Free Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel by Claire Fuller Page B

and darkness loomed.
    “Peggy!” my father shouted once more.
    “My name isn’t Peggy,” I called out.
    He froze, up to his waist in the water. He appeared unsure of what he had heard. He turned his head one way, then the other, trying to work out where my voice had come from. He waded back to the bank.
    Louder, I said, “It’s Rapunzel.”
    My father looked toward where I was sitting and ran forward, almost tripping over himself in his anxiety. He bent over me and put his face, which changed from white to red, very close to mine. He took me by both shoulders and dug his fingers into the hollows between my bones. And he shook me.
    “Don’t ever, ever do that again,” he yelled into my face. “You must always stay where I can see you. Do you understand?” My body was jerking backward and forward in the opposite direction to my head. Tears of painand terror came, and I wondered if it was possible for my neck to snap from so much shaking.
    His underpants were wet, leaking rivulets of water down his legs. He let go of my shoulders and, instead, held me by my wrist and pulled me upright. My father was a tall man. He lifted my wrist as high as he could, raising my arm over my head, so I had to stand on tiptoe in order for my body to follow after it. I started to cry—whimpering at first, then much louder. In bare feet, hopping over the twigs and stones, my father pulled me back to our pile of clothes and scooped them up. He carried on dragging me, howling, down the bank to the fish, which was still giving an occasional weak flap of its tail. He picked up the rock and held it up above my head. Against the bright sun, it was a meteorite spinning toward me. He brought it down fast. I tried to pull away, but his grip on my wrist increased. I kicked against the ground, knocking the slippery fish with my bare toes—turning it over onto my trousers. The hand with the rock whipped past my face by a couple of inches and landed on the trout’s head, destroying it. My father let go of me and hurled the rock into the water.
    “Fuck!” he shouted as he threw it. I curled into a tight little ball beside the trout, my fingers locked together over the top of my head, still expecting the blowfrom the rock to land on me. We were both silent; all the world was silent for a moment.
    “I want . . . to . . . go . . . home.” I struggled to get the words out between choking sobs. I tried to not look at the fish with its mashed head.
    “Get dressed.” My father gave my shoes a kick toward me. He picked up his own clothes and put them on with fierce movements as if they too had misbehaved. He took his fishing rod apart in angry bursts.
    Almost under my breath, I repeated, “I want to go home, Papa.”
    “Get dressed!” My father pulled my trousers out from under the fish as though he were performing a magic trick with a tablecloth. He flung them at me. Pieces of crushed fish flesh and skin stuck to them. Still crying, I put them on, then my socks and shoes.
    “We’ll go home when the fucking fish begin to fly,” my father shouted. I tried hard to swallow my sobs and talk in a way that would reach him.
    “I miss, I miss,” I stuttered. I wanted to tell him that I missed Becky and school and Ute, but the words wouldn’t come.
    His anger was like a popped balloon—all the rage gone in an instant. He sat on the bank with his head in his hands.
    “We can’t go home, Rapunzel.”
    “Why not?” My voice was reedy.
    “Mutti, she just isn’t there any more.” My father rushed the words without looking at me.
    “She’ll be back from Germany soon though.” Even as I spoke, I knew that couldn’t be right; already more than two weeks and three days had passed since my father and I had sat beside the fire in London and he had told me that was how long it would be before Ute came home.
    “No, that’s not what I mean. She’s gone, Punzel. She’s dead.” He still looked at the ground.
    I remembered what I had told my headmaster