Dragon Skin E-Book

Karen Foxlee

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Children's Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 248

Beschreibung

From the author of Lenny's Book of Everything, a deeply affecting, uplifting novel in which a girl finds refuge from her difficult home life while caring for an ailing baby dragonShe didn't want to go home and that's why she found it. Avoiding the tension in her house, Pip spends her time digging around for treasure in the muddy creek. One night, a burst of colour catches her eye and Pip stumbles across something magical - a dragon. Tiny, possibly dying, but definitely a dragon.She quickly realises that dragons don't come with instructions: what do you feed a dragon? Where did it come from? And how can Pip cope with the enormous changes this creature will bring into her life?Full of enchanting magic and poignant truths, Dragon Skin is a moving story of friendship, family and finding a way to fly.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title PageDedicationACT IACT IIACT IIIAcknowledgementsAbout the PublisherAbout the AuthorCopyright

For my sister Ruth

ACT I

SHE DIDN’T WANT TO GO HOME AND THAT’S why she found it. If she’d gone home through the newly dark roads, washing her feet in streetlight pools, she would have found her mother in the kitchen making dinner looking scared. Matt would have come home and the screen door would have slammed hard and his tool bag would have crashed down on the kitchen bench. They would have flinched, her mother and her, waiting, but everything would have been normal.

She was the kind of girl who liked to dig with a stick in the dirt though. She liked to upturn things, searching for treasure: rocks, old bottles and silvery 4wine cask bladders, toothbrushes, coins, the carcasses of handbags. These strange things were swept up and snagged at the riverbend and left to dry once the water was gone. A wallet emptied out and brittle. Parts of a saddle. A belt buckle with the insignia of the silver mine.

She knew all the creek’s white rock, all its blond grass and bleached trees. She knew the sun going down, the galahs screeching, rising and settling, rising and settling in the trees. She sat with her feet dipped in the waterhole and watched the night approach. The waterhole was a small deep pool of water that never dried up. It remained there even after the river flooded and then dried out to its normal self; a skin of stones and silt cracked into a million scales.

Mika always said, Whatever you do Pip, take your feet out at night because that’s when the bunyip comes out.

She drew her feet out and sat in the dusk. Her stomach whined. Mika was a long time ago. Mika was months and months and months ago. The lights came on in the houses behind the trees. She felt the warm air against her wet legs. She waited for the part 5when the last ray of sun hit the creek stones, a brief moment when the whole riverbed shone and then was swallowed up by shadow. She promised herself she’d go home after that.

Only it was in that moment that she found it.

It didn’t look like much at first, a scrap of something, fabric maybe, a snakeskin twisted around a stick perhaps, but that last wave of light caught it directly, shone it up bright, a burst of pinks and golds and greens, a small fire. Then was gone.

‘Hey,’ she said to herself and to the brand-new night. She was up, striding towards the spot just metres away, with her digging stick. ‘Hey,’ she said, softer, because she knew. She knew exactly what it was.

Later, she’d think about it over and over. When they were leaving and knew they’d never go back home again. When she’d grown that other skin. She knew what it was before she stood up. Even before she saw it shining there. She’d always known it.

SHE KEPT ITS SMALL HUSK OF A BODY CLOSE to her chest as she walked home through the streets. She made a cradle with her T-shirt and nursed it there. It was the size of a small kitten, hairless, a little lump for its belly and legs curled beneath. There was a tangle of something on its back, like fishing net. It was half-dead. Almost dead. It made a sound as she nursed it, a dry leaf sound, a dying sound. ‘It’ll be okay, Little Fella,’ she said to it. ‘It’ll be okay.’

Her house was three streets from the creek and her feet could have walked her there by themselves. All the houses were the same, each and every one. Mining company houses with pale corrugated skins, 7six cement stumps and one small patio. Each house she passed, the outdoor air conditioners shuddered and hummed to themselves. Some evenings that’s all you could hear; air conditioners thrumming and out on the highway the road trains coming in from the desert sounding their horns.

She passed the Lees’ house, keeping her head down and the thing wrapped up in her shirt. Mrs Lee, watering her buffalo grass in the dark, saw her though.

‘What are you doing out so late again, Pip?’

‘Nothing,’ said Pip.

