The Bone Dragon (12 page)

‘What did Adam look like?’ I asked because it was the first time the subject had come up since they had brought me to live with them. They didn’t hide it, of course: I knew right from the start that they’d had a little boy who’d died. And I knew too that they didn’t like to talk about him, so I’d never asked, but I’d been waiting and waiting for one of them to mention him.

Paul and Amy exchanged a look over my head. Emotions bled so quickly across Amy’s face that, for a moment, it twitched and twisted as if she were trying to be funny. Then she took a deep breath, smoothing her hands down her arms, all the way from her shoulders to her elbows.

Because there’s still water on them
, I thought, then wondered if maybe it wasn’t more than that: an attempt to push the pain away from her chest. Push it down and away, out of her fingers.

And I opened my mouth to apologise, to tell her I didn’t really need to know, that it wasn’t any of my business . . . But Amy was already getting up.

I thought she was going to walk away, but she just turned her chair to the side and sat down again so that we were neatly at right angles to each other: every movement precise and careful, as if it was important to get the actions just right. Then she drew the locket out from under her jumper, peering down at it as she flicked open the tiny catch with her nail. I twisted, turning in my chair so I could peer close as she held it out to me.

‘Who’re they?’ I asked, pointing at the second photo.

‘My parents.’

I reached out to tug Amy’s hands closer because the light was reflecting off the glass over the pictures, obscuring the tiny faces. Her fingers were cold and rigid as if they’d frozen.

Little by little, Amy leaned forwards, further and further forwards, until our heads touched. Then she jumped, jerking back into her chair, hand reflexively shielding the locket against her chest.

For a moment, there was nothing in her face or her eyes, then she started.

‘Goodness,’ she said in this strange voice, the words too light for the heaviness in her tone. ‘I really let myself get swept away for a minute there. Let’s have a look at this maths, then.’

When I turned back to my book, I realised that Paul was gone.

That was one of the only times either of them has mentioned Adam in front of me while the other was there. Separately, they’ve added a few facts over the years. Hints at happy memories. Fragments. Tatters of a different life. They’ve never refused to answer the few questions I’ve dared to ask – only when I’m with just one of them, of course – but they’ve always cut those conversations short. Uncle Ben’s the one I go to when there’s something I’ve just
got
to know about Adam, just like it’s Amy or Paul I ask when I want to know something about Aunt Minnie.

But while Amy and Paul adopted me only two years after the deaths, I’m pretty sure Uncle Ben hasn’t gone on a single date. Lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about how Uncle Ben seems like he needs some help to start moving on a bit. But this is the first time it’s struck me that the only way Uncle Ben is different from Paul and Amy is that they’ve found themselves a new child to love while he hasn’t found a new wife. I never really thought about it before but in some ways Amy and Paul haven’t moved on with life any more than Uncle Ben has: they’ve just tried to start a new one, as if they’ve pushed all their memories of Adam into a room and closed the door on the wreckage and then papered over that door to pretend it’s not even there any more: that there never was another door to another room. Maybe they think they can eventually open the door and all those broken things will have mouldered away, or been dissolved by time, so that all the wood splinters and the glass shards will be rounded at the edges, safe to pick up again. Soft as ashes.

I tried that. With my memories of Fiona and her parents. But it never worked. Not properly. The pain in my ribs made it impossible to pretend that none of it had happened: to pretend that I had always been Amy and Paul’s daughter. There were all sorts of stories I tried to pretend. But then my ribs would shift and grate, the ends of the bones rubbing together – or I’d twist and there would be sharp, long needles of pain through my chest – and it would all still be here and now instead of there and then. And here and now can’t be pretended away.

As I drift from one aisle of the shop to another, for the first time it strikes me that maybe it’s worse to be able to do that thing with the room and the locked door all papered over. Even though it seems easier to lock misery away, perhaps it’s just as much work to pretend you can’t ever hear things shifting and sliding behind the door behind the wallpaper when a wind creeps in through some unstoppered gap. Perhaps it hurts less, but there’s something infinitely sad about that store of discarded, broken things that used to be part of happiness.

Paul asks me a question and I hum in reply. This seems to satisfy him, and he turns away towards the till. I trail behind.

When I first saw the pictures in the locket, oh how I longed to have mine added. But I’m not jealous any more. Amy keeps Adam’s picture close, but locked away. And I have everything else.

‘Is this because of what Paul and Uncle Ben are up to?’ I huff to the Dragon as I stump along the furrow between two rows of cabbages or cauliflowers or whatever the low-growing crop is: the lines of plants are merely darker stripes of near-black across the fenland fields. It is so dark I could easily be walking between little bushes with squirls of pasta hanging off them. ‘Couldn’t we stay out of their way somewhere nicer?’ The Dragon does not deign to reply. With a sigh, I give in to the silence.

The world is purple and velvet blue, the darkness like black mist. One minute I think my eyes are starting to adjust to the night and I can see. The next, the image of the landscape around me fades away and reforms into something different. The horizon, usually a faint grey-orange cast by the distant lights of Cambridge, is rust and brown tonight, like long-dried blood.

But with the Dragon on my shoulder I am not afraid. Rather I am slowly growing dizzy with disorientation. Down keeps shifting, just slightly, as I step on the bank of the crop-row to my right then stumble into the rise on the left.

