‘The girls were, uh, sweet. They were sweet. One ran past me.’ Laura’s skeleton hand moved to cup her elbow. ‘She had dimples, here. Puppy fat—’ She broke off, the internal tension the words had created in her palpable.
‘The storm held off?’ Jessie asked, changing the subject to relieve the pressure.
‘It went out to sea. It was nice. Not hot, but warm, sunny.’
Her gaze moved from the blank wall to Jessie’s scarred left hand. It was clear from her questioning look that she wanted to know how the scars came to be there, but Jessie wasn’t willing to share personal information with a patient. She’d had colleagues who’d been burnt in the past, letting a patient cross the line from professional to personal. However much she sympathized with Laura and felt a shared history in the traumatic loss of a loved one far too young, she had no intention of making that mistake herself.
‘I have scars too.’ Laura gave a tentative smile. ‘And not just psychological ones.’ Slipping off one of her court shoes, she showed Jessie the pale lines of ancient scars running between each of her toes. ‘I was born with webbed feet, like a seagull. Perhaps that’s why I like the sea.’
They both laughed, nervous half-laughs, grateful for the opportunity to break the tension, if only for a moment. For both of them the subject – scars, psychological scars – was minefield sensitive.
‘Will it ever stop?’ Laura croaked.
What could she say? No. No, it will never stop. Your dead daughter will be the first thing you think about the second you wake. Or perhaps, if you’re lucky, the second after that. During that first second, still caught by semi-consciousness, you may imagine that she is alive, asleep under her unicorn duvet cover, clutching her favourite teddy, blonde hair spread across the pillow. But you’ll only be spared for that first second. Then the pain will hit you, hit you like a freight train and keep pace with you throughout your waking hours. This is now your life. Over time, a long time, it will lessen. One day you’ll realize that instead of thinking about her every minute, you haven’t thought of her for a whole hour. Then a day. But will it stop? No, it will never stop. Jamie never stopped, even for me, his sister. And for my mother? No, never.
‘It will fade,’ she said lamely.
Laura’s fingers had found the buckle of the narrow black patent leather belt cinching her skirt at the waist, the only thing preventing it from skidding down over her non-existent hips, the skirt having been designed for a figure ten kilos heavier.
‘It has been two years.’
‘I know.’
‘September seventh. It’s supposed to be the luckiest number in the world, isn’t it? Seven?’
Seven dwarves for Snow White, seven brides for seven brothers, Shakespeare’s seven ages of man, Sinbad the Sailor’s seven voyages, James Bond, 007.
Laura’s eyes grazed around Jessie’s consulting room, minute changes of expression flitting across her face as she absorbed the salient details: no clutter, no mess, spotlessly clean, the single vase of flowers – white tulips, Jessie’s favourite – clean and geometric, arranged so that each stem was equidistant from the next. The sunlight cutting in through the window lit tears in those liquid gazelle eyes, Jessie noticed, as her gaze flitted past.
‘Except that the bible doesn’t agree,’ Laura said.
Seven deadly sins.
‘It was my fault.’
Jessie shook her head. ‘No. We’ve talked through this, Laura.’ Countless times. And they would, she knew, countless more. ‘It was an accident, plain and simple. An accident with horrible consequences that you would have given everything to be able to prevent, but still an accident.’
‘That’s a mother’s job, isn’t it, though? To protect her child from harm. That above anything else, the one and only vital job. You can fail at all the others, but not that one. Not that one.’ Laura rubbed her hands over her eyes, smearing the welling tears across her cheeks. ‘I succeeded at everything else. All the stuff that I thought was so bloody important back then. Writing her name before she’d even started in Reception, reading level 4 Biff and Chip books by the Christmas holidays, number bonds to ten by Easter, even though learning was such a struggle for her. But it wasn’t important, was it? That was all a big fat lie.’ Her face twisted with anguish. ‘And the one thing, the only thing, the only critical job was the one I failed at. The job of keeping her alive.’
Jessie had faced her fair share of grief, her own and other people’s, patients’, in bland consulting rooms like this one, but the grief pulsing from this woman felt different. Like the grief she had felt from her own mother when her little brother, Jamie, had committed suicide. Grief and guilt. The overwhelming emotion – guilt. And something else too, something she couldn’t put her finger on. Why wouldn’t Laura look her in the eye, even momentarily? Still?
‘Laura.’
She nodded. She looked worse than the last time Jessie had seen her, just a week ago. Exhausted, thinner, if that was possible in such a short time, the black rings under her eyes so dark, they looked as if they had been charcoaled on. She reminded Jessie of a pencil sketch: there, but almost not.
‘It wasn’t your fault, Laura. None of it was your fault.’
The woman screwed her eyes up against the rain and the wind that drove it horizontally into her face and lashed the wet dregs of her blonde hair around her cheeks. She was alone on the beach, and that was how she liked it.
The gunmetal sea lapping the sand was deserted also; certainly no pleasure boats out this afternoon, but no ships either that she could see, visibility misted to a few hundred metres offshore, the primary colours of the rides at Hayling Island funfair across the mouth of the harbour resembling washed watercolour strokes on grey paper.
Weather like this caused holiday-makers to bolt for shelter. Duck into the cafés and restaurants on Shore Road, their steaming waterproofs draped on the backs of chairs while they had tea and cake; or potter around the pound shops in East Wittering village, throwing a fiver at their kids’ boredom until the rain stopped or the shops closed, whichever happened first. There were too many people during the summer months, which was both a curse and a bonus for her. She watched them with suspicion and they watched her with more, used to seeing tanned, long-limbed girls in surfer T-shirts and board shorts at the beach, not the kind of woman they’d expect to see begging for coins around train stations in grotty town centres or rifling through the ‘past sell-by date’ bin in budget supermarkets.
She had mixed feelings now that the summer holidays were nearly over. She despised the tourists who arrogantly commandeered her beach with their hoards of possessions and their loudly advertised happiness. She hated them, but their presence occasionally brought her a windfall: things deliberately discarded, others left accidentally, having slipped from overflowing beach bags or dropped from baggy pockets. Items she could use, barter or sell. Days like this were good, rain following sun. She didn’t mind the miserable weather because it cloaked her in solitude. Solitude was comfortable to her – she knew nothing other than loneliness. There had been only a brief period in her life when she hadn’t been on her own, a wonderful, fleeting time that had changed everything.
The woman looked from the stormy horizon to the little girl lying in the dunes at her feet. The sand was white, the little girl’s skin whiter, as if she had been washed sparkling clean by the rain. The tinny tune of a washing powder advertisement from years ago, from when she had used to be parked in front of the television for hours on end as a girl herself, chimed in the woman’s dulled brain.
Little girl, far away in a world of your own, in a world built of dreams that are yours