The Bone Dragon (21 page)

The Dragon smiles – mysteriously, of course.
We will return now
.

Back in my room, I tuck my clothes and shoes into the back of the closet before creeping out to the bathroom. I help the Dragon to clean itself, then fumble around for paracetamol. There’s a soft knock on the door.

‘Evie darling, are you feeling all right?’

‘Sorry I woke you,’ I whisper, opening the door. ‘It’s just a headache. I can’t find the paracetamol.’

Amy brushes my hair away from my eyes, then feels my forehead, frowning. ‘You’re like ice, Evie. Are you sure you’re all right? There’s nothing wrong with the radiator in your room, is there?’

I blink at her for a moment. ‘I put my head out of the window for a while,’ I say. ‘I thought the cold would help with the headache.’

‘Oh, Evie,’ Amy sighs, handing me the paracetamol then ushering me back to my room. ‘You’ll give yourself pneumonia and that’s
not
going to help.’

I let Amy fuss with the bedclothes as I swallow the pills.

‘Shall I leave your stereo off if you’ve got such a bad headache, darling?’

‘Hm? Oh. No, it’s fine. I’d like it now,’ I say.

Amy smiles, kisses my forehead and clicks the stereo to play.

I watch the angle of light from the door diminish then vanish, as she eases it to, before I roll over, taking the Dragon out of my pocket and setting it on my nightstand. From the corner of my eye, as I squirm to get comfy, I see the Dragon settle down, tail neatly curled over out-turned feet. Something about the pose says ‘lesson time’ and I sigh, but it quickly turns into a yawn.

You must clean your shoes
, the Dragon commands.

‘It can wait,’ I mumble around a second yawn, closing my eyes.

No
, says the Dragon.

I turn my face away and sink into the pillow.

No
, says the Dragon again.
It cannot wait. Not tonight. Nor any night. You must always remember to clean your shoes when there is no frost. There must be no exceptions. It must be as automatic as breathing
.

I long to scoff at the ridiculousness of this statement. Nothing about our night-time adventures is even remotely automatic. How could it possibly be?

You must be able to do all these things, remember all these things, even in your sleep
.

I manage a faint snort, but am too warm and sleepy to vocalise my disdain.

No
, commands the Dragon.
You asked once what I am here to teach you
.

I sigh and sit up in bed, scrubbing wearily at my eyes. ‘You’re here to teach me to clean my shoes when I’m half asleep?’ I mumble scornfully.

Yes
, says the Dragon.
Yes, that is part of it
.

I stare down at the headstone as Amy puts her arm about my shoulders and hugs me close to her. I can feel her trembling. Paul is on Amy’s other side, his arm about her waist. She has already laid the flowers on the grave, cleaned away the bird-muck and bits of dried cut grass, though there was surprisingly little this year. I suspect from the look Uncle Ben cast in Amy’s direction as she set to work that he had something to do with this.

Now Paul and I have finished pulling out the weeds and deadheading the winter pansies and, like every year, Amy is telling Adam about everything that has been happening in our lives since our last visit.

Uncle Ben is standing a few steps away, midway between Adam’s grave and Aunt Minnie’s. I helped weed that one too since Adam’s was already so tidy. Besides, I’m worried about Uncle Ben. Usually he stays over on the night before the anniversary of the deaths, just like on his and Aunt Minnie’s wedding anniversary, but last night he went home again once Amy had gone to bed. He didn’t even come back for breakfast but met us here, at the graveyard. He seemed normal enough, greeting Amy with a smile and a big hug and lots of reassurances about inconvenient problems at work.

But he keeps cleaning his glasses. Amy hasn’t noticed – not surprising, given what day it is – but she knows as well as I do that he only does that when he’s told a fib. I just can’t figure out what he might need to lie about. He doesn’t look like he’s been crying. And he doesn’t smell like he’s been drinking.

