Bone by Bone (26 page)

‘I'm going to call the police,' she said, holding out her hand for Autumn and walking towards the boy.

He backed away from her until he was blocking the door. She stood directly in front of him. She could see the rise and fall of his rib cage. Autumn's hand felt fragile; her soft, small bones turning in her palm.

‘Why are you here? What are you doing in Autumn's bedroom?'

When he didn't speak, she stepped forward to push him out of the way.

‘I wanted to scare her,' he said, his words tripping over each other, the whites of his eyes glinting in the watery light from the street, ‘as punishment, you know, for telling on me. And she wasn't in school…'

Laura felt anger surge through her. He wanted to
punish
her daughter? And what had he planned to do to her? How had he even got in – to the garden, never mind the house? She reached towards him and he flinched. She yanked his hoodie down so she could see him properly. He wiped the rain from his face and tried not to look at her.

‘Telling on you?' she said, her voice rising.

‘Yeah. You know. The Facebook page. Mr George called my dad. And he got mad.'

‘Your father didn't know about it?'

Levi shook his head. ‘Nah. He made me tell him.'

Laura snapped on the lights. ‘Tell him what?' She leant towards him and he shrank from her. His eyes, that strange green of a quarry pond, widened.

‘Everything.' He paused, his breathing laboured. Reluctantly, his voice fading, as if speaking was an effort, he said, ‘I stole her pen and put it back so she'd look stupid – Dad borrowed the key to her classroom when he was fixing the computers and I copied it. Her bike, you know? Cutting off her hair. The garden where you worked. Painting on your wall.'

‘That was all you? By yourself?'

‘Yeah.'

‘But… how did you know where I worked? Or the key code to get into our garden? Or what to write?' She thought of the words,
Bone by Bone
, scrawled in red across the wall of their house, a fragment of a poem that spoke of unendurable pain. ‘How did you know it would even mean anything to me?'

‘My dad's got a file on you. All the stuff he took off your laptop. Notes he's made about you. He's so angry with you for pushing me, cutting my face, complaining about me. He thought I hadn't done anything and you were being mental and it was his way of getting you back. Teaching you a lesson, he said – you know, the virus, and deleting all the photos of Autumn on your hard drive. He wrote a program specially.

‘He was reading one of your essays. I saw the start of it. This weird poem. I didn't know what it meant but it sounded, you know, proper scary. Dad laughed about you having the same password for everything. He copied down the key code for the garden – he said how stupid you were to use Autumn's date of birth. He said you were the sort of person who'd have a spare key hidden in the garden.'

Laura closed her eyes.

‘I'm still going to call the police, Levi. Get out of the way.'

The sound made them all jump. Incongruous in that small room, in the still of the night: it was a woman singing a catchy pop song peppered with expletives.

Levi fumbled for his mobile. ‘It's my dad,' he said.

She hesitated. Should she speak to Aaron? She wondered why he was calling Levi at this time of night – he could hardly know the boy was here and she didn't want to risk angering him.

‘Answer it. Put him on speakerphone.'

Levi shook his head.

‘You either answer that phone now or I ring the police.'

Levi blinked. He looked smaller, frailer, not the malicious thug of her imagination. It came to her then that, in spite of what he'd done, he was only a child, a frightened boy who didn't want to speak to his own father. The ring tone continued, the music sweet, the words vengeful. Levi hesitated and then pressed a couple of buttons.

Aaron's voice barked, ‘What in God's name are you doing in their house?'

‘How do you know where I am?'

‘I can track your mobile, you moron. Do they know you're inside?'

Laura stared at him. She couldn't believe a father – even a man like Aaron – would speak to his son like that. She thought of the suave way he'd spoken to her and the other mums when she'd first met him. Levi looked anxiously at her. She shook her head.

‘No,' he said.

‘Well, get out, now. Start walking. Head towards the school. I'm almost there. I'll pick you up.' There was a click as he hung up.

After a moment Levi said, ‘Thanks.' He didn't look at her.

