Free Spin by Nina Allan

together. I began to sink almost at once.
But of course all I had to do was kick out a few times and I was
afloat again.
    “ I kept trying to imagine what went through my mother’s mind,
what it was like for her in those last few minutes when she knew
she was drowning and that no one was coming to save her. In the end
I had to stop trying to imagine it because it gave me nightmares.
But they were only nightmares. I could kick my way out of those the
same as I could kick out in the water to stay afloat. My mother
couldn’t do that. She had to live the nightmare right to the
end.”
    Layla began to
cry, small, hard tears that forced their way out from under her
eyelids and scuttled away down her cheeks. The last time she cried
in public she had been thirteen, when she had let Iona goad her
into a petty argument about how much vTV she should be allowed to
watch before a school exam. She still remembered the humiliation
she felt, that she had allowed her personal feelings to be exposed
in this way.
    This time it
felt different. It felt as if she was sharing something that could
not be shared in any other way.
    “ I want to hold you,” Alcander said. “But my hands are so
awful.”
    She raised her
head, meeting his eyes, and then took his bandaged hand in both her
own. She did it as gently as she could, afraid that her touch might
be hurting him.
    “ Your hands are not awful,” she said. “It’s the disease that
is awful, not you.”
    “ But if you live with something long enough it becomes you.
That’s what frightens me, anyway. That without this thing to define
me the person I know as myself wouldn’t exist.”
    “ That’s rubbish,” Layla said. But it occurred to her even as
she said it that he might be right. Would she still be who she was
without her mother’s execution, and the way she had secretly formed
her identity around it all these years, guarding its horror within
her like a vital organ? The thought was new to her and terrifying.
But she guessed it was too late to worry about it now.
    She saw the
way Alcander looked at her as she held his hand, with wonder and
also with fear, as if he knew, even so soon, that in allowing
another person to approach him so closely he was opening up an
entryway for hurt.
    She saw also
that he looked tired.
    “ I should go,” she said. She thought he might object but he
did not, either because he really was tired or because, like
herself, he wanted to be alone to think about things. She squeezed
his fingers gently, exerting the slightest possible pressure. The
bandages were stiff to the touch, encrusted with solidified mucus,
and this repulsed her even as she felt anger rise up inside her at
the thought of his pain. She felt like crying again.
    “ Should I see your mother before I go, do you think?” she
said.
    “ Don’t bother,” said Alcander. “She goes on the simulation
most afternoons.”
    “ You mean – ?”
    He
nodded. “You’ve seen the garden? She had a print made of Dad, the
same kind of ultra-high-resolution holoprint. The holograms are
like a drug with her. She’s probably bonking her brains out as we
speak.” He smiled wanly. The mention of sex seemed to float in the
air between them, a miasma of yellowish particles, acrid as
pollen.
    “ What about your sisters?” Layla said finally. “Who looks
after them while she’s…gone?”
    “ The girls are holograms too. I thought you knew.”
    “ But I touched them. I talked to them.” She remembered the
fairy cakes and then the lemonade, sweetly fizzy against her
tongue. She did not believe she had imagined these things, though
she had to concede that the more she tried to concentrate on them
the vaguer they grew. She did not know which was worse: that Nashe
Crawe should have to invent two normal children in order to make up
for the fact that her real child, Alcander, was probably dying, or
that Alcander appeared to be alone in the house with an insane
mother.
    “ I don’t like leaving