Chapter Two
Frida was heading back to Ground Control where zookeepers did unmentionable things like spreadsheets, mainlining sugar and visiting the toilets aka the Dung Heap, when a familiar shout stopped her in her tracks.
A bucket-load of coffee awaited her, but she grinned as she turned back to see Antony and Hamish, her two best friends, trotting towards her down the still-empty yellow-brick roads.
“Morning, Fri,” Antony whispered, wrapping her in a bone-shattering hug.
Over six feet tall and muscular with it, Antony had been awarded Most Likely to Break Your Ribs in a Hug at the staff Christmas party four years in a row.
Frida inhaled his scent of laundry powder and mint as he squished her to him, feeling the customary tickle of his perfectly groomed beard against her cheek.
‘Ant, you fool. Look at her, she’s filthy!’ Hamish exclaimed at a safe distance in their Glaswegian drawl, scooting handily out of the way as Antony attempted to gather them up as well. ‘Not a fucking chance.’
‘Oh shit, sorry.’ Frida guiltily pulled away and looked ruefully at the patch of dung that she had, unwittingly, imprinted like a Rorschach test onto Antony’s Forest-green shirt.
Darting a look at herself in one of the Ground Control windows, she winced.
Hamish was right: her pale face was streaked with faeces, so much so that she could barely see her freckles, and her mousy braid was barely hanging on by its hinges.
Hamish gingerly plucked at a particularly pungent piece of shit caked in her braid-not-a-braid, and quirked a deadpan, dusty blond eyebrow at her.
Rosy-skinned and willowy, Hamish was a fabulous violet-wigged drag artist in the back alleys of Melody at night, very handy with a shovel by day, and they never got dung on their uniform if they could help it.
‘My love, did you really get into a fight with the grootnecks again?’ they asked dryly.
‘We haven’t even had our coffee yet. Although .
. .’ They dramatically wrinkled their nose, sniffing her.
‘Smells more like eau de unicorn, don’t you think Ant? ’
Antony looked as though he thought they’d both lost their minds. ‘Are we really talking about dung right now?’ he exclaimed, his face breaking into a dimpled grin so wide, it reached his adorable bucket ears. ‘Today of all days?’
Frida was furiously attempting to rub at his shirt, only succeeding in smearing an even greater circumference of dung.
Antony was a soft-spoken, humble, too-kind-for-his-own-good Black Jamaican-Londoner who loved two things with absolute fervour: his friends, and anything containing chlorophyll.
Like Frida, he’d moved with his family to Melody to become a zookeeper.
Five years ago, on the first day of their Training Programme, she’d been sat at a table on her own, and he’d come up and quietly offered her his blueberry muffin.
In week two, Antony had saved Hamish from being attacked by an angry hangfern, and the rest was history.
Frida rolled her tattooed shoulders, hearing the satisfying crack.
Fireheart’s wrinkled terracotta tail curled down her right arm, a salubrious pink ghost-lynx on her left.
On her knees, grunkles danced, storm monkeys struck lightning down her ribs, and Issy the baby unicorn cavorted over her hands.
Gorgonzola, Gouda and Gruyere, the LEZ’s trio of grey-horned grootnecks, were on her neck and the deliciously ghastly visage of the Nuckelavee, the thousand-year-old Orcadian seahorse demon from hell, was on her left shin.
Michael the phoenix lit the other leg, snuggling up to his beloved thunderbird Fran.
She grinned up at Antony. ‘The dragon’s coming today.’
Antony’s answering chuckle was a low rumble. ‘Your dragon’s finally coming.’
Even Hamish, leaning laconically against the wall, couldn’t help their lips from quirking.
It wasn’t really Frida’s dragon, of course.
But Frida had been waiting for this moment since she’d been six years old.
No new dragon had come to the LEZ for a long time.
The last had been in the 1930s, when a string of acquisitions had ended in a very public tragedy, and three sea dragons had died within a month of each other.
Everyone knew there were only eighty-six documented dragons left in the wild, and only fifteen in captivity in the network of Extraordinary Zoos around the world.
Frida had simply assumed that Fireheart, who lived in Sky, was destined to be the only dragon in Melody forever.
Until – everything changed.
Three months ago, Cliff Anderson, the Head Keeper of Forest, had told them the news: a young tree-dwelling dragon had been rescued in Bolivia, and, with much public fanfare, the LEZ had acquired him.
Today was the day Frida had been waiting for since she’d been given her LEZ baseball cap and green Forest uniform, since her mum pointed at the TV and said, Look Friduska, D-R-A-G-O-N.
They’re real you know, wings, fire-breath and all.
Her mum.
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.