Dancing On Bones

By Frances Kay

We first met nomadic puppeteer Billie in Dollywagglers. Now, in a lawless, post-pandemic world, Billie is learning to be human again – a task easily as challenging as scrounging for food and fighting off suburban savages. In Dancing on Bones, Billie’s band of three unlikely friends heads to Wales to find some semblance of civilisation, but just when they begin to settle, terrible news from London forces Billie back among the grim survivors of the capital. What happens there blows apart the seemingly invincible fortress of the dangerous elite in charge and plunges the nation into chaos once more – chaos that is mirrored by the erupting volcano that is Billie’s personal life. Though at first the fledgling democracy of Wales appears to be the haven the friends hoped to find, now it seems like their world may just end in a hail of bullets after all. Bonus short story Strange Creation is the extraordinary diary of Dr. Dorothy Broadhurst, an evolutionary biologist working in central Africa in 1950 when her academic life is violently disrupted by a local rebellion. Abandoned and isolated in her compound, surrounded only by the apes whose lives and habits she has been studying, she tries to maintain her ordered, scientific routine. But, she doesn’t know the apes as well as she thought. Soon, she becomes like them: a hunted animal desperately clinging on to survival and sanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tenebris Books
• Release date: May 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781911497974

Frances Kay

Frances Kay works with organizations in the field of research and corporate development. With many years' work experience covering politics, law and the diplomatic service, she has for many years also worked on covering retirement issues. She is the author of Successful Networking and co-author of Tough Tactics for Tough Times and Understanding Emotional Intelligence.

Book preview

Dancing

on

Bones

Frances Kay

Bonus short story, Strange Creation

Tenebris Books Logo

www.tenebrisbooks.com

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Strange Creation

Copyright © 2018 Frances Kay

Frances Kay asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Paperback ISBN 978-1-911497-96-7

Epub ISBN 978-1-911497-97-4

Cover art by Meg Amsden

Typesetting by Zoë Harris

Tenebris Books

An Imprint of Grimbold Books

4 Woodhall Drive

Banbury

Oxon

OX16 9TY

United Kingdom

www.tenebrisbooks.com

Dedicated to the schoolgirls of Chibok, and to the mother whose anguish gave me the title of this book.

It is by distortedly exalting some men that others are distortedly debased, till the whole is out of nature. A vast mass of mankind are degradedly thrown into the back-ground of the human picture, to bring forward, with greater glare, the puppet-show of state and aristocracy.

Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

1

Language! hisses Sylvia, pursing her eyes as well as her lips.

I’d smack her stupid face if she wasn’t driving.

What’s your problem, I trill, as irritatingly as I can, "never heard the word fuck before? We are adults, aren’t we?"

Sylvia jerks her head back towards Kyra, sprawled asleep on a pile of tinned and dried goods; her unmusical snores resonate around the little van.

"If Kyra was awake, I’d agree, but as you can hear, she is deeply asleep, and actually, fuck is a word she used to hear every day. Hippies don’t mince words."

An ugly silence carves a path between us. Our pasts rise up and writhe inside our heads like cut worms, twisting, rolling, agonised, yet refusing to die. Different, yet shared, my journey and hers. The deaths. The chaos. Being flung together, randomly, with others who suddenly became the focus of my interest, as I was of theirs – as toxically intimate as family. So now here I am, technically a sane and self-sufficient adult, sharing my fate with two people I never knew a month ago. I can’t say I actually know Sylvia yet. So far, I experience her as a cliché, a tidy, earnest, haircutting wife – no, a widow, mother of five dead children, including a set of twins. And travelling with us is Kyra, aged ten, the remnant of an episode I still can’t talk about. She binds, inspires, baffles us.

Sorry, I mumble, and Sylvia, relieved, I guess, to escape her own thoughts, flashes me a smile and recklessly toots her horn.

Kyra jumps awake, and we hear the steady rustling of crisp packets being opened, and the ruminant chew and crunch as her teeth, lovingly tended and denied all artificial ingredients for ten years, now engage with prawn cocktail crisps oozing flavouring, grease and sugar.

Hi Kyra, welcome back. Shall we try and guess his name again? Have you remembered it?

It’s . . . hard to say. She has said this before. All we know is, the brother is Welsh. We have to make a few stabs in the general area of Celticity, with zilch Welsh knowledge to go on.

