All Bones and Lies (5 page)

‘Let's see how that leg's doing,' he said, dropping to his knees in front of her on the carpet. She slapped him away. ‘No, thanks! It's only just getting better. I don't want your grubby fingers poking at it.' And clambering, embarrassed, to his feet, he had another of his blinding visions about his father's famous ‘accident'. Dazzled by
oncoming headlights, indeed! Sick of having his hands slapped away, more like. Sick of being humiliated. Sick of her viperish tongue. It was obvious even the police officer bringing the bad news didn't for one moment believe the tale he was telling. But people were kind, and what was the point in stirring things up unnecessarily? Her horror had been unfeigned, her sense of outrage at her loss deep and real. She must have spoken about their father practically every day (as often as not in scathing terms, but that was the way of her). And it couldn't have been easy raising a daughter as awkward as Dilys. Or even a son as unforthcoming as himself.

He made another effort.

‘So, apart from winning the Comparative Shopper of the Year Award, what else have you been doing?'

She said with relish, ‘It's really got to you, hasn't it, this insurance business? You can't let go of it for a moment.'

Stop it!
he longed to shout at her. Stop making things so
impossible
.

‘I was just interested.'

But to the person whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. ‘Interested in finding fault!'

Affecting deafness, he escaped to his shopping bag. ‘Oh, goody!' she said with unaffected glee as he dropped the great slab of papers he was in the habit of bringing her onto the wobbly little table at her side. Instantly, she started pulling them into sections and dropping half of them in the bin.

‘Don't do that,' he complained. ‘It's like visiting someone in a fundamentalist sect. “Thou shalt not read
Sports
or
Appointments
.”'

‘Moan, moan,' she chided. But the newspapers had done the trick. She was already feeling in her pockets for one of the many pairs of spectacles she hoarded around the house. Enjoying the silence, he picked the
Business
and the
Foreign News
out of the bin, then promptly fell in a depression, realizing he didn't want to read them either. Already his world, like hers, was narrowing. He'd noticed it first with Chad, a country for which his school had raised thousands of pounds during his sixth-form year. Colin had signed up for a Sponsored Silence, behaved through the fortnight almost exactly as usual, and, but for his crippling inability to ask people to sponsor him, would have raised a lot of money. For some years afterwards, he'd taken quite an interest in Chad, devouring everything the newspapers had to offer about that benighted land. Then gradually a feeling of
déjà vu
crept into his reading, as drought and famine and hardship wheeled past his eyes again and again. He took, first to scanning, then skipping. And somehow, before he even realized what was happening, he'd given up on Chad. Africa in general followed. Then the Middle East. Already the lights were going out all over Europe. And, were it not for the fact that news from America so often doubled as Entertainment, he would have given up on there as well.

And in this, he admitted, he was his mother's son. How often had he heard her, over the years, declaring, ‘I can't be bothered with the ozone layer any more.' (Or recycling. Or the teachers.) Secretly he'd sympathize, knowing that he, too, was halfway to hell in the handbasket of indifference, and, like her, soon the only things that he'd be
stopping at as he flicked through the pages would be gossip and murders, scandals and divorces. In fact, she'd have wider interests than his own, because she kept up with interest rates and enjoyed the obituaries.

And this, he thought, digging a lump of chewed slipper out from the small of his back to settle more comfortably with the Arts section she'd discarded, was why she still liked him to come, and why, when he was there, he only toyed with the idea of running her through with one of his father's old chisels. There was a balance between them. His visits to her passed in a fine mix of mutual condescension and respect. She had a fathomless contempt for his naïvety and weakness. And he could only despise her lifelong failure to put her talents to good use. But he respected her untiring courage and impregnable cynicism, and she was continually impressed by his flashes of mutiny. As a child, Colin had never dared even to try to stick up for himself. But one day, as she was working herself into a froth about one of his adolescent shortcomings, he'd somehow come out with a crosspatch remark and brought her up short. It was a revelation. From that day on, at least with her, he was a different person. Unlike with the spells, where regular failure had tended to augment rather than diminish his sense of her supremacy, his caustic moments were good for both his spirits and hers, as now when, handing back the slipper, he said, ‘I see you're still favouring Flossie as your personal designer.'