Mrs Lee raised the hose and sprayed water after Pip’s feet. ‘Hope you’re not stealing Mrs Watson’s pawpaws again?’ she called, laughing. Pip was already running, turning the corner to home.

Pip wanted to stop, to look again at its dark withered shape, but she didn’t. When she’d glanced at it beneath the first streetlight home, her heart had swelled and it had been a sorrowful rushing inflation. She needed to help it soon or it would die.

‘It’ll be okay Little Fella,’ she whispered, opening the metal front gate as quietly as she could. She needed 8a plan yet a plan evaded her. There was no plan for someone home late carrying a nearly dead dragon.

‘Pippa,’ shouted her mother. ‘Don’t you try to sneak past me!’

She must have heard Pip’s footsteps in the hallway, even though Pip had tiptoed. Pip ran the last steps to her room and pulled a hoodie from a drawer and made a little nest for the creature on a shelf in her wardrobe.

‘Pippa!’ This time it was even louder.

‘I’m coming,’ said Pip. One last glance at the thing lying curled there. ‘Ouch,’ she said because her heart had done that thing again. That big thing. An aching swell like a kicked toe grown fat. Could kids have heart attacks the way old people did? She shut the wardrobe as her mother appeared at her bedroom door.

‘Ouch?’ said her mum, looking at Pip standing there holding her heart. ‘What? Are you hurt?’

‘No,’ said Pip.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Softer, her eyes moving to Pip’s dirty legs, the scratches over her shins, and then 9up to her tear-streaked face. ‘Creek again? Seriously, Pip. You know we’ve talked about this.’

‘Sorry,’ said Pip.

‘It’s a school night.’

‘I know, but school is nearly finished.’

‘It’s so late. It’s dark for god’s sake. You’re ten.’

‘I was just sitting there,’ said Pip. ‘I forgot time.’

That wasn’t true. She never forgot time. She knew every single moment of time at the creek at dusk. The shadowy stripes of the silver box trees falling down into the lap of stones. The sun dipping down to wink behind the bent branch of a ghost gum, the number of rises and falls it took for the galahs to go to sleep.

‘I promise,’ Pip said, not even sure what she was promising.

‘He’s not coming back,’ said her mum. ‘He is not coming back.’

‘I know that,’ Pip whispered.

Pip took the embrace her mother offered; a sweaty, gym pants, gardening-smell hug. She must have been trying to save her dying roses again. The angry moment had passed. Her mother could never stay angry for long. 10

‘It’ll be all right,’ said her mother. ‘It’s okay to be sad. Don’t hang out there at night. Okay? Hanging out in the dark doesn’t change anything. Quickly, shower. I’ve made spaghetti.’

‘Okay,’ said Pip.

At the dining room table, Pip twirled her spaghetti.

‘It was hot,’ said her mum, sitting opposite, ‘about an hour ago.’

‘I’m not complaining,’ said Pip.

She was wondering if the dragon was still alive in the little hoodie nest. It had been after the world’s fastest shower. She’d peeked into the wardrobe and seen its little belly rising and falling, heard its ever so small rasping breath. The sorrowful swelling in her chest almost lifted her off the ground. She was wondering how to save a dragon.

Stay calm Pip, Mika said quietly in her head. Keep your nerve. Eat your spaghetti and think. What do you need to save a dragon?

Relief made her sink back into her chair. She was 11always so glad when he spoke to her. Just when she thought he’d gone for good, there he was.

Remember that time we saved Ursa? Mika said. Remember?

Kittens are different to dragons, she silently answered him.

‘Eat up,’ said Mum. ‘Look you’re hardly even touching your dinner and it’s so late and Matt will be home soon if you don’t hurry and what will he say if he sees you still sitting here eating dinner and not in bed?’

It was a rhetorical question. Pip needn’t have answered. Matt liked Pip in her room with the light off and the door closed so he could have her mum all to himself. He didn’t like any competition. Competition made him angry.

‘He’ll go off his brain.’

That was the wrong answer. There was the glimmer of tears in her mum’s eyes.

‘Eat up, okay?’ she said.

Pip, you are going to need medical supplies and food, Mika said. Sugary food. Sugar helps sick things. 12

‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ Pip said to her mother. ‘I mean, spaghetti is the least fast-eating food there is.’