Kyra blows up the empty crisp packet and explodes it. I jump. Sylvia doesn’t. She is a proper mother, that’s why.

How about . . . Llewellyn, I say.

No.

Tom, as in Tom Jones.

No, says Kyra, and Sylvia, too pert by half, observes: That’s not difficult to say.

"I know, Sylvia. We are brainstorming. We are opening our minds to creative suggestion, and in order to do that, you and I are not allowed to say no to any idea that comes. That’s Kyra’s prerogative."

My mind empties of aforesaid inspiration, as cold, dark memories flood my synapses once more. I can’t think of any Welsh boys’ names. I can’t remember meeting any Welshmen – except one. Sylvia, contrariwise, is brightly focused on the task in hand.

Taffy, she says, smirking, not meeting my politically correct gaze.

No, says Kyra through a mouthful of crisps, dragging me willingly back to the prawn-cocktail-fragranced present.

Geraint! Gwyn and Geraint! There’s lovely brothers! I say in what I fondly imagine is a Welsh accent.

Kyra gives me a pitying look.

Barry! shouts Sylvia, and now it’s my turn to roll my eyes and shake the head.

That’s not Welsh.

It is – what about Barry, Glamorgan?

Yeah, right – and Martha Tydfil—

And Holly Head—

Kyra is looking bemused.

"And you’re not allowed to say no, are you?" chirps Sylvia, pursing her eyes at me again.

As usual, her mental acuity, even while driving, catches me on the hop, and I make a goofy face at her, and we start giggling.

Can I have more crisps? and Kyra starts to climb over boxes to get them herself, seriously endangering the life of our chauffeur, and by extension, her entire adoptive family and herself.

I fish around in the back of the van and locate another box. One hour into the journey and we are already making serious inroads. Ah, what the hell, when they’re gone, they’re gone. It’ll be quite a while before crisps start rolling off the production line again. And when they do, they’ll probably contain all kinds of mind-controlling governmental additives.

My idea, I say to Sylvia, before the Eppie, was to make a fortune by flogging fluoride-impregnated sweets. That way, the more sweets you eat, the more good you’ll be doing your teeth.

Kids would never eat them, counters Sylvia briskly, you can’t put anything that’s good for them into sweets; they would run a mile. Like when they made Smarties with all natural colours, my kids wouldn’t touch them. And fluoride is a poison, actually.

The Eppie. The plague, the Death. The further away in time it gets, the more nostalgic I become for that immediate aftermath, when my life was reduced to monosyllabic essentials – sleep, eat, wank, survive –

That’s two syllables, says Sylvia, and I realise I have been talking aloud, and that her parental radar has once again picked up on yet another naughty word, as she telegraphs mild disapproval in my direction.

If I thought solo travelling was hard (and it was, in the feral cauldron that was London), travelling as a lone parent even harder (me and Kyra, en route for Southwold and some inadvertent personal growth), travelling as a threesome is not the picnic I might have imagined it to be. Sylvia is – was – a real mother, not the faked-up version I am currently play-acting. Or am I a merely a ‘big friend’ and Sylvia has become the ‘real’ mother substitute?

I’ve got to stop, my eyes are going like poached eggs, she says, and pulls over, parking tidily, though the road is so deserted we might just as well stop where we are, in the middle lane of a dual carriageway leading west, away from Southwold.

Almost without realising it, sleep overtakes us all, and soon we are dreaming, cramped and uncomfortable, dead to the world.

2

You actually gonna eat that shit? says Amber.

I’m pregnant. I’m allowed to have cravings.

Yeah, but, like, you don’t know how long it’s been on the road or who had it or why they dropped it. It’s gross! All dirty and chewed.

Clover stuffs the bar into her mouth.

Oh my fucking god, it’s totally delicious. Want some?

Amber hesitates.

Go on, the wet stuff’s only my spit. And what if we die, will that be worse than what we’ve already—

Shut up.

Amber takes a bite, and her body relaxes into a pleasure so intense and childlike and pure, that tears spill from her eyes. Clover snatches it back.

It’s not that good, you cow. It’s mine.

Arguing, weeping, holding hands, giggling, they continue down a road they don’t know, to a place they don’t know. At least they are together. For now.

3

Ah, Leon – good morning. Sleep well?

