The Bone Dragon Read online

  alexia casale

  First published in 2013

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This eBook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © Alexia Casale, 2013

  The right of Alexia Casale to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–29563–0

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Inserted Copyright

  Book starts

  Author’s Note

  About the author

  Book starts

  I rise up, towards the surface.

  Through velvet blue into grey dimness.

  Up towards the light.

  And sound starts to penetrate now. Low echoes, vibrating through the water.

  But I’m not ready to leave yet. I’m safe here, floating in the shadows. The pain is distant, belonging to the light and the warmth and the air.

  My hands scull uselessly, trying to cup the water: trying to hold myself down. It eludes my grasp, flowing between my fingers like silk. And still I rise.

  Beneath the surface now, I look up into daylight. A face appears above me, wide and distorted: pink with heat that can’t touch me here in the cool shadow of the water. Her mouth opens and words ripple across the surface, dim and uncertain.

  For a breath I rise, breaking the surface. I feel a tear slithering down, curving over my cheek. Sound echoes in my throat. I reach out, fumbling to grasp: her wrist is fat and warm. Another face appears, peering at me, bending down. Fingers close over my own. A hand pats mine and eagerly I grip back, finding purchase, then push away.

  I sink back under the water.

  The world becomes distant.

  The shadows are calm, unhurried. The darkness beckons me down.

  ‘Evie?’

  Amy’s voice. Soft and warm, like the blankets, like the bed.

  Amy, not Fiona.

  A sigh. My own. The air is hot and sharp with the smell of chemicals. My feet stir against the blankets, the sheets moving cool and stiff across my legs. And my fingers flex, tightening, loosening on cotton, starched and grainy.

  ‘Evie sweetheart?’

  My head turns towards her voice, towards the gentle fingers moving my hair away from my face. Amy.

  When I open my eyes it will be Amy, not Fiona. Not that blank face, those staring eyes. But love. And comfort. Safety.

  My lips are dry, my tongue fat and clumsy. I swallow, and feel the movement travel down my body. I become aware of my throat, my shoulders, sunk heavily into the pillow, my back into the mattress. My fingers twitch and my forehead spasms into a frown. Pain echoes dully around my ribs, into my spine, up my breastbone, catching my breath in my throat.

  ‘I think she’s in pain. Paul . . .’

  ‘I’ll find a nurse.’

  I open my eyes.

  ‘Evie sweetheart.’ Amy smiles down at me with relief and concern and tenderness: all the things a parent should feel. Everything a mother should show.

  Amy, not Fiona.

  Her hand finds mine, squeezes. ‘Are you OK? Are you in pain?’

  I sigh again. Again my breath catches. The pain pulls up from my chest and sharpens the room into focus. My arms, legs, are clumsy as I twist, trying to turn towards her. As if I am still dreaming, thoughts form lazily after my attention has drifted away to something new. How strange for my eyes to be out of step with my thoughts: to be recognising one thing while looking at another, I find a voice in my head comment wonderingly. I float along on this strange, slow time, registering sensations, unable to make anything of them, out of time with myself.

  ‘Dr Barstow says the operation went wonderfully. You’re going to be absolutely fine, darling. Better than ever,’ Amy is saying. Her forehead tightens in sympathy, lines drawing down into a fan of arrows above her nose.

  I blink and even this is slow, eyelids descending, rising again. The room sways dizzily away as if on a pendulum: swings, settles.

  I swallow again, tasting the air.

  The door opens before my thoughts have time to coalesce – something about the hospital room, how dry my mouth is, the lingering memory of an earlier awakening.

  ‘Hello, Evie.’ Dr Barstow is crisp and smiling: all sharp lines. No nonsense. No fuss. None of the horrible sympathy of the nurse before the operation, injecting both the anaesthetic and enough pity to drown me in.

