Nine Days by Toni Jordan Read Free Book Online

her hands up and down her arms, like she’s cold. She’s not cold. If she was, she’d tell me to turn the heat up, pronto. ‘You’d be an idiot not to be afraid of stuff like that. We’re so fragile. We’re like balloons filled with blood. The slightest injury, the smallest bug. Sometimes I feel we should walk around with our own invisible force field. Anything could do us in. There’s malice everywhere. Don’t you watch the news?’
    The anonymous death, the one among thousands, the symbolic, representative, impersonal killings: she fears this not at all. She fears the deliberate, the targeted. Someone would need to aim for her. This is not a logical understanding of the risks, although I can see her point. If someone’s trying to kill you, at least it should be about
you.
    She stops her circumnavigation in front of my desk. ‘What’s this?’
    I know what she’s asking right away. My desk is usually bare like every surface in my office, bare like every tabletop in my room. I like things sparse, lean, minimalist. Clutter makes my eyes ache. Charlotte and the kids, the mess drives me crazy.
    Sometimes I put my foot down. When we moved in, Mum gave us a set of white lace doilies as a housewarming present. Doilies. They were wrapped in a striped linen tea towel with a wooden spoon holding the ribbon in place. So I can see where Charlotte gets it from. Our parents’ place—God, it’s a shrine to bric-a-brac shops the world over. It’s where paintings of dogs playing poker go to die, every surface covered in shepherdess figurines and crystal koalas and miniature cars. And photos, of course. Newer ones of the kids and older ones of the three of us. Never Dad, because he’s always taking the picture. It looks like my sister and I were brought up by a single mother with a time-delay camera. And there’s no satisfaction in appealing to Dad. Despite his world-famous aesthetic sense and natural good taste, he won’t say a word to Mum. He lets her do whatever she wants, he always has.
    But today my desk is not bare. Today there is an old coinon it, a shilling. I should have put it in the drawer with my handbag when I first came in. I don’t know why I didn’t. My theory of practice allows for some self-disclosure. An unguarded response can sometimes make clients feel safe, especially since it’s Violet’s relationship with her father that seems to be at the core of her troubles.
    ‘It’s my father’s. One of his most prized possessions. Mum smuggled it out of his study. I’m getting it framed, as a get-well present from me and my sister.’
    ‘Funny prized possession.’
    ‘He says it reminds him of silver linings.’
    ‘Money? That’s a silver lining all right. I couldn’t agree more.’
    She couldn’t be more wrong. It’s just that he’s attached to this coin. It’d be the first thing he’d grab if the house was burning down. He’d leave the art, Mum’s jewellery, even his first editions.
    ‘I’m wondering what your prized possessions are,’ I say.
    She doesn’t answer. For the rest of the session, I try to bring her back to her father, her husband, her boyfriend, her habit of dropping things into pockets and open handbags. Instead she talks about a new nail bar that’s opened in her neighbourhood, about trying to set her brother up with one of her friends, about someone she knew who left the window open while on holiday on the Peninsula and a duck flew in and shat on her friend’s luggage, the bloody duck didn’t care it was Louis Vuitton, so that night at dinner they all ordered the duck as revenge.
    I don’t know why she’s telling me these things. I don’tknow why she’s here. More worrying is that I don’t know why I’m here.
    Eventually our time is up and I feel like I’ve felt for months now: like a child listening to the teacher drone on, then hearing the bell ring and knowing I can finally go home. My heart leaps; I can actually feel it, giving a little hop in its cage.