Lasting Damage by Sophie Hannah Page A

you’re not bleeding to death, or hanging from a cliff by your fingernails. Save your permission to ring in an emergency for a life-or-death situation, don’t squander it on this.’ But why not? I mean, it is a life-and-death situation: the woman I saw had been murdered – she must have been. And why did I decide it was a once-only thing and that after I’d used up my ringing-in-an-emergency allowance, it would be gone for ever? Would you be angry if I rang you outside working hours in a few months, or even years, if I was unlucky enough to feel as bad as this again?’
    ‘Are you noticing the words you’re choosing?’ Alice asks. ‘ “Saving”, “squandering”?’
    No, I didn’t notice. Admitting as much would be too depressing, so I say nothing. When I first started to see Alice, the long silences unsettled me. Now I’m used to them. I’ve grown to like them. Sometimes I count how long they last: one elephant, two elephants, three elephants . Sometimes I go into a kind of trance, staring at the clear glass beads that run along the bottom of the cream silk blind, or at the pink butterflies chandelier.
    ‘Why did you tell your family about seeing the woman and the blood?’ Alice says eventually.
    ‘Kit asked me the same thing. ‘‘Why tell them?’’ he said. ‘‘They’ll give you a hard time and make you feel a hundred times worse.’’ I knew he was right, but I still went round and put myself in the firing line.’
    ‘You often describe your parents as suffocating.’ Alice remembers every word I have uttered in her presence since we first met, without the help of notes. Maybe the pink butterflies are hiding some kind of recording device. ‘Why did you go round to be suffocated, on no sleep and after the worst shock of your life?’
    ‘I had to tell them. A detective came to interview me. It was . . . too big to keep from them, too important. I can’t be involved with the police and hide it from my family.’
    ‘Can’t?’
    No secrets between people who love each other . I’ve had it drummed into me all my life. I’m not sure it’s possible to explain that sort of programming to someone who hasn’t experienced it.
    ‘Yet you’ve kept quiet about the other big, important thing in your life at the moment,’ says Alice. ‘The problem that’s been preoccupying you since January.’
    I laugh, though I feel like crying. ‘It’s not the same. That might be nothing. It probably is.’
    ‘The dead woman you saw might be nothing, if you imagined her.’
    ‘I didn’t. I know I didn’t.’
    Alice takes off her glasses, drops them in her lap. ‘You didn’t imagine what happened in January, either,’ she says. ‘You don’t know what it means, but you didn’t imagine it.’
    ‘I can’t tell Mum and Dad that I’m afraid Kit might have a whole other life that I don’t know about,’ I say, loathing the sound of the words. ‘It’s just not an option. You don’t understand. I might have changed my surname, but I’m still a Monk. Everything in the Monk family is nice and normal and happy. That’s not a coincidence, it’s a rule. There are no problems, ever, apart from Benji not eating his sodding broccoli – that’s the worst thing that’s allowed to happen. It’s out of the question, absolutely forbidden, for there to be anything weird going on – really bad weird, I mean. Weird funny is okay, as long as it makes a good anecdote.’
    I wipe my face, try to compose myself. ‘The only thing worse than bad-weird is uncertain. My parents don’t accept ambiguity of any kind – literally, as soon as it dares to make an appearance, they show it the door in no uncertain terms. And, yes, I said that deliberately. Everything Mum and Dad do, they do in no uncertain terms. Uncertainty is the enemy. One of the enemies,’ I correct myself. ‘Change is the other. And sponta-neity, and risk; there’s a whole gang of them.’
    ‘No wonder your parents are scared,’ says Alice. ‘You