  My gaze drifts to the frieze of teddy bears marching around the top of the walls, then to the multicoloured balloon print on the curtains. An echo of my initial indignation when the nurse first showed us into the room washes through me, but I am too weary to be irritated afresh. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll wish they had put me in a normal room, not a paediatrics one. I mean, I can’t be the only teenager they’ve ever had here.

  ‘. . . very well, though I’m sure it has set your parents’ minds at ease to see you awake again,’ Dr Barstow is saying, casting one of her tight little smiles in Amy and Paul’s direction. ‘Can you rate your pain for me, Evie?’

  I open my mouth to answer, but my tongue is too dry to work. I swallow then grimace.

  ‘How about a little bit of water?’ Dr Barstow asks as she bends to work the controls of the bed. I feel it shift beneath me, levering me slowly into a half-sitting position.

  Amy leans over with a glass of water, guiding the straw to my lips. ‘Better?’

  ‘Yah.’ On a breath, a thin quiver of sound. But Amy smiles anyway, her eyes liquid with relief and love. Paul leans in, smiling at me too. His hand moves to Amy’s shoulder. Hers automatically reaches up to cover it.

  ‘And the pain?’ Dr Barstow asks. ‘Where is it on that scale of one to ten we’ve talked about before, with ten being the worst pain you can imagine?’

  ‘Maybe . . . a six?’ It’s almost a whisper this time. And I feel the strange, dull pull radiating up and around my chest. My hand flutters over the blankets, touches the edge of a thick, padded dressing through the hospital gown.

  ‘Gently, gently.’ Amy catches my hand and moves it away.

  ‘I’ll order something extra to help get the pain under control,’ Dr Barstow says as she turns a page in my chart, adds a note. She closes the file, returning it to the foot of the bed, then glances at the monitor to the left.

  My eyes follow the cable down in a long loop towards the floor, back up, over the edge of the bed, to my finger, encased in a flat clip: oxygen, that’s what the nurse said it measured when she first attached it. I don’t like thinking about the IV line, the way it snakes across the back of my hand, the strange stiffness in my wrist from the drugs pumping through it.

  With an effort, I shift my drifting, lazy thoughts back to Dr Barstow. ‘If everything continues like this, your parents will probably be able to take you home the day after tomorrow,’ she is saying.

  Amy beams at me. ‘We’re all set up, aren’t we, Evie? Lots of nice new DVDs.’

  ‘We’ll need to get you up and walking first,’ Dr Barstow says but she is distracted, fishing for something in her pocket. ‘The nurses will be by to talk to you abo
ut that in a bit. But here, I thought you might like to keep this.’

  And she puts a little pot down on the wheelie table at the foot of the bed. I register clear plastic. A marigold-yellow lid. And something an odd mix of grey, white and pink sitting inside. Almost like a finger. Mine flex unconsciously in response. All accounted for.

  Amy and Paul are frowning. Bewildered. A little worried.

  ‘That is the rib that’s been giving you so much trouble. Well, a piece of it anyway.’

  Amy flinches, drawing back into herself, while Paul jerks oddly, his face twisting. I see his mouth open as if he is about to say something – something angry. Then he shrugs very slightly. His eyebrows and the corner of his lip twitch, but he closes his mouth, flicking a glance at Dr Barstow.

  ‘This piece was completely avascular – completely dead. So there was no chance of it healing. Because it is – was – so low down in your ribcage, you don’t really need it. Not a good idea to have it hanging around in there unattached. Much better to take it out. Even better, it should stop your chest hurting. Well, after the wound heals up. I’m going to go and order that painkiller for you now. See you in a bit.’

  She, Amy and Paul exchange polite smiles. I turn my attention back to the little pot. And my rib sitting inside it. The thought that I should feel sick, horrified, surfaces. But I don’t. I just feel curious. And a little sad. Looking at another thing I’ve lost.

  I smile, drawing my feet up to make space on the sofa, as Uncle Ben comes back into the living room. He pats my ankle as he sits, perching on the edge of the seat so that he can lean over to the table crowded with drinks and pills and tissues that Amy has set up beside me: everything within easy reach of where I lie, propped up with five pillows and snuggled under my quilt.

  ‘Comfy set-up you’ve got here,’ he says as he peers into the pot holding my rib.

  ‘Apart from the great big hole in my chest and the eight staples, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah, apart from that,’ he answers casually. That’s one of the things I love about Uncle Ben. He’s never thrown by these things. And he never tries to drown me in sympathy. But I still know he cares. He’s just smart enough to know that sometimes you don’t have to be serious, even about serious things. He’s holding my rib up to the light now. ‘Pretty good specimen,’ he says.

  And he should know. He’s a pathologist. Which is really odd: he’s such a nice person it’s a pity he isn’t a doctor for living people. But I suppose I can understand it: he says he doesn’t want to have to deal with people who spend all their time whining about having a pimple at the end of their nose. I wouldn’t want to have to listen to people whining about that either.

  ‘Amy says it’s morbid and disturbing.’

  ‘I never could figure out how I ended up with such a squeamish sister,’ Uncle Ben says, shrugging. Then he grins. ‘But it was great fun when we were kids. She had the most amazing squeal.’

  I grin too, reminding myself not to laugh. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Oh, nothing too horrible. The odd slug on her toast . . .’

  ‘Ew!’ I grimace, but I’m grinning still, wanting to laugh. But it’s going to be another six days before I can laugh – after the staples come out.

  I hate the staples. It’s not so much that they hurt; it’s the way my whole left side feels so stiff and heavy all the time. I can’t understand it really. They’re only little. The wound – the bit where they cut my chest open during the operation – is only about four inches long. Which is big, but not so big that it should make it this difficult to move. I have to move very slowly when I do things like getting up: anything that involves twisting or bending. Amy has to help me in the shower. I thought I would mind that. A lot. But I don’t. Because it’s Amy. And she loves me. And I’m not at all afraid of her. Besides, nothing bad ever happened in a shower. I think that helps.

  ‘So, Squirt,’ I stick my tongue out at Uncle Ben, ‘your Uncle Ben, being a man of stunning genius,’ I roll my eyes, ‘has had a brainwave! A moment of unsurpassed brilliance.’ He grins at me, waiting for me to encourage him.

  ‘What?’ I ask, annoyed at myself for giving in, but not really. Annoyed in that good way. Because I like it when Uncle Ben teases me. As if it’s been like that since I was born. As if we really are family. Uncle Ben’s great that way too. He was never awkward with me. Never seemed worried about what to do or what to say or . . . anything. Auntie Beth, Paul’s sister, is lovely but she’s still so . . . careful. As if I’ll break. Or bite. Or both.

  ‘I’ll give you a clue. It has something to do with this impressive specimen.’

  ‘But what?’ I plead. ‘Come on! You have to be nice to me! I’m sick!’

  Uncle Ben sighs dramatically. ‘It’s going to be a terrible struggle, you know, being nice to you for another fortnight. I don’t see how I’ll manage it. I’m far too wicked.’

  I grin and nudge his thigh with my toe. ‘You are! You always make me wait!’

  ‘Well, I suppose I’ll just have to come clean. So, my idea of amazing brilliance is . . . Well, no. Let’s start from the other end.’

  I roll my eyes, heave a dramatic sigh and feel the air jerk out, pain catching in my throat. I lever my left knee up towards my chest and breathe through the ache. Uncle Ben’s hand comes down on my leg and squeezes gently.

  ‘What’s the other end?’ I ask. My voice is a little flat, but Uncle Ben doesn’t mind.

  ‘The other end is a story. People say – well, Jews and Christians say – that after God made the world and all that, he made Adam . . .’ As the name passes his lips, I see his thoughts go to Paul and Amy’s Adam, his Adam: the pain ripples across the muscles of his face and through his eyes.

