The Girl in the Water. A Grayson J

want to know,’ she said. ‘These nice looks you give me, the “it ain’t so fuckin’ bad, you’re a good girl” sentiments, you’re not gonna have ’em for long if I tell you what … what …’

      Her throat seized up. She wanted to be defiant, but a sob stopped her.

      Marcello leaned forward. Despite the torrent of my memories, my emotions, I leaned forward too.

      ‘Emma, there’s nothing you can tell us that will cause me to change my desire to care for you.’

      It’s a lie he’d been trained to tell. All of us, actually, even if we’re just pharmacists in a prison ward – and we’re taught to believe it, too. Our goal is to help the patient. Nothing can change that. There’s nothing they can say that ought to cause us to look at them differently. No deed a person has done that devalues his worth or affects our duty to care.

      But it’s a lie. A terrible, dreadful, hideous lie. Maybe I was never meant to become a man of Dr Marcello’s moral objectivity, maybe my own experiences meant I couldn’t maintain that ruse of unflappable dispassion, but reality’s reality. There are things a person can say – things a young woman can say, in a little room beneath fluorescent lights before an analyst and a pharmacist at a metal table – that should make any human person change their mind radically about them. Things a person can say that show they’re not people at all, but monsters. Monsters whose existence makes the world itself groan, repulsed by more than their actions.

      Repulsed by their very existence.

       17

       Amber

       I have to get home. I have to get to my husband.

      I’ve managed, somehow, to go through the remaining motions of the day. No customers want newspapers after 3.00 p.m., and if you haven’t caught your glossy copy of Esquire