane. Scon. It’s Scon. Isn’t it?

  We do scones at work. Thick, they are. With or without raisins. Once I had an actual real-life proper, proper scone. It was at a hotel for my mum’s birthday. We had afternoon tea. A big clothes-horse apparatus of a thing decorated with little fancy cakes and pastel-coloured macarons, perfect chocolate éclairs and frilly cupcakes – and then there were the scones. I’d only ever known them to be chalky baseball-type things with machine-made frills around the edges, pale and hard and heavy with little icicles of raising agent worming through the crumb. Impossible to warm the whole way through without burning the top and singeing the raisins to bitter rat poos, toasting them. Illegal. After you eat them you’re left with a syrupy glue, a sort of cream-cheese paste at the back of your throat that hangs on the roof of your mouth like a hammock for a spider. Totally vile.

  But these scones were warm, for a start. In a toasty napkin envelope, all their eyes peeping up like baby chicks … The tops of them glazed with a golden brush of egg yolk so they looked shiny and smart, their shapes individual, unique because they were made by somebody’s kind hard-working hands. Once you broke them, they crumbled apart, their insides soft, fluffy, almost melting under the press of a heavy posh silver knife to wax with clotted cream and pippy posh jam.

  Ours here are beach pebbles painted to look like ostrich eggs. Well, they may as well be. You get your ‘scone’ with a tincy pot of jam that is so stingy the makers should be put in prison for the offence. The opening of the jam pot is too small for either spoon or knife, making it even more hateable and not even one pot is half enough jam to cover half of a half of a scone. Stupid. The cream isn’t clotted. It’s a foiled tablet of cheap salted butter. BUTTER.

  Don’t order the scone at Planet Coffee; you might think you’re eating moon rock. I wouldn’t even put it past Alicia to go that far with the space theme. That’s what makes me sick.