‘For what?'

‘For not telling him.'

‘You'd better get going,' said Laura.

Levi didn't move.

‘He'll be really angry, won't he?' said Autumn. Her voice was soft.

Levi nodded.

‘Your black eye.'

His face twisted as if he was going to lash out at her, to say something hurtful and cutting, but then he stopped himself and his expression went blank. Laura thought it was worse than if he'd looked angry or upset, like a normal child would have done. There was a faint trace of a bruise on his upper cheekbone. It was the one she'd caused, she thought with a stab of guilt. And then she realized there was no scab where he'd cut his face on the rock when she'd pushed him – it was Levi's other eye that Autumn was talking about.

‘Does Aaron
hit
you?' she blurted out before she could stop herself.

Neither of the children said anything.

‘I'm going to call your mum. She can pick you up. Give me her number.'

‘You can't. You saw his house,' said Autumn.

‘What?'

‘Yeah. We followed you yesterday.'

There was a pause as Levi took in this information. ‘My mum is ill,' he said defensively. ‘She's, like, tired all the time. It's a proper disease. ME.'

‘Does Aaron know?' asked Laura. ‘I mean, does he know how bad it is? That you're living like that – virtually caring for yourself?'

Levi shook his head.

‘Then perhaps calling the police really is—'

‘No!' He shouted so loudly, Laura and Autumn jumped. He held up his hands. ‘I can take care of myself. I'll just leave, okay? I'll go through the garden, back to my mum's. She won't even know I've been gone.'

He opened the door and stepped out onto the landing.

‘I can't let you do that. It's the middle of the night. You can't walk home by yourself in the dark.'

Levi snorted. She could tell he was about to make some kind of smart-ass reply, but then he looked at Autumn. His lips parted, his teeth blue-white, but he said nothing. He opened his hand, his palm pale in the moonlight filtering through the landing window, as if he were going to offer her a tiny gift, and then he laid his hand gently on her arm for a single second. He started down the stairs, his wet trainers squeaking.

She couldn't let him go, she suddenly realized – a twelve-year-old child, alone in the early hours, crossing the city in the darkness. It made her shudder just imagining it.

He was a couple of stairs below her. She put out her hand to stop him. And then the kitchen door opened.

Autumn, her eyes wide with fright, looked at her mother. Levi froze. The door squeaked and closed softly.

‘I left the key in the lock,' said Levi. ‘And my dad knows I'm still here.'

If Laura had felt frightened before, it was nothing to the terror that engulfed her now. It was overwhelming, like the emotional equivalent of white noise. There was something inevitable about this moment, crouched on the stairs in the dark with her daughter and her daughter's bully; her ex-husband, her mother, her father, her brother all on continents so far away they could literally be on other planets, on other stars. And, all the while, the man she feared the most had let himself into their house and was coming to find them.

She dug her nails into the thin flesh of her wrists and made herself speak firmly. ‘Go to him. Pretend we're all still asleep. And then leave. Both of you.'

Levi shook his head. ‘You don't know my dad.'

His face had become mask-like again, the skin waxen.

They could hear the slow, stealthy tread as Aaron started to climb the stairs from the kitchen to the hall. Levi pushed past them and ran back into Autumn's bedroom.

Laura and Autumn followed and shut the door. Levi turned off the lights and started fumbling with his phone, trying to prise off the back.

‘He knows you're here already. He won't be fooled,' said Laura. ‘If you won't go and speak to him, then I will.'

Levi ignored her, scowling as he was unable to open the phone. Laura reached out to snatch the mobile from him but it was too late. He sprinted to the other end of the room, hauled up the sash window and threw his phone out. A blast of freezing air hit them.

‘We should hide,' said Autumn. She held the door of the Wendy house open for Levi and he clambered in after her.

In that instant, Laura spotted something, half hidden by the toys Levi had kicked over. It was Autumn's mobile.

What's it doing here? She must have gone through my office, searched the drawers in my desk.

