The Bone Dragon (6 page)

‘No nightmares,’ I say, putting some toast on.

‘That’s wonderful, darling. Maybe with your ribs getting better you’ll start sleeping soundly more often.’

‘Maybe.’

Amy doesn’t tell me to think positively, but she smiles hopefully. ‘Well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed,’ she says.

I think about night after night of uninterrupted sleep. Of Dragon-dreams, vivid and strange. Of waking and feeling calm and rested rather than as if I have been trapped, struggling desperately in the darkness all night long.

I should be glad that we’re studying
Hamlet
for our English GCSE, but I’m not. It’s like sand under my skin. Something about it bothers me.

‘You look puzzled, Evie,’ Ms Winters says.

‘Hm?’ I say stupidly, then realise I must have been pulling faces as I itch at the prickly feeling the play gives me. ‘Oh. No. Just thinking.’

Someone – Sonny Rawlins probably – makes a rude noise at the back of the class.

Ms Winters ignores it. ‘Anything good?’ she asks. She’s not being mean: she thinks it’s as weird as I do that I just can’t seem to get my head around the play. We’ve even stopped working on it in our little after-school sessions and swapped to
The Tempest
instead.

We’re still doing our ‘extra classes’ even though I’m back at school and up to date with everything. When Ms Winters suggested we keep going, she phrased it in terms of it not being right for me to be bored in English when I love to read so much. But we both know
that
part of things is just a reward for my putting up with the not-counselling aspect of her visits.

‘It’s . . . I’m just . . . I’m really fed up about how much Hamlet whines about everything,’ I say, and am both surprised and pleased when a whole bunch of the class laugh. ‘I mean, I get that he’s . . . he’s frustrated and angry and that he feels helpless. But why does he have to whinge about it so much? I mean, either he’s willing to make sacrifices to get revenge for his father or he isn’t, right? Why doesn’t he just make a decision instead of mucking around so much?’

Ms Winters smiles. ‘What does everyone else think?’ she asks.

Everyone else is busy looking elsewhere, thinking nothing at all, at least about Hamlet. I prop my chin on my hand and let my gaze drift towards the windows.

For once, English drags by. When the bell goes, Lynne and Phee are out of their seats before I’ve even raised my head. I trail after them as they chatter on about some TV series I don’t like, lamenting the lack of boys worth snogging in real life apart from sixth-formers, who aren’t interested in Year 10s. Lynne laughs as Phee gesticulates energetically, her face alive with intent. They link arms: a careless, automatic gesture.

I slow, watching them laugh and jostle their way down the corridor, ploughing through the ranks.

Phee and Lynne were best friends for over a year before I started here and our form teacher asked them to look after me. Sometimes I wonder if that’s all our friendship is: my tagging along after them and them feeling a bit sorry for me. I mean, I know they like me – it’s not like I have any weird idea that they hate me and just pretend not to – but sometimes I think they’d be at least as happy without me always turning their pair into a trio. They’re not the sort of people who’d tell me to push off and leave them alone just because they felt they could take or leave my company, but who wants to be tolerated, however nicely?

Most of the time, I try not to worry about it too much but recently, with all that’s happened, I can’t help feeling that gaps are opening up and showing how it was all along: that I’m not really wanted. That I don’t really fit. That there’s Phee and Lynne, and me somewhere on the outside, following along after them.

They’re already queuing outside the science labs when I finally get there. They’ve got their heads pressed together, making plans for the evening.

‘Can I come too?’ I ask.

They both blink at me in surprise. I watch their eyes.

‘But we’re going to do a season one marathon,’ Lynne says.

‘We didn’t think you’d want to,’ adds Phee. ‘But you’re welcome if you fancy it.’ She looks to Lynne and I try to translate what passes between them.

Lynne shrugs, then grins. ‘So, does this mean you’re finally ready to be inducted into the fan club?’

‘Are we going to find out you’ve been sneakily watching by yourself? Will you know all the trivia in the special features?’ Phee adds, laughing.

And I know that they’re doing their best to make sure I don’t think they’re trying to exclude me, but perhaps that’s just because their parents have told them to be extra nice to me . . . But even if it’s not, the united front, minds-in-concert thing they’re doing is making all the unease that welled up in me during English a thousand times worse. As we’re called into class, I trail after them wretchedly, wishing I could just go home and hide under my bed.

Instead, I reach into my bag and take out the pot with the Dragon in it and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until I’m afraid the plastic will shatter as I will myself to believe that last night’s Dragon-dream is just the first of many: that when I ‘wake’ tonight, the Dragon will be there watching me, waiting to greet me. 

‘Amy says you’re still adamant that you don’t want to visit Fiona’s grave,’ Ms Winters says out of the blue, as we pore over Waterhouse’s painting of Miranda and the Tempest.

Pressing down on the book’s spine to flatten the pages, I lean closer to the picture, refusing to look up.

Amy thinks that because she needs to visit Adam’s gravestone, and Aunt Minnie’s and Grandad Peter’s and Nanna Florrie’s, that it’s the same for me and Fiona. But it’s not. It’s not the same thing at all.

‘She’s dead,’ I say. ‘She’s buried. There’s a grave. End of story.’

‘Closure isn’t that simple, Evie.’

I think of all sorts of things to say to that but manage to keep my mouth shut.

‘Is there anything you
do
want to talk about?’ Ms Winters asks when she sees that I’m not prepared to cooperate on the subject of visits to gravestones.

