Sometimes I lay in bed and thought about how she had cried that day. Holding the coat. Embracing the coat. And then I’d ponder on (Oh God, what had possessed me?!) how cruel I’d been about her hair! The hair-clip, which later (I realized (and I won’t bore you with all the interminable details) had been a stupid gift from Mrs Meadows!

A hair-clip! A silly hair-clip! That everything should finally have hung on the fall (or lack!) of Miss Hahn’s fringe! The wearing or not wearing of …! Ridiculous! That something so slight should have …? Petty! So very petty!

Hadn’t it always been this signal lack of feminine guile – of calculation – that had drawn me to Miss Hahn in the first instance? Or drawn me to mock her, more like? To satirize her mercilessly? Because I was such an ignorant fool? So proud? So haughty? So terrified of … of …? Of here? Of here? Of being here, feeling this, this miserable love?

Or was it actually quite insignificant, this tiny ‘slight’? Not important at all? (Although isn’t every parlous scenario in this miserable world – war, genocide, famine – merely a gradual accumulation of tiny slip-ups?)

Was it even about the hair-clip, anyway? Wasn’t it actually about my curious inability to … to accept … to detach … which is also a lethal kind of detachment in itself (from responsibility? From true attachment? From life?)?

Hmmn. Which was it to be, ultimately? Eh? Caring too much so you don’t care at all? Or not caring at all so you care way too much?

Was I being punished? This is something else I found myself dwelling upon. And was Miss Hahn being punished too (by … by herself? By her past? By the child? By … by me?)? Were we all just a tiny part of a much greater scheme? And was the only way to really survive it – pride still marginally intact – simply to give in? As Miss Hahn now seemed so inclined to do?

My health slowly improved, and I was finally (the joy! The inexpressible joy!) able to graduate to sitting in my favourite spot on the broken bench on the back porch. Perched upon a rubber ring (Mrs Meadows’s idea). I would wait for Miss Hahn to appear. On her bike. On the road. On the beach. But she never did. So I would watch the badgers, at dawn, at dusk, crashing around in the borders. Grunting. Instigating a series of pointless – but explosive – arguments between themselves. And sometimes I would sense the child playing on the lawn. Perched among them. Laughing. Or engaged in quiet prayer. But I had no idea why she prayed. Or what she prayed for. Only that (and this I was quite certain of) she prayed for me.

48

Miss Carla Hahn

It’s always the things we don’t have that we crave the most. And in my case it was those two photographs. Those missing photographs: 04 and 40. I tried to tell myself that it didn’t really matter – the photos had never particularly interested me anyway (they were Mr Huff’s ‘trump card’, remember? Kimberly Couzens’s own patented worldview?). And if I had wanted to (to look at them, I mean), then it was only because Mr Huff had tried to deny me that most basic right. Which was almost like being denied permission to … to stare at my own face (examine my own reflection). Which was something (in general) that I preferred not to do.