Her mother laughed.

‘God, what am I going to do with you?’ she said.

‘Don’t know.’ Pip smiled back, mouth full of spaghetti. But she was thinking about the dragon in her wardrobe.

THE THING WITH DRAGONS WAS THAT NO ONE expected to find one. No one in the world would be ready for such a thing. There was no section in the library between Pet Care and Gardening called Dragon Care. Pip looked at her mother who was looking at her phone. Pip would have told her if it was in the before time. She would have told her and her mother would have listened the way she used to listen. Not like now, like she could only half-hear. Like she had a song in her head or a puzzle she was trying to solve.

She would have stopped whatever she was doing and come to help.

Her mother smiled a half-smile as she scrolled. 14

One-minute quiz what’s your body type five fail-safe recipes seven-day meal prep for weight loss see the great barrier reef five best workouts to blast belly fat does he really love you online oracle fifty-day declutter your life challenge summer dresses to suit your body shape common problems with roses, why are my roses dying?

‘I better have a shower,’ her mother said, still staring into the screen. ‘You get ready for bed.’

Pip searched through the medicine drawer in the kitchen when she heard the shower turn on. The drawer contained sting cream and bandaids and Ichthammol, which her mother used for drawing out rose thorns. Panadol, asthma puffers and an eye-dropper, which Pip put in her dressing-gown pocket. Mika and her had used that eye-dropper for a baby bird they’d found on the way home from school. They’d kept it in an empty margarine carton and dropped water into its mouth until Pip’s mum had taken it to the vet.

See, there was the bird too, remember that? We’ve got a good track record at saving things.

She found a plastic syringe. A plastic syringe would be perfect! Her grandmother was a wildlife carer in 15Townsville; she’d seen her use a syringe with a baby possum.

Herbal sleeping tablets, Deep Heat gel, anti-fungal toe cream. Her fingers flicked through the drawer. She took the bandaids. A pair of scissors. Two cups of water, a spoon and the sugar pot. Eye-dropper and syringe aside, none of it really seemed like the type of stuff that could save a dragon.

When her supplies were safely in the top drawer of her bedside table, she stood at her door until the shower stopped.

‘Good night.’

‘Night.’ Her mum kissed Pip on the forehead. ‘You okay?’

‘Yes,’ said Pip, even though she had a dragon to save.

In her bedroom with the night light on and her door closed, she scooped the little thing out of the wardrobe in its hoodie nest. She sat with it in her lap, curled, the way a caterpillar curls itself when something wants to eat it. Its head was much bigger than its body and that head was nestled down inside the circle its body made. Its long tail looped around it. It didn’t 16have spikes, the way dragons in stories had spikes, but on its back and tail there were small tufts of papery stuff. It had the nubs of two little horns upon its nose. She resisted the urge to touch them even though the urge was strong. It was definitely a baby dragon. Not a lizard. Not a baby croc.

‘I’m not imagining you,’ she whispered to it.

It had three claws on each foot, caked in river dust, and its body was coated all over too, as though it had laid there for a long time.

‘I’m not imagining you, am I?’

It was thin. Its rib cage showed with each tiny breath. Its wings were tangled. At least she thought they were wings: they were dark, delicate, completely in tatters, the way old black garbage bags looked at the dump, stuck to barbed wire fences. They were torn.

She would have to fix those rips but first she’d have to stop it from dying.

She heard her mother’s footsteps in the hall and held her breath. 

‘Love you,’ her mother said, then, ‘remember to turn out your night-light too.’ 17

Remember to disappear. Remember to stay quiet. Remember to not exist.

‘I will,’ said Pip. ‘Love you.’

She spooned sugar into a cup and mixed in water.

She sucked up the liquid with a syringe and tentatively placed her finger on the little dragon’s mouth, moved it gently, carefully, trying to find a place to insert the tip. It didn’t move, just took its tiny rasping breaths. Small, sharp teeth by the glow of her night-light and right at the back, a very small gap. She inserted the syringe tip and squirted slowly.

It dribbled out.

She tried again.

The little thing made a gurgling noise.

‘It’s okay, Little Fella,’ she whispered. ‘You have to swallow.’

