Free Touch by Graham Mort Page B

only a few feet away. Lucy pushed the duckling under the water, testing its buoyancy. She pulled it out and then gently pushed it under again, holding it there until its struggles weakened and it fell still in her hand. She brought it out and laid it on the beach.
    Two thin rivulets of water ran out from the nostril holes in its beak. It twitched its webbed feet feebly a few times. The sun seemed to evaporate its remaining energy and it began to die, a milky film coagulating over each eye. Lucy watched it, engrossed, as its life ebbed away. Now that it was dead she was afraid to handle it. It had become taboo, an untouchable. She scuffled the little body with her feet so that it rolled over and picked up a coating of dust, pushing it back into the shadows of the rhododendrons.
    Crouching under the low branches, Lucy scooped out a little grave from the gravel and decaying leaves and laid the duckling in it. She built a mound over it then fetched some pink blossoms of rhododendron which she laid across the grave. She wanted to cry, scared now, the dead duckling hidden in the earth below her feet. She felt a sudden outburst of love for the creature that only minutes before had been almost incandescent with life. Its mother swam around so stupidly, losing her children and not caring.
    Lucy cried in stuttering sobs, swirling her fingertips in the dust in little panicky movements. Then, suddenly, she stopped. She flung the flowers away from the grave and stamped the earth flat so that there was no visible mound. Then she scuffed dust and leaves over it until it was almost indistinguishable from the surrounding earth.
    Lucy went and washed her hands in the lake; her fingernails were black crescents, packed with soil. She took out a handkerchief and blew her nose thoroughly. No one must notice that she had been crying. Then she set off for home, threading her way through the people who still lay on the grass, unconcerned. She felt slightly breathless, her heart beating close to the surface of her chest. What if they all knew what she had done? She imagined a secret observer. Someone who had watched her drown and then bury the duckling. She even thought up a story in her defence: how she had found the duckling and realised it was sick and had tried to revive it in the water. It was no good. She had drowned it, killed it, kidnapped it from its mother and shut off its life.
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When she got back to the house everything was spotless, every cushion plumped and tidied, no trace of dust on the glass-topped coffee table. There was a note from her mother to say that she had gone shopping and would be back by one o’clock. Lucy glanced at her watch. A whole hour to go. She searched inside her head for something to do, something that would please her mother. But the house was hermetic, organised, sealed up in itself.
    Sitting in the lounge, Lucy watched thousands of dust motes glitter in a shaft of sunlight. They turned just as planets turned in the emptiness of space. The tight feeling was there again in her chest. She got up, drew the blinds to keep the sun off the Indian rug, then went into the kitchen to set the table. The telephone rang but she was afraid to answer it. She let it ring, on and on, rapping down the knives and forks to shut out the noise. At last she could bear it no longer and picked up the handset just in time to hear the other receiver being replaced. The line clicked. A steady buzzing set in like tinnitus. Lucy stood there for a long time, holding the telephone, waiting, imagining her father’s voice.

The Caretaker
    Mary held the child as he was sick into the bath. She felt his ribs convulse. A gush of vomit splashed onto the enamel. He struggled to spit out thick dribbles of saliva and his hair was damp with fever. Mary reached beyond him to turn on the taps. Water swirled into the vomit, its smell sweet and sour and cloying. She almost retched.
    â€˜Alright now darling? Alright?’
    Mark nodded