My fingers and toes were cramping with cold, so I started to walk back to the house. I felt even lighter than I had when I set out, and I knew it wasn’t just because I was going downhill instead of up. It was because I had a plan. The front door was still stuck with the mat, and I closed it behind me with a careful click. I put the sugar back in the kitchen and climbed back up the stairs. Everything was still quiet. Everything was still dark. In bed I tucked my knees up under my nightie and put my hands in my armpits. I was very cold but very real. Very living. Every tiny part of my body had its own heartbeat, its own clock beat.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Julia
It’s the first day of spring today,” said Molly, running her knuckles along the seawall.
“Don’t do that,” I said.
She lifted her hand and began licking off the concrete dust. I pulled her sleeve.
“Don’t,” I said. “It’s dirty.”
In front of us a woman took hold of a toddler around the middle and lifted him with a small grunt. He walked along the top of the wall, arms held out either side of his body, face tilted up to catch the salt in the air.
“Mummy!” he said. “Look at me!”
“Amazing, darling,” she said, looking in her handbag. We looked at the boy. We looked at him as he reached the end of the wall, tensed, and jumped into the woman’s arms. She kissed his cheek and put him down.
“He didn’t fall,” said Molly.
“No,” I said. “He didn’t.”
I hadn’t seen her climb onto the wall on Friday—I had been watching an other-mother and other-kid. They were walking with their fingers knotted, swinging their arms in a lazy swish, and I was wondering how it would feel to have Molly’s fingers laced between mine. Molly’s fingers were small and thin, like skin-covered matches. I was wondering how they would fit into my gaps.
“Look!” she had shouted. When I turned I saw her balanced on the top of the wall. “Look!” she shouted again. She didn’t mean “Look.” She meant “React.”
“Come down,” I said. I went to the wall and held up my arms. “You can’t be up there. It’s not safe. I told you.”
“I can do it,” she said.
“Get down, Molly,” I said.
She didn’t answer, didn’t fold herself onto my hands, so I tugged her arm. It wasn’t a big tug. I meant to catch her. She yelped as she pitched forward, and I scrabbled at her coat, and the chunk of it grasped in my fist slipped out as she tipped to the ground. The sound was a crunch. She stared up at me, her mouth puckered in a small o, and I felt splashed with icy water. There was a scream of silence before she cried, and when it came it was a thin, bewildered moan. Her arm hung limp in her coat sleeve.
I felt someone behind me and turned to see the woman and girl with the laced fingers. The woman didn’t ask what had happened or whether I wanted her help; she knelt beside Molly, put one hand on her wrist and the other on her back, and asked, “Is this where it hurts, sweetie?” When I moved my tongue around my mouth it made a noise like footsteps on wet pavement. I tasted of carpet. I wanted to yank the woman up by her collar and demand to know where she had learned what to do when a kid fell off a wall, but I couldn’t speak. My throat was blocked by a mesh of pushed-down scream.
“I’ll go to one of those houses to use the phone,” the woman said, pointing to the row of cottages along the seafront. She bustled away before I could ask whether she was going to call an ambulance or the police.
I knelt beside Molly, put one hand on her back and one on her arm. Her wrist was white and waxy, and I found myself wishing there was blood. Blood was frank—the oily sluice of it on skin, the smell of metal and butchers. Molly’s arm was live on the outside but dead on the inside, and I pushed down her sleeve so I could pretend it was bleeding instead. When the woman had been kneeling she had murmured things, but I hadn’t heard them, so I couldn’t copy them, so I didn’t know what to say. I listened to the seagulls crying overhead and tried not to listen to Molly crying beside me.
Eventually the woman bustled back, holding a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a tea towel. I could tell she was having the time of her life.
“Here,” she said, giving me a look that said, “I’m back now. You can get out of the way.” I got out of the way. “Lovely lady in that first house,” she said. “The ambulance is coming. They said we could drive her ourselves but I’ve not got the car. Let’s pop your poor wrist on here, sweetie.” She held the peas like a cushion and lifted Molly’s hand on top. I didn’t ask why she had assumed I also didn’t have a car with me, because getting cross with people for making assumptions only really works when the assumptions they have made aren’t true.
When the ambulance whined to the end of the road the woman tucked Molly’s hair behind her ear and said, “Here we go, sweetie, here they are to help you.” I watched the white van stop and spit out two grinning paramedics, who walked over without obvious urgency. They were heavyset and exhaustingly upbeat. Once they had established that the woman