I shrug again. Talking about my frustrations over all the things I’ve missed at school – all the in-jokes I don’t understand, all the memories I can’t share – isn’t going to make me feel any better about it. Besides, what can Ms Winters say? I’ll get better. I’ll catch up and there will be newer things that I am part of. It’s just a matter of waiting. In the meantime I’m going to watch lots of TV that bores me to tears so that I’m no more out of the loop than I can help.

But before I can direct her attention back to the book, Ms Winters is asking, ‘Do you have any good memories of Fiona you could tell me about?’

I hold very still while I think about how to deal with this. Only for a few seconds of course: any longer and I know Ms Winters will never let it drop. Oh, she might for today, but she’ll come back to it. She’ll keep coming back to it. I fix her with my most unpleasant stare and heave a grumpy, petulant sigh as if the whole thing is just an irritation.

But Ms Winters meets my stare and returns it.

I slump back into the armchair and look away. I want to ask how anyone could possibly think I associate anything good with Fiona . . . but there is a picture of our old garden path in my mind, of the crooked concrete slabs leading to the blue back door and the dandelion by the mat.

‘My old school had a half day once. I don’t remember why,’ I find myself saying. ‘I thought for a while that no one was home, so I let myself in with the key they probably still keep under the petunia pot by the back door . . . And Fiona was standing there in the kitchen, with an apron on, making a cake.
They
were both out. I don’t know why. But it was just us, in the kitchen, making cake. We ate the whole thing, sitting at the kitchen table and playing games. It was sunny. I remember the kitchen all lit up with sunlight and Mum’s . . . Fiona’s hair glowing like copper and gold.’

Outside our window, the day is grey and drizzly.

‘That was before I knew she was sick. Before . . . before,’ I say firmly, closing down that avenue of discussion. ‘I think we hadn’t lived there very long yet,’ I offer instead.

‘Was it like that with Fiona and your dad, before you went to live with your . . . her parents?’ Ms Winters prompts, though she has the sense not to look at me as she says it, fixing her eyes on Miranda instead.

I shrug, going for nonchalant. ‘I don’t remember,’ I lie. ‘I just remember that I was really happy that day in the kitchen. And I hadn’t been. Neither of us had been. That day in the kitchen, when we heard the front door open, Fiona started to cry. Then she started washing up. Things from the draining board. Clean things.’

For a moment, hope rises that I’ve said enough, but Ms Winters has her next question all lined up: ‘Why do you think Fiona took you to live with her parents after your father died?’

I sigh inwardly. I know the only way to escape the topic is to go with it just enough for her to think I’m not afraid to talk about it. ‘They probably told her to come home. Without Dad there to stop her, she probably didn’t even argue. Just went,’ I say shortly, hoping (against hope) that Ms Winters will decide not to push if I merely show annoyance. I turn my attention to a catch in my nail.

‘I know you don’t like thinking about it, Evie, but it’s important that you understand that they probably did the same things to Fiona when she was young.’

Clearly Ms Winters, like Amy and Paul, thinks I’ll feel sympathy for Fiona if I believe this. They don’t seem to understand that, if it’s true, then what Fiona did was even worse: if it’s true, then Fiona
knew
. Didn’t just close her eyes and ears so she could pretend nothing was happening. She knew. And she still just went into the kitchen, every time, and washed up the clean things from the draining board so she could pretend she wasn’t meant to be doing anything else – anything else in the world – but that.

‘Maybe Fiona was too frightened of her parents – had been frightened of them for far too long – to be able to stand up to them. I am not trying to excuse what she did,’ Ms Winters adds quickly, ‘but maybe it’ll help to understand it.’

I dig the nail of my index finger into the catch in my left thumb nail. I want to say that I understand everything I care to. Fiona was a coward. She went back and took me with her. Because with me there she was safe.

‘Do you think that perhaps Fiona let them persuade her to go back home when she found out about the cancer: when she knew she was going to keep getting sicker?’

The snag in my nail is proving stubborn. I work at it with my teeth to no avail, trying to ignore the fact that Amy has clearly told Ms Winters more about Fiona than I’d realised. Ms Winters just sits there, waiting patiently for me to answer.

‘What difference would that have made?’ I say eventually.

‘Maybe she was hoping . . .’

‘She knew what would happen,’ I snap then, before Ms Winters can continue. ‘She didn’t go so that there would be someone to look after me.’

‘But you do recognise that she was grieving for your father. People do strange things when they’re desperate, especially if they’re also ill.’

‘They told her to go and she went. That was it. She just did what they said. She always just did what they said.’ I shove my nail back into my mouth to stop myself saying any more. The rough edge catches on my tongue. I swallow away the ferrous bite of blood.

‘But she did marry your father, Evie,’ Ms Winters is saying. ‘Reading between the lines of what you’ve told me, that must have been very much against her parents’ wishes.’

‘It was Dad’s idea,’ I say as I return to digging my right thumb nail under the catch in the left. ‘He joked about it once, though I didn’t really understand it. How they ran away to get married, like she was a princess and he was a commoner. How Fiona looked over her shoulder the whole way to the registry office as if they were about to be chased down.’

‘Perhaps, by that point, she couldn’t believe that she would ever be able to escape her parents.’

‘She didn’t, did she?
He
rescued her.’ The blood on my tongue tastes like acid as I swallow it away, swallow it away.