‘They might be old, these slippers, but they're comfortable.'

‘Perhaps it'll catch on, this natty notion of keeping them on your feet with elastic bands.'

‘Perhaps you should mind your own business.' But it was in a companionable silence that she read on, making it clear from a few tart utterances about ‘the disadvantaged' that, by her, the expression was taken to be entirely synonymous with ‘wastrels', and, just as he was thinking of making quietly for the door to put the kettle on at last, raising her head to make a series of observations about child prostitution in Salford that left him in no doubt that, in her book, the war on this evil could most usefully begin with the speedy and permanent dispatch of its victims. Cunningly without giving him a moment in which he might get the suggestion in ahead, she rounded off this peroration with a plaintive, ‘And I don't know
when
I'm going to be offered a cup of tea . . .'

He put down his unread paper. ‘Biscuits or teacakes? I bought both.'

‘I'm sorry. I've simply no appetite.'

Notwithstanding his pasta ballast, he took the downstairs run at speed, determined not to have to hear how long it was since she'd forced nourishment between her lips. As he rushed by the letter rack, he had the presence of mind to snatch up the envelope from Frampton Commercial and, under cover of his kitchen clatter, take a quick look. It all seemed perfectly reasonable. The conditions were unexceptionable, the exclusions customary. (If the policy had been a coin, Colin would have bitten it.) Feeling the smug good son who spreads his safety net beneath his mother's increasingly enfeebled wings, he was about to stuff the printed sheets back in their envelope when he finally noticed it, up in the top left-hand corner, dwarfed by the reel of numbers trailing halfway across the
page to try to create the impression that everyone in the world had some sort of policy with Frampton Commercial.

The amount of the coverage. It was next to nothing.

He stared. Had some computer glitch sucked the noughts up a line, to fatten the policy number? Surely there must be some mistake.

He rushed up the stairs, stabbing the policy with a finger. ‘The house must be insured for more than this!'

She glanced up. ‘Oh, so you're nosing through my letters now?'

The prudent man in him was far too exercised to be derailed. ‘Listen,' he told her. ‘This won't do! You couldn't rebuild the woodshed with this sort of money. What can you be thinking of? With coverage this low, you might as well be totally uninsured!'

She turned back to her paper, saying indifferently, ‘It's as much as it's ever been. I've never had a problem.'

‘You've never had a bloody fire!'

‘I hope I won't,' she said, in a tone that implied he was threatening to build one on her carpet. ‘And, if I do, I hope I'm safely burnt to death in it and don't have to listen to the likes of you moaning on and on about insurance afterwards.'

‘You won't,' he said. ‘Because one or another of us is, right this minute, going to phone this Frampton Commercial company to quadruple the coverage.'

He stood there, waiting for the argument to start. ‘How dare you! It's my business. This is my house. Don't think that you can – bleh, bleh . . .' But she was already back to reading the paper. He waited a little longer, at a loss, but
nothing happened. Should he make for the door? Perhaps then she'd pounce, with one of her dangerous little last-minute slingshots. ‘And, by the way . . .' He gave it a go. But still his mother didn't say a word. Colin stopped in the doorway, unsettled. How was he supposed to wrap himself safely in the mantle of martyrdom if she was this complaisant, this indifferent? Surely she couldn't be about to let him get away with reading her mail, scolding her roundly, and being responsible for a rise in her premiums?

Of course she couldn't. No. She'd have revenge. He'd pay for it later. But still he felt uneasy. And even more so when, as he was still staring, baffled, at her bent grey head, she dragged her attention back from the unsavoury details of the rape case she was devouring just long enough to say, with only mild irritation, ‘Don't stand there watching your boots mildew. Go and fetch that tea.'

