Vanessa Gebbie

Bone Magnet

Bus tickets damp from the drizzle, torn from the roll by a man with a missing middle finger. I wanted to touch the stump, see skin folds cushioning half a knuckle, feel the end of a bone never meant to be felt. Take his hand and stretch the remaining fingers into a starfish. Press them against the window. Breathe huh huh on the glass, draw a flower in the finger-gap. Where was that finger now? Took it like a mouse found stiff in the morning I bet, laid on a folded handkerchief in a small box. A cardboard box stapled, stamped, franked. Walked down the back garden while the streetlights were coming on and the Pritchetts next door were sitting down to a fish supper and evening TV. Found a loose stone behind the garden shed, slump of old spades and hoes, the stink of bone meal. Underneath, half-tunnels of night-walking creatures, eyeless. Cheated them, the sort that feast on complete corpses, and here he is with only half a finger. Before he sank the box six inches into unhallowed ground, lifted his finger out of the box one last time, fitted it to its stump. To feel the tingle of frayed skin, the high shout of something lost, the early pull of a bone magnet.

Boys will Be Boys

Clearing out your flat I found eleven umbrellas, six walking sticks,

a cream-maker in its fifties box and eight powder compacts. Without

thinking I stripped your bed and set the machine going in the kitchen.

It sounded hollow. The wet duvet cover was heavy with roses. You

would not have wanted them dripping on your kitchen floor. I found

six thermos flasks and fifty seven plates, three clothes brushes, eight

tea pots. Receipts for everything you had ever bought since 1954.

I found your son’s toy cars, his teddy bears, his photo. His birth, his

death certificates, seven years apart. Cause of death: multiple injuries

on a railway due to trespass. A faded cutting from The Sussex Express

and County Herald , August 1969, Inquest Says Boys Will Be Boys. Your

clothes have gone to Mother Theresa’s. The plates have been washed

before going to the dump. I kept a few of your things. Your son’s cars,

a painting on school paper. July 1969. Robert Diplock, aged 7.