Free Tim by Colleen McCullough

because when I was a little boy I got so sunburned one day I had to go to the hospital. It hurt so much that I cried all day and all night and all day and all night. I don’t want you to cry all day and all night, Mary.’
    ‘I tell you what I’ll do, Tim, I’ll sit under the shade of my umbrella and watch you. I promise I won’t read, I’ll just watch you. Is that all right?’
    ‘All right, all right, all right!’ he sang, playing at being a submarine but nobly refraining from torpedoing her.
    Making sure she was entirely shielded by the umbrella, Mary spread her dripping body along the deck chair and mopped her face. The bun at the back of her neck was trickling water down her spine in a most annoying way, so she took the pins out and shook her hair over the back of the chair to dry. She had to admit that she felt wonderful, almost as if the salt water possessed medicinal value. Her skin tingled, her muscles were slack and her limbs heavy…
    … She was paying one of her infrequent visits to the beauty parlour, and the hairdresser was rhythmically brushing her hair, one-two-three, one-two-three, tugging at her scalp each time the brush engaged and drawing the tug out deliciously as the brush travelled down the length of her hair. Smiling with pleasure, she opened her eyes to find she was not in a beauty parlour at all, but lying in a deck chair on the beach, and that the sun was slipping down so low behind the trees that shadows had blanketed the sand completely.
    Tim was standing behind her with his head bent over her face, playing with her hair. Panic overwhelmed her; she sprang away from his touch in inexplicable terror, snatching at her loose hair and scrabbling frantically in the pocket of her cut-down dress for the pins. A safe distance away and more fully awake, she turned to look at him, eyes dilated in fright and heart thumping.
    He still stood in the same spot, gazing at her out of those incredible eyes with the peculiarly helpless, agonized expression she only saw when he knew he had done wrong but did not understand what it was he had done wrong. He wanted to atone, he wanted so badly to understand what sort of sin he had unknowingly committed; at such times he seemed to feel his exclusion most acutely, she thought, like the dog which does not know why its master kicked it. Utterly at a loss, he stood wringing his hands together, mouth slack.
    Her arms went out to him in a gesture of remorse and pity. ‘Oh, my dear! My dear, I didn’t mean it! I was asleep and you frightened me, that’s all! Don’t look at me so! I wouldn’t hurt you for all the world, Tim, truly! Oh, please don’t look at me like that!’
    He avoided her hands, holding himself just out of her reach because he wasn’t sure if she meant it or not, if she wasn’t just trying to soothe him.
    ‘It was so beautiful,’ he explained timidly. ‘I just wanted to touch it, Mary.’
    She stared at him, astonished. Had he said ‘beautiful’? Yes, he had! And said it as if he really knew what the word meant, as if he understood that it was different from ‘lovely’ or ‘nice’ or ‘super’ or ‘grouse’ or ‘beaut’ in degree, these being the only adjectives of praise she had heard him use. Tim was learning! He was picking up a little of what she said, and interpreting it correctly.
    She laughed at him tenderly and went right up to him, taking his reluctant hands and gripping them strongly. ‘Bless you, Tim, I like you better than anyone else I know! Don’t be annoyed with me, I didn’t mean to hurt you, really I didn’t.’
    His smile came out like the sun, the pain faded from his eyes. ‘I like you too, Mary, I like you better than anyone except Pop and Mum and my Dawnie.’ He paused thoughtfully. ‘I think I like you better than my Dawnie, actually.’
    There he went again! He had said ‘actually’, just the way she did herself! Of course, to a large extent it was simply parroting, but not entirely; there was a