She swapped to the eye-dropper. She placed her fingers against the snout, prised gently, opening the tiny mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth and a dry thing that could only be its tongue. She squeezed the bulb of the eye-dropper gently and let a single drop of sugary liquid fall into the mouth. 18

‘Come on, Little Fella.’ Its tiny body convulsed in response to the drop and she saw the rippling of its throat as it swallowed.

She arranged her equipment on her bedside table quickly. Cup of sugary water. Eye-dropper. Tissues for mopping up excess dribble. She kept one hand on mouth-opening duty and one hand for eye-dropper duty. She let the dragon rest after each three drops. Three drops was all it seemed to manage before that rippling swallow weakened and the liquid pooled from the side of its little mouth.

The light from the television in her mother’s room bled under her door. Green, then blue, then white. Her mum would be staring into that light. Rhinestone caftans, knives that never go blunt, steam mops, ab-trainers. The complete crystal healing set. Bach flower oils, the robo-vacuum, holiday clubs. Her mum would gaze into that glow like a princess into a pond, wishing and wishing.

In the pauses between swallows, Pip touched the dragon’s scales with her fingertips. They felt strange but, even stranger, not unfamiliar. She had never touched 19a dragon before, she was one hundred per cent certain, yet she felt like she had. There was no explaining that. And she was almost certain, suddenly, that Little Fella was a boy. She had no knowledge of how to confirm this, just knew.

‘You’re going to be all right,’ she told him, lying there curled in her lap. ‘Little Fella, that’s your name.’

Little Fella.

She whispered it, again and again. In the darkened room she fed him and whispered to him without stopping for what seemed like hours. Three drops. Rest. Three drops. Rest. Three drops. Rest.

When she heard the screen door slam open and Matt’s tool bag crash down onto the kitchen bench, those sounds barely registered. Even the sound of her mother’s quick, soft footsteps, ready to placate him, seemed to come from a faraway place.

PIP WOKE TO DAWN LIGHT AND THE EYE-dropper still in her hand. The dragon had vomited in the bed beside her. It was a dark spray over the hoodie and part of the pillow. The outside of the dragon might have been dry and shrivelled but the inside of him smelled wild; grassy, sky-filled and tart as grapefruit.

He was also dead.

She’d come up from her dreams like a deep-sea diver and there he was, not breathing.

‘Please,’ she whispered, searching for the rise and fall of his chest.

There was nothing. 21

She pulled at her hair and one single high-pitched squeal escaped from her. There was a lament, hurricane-sized, just waiting to burst from her lungs. She squeezed her hands into fists and banged against her own chest and opened her mouth, soundless, because she was useless at saving things, because he shouldn’t have died, because sugary water was probably the wrong thing and she’d killed him. Because this was her one and only chance to save a dragon and he had depended on her.

The dragon suddenly took one long shuddering breath, coughed weakly, blew dark vomit from his nostrils.

Pip gasped.

Little Fella took another shuddering breath, shifted, curled himself tighter, the first time he’d moved. Pip gasped again. He shuddered again, breathed more black vomit from his nostrils. They gasped and breathed at each other until Pip was laughing through her tears.

‘That was seriously bad,’ she whispered to him, to herself. ‘Seriously bad. You can’t die.’

She scooped him up in the hoodie and placed him in her wardrobe again. She looked at the vomit 22on her pillow, decided it was a problem. She removed the pillowcase and quickly thrust it under her bed, pulled her sheet up over the remaining flecks across the top of the bed. She dressed in her school uniform even though she knew she wouldn’t be going to school.

In the bathroom she gauged the sounds of the house. It was quiet apart from the sound of the frying pan. That would be her mother cooking breakfast for Matt. There were no voices. She stared at her reflection: brown hair, brown eyes, freckles. A large mole on her right cheek. She didn’t look like someone who was saving a dragon.

She listened for Mika’s voice in her head. It didn’t arrive. She hated that emptiness. He never came much in the mornings, she knew, but she’d thought, considering the circumstances, that he might.

So, he nearly died, she told Mika as she tied her hair into a rough ponytail. He didn’t, so that’s good news. Obviously, I can’t go to school.

She waited several seconds. Nothing. She knew she was only stalling anyway. She went down the hall into the dining room. 23

‘Hi Matt,’ she said.

