cO-WINNER OF THE 2025 LEWIS EDWARDS MEMORIAL PRIZE

 

 

 

BONE SMASH THEORY

 

 

Before anyone knew about the fire, the photos, and that business with the Tamry girl, Rex decided to give me an education on sex.

‘The trick,’ he said, leaning on the bus shelter, ‘is you have to hate them, just a little. You know?’

I was thirteen; I didn’t know. ‘Right,’ I said.

Rex wasn’t done. ‘If you don’t, they’ll lose interest, or say you’re bad at it. They get funny like that.’

The schools were out for half term, and it was raining, the bars and clubs spilling out into that heat, red lights shining in puddles and wing mirrors. Rex pointed across the street, where the Kierney sisters walked, moving past us in a blur of bleach blonde and lavender spray. ‘Just look at them,’ he said. ‘Mental.’

I stared at Rex. He had pale wrists, red knuckles, and a strange, bloated look about him. His hair was thinning, and was combed over the rest of his head, revealing slits of pinkish skull. I felt sorry for him, in the same way I felt sorry for pageant girls, or broken vending machines, beeping out sad messages over and over in the dark.

‘Well, anyway.’ Rex scratched his cheek, as though he had found a bit of lint there. ‘Are you in high school?’

‘Yeah. Started third year last month.’

He nodded. I was surprised that he didn’t follow this up with something about the girls in my class, Nella Johnson, or Daniella Smith. But he just smiled, and put his hand in his pocket. The rain was heavy by then, and thick, too, hitting the top of the glass.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘It’s obviously not coming, so. I’ll be off.’

It took several rain-soaked minutes, wondering what I had said to scare him off, before I realised what Rex had meant: that there would be no X21 bus that evening, and I would have to leave, thinking of his strange brown coat, and the pustule at the end of his tongue, on the walk back to Amstel Street.

 

My education, as Rex called it — ‘this is your education, now’— hadn’t finished. He had plenty to tell me, tales of inflated dolls, backseat taxi rides, and salty liquid running down his mouth. An eccentric in most things, from his unshaven chin, to his obsession with rococo style architecture, he liked imperfect women, women with bent noses, absent eyebrows, and lopsided breasts. ‘It’s not about the ones in the magazines, David,’ he’d say, as though I had been thinking of buying a subscription to playboy, and he was intent on saving me the two dollars. ‘It’s about the strange beauties.’

His justification: the ugly ones had more to prove, and were better at sex generally. ‘And you don’t want to be bothering yourself with the above averages,’ he added, after talking about Eilis Danvers, a woman with an ‘anteface’, a lisp, and a charge of manslaughter, for most of the evening.

By then, I’d graduated out of our chance-meetings, seeing him at the edge of Queen’s Park, or at the bar, waiting for Rex to order his gin under blue LED lights.

Standing over the pub table, his palms stuck to the wood, he sighed. ‘Eilis was a nice kid, in the end.’ Rex pressed his glass to his forehead, creating a slick rim of damp.

‘What’s she doing now?’

‘In London, or something, I don’t know. You interested?’

‘Maybe.’

He laughed, then, at the insanity of me (fourteen, striped polo, purplish acne around the jaw) expressing any kind of interest in a female. ‘Imagine that,’ he said.

There was no more talk of Eilis: she had, like all the women, slid down into some unknown bog, getting muddied, nostrils crusted over in the dirt, the more men they went with, and the ‘wider’ they became. It didn’t make sense, even then, that each woman he slept with — Eilis, Nancy, Jana, Lucy — was hated afterwards, as though he knew, on some level, that touching him would contaminate them. And perhaps I’m giving myself too much credit, given everything, but I remember thinking that, in order for Rex to fuck women, they would also have to let him fuck them.

Rex moved closer, his breath warm, like a dog’s. ‘Did you hear me?’

‘Not really.’

I’d been thinking about this mathematical impossibility, Rex’s bad sum (sex = good, women who want sex = bad), as he wittered on, bathing in the green exit sign, and the sound of glasses from the table beside us. I watched Rex’s legs swing in the air, listing all the things I needed to give up, the swingsets and metallic sunscreen and choc-ices in the summer. When Rex put his glass down, I drank from it, and smiled. If he was this bad, and still got women, then I’d be absolutely fine.

‘Anyway.’ Rex nodded. ‘Keep an eye out for the weird ones.’

‘Won’t they mind you calling them that?’

‘Calling them what?’

‘Weird.’

‘The right one won’t mind.’

From the other table, a girl with a ponytail was laughing, exposing little rows of delicate teeth. Though she was beautiful, and had a small nose, which turned upwards, like a pug’s snout, he didn’t look at her once.

Rex had his ‘tastes’ — and she obviously wasn’t included in them. His ‘tastes’ involved skin-tight tank tops, any clothing involving lace, and Swedes. ‘They’re like Gods, David, like Gods,’ he said.

