Cut To The Bone (2 page)

Jip, not much more than a thin and wormy pup, when Frank found him in North Barton a year ago, had followed him everywhere. In the end, as there was no collar and he’d looked so neglected, Frank had brought him home. Now he and Jez shared walking him, feeding him He was a man's dog, they'd decided, even though Rita always felt safer when he was around.

*

The M1 became clear past Northampton, and the rain from a flat grey sky eased to a drizzle. They stopped at the Newport Pagnell Service Station where Jip leapt so fast from the back of the van that Jez lost his grip on the lead and the dog nearly went under the wheels of an Eddie Stobart lorry. 

"Did we
have
to bring him?" Rita struggled to free Freddie from his car seat while Frank stayed put. "'He's going to be one trial after another."

"I'll sort it, Mum. No worries." Jez kept the dog close now, waiting as he cocked his leg against a litter bin.

"No worries," imitated Kayleigh and got a thump from her brother.

"Now kids,
be
have
." Rita turned away from Frank and counted out the contents of her purse. With Frank's contribution she'd got just enough for a Coke and crisps for everyone except herself and, five minutes later delivered the kids and the snacks back to the van.

"What about you?" Frank saw her empty-handed.

"You're tight, that's what." Jez proffered her his open packet. "Have some
o
’
mine, Mum."

"We've a week to get through, son. It ain't been easy..." said his father.

"I’m on a diet," Rita lied.

"Don't be daft. You can't get much thinner." Frank tipped some of his crisps on to her lap. "Stand sideways and we'd lose you."

"Would you care?" she said, passing Freddie a rusk.

Frank leant sideways and planted a stubbly kiss on her cheek.

"You forgotten what day it is today?" 

“Tell me."

Frank dug in his donkey jacket pocket. The one garment that had almost become part of his skin. He extracted a tiny blue leather box and handed it over.

"What on earth?" Rita's eyes widened as she stared at it. Then, as she opened the lid, her mouth fell open. The gold label inside said
ASPREY. Bond Street
,
London.

"Jesus, Frank..." 

The ring was a thicker gold band than her wedding ring, with a single aquamarine inlaid at the front. It looked worth a bomb. At least a grand.

"It's our anniversary, innit?" he said. "Remember Tottenham
Town Hall?"

"Course. I clean forgot, what with everything else to think about. So what's this, if we're already married?"

"An eternity ring."

Jez's bright eyes fixed on it through the gap in the front seats. "Eternity. That's cool."

"Cool," imitated Kayleigh pulling Sharon's dress over her head.

"It's really lovely, Frank." Rita felt hot, tired tears begin to sting, and she tried not to let the kids see how moved she was. How bad she felt for doubting him. "It must have cost you your arms and legs, never mind your bad foot. Oh Lord."

She pressed the ring to her lips. It felt cold against her skin. "I can't take it, though," she said suddenly, returning it to its beige, velvet bed and passing the box back to him. 

"What d'you mean,
can't?"

"Not the way things are." She started the van's engine. "We don’t have that sort of money, you know that. Be different if I trusted that boss of yours."

Frank scrunched up his crisp packet and shoved it in the glove compartment while overhead, a pale sun intervened in the greyness. It caught her own paleness, her anxiety, and in that moment, Frank knew she was serious.

"Look," Rita went on, following signs off the motorway for Bedford and Cambridge. "Give it back, eh?  Say I've died. Anything. Then we can get Jez that bike he's been going on about, and pay off a few bills..."

"I didn't buy it."

"What d'you mean?" A car overtook and cut in again, much too close. She had to brake hard. 

"I did someone a favour. So I 'ad a choice..."

"Choice? Of what, for God's sake?"

"Either this or a load of computer stuff."

"How come?" She took a bend too tight and the three kids lurched together to the left, while Jip barked and leapt about, rocking the van even more. The road was unrecognisable from when she and Frank had travelled along it towards their brief honeymoon. Then there’d been fields dotted by the odd pretty village. Now they were lost amongst urban sprawl. "What favour?" She asked him, knowing that was a waste of breath.

Frank duly placed a finger across his lips and Rita felt as if a heavy stone had settled in her stomach. This man who'd always opened his mouth and put his foot in it, who went round with his heart on his head never mind his sleeve, was playing a different game now. But for the sake of the kids and this holiday they'd been looking forward to, she kept her own mouth shut, as the road ahead opened out to a dual carriageway, heading for Essex and the coast.

2

Jip stalked the damp shoreline, watchful of each new frill of creamy foam which threatened to reach his paws. Head down, loins bunched up - he looked like someone else's dog, Rita thought distractedly, putting on her new BHS sunglasses for the first time. 

The sand she stood on, stretched away to the North Sea, darker beyond the deep, dry footprints, the odd protruding lolly stick and things fetched in by the tide. She watched Jez running like a demented elf, cartwheeling beyond the encampments of windbreaks and beach umbrellas, his distinctive hair like a red halo around his head. His shrieks of abandonment mingled with the gulls who'd deserted the fishing boats for easier pickings nearer home - notably the picnic which she’d painstakingly packed into two Spar carrier bags.

She'd catered for everyone when trekking round the campsite store, while Frank had stopped in the caravan with the kids and the dog till she got back. The Westlea caravan was too small for them all, she knew that now, especially with the day's earlier tension still in the air and him all closed-up and grim looking. But, having unpacked their clothes into the dolls'-house sized drawers, Rita had offered up a silent prayer that at least the sun was reading the script and they could all be out of doors until sunset.

"I'm fuckin' starvin'." Kayleigh knelt down in the sand and explored the picnic bags with sandy fingers.

