Bone by Bone (5 page)

The series producer had done her best to undermine Laura. She pointed out that, while Laura had been at home looking after Autumn, her peers had all moved up the career ladder and were assistant producers or even producers. As someone who would only be able to work from 9.30 until 3, and not on school holidays, her options were extremely limited. She wouldn't be able to go on film trips or do anything that demanded long hours and a quick turnaround – including the series she had been so rash to apply to work on. The technology had changed too – everyone was shooting and editing themselves, the woman added.

How much experience do you have as a self-shooting producer-director?
she'd asked, and Laura, feeling flustered by the thought of even the simplest recording and editing devices, had to admit she had none.

She had come away utterly humiliated. The job had gone to a young, ambitious and childless man.

Without a job, she'd been lonely. Getting an allotment had given her something fulfilling to do and she'd met an odd assortment of people who tended the allotments near hers. It was an elderly man who had leant on his spade, admiring her chaotic profusion of flowers and vegetables, and said,
You should do this for a living
, that had prompted her to sign up for the horticulture degree course in London. When they moved to Bristol she'd transferred to the University of the West of England, where she studied for a day a week; the rest of the time she worked at Bronze Beech. And any spare time she had, of which there was precious little, she spent on the garden-design business she was hoping to launch with Jacob. There was no doubt her mother was as irritated as Matt had been that Laura no longer had what they'd both considered a successful career. It was true she'd made sacrifices in order to be there for Autumn, but that would have to change because now she was the sole parent and breadwinner. She had to make it work: she was all Autumn had.

She looked up and saw her daughter in the doorway. The child's expression cut her to the core. She didn't look angry, only sad, almost resigned; as if she were thinking,
I am on my own.

She must have heard them talking about private schools. Autumn rushed over to Vanessa and hugged her, but didn't look at her mother. She had dried and brushed her hair and it gleamed as it hung long and loose over her shoulders. She was wearing a burgundy cord pinafore with a pink bird on the bib. It made her look even more child-like than she was.

‘Your mum told me about that horrid boy,' said Vanessa. ‘You mustn't take any notice. Bullies just want to see they have hurt you. If you don't show how you feel and you laugh off the teasing, he'll soon stop, believe me.'

‘I can't,' said Autumn in a small voice. Her face crumpled as if she was going to cry but she managed to stop herself.

‘That's my girl, my big, brave girl,' said Vanessa, stroking her hand.

‘The boy tore up all of Autumn's paintings on the way home from school,' said Laura.

Vanessa's mouth tightened into a thin line.

Laura didn't add that she'd grabbed hold of Levi and pushed him so hard he'd fallen in the mud and sliced open his cheek. Shame engulfed her. She closed her eyes.

How could I have done it?
she thought.

‘Mum came and got me. From the boys,' said Autumn.

She said it dully – not, thought Laura, as if she was grateful she'd been rescued.

‘You didn't tell me that bit,' said Vanessa, twisting around to look at her.

‘I didn't have a chance,' Laura said. ‘There was a gang of them, including Levi. Six or seven. They didn't hurt you though, did they?'

Autumn shook her head but she still wouldn't look at her. Laura held her breath. Was Autumn going to tell Vanessa what had really happened? How would Vanessa react if she did? She imagined Vanessa looking at her; she wouldn't have to say a word, only stare at her, her pale-grey eyes bright and hard. Laura felt ashamed at even the thought of Vanessa finding out.

There was a horrible silence. For once she knew that Vanessa was thinking exactly the same thing as her:
what if they had?
What if Laura hadn't got there in time? And if they had so much as touched Autumn, Laura knew that she wouldn't have been able to stop herself. She might have done something even worse.

‘I think,' said Vanessa, ‘it's time for pizza.'

Autumn forced out a smile, without opening her mouth, and Laura was reminded how sensitive her daughter was about the gap between her front teeth.

