All Bones and Lies by Anne Fine Page A

track before diving in the woodshed. There, he rammed home the bolt his father had had the foresight to switch from the outside to the inside, and, in search of distraction and comfort, reached under the chisels. But before he’d even managed to give his sweet bouncing girl a fighting chance to soothe his spirits, he’d realized that it wouldn’t work. He was too rattled. And anyway, the added guilt of seeing Suzie in work hours always made things so much more difficult. It wasn’t worth the candle.
    Candle . . .
    Time for a spell. Lifting the old varnished box out from its hiding place behind the ancient mangle, he sifted through. What did he need? A few of the pretty things, more for their comfort than their efficacy. The spiral stone, perhaps. The chipped medallion. A handful of shells. And the beetles, all three of them, glossy, black and perfect, and, for all he knew, dead for a thousand years before he’d found them in that hollow stone down by the quarry. He wrote his incantation backwards with the silver-tipped pen from the spine of his father’s last diary, repeating it over and over under his breath as he shoved the torn scraps of paper deep in the twisty shell. Setting the candle in the very centre of everything, he spread his hands and began as usual: ‘
Something from inside, something from outside
. . .’ In moments the spell took off, the sheer word-spinning command of it startling that tiny part of him he’d had to leave alert for calls or for footsteps. When else had everything ever spun along so well? No words said wrongly, no charm water spilled, no candles tipping over. When else had that silent, watching custodian out of self had such a strong sense that, with a bit of luck, this time, this time . . .
    So what went wrong? Was it the rustle in the ivy outside? That, after all, could have been Floss, nosing around in repentance. Or the way that the candlelight swam in the shadows? Perhaps, he thought after, it was simply the nastiness of what he was wishing another poor soul on the planet that made him, at the very last – and he could sense it, it was about to be the
perfect spell
– lose his nerve utterly, and let that shadow vigilant who watched fordanger break in to stop things in their tracks, and twist the force of magic round.
    â€˜Blimey!’
    This echo of his sister brought Tammy instantly to mind. And he felt shame. How could he go and shuffle in Mel’s doorway, holding the indispensable bag of fruit and this week’s excuse, the lovely bright alphabet letters, when scarcely an hour before he’d been hunched over a trestle top, playing at wizards? What on earth was the matter with him? Raw with the sense of his own lack of dignity, he raised the candle to the twisty shell and punished himself with its heat on his fingers. The spell words floated down, spluttering ashes, and, still disquieted, he stirred the mess into his father’s work bench. Had it been haste? Or panic? Hard to tell. But still it had been a very strange thing to end up wishing his mother.
    Light and Life.
    Still in his socks, he took the opportunity to climb in the larder window and examine the paperwork she’d stuffed in the breadbin. You had to hand it to her generation, he decided; they’d had a proper education. None of the botch-alike Clarries in the office could have made nearly so good a job of jotting notes on the application forms he found himself holding. At the bottom of Prudent Secure’s notes, she’d summarized: ‘practices in review’. (Clarrie would have spelt it ‘practises’.) On Heft Insurance, ‘nothing definite – changes in pipeline – girl
very
shifty’. And on good old Tor Grand’s, it was ‘no plans at present – but no guarantee’. Inspecting the envelopes, he noticed with interest that she’d been more efficient than Clarrie ever would at gettingthe forms sent to her first