‘Morning,’ he said, and didn’t look up from his phone.

She wondered, if he did look up, would he see it on her, all that finding a dragon and nearly losing it? All that dragon-saving? She hoped he wouldn’t look up.

He was dangerous. Dangerous like water. He could seem calm and glassy on top but underneath he was all dark silt and weed.

He was big too, probably as big as a bear if a bear were in their kitchen standing on its hind legs. Sometimes as ferocious. Now he was sitting drinking his coffee and scrolling through Facebook stealing all the oxygen. Her mother and her had to survive on small sips of air.

‘I was nearly coming to wake you,’ her mum said quietly. ‘You’re going to be late.’

‘I was out to it,’ said Pip.

Pip made Weet-Bix. Weet-Bix might be good for Little Fella. Weet-Bix made kids strong. Maybe it would be the same for a dragon.

In the dining room she sat opposite Matt. 24

He asked her if she had done her homework. He didn’t look up from the phone for the question.

‘There’s no homework,’ she said. ‘It’s the last week of term.’

He laughed at that, still scrolling. A harsh, scornful laugh, as though that was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. Like she’d said, We’re never having homework again. Homework is history. Homework no longer exists.

She never knew what was going to annoy him. She wished, very quickly, several times, for him not to be annoyed that this was the last week of term and that there was no homework.

What if she said, I found a dragon. I found him in the creek when the sun was falling down. I found him and he needs to be saved and I’ve been up all night saving him. I thought he was dead but he breathed again. What if she said that?

He didn’t continue the conversation, kept scrolling. Pip felt she’d escaped something momentarily, then checked herself just as fast.

That’s how it was.

He was dangerous like the hairpin bends in a road. 25You didn’t really know what was coming the other way.

‘How about I drive you this morning?’ said Mum, putting down the plate in front of Matt. It was perfect. The toast, the eggs, the bacon. Yet Pip watched his eyes searching for something to fault. He didn’t say thank you. It was on Pip’s tongue, to say thank you for him.

‘I’m right to ride,’ said Pip. Matt didn’t like her mum driving the four-wheel drive.

‘Let her ride,’ said Matt. ‘It’s good for her.’

Because he was in charge of everything. What was good for them, or what wasn’t.

You’re going to need arrowroot biscuits, said Mika abruptly in her head. It gave her such a fright she jumped in her chair. Remember the story I told you about the baby on the station, a long way from a hospital, that was sick and fading fast then they mushed up arrowroot biscuit and—

‘Well, you better eat up quick,’ said her mum. ‘It’s late, you know.’

‘Good bacon,’ said Matt. Pip glanced up and into the kitchen and saw her mum’s shoulders relax. 26That’s how quickly it could change. There was suddenly air again, like a vent had been opened.

Pip ate her Weet-Bix as quickly and quietly as she could and then went back to the kitchen to take her lunch box.

‘What are you looking for, Pippa?’ asked her mum when she was down in the bottom shelves of the pantry again.

‘Muesli bars,’ said Pip, even though she wasn’t. She was searching for arrowroot biscuits.

‘I already packed you one,’ said Mum.

‘Maybe some arrowroots,’ said Pip. ‘I just really feel like some.’

‘Hurry up,’ whispered Mum, going past her to take coffee to Matt. She obviously didn’t want anything to ruin Matt’s brand-new shiny good mood. Pip grabbed the entire packet when her mother was out of the kitchen and thrust it into her schoolbag.

School, she thought. One hundred per cent impossible.

In her room she bundled up Little Fella in the hoodie. He had vomited again and that was a bad sign. Maybe the sugar was one hundred per cent a bad idea. 27Maybe dragons were sugar intolerant. He wasn’t curled tight anymore, he was limper. He looked smaller and more dried out again. Flattened-toad dry. But he was still breathing.

Into her schoolbag on top of the arrowroot biscuits went the dropper and the syringe. The cup, a water bottle. She placed Little Fella, wrapped in the hoodie nest, on top, staring until she saw the tiny rise and fall of his chest, rechecking again, in case her eyes were playing tricks on her. Her heart ached like an old broken bone in the cold.

She wondered again if she should tell her mother. Even while her mother kissed her and Pip was being careful not to look into her eyes in case her mother saw the lie, she was wondering it.