I remember thinking that there must’ve been some kind of mistake: I’d tried a Swede once, during one of my mother’s adventurous cooking streaks, and had been appalled, at what was a very fancy, and really quite disgusting, kind of carrot. But I nodded anyway, and Rex patted the top of my head, and said that I’d done a good job: I was learning the trade already.

 

/

 

 

Rex was a man without any origins, one of those people who come straight from the earth, like an alien, or a ghost. Even his name – Rex – was strange. It might have been his surname, or his first name– he never said. His accent was traceless, vowels all straight and clipped, as though he had learned to speak from old television broadcasts, or had one of those elocution corks put in his mouth, reciting, ‘How Now Brown Cow’ until his eyes watered. He might have camped out in the ruins on Church Rd, or lived in the beige house by the school, or in the green tent outside the Boardsmith Tescos. It didn’t matter: I always knew that, come seven o’clock, he’d be by the bar, sat under the poster of the Norfolk Broads with the usual smile on his face.

By the time the parish church had started their Christmas collection, I’d tried rum and coke, vodka, IPAs, guiness, and mojitos. I knew how to do a three-card trick, flicking out the Queen of Hearts from any woman’s ear. And by January, I knew Irish folk songs, the age Rex had learned to cycle (seventeen, his uncle’s road bike), and I had been rewarded with gonnorea and chlamydia, for my troubles. I could even speak a little Spanish, talk about Rembrandt, and Dr Tulp’s anatomy class — to catch the ‘more intellectual females’ out there. We were chameleons, Rex and I, adapting to whatever mould the women gave us.

That evening, Rex had something for me. ‘It’s just a little something,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s nothing much.’

He looked strangely vulnerable— there was a little red above his cheekbones, and his hair, already so thin at his crown, pricked at his left eye. Rex slid a package over the table, the brown paper catching on the wood, collecting pork scratching fluff.

‘Happy birthday,’ he said.

I hadn’t told him about it— I hadn’t told anybody, really. The only celebration that day, was a pair of football socks from my mother, and a blue WKD by the bike racks.

I opened the present, smoothing out the paper, with all its wrinkles, like an old woman’s skin, onto my lap. The box was large, cartoonish, with an image of a young boy, one arm raised in the air. ‘ONE PERSON TABLE TENNIS.’

I thanked Rex, while he looked at his shoes. It was funny – I had managed to embarrass him, without doing anything at all. ‘Thanks again,’ I said.

 

Opposite us, the girl with the ponytail was back. She had dyed the ends of her hair pink, which made her look ridiculous, sickly, and like a toddler. She made a little pointing gesture with her right hand, looked at our table, and laughed. Quick flash of teeth, quick canine laugh.

‘Don’t bother with her.’ Rex was frowning. It made him look far older, all the wrinkles collecting at his chin, twisting his face into a raisin. ‘It’s your birthday. Just enjoy it.’

It was time for a classic Rex-monologue. I could sense it coming; it was in the tight puckering of his lips, the stretching of his back, the movement of his head, towards the light. I knew what he was going to say: the girl was a bitch, acting on her inferiority, and the knowledge that this, ‘the sweet 20 days’, were fading at last, and that all the nights after this one, would be filled with large, puckering fat around the thighs, slowing metabolism, and a dried up vagina, turned husky and wrinkled with disuse.

I had already started to smile, holding the box, when Rex told me that he had a son. ‘Thomas,’ he said. ‘His name’s Thomas. He lives down in Southampton, and his mother says he’s doing well, apparently,  just got promoted to assistant manager.’

The girl was still laughing, nudging her friend with a pointed, ashy, elbow.

‘What a beautiful boy he was. Got these little blue socks for him the day he was born, and everything. Still got them in a drawer somewhere.’

The girl’s pink strands fell into her mouth as she laughed, her mouth opening too wide, all dark and wet.

‘Such a nice boy,’ Rex continued, pawing at his face, ‘really really lovely. And I’m not allowed to see him. Not allowed at all. Can you believe it?’

I was too busy looking at the girl — Tamry, I remembered, her name was Tamry, she had been in the year above — while Rex kept going: Can you believe? Can you believe?

 

I stood up, leaving the paper at my feet, walking behind the girl. She moved through the swinging bar doors, not looking behind her, not looking up from her phone, where an animated cat danced, ringing out from her tinny speakers.

She kept the video on, as she reached into her trouser pocket for a cigarette. Very quickly, I had become like Rex — she couldn’t even see me, I was being ridiculed, made more of a myth, than a real person. She blinked. ‘Alright?’

‘You were laughing.’

‘What?’

‘In there, earlier. You were.’

Her pink hair caught the sunlight, little streaks of yellow poking in through the gaps. ‘What are you on about? I’m just out for a smoke.’

She had a triangular face, though it had somehow become inverted, making her chin thick, and her forehead pointed. It felt wrong, at odds with nature. When I told her this, she just laughed again, turning the end of the cigarette with her forefinger.

It was only later, after she lay flat on her front, scalp exposed to the February air, that I realised why the back of her head was like that: it was concave, turned inwards — she hadn’t been picked up enough as a baby. The head can get like that, you know. Rex told me all about it.

May 7, 2025

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