Free All Bones and Lies by Anne Fine Page A

‘What I want to know is, are you still bothered by – by the sheer
split-secondness
of it?’
    She looked at him, not blankly, more as if wondering if she’d heard him right. He tried to struggle through it another way. ‘What I mean is, it’s almost as if she—’ He pointed to the carrycot. ‘As if she—’
    â€˜
Tammy
,’ she said, quite sharply.
    â€˜Yes, Tammy. As if she should have—’ He was really floundering now. But he so wanted to get it said, he tried again. ‘As if, really, she shouldn’t be—’ He couldn’t finish that one, either. ‘As if it was all so
unlikely
– that catching – that it shouldn’t really—’
    â€˜Shouldn’t have
happened,
do you mean? That really my Tammy ought to be
dead
?’
    He nodded, horrified. It seemed even worse as cold words than as nightmares. But, to his astonishment, she simply drew her cheap cardigan more tightly round her shoulders and spoke slowly and clearly to the dustpan and brush that were propped against the fender.
    â€˜I think we were just very, very lucky. I suppose you could say Fate smiled on us. I am so grateful that dear Dilys happened to be there, and that—’ She broke off. ‘Why aren’t you taking notes? Have you got some taperecorder running?’
    â€˜Sorry?’
    And then he’d realized. She hadn’t recognized his face. She thought he was just one more reporter. ‘No!’ he said, shocked into the nearest he came to fluency with people he didn’t know. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. I’m
real.
I’m asking a real question.’
    â€˜A
real
question?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Do I think Tammy really should have died?’
    Again, he nodded. Again, she stared at the dustpan. But, this time, a real person answered. ‘I worried about that. I kept thinking weird things like, “I bet they try again,” though I didn’t have the faintest idea who I was thinking about, and anyway I don’t believe in—’ She stopped. ‘Who
are
you?’
    â€˜I’m Dilys’s brother,’ he said, desperate for her not to distract herself, not to stop trying to explain. ‘You’ve met me. I was there.’ Truth compelled him to add, ‘And if it had been me, I would have dropped her.’ He sensed her terror. ‘No!’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. I meant that I’d have—’ Oh, God. How did people who hadn’t gone to the same school as him say, ‘Colled it up totally’? ‘I’d have been caught off guard.’ He risked a glance. ‘It mattered so much, and I would definitely have botched it.’
    She gave him the longest look. Then, ‘Perhaps,’ she said gently, ‘if you were to pick her up and hold her . . .?’
    And he had wondered, as he scooped the snuffling lump out of the carrycot, if this was how she’d worked her own exorcism. Or if she’d simply guessed that it might work on him, holding those solid little wool-wrapped struggles and watching the fierce sneezes that didn’t evenmake a dent in sleep. He was still gazing, rapt, at the veined lids that barely hid the rolling business of dreams behind, when the door opened.
    â€˜Another visitor, eh, Mel?’
    Colin, the target of a thousand playground tauntings, couldn’t be fooled by the easy way the young man chose to lean against the frame of the door he’d rather insolently left open wide. What was the accent? Czech? Romanian? He wasn’t sure which was the stranger’s more intimidating feature: the powerful, almost oiled shoulders, or the dark, brooding eyes. But Colin had played his bit part in this scene often enough to get his lines out pat. ‘I’m from Environmental Health.’ He reached for his card, the gesture, as always, designed more to reassure the suspicious third party than