How to Tame your Anxiety Dragon: Part 1

Writing is great, but it can be very lonely. Shut away listening to the voices in your head, it’s sometimes hard to separate genuine issues from shadowy fears, let alone find a way to move past them. In the light of this, myself and the brilliant Yael Tischler would like to present our first collaboration for the blog. With our powers combined, we are insane. We hope you enjoy the result. 

This is the first chapter of a potential blog serial entitled “How to Tame Your Anxiety Dragon”. If we get enough comments on this chapter, we’ll treat you all to a second chapter.  And if you like our second chapter, well, you just might get a third.  And so forth… 

Also in the spirit of collaboration, if you’d like to include ridiculous story ideas in your comments, we’ll do our best to work them into future chapters. 

So without further ado... Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

How to Tame Your Anxiety Dragon

Part One

Pip couldn’t see the dragon, but he knew it was there.

He could feel it, peering over his shoulder and breathing hot, dry air in his ear.  If he tried to move away, it followed him.  If he tried to look behind him, it moved away.  But he knew it was there, because everything its breath touched went tense.

He wasn’t sure what to do about it. Normally, he would have asked his sister, Stella, but she’d been in a weird mood ever since they’d arrived at Calvary Court. Stella knew all about Calvary. She’d stayed at the centre loads of times on drama and writing courses. But it was Pip’s first time.

 Mum had told Stella to keep an eye him. But the minute Mum’s car had pulled away from the old farmhouse, Stella had turned on her heels and flounced off. 

So Pip was on his own. With the dragon.

He didn’t like being alone in the first place.  But being alone with a dragon. That was even worse. He rolled his shoulders, attempting to spread out the tension. It didn’t work. He tried spinning around in circles, so that he might catch a glimpse of the dragon.  Maybe, if he could see it, he would have a better idea of how to make it go away.  But the dragon kept out of sight, so Pip just ended up very dizzy and eventually fell on the floor.

“I don’t know you,” Stella hissed as she passed him in the corridor. Pip watched her disappear towards the Common Room, to join the other students for break. Stella had told him that, at break, they got all the chocolate bourbons they could eat. Chocolate bourbons were very good biscuits, he reasoned. Maybe he could bribe the dragon to leave him alone?

Pip slipped through the double doors.  The shouts and laughter of students playing Twister dimmed the sense of the dragon.  But only for a moment.

Pip sidled over to the tray of biscuits. He took one for himself and a second for the dragon.  He shuffled towards the hiding space he’d found the previous day, a gap formed by the right-angle between the sofa and the cabinet.  He ducked into it.  He wanted to be out of sight, just in case it was against the rules to feed a dragon in the common room. 

The dragon sniffed the biscuit. Its breath sucked at his arm-hairs like a vacuum cleaner. Pip shuddered and held the biscuit as far away as he could. But it was no good. Even when he screwed his eyes up really tightly and counted to ten, the biscuit remained uneaten. Pip had the horrible feeling that the dragon might be a carnivore.

An image flashed into his mind of the dragon devouring him, just as he had devoured his own biscuit.  It made his heart beat faster and his breath speed up and his muscles pulse and pulse.  And all the while he thought of the dragon, he swore he felt the heat on the back of his neck grow stronger, saw the dragon’s shadow loom larger. He was sure of it: with each passing moment, the dragon got bigger. 

Pip pulled his knees to his chest and curled into a ball. He was going to be eaten, quicker than the donuts at last night’s dinner. He tried not to think about how dragon teeth would feel, tearing through his skin. 

“Hey look! It’s a boy in a ball!”

Pip recognised that voice. It belonged to Liam Williams, who had spent most of last night shrieking and bouncing on his bunk-bed as if it were a trampoline.

“Really?” said another.  It had a harsher sound.  Mocking.  Ben Bradshaw, thought Pip.  “I’ve never seen a boy in a ball before.” 

A boy in a ball? Perhaps that could distract the dragon. Pip looked up. Liam’s shock of white-blonde hair and Ben’s gelled black spikes crept over the edge of the sofa. Pip’s eyes widened. He realised: the other boys were looking at him. Pip’s face burned and he dove back into the shelter of his hands. 

“Hey, ball-boy,” said Ben. “You trying to turn yourself into a football or something?”

Liam giggled. “That would be awesome! If you bounced, I bet you could get up onto the roof and see the sea and bound right through the clouds out into space. You could orbit the earth and bring back an alien from the moon and then -”

“Now there’s an idea, Liam,” said Ben. “You wanna see how far we can launch him?” 

Liam let out an excited squeal. “Pip, you wanna be a spaceman?”

Pip swallowed. He wasn’t keen on outer space at the best of times. He tried to shake his head without moving his body. It didn’t really work.

 “He looks like a shivering guinea pig!” said Ben.

“Do you think there’s ever been a shivering guinea pig in space?” asked Liam.

Pip imagined himself blasting through the air, trembling, heading straight for the moon.  His stomach churned. He thought he might be sick, right here behind the sofa. The dragon seemed even bigger now. Beads of sweat dotted Pip’s forehead.

