The Bone Dragon
alexia casale
Table of Contents
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 about 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.