Amy fretted us half crazy this morning until she clapped eyes on him and could see he was OK. Paul was tense too, but thankfully he goes quiet and stiff when he’s worried, so no one hurled any cereal about the kitchen. The really weird thing is that Paul relaxed as soon as we stepped into the graveyard, before we even saw Uncle Ben. I wonder for a moment, as Amy tells Adam about my getting top marks in history, if it was because he’d seen Uncle Ben’s car in the car park and figured he must be all right. But that’s not it: when Amy pointed the car out, Paul didn’t relax at all. Just took out his phone as if checking for messages.

Now I study them each in turn, but the only interesting thing is that, once, Paul catches Uncle Ben’s eye and inclines his head very slightly, smiling. Uncle Ben smiles back, then carries on pruning Aunt Minnie’s ballerina rose. And that is it.

I don’t get it. I mean, of course Uncle Ben’s not going to be himself today – I don’t expect any of them to be – but this is the third anniversary I’ve been around for and I don’t see what’s different about it. Or why Amy doesn’t think it’s different too. Because she doesn’t. I can tell she doesn’t. She is exactly the same this year as she’s been every year so far.

Once Amy has finished talking to Adam, we set to work on Nanna Florrie and Grandad Peter’s graves. Again, there’s amazingly little to do. About the only thing I find as I pick a few stems of dry grass off the face of the stone is a few strange little flecks of bright blue stuff, like paint, in the curve of the ‘P’ and the plinth of the ‘T’. I scratch it out with my nail, watch it drift down to join other tiny spots of green and blue and red in the mud underfoot.

Now that I’m looking, I realise that the grass for twenty paces all around is highlighted with points of colour. And the ground is damp, as if it’s been raining just here. I crouch down to inspect a patch of grass mottled with red and yellow and blue as if someone has been scattering the shavings from freshly sharpened coloured pencils. I reach out to touch, but the flecks of colour melt away on my fingertips. It’s like someone came and threw handfuls of tiny, tiny confetti on one of the graves, then someone else tried to wash it away because people aren’t meant to celebrate a lost life in a graveyard: signs of festivity don’t belong here, where everything is expected to be solemn. And of course no one expects people to want to celebrate a
death
.

But if I ever went to Fiona’s grave, that’s exactly what I’d want to do: celebrate. And I suppose I can’t be the
only
person in the world who’d feel like that. I look about with renewed interest, wondering which grave holds a person someone hates as much as I hate Fiona. Wondering how that other person came to feel the same way I do about the dead.

Amy and Paul and Uncle Ben visit their graves. They care for them. Tend them. So it’s oddly reassuring to discover that perhaps I’m not so unique in my horribleness for only wanting to visit Fiona’s grave if I could dance and celebrate over it and chuck rubbish about. I mean, it may not be my fault that I feel that way – probably even Amy would feel that way in my shoes – but she’s not and so she doesn’t. Instead, anniversary days show how lovely and decent and
nice
Amy and Paul and Uncle Ben are. And how different I am. How even all the niceness and love they lavish on me can’t change how I feel when I think about Fiona: cold and hard and nasty inside, just like Fiona’s parents always said I was. I’m so lucky now, so very, very lucky, but I still can’t stop myself from being just a little bit Fiona’s daughter. Paul and Amy deserve so much better.

I sigh, turning away from the sight of Amy stroking her hand gently across the word ‘mother’ on Nanna Florrie’s headstone. And suddenly I remember the night of the hoar frost and the people singing and shouting in the graveyard, and how I’d been horrified that anyone should be so happy in Amy and Paul and Uncle Ben’s most sacred place . . . And I realise that perhaps it wasn’t people being nasty and inconsiderate of the tragedy around them after all. Perhaps it was people celebrating: celebrating over a particular grave, with a particular person in it. A person just like Fiona.

Suddenly I’m not angry any more. I’m curious.

I wander absently away along the line of graves, peering down to see where the flecks of colour are densest in the grass, where the ground has been churned most violently to mud.

‘Evie love, you OK?’ Paul calls.

I jump. Swinging round, I realise I’ve drifted further than I’d intended and I hurry back to Paul’s side. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Got caught up in thoughts.’

Paul puts his arm about me, though he doesn’t take his eyes off his son’s headstone. I look from Adam’s to Aunt Minnie’s, then back to Grandad Peter and Nanna Florrie’s.