‘Where are we going?’ I hiss in exasperation as I stagger to a stop, panting with the effort of wading through the darkness. ‘I thought we were going to do something special tonight.’

This dark moon is not the one for action
, the Dragon says.

I snort. ‘Sounds like a big, fat excuse to me.’

The Dragon tightens its grip on my shoulder until I feel the pinch of its claws even through my coat.

‘OK, then tell me what wonderful plans we’re going to be working on in the middle of this field in the pitch black!’

That is not the way to persuade me to share anything of value
, the Dragon returns sniffily, managing to convey the fact that dragons require a certain level of respect whether one is standing ankle-deep in mud or not.
A wish must always have a purpose
, the Dragon finally deigns to tell me.
And a purpose is the seed of a plan
.

‘Well, I wished you were a real dragon and you are, so that was the purpose of the wish, but I don’t see where the plans come in unless they’re the same as the purpose . . .’

The Dragon efficiently communicates the message that I am being immensely stupid.

‘OK, so . . . So if I wished you, then your purpose is to grow plans?’ I venture. ‘At least with seed packets you know what you’re growing,’ I say grumpily.

A part of my purpose – and the keystone of our contract – is that you should only understand as much as is to your benefit. You must trust. You wished me and I am here
.

I roll my eyes but continue along the furrow. ‘Don’t I even get a hint instead of all this cryptic . . .’ – the word ‘rubbish’ comes into my head: the Dragon seems to read it from my thoughts and its disdain magnifies – ‘. . . stuff?’ I amend, trying to make my tone as polite and conciliatory as it’s possible to be while sliding about in a field on a moonless night.

Reach out your hand
, the Dragon commands.

I touch tree bark.

Move ahead carefully
.

Long grasses tug at my legs, treacherous with rotting leaves. Roots distort the ground. There are branches in my hair, thin and cold, as if I have plunged underwater in the blackness and the long, long reeds of the fenland waterways are reaching out to caress my face.

We may stop here
.

I stand in the embrace of the trees, the branches grounding me in the darkness. ‘What are we waiting for?’ I whisper. ‘I can’t see a thing!’

No
, says the Dragon,
you cannot
.

‘So what do you expect me to look at?’

I do not expect you to see anything
.

‘Then . . .’ I start, but understanding comes rushing in before I have formed the question. I feel the Dragon settle itself in contentment.

Somewhere off to my right, I can hear and smell water. A rustle to the left. A hiss. A shriek. A skirmish in the grasses.

Something passes overhead. I can hear the strength of feathers, tightly woven, as they catch so gently at the air, cupping it, tugging on it like gossamer-thin silk but never pulling a single thread. The twigs against my cheek stir faintly, oh so faintly, with its passing, and settle.

I open my mouth and taste the air. There is a rich, deep scent from the field of autumn crops behind me. I savour iron and deep, verdant green. The gold of grasses grown long in the summer and softening now. A sultry, damp taste is creeping in: the taste of moisture stealing the brittle, dry strength of the stalks, turning them rubbery and fibrous. I smell the tang of brambles and the sweetness of fruit, taste the scent of quince, complex and mysterious. Branches crack and shift, snap and splinter, and things move in the darkness around me, breathing in the colours in the air.

And I grow light with joy, free and wild as the night around me. In the darkness I have no limits, no boundaries: I bleed into the hugeness of the night, reaching out and growing strong, filling up with power.

The dark moon is not always a time for action
, the Dragon says softly.
Sometimes it is a time for laying preparations and gathering strength. Sometimes it is a time for making plans, not for carrying them out. And we have many plans to make. But after, when the days are longer and the nights are light, then we shall watch the nymphs become dragonflies
, the Dragon pledges.
I will take you to taste the sourness of daffodils growing in the moonlight, let you stand in chaos of honeysuckle in still midnight air. I will show you where to gather primrose and violets from the banks. Where to walk over mint and wild thyme so that each step raises a spell of scents into the air. We shall see fox cubs and the black balls of new-hatched moorhens. When the dawn comes early, we shall watch the sun rise in the water
.

‘Here you go,’ Uncle Ben says, thrusting a large bag into my hands before I’ve even got the door fully open.

I leave him to hang up his coat and take the present into the kitchen. It’s a book about Dalí: a glorious, glossy-paged book full of prints of paintings and photos of statues and glasswork. I laugh, throwing my arms about Uncle Ben’s neck. ‘Thank you!’ I try to say, though it comes out as a squeal because the book is great but the really wonderful thing is having an uncle who’ll get me something like this just because we watched the Hitchcock movie
Spellbound
last weekend and I loved the dream sequence by Dalí at the end of it.        

Uncle Ben bends to kiss my cheek as I flop into a chair to pore over the glossy pages. Then he moves to lean over my shoulder to look with me.

But I’ve barely had time to freeze at the feeling that someone is standing Right Behind Me, where I can’t see them and can’t know what they’re about to do . . . when he pulls out the chair next to mine and sits down instead. As if he meant to do that all along. I lean into him in apology, fumbling for the words to explain that it’s not
him
, but he just drapes his arm over my shoulders and squeezes and says, ‘I figure I might get away without Amy telling me off for spoiling you since it
is
an art book,’ in a perfectly normal voice, without the faintest hint of offence, as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened.