‘CATS HAVE TWO HUNDRED AND forty-four bones, thirty-eight more than humans, and their skeletons are constructed for agility and almost supernatural feats of acrobatics,’ said Ava to her best friend, John Eades. ‘They have free-floating clavicles and collapsible bodies so they can leap, bound, fall and fit into narrow spaces, as if they are poured oil.’
They were at the rear of the apartment block and at Ava’s feet was a dead cat.
When Ava was in full flow, John could listen to her talk all day, but today he just wanted to talk about films and not deceased felines. ‘He’s a big tom in his prime, a rare silver mackerel tabby,’ Ava continued and peered closer. ‘See how his tongue is tinged grey at the edges? The papillae on its surface are dry white hooks when they’re dead.’ John pretended to see but he wasn’t really looking. He supposed he was thankful it wasn’t yet rotting. ‘It probably died in the early hours,’ Ava added.
In her crisp-packet gloves, because litter was everywhere and crisp packets made the best disposable gloves, she pushed a finger against its ‘armpit’. ‘There’s no lingering warmth. It’s in the latter throes of rigor mortis and there’s an absence of flies, but then it is a rainy day and any self-respecting green bottle would have the good sense to stay inside!’ She turned to John to see if he got her little joke. He’d got her little joke just fine, but he was struggling to find humour in this situation. The cat lay on its side, facing the wall, shattered like a Bull Ring toffee slab.
‘I don’t like the way it looks in this spot at the bottom of this building,’ said Ava.
John didn’t like standing in full view of someone’s bedroom window as they were.
‘Christ-on-a-bike, Ava, we’ll be seen,’ he said.
‘Ssh then! Crouch down between the windows. It’s a blind spot,’ said Ava, without looking at him.
John did as she said, and glad he could now see Ava’s face. He was just happy to look at her sometimes. It helped that she didn’t know she was pretty. ‘Ava, can’t we just carry on talking about Gregory’s Girl? Can we leave dead things alone just for today, please?’ They’d been happily chatting about the film until her unerring death radar had helped her discover the cat.
‘We will, just . . . not yet,’ said Ava. She was totally focused on the cat now, and her hands travelled over its form as gently and nimbly as a vet’s. Her eyes glittered with unshed tears as she stroked the animal as if it was still alive. John knew all about her roadkill body farm, as he knew a myriad other secrets, but that was all right because she knew all of his too. John was a year older than Ava, in the familiar throes of senior school, but at Waseley Secondary not Colmers Farm. He wished she’d come to his school. She would already have a gang of mates to protect her, not like at Colmers Farm where she was hunted by bullies every day.
John had met Ava when she was eight and he was nine. His mother, Carol, ran her own mail order business for bespoke baby clothes, and was roundish, blondish and, to John, an only child, she was sensational.
Carol encouraged John’s friendship with Ava because, he thought, she liked Ava’s influence on him. Ava was invited to the house any time she wanted. And it wasn’t totally unselfish: his mom would talk to her for hours about so many things. Even his granddad thought she was ‘glorious’ and treated her like another grandchild. Ava had met John’s school friends, and they neither knew she was being bullied nor cared that she was poor. They’d grown used to the fact she was a girl and liked her because she was funny and interested in seriously disgusting stuff. Little Adam Booth idolised her and, when she wasn’t around, would always ask when she was going to be.
And John didn’t like Ava’s mother because she always seemed to be snapping or sulking. And he loathed Trevor.
John watched Ava’s hands move over the cat again. ‘It feels like a fluffy bag of knitting needles,’ she said. ‘Some of these breaks are brutal, not possibly just from a fall – even a great fall. Look how some of the bones protrude, splitting the skin and jutting forth as bloodied spines.’ John didn’t look – her description was enough. ‘And see how a clear fluid has congealed in its ears, into the Henry’s pockets,’ she added. ‘A fractured skull?’
Ava looked right, then left, then up.
‘It fell,’ she said. ‘Or . . . it was chucked.’
‘Holy-Christ-on-a-bike!’ said John too loudly, and slapped his hand to his mouth.
Ava growled. ‘It isn’t right.’
‘It was likely accidental, Aves. Come on, he must’ve jumped. He must’ve made a mistake and then bang, he’s gone.’
‘Nobody in this block has a cat like this,’ said Ava. ‘Nobody.’
