fiction

With a smile, she gamely offers to help remove items from the boot of the car; heaving a large bag from within, I smile in turn as I look back to see her trying to do the same. Little imp, barely waist-high by my side; the bag is far too big for her, but with that insurmountable determination that so many kids possess, she goes at it anyway. I'm making my second trip by the time she has it in the door, but no sooner has she set it down when she's off to the car again, yammering on about something that I can't quite make out.

I used to resent this one; we have one parent in common, and there was a time when I looked upon her as the embodiment of the relationship that tore my family in two. At that age, it was all I could do not to think of her in any other way, yet the time soon came, though perhaps not as quickly as it might have, when I was won over by her brutal innocence, my stubborn rationality, the fact that she and I shared something that ran deeper than my resentment of the afflication that was our forced association. It can be a difficult thing to ignore the real beauty within one's circumstances, particularly where blinding hate isn't on the menu; there isn't any of that here, it doesn't suit me.

Her accent makes me smile; I used to talk like this all the time; we even have a name for it. Nowadays, I carry the accent of the Home Counties, but slipping back into my demented pastiche of a mother tongue comes easily; I didn't know anything else until the Queen's English was laid gently upon me, discretely hacking off idioms here and there, and smoothing over my many -isms until I was as regular as Oscar. What is it they say, a monkey never forgets how to scratch his balls?

As I walk toward the car, she is handed a steel box of fishing tackle, small but heavy, requiring two hands to manage. Taking a few steps, she stumbles heavily; uncertain of herself in the urgency of the instant, she lets go so that she might catch her balance, and the box falls. As it hits the ground, the catches fail, the lid flies open, and an assortment of colourful spinners and glinting shot spills onto the metalled surface of the road. She wears a look of dismay as some of them race down the hillside, well beyond any means of recovery, and turns imploringly toward the man in charge.

She has barely turned to register him when he is upon her, two decisive strides, a raised hand; he slaps her so hard across the face with the back of his hand that she is thrown to the ground with a weak, involuntary cry of shock. A wave of nausea passes through me at the dull thud of his knuckles against the side of her pretty head, the sound of her body hitting the road; I feel it in the pit of my stomach; it makes my eyes burn; I quiver on the spot, paralysed somewhere between a rush of fear and some brand of rage and disgust.

As he walks away, she looks up from the road, her lower lip trembling, brown eyes full of hurt but too confused to cry, then towards me. My vision wavers as my own eyes threaten to fill, and I can't move; in her young face I see the slow death of a happy spirit, a crushed vitality, and recognise that once, not so long ago, this was me.