Girl Unknown(99)

He cannot think what to say. Even if he could, speaking is an impossibility: everything is plugged up inside him, held fast by the overwhelming sensation of fear. His whole world is contracting away from him. Everything is strange.

‘I know you think I should be sorry,’ she tells him. ‘But I’m not.’

Coldness goes straight to the marrow of his bones.

‘I’m glad she’s dead,’ his daughter tells him. Her eyes narrow and she pulls her bike close.

She turns from him then, his little girl, swings her leg over the saddle and steps on the pedal, pushing herself away.

He watches her cycling down the path. The words are beating about his head like wings. He looks up to the sky, scanning the horizon as if he might catch sight once more of that majestic bird, its wings spread wide, the proud angle of its head. The sky is empty. The ocean rumbles in the distance – waves beating on cliffs unseen. Here, where the land is flat, and the path twists and turns through marsh, all is quiet. He looks back towards the harbour, but Holly has rounded a bend and disappeared from view. He feels the weight of her words pressing down on him, feels the heaviness of this new unwanted knowledge. There is no one he can share it with.

The wings of his grief beat in his chest. He thinks again of Linda’s Angel of History, how he would like to awaken the dead and piece together what has been smashed. Above him, the wind stirs and he looks again to catch a glimpse of the bird in flight. But there is nothing there. No bird, and no angel. There is only him and the deep silence of the still water.