Hollow Bones

Chapter Three.

3.

 

The implications of my abnormality didn’t hit me for quite some time. Months. Years. In that time, we crossed the sunburnt desert and settled in New South Wales. My mother started a PhD.

We lived in my grandmother’s carport. It had broken light sockets and wooden frames supporting the ceiling that looked like titanic spiders scuttling upside down, bumping into each other’s legs. The blue carpet was perpetually damp and spotted with mold. Strangely, the place was also infested with venomous snakes. Hissing only when alone. Revealing themselves when no one needed them.

My grandmother was a round woman with a tragic, 1980’s hairdo and wobbling jowls. She never looked happy, but carried the appearance and temperament of an overfed bulldog.

 

She worked as an “alcohol and drugs support officer” in the city. If irony were sherry, she’d have downed the lot. Even her skin smelled acerbic.

She abused anyone within earshot.

‘You, git over here. You seen me bottle opener? Betcha took it, ya rat. Filthy goddamn vermin. Worthless.’

 

And still, my mother’s eyes remained distant. Even when she spat insults at her and reminded her of her disappointment in love and her withdrawn, introverted child.

At school, the children treated me cautiously. Like I’d bite at a moment’s notice.

She was weird.

I was nine when I made my first friend. His name was Alex Peters, a lofty, freckled boy with a head of hair that somewhat resembled a flame-tree in autumn. Other than a rather hazardous fascination with heights, he was mellow. He never looked you in the eye.

‘Whatcha gonna do with that fiver you found, Sola?’

‘Save it for a rainy day.’

‘But it is a rainy day!’

Alex and I sat on a dull, sleepy looking park bench. Its bottle-green paint peeled off in jagged ringlets and crudely drawn male anatomy was scribbled anywhere where paint wasn’t. I held a pink polymer banknote up to the sky like they did in the movies to see if it was real. There were two problems: