The Bones of You by Gary McMahon Read Free Book Online Page A

relationship…but in my eyes, that was tantamount to a criminal offense.
    The supermarket wasn’t too busy, so I managed to get around quickly. I decided I’d fall back on the old single man’s standby and cook steaks. Not exactly adventurous, but in this economy they were still out of the ordinary enough to be classed as a treat. I bought a couple of potatoes for baking and some coleslaw from the salad counter. Then I selected three bottles of decent white wine—they were on a three-for-two offer, and I thought we might get through at least two of them.
    As I walked back along the meat aisle, I was distracted by the sight of a row of cuts of pork. As some kind of marketing campaign, a severed pig’s head had been positioned at the front of the display. I couldn’t tell if the head was real or a plastic fake. Its beady eyes seemed to watch me as I walked past, and when I turned my attention away from it, the head looked like it belonged not to a pig, but a child. I looked again, and the illusion died.
    I was tired. Last night’s weird episode in bed had left me unable to sleep properly, and I’d woken up again not long afterward. It was the first time in a very long time that I’d got to watch the sun come up. The association wasn’t a good one. Most of the regrettable acts in my life have been rubber-stamped by the onset of a sleepless dawn.
    I paid for my provisions and went back to my car. The air was cold again—this autumn cold snap was lasting longer than anyone had expected. As I put my carrier bags in the trunk of the car, I heard a distant firework from somewhere on one of the housing estates at the top of the valley in which the supermarket was located. They were always setting off fireworks there, whatever the time of year, but the sound made me realize that Halloween was approaching. After that, it would be Bonfire Night, the old celebration when fireworks were actually meant to be set off to commemorate the burning to death of a political activist. I didn’t think many of the current generation of kids knew who Guy Fawkes was. His role in the event seemed to have been forgotten.
    But unlike Bonfire Night, Halloween was a growth industry these days: there was a whole Americanization of the day happening, to the extent that it was even called a holiday. When I was a child, it was a low-key affair: carved turnips with candles inside, a few desultory groups of kids in bad ghost costumes roaming the streets and knocking on doors to recite a poem for money— the sky is blue, the grass is green, have you got a penny for Halloween .
    It was all different now: decorations in windows, pumpkins on sale in all the shops, expensive costumes, and the call of trick or treat drifting through the towns and villages of the country.
    I drove back home with these thoughts in my head, remembering that everything changed; nothing could ever stay the same. The nature of existence was that things evolved, people moved on, took on all kinds of influences. The idea of this depressed me. I was the kind of guy who liked things the way they were: if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
    When I got home, somebody had stuffed a bunch of takeaway flyers through my letterbox. I kicked them across the floor and took my bags through to the kitchen. Despite the big push by supermarkets, I didn’t think the people in this neighborhood would make too much of a fuss out of Halloween.
    When I returned to pick up the flyers and shut the front door, I saw my favorite goth girl—Pru—was once again standing in the street outside the house next door.
    “Hey.” She said it without even looking at me.
    “You’re here early. I wasn’t expecting your habitual vigil until much later.”
    She gave a wan smile. I didn’t really know what that word meant until I saw her expression: it fit the description perfectly. “Yeah…well. I was feeling a bit low. Thought you might be able to cheer me up.”
    Today she was wearing something a little