Whatever You Love by Louise Doughty

them, apparently, well you know more about these things than I do. Her leg was still very swollen and the break wasn’t healing well. They took her over to the Royal Infirmary, to the paediatric intensive care unit there, but she died twelve hours after being admitted. Septicaemia, you know how quick that can be, but it should have been picked up. There’ll be an enquiry.’
    I lift Betty’s scarf and bury my face in it. Dear God. The pain feels as intense as one of the pure moments, but still not pure. I can hardly bear it, yet hardly feel it. I could not begin to explain my feelings to myself.
    ‘God. Sally…’ I say, helplessly.
    ‘Sally and Stephen were with her when she died,’ said Toni. ‘They had that at least.’
    ‘Does David know?’
    Toni nods. ‘I phoned him before I came over here, in case he wanted to tell you himself. I think he would have liked to but things are a bit difficult for him at the moment so I offered.’ Coward , I think, briefly. Toni continues, ‘The funeral will probably be Friday. They’re making arrangements today.’
    I search my feelings, struggling to discover what there is inside me that is authentic. Can I honestly say that there is not some tiny part of me that is relieved I will not have to have the talk with Willow I have been dreading, about exactly what happened that day? Am I, perhaps, relieved that I am not alone any more, even though Sally is one of the last people I would wish to be not-alone with; relieved (and this is it, I think, most of all) that, for a short time at least, I will not be the focus of attention, that I can be a bit part in someone else’s tragedy. How dreadful, that I should feel any of these slivers of relief, even momentarily. I feel sick. A girl has died.
    ‘Things are going to be a bit difficult in town for a while,’ Toni is saying, thoughtfully. ‘We’ve had to set up something called a Gold Group. It’s what we do when there’s, well, what you might call a bit of tension in a community. I can talk you through it if you like, what we’re doing, and the investigation, where we are up to.’

    I nod, then rise. I don’t want to talk through it, any of it. Betty is dead, now Willow. ‘It’s all right. You don’t have to stay.’
    *
     
    That night, I cannot sleep. Normally I manage to doze for an hour or two before waking but that night unconsciousness eludes me entirely. I lie in Betty’s bed, thinking of Sally and Stephen, the newness and rawness of their grief, how they are almost certainly awake too, wandering around their house and staring at each other from time to time, disbelievingly.
    I lie like that for a long time, with my hands behind my head, waiting for the moment when I feel like turning on my side in the foetal position, closing my body up, in preparation for it to be deserted by my thoughts. The moment doesn’t come. Around 2 a. m., I rise, look in on Rees who is breathing softly, and go downstairs in my dressing gown, clutching it around me, shivering. The house is dark and strange, as it always is at this time of the night. I make myself a large mug of camomile tea and sit at the kitchen table with the photo albums – David was always very good at that. He took hundreds of pictures of the children and in the old days always got an extra set of prints and sent copies of the best one to the aunties and a far- flung cousin somewhere in the Middle East, so far-flung I had never even met him. As a result, we always ended up with two copies of the less-good photos – the blurry ones where Betty or Rees turned their head or loomed at the lens; the ones where they are cross-looking or have their eyes closed. David would never throw anything away. There were half-full albums and yellow envelopes of prints all over the house. It drove me mad. Thank God for the advent of digital. Since he and I split up, the children were hardly photographed by me – on special occasions of course, birthdays and Christmases. But