A formality. Setting the agenda, the status. He may be the (unelected) Prime Minister, but his ‘civil’ servants demand answers to personal questions, limit his freedom, give him unsavoury tasks. He is their creature, in a literal sense. They fashioned him from a gutter remnant – not that they would ever be so uncivil as to remind him. Jeffryes’ question is enough; the question does it. What else could intrude upon his sweet slumbers but odious visitations, endless reruns of the horrors of his criminal past? Crimes he can never undo, never be forgiven for.

They are all sitting now, plump, monochrome-suited, satisfied men, manicured hands resting on the polished mahogany conference table, while he stands alone, a grey-haired, seemingly dignified figure.

That’s good, take a seat. Now – today’s agenda—

The voices drone on. His opinions are not needed. This committee, or cabinet, or caucus, never votes; consensus is arrived at by nods and eyebrow work; subtle, excluding. Only his silent, acquiescent presence is required, so they can draft regulations, stifle rebellion and distribute the dwindling resources they have commandeered – after the self-appointed ministers of this fledgling government have taken their share. He looks wearily at their faces. To him, they appear as clones, museum pieces all. Yet, to a weary public, they exude stability and authority. To the scattered remnants of society, to everyone that tunes in to their regular ‘official’ radio and TV broadcasts, they are reassuringly solid, permanent, and English to the core; soon they will be invading the lives of every single survivor in active, unsettling ways.

Leon doodles on his memo pad, letting his mind wander.

Prime Minister!

He jolts to attention, horrified to see that what he has written and embellished is his old name – Rodney. Not once, but several times. He screws the page up; but they know what is lurking in the muddy wastes of his memory. They will always know.

The next item on the agenda is – the Royal Family.

4

We should think of a plan, I say as we drearily mumble a few of our precious biscuit supplies – a disgusting but necessary breakfast, limp and slightly stale – for when we meet a road block.

We won’t meet them, if we’re clever. Sylvia, more adroit than I could ever be, is managing to tidy Kyra’s hair with one hand, eat a biscuit and flick through our A.A. road atlas with the other. All we have to do is go by the ‘B’ roads.

You think we’re not going to meet anyone on ‘B’ roads? Instead of soldiers and guns, it’ll be the local loonies with pitchforks—

Sylvia makes a pointy gesture over Kyra’s head, mouthing: Pas devant les enfants.

Kyra knows what I’m talking about. We’ve seen far worse.

Sylvia slams the atlas shut.

Will you shut up, Billie. Don’t go there!

Ooh, we seem to be having our first proper row. But of course my companion is right. The old civilisation may be gone, but it’s rapidly being replaced by the new mores, one of which is an unspoken agreement never to mention our personal pasts. Which is fine by me.

Kyra, although well loaded up with hyperactivity-inducing sugars, trans-fats, colouring and flavouring additives, manages to fall asleep again.

It’s a grimly unwelcoming morning, with dark grey, heavy skies. The clock on the van says eleven o’clock, which must be right, as Eddie, Sylvia’s dead husband, seems to have been punctilious in his attention to detail.

We’re not doing too well at guessing this brother’s name, I offer as an apology, and she flashes me a smile. From this I learn that she is not one of those smouldering types that carries a brazier of red hot grudges ready to dump at my feet. See, that’s how new our acquaintance is; we are still noticing the traits you observe when chatting at parties, long before you’ve been selected as a friend.

I’m driving in my trademark dyspraxic, erratic style, and give her a smile back.

Our friendship is only a few hours old, but we’re deeply committed already. It could be a lifetime thing, or a temporary entente until either of us meets up with more like-minded company. But we can’t leave Kyra out of the equation – Kyra, whom neither of us is prepared to give up. She is our glue, our talisman – and right now, we’re travelling west on the promptings of a tantalising fragment of her memory.

We need to get her talking about this brother. Describing him. Remembering the time she last saw him.

We can’t do that, Billie! It would be brutal! Asking her to remember the past. It’s cruel.

Yes, it would be cruel. My thoughts have swung back to Kyra’s home – Paradise Farm, the beautiful half-timbered old house, the walled parkland, the outbuildings with their Suffolk pantiles, and the hippies, two of whom were her parents—

You okay? she asks, offering me a tissue, which I scornfully reject.

I don’t do crying, ever. But you’re right. We can’t make her rake over those memories.

If only there was an internet café, we could get a list of Welsh boys’ names off Google—

You serious? Going into a town with no papers, no I.D.? We’re on a wanted list already.

No we aren’t – we’re small fry. They’ve only just begun registering people in Southwold.