‘You don’t know that a hundred per cent, said John. ‘You aren’t the . . . Cat KGB. It could be a . . . new cat.’
‘I know all the pets in this block and nobody owns a superstar cat like this one,’ said Ava.
‘He could be a stray?’ John suggested.
‘He isn’t a stray, John, he’s in spectacular nick. I bet he’s even had his injections.’ She checked between the cat’s hind legs. ‘And he’s been neutered, so he’s definitely loved.’
John bit his lip. ‘D’you think he fell off a balcony . . . ?’
‘“Fell off”? Cats don’t just fall off, John! No, he fell straight down.’ They looked up at the apartment block. There were no open windows, no shocked faces peering down. ‘I think from the roof. If he’d fallen from a balcony, he’d have bounced off a railing and landed on one of the other balconies. Or bounced off and landed on the grass opposite the balconies. If he’d fallen off a balcony and lived, you’d see drag marks in the gravel to this spot because he’s a big, heavy cat. But there’re no drag marks – he died on impact. It was a graveyard smash.’
‘I know cats can get everywhere, but the roof?’
‘Somebody must have taken him there.’
‘But it’s locked! They’d have to get a key!’
‘Keys aren’t unicorns, John. Grown-ups can get keys.’ Ava pointed to the roof. ‘They took the cat up there then they chucked him over on purpose – to see.’ She was earnest as she looked at him. ‘Imagine how scared the cat must’ve been, held aloft in the dark over the edge, in so much pain. Then, for one tiny moment, airborne and free like the birds he’d chased. Flight before final impact.’ John thought she should write books when she was older. She had a turn of phrase that formed pictures in his head. It was a pity they could be pictures he really didn’t want in his head.
Ava crouched beside the cat and bent its limbs. John heard a cracking sound, and he winced. She did it again.
‘Stop doing that, Aves, it sounds rank, man.’
‘Cats don’t always land on their feet. They can still get injured or die if they fall from a building, especially if they can’t engage their righting reflex. But this cat didn’t stand a chance. Somebody deliberately snapped the bones in his legs like they were pencils then chucked him over.’
‘“To see”, you said,’ said John. ‘To see what?’
Ava’s gaze was serene. ‘To see what it felt like to kill something maybe. To see if they could get away with it.’
John felt sick. Bad people do bad things, the news said so, and a dead boy and a cat crippled on purpose proved it.
What if they’re still around?
Once, Ava had showed John how eating grass turned your spit green, and then how to shoot the goo through the gaps in your front teeth like venom. She’d taught him how to draw a Tiger tank and a motorbike using basic shapes. She voiced hilarious impersonations of David Bowie singing nursery rhymes, or of John Lennon asking banal questions. And she could mimic all sorts of things – animal sounds, trains, machine guns, accents.. And all of her accents came with complete characters. She’d make words up and pretend they were real, and use them against him until he checked in a dictionary and found they weren’t there. She had a labyrinthine mind, an imagination that astounded, and she possessed an animalistic quality which had John hooked. But she knew too much: she had instincts and intuitions that most grown-ups lacked and, in this moment, her knowing made him fluttery in the pit of his belly.
‘Let’s bury him.’ Ava lifted the cat into her arms and, with John by her side, they made their way to the laburnum bushes. Ava retrieved the garden trowel she’d nicked from Trevor’s brother and began digging a trench. She handed John a discarded length of wood and together they dug deeper.
John regarded Ava steadily.
‘Aren’t you going to body-farm the cat?’ he asked.
Ava sighed. ‘No. Let him rest now.’
‘What if the cat’s owner is looking for him?’ asked John. ‘Wouldn’t they want to know where he is?’
Ava stroked the cat’s head before placing him into his final resting place.
‘I think it best they never know, and as long as we know he’s safe, that’s all that matters.’ Ava looked at him – or through him, beyond him. It was sometimes like sharing space with a feral creature.
‘Ava?’ John said. ‘Did you find Mickey Grant’s body?’
‘Yes,’ said Ava instantly.
‘I’m not going to ask why you were out at two o’clock in the morning, Aves.’
‘You know why, you flump. I was there to check on the fox.’
The fox! She’d found him just before he’d gone on holiday. Having never observed a subject at night, she’d chosen the worst night to do so. Bloody typical Ava!
‘I recognised Mrs Poshy-Snob when I heard her on the radio,’ said John.
