The Bonesetter's Fee and other stories

By Rashida Murphy

The Bonesetter's Fee and Other Stories brings light to the growing pains of the migrant experience. Murphy explores themes of identity, breathing life into superstition and myth. The collection encapsulates how one's heritage and history can influence their personhood, and how human connection and understanding links us together. With e

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spineless Wonders Publishing Pty Ltd
• Release date: Oct 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781925052817

Book preview

The Bonesetter’s Fee

IT IS A slippery afternoon. Fingers slip when holding hands, hands slip when pulling at bones – it didn’t feel like fixing what was broken. How can being fixed hurt so much? The Bonesetter is grim with sweat and intent and Mrs Bonesetter keeps wiping my palms so he can get a grip. Such pain. And the bone jutting jagged through skin. My parents have left me here with barbarians. Noisy unpleasant barbarians whose voices are like protruding bones.

Uncle Hamid had looked at my poor arm, my sweaty face, my streaked cheeks, and told my parents not to take me to this man. He whispered, but I heard. I heard The Bonesetter had a reputation. I heard him called the bonebreaker. ‘It would be better to wait and see a proper doctor,’ Uncle Hamid said.

‘A girl,’ Hamid’s wife said, loudly and uncaringly, ‘must not have visible defects. How can you trust this man to set her bone properly?’

‘Ssh,’ said Mum. ‘What choice do we have? The child is in pain and she’ll scream all night. Nothing but trouble I tell you. She’ll be alright. Don’t be paranoid. He can fix that arm. People in the mohalla have been going to him for years.’

Dad hustled me into this room and left. I’ve been lying here for hours. They have been tugging at my arm and wiping my hands for hours. Maybe I should try to pass out. Instead I remember the fall that got me here. Thirteen of us on our bikes, showing off, riding hands-free, linking arms when we got close enough, ignoring annoyed shouts from other road users, and the baby goat who chose that moment to run in front of me. Had I passed out then? All I remember is a twisted bike, an arm that didn’t look or feel right and horrified cousins leaning over me while my sister wailed, ‘Mum’s going to kill us.’

‘Stop sweating,’ The Bonesetter says, ‘I won’t hurt you.’

‘Stop shouting,’ the woman says, ‘she can’t help it.’

They shout at each other for a while, and I try to pass out again.

My arm emerges from its white casing two months later. Withered, thin and shorter than the other one. Apart from an awful twinge when I straighten it and a bruise where the bone had protruded, it seems fine. 

‘See,’ says Mum, running a vigorous sponge over it, ‘I said it would be alright.’

The Bonesetter would always be called the bonebreaker in family conversations and my luck, rather than his skill, would become the stuff of myth. Uncle Hamid and his wife tut-tutted and said the real doctor would have done a better job - who knew what problems that arm would cause as I grew up? Mum said if I ever caused such trouble, she would break my other arm to match. She was mad at me. She would remain so all her life. My body had inconveniently chosen to demonstrate that uncomfortable rite of passage the day after they brought me home from the bonebreaker’s shack. I woke up in a pool of blood. It had soaked through the sheet and mattress. Mum shouted that I had always been more trouble than I was worth. My sister tried to tell me what was going on, and that I wasn’t going to die, but Mum had to wash the sheets and sponge the mattress. I slept on the floor while everything dried. The stain remained, and I felt its unwelcome presence even when my sister flipped the mattress around.

A girl’s worth is not in the symmetry of her bones.

***

I meet The Bonesetter one more time, accidently, at a party when I’m sixteen. My friend says a large bald man is waving at me from across the room. I have no idea who he is. I stand looking at the ground while he pumps my right arm up and down, then holds it up like a trophy.

‘I fixed that arm, hey?’ He has hair on his nose and his teeth are yellow.

‘Actually, you fixed the other one,’ I stutter.

‘Haven’t broken anything lately? Hah. Where are your parents? You know they never paid my bill? I should sue. How old are you now? Maybe you can pay, eh? Just because I don’t hang a certificate in my office, people think I run a charity.’

‘Sir. Doctor. I will ask my parents to pay the bill when I go home. I’m still at school. Thank you for fixing my arm.’

***

‘Bloody thief,’ says my father when I inform him of the overdue bill. ‘He didn’t deserve any money after what he put you through. We took a risk. You might have been permanently damaged by that charlatan. He should be grateful we gave him any business at all. And he wants money too?’

‘Why did you speak to him? Have you no brains?’ Mum asks.

‘He recognised me!’

‘Huh. As if. You must have gone over to say hello. I know you. You’ll talk to a stray dog if I let you. You are the most troublesome child I’ve ever had. Now you’ve reminded this crook we owe him money and he’ll send his thugs after us. Your brother will probably have his legs broken so he can pretend to fix them. Oh. What am

I going to do with you?’

‘Calm down woman. No one is breaking anything.’ Dad laughs.

‘But why didn’t you pay him?’ He did fix my arm. You would have paid any other doctor, wouldn’t you?’

‘Oh. So, he’s a doctor now, is he? How convenient. Have you seen his degree?’

Uncle Hamid doesn’t think it was a problem either when I complain.

‘My child. It’s your good fortune that your arm healed. Nothing to do with that man. So why should they pay him? Makes no sense that he’s threatening you. I’ll send my boys around to chat to him, if you like.’

‘He didn’t threaten me. He just wanted to be paid for his services.’

‘Rubbish.’

A girl’s bones are not worth paying for.

***

I perfect the art of passing out as an adult. I do it in the bus under the English Channel at Calais. A metal box inside a metal box underwater and claustrophobia rushes at me like the water I cannot see. When I come to, I see the gracious British Pullman waiting to chug us towards London. My husband tells me I dropped my head on his shoulder and scarcely breathed through the 50 km journey.

‘How do you do that?’ he asks. ‘It’s scary, but better than you freaking out, I suppose.’

‘Have I done this before?’

‘Freaking out or passing out?’

‘Smartarse.’

‘Yes. You do it when we’re watching a movie that upsets you. When you see someone on TV talk about … you know … kids being abused.’

‘Have I done it in public before?’

‘Not when I’ve been around.’

***

When we take the Eurostar from London to Paris a few years later my husband talks to me so earnestly I know we’ll enter the tunnel soon. I want to tell him not to worry. I want to tell him claustrophobia is a thing of the past, but I can’t get a word in.

The English couple sitting opposite us smile and say, ‘and now we’re in the tunnel.’

‘Ah,’ says my husband. ‘I was hoping …’

Rolling hills and dense autumn foliage greet my eyes as I lift my head