The Bone Dragon (23 page)

I shrug and turn my attention to the rug. It’s a really ugly rug. I’ve always thought so. There’s a series of misshapen blobs along the border and even after four years I’ve no idea what they’re meant to be. Leaves? Sheaves of corn? They’ve got dots in the middle so I can never quite figure it out. I tilt my head to the side.

‘What do you think happened, Evie? Why do you think they changed their minds?’

I shrug one shoulder.

‘OK, maybe that’s a difficult question. Let’s start with why they changed their minds
then
. What prompted the decision?’

I meet Ms Winters’s pretty hazel eyes, but part of me doesn’t see her sitting on the other side of the kitchen table: part of me sees Fiona’s mother’s face, wide and frantic with fury and fear as she tows Fiona down the upstairs landing towards my room. She must have dragged Fiona up from cowering in the kitchen because Fiona still has a dishcloth in her hand.

‘Go and clean it up!’ Fiona’s mother is shrieking. ‘I told you to go clean it up!’

But Fiona is standing with her knees locked, staring at me.

‘“Go and clean it up,” I said!’ Fiona’s mother screams, pushing and pushing at her, but Fiona is heavy and stiff with terror, and the knowledge that her mother can’t enter my room: can never bring herself to step past the threshold, no matter that she knows exactly what goes on in here.

Fiona’s mouth is open. She gasps for breath as if someone has been holding her under water.

I shiver, jerking my head to the side, and close my eyes.
Just keep focusing on the blanks
, I tell myself firmly.
Life doesn’t have gaps, only memories do.

That day – that memory – is full of them.

I don’t remember how I fit into the scene on the landing in Fiona’s parents’ house, though I suppose I must have been standing in the doorway of my old bedroom.

And I have no idea where Fiona’s father was by then. Or when exactly they left the house, though with all that blood I know they must have gone to the hospital.

I do remember being downstairs in the kitchen, watching Fiona take the rubbish out of the kitchen bin and lay it all out on the floor in a meticulous arc, every movement a study in precision. Once the floor is awash with cigarette packets and banana skins, she gingerly lowers the bloody cloths down into the bottom of the empty bin before piling the rest back in on top. She is whispering, whispering, whispering the whole time, though I can only make out the occasional word.

After that it’s a blank. The next thing I remember is hearing the front door open and knowing that Fiona’s parents are back. There’s a murmur of voices in the hall, the sounds of people moving about the house . . . Then nothing. And it’s not that I
don’t
remember: it’s that there is nothing
to
remember. Because by the time I hear the front door open, Fiona has locked me in my room.

She keeps me locked in there until I can show her that all my bruises have gone. It’s the summer holidays so no one notices.

The day Fiona judges the bruises to be sufficiently faded to pass unremarked, she leads me out into the hall. Not to go to the bathroom – the only place apart from my bedroom I’ve been for what feels like years – but downstairs. Downstairs!

I think we must be going to the kitchen, but Fiona turns into the hall and we go to the front door. We go
outside
.

‘Get in,’ Fiona hisses, fumbling with the car keys.

And then we’re driving, and I don’t care where we’re going. I just don’t want to go back, even if it means leaving everything behind. If only we can just keep going . . .

But we stop in the car park of a big office building.

I close my eyes on the sight, concentrate on the feel of the wood-grain beneath my fingertips as I grasp the edge of my chair, fighting to hold myself steady. Fighting to remember
when
I am.

Amy and Paul’s kitchen. Our kitchen with all the lights on and a pot of curry simmering on the stove, steaming up the windows. Ms Winters, sitting patiently on the other side of the table, is still waiting to see how much I’m willing to say.

‘She went mad,’ I tell her with a calm shrug and a tone that says
I’m sure Amy and Paul have told you this already. Do we really have to go over it?
‘Maybe it was the cancer drugs or something, but she just went mad. Totally bonkers. She drove me down to this office block. Probably Social Services. It’s a miracle she managed to get there without killing us both. They took one look and knew she’d gone completely off her rocker and that was that.’

I remember the faces of the office staff as we came in, me first, Fiona trailing behind as if she couldn’t bear to be near me, not even near enough to drag me inside to leave me all the sooner.

‘Go!’ Fiona gasps. ‘Go. Keep walking. I said, “Keep walking.”’

I shiver as her breath heats my hair.

I’m in Paul and Amy’s kitchen
, I tell myself, fixing my eyes on the family photo Amy has pinned to the fridge.
I’m fourteen now. And Fiona is dead.

The memory grows distant again: turns back into a story about the past.

‘Go! Keep walking,’ Fiona gasped.

Gasped
, I repeat to myself, holding on to the tense: pinning down time.

I suppose we must have passed through some sort of reception area. And I suppose Fiona must have asked where to go next, but I don’t remember any of that. I do remember the horror on the face of the woman nearest the door of the big open-plan office: I remember watching her look into Fiona’s mad, staring eyes.

And just like that
then
starts to become
now
, rushing like floodwater into the present. The sides of the kitchen are being pushed inwards. The table is being squeezed, squeezed, squeezed, like when you screw your eyes up and the world compacts so you can only make out the things directly in front of you. To my right, there’s a desk where the stove was and, on my left, another where the dishwasher should be. It’s all dim and blurry, so faint beyond the bright vision of the kitchen in front of me, that perhaps it’s just a trick of the light.

All I have to do is turn and look at that desk on the left – look at it straight on – and it’ll vanish
, I tell myself.

But I don’t turn because somehow I know there’s a photo frame on the left-hand desk and a plant on the right-hand one.

Just turn and it’ll vanish
. . .

But what if it doesn’t?
echoes back because I can
feel
the desk there on my left. I can
feel
it.