Her gaze was piercing but Ava was calm. ‘Did you tell anyone?’
‘No,’ said John.
‘Not even your mom?’
‘No,’ said John. ‘Ava, you have to tell a grown-up because—’
‘Why do I have to?’ Ava was obviously pissed off now. ‘If I tell a grown-up, I’d have to explain what I was doing out there at night, and they’d ask a billion questions about me and not about Mickey. They’ve got nothing else; so suddenly it’s about what I did, even though what I did actually helped them out. Mom would be told and then I’d have to deal with the fallout from her, so I’d be exiled to Nazareth House.’ Nazareth House was the huge Victorian children’s home run by nuns, and it was bang opposite the Austin Works. Some parents threatened to send their kids there if they misbehaved. ‘Instead, nothing has happened to me, has it?’ Ava used her hands expressively when she was on a rant. ‘Mickey’s been found and now the police are investigating.’
‘But weren’t you scared?’ John whispered. ‘It must’ve done . . . something to you.’ He’d have been terrified. Dead humans were vastly higher on the terror scale than dead cats.
‘No. I wasn’t scared, and it hasn’t done something to me.’
‘No nightmares?’
‘No, John.’
And John believed her. Ava could do that: separate parts of her life and feelings as if none bore any relation to the others. She dealt with her world in her own time in her own way. ‘Weren’t you afraid the killer was still around?’
‘There was nobody there but me,’ said Ava.
John had had mixed feelings on hearing Mickey’s body had been found. Years ago, Mickey and a couple of his friends had shoved John and Little Adam against the walls of the underpass. John had kicked Mickey’s legs, which made Mickey angry enough to smack John in the gob so hard it made his lip bleed. They then spat in Little Adam’s hair and mushed it in. For weeks after, Little Adam was too scared to leave the house. John was bigger and stronger now, and would have loved for Mickey to try it on again, only this time in a proper fight. With Mickey dead, he’d never be able to beat seven shades of shit out of him. He supposed being dead meant Mickey had paid the ultimate price for being a wanker and that price was too high.
‘Mickey was a tosser, Aves.’
‘I’m glad he’s gone,’ said Ava. John breathed a sigh of relief, grateful he wasn’t alone in feeling guilty for not feeling guilty. ‘But the way he died wasn’t right because somebody killed a kid and that puts all kids in danger, like you and my sisters . . . ’ And you, thought John. You’re a kid yourself, Aves – don’t forget.
Their secret was gargantuan. It loomed above them both, greater than the building and the Quarry, the most serious thing to ever have happened to Ava, and now John too because he was part of it whether he liked it or not. It was scary and exciting, an adventure – but also a horror story. Ava was part of the investigation and nobody else knew it but him.
Ava patted the earth, folded her hand into a makeshift paw, placed it on the low mound of grave and murmured The Rabbit’s Prayer. John tilted his head and said amen at the end, which made her smile.
‘Did you say the prayer for Mickey?’ John asked.
‘Yes,’ said Ava.
There was a loud whooshing sound from the road. Both children were obscured from view as Nathaniel Marlowe cruised past, hands-free, on War Horse. It was the name Ava gave Nathaniel’s bike – a heavy black Raleigh Roadster modified with chunky wheels, a sturdy trailer full of bricks and tools at its rear. Marlowe whistled The Dam Busters theme under the hood of his Quadrophenia coat, cool as anything. Riding a bike hands-free was a skill Ava envied. But she’d only recently learned how to ride a bike, and that was only because John had taught her how on Winston, his orange Chopper. No-hands riding would have to wait.
Marlowe didn’t see them as he sailed by, his arms outspread, the tails of his military coat flapping like wings behind him as he descended the hill and out of sight. As fearless as all teenage boys seemed to be.
‘What if they find out Mrs Poshy-Snob was you?’ said John as they got up and dusted dirt from their clothes and knees.
‘How can they find out unless you or I tell them?’
John said nothing.
Ava told him about the footprint cast, and the telephone call she’d made to the investigation team yesterday.
‘You’ve got steel bollocks, Aves,’ John said with admiration. It struck him for the millionth time that the reason other kids were cruel to her was because they were afraid of her. Ava, perhaps bemused at his awe, shrugged.
‘I’m chuffed you recognised Mrs Poshy-Snob,’ she said with a smile. ‘I knew you would.’