She knew she couldn’t.

If she told her mum, then her mum would tell Matt and Matt owned everything. Her mother had to tell him everything because he was the king of knowing everything.

He’d say, one hundred per cent, they’d have to put it out of its misery. 

S​HE DIDN’T GO DOWN THE LONG‚ STRAIGHT road that ran beside the creek to school. She turned left onto the road that crossed the creek instead. There was a still heat, no wind, like the inside of an oven just turned on. That heat would increase as the sun rose. That heat baked the skin of the dry creek. It cooked the bitumen and cracked it open like the top of a pie. It burned the swings in the park so that you couldn’t touch them and sucked all the colour from everything: out of grass, out of leaves, out of clothes left on the line. She rode as fast as she could.

She hoped that leaving later than normal would help her avoid other school kids. Angus Barton or 29Audrey Coles or Lucy and Emily Cartwright, the twins, at the bottom of Buna Street, who’d always call out, and pedal behind her quickly, singing out, Pippa, Pippa, wait for us.

She wasn’t lucky though. There on the other side of the crossing was Archie Morgan. She swore under her breath. He was on his BMX and he was going to stop her for sure. Archie lived on the other side of the creek and she should have remembered that.

He stopped in the middle of the crossing; a road built across the dry river that disappeared completely when it flooded. He was smiling, his streak of dyed orange hair glowing in the morning sun.

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘You’re going the wrong way.’

Pip shrugged, glanced at the sky.

Archie Morgan, suddenly keeper of the bridge and that side of town, with the hills she needed and the rocks and the caves, seemed like he was going to let her pass. She hoped Little Fella wasn’t suffocating in her backpack.30

‘You wagging?’ he asked. ‘You’re going to get in real big trouble, Pip.’

Sometimes Archie had hung out with Mika and her. Some afternoons down the creek, if he’d spotted them there at the Junkyard on the swing, he’d come to sit on a rock and talk with them. He’d never made jokes about Pip and Mika, the way other kids did. Love and marriage and a baby carriage. That kind of stuff.

‘I’m not wagging,’ she said. ‘I’ve just got to drop something somewhere.’

‘Drop something?’ he said. ‘Somewhere?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Okay,’ he said, long and slow.

‘I’m not wagging,’ she said again and started to ride.

He laughed and started to ride too, in the opposite direction, not even looking back over his shoulder.

‘Will you tell?’ she called after him but he didn’t answer.

He probably won’t, she thought as she rode furiously, he isn’t that kind of kid. But she couldn’t know for sure.

The other side of the creek was an industrial estate: 31a tyre place, a truck mechanic, a vet surgery, the old rollerskating rink with its padlocked fence and its once colourful sign covered in graffiti. ROLLER-FUN. Horse paddocks with horses crowded in any shade they could find, and then the hills.

There were other faded suburbs with bleached gardens behind the hills and the old cemetery, with its quartz rock grave markers and in a small slice of green, the lawn cemetery, where the sprinklers whirred constantly, trying to defy the desert sun. Yet it was the hills she needed. Their hill.

Mika and her had practically lived at the hill on weekends but they didn’t know about the cave in the beginning. They’d explored for days before they found it, each time dropping her bike down into the gully beside the road and clambering up through the spinifex and rocky spines.

Mika touched those rocks. He ran his fingers over them. He crouched down and spent time examining them. He said serious things like, ‘When these rocks were formed this would have all been the sea,’ or, ‘This rock is older even than the dinosaurs.’ 32

Pip didn’t know where he got his information from, but he said these things with such conviction that she wanted to believe him. She was only nine then and she’d never met another kid her age that spoke like that. It made her laugh nervously yet feel excited, like standing near him made the world feel bigger. She got butterflies each morning when she saw him waiting for her at the end of the street.

Their hill had three distinct sides, which led Mika to hypothesise that it was the remains of an ancient pyramid built by aliens. The rocky spines had once been its walls. She’d squinted against the sun, hand over her brow, and said, ‘Seriously?’

She knew from the welcome to country that the land belonged to the Kalkatungu people and they’d been living there since forever and she was pretty sure they would have noticed a whole heap of aliens building a pyramid.