Don't Stand So Close Read Free Page A

forehead with his left hand. Was he left- or right-handed? She watched his hand, still stroking his forehead, and pictured his fingers stroking her. She shifted, uncrossed her legs and pressed hard against the base of the chair. She wanted him to fall in love with her, to take her home with him, to look after her, always. She was pretty. Much prettier than most women. Why should he not want her? Lots of men his age wanted to be with her that way, she had proof. And now she wanted him. She slid from the chair on to the floor, giving him a small smile as she moved. She sat on the floor at the bottom of the chair, pulling her knees up to her chest. She didn’t say anything.
    ‘I can’t read your mind,’ he said. ‘You have to tell me what you want my help with.’
    She lifted her arms up above her head and stretched.
    ‘How are you feeling right now?’ he asked.
    ‘Wet. How are you feeling?’
    ‘I’m going to have to end the session for today if this goes on.’
    He was nervous. She could see it in his eyes and she could hear it in his voice, all tight and squeezed up. She held on to her knees and rocked, looking up at him. The buttons of his shirt were done up all the way to his throat. He wore a pinktie. He also wore a wedding ring. She wondered what it was like, when they had sex. She hated his wife. It wasn’t fair, she was probably some woman who had always had everything: parents who loved each other, and a nice house to grow up in with cats and bloody dogs. A really big, clean house with no shouting and screaming and definitely no drinking. With a bedroom that her parents had decorated for her with pink girly stuff, a bed with a pink duvet and matching pillowcase, a pleated bed frill, a pink wallpaper strip with fairies. She could see it all. Dolls and soft toys. And his wife-to-be would grow up all safe and liking herself and she would go to university and meet a man like him.
    It wasn’t fair.
    But then she was beautiful and she was young. And some men liked young girls. Being pretty could get you a lot. She wanted him. And not just for fifty minutes once a week.
    ‘You asked me how I felt,’ she said. ‘And now you’re going to punish me for telling you the truth.’ She
was
pissed off.
    He softened, she could see. ‘Do you think that sex is going to help you? To get the relationships you want?’
    ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
    ‘Who taught you that the only thing important about you, the only thing of value, is your sexuality?’
    ‘Nobody taught me anything.’
    ‘And you have feelings about that?’
    ‘I don’t want to talk about my feelings.’
    ‘So you put a wall between us. A wall of sexuality. And we never get to know the real you, under that barrier.’
    ‘It’s not a wall. I want to be close to you. I don’t want any wall.’
    She crawled towards him on her hands and knees, until shewas at his feet. He didn’t move, legs crossed and hands folded in his lap.
    ‘You know our agreement,’ he said. ‘No acting out. No touching.’
    ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I just want to rest my head against your knee. No one’s ever touched me, or hugged me, never.’ OK, that was all lies.
    She leaned forward, touching her forehead to his leg. The linen of his trousers felt a little rough against her skin. She could feel the hard edge of his knee as she pressed against him. She closed her eyes.

Grove Road Clinic, April 2009
    Stella pulled out the file marked
Simpson
and skimmed her notes one more time. The family had first come to the attention of social services, and then the Courts, more than a decade earlier; now the case had been handed to her as a twisted mess of accusations and counter-accusations between two warring parents. There were several professionals involved already, and a general air of pessimism prevailed about ever making progress in a case where hatred between the parents obscured every fact and where the child remained a pawn between two factions. Court proceedings had