Marion Lennox - A Child In Need

He stood on the pavement and couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Shanni was grinning like a Cheshire cat and, beside her, Harry was simply looking. And looking and looking, as if he couldn’t get enough of him.

‘Shanni…’ He was starting to sound inane. He was starting to feel inane!

‘I’ve ordered fish and chips,’ she said, ignoring him. ‘We’re collecting them down at the wharf in five minutes.’

‘What if I don’t want to come?’ He sounded pathetic!

‘Of course you want to come,’ she said kindly. ‘You just don’t think you do. Harry and I are here to change your mind. Shall we take your car-or walk?’

‘I don’t…’

‘Don’t want to drive? Okay.’ She beamed. ‘It’s not far. Harry doesn’t like cars and he’s been practising with the new heel on his cast like anything. And please, take your tie off.’

‘No.’

‘You look silly with it on.’ She twinkled up at him in the sunlight. ‘But it’s the same one you were wearing when we first saw you. Don’t you have a change of clothes?’

‘I just brought the one suit. I’m heading back to Melbourne at the weekend.’ He’d go nuts if he couldn’t.

‘Now that’s a waste of a weekend if ever I heard one,’ she said. ‘Spending it in the city changing designer ties!’

And she smiled straight at him-and, despite himself, he was forced to smile right back. Unbelievable! And then he found himself walking at her side down toward the harbour. Harry clumped on bravely on her other side, clutching her hand and occasionally venturing a peep at him around the soft folds of her dress.

‘Do you never go to Melbourne?’ Nick asked, trying to think of something to say to stop him sounding even more pathetic. As a lawyer and magistrate he was used to facing the world on his terms. It wasn’t often the world had him as off balance as this.

‘I did my training there,’ she told him. ‘But I hated it. I came back here every weekend to get my fix of sea air and laid-back country lifestyle.’

‘So you admit you need your fix of sea air. Well, I need my fix of city. We’re equally addicted, Miss McDonald.’

‘We are indeed,’ she agreed equably. ‘Equally nuts, but if we’re comparing the sea to the city I know which I’d rather. What do you think, Harry?’ She tugged the little boy forward, scooped him up and placed him so he was between the two of them. ‘Do you think we’re nuts?’

Harry considered. ‘No,’ he said at last, seriously, and Shanni chuckled her delight. She really did have the loveliest chuckle.

‘You’re wonderful, Harry,’ she told him. Then she looked down at him. He was walking bravely but the cast must be a pain. ‘Do you want Nick to carry you?’

‘No.’

That was definite enough, Shanni considered. ‘Okay. What about playing One, Two, Three, Jump?’

Harry didn’t know what she meant. His small face stared up at his kindergarten teacher in mute enquiry.

‘We need to teach him,’ she told Nick, but Nick shook his head, as in the dark as Harry.

‘Sorry.’

‘Sorry, what?’ She stared at him.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

That stopped her dead. She whirled to face them, staring from Nick down to Harry and back to Nick again. ‘You mean…you both don’t know One, Two, Three, Jump?’

‘Enlighten our ignorance,’ Nick said dryly, knowing she was about to do just that.

But she gave him a strange look-reassessing. It was an odd sideways look, and it left Nick feeling disturbed. As if she was probing where he didn’t want to be probed.

‘It’s very simple,’ she said at last, falling in again beside them, but still with that disturbed look on her face. They’d left the single line of shops in the main street behind and were walking down the hill to where the boats were tied up in the harbour below. ‘One, Two, Three, Jump requires two adults and one child. We have all the prerequisites right here. Nick, take Harry’s hand.’

‘But…’

‘You quibble, we can’t play,’ she said direfully. ‘No quibbling. Take Harry’s hand.’

There was nothing for it. Nick put his hand down and took Harry’s fingers in his. Harry looked high up into his face, and then stared intently at their linking-his tiny hand in Nick’s large one. Then, very slowly, Harry smiled. He turned and headed on down the hill between his two anchors, stumping gamely on his cast, heading into the wind. As if he’d just had a win of gargantuan proportions.

‘Now we’re ready,’ Shanni announced, and if Nick thought he saw a glimmer of a tear on her eyelashes then surely he was imagining it. She swung Harry’s arm. ‘One…two…three…!’ And before he realised what he was doing, Nick was swinging Harry’s little body out before him.

‘Jump!’

The tiny boy flew high, held safely between them and, when Harry landed, the look on his face of absolute incredulity that anything like this could be happening to him made Nick falter.

Damn, he might be sure there were tears on Shanni’s eyelashes, but what the heck was the lump doing in his throat?

There was nothing for it now but to do it all over again. They One, Two, Three, Jumped all the way to the fish shop, and then Nick held the fish-and-chip parcel in one hand and Shanni carried the drinks in another so they could keep on One, Two, Three, Jumping all the way to the beach.

And finally Nick found himself sitting on the sand by the sea, fish and chips spread out before him, and he had absolutely no idea in the world how he’d come to be there.

TO HIS surprise, they ate in silence.

Nick was no longer sure what he expected of this girl, but silence surely wasn’t it. She’d chatted and laughed all the way to the beach, but now, sitting on the sand with Harry on her knee and a spread of fish and chips beside her, she had subsided into a silence that Nick found almost disconcerting.

Not that he didn’t welcome it. He needed time to get his breath back.

So he ate the fillets of fish that must surely have only been caught that morning, and he crunched on the golden chips and he absorbed the silence. It was peaceful. It was right, but it was…strange.

As were the sensations. The sand was sun-warmed and soft, and the wind was blowing gently in across the rolling waves. The beach was pristine. There were no footsteps for miles-no one had been on this beach since high tide. The town was clustered round a horseshoe bay-the Bay Beach the town was named after-but Shanni had led them down the track to the back beach, which was the beach the tourists didn’t use. Miles wide, with golden sand stretching away into the distance, there were ancient Norfolk pines at its higher reaches casting sentinels of shade across the sand-hills. There was nothing else.

They might as well be the first man and first woman and first child ever to sit on this beach, and, with the silence, it was weird.

When had he last sat on a deserted beach like this?

Never, he thought, and the knowledge was suddenly bleak. He was a child of the city, who’d never had parents to take him anywhere.

He was like Harry.

No!

He wasn’t going to think like that, he decided harshly, because that was the way of attachment. That was what this girl wanted, he knew. This outing was planned with one thing in mind-to establish a link between Nick and the little boy she was holding.

‘Finished your chips?’ She was smiling at him, still with that strange look in her eyes that said she was searching for something deeper than an answer about the chips. What was she seeing? He didn’t want to know.

‘Yes. Thank you.’ They’d bought far too many.