All four bear the same date.

Six years ago today they were all driving back from a big family party at Paul’s parents’ house. They had to take two cars, and that’s just how it divided up: Grandad Peter driving Nanna Florrie, Aunt Minnie and Adam, and Uncle Ben driving Amy and Paul. Paul told me once that because Uncle Ben was driving, he saw the accident in the rear-view mirror. They were driving in convoy across a T-junction by a bridge when a drunk driver in one of those stupid, fancy 4 x 4s ran a red light at sixty-five in a thirty zone and smashed Grandad Peter’s car through the barrier and down into the river. The drunk driver’s car followed.

‘Which was something,’ Paul said the one time he talked about the accident. ‘If I’d seen him coming up the bank after, I’d have had to go and beat his head in.’

Paul and Uncle Ben both went in the water, but because the drunk driver had smashed into the back of Grandad Peter’s car, Nanna Florrie and Adam died in the back seat before Paul and Uncle Ben reached them. Paul told me that Aunt Minnie died on the riverbank. Grandad Peter made it to the hospital.

All Paul would say about the drunk driver was that he’d been dead when the police pulled him out of the car. I think he must have been killed on impact. There was guilt and bleakness in Paul’s eyes when he told me, but nothing else. No stirrings of hunger. So the guilt’s not for anything Paul and Uncle Ben did to him . . . or failed to do to help him. It’s because Paul isn’t sure what he
would
have chosen. If the driver had been pinned but alive, would Paul and Uncle Ben have helped him to get out or left him to drown? If he had been stuck and bleeding, would they have done what they could?

But it never came down to it, so Paul doesn’t know. And he doesn’t know how to feel about that: that mix of hope that he and Uncle Ben would have made sure the drunk driver died too, and the fear that he would have discovered that they couldn’t. I wouldn’t have found it hard at all.

I never met any of them, of course, but I love them anyway. They’re the reason that Amy and Paul got me. Amy says that they’d always considered adopting because of the problems with getting pregnant that run in her family. I sometimes wonder if that was a little white lie as they never mentioned any difficulty with having Adam, but I don’t mind either way. Amy and Paul did get me and that’s what counts.

Now, Uncle Ben comes over to press Amy’s shoulder, then Paul’s. Amy stands staring at Adam’s grave a moment longer, then we all turn away and set off for the car park. No one speaks as we walk, or on the drive home. I sit, staring out of the window, thinking about anniversaries past.

I came to live with Amy and Paul just over two years after the deaths. That’s what Amy always calls what happened. I understand why, so that’s what I say too. When it came round to the third anniversary and I’d been with Amy and Paul for nearly a year, they sat me down and asked whether I wanted to ‘join’ them in visiting the graves. That’s another word that stuck. Not ‘come with them’ but ‘join’: become part of. They didn’t just want me for a new family, but as part of
all
their family: even the part of it I’d never get to know.

Amy and Paul had completely misunderstood why my eyes filled up with tears and hurried to reassure me that of course they wouldn’t be insulted or anything if I preferred not to deal with that trauma. I didn’t explain it to them. But I did go. Of course I did. Why wouldn’t I want to be loved that much?

I think maybe the reason I nearly cried (the first time Amy and Paul had even seen me come close) was something to do with the fact that being asked to ‘join’ them made me really believe that they loved me. I’d been so happy I’d hurt.

But happy isn’t the right word, and getting words right is important. And joy isn’t exactly right either. It was more like relief. Though I hadn’t even realised there was something I
needed
relief from. The something wasn’t fear that Amy and Paul would never love me: I’d never expected they would, and that was fine with me. I’d agreed to it all, understanding that fully. I’d seen that they were nice, honestly nice, decent people and I knew that not only would they not do anything horrible to me, they would actively feel responsible for being good to me. And they were good to me of course, right from the start: affectionate and warm without being pushy, and that really was more than enough. But then the anniversary came around and . . . I’d wondered a few times by then if they did love me after all since they were so much nicer to me than I’d ever imagined they could be, but I’d figured I’d never really know one way or the other . . . and then I did. So of course I went: of course I go.