His unease deepened. Surely the bedrock of his confidence had always been her sheer predictability, his absolute assurance that she would never miss a chance to put a member of her family in the wrong? Look at the times his father had fetched up in the doghouse for anniversaries forgotten, or birthdays missed. Look at the weeks of small snubbings ignored by hard-boiled Dilys when, year after year, she'd dared to sail home from guide camp without the statutory present. (A world away from Colin, in whom their mother's daggered silences fuelled inarticulacy till it turned to blinking dumbness, and honed his clumsiness till he was barely capable of getting through a doorway in his own home without a hip bruise or a damaged shoulder.)

All right, the glory days were over. But still . . . But still . . .

What was the
matter
with her? Was she
ill
?

All the way down the stairs he was as firm with himself as he could be. Rubbish, he kept telling himself. There's nothing wrong with Mother. She's just saving herself up to eviscerate me later.

And yet it wasn't convincing. Not her style. He was so rattled he found himself fumbling as he jotted down policy details. (If she didn't make the call he'd be doing it for her.) Stooping to pick up his pencil for the second time, he caught his sleeve against the old toast rack that served as a letter holder, and, reaching out to steady it, knocked it so forcibly that everything in it cascaded to the floor.

Including a photo of Perdita.

Colin peered closer. There was no mistaking it. Those eyes. That hair. He picked it up, sighing, and put it, separately, in his pocket. What mysteries his mother weaved around herself. You'd think, to find yourself enmeshed in them, that it was she, and not he, who kept all those little piles of weird things in the woodshed.

By the time he came back with the tea, his curiosity had triumphed over caution. He chose his words carefully, determined not to let drop his own connection with Perdita and spark off the usual disquisition on his sister's faults. ‘So how come this drop-dead redhead is risking her death lying about on your floor tiles?'

Immersed in her sexual horoscope, she only muttered, ‘What are you wittering about now?' He held the photo
so close she couldn't help looking. ‘Oh,
her.
That's Dolly's Perdita.'

To glean more, he affected idiocy. ‘What, Dolly from Canasta Club?'

She nodded, scowling. ‘Look at her! Tarty carroty hair. She must fling her mascara on with a tablespoon.'

‘So why keep a photo of her on your hall floor?'

‘Don't be a twerp. It must have—' She interrupted herself. ‘Is it Saturday?' Forgetting she was already in the right glasses, she flapped her wrist towards Colin. ‘Quick! Tell me what it says.'

He glanced at his own watch. ‘Just a little after four.'

‘Oh, drat! I've missed it. Now I am really going to be in Dolly's Book of Sinners. Her precious Perdita was on television this afternoon.'

‘Is that why she sent the photo? So you'd recognize her? What's she doing on telly anyway?'

‘Spouting about property values in the Rift Valley.'

‘The Rift Valley? Are you
sure
?'

She shook her head. ‘Rift . . . Ribble . . .' (Even his mother didn't dare add, ‘What's the difference?') ‘And
Weekend Round-up
will be over now.' She glared. ‘I'll simply have to tell Dolly you made me miss it.'

Less from a sense of helpfulness than in self-defence, he suggested, ‘Why don't you tell her what you'd end up telling her anyway? That her daughter looked lovely, and it was a pity the bit with her in it was over so quickly.'

Oh, they both knew their telly. Her eyes narrowed as she appraised this advice without finding any flaw. ‘Do you think I'd get away with it?' He was in the middle of replying, ‘I don't see why not,' when the phone made
them both jump. You had to hand it to her, Colin thought. She certainly had pluck. Still eyeing Colin closely, she lifted the handset. ‘Dolly? . . . Yes. Yes, I did . . . Yes,
wonderful
. I thought she looked tip-top . . . Yes,
didn't
she?' There was a longish pause, during which he could see his mother visibly growing in confidence as she listened. Indeed, it was almost with a hint of cockiness that, at the end, she added, taking an obviously quite unnecessary risk, ‘My only complaint, dear, was that they could have given her just a little more time.' Another long and satisfying pause gave Colin reason to think his mother must be home and dry. ‘Yes, dear. Yes,
absolutely
. Yes, I will. Of course you must. She'll be
waiting
.'