  But Adam is gone and I am here and, as I watch, I see him lavish his grief back into love to offer it where it’s needed.

  ‘So,’ he says, just a little too briskly: moving along, moving on, ‘God put him in the Garden of Eden. But,’ a breath for courage, ‘Adam wasn’t too keen on kicking about in there by himself, so he asked God for a companion. Well, God thought that this was a pretty reasonable request, so he put Adam to sleep and, while he was asleep, God took out one of his ribs and made it into Eve. So, really, all of womankind came from just that one rib.’

  ‘God’s never been very interested in me.’ There’s something nasty in my voice. I can’t stop it.

  For a moment, Uncle Ben frowns. Then he squeezes my knee again. ‘You know I don’t believe in any of this stuff either, Evie. I’m just like Amy and Paul: a hopeless heathen.’

  I try to swallow away the nastiness that stings my throat, makes my chest pull around the staples with the weight of the air in my lungs. ‘Yeah.’ My voice is hoarse, like a whisper. But it’s not so nasty this time.

  ‘I just thought it was a funny sort of idea that if all of womankind came from one of Adam’s ribs then, theoretically, we should get something pretty amazing out of yours, right?’

  I shrug. I used to believe in God. I was quite good at it, even if I didn’t go to church. I used to pray every night. But it never did any good.

  And if God hadn’t done anything to help me back then, there wasn’t much chance he was going to be interested now. And if he’d wanted one of my ribs, well, why couldn’t he have taken it the way he took Adam’s? If it had just been an operation, just a matter of going to sleep and having it taken away, that wouldn’t have been so bad. Even with the staples.

  ‘Think of it as one of those myths and legends about the Norse gods. You know, like in that project you did at school last year,’ Uncle Ben says, but his voice is losing the laughter that it had before.

  And I know I am frowning, pulling my face down into that look that made my . . . made Fiona’s mother call me ‘an ugly, sullen little beast’. I try to breathe it away, smooth it away just like my hands straightening the creases in the quilt.

  ‘How about this,’ Uncle Ben says, almost urgently, ‘if you could have a pet – any type of animal in the w
orld, or even out of the world, even things that don’t really exist – what would it be?’

  I don’t even have to think about it. ‘A dragon!’ I say, breathless at the very thought, seeing in my mind a picture from a book about Chinese art from school: a serpent-dragon, red and gold, twisting and circling, smoke and fire wreathing from its nostrils. I focus on it, making it as real as I can in my mind, willing myself to forget about God and prayers never answered and the bitterness of worthless hope.

  I make the dragon realer and realer, clearer and clearer.

  Uncle Ben laughs. ‘I can see that,’ he says. ‘A dragon. That would be a pretty amazing pet. What colour would it be?’

  The dragon in my mind – from the book – is red, but I say, ‘Any colour.’ It wouldn’t matter. If there really were a dragon, if I really could have one, I wouldn’t care what colour it was. ‘And any size. A little one would be perfect too,’ I say out loud.

  This time my chest is tight with longing. If I had a dragon, I’d never be powerless again . . . But I can’t let myself think about that.

  ‘So long as it could breathe fire,’ I whisper, forcing my thoughts away. I imagine the dragon sitting there, on my lap, looking up at me. ‘It would have to breathe fire.’

  ‘Of course!’ Uncle Ben says, the laughter back in his voice. ‘Anyway, I thought that we could have a little project together. We could take that rib of yours out of the formaldehyde and dry it out and then carve it into a dragon. Not quite as good as a real one, but I’m afraid I’m all out of magical powers. Besides, maybe if you did a spell on it or a wish or something . . . Who knows, right? It’s a nice thought at least.’

  ‘Wonderful.’ I sigh, closing my eyes and seeing the dragon. I smile at the picture in my mind. ‘There’s this book at school with a picture of a dragon. Do you think we could try to carve it like that? All twisty and stuff.’