"You watch your language, my girl." Rita glared at her. "No kid of ours is going to sound like a guttersnipe, if you please."

"'Ave I got a chicken nugget?" The six year-old persisted, having repeated ‘guttersnipe’ over and over.

"Yes. Two. But hold on. Your Dad comes first."

She passed a greaseproof pack of cheese sandwiches to Frank who lay next to Jip on a decorator's sheet from the van, gazing up at the sky.

"Me favourites,” he smiled. “Ta, you."

She then unpinged a Budweiser and left it by his free hand, wondering what he'd do with that posh eternity ring, and would she ever know, when all at once, Jez landed at her feet with a spray of sand.

"Look, Mum! See what I found!"

He held out a length of smooth, bleached wood harbouring tiny barnacles in its dark cleft at the top end.  It stank of the sea.

"Brilliant, ain't it?" He examined it again as if it was the most wondrous thing on the planet. "I could make a swan out of it. There's the bigger bit down there, and this would be its head."

"How'd you do that then, son?" Frank asked, propped up on one elbow, chewing.

"Wiv a knife o' course."

His parents exchanged glances. The only knife Jez had ever tinkered with, apart from at table, was a small rusty penknife from when he'd joined the 1st Briar Bank Cubs. It had dangled from his belt by a piece of string, together with a set of accurately tied knots for which he'd always had top marks from Akela.

"We'll take a look round Walton tomorrow," Frank relented, biting deep into his last sandwich as Freddie began grizzling in his buggy. "But I'd 'ave to show you how to use it properly, so's your fingers wouldn't end up all over the floor. And it'd be for carving your bits, nothing more. Promise?"

Jez squatted down to give him a hug.

"Yeah, ta, Dad." He looked up at Rita. His eyes even brighter than that gem.

"It'll be a pressie for you, Mum. For yeranniversry. Mind you, it might take me a while, what with school and everything..."

"You're a great kid." She ruffled his hair.

"Can I make somefing an' all?" Kayleigh had heaped up a shifting mound of sand over her knees then let it subside as she wriggled free.

"What can you do, stupid?" Jez dragged his piece of wood away and rested it against the concrete slope up to the caravan park.

"I can draw." She stuck out her tongue at him.

"She can too." Rita wiped her daughter's face with the edge of her tee shirt. Spat on it to work inside each nostril. "You won that prize in
The Gazette
, remember?"

"OK." Jez said grudgingly, now paying attention to what lay in the carrier bags.

"You do a drawing, eh?"

Rita picked Freddie out of his buggy and with his bottle ensconced in his mouth gazed round at the beach, her eyes heavy, her body relaxed for the first time in weeks. It was as if the salt breeze was teasing out all her weariness and uncertainties like those chiffon scarves from some magician's hat, and casting them high into the sky...

*

At four o'clock the sun was still warm, reaching her bones through her clothes. She settled Freddie in the crook of her arm and rolled up her new jeans to bare her white, thin legs to its glow. She'd lost weight since his birth, which hadn't been planned at all. Doctor Taylor at the Health Centre had given her targets to aim for but somehow nothing made any difference. Seven stone was dangerous, he'd warned, especially with three kids to see to. But it wasn't them, she'd wanted to tell him. The problem was lying right next to her, snoring in an out in time to the sea, his hand resting on the dog's neck like they were brothers.

She knew deep inside these next few days would become as important to her as that burnt bit of wood was to Jez. More so, because if Alf Bassett mucked Frank about, the weeks ahead when she'd be reaching thirty, would see them all hurtling down the road of debt, of creditors, dodgy loan sharks, and living God knew where.  While the most terrifying thing of all was, she'd be powerless to stop any of it.

3

The sun turned the Westlea's curtains the colour of butter and cast its benign light on the sleeping occupants. All that is, except Rita, still drowsy, and the ten year-old sculptor sitting on the caravan steps in his pyjamas humming something from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat  as he whittled away at the driftwood.

Jez kept what would be the swan's neck tight between his bony knees as the first of his two-knife set fashioned a head and a beak while the blade's sharp point gouged out the eyes for the later addition of glass beads. He sat back to appraise his handiwork with a grin lighting up his sunburnt face, then realised he was starving, and hunted along the step for the knife's leather sheath like he'd been taught.

“Good lad,” Rita said, relieved he’d remembered. She then raised herself to see what he’d done, but his body was in the way.

"And that little box they both came in?" She asked.

"In me bag."

"We don't want Kayleigh getting hold of them, that's all."

Obediently, the boy who’d slid the blade back into its pod, then returned it to the box with Walton-on-Sea pyrographed into its lid, matching each knife handle. He then placed the box high out of harm's way in the wardrobe's topmost cupboard.

Rita watched his every move. He'd make a good little dancer, she thought, being so light on his feet. And it was he, more than either Kayleigh or Freddie who often made her wonder what her first son might have looked like had he survived. Would he have had his red hair? His build? His general good-naturedness?

But that sort of wondering never did any good.  She and Frank were lucky to have what they'd got, given those children's ward programmes on TV.

"Hey, got any jam?" Jez called out, and in doing so, triggered a chorus of grumbling from the others waking up.

Rita eased herself out of the bunk bed, her legs dangling down by Frank who grabbed her ankles.

"Come ‘ere you."

"Ssh, Jez is looking."

"So what?"

The boy shrugged and resumed his burrowing in all the mini cupboards which made up the kitchenette.

"Remember our honeymoon 'ere?" Frank still hadn't let go and Freddie was building up for a yell. "It were twice a night in them days."

She managed to lower herself to the floor but he pulled her to him.

"He'd be twelve now, our Andrew."

"I know. I know..."