And then Fiona is there. There, in the space where the back door should be.

She has put half her clothes on backwards and her hair is all clumped in peculiar ways: sticking out here, matted down there.

‘I can’t have her any more,’ she gasps, staggering round to look at the people who have stood up from their desks to stare. ‘I can’t . . . I can’t . . . I won’t . . . They said I can’t . . . They said they won’t . . .’

I stand there watching her until a woman kneels down next to me. ‘Sweetheart, do you think you could come with me now?’ she asks very kindly. ‘Let’s go and get you a nice drink while someone sees if they can help your mum calm down a bit.’

Just like that it’s over. The office, the desks, Fiona – they’re all gone. It’s just me in Amy and Paul’s kitchen with Ms Winters, and the memory of the way Fiona’s voice rose and rose and rose until she was screaming things that even I couldn’t make out. I’m not sure they were even words.

‘She stood right in the middle of the office and started screaming,’ I tell Ms Winters. ‘Screaming and screaming. So I don’t think she really made a decision about leaving me exactly. I don’t think she was capable of deciding anything at that point.’

It isn’t a lie. Fiona’s parents made the decision, just like they decided I would stay safely locked up until the bruises were gone and no one would have to be any the wiser about what had been happening. I know it as surely as I know anything, even though I was locked in my room so I never heard the discussion that decided how things would be. But I didn’t have to be there to know who was making the decisions. It had been a long time since Fiona had decided anything by that point and after that day . . .

Maybe the cancer and the drugs helped her along, but I always figured she lost her marbles the minute she started cleaning up the blood. All I know is that every time she brought meals up to my locked room she was just as hysterical as the last.

I’m  surprised her parents managed to get her to take me down to Social Services, or wherever it was she left me. But perhaps by then they were as frightened of me as Fiona was: frightened enough to find a way. They must have realised there was no chance that anyone would suggest my going home with Fiona once they saw the state she was in.

‘They took Fiona straight to the hospital,’ I tell Ms Winters. ‘I can’t remember who told me, but I know that’s what happened. Everyone could see that she had just lost it.’

‘But something must have triggered it. Did she have a fight with her parents? Do you remember them having an argument . . . perhaps about Fiona’s diagnosis and what would happen to you?’

I shake my head.

‘Maybe your mother realised she couldn’t leave you with them, once she had to be in hospital a lot. Maybe she wanted to make plans for when she died. After all, from your . . . from her parents’ perspective, it might have been a lot . . .
easier
to have you to themselves, with her out of the way.’

‘Fiona never got in their way,’ I say. ‘Not for anything.’

Ms Winters purses her lips together in the way that means she’s sad but trying not to look like she pities me. ‘Why do you think her parents let her send you away then, Evie?’

I think of the cream brocade of the curtains in my old bedroom and the slash of seeping spots of blood blossoming into the thick swirl of the fabric. I think of the warm slickness running down the cool sides of the glass that always stood on my bedside table so I could have a drink at night.

For a second, I feel blood collect in my palm once more.

‘Do you remember how it happened, Evie? Did she just take you away one day without telling them?’

I shrug.

‘Why do you think Fiona’s parents didn’t try to get you back?’ Ms Winters presses. ‘It probably wouldn’t have been hard, since there wasn’t any other family and no one realised then that you’d been abused.’

I flinch at the word. ‘I expect they just said they couldn’t cope with an eight-year-old grandchild
and
a daughter who was sick and mad,’ I say to block out the echoes of that awful word, to move the conversation on before Ms Winters can use it again.

‘Yes, but
why
did they say that, Evie?’

For a second I am back in my old bedroom, holding the rose-pattern glass.

I see it splinter as I smash the edge down on the corner of my bedside table.

I see surprise, morphing into horror, on Fiona’s father’s face.

It has always bothered me that I can’t remember what happened next. But I just can’t draw anything into focus. There are too many gaps, in all the important places. I have never been able to remember exactly what I did to create all that blood and that look on Fiona’s father’s face.

All I remember is how wonderful I felt.

And suddenly I remember the wisp of thought that danced out of reach when Ms Winters first talked to me about goals. I don’t intend to tell Ms Winters the whole story – not now, not ever. But it’s no longer because I’m trying to hide that thing I used to keep locked inside, all teeth and venom, thick and deep as oil. Somehow it just doesn’t seem to be there any more. The place where I kept it, all secret in darkness, is full of light now. Whatever was there is gone: the Dragon has taken it away to guard it and keep it secret for me. And with it the Dragon has taken the fear that someday I will be careless and let it creep out into the open where even Amy would recoil from it. From me.

‘Maybe Fiona’s parents just thought I was as mad as she was underneath,’ I tell Ms Winters. ‘They always hated it when there was screaming. Everything had to be silent. As if then it didn’t count.’

Paul grins at me as I trail into the kitchen and slump down at the table, yawning widely. ‘I wouldn’t bother trying to wake up,’ he says as he pencils something into the crossword. ‘Sounds like this soap opera marathon you’ve got planned with Phee and Lynne will just put you right back to sleep.’

‘Not going. I texted Lynne already,’ I mumble around another yawn, stretching awkwardly and then wincing.

Paul frowns. ‘Is that wince you just gave something we should be worried about, Evie love?’ he asks, making Amy turn abruptly from the dishes and begin scanning me from head to foot.

‘No,’ I say, sighing. ‘Just a bit sore. Stiff. Think I slept funny.’

‘But it’s not like you to cancel plans with your friends, darling. Are you sure you’re all right? We could pop down to the doctor . . . We
should
pop down to the doctor if there’s any
possibility
that something’s wrong. Especially after everything that’s happened recently with the pool and . . .’