Free Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes Page B

first period arrived, halfway through a Chemistry class, she greeted it with a chuckle as she carefully put down her pipette and made a sprightly dash to the girls’ toilet. In the years that followed she faced all the changes in her body and mind with just such a buoyant manner.
    When she was fifteen, Lotte was hit by a car. The driver of a BMW failed to stop as she walked over a pedestrian crossing, and the impact hurled her high into the air in an arc of several metres. She landed hard on the tarmac, and as she lay in a heap in the middle of the road, twisted into an unnatural shape, a crowd gathered around her. As they waited for assistance to arrive she made light of her injuries. Her cries of pain were leavened with smiles and laughter, and she told the onlookers that it was nothing, that the doctors would soon make her better, and in the scheme of things there were people far worse off than she was. And besides, she went on, apart from a few scrapes and bruises here and there, and maybe a few broken ribs and a fractured collarbone, her serious injuries were confined only to one of her legs. What if she had landed differently and hurt her head? If you were to look at it that way, she jauntily explained in between yelps of agony, she was the luckiest girl in the world.
    Minutes later the ambulance arrived, and a new wave of passers-by supposed the paramedics had taken leave of their senses as they smiled and joked with their patient. But on drawing closer and seeing the face of the girl who was being tended to, the onlookers also began to smile, even as they noticed that her left shin had snapped and the leg was bent at a horrifying angle, and a long, jagged shaft of raw bone was sticking out from a fist-size wound below her knee.
    As she lay in her hospital bed she was surprised and delighted by the stream of chocolates, flowers and cards that arrived. It seemed as if the whole town wished her a full and speedy recovery. She was particularly taken aback by the amount of cards from boys, some of whom she had barely spoken to, in which they said all the usual things about how they hoped to see her up and about before too long, but also things she hadn’t expected, like, I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t made it through .
    That’s interesting , she thought.
    Her shattered bones fused as well as the doctors could have hoped, and shortly after starting back at school, with the slight limp that would never leave her, Lotte discovered she enjoyed kissing very much. She often found herself in the arms of a boy, and these boys would return her smiles and arrive at her door with flowers in their hands and dreams in their hearts. While she found their attentions delightful, they didn’t set her heart aflame, and she could see that none of them was going to grow into the man she was sure was out there waiting for her. Whenever she decided that the time had come for them to part company she would tell the boy in such a way that in the moment it seemed to make perfect sense, as if they really had come to the end of the line, that it would be best for both of them if they were to just be friends, and that he would find somebody to replace her, somebody he would love more than he had ever thought possible. It wouldn’t be until he got home that he would wonder why he was smiling, and realise that this really was the end, that he would never hold her small, pale hand again, or kiss those freckled lips.
    On occasions when she knew a smile would be inappropriate, Lotte’s face would go into a state of repose, but she still radiated joy. Even in bereavement her belief in heaven, and in the inherent goodness of the departed, kept her shining as she grieved. And thus she smiled her way though childhood, through university and out into the world, and at the age of just twenty-four she smiled her way into a job as the Head of Concourse Relations at Bremen International Airport.
    Lotte’s disposition came across not