Free Losing Touch by Sandra Hunter

than you.’
    â€˜You still can, Dad.’ She rolls the ticket into a tight cylinder.
    â€˜I’m serious. You could run really well if you wanted to. You have the right frame, and you can accelerate quickly.’ Accelerate. He makes her sound like a car.
    â€˜There’s loads of kids in my class who are faster than me.’
    â€˜There are loads of kids. It’s a plural.’ The correction is automatic. ‘Anyway, I could teach you how to run.’
    â€˜I wouldn’t be any good.’ Already she’s turning away from the subject.
    â€˜What’s your time for the hundred?’
    She shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’
    One moment she is close, a small child again, reaching for his hand. The next she is gone, her narrow shoulders closing around her. I don’t want you. It is easy to slide from this one moment to recollections of others: the refusal of eye contact, the bare skimming of his cheek with her reluctant kiss, the deliberately ugly clothes, her nail-biting even though he has taken time to show her how to trim and shape her nails.
    â€˜Sit up straight. You’re ruining your posture.’
    She jerks herself upright and stares out of the window. He glances at her profile: the thin long nose with its tiny bump. He calls her Big Nose but secretly loves the shape of it. It isn’t one of those forgettable noses. Hers is distinctive, meant for great things. She could be a leader, perhaps even like Indira Gandhi, although Mrs Gandhi is quite ugly. And Tarani is going to be a beauty, despite the bitten fingernails and scrawny legs. She sometimes reminds him of Mughal paintings: long hands with fingertips that curve back, eyes that tilt up at the corners, high-arched eyebrows. He’d shown her the pictures but she turned away, repelled by anything Indian. She insisted, ‘I’m English .’ And his response, ‘You’re Indian. I’m an Indian father and you are my daughter.’ He wanted to show his love, but she stamped upstairs, face frozen in anger.
    He glances at her again, her face turned away. She thinks she is inscrutable with her careful blank expressions, forgetting that every little transitional flash of feeling is telegraphed as surely as if she has shouted at the top of her lungs. Poor Tarani, trying so hard to be like Murad. Murad has never had much in the way of facial expressions, so his metamorphosis to unsmiling Sphinx is more credible. Murad, with his belief that his spring contraption will make him popular with the girls; it’s enough to make you weep if it weren’t so funny. If only there were some way to tell Murad that to have girls like you, you just have to be yourself. Surely it’s not so hard to understand. But who is Murad when he is himself? The morose eye-contact-avoiding boy who sits at the dining table? The strangely talkative cousin who entertains Sadiq? Is there yet another Murad whom Arjun doesn’t know?
    The rising volume of an exchange between the bus conductor and a tall, thin West Indian woman claims everyone’s attention. The woman refuses to pay the bus fare for her three children who are all, she claims, under twelve. Two of them are old enough to stare back coldly at the curious faces. The passengers hang intently on the argument, some of them shaking their heads in delighted disapproval. Who does she think she is? The oldest, a boy with a strip of dark fuzz on his upper lip, mutters a curse at the conductor and there’s a collective gasp of horror. His mother extends one arm and clips him around the head, dislodging his red-yellow-and-green-striped knitted hat. He makes the mistake of pursing his lips and making some indecent sucking noise. His mother uses her free arm and then her handbag to belabour him, screaming high-pitched abuse. In one athletic movement, he snatches up his hat and is halfway up the stairs when the conductor furiously rings the bell, shouting, ‘Off! Now.