Читать книгу Two Little Girls - Kate Medina - Страница 8

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 and yours alone.

She had wanted to be the girl in that advert. That perfect, soft focus blonde child playing in a meadow full of wild flowers. She had wanted, so desperately wanted, the crisp white broderie anglaise dress the little girl was wearing. But though she was blonde and fair-skinned, she had never owned a dress like that, never seen a field of grass, just the scrappy patches of dirt dotted around the tower blocks where she lived, where kids skidded their bikes and teenagers smoked and fucked. She had never seen a meadow, cows, sheep, horses; had never seen any animals aside from the pumped-up dogs dragged around on studded leather leads and the rats that scurried around the bins at night.

The eyes of the girl with the perfect white skin were open, staring fixedly up to the sky as if her gaze had been caught by one of the seagulls hovering above them on an updraught. They were cloudy green like the sea on a cold, clear day. Her hair was brown and curly, so dark against the sand and her own white skin that it looked as if her head had been caught in a halo of dirty seaweed.

Little girl, far away in a world of your own, in a world built of dreams that are yours and yours alone.

A doll lay next to the girl. A nasty plastic doll dressed in a cheap pink ballerina dress, with eyes that the woman knew would move if she lifted it. The doll’s eyes were green like the girl’s.

You’ve always been a quiet one, but I don’t know, it doesn’t seem to keep you any cleaner.

Shells ringed the child and the doll in the shape of a heart, a heart even whiter than the sand and the little girl’s washed white skin. It was so long since the woman had considered love, felt love, that the shape of the heart knifed, just for a second, into a part of her that she had long since shut and padlocked. She shook her head, trying to shake off the memory and the feelings the sight of the little girl and the perfect pale heart surrounding her had brought to the surface.

Extending her foot, she nudged her toe against one of the shells, knocking it out of kilter, against a second, third and fourth, kicking them out of line too. She smiled to herself, a small, satisfied smile. The heart was broken now and that was better. A broken heart reflected the life that she had lived. The life this little girl would doubtless have lived, had she lived. Real hearts were for television advertisements and soppy songs written by fools.

Bending down, she fingered the necklace around the girl’s neck. It was a silver locket; antique, from the look of it, engraved with two sets of footprints: those of an adult and, next to them, the smaller prints of a child. The silver was cold and her thumb pushed the wet from the engraved metal and left a dull print that was swallowed by raindrops the instant she pulled her thumb away. It would be worth something that, but she wasn’t going to take it. She had her reasons for not stooping to that. For not taking a necklace off a dead child. Beneath the necklace’s chain of silver coiled another, the thick dark chain of a bruise. Apart from the bruise, starkly black and purple against the soft white skin, the little girl looked untouched. Alabaster.

The woman stared down at the dead child and thought that she would feel something.

Sadness? Horror? Anger?

Or nothing? At least – nothing.

But what she felt was worse. It was a feeling that she recognized as satisfaction. Satisfaction that someone else would hurt the way she hurt every moment of every day. Cruel. When had she become so cruel as to enjoy someone else’s grief?

Little girl, far away in a world of your own, in a world built of dreams that are yours and yours alone. Though I cannot share your dreams, you are still my very own.

A small part of who she was – who she used to be – hated herself for the feeling. But that person was so far gone that she existed in another life, a life that had happened to someone else, and the tiny nugget of self-hatred was easy to ignore.

She looked down at the bruised tracks on the underside of her forearm, the soft skin there almost as white as the dead child’s, the needle marks dark as the snake of bruises coiled around the child’s neck. The woman had lived by the sea all her life and she recognized weather patterns like she recognized those self-inflicted patterns on her arm. The rain had set in for the evening, at least. There would be no one else to disturb the quiet of the dunes today, walking where she had walked. She didn’t need to rush. There was no urgency to tell the police. The little girl was dead. She would stay right here in her heart of shells and the doll with the matching eyes would keep her company.

Pushing herself to her feet, stepping carefully around the prone child, the woman walked on, the wet sand clinging to her bare soles, rainwater slopping around her toes. A packet of cigarettes caught her eye, damp, sodden, but she could dry them. Bending, she slipped them into the pocket of her jacket. A little further on, a two-pound coin, spilled from a purse or pocket. Lucky. A lucky day, for her at least. September seventh. Lucky seven.

Straightening, she walked on, eyes grazing the sand for treasure, leaving the dead child behind her alone in the dunes, staring up at the sky, staring up at nothing.