The Bone Dragon Read Online Free PDF Page A

her sake. I’m just saying that it might be . . . helpful. For you.’ She is about to go on, but then she starts, draws her hand away from the arm of the chair, staring at the broken blue thread. Her fingers part. The thread drifts to the floor.
    ‘How’s seeing a bit of rock and some grass going to help?’
    ‘Maybe it won’t. It’s just worth giving some thought to.’
    But I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to find out what the stone says. Whether they dared to use those words – the usual epitaph, the standard inscription. She wasn’t beloved. Not beloved at all. For a second, I feel my fingers scrabble in the grooves of the letters, catching in the plinth of the ‘M’, in the belly-curve of the ‘O’, in the bar of the ‘T’. My nails tear into splinters as I claw at smooth stone.
    I snap my eyes closed, toss my head to the side and the image vanishes. But still my thumbs pincer to meet my middle fingers, nail sliding under nail. But there is no dirt, no blood, no fragments of marble dust to dislodge. My fingers are clean and whole. I curl them into my palm and watch my knuckles whiten.
    ‘Amy and I went on a walk the other day, to celebrate the staples coming out,’ I say cheerfully.
    Ms Winters lets me: allows me to change the subject, change the mood. Even though she knows that I know she’s not fooled, she’s smart enough not to call me on it.
    ‘We went down the towpath and fed the swans. There’s a black one there, you know, with red eyes. And this houseboat came along and the swan swam after it making this noise just like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. There were two little girls on the boat and they went running up to the front, screaming. When it came over to us, Amy threw all the bread in the water in one go, then we went up to the lock and sat there for a while and looked at the clouds.’
    Ms Winters rocks her left foot over on to its side, rubs her toes against the foot of the armchair without seeming to realise she’s doing it.
    ‘I used to watch the clouds when I climbed outside to sit on the roof at Fiona’s parents’ house when . . . And I made up stories about them. But my favourite one was about Roger, and he was a fish who swam in the sky. But he was my friend and he would always stop over the house and talk to me on the way to visit his Auntie Mabel, who was a bird who lived in the water. And he used to tell me all sorts of things, because he was a very nice, polite fish . . .’
    ‘Did he ever ask why you were up on the roof?’
    I shake my head – not letting her win that easily – and smile. ‘Of course not! I told you: he was a very polite fish. He wouldn’t have asked me something like that. And, besides, I was busy listening to his stories about his Auntie Mabel.’ My words get faster: too fast for her to interrupt me without being rude. ‘One time he invited me to go with him to meet her and have tea at her house in the water . . .’
    And I stop because I didn’t mean to tell her that. It’s too close to things I’ll never tell anyone.
    ‘And did you go?’
    ‘Of course not!’ I say, as indignant as I can manage, to cover the sudden flatness in my voice. ‘I didn’t know how to swim in the sky!’ But I thought about it. Wondered whether it would be worth trying, just to see if I could. Because the alternative was to stay on the roof until I couldn’t stay any longer and I had to go back inside.
    But I did stay. And eventually I did go back inside. And I never quite forgave myself for that.

     
     
    The scales clothe all four legs now and cover the dragon’s back with its ridge of little spikes. I’ve scraped and scraped the tool across the dragon’s tiny feet to make clawed fingers, and scooped around the crest of the skull for the ears: small but long, they lie along the dragon’s neck, tapering to a point. The jaw is square, sharp-angled at the corners and back towards its cheeks. The nostrils curve up into little points