“There’s a doctor comes to see my sister,” I said. “I could bring him here to see you.”
“No doctors. Nobody.”
“Who are you?”
“Nobody.”
“What can I do?”
“Nothing.”
“My baby sister’s very ill.”
“Babies!”
“Is there anything you can do for her?”
“Babies! Spittle, muck, spew, and tears.”
I sighed. It was hopeless.
“My name’s Michael. I’m going now. Is there anything else I can bring you?”
“Nothing. 27 and 53.”
He belched again. His breath stank. Not just the Chinese food, but the stench of the other dead things he ate: the bluebottles, the spiders. He made a gag noise in his throat and he leaned away from the wall like he was going to be sick. I put my hand beneath his shoulder to steady him. I felt something there, something held in by his jacket. He retched. I tried not to breathe, not to smell him. I reached across his back and felt something beneath his other shoulder as well. Like thin arms, folded up. Springy and flexible.
He retched but he wasn’t sick. He leaned back against the wall and I took my hand away.
“Who are you?” I said.
The blackbird sang and sang.
“I wouldn’t tell anybody,” I said.
He lifted his hand and looked at it in the beam from the flashlight.
“I’m nearly nobody,” he said. “Most of me is Arthur.”
He laughed but he didn’t smile.
“Arthur Itis,” he squeaked. “He’s the one that’s ruining me bones. Turns you to stone, then crumbles you away.”
I touched his swollen knuckles.
“What’s on your back?” I said.
“A jacket, then a bit of me, then lots and lots of Arthur.”
I tried to slip my hand beneath his shoulder again.
“No good,” he squeaked. “Nothing there’s no good no more.”
“I’m going,” I said. “I’ll keep them from clearing the place out. I’ll bring you more. I won’t bring Dr. Death.”
He licked the dry sauce from below his lips.
“27 and 53,” he said. “27 and 53.”
I left him, backed away toward the door, went out into the light. The blackbird flew away over the gardens, squawking. I tiptoed into the house. I stood for a minute at the baby’s crib. I put my hand beneath the blankets and felt the rattling of her breath and how soft and warm she was. I felt how tender her bones were.
Mum looked up at me and I could tell she was still asleep.
“Hello,” she whispered.
I tiptoed back to bed.
When I slept, I dreamed that my bed was all twigs and leaves and feathers, just like a nest.
Chapter 11
NEXT MORNING, DAD SAID HE COULD hardly move. He was all bent over. He said his back was killing him. He was stiff as a blinking board.
“Where’s those aspirin?” he yelled down the stairs.
Mum laughed.
“All this exercise’ll do him good,” she said. “It’ll get that fat off him.”
He yelled again:
“I said, where’s those blooming aspirin?”
I kissed the baby and ran to catch the bus to school.
That morning, we had science with Rasputin. He showed us a poster of our ancestors, of the endless shape-changing that had led to us. There were monkeys and apes, the long line of apelike creatures in between, then us. It showed how we began to stand straighter, how we lost most of our hair, how we began to use tools, how our heads changed shape to hold our big brains. Coot whispered it was all a load of rubbish. His dad had told him there was no way that monkeys could turn into men. Just had to look at them. Stands to reason.
I asked Rasputin if we’d keep on changing shape and he said, “Who knows, Michael? Maybe evolution will go on forever. Maybe we’ll go on changing forever.”
“Bull,” whispered Coot.
We drew the skeleton of an ape and the skeleton of a man. I remembered what Mina had said and I looked really closely at the poster. I put my hand up and said, “What are shoulder blades for, sir?”
Rasputin crinkled his face up. He reached behind his back and felt his shoulder blades and smiled.
“I know what my mother used to tell me,” he said. “But to be honest, I really haven’t got a clue.”
Afterward, Coot hunched his shoulders up and lowered his head and stuck his chin out. He lurched through the corridor, grunting and running at the girls.
Lucy Carr started screaming.
“Stop it, you pig!” she said.
Coot just laughed.
“Pig?” said Coot. “I’m not a pig. I’m a gorilla.”
And he ran at her again.
In the yard when I played football, I realized how tired I was with being awake so much during the night. Leakey kept asking what was the matter with me. I was playing crap. Mrs. Dando came again when I was standing by myself at the side of the field.
“What’s up?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“And how’s the little one?”
“Fine.”
I looked at the ground.
“Sometimes I think she stops breathing,” I said. “Then I look at her and she’s fine.”
“She will be fine,” she said. “You’ll see. Babies so often bring worry with them into the world, but you’ll be wrestling with her before you know where you are.”
She touched me on the shoulder. For a moment I wondered about telling her about the man in the garage. Then I saw Leakey looking so I shrugged her off and I ran back, yelling,
“On me head! On me head!”
It was a dozy afternoon. Some easy math, then Miss Clarts reading us another story, this time about Ulysses and his men trapped in the cave with the one-eyed monster Polyphemus. I was nearly asleep as she told us how they had escaped by pretending to be sheep.
I took my skeleton picture home. I kept looking at it on the bus. There was an old guy sitting beside me with a Jack Russell on his knee. He smelled of pee and pipe smoke.
“What’s that?” he said.
“Picture of what we used to be like long ago,” I said.
“Can’t say I remember that,” he said. “And I’m pretty ancient.”
He started going on about how he’d seen a monkey in a circus in his young days. They’d trained it to make