Autumn had been looking at something on it. Laura snatched it up and quickly pressed the On button. It was still working. The screen opened on Facebook. She started back in revulsion when she saw the image – just about visible beneath the network of cracks. It was the same picture Aaron had sent her just before he destroyed her laptop, but this time the naked woman had a photo of another person's face crudely pasted over her own. Autumn's face.

She felt sick. But there was no time to think about it right now, to worry how Autumn was feeling. She quickly pressed a few buttons. There was no time to write a proper message. She slid the phone under a teddy. She wanted to keep the line free, in case he called back, so she ran down the next flight of stairs, her footsteps sounding unbearably loud, to get the phone out of her office. She could hear Aaron had reached the hall, one flight below her. She grabbed the handset off the desk, dialled 999 and pressed the call button. Nothing happened. She pressed it again. She dialled again. She put the phone tightly to her ear. There was no dial tone. She felt panic swell inside her. She should have kept hold of the mobile.

‘It won't work. I cut off your landline.'

It was Aaron. He was dressed entirely in black: black boots, black trousers, a black jacket and a black woollen hat.

‘A precaution.'

He was standing in front of the stairs leading up to Autumn's bedroom.

‘I'm assuming they're both in here,' he said, looking up.

Aaron took the stairs two at a time. Laura ran after him. He burst into her daughter's room and turned on the light. He scanned the space – the boxes of upended toys, the bed covers tossed on the floor, the empty bed, the open wardrobe.

‘Get out of the dolls' house. Now.'

After a moment, Levi pushed the little wooden door open and he and Autumn climbed out.

‘Your son!' Laura shouted. ‘You must believe me now! He broke into our house in the middle of the night to frighten my daughter.'

Aaron inclined his head. There was a long moment of silence. She could hear the rise and fall of Autumn's breaths.

‘Well, now we have a real problem,' Aaron said eventually. ‘Both of you are here. Both of you know what Levi has done.'

‘God knows what he was planning on doing! He said he was going to punish her!'

‘But no one else knows that. And no one else knows we're here.'

It was not what she expected him to say. She took a step forwards, stretching out her hands towards Autumn. Aaron moved in front of both children, barring her way.

‘You know how important my son is to me,' he continued quietly. ‘I love him. I want him. I want him with me. I want his mother out of his life. I have worked hard for this. I live in a slum and I work every goddamn hour, all hours of the fucking day and night, to try and raise the capital to pay blood-sucking solicitors extortionate sums to ensure I will get custody of Levi.' A muscle in his jaw worked and his voice rose in power and fury. ‘And no one is going to fuck it up. Not my son, not your manipulative little girl, and certainly not you.'

Aaron's fists were clenched and Laura thought of those hands, hovering over her laptop, his fingers fine and strong, almost stroking the keys, and how he'd laid his hands in his lap, fingers intertwined, as he'd quietly spoken of stars and planets. She'd thought of touching those hands, of them touching her… Yet this was a man who abused his own son. And she had let him into her home, into her life. She had hurt his child and all that followed had been the result of that single, thoughtless action. Laura desperately tried to think of what she could say, how she could stop him. Autumn gave a tiny whimper.

‘The thing is,' he said more quietly, rocking backwards and forwards on his toes and heels, as if warming to his topic, hooking his thumbs in his jacket pockets, ‘the thing is, my son is a good, decent boy. He's just had a lot to deal with, with the divorce and so on. I must admit, I was surprised that he really was bullying her and it wasn't some racist little tale you'd made up to kick him out of school. But, for some reason, your daughter's a temptation for him. God knows why. He can't help himself.'

He took a step towards her. His eyes had not once left her face. She could see he was barely managing to control his rage and was trembling with the effort.

‘I've tried to warn you. God knows how hard I've tried. I hoped you'd get the message.' A sliver of light from the street lamp outside sliced across his sharp cheek bones. ‘I thought you'd back off, take your daughter out of that school. But you're too stupid. Too stubborn. I think it's you who needs to be punished. It's you who needs to be taught a lesson.'