The rest of the UK is not like Southwold. Not so . . .

—thick? Yokelish? Slow on the uptake?

Ah, Sylvia is too quick for my lumbering mental process. She’s from Birmingham originally, but fiercely loyal to her adopted town. Understandably, because her man and her kids were natives.

We’re now passing through Peasenhall, notable for its vineyard (in the old days) and as the home of various minor BBC illuminati. Deserted now, it has a curiously mediaeval air, as if we have genuinely travelled back in time.

How long before we get to Wales? I ask, to distract her inner Southwoldian; she’s also got a watch that works, of course, and she’s frowning at it, making calculations.

If we can keep going without more sleep, we should be there in nine hours, maybe.

I don’t contradict. I’ve never done this trip before, but surely one side of the country to the other can’t take more than a day? Especially as we are in sure and certain knowledge there will be no rush hours.

As we head towards Stowupland on the A1120, I hear the infuriating, chirpy beep I hoped would never bother my auditory circuits again.

Sylvia, I now notice, had plugged her mobile into the car’s phone charger. Her unassuming, all-round efficiency is beginning to get up my nose. She, however, is pleased at this resurgence – who wouldn’t be? Normal service seems to be being resumed. A phone would actually be quite useful, though hers doesn’t look like a fancy one. No wifi or touchscreen.

I’ve got a message! She tap-taps eagerly; maybe it is a word from beyond the grave from Eddie, sent before he died, hovering in the ether all this time – how long? Weeks? No, months. Messages can do that.

I don’t ask who it’s from. I’m not that kind of woman. But she tells me anyway. That’s the kind she is.

It says ‘your device is not recognised’, she says, in a puzzled way.

Fear grips me.

Check your contacts.

She does, and her face drops. Her voice is a shocked whisper.

My whole address book’s been wiped. It’s totally empty. I haven’t sent or received anything for ages, so how could they hack into my phone and delete my whole address book?

Oh, they have ways.

For a minute I think she will open the window and throw the phone out. She opens her window – but then her practical side wins.

Maybe there’s a way I can get it registered?

Yeah, of course there is. Go into any police station and tell them everything about yourself, and in return they’ll let you send a few hacked messages to other idiots on their national database. Great idea. Now, switch it off. Please.

You’re so cynical, she says, putting the switched-off phone in the glove compartment.

I’m so right, I flash back, and she suddenly crumples; her face relaxes, and whatever it was that the adrenalin of last night has compacted, is now billowing into a silent, mighty mushroom cloud of despair. We glance behind us. Kyra is peacefully asleep. Her sleeping moments will be the only brief intervals when we can allow our personalities to parade their natural selves – miserable, needy, terrified, spineless – of course, we will also manifest those attractive qualities when she is awake, but always, I devoutly hope, cloaked by a merry veneer of adult adequacy that has seemed enough to fool her, so far. Our individual memories are nothing to do with her, nor hers with us. Yet here we are, depending on her to provide us with optimism, and a simulacrum of family. Let’s hope the kid is up to the task.

Sylvia jack-knifes forward; her spine won’t hold her up. She is moaning softly, and I stop the car, not bothering to check the rear view mirror – who would be there?

They all died, I make out, as she muffles her mouth with both hands, so as not to wake our mascot. It was okay when I thought I was going to . . . join them . . . all I wanted was to be with them, that was how I could cope, but I had to watch them . . . die, and I’m still here . . .

Time passes. I imagine I am dragging luxuriously on a tobacco-rich spliff. Drawing with teasing slowness that sweet, acridly hot smoke deep into my – it’s not helping.

I let my hand rest awkwardly on her right shoulder. It’s as stiff as an ironing board. Five kids, she had to watch sicken and die, and Eddie too. Did she bury them, alone? Who died first? How do you dig six graves deep enough?

What a dam her emotions have finally burst through. All the time since Kyra and I first met her in Southwold she had been pretending to be cheerful and capable, when in fact there was an orphan inside her, crying endlessly.

I’m hopeless at this girly stuff, always was; I want to run a mile. I wait until she has tidily blown her nose, then start the car again, and we lurch forward with our cargo of strangled emotions.