“Hey, Ben!” yelled Liam. “Looks like he’s gonna be sick!” He scampered around the sofa and proceeded to poke Pip in the shoulder. Repeatedly.

Pip held still.

“Ben?” Liam sounded worried now. “Hey, Ben - he’s not moving. Maybe he’s dead?”

Dead? Pip screwed his eyes up tighter. He didn’t think he was dead. But maybe that would make things easier. Then he wouldn’t have to deal with the dragon.

Liam paused. “Hey.... maybe he’ll turn into a zombie?”

“That would be awesome,” said Ben. 

“Hey, guys. What’s going on here?” said a new voice. It was older and kinder and reminded Pip of the cranberry flapjacks Mum baked sometimes. He thought he recognized it as one of the tutors’.  Mark perhaps? Marcus? Marvin? Something like that.

“Sir! Sir! We think he’s dead!” shouted Liam, jumping up and down.  Pip felt the floor judder.

“Who?”

“Pip, sir!”

The tutor knelt down next to him.  Pip removed his hands from his face to see a young man with kind blue eyes, magnified behind thick plastic glasses. His concerned smile was almost as bright as his red hair.

“You alright, Pip?”

Pip made himself nod. Maxwell - or was it Maximillian? - smiled even wider.

“Good. Okay, you two. Break’s over, and you should be in the classroom. If you don’t get a move on, you’ll miss the bus to the beach.”

Liam and Ben looked at each other and sprinted off. The tutor - Melvin (?) - sighed. “Don’t run in the corridors,” he called, hopelessly. Despite the dragon, Pip smiled.

“That’s better,” Milton (?) said. “Now, are you sure you’re alright? Think you can climb out of your corner? You’re meant to be going to the beach too, aren’t you?”

Pip thought about this. He could still feel the dragon’s breath, hot and itchy against his skin, but the shadow looked a little smaller. Maybe too small to eat him at the moment? And he did want to go to the beach.

Marlowe (?) held out his hand.  Pip took it and pulled himself to his feet.

“Let me walk you back to the room,” said Merlin (?).

Pip followed him along the long, glass-covered corridor to the house.

“What were you doing behind there, anyway?”

Pip shrugged, but didn’t answer. 

Mercutio (?) smiled. “You know,” he said.  “I used to hide back there too, when I was a student.  It’s a cozy spot.  I found it was a good place to be scared, because I could stay there until I’d calmed myself down a bit.”

“How did you do that?” Pip asked.

“Well,” the tutor paused.  “It was never easy.  But sometimes I found that if I thought about it long enough, the things that scared me weren’t that scary at all.  They were actually quite silly, really.”

Pip thought about this. “Have you got any experience with dragons?” he asked hopefully. Machiavelli (?) turned to look at Pip, rubbing the bridge of his glasses as if he were thinking hard.

“Dragons?” he said, considering. “Why do you ask?”

Pip scuffed his trainers on the carpet floor. “Well,” he began. “Let’s just say... If a dragon was bothering you...?”

Mandrake (?) frowned. “The thing about dragons,” he said slowly, “is that they’re tricksy creatures. They like riddles and intelligent conversation. I don’t know... I think I might try talking to them.” He smiled at Pip. “Theoretically, of course.”

“Oh,” said Pip. Talk to the dragon? He hadn’t thought of that.

In a moment, they reached the classroom.  Marmeduke (?) pushed open the door, and led Pip inside. 

“Hey, Trish, I’ve got another one of yours,” he said..

Trish, Pip’s tutor, smiled and waved.  “Thanks, Martin.”

*

Calvary beach was stony and windswept, despite being sheltered by the curve of the cliffs. Pip stared at the long, thin ridges of rock that grew from the ground like scaled dragon spines. Liam Williams was already racing along one, wellies slipping in the seaweed.

Pip frowned. He wasn’t sure the beach was safe.  He decided it would be best if he stood still, in a dry patch of rocks, far enough from the sea that he wouldn’t be dragged under by the waves.  Of course, this meant that he was so far up the beach, that all the other students looked like small seabirds, poking in the sand for hidden treasures.  It also meant that, once again, he was alone.  Well, except for the dragon.  
Pip thought about what Martin had said.  Perhaps he could try talking to the dragon? It might work.  But how, exactly, did one open a conversation with a dragon? 
“Hello?” tried Pip.  
There was silence behind him. Pip listened. He didn’t think it was a threatening silence, so much as a thoughtful one. As if the dragon were trying to work out how to hold a conversation with a small boy. Its breath tickled the back of his neck. And then, the dragon spoke.  
“Hello,” it said. Or, not said exactly. It was as if the word crackled inside his mind.  
Pip gulped.  The dragon’s voice wasn’t unpleasant. Just strange. He had imagined the dragon would sound frightening, but really, it just sounded...  Nervous.  He didn’t blame the dragon, though.  He felt pretty nervous, too.  He wondered what sort of question a nervous dragon might like to answer. 
“Do you like chocolate bourbons?” he said.