Hollow Bones

Chapter One.

1.

Reality seemed surreal. My heart hammered.

He walked urgently towards me. Pressed his face against mine. His heart hammered.

He needed me. Needed.

 

His hot breath stroked my neck and sent a prickly feeling over my back. The soft smell of his hair filled my nostrils. The ground’s smell after a rainstorm. Metallic.

I shuddered and closed my eyes. He knew me. He knew my mask, my dress-up personality with the empty backstory and hollow, make-believe happiness. He related my mark to his own. He recognised my lack of normality. And still he needed me.

Naw-mal-i-tee.

I first heard that word when I was seven.

It reeked of lifelessness. Monotone. Like rain’s dreary pound on a double-paned window. Or a hospital’s sour, clinical smell.

I never understood normality, or the nuclear family, with its golden retriever and two Commodores. I never thought of father-mother-brother-sister-me home.

My father left when I was five. He left with a marble look in his grey eyes and his jaw clenched, vinegary-toffee caught between his teeth. He squeezed my cold hand and stepped into the tunnel that connected the port to the plane. I watched him fade – feet, legs, torso, shoulders, and finally, the straggly, stand-up-straight hairdo he called the “half-sucked-mango”.

I never saw him again.

My mother’s face sank slowly, her hair turned wiry. She had been beautiful, but an emptiness neither money nor safety could fill etched a permanent melancholy on her face. Her eyes were a kind russet colour, lips pale and full, and her nose turned upwards. Nothing about her face, or, in fact, her body was harsh or angular. It was her mind that was sharp. She stayed in university for over a decade, not because she wanted an education, but as a distraction. Sadness crept over her like five p.m shadows.

We strayed from one place to another, one dilapidated house to the next. Nowhere felt permanent, but each had a peculiarly distinct sense of secondhandedness. In one, the treehouse still kept all its furniture and playthings – beheaded, stark naked Barbie dolls, broken plastic chairs and an assortment of jealously hoarded stickers. The names “LUCAS” and “LILLIAN” were inscribed messily in the corrugated wood. Hushed, whispery secrets hid in every corner. As if they were sandy-coloured geckoes on a sandy-coloured wall. Trilling only when alone. Revealing themselves when no one needed them.

 I disliked school. Children shied away from the tall, new, curly haired girl.

 

“She was weird.”

 

 Once, I overheard the teachers talking in low, grumbling voices. They mentioned my name, so I crouched below a desk and listened.

 

‘That Sola Hindemid girl’s a strange one, innit she?’

‘A little slow, if you ask me.’

‘Apparently, her father took off a couple years ago. Drug addict.’

‘Disgusting. Not normal.’

 

The word “normal” stuck to my mind. I’d put my mind into a place it shouldn’t have been – into the grown-ups blurred, homogenous realm. Normality welded to me like the wads of chewed-up gum that lined the underside of every desk in the school.

I drew my knees up to my face and bit down with my small, sharp teeth. They left a bumpy, canoe shaped dent wet with saliva. A twisted, backwards looking boat that had sprung a leak.

Sigh.