When the bottle went, the boy did not cry.
He was eleven months into his life and a glass bottle had just gone off like a gunshot about a metre from his head, and his mother had made a noise, and four adults had gone rigid.
And he leaned over the side of the buggy to look at the floor, interested, and then held the giraffe out.
Towards the mess. Towards nobody in particular — the way they do at that age, offering you the thing they are holding because something has happened and they do not know what else to do.
He offered a stuffed giraffe to a broken bottle, in a corridor, while the four adults responsible for his entire life stood over him being the worst versions of themselves in public.
Bernadine saw it too. She mentioned it, months later, without my bringing it up.
And that is the image I have instead of the one everybody wants, which is my ex-husband’s face when the lift opened.
I can barely remember his face.
I can remember a child holding out a toy to a puddle of milk and glass because he had worked out that something was wrong and that was everything he had.
And the last thing.
In the May of this year a referral came through to my clinic.
A boy of twenty-two months, routine, from a GP in Brackwater, about his hearing after a run of ear infections. Nothing frightening. The sort of thing I see four times a week.
And the surname was Mallory.
I sat and looked at that screen for a while. Not long. Perhaps a minute.
And then I filled in a form.
There is a box on it for the nature of the conflict, and you write it in free text, and I typed: I am the former spouse of the patient’s father and have been party to legal proceedings involving both parents.
And then I passed the case to a colleague called Jun Abara, who is better than me at ears anyway, and I wrote a one-line note on the system and did not open the rest of the record.
Yvie rang me about it eight days later. She had been told it had been reallocated and why, because that is what the letter says.
And she said — and she was crying, and I do not think it was tactical — “You could have just seen him, Petra. I’d have been fine with it. I’d have preferred it.”
And I said no.
And she said: “Why? You know you’re the best one there for it.”
And I said: because he is two.
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