Memory of Bones by Alex Connor Read Free Book Online Page B

from which steel rods protruded into her cranium. The metal screws on the helmet were turned twice a day to gradually pull the features into alignment. Brutal. Painful. Necessary.
    An old memory came back, unbidden. Of his brother falling out of a tree. Falling flat, like a sandbag, without putting out his hands to break his fall. Leon, bellyflopping into the parched Spanish earth … He had broken his left leg, his jaw and two of his ribs and knocked out four of his teeth. In a Madrid hospital Leon’s jaw was wired back into line and his leg put in traction – and all the time he joked with Ben about why he had fallen.
    The tree told me to do it
…
    What their parents had euphemistically referred to as ‘Leon’s accident’ had determined Ben’s future career. Throughout their teens he had gone through every operation with his brother, sat with him, listened to him,watched him. Known how much the surgery hurt as he observed the slight body pulled back into shape, the face restored, rebuilt. Over a period of years he saw Leon turned from a disfigured misfit back into a normal child. Physically, at least.
    Two decades later Ben had notched up over twenty years’ experience as a reconstructive surgeon, treating both adults and children. Twenty years of facial burns, of careless playing with candles, of car accidents, of hit-and-run drivers. Two decades of womb injuries, of nature’s vicious tricks, of hiccups in the DNA. Twenty years, two hundred and forty months, one thousand and forty weeks spent in the company of victims. While his colleagues had made fortunes from facelifts and liposuction Ben Golding had stuck to his principles. He wasn’t interested in making someone perfect; he was interested in making them fit in.
    Walking over, Megan interrupted his thoughts. ‘I was reading about one of your cases. Harry Collard—’
    ‘I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes. I’ve got to get back to my office,’ Ben replied, glancing at his watch. ‘Let’s talk as we walk.’
    Together they made their way down the main arterial corridor of the hospital, leading to the consulting rooms.
    ‘Harry Collard’s had over twenty operations, hasn’t he?’ she asked, almost running to keep up with Ben. ‘Isn’t that a lot for a child?’
    ‘Harry’s twenty-one now.’
    ‘But he was a child when you started,’ she persisted.‘And surely the risks of all those anaesthetics is serious? Research shows that they can undermine a person’s resilience, even do long-term harm.’
    Pausing, Ben opened the door of his consulting room and showed her in. The room was crowded with research books, piles of X-rays creeping inexorably across the top of the filing cabinets. On the wall, over a black-painted iron fireplace, was a painting of a landscape long gone, the chimney behind leaking a faint odour of soot.
    ‘We both know serial anaesthetics are bad for a child,’ Ben said evenly. ‘And much as I commend your interest, I think it’s a front.’
    ‘
What?
’
    ‘Let’s be honest, that wasn’t what you wanted to talk about, was it?’
    She flushed, surprised by his perception. ‘I’ve got to make a decision about my speciality.’
    ‘You could do well in reconstructive surgery.’
    ‘I don’t want to do what you do. I want to go where the money is,’ Megan admitted bluntly. ‘The National Health’s declining. If it was a patient, they’d turn the respirator off.’ She gestured to the high walls, brown wood below the dado, dark anaglypta wallpaper above, the lamp-shade over their heads a cheap inverted bowl design from the 1930s. ‘I don’t like being poor. I want to get on to the reconstructive gravy train.’
    ‘But there are a lot of cosmetic surgeons,’ Ben replied evenly. ‘Why don’t you do something more worthwhile?’
    ‘Maybe I’m not the worthy type.’ She held his gaze, butdidn’t pull her punches. ‘That little girl, the one we’ve just seen – I don’t think she should be alive. I don’t