Two Little Girls. Kate Medina

      Where does it come from? Where is it going to? What’s in all those big coloured blocks on the ship, Mummy? Why don’t they all topple off into the sea? How does the ship stay upright, Mummy? Mummy? Mummy? Mummy …

      Carolynn’s gaze had found the writing on the side of the ship’s hull. China Line. All the ships that cut through the Solent seemed to be from China these days.

       Toys, darling.

       Toys?

      Zoe’s brown eyes saucer-wide, terrified she might miss the answers if she blinked for even a millisecond.

      The day had been changeable, much like today. Grey clouds skipping across the sun, but still warm enough to walk in T-shirt and jeans, a cool breeze blowing in from the sea, the sand warm under their bare feet, holding the summer’s heat. The last day of their long-weekend break.

      ‘Can we watch the ships next time we come here?’

      Reaching for Zoe’s hand, feeling the spangles of sand on Zoe’s skin grate against hers, squeezing tight, so tight. ‘Of course we can, darling. If you’re good. But you must try very hard to be good.’

      They had driven back to London that night, she remembered: Zoe fast asleep in the back seat, exhausted by the fresh air, a layer of sand coating her bare legs and arms and pooled around her on the seat, as if someone had sprinkled icing sugar through a sieve; Roger miles away as he stared through the windscreen, exasperated by the weight of Sunday traffic, his mind already fixing on tomorrow’s workday.

      She shouldn’t have come to the beach today. It had been a stupid mistake.

       Next time.

      She might go for hours with the sense that she was finally getting to grips with her grief, and then suddenly she’d be visited by a memory, an image so intense that it would take her breath away. And even the good memories hurt so badly.

       Next time.

      There hadn’t been a next time.

      She raised her hand to her mouth, pushing back a sob. How could anyone believe that I murdered my own daughter?

       2

      Jessie reached for the green cardboard file of loose papers on her desk, but her fingers refused to obey the command sent from her brain, and instead of gripping the file she felt it slide from her left hand, watched helplessly as a slow-motion waterfall of papers gushed to the floor and spread across the carpet.

       Shit.

      She sank to her knees, feeling like a disorganized schoolkid, ludicrous, unprofessional. How the hell was a client supposed to trust her judgement when she couldn’t even persuade her useless, Judas hand to grasp a simple file? The disability constantly there, goading her. She should have stapled the papers, but she didn’t like to. Liked to be able to spread her patients’ – ‘clients’, the majority of them were called now, she reminded herself – files out on her desk, look at the pages all at once, her gaze skipping from the notes of one session to the notes of another, nothing in the human brain working in a linear fashion, so why should notes be laid out linearly, read sequentially? It made no sense.

      ‘Please, just sit down. I can get them myself.’ Trying to keep the edge from her voice.

      ‘I’m happy to help.’ The tone of the reply too bright, too jolly for such a benign statement. Everything that Laura said tinted with that Technicolor tone.

      Even down here on the floor together, scrabbling to collect Jessie’s spilled papers, Laura wouldn’t meet her eye. Five sessions in and Laura had never looked her directly in the eye, not once, not even fleetingly. She wore a sober grey skirt suit and cream pussy-bow blouse, work clothes, from a life before her daughter’s accident, but Jessie noticed a fine layer of sand, like fairy dust, coating her bare feet in the sensible, low-heeled black court shoes. She had been to the beach before she came here. Outside. Nature. Jessie wouldn’t know until they started talking whether that was a good or a bad sign. Laura had told her in that first session, five weeks ago, that nature – immersing herself in nature, walking, or more often running now – since her life had changed in that one fleeting moment two years ago, was the only way she could force her mind to float free. To give up its obsessive hamster-wheel motion, if only temporarily.

      Two years today, wasn’t it? September seventh? Jessie glanced down at the scattered pages, trying to find the notes from Laura’s first session to check, knowing, as she looked, that looking was unnecessary, the date cast in her memory. Seven, randomly, her favourite number. When she was a child, she used to change her favourite number every year on her birthday to match her age. At the age of seven, she had been old enough to understand that a favourite number wasn’t favourite if it changed annually, and so seven stuck. It was only when she was older that she realized she’d happened upon ‘lucky 7’. Seven days of the week, seven colours of the rainbow, seven notes on a musical scale, seven seas and seven continents.

      Seven for Laura, a number forever wedded with tragedy. The day that her daughter, spotting her best friend across the road, had pulled her hand from Laura’s and been hit by a courier’s van.

      Laura held out the papers she’d collected.

      ‘Thank you,’ Jessie said, taking them.

      They rose. Clutching the file to her chest with her left arm, Jessie sat down in one of the two leather bucket chairs that she used for her sessions. She had positioned the chairs in front of the window, as the bucket chairs in her old office at Bradley Court had been positioned. No discs in the carpet yet, from their feet, to knock her sense of order off-kilter if patients nudged them out of line, the office and her life outside the army too new for such well-worn, comfortable grooves. She glanced over to the window, her gaze still trained to expect the wide-open view of lawns sweeping down to the lake, saw instead a brick Georgian terrace. Her ears, tuned to birdsong, heard the hum of traffic. The architecture was beautiful, the road narrow, quiet, but this new environment was grating all the same. Grating, Jessie admitted to herself in her more honest moments, purely because it wasn’t Bradley Court. Wasn’t her old life. A life that she hadn’t voluntarily surrendered.

      She looked down at her left hand. The scar across her palm from the knife attack was still a gnarled, angry purple. Two finer, paler tracks ran perpendicular, where the surgeon had peeled back her skin to repair the severed tendons, a row of pale spots either side of the main scar where he had sewn her palm back together, each stitch identical in length and equidistant, a triumph of pedanticism, the best job that could be done, given the severity of damage to her extensor tendons, he had assured her. It still felt as if it belonged to someone else – the grotesque hand of a mannequin. Occasionally it obeyed her; more often it didn’t.

      She sensed Laura watching her, looked up quickly to try to catch her eye, saw her gaze flash away.

      ‘We can sit at the desk, if it’s easier,’ Laura murmured.

      Jessie shook her head. The barrier of the desk was too formal, too divisive for such a tense, skittish patient. ‘How was the beach?’ she asked.

      ‘Huh?’ Laura’s eyes, fixed resolutely on a point just to the left of Jessie’s, on a blank spot of wall, Jessie knew without needing to look, widened.

      ‘Sand. Your feet.’

      Laura glanced down. ‘Oh, I thought you were a mind reader for a second.’ A tentative, distant smile. ‘I’d hate you to actually be able to read my mind.’

      Jessie returned the smile, watching Laura’s expression, listening to the nuances in her voice. The forced jollity, like a game-show host worried for her job, always, irrespective of the subject matter.

      ‘So how was it?’ she prompted.

      ‘What?’

      ‘The