Free All Bones and Lies by Anne Fine

down on either side since – since that morning – without feeling faint. How could it possiblymatter if the two of them were five minutes late for some stupid gallery opening? Just because Dilys’s bank had sponsored the exhibition didn’t mean that the doors couldn’t open without her. It was typical of his sister’s cast-iron self-importance that she would ride over his known susceptibility, his absolute distress, to get there on time.
    And odd that she felt nothing. Not a pang. It was, after all, she who had saved the baby. The way she walked down the street now, you would have thought all she had reached up to catch that eerie, steel-blue morning was a ball. You’d never think that while he was standing like a dummy pointing at the rainbow, and wondering slightly at that strange, isolated
thwack!,
she’d been the one to turn towards the ashen-faced driver stopping on a sixpence, the crumpled pram, and seen that little mound of snow-white tracery hurtling towards them out of the sky, trailing ribbons and blanket. Shouldering him aside so forcibly that he’d stumbled, she’d raised her arms as if in supplication, and, with the most flawless precision and even a little twirl on her toes to lessen the impact, accepted a pink and perfect flying baby into her hands.
    â€˜Blimey!’ That’s what she’d said. ‘Blimey!’ Traffic had stopped, shoppers had frozen in their tracks, and everyone had stared at her as if she were Christ in the middle of a miracle. And she had said nothing but, ‘Blimey!’
    And that’s when it came to him first, this sickening vision of the tiny fuzzed head splatted like yolk on the pavement, the blood-streaked shawl, the chubby legs twisted like something dragged from a toy cupboard and chewed by a dog: what he’d have been looking at if thisimpossible sister of his hadn’t been there. What would quite definitely have happened if that extraordinary, precious moment had been left to him.
    Now, over two years later, the merest thought of it still made him so nauseous he could barely stand. Everyone else had got over it. Even the local paper’s interest in ‘The Flying Baby’ now amounted to mere anniversary reminders. His sister and the young mother were down to occasional ‘been so busy’ flowered notelets. The baby herself was now a toddler. (Last time he’d taken her out, she’d stared at a fir cone lying underneath a tree and asked it gravely, ‘Are you here all by yourself?’) And only Colin still sometimes felt as shaken and unnerved as if his world were once again listing on its axis, as it had then, with the sheer
accidentalness
of things, the blinding
chance
.
    That’s why he’d visited the first time, desperate to find another person who might understand this sense of horror of his that would not fade. Naturally he’d turned to Mel. He’d wanted to ask her, ‘Isn’t the thought of what so nearly happened to your baby driving you
mad
? Are you
haunted
, like I am?’ But as he’d stood at her door, unable to spit out even the first civilities, she’d slickly transferred the hairdryer in her hand to an armpit, her comb to between her teeth, and slipped off the safety chain. ‘Come in, then. Though you’ll have to wait till I’ve finished my hair.’
    The carrycot was in the corner. Was the flying baby inside? He didn’t dare go over to look. He just stood on the edge of the swirly green carpet till, irritated, the leaning naiad lashed to the worrisomely overloaded double plug waved him down on one end of the leaking sofa andswitched off the dryer. ‘All right. I’m ready. You can start.’
    It struck him as an odd beginning to a conversation. But who was he to cavil at another’s inability to string words together in the usual way? Anyhow, it made it easier for him to stumble through his most peculiar question.