Page 2 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

The word landed in her chest.

Instinctively, her hand went to her wrist where there was a tattoo of a yellow rose. She’d done it herself a year ago, with a needle in the bathroom one especially awful night.

Antony’s brow clouded. ‘Fri?’ His gentle eyes read her like a book. She felt sick as the cheerful scent of sugar and manure turned stale.

‘Can you believe it?’ she said, trying to force a smile. ‘It’s Dragon Day!’

But as Antony’s bronze-brown skin caught the gleam of the sun, she couldn’t bear to see the worry on his face. Her gaze dropped to his strong, knuckled hands covered in a familiar pattern of fence scratches, animal bites, and mud-shovelling callouses. Just like hers. Except he had flawlessly manicured nails which Hamish had painted dragon’s blood red last night. The sight was so perfectly him – so quietly rugged and unassumingly fabulous – that a knot of emotion roared through her.

She thought she could smell roses.

Hamish shot Antony some warning side-eye.

‘Fri,’ Antony said under his breath, ignoring Hamish’s warning. ‘You know she would have been so proud of you today.’

Antony was right. Her mum would have been proud. But Frida shoved the smell of roses away, pushed it into a locked box in the dark, cobwebbed depths of her mind. An ancient, oiled chest made of rosewood, with a large silver padlock. She metaphorically kicked the thing with a growl.

’I’m fine,’ she answered roughly to Antony’s unasked question. ‘And I don’t want to think about it, thank you. Not today.’ Not ever.

All Frida had ever talked about was dragons, dragons, dragons, and Ada Rose, for better or worse, wasn’t the kind of parent to just say, ‘Well, we’ll just watch them on TV, Friduska love, now let’s go do some of that algebra homework.’ Her mum had worked three jobs so they could travel to the seaside once a month and queue up outside these hallowed walls. To be in a place where extraordinary lived. But her mum was dead. She’d died of stage four ovarian cancer one year, seven months, and twenty-six days ago. They hadn’t even had a month to prepare before she was just gone. The house wasn’t full of her mum’s favourite yellow roses anymore. Her laugh, low-pitched as honey, didn’t sound through the kitchen. No more messy stacks of books about gnomes and dire-cats and naiads on every surface, no more eating ice-cream until they lay on the floor in foetal positions.

When she’d been alive, the world had felt like a place for dreaming. Now the world felt small and heavy. The only thing that felt possible was putting one foot in front of the other and the only solace was making sure Issy and all the others got fed. Frida’s eyes started to well.

‘We love you, Fri,’ Antony murmured, squeezing her hand.

Suddenly, it felt as if her chest was caving in. She jerked away and started to walk towards the small, gated staff door into Ground Control, hidden by a few hundred layers of ivy. Hamish said something inaudible, and she heard a thud – presumably Hamish’s fist against Antony’s arm, judging by Antony’s pained yelp.

‘What?’ Antony exclaimed, sounding wounded. Then, calling after Frida, ‘I didn’t mean to make it worse, it’s just—’ He shifted. She could hear his boots creaking on the cobbles. ‘We miss her too.’ He hurried after her. Reluctantly, she turned to look up into his pained face. ‘We know you barely sleep, and it’s been months since you’ve wanted to talk about her, about anything even. I know now’s not the time, but . . .’

As Antony trailed off, Hamish pinched the short, flattened, broken-a-few-times bridge of their nose, and gave Frida an apologetic shrug.

‘Sorry Fri,’ they said with uncharacteristic softness. ‘But you have taken so many extra shifts this month. We’ve been worried, that’s all.’ She could see the concern writ in the line of Hamish’s slender shoulders. Hamish’s heart was just as big as Antony’s, albeit hidden behind a prickly temper and carefully jaded aura. The reams of romantic trash on Hamish’s bookshelves could attest to that, and truly – although Hamish would rarely admit it – they got excited by anything from a new brand of toilet paper in the Dung Heap to the birth of a new friperit. So, when Hamish wouldn’t meet her eyes, she knew it was bad. And when she looked at Antony, the genuine heartbreak on his open face was enough to floor her. Antony and Hamish were her family. They were all she had now, apart from Issy and the others. And they both had enough to deal with. The last thing they needed was to worry about her.

‘I’m fine, truly,’ she said, under her breath.

They both looked sceptical.

‘I am,’ she managed with a laugh, although she could hear her voice breaking. ‘And I’m grateful, to both of you,’ she said, elbowing Hamish when they made to slide Antony some more dour side-eye. ‘I just. . . you know. I miss her.’ With an effort, she gave them both a shrug, toeing her muddy boots against a loose bit of brick. ‘Come on, did I hear you say something about coffee earlier?’

A beat passed and then Hamish let out an ear-splitting squeal, almost knocking them both aside in their spectacular attempt to get through the Ground Control door first. Antony shot her a lopsided grin. Only one dimple, but it was enough. She grinned back as he took her arm.

‘Today is going to be the perfect day,’ he said firmly.

She leaned into him, grateful for his steadiness. They proceeded into the stuffy bowels of the building, and the typical zookeeper perfume of sweat and old meat wafted around them. Radios at their belts buzzed with low-level chatter and Antony’s dimples returned in full force. The corridors thronged with keepers in all the colours of the LEZ: coral pink, grey, ice blue, cerulean, ochre, grassy emerald and the classic Forest green. Every now and then someone stopped to high-five Antony, which he returned affably, causing Frida and Hamish to exchange wry eyerolls. The idea of high fiving anyone they hadn’t already exchanged some form of bodily fluids with was, quite frankly, outrageous.

Anticipation crawled up Frida’s neck, tingling her scalp.

Everywhere they went, the word dragon hung in the air.

Chapter Three

As they approached the kitchen, they could hear Cliff’s booming voice vibrating through the thin walls. Inside, they found their battering-ram of a boss yelling cheerfully into his radio, whilst stress-eating his way through a gargantuan box of pastries. Cliff was white and in his mid-fifties. French-Canadian with tanned, weather-beaten skin. He had a bulbous nose, crystal blue eyes that crinkled, and a voice that could shake the rafters. If Antony was tall, Cliff was taller, and he sang baritone in a West End cover band called Joseph and The Dreamboats.

Behind his head was the famous portrait of Joshua Beaufort, 3rd Earl of Marlow, the founder of the LEZ. Sitting behind an ancient wooden desk, Sir Joshua’s handsome, square-jawed chin was propped on his fist and, as he stared out at them, the mysterious smile on his sensual, upturned lips lit up the kitchen.

‘Ah, my Swans!’ Cliff bellowed, eyes brightening as he slammed the radio back into his belt and offered up the pastry box with a smile. Swans mated for life, and in Cliff’s mind, Frida, Antony and Hamish should just set the date already. Frida didn’t mind; in fact, she loved their callsign. Antony and Hamish did not love it, but that was only because they were secretly in love with each other. It was a whole thing, and it was annoying, because it was the only thing the three of them were Not Allowed To Talk About.

When Antony nabbed the last chocolate croissant, Hamish’s death stare might have turned a pixie to stone. Antony just gave Hamish a cheerful pastry-dusted middle finger. Frida tried to hide behind them both, not wanting Cliff to mistake her for a mud golem. But Cliff was busy booming out a winding tale of how Management had come to do their thousandth check on the new enclosure, Dragon’s Deep, when one of the be-suited, bearded nerds with a clipboard had fallen into the dragon’s new swimming pool. He’d just got to the punchline when they all heard the unmistakable sound of clipped footsteps from down the hall.