If you could save someone's life, would you? Anyone's? Ali's older brother has a swastika tattooed on his knuckles, a prison ID number for nearly beating an immigrant to death, and spent his teenage years ruthlessly persecuting Ali for being gay. Blood may be thicker than water, but Ali has spent most of his life desperate to prove he is nothing like Tony. A committed vegetarian, charity-supporter, and blood donor, Ali would do anything for anyone. Ali may share parentage with Tony, but he’s determined not to share anything else if he can help it. So when Tony contracts leukaemia, and Ali is the only match for the urgently-needed bone marrow transplant, Ali is caught between two equally awful choices: to refuse and condemn a man to death, or to donate. And in donating, save the life of the man who nearly murdered Ali's Iraqi boyfriend?

Thicker Than Bone

“Thank you,” he whispered, once he was sure Yazid was gone. Ali ran his nails gently down Yazid’s arm, through the dark hair and over an old scar from breaking the bone several years ago.


He felt calmed, de-stressed, and settled again—and right where he belonged, with the only person who truly mattered.


Ali closed his eyes, and drifted.27th–28thAugust 2010


He drifted for a long time before the world began to come back. Little sparks of sound. Whispers of movement around the edges of his mind. And eventually—


Yazid came round slowly. Sound introduced itself gently—a muted, far-away hustle-and-bustle and an odd, distant echo to voices not quite in the room. Then came smell—a sterile, antiseptic kind of stink, like the insides of first aid kits, or…


He cracked open his eyes. One felt puffy and sore; the other gritty and heavy, like the eyelashes were clumped together. There was a faint, patchy red mist over the world and when he blinked, it didn’t go away.


Chapter 76