Interpreters by Sue Eckstein Page B

dwarf sidles round the rock, a square head framed with wild, wiry hair followed by a long, powerful torso, on short, bowed legs. Still peering round, he waddles, scuttles, crab-like, stopping and starting, stopping and listening, down to the lake, and crouches, elbows splayed, at the water’s edge. A watery sun breaks through the thin grey cloud, catches the ripples as a great golden fish rises majestically through the water, bubbles rising and breaking, shattering the dwarf’s reflection into a hundred ripples. A branch cracks; the fish glides back down into the black water; the dwarf freezes, taut, alert, sniffs the damp air. Then is gone.
    Max was right. I shouldn’t have watched it.
    Perhaps rather rashly, given Angie’s warning about booby traps, I slide the cupboard door open. Catherine’s cupboardsare full, but not as full as mine used to be. My shelves used to be stuffed to bursting. Unlike most of my friends, whose mothers would go through their belongings periodically, consigning broken or outgrown toys to the Scouts’ jumble sales, my mother let us keep absolutely everything. Somewhere, in a set of plywood packing cases – now in Max’s attic, I think – we still have every single childhood book, toy, board game and school exercise book that we have ever owned.
    No dolls, though. I never went through a doll phase. I didn’t need to – I had the real thing. For several years – probably from the ages of about nine to twelve, and before I reached the stage where I would have gladly chosen death over being seen out in public with my father – I would often accompany him on his regular weekend calls to one of the hospitals at which he worked. Almost every Sunday afternoon the phone would ring and my father, after a brief, hushed consultation, would announce to us that he had to go to work and would be back in a couple of hours. I could never understand why this made my mother so tight-lipped and angry. Surely doctors couldn’t help having to go to work at the weekend? Leaving Max to his violin practice and my mother to the debris of Sunday lunch, we would head off in the car away from Tenterden Close and my mother’s brooding discontent.
    I loved the comfortable, nicotine-imbued silence of those car journeys, during which my father would smoke cigarette after cigarette, flicking first the thin plastic film, then the silver paper, then the burning stubs and finally the empty cigarette packet out of the car window. I rather admired the way he could steer with his knees, even while driving round roundabouts, as he extracted his lighter from deep within his trouser pocket. There was slightly less flashing and hooting from swerving cars once he upgraded his car to one with a built-in cigarette lighter. Sometimes he would listen to classical music or the news on the radio, but mostly he juststared ahead, thinking.
    ‘What are you thinking about, Dad?’ I asked once, having studied his impassive profile for several miles of London suburb.
    ‘What, dear?’
    ‘What do you think about all the time when you drive to work or sit at your desk in the evenings?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘You must know. You’re the one thinking.’
    ‘Yes, dear.’
    ‘So what is it you think about? Work?’
    He didn’t reply, hoping, no doubt, that I would get bored with interrogating him so we could revert to our companionable hush.
    ‘Go on – what do you think about? Me?’ I asked, hopefully.
    He smiled. ‘Yes, you. All the time. Every minute of the day and night.’
    ‘Why do you never take anything I say seriously?’
    ‘I do, dear.’
    At the hospital, I’d be delivered to Curtis Ward on the third floor where Sister Collins, her hands tucked into the bib of her apron, would take me on a personal ward-round, briskly pointing out the babies who were well enough to be taken out, changed, bathed and played with. It seems unthinkable now, that a ten-year-old child would be let loose in a ward full of babies,