The Reading List(84)
Rohini watched them as she scrolled on her phone, typed out some emails. She smiled.
Mukesh beamed back at her. This was everything he’d wanted. Here his granddaughter was, no longer locked in her own thoughts, in her own little world. He remembered Naina and Priya giggling away at a character, their quirks. He’d never understood. Now he knew that Scout, Atticus and Jem were as real to Priya, and to him, as her own family. Now, he understood.
Chapter 29
ALEISHA
SHE WALKED BESIDE HER dad, her 5-year-old hand held loosely in his. She could feel the rough tips of his fingers with her soft ones. She held on tight as she felt the soles of her trainers slipping ever so slightly on the sand-covered decking. They were walking towards the sea. She couldn’t see it yet, she just trusted that that’s where they were going.
They were walking through forest. She could see nothing but trees. Tall trees, thin trunks, and long, spiky green leaves. Fir trees, her dad told her. She was in a fir forest. She could hear birds and some dogs barking in the distance, though it sounded as though they might be right beside her. She kept turning round to check. Her dad told her to stop moving, he would lose his footing.
Aleisha didn’t want her dad to lose his footing. She didn’t want him to fall over. Then she would be all alone, without anyone in the world, without any way to get home. Her mother had taken Aidan to Cromer. He was adamant he didn’t want to go to the beach, especially a beach with nothing much on it; he just wanted some food, maybe even an arcade. He wanted to see the pier. His friends had been the summer before and he wanted to be able to say he had seen it too.
Today, it was just Aleisha and Dean. As she felt her small hand in her father’s larger one, she squeezed just a little too hard. She had no idea what to expect. She couldn’t see very far ahead, but she noticed a glimmer of light breaking through the trees ahead of her. And then she was there, standing on the line that separated forest from beach. Land from sea. Life from what she felt might be heaven.
She looked around. All she could see now was milky, golden sand. Grasses. So tall, maybe even taller than her, reaching up and touching the sky in some places. The sand on the dunes looked warm, the light hitting the beach in patches, leaving everything else in darkness.
They continued walking, and Aleisha finally felt bold enough to let go of her dad’s hand. She could feel her feet sink into the damp sand. In some places, the sand was soggy and moist, like treacle. In other places, it was wet but hard, solid, easy to walk on. The wet sand was darker – on a duller, drearier day she might have called it dirty. But not today. Today it was too perfect to be dirty.
She felt crunching under her feet, and when she looked down, she saw shells. Thousands and millions of shells. Normally, she would have picked them up, collected as many as she could. But it was just right as it was. She didn’t want to be the one to ruin it. As she looked around the beach, she saw figures, people and dogs, dotted along their own horizons. She didn’t look at them for long. They continued to walk; she knew the sea wasn’t far now. She saw a thin layer of water sitting on the surface of the sand, the sun and the sky reflected in it.
She turned around to look for her father, she could see him behind her, a little to her left, on sand she’d left untrodden, untouched. He was standing behind a figure, a blob on the landscape.
She skipped towards him, not minding the detour. She would get to the sea today eventually, though it was probably too cold for her to put her feet in. She could see now he was waving to her, his arm held high above his head, reaching further than the trees.
As she got closer, she realized the blob on the landscape was a seal. She had been told by her big brother that there were seals around here, in Norfolk. And as she got closer still, she saw it wasn’t a perfect seal. It had a hole in its side, flies were buzzing around it, and the sun hit its skin for just a moment, long enough for her to notice the flesh around the hole starting to draw back, weeping with some kind of liquid that wasn’t blood, but wasn’t water either.
She had never seen a seal before. Now she had never seen a seal alive before. She kept staring; she couldn’t take her eyes away. Where had the hole come from? What did it mean? Her father’s eyes were on her, and she could feel her head start to ache. A familiar ache. The one that came before tears, after sadness or anger.
She felt her father’s hand on her shoulder, and she wanted to nestle into his stomach, to block out the seal, the endless sky, the endless beach, and see nothing but black, smell nothing but her dad’s musty coat. Her tears were silent at first, cold and sticky as they crawled down her face. But then came the sobs, and she was embarrassed before they started, distraught when they did, and unable to stop. She couldn’t imagine anything worse than being this seal right now. Decaying. Dying. Dead, already. With no one here to watch over it, no one but two strangers, one who didn’t seem to feel a thing.
‘Aleisha,’ Dean said to his 5-year-old daughter. ‘You don’t need to be upset. Things die all the time. It’s not a big deal.’
She wasn’t upset. She wasn’t anything. She looked at her hands. The policewoman was still sitting on the chair opposite her. Her mouth was opening, closing, as though she was speaking – mouthing words like ‘bad news’, ‘found by a stranger’, ‘so sorry’ – but the room was entirely silent. And all Aleisha could think about was that seal – the memory was so distant, like words written by someone else in a novel – and yet she still felt her own heart ache at the memory. How could Aleisha have grieved for a seal, yet feel nothing when her brother, her Aidan, had been hit by a train.