Pizza was Autumn's favourite food but Vanessa thought pizza was
terribly bad for one
– all that stodgy white bread and fatty cheese was
a nutritional wasteland
– so Laura knew that her mother must really want to help her granddaughter feel better.

She wondered if Autumn would tell Vanessa the whole story when she wasn't there.

‘The computer man is coming round tonight,' Laura reminded her mother.

Vanessa looked at her with annoyance because she was spoiling her plan, and then said decisively, ‘Then Autumn and I will go out together. On our own.'

Laura barely heard her. She knew she had crossed a line. What would happen when the boy told his parents? Would they try and track her down? Speak to the school? The worst part of it was that it would reflect badly on Autumn, deflecting attention away from the real issue, away from Levi and his bullying.

‘We'll bring you some back,' said Autumn.

Without them the house was unbearably quiet. Laura poured herself another large glass of wine and carried it upstairs to her tiny office. She turned on her laptop and fetched another chair.

She was just about to take a sip of her wine when the doorbell rung. She looked at her watch. Aaron Jablonski was exactly on time.

She ran downstairs and opened the door. ‘Come in. It's so kind of you to fit me in at such short notice.'

He stepped in off the street, holding out his hand to her. ‘It's no problem, Laura. It's good to see you again.' His grip was firm, warm.

He was taller and leaner than she remembered, filling the space in the narrow hall. She stepped back, flustered. ‘My office is this way, up the stairs.'

He shrugged off his coat, damp from the rain, and hung it up before following her, making her pause awkwardly on the stairs; she should have offered to take it from him. When they reached the office, he had to squeeze himself into the space, and as she sat down, she realized how close she was to him.

‘It's the Internet,' she said. ‘It keeps cutting out and my laptop is always crashing.'

He nodded but didn't look at her or ask for any further explanation. He started to press buttons on the keyboard.

‘Can I get you a drink?' She gestured at the wine glass. ‘Wine, beer, a soft drink?'

‘I know this is going to sound odd,' he said, ‘but could I have a glass of red wine and a black coffee?'

‘Of course,' said Laura, smiling.

In the kitchen she haphazardly measured out coffee into the cafetière and placed two cups on a tray, another wine glass, the wine bottle and a plate of biscuits. She hadn't eaten since lunchtime and was suddenly ravenous. She ate a biscuit as she waited for the kettle to boil.

The only good thing about today was that the bullying would stop. Faced with an adult who knew what he'd been doing – the boy had practically admitted it – and who'd told him off, any normal child would be too frightened of the consequences to continue.

She carried the tray upstairs but there wasn't even enough space to put it down in her office so she had to set it on the floor. There was something ridiculous – practically abstemious – about making this room into her study when the house was so large. It was almost too small to be called a room, but it had a high window and ceiling and faced out over the garden, which was why Laura had chosen it. There was just enough room for a desk, a chair and a set of shelves.

The house itself had a curious layout. The sitting room opened off the hall, which was where the front door was. On the next floor up there was a largish bathroom desperately in need of renovation and the spare room where Vanessa was sleeping and in between, directly opposite the staircase, the minute room Aaron was now in.

The floor above held Autumn's room and another spare room, and in the attic, nestled into the eaves, was Laura's bedroom. If money became really tight, Laura thought she could rent out one or both rooms – or, now she'd got Autumn into her choice of school, move to a smaller place. But she'd imagined being able to use them as offices for the new business.

The kitchen, dining room and a tiny bathroom were on the bottom floor, one level below the street and the sitting room. From the kitchen you stepped down to the garden. At some point, she planned to knock through to the small, dark dining room that had become a dumping ground for unsorted papers and piles of clean, unfolded laundry. It was also full of boxes from the house move that Laura hadn't got around to unpacking and pictures that she hadn't hung.

‘It's certainly quirky,' said her mother, when she'd arrived at Wolferton Place yesterday.

