Free Every Contact Leaves A Trace by Elanor Dymott

early so I wandered through the square and sat on a bench to wait. After a moment or two a boy ran past me, carrying a balloon. He moved awkwardly, holding the balloon low down in front of him, and I realised it was full of water. I know this boy, I think to myself, and then I remember that I saw him last week as I sat on the same bench waiting. He can be no more than twelve years old and he has an unusual face, his eyes set wide apart and slanting slightly downwards. His hair is long, but in an artful rather than a neglectful sort of a way, and there is a brightness and a cleverness in his gaze when it rests on me. When he disappears with his balloon I close my eyes. He is there again when I open them, running past me at full pelt. His hair and his T-shirt are soaking wet and he is shaking water from his hands and his arms. A fight, I think. He is engaged in a water fight somewhere around the square. He reappears with a friend, a boy smaller than himself and smarter in his appearance, and they are laughing and excited. The balloon he is carrying this time is bigger and fuller than the one before, and he turns his head from side to side as he walks, looking at the people sitting on the benches smoking cigarettes, or making phone calls, or, like me, just watching.
    Everyone has begun to notice them now, the boys and their water bomb. A few people laugh at what they see, but others frown and put their things away in bags and start to leave the square. At this point I also become uncomfortable, and it occurs to me that it would be inconvenient to find myself soaking wet minutes before I am due to knock on my psychotherapist’s door and take my seat in his hallway underneath the coat rack and opposite the children’s buggy that is propped against the stairs and festooned with tiny cardigans and picture books on strings.
    The boys are standing on the path in front of me. They face away from one another, their backs together, as if in preparation for a duel. Then, walking in opposite directions, they count out five or six paces before they stop and turn to face each other. The smarter friend , I think to myself, has volunteered himself as some sort of a practice target. But then he shouts out, ‘Do it!’ and the long-haired boy bends his knees and lowers the balloon almost to the ground and hurls it up in the air and positions himself underneath it so that when it falls it bursts open on his own head and soaks him utterly. His friend is laughing, bending over and laughing and holding his sides and clapping and they are both laughing and they run towards me and disappear. As they go, shouting out words that are indistinguishable, I realise suddenly that the thing they have disappeared behind, the thing that the long-haired boy must also have been running around the first time I saw him, the thing looming white and wooden and enormous from the centre of the square in front of me, is a bandstand.
    I thought to myself, as I sat there looking at the bandstand and reflecting on how extraordinary it was that it should be there, that I might begin my session by talking about what I had seen. And that if I was asked why I found it so extraordinary, the bandstand at the centre of the square, I would begin by saying that it was only the night before that I had sat at Rachel’s desk after dinner, watching the heron that sometimes visits my balcony. And then I would say that after I had seen it drift down the canal into the setting of the sun, I wrote a postcard to Harry Gardner about the leaves gathering in the square, and about how it seemed to me to be exactly the sort of square one would expect to see a bandstand in and how strange I found it that there wasn’t one. And then I would have told him that I’d realised as I waited on the bench that I must have seen this bandstand every time I had walked through the square, but that until that morning, I had never so much as noticed it.
    That was not how the session began after all. I