Most women in my place would naturally, I guess, empathise, start crying and sharing their own similar experiences – and these days, we’ve all got them, those raw griefs and losses and vivid images of awfulness. But my emotions don’t work like that, even though recent experience has taught me that some of the feelings common to humanity lurk behind the brightly painted puppet booth of my public presentation. Oh God, it gets worse – I begin to feel irritated with her. She’s now crying so monotonously that I can’t concentrate on driving, and sitting next to someone crying is, after a very short time, maddeningly boring. I hope Kyra might wake up and entertain us back to equilibrium, but she lets me down – she is snoring comfortably on a pillow of cheese and onion crisps, the aroma of which is also boring, but in another, less bearable way. Those crisps, I muse, were made in the old world, in a factory powered by electricity, using machines to slice the spuds delivered in industrial quantities into a vat of boiling oil . . .

Sylvia suddenly sniffs herself into silence. She says sorry in a small voice. I tell her she doesn’t have to be sorry, but she can tell I’m being insincere.

What are you thinking about? she asks, trying for an upbeat camaraderie.

Boiling oil.

If only there was a really bad Radio 4 play on the radio. If only we had some C.D.s to distract us. If only this reality was not actual, but a dream from which we could both wake up.

Come on, girl, I say, let’s try and recapture that swashbuckling mood we set off in. We’ve escaped from Southwold and the soldiers.

But we can’t escape from the past, drones Sylvia, bringing me for the second time to a fraction away from slapping her.

Is that why you didn’t bring any C.D.s with you?

Sylvia then surprises me. (Hooray for that.)

I don’t like music in cars, and Eddie wasn’t bothered.

"You don’t like music? How can you say that?"

In cars. I don’t like having my thoughts hijacked by other people’s words when I’m travelling.

This, I abruptly realise, is but one of the reasons why, if I had been a man, I couldn’t have contemplated marriage with this woman, not if she was the last person in the world.

What about singing, in cars?

Yes, we liked songs. Songs are okay. But there’s no one to hear them now.

She’s going back into meltdown, and I inject some false strictness into my voice.

There’s me and Kyra. We love songs, and yes, they remind us of dead people, but so does everything. Tell me a song you used to sing.

Sylvia shakes her head mutinously. Good, because twelve verses of The Wheels on the Bus might well reduce me to tears, and they would not be tears of loving nostalgia.

I need a slash, I say, hoping this will shock her back into capable parental mode. It was this brusque manliness that served me so well in my previous bachelor existence. I pull over and get out.

It is beginning to spit little rainy daggers, and the wind is icy.

Sylvia hops out too, and sniffs the air. We have left Suffolk now, and are in the flatlands of Cambridgeshire, heading for Junction 31 to merge, painlessly and efficiently, into the A14, looking for The Midlands (as if they are one flat palette, a blob of geography which you enter and then leave as if exiting from a room), The North (even more intimidating), and Huntingdon, which for the only time in its life is linked, like a minor Shakespearian lord, with the greater barons – rather to its detriment, I should imagine when you get there. (I’ve actually never been to Huntingdon.)

She climbs over a fence to squat where I can’t see her. I crouch openly by the roadside, and it serves me right when a vehicle suddenly looms up, its headlights cruelly highlighting my unstoppable flow, and screeches to a halt. (Okay, we seem to have got the Radio 4 play, but for real. Wishes, as any fairy tale will tell you, are booby traps).

Out of an army-type Land Rover two soldiers emerge, with man-sized guns, looking as mean as only pimply nineteen-year-olds with brutally-shaven heads can look. They don’t wait for me to finish my embarrassing dribble, but stand, legs apart, one on either side of me, looking down and shouting I.D.! Where’s your I.D.?

My trickle finally stops, and I rise ponderously to my full height, pulling up my trousers and wondering how to proceed. Some basic grasp of psychology might once have stood me in good stead, but in these times of flux, even a sound theoretical grounding might avail me naught. I decide to go for village idiot mode, and smile inanely at the shortest, who is a good six inches shorter than his mate, and indeed, than me.

No one’s asked for any I.D.

Well, we are now.

Then you’ll have to give us some. Where we’ve come from, they don’t bother about I.D.s.

Which is?

Sylvia appears, looking tidy and accommodating.

You don’t want to waste your time with us, we’re only passing through, she suggests, making her voice sound as boring as possible.

The short-arse soldier, who has a bad case of acne, raises his rifle – but not to shoot either of us; he’s drawing a bead on the front offside tyre of our van, while for some ridiculous reason I raise my hands. Interesting; that’s the first time I’ve done