Laura had frowned. Vanessa meant quirky as a critical comment, not quirky as in:
how quaint and adorably eccentric
. Laura had fallen in love with the spectacular view over the south-east side of Bristol. Sometimes, early in the morning, she watched balloons drifting over the attic window. It was the garden that had really sold it to her though: long and narrow, south-facing with high brick walls and almost nothing in it but a strawberry tree and some shrubs, it held such potential. She imagined it being a showcase, a floral meeting space for new clients.

‘It's spooky,' Autumn had said.

They'd been standing in Laura's room at the time and Autumn was holding her grandmother's hand. Autumn didn't like the house and Laura felt trapped, wanting to sympathize with her child yet not wanting to have to explain all the practicalities of buying as big a house as you could afford as an investment; of having to move to a neighbourhood with a good school; of having to be the only adult to make all the decisions from now on.

‘Why do you think it's spooky?' asked Vanessa. As a scientist, Vanessa didn't have much patience for opinions about the supernatural.

Autumn shrugged. ‘It makes funny sounds – creaks and moans and sighs. And we're all so far away from each other.'

That was certainly true. The house was cold and draughty and needed a lot of work, which Laura could not afford.

To her surprise, her mother had laughed. ‘It's an old house, Autumn. Of course the wood will creak. And, apart from me when I'm in the spare room, everyone is an awfully long way away from the loo.'

Laura poured Aaron a coffee and a glass of wine and placed them on the desk. She held up the biscuits but he didn't look at her, so she put them down again.

Aaron's fingers flew across the keyboard. He suddenly stopped and ran his hands through his hair. It was thick and dark, greying at the temples. He took a sip of the coffee and then the wine before turning to her.

‘You haven't got a password on your Wi-Fi.'

‘No.' She shrugged and eased herself into the chair next to his. Their knees almost touched. ‘Who's going to sit outside our house and use our broadband?'

He had dark-blue eyes, almost navy, deeply set with crow's feet around the edges and a fine, straight nose. He looked at her for a moment and shook his head. And then, with a start, she remembered somebody
had
been standing outside their front door at four that morning.

‘I'm going to put a password on. Someone could access your computer and hack into your bank accounts. I'll try a few things to get your laptop running more smoothly. If they don't work, I'll have to take it to my office and wipe the hard drive and rebuild it.'

‘Oh,' said Laura, thinking she really needed the computer to work – there was the essay she had to do for her course and Matt's Skype call on Saturday.

‘I'll do my best to fix it now,' he said.

Laura craned forward to see what he was doing but it made no sense. He typed with great speed as he flicked through screens on the monitor, switching back and forth from computer code to the view that she normally saw. It was disorienting. She knew, of course, that binary was what made her laptop look the way it did, but actually seeing it was like glimpsing another reality; an
Alice Through the Looking Glass
world where appearances were superficial and ultimately treacherous.

Aaron barely spoke other than to ask her for the password to her email and Skype accounts and what she wanted her new password to be on the Wi-Fi.

‘Ode to Autumn,' she said, without thinking.

Laura loved her daughter's name. Autumn Wild. It had come to her when she was six months' pregnant, feeling her daughter kick and stir as she walked through a field of barley, the sheaves soft as silk against her calves, the green of their stems turning a dry gold.

Autumn. It had seemed a perfect name for a child who would be born at the tail end of such a glorious season. Every time she said it to herself, Laura pictured vermillion Virginia creeper leaves, the smooth, sweet gleam of conkers cracking through their grenade-like casing, scarlet haws amid the downy tangle of old man's beard. Although now, of course, Autumn's beautiful name had been the first thing her daughter had been bullied about, she thought.

Aaron wrote
oDetOauTumn21
on a piece of paper and passed it to her. ‘Safer,' he said. ‘Harder for a hacker to crack.'

Aaron had rolled up his shirt sleeves as he worked and Laura noticed how muscular his arms were. She thought about standing opposite Levi, a boy, a child, and how weak she'd felt.

‘Do you work out?' she asked.

‘Yes,' he said. He didn't seem surprised at her question. ‘I do martial arts. I have a black belt in Taekwondo.'