value
There is something to be said about the way we hold the things that are of the most value to us.
She thinks about the way her Mummy and Daddy hold her hands in the street. They hold them so tightly that she feels secure. She is secure and she knows that she is, what with Mummy on her left and Daddy on her right; she sandwiched between them, allowing herself to be swung.
1, 2, 3... Jump!
They don't hold on to her in this way because they don't trust her or because they think she is going to run away from them.
(She would never do that.)
They do it because they want to keep her safe. They do it because when they are crossing roads, she is sometimes so eager to get to wherever it is they are walking to – whether it is Roy's for breakfast, or Nanny's for tea, or Aunt Shelley's at the weekend, or anywhere at all, really – that she forgets to check for traffic. Forgets to turn her head one way and then the other, just like her Daddy told her to. She forgets that danger exists, that the world isn't just going to stop at her say so.
And it's okay to forget sometimes. Daddy can be very forgetful. He often forgets when Mummy is working late because she is in meetings with important business people with funny hair and even funnier voices. He forgets in the mornings to turn the toast over in time for it not to burn. He forgets to pick her up from school – but that did only happen the once. And he was very busy that day. Mummy said something about Simon and she thought no more about it.
But it's okay to forget.
And she knows that.
It doesn't mean you value what you forgot any less than what you would've had you remembered it. She knows because on the days Daddy forgets to tell Mummy he loves her before she leaves for work, that she looks good and smells even better (even though she can't wear her favourite perfume anymore, not after the bottle was found mysteriously smashed on the bathroom floor, its culprits' sticky handprints visible on a nearby mirror), it is the first thing he says to her when he sees her again, the moment she is through the door.
He helps her take off her coat. He smiles at her, kisses her cheek; rubs the ring on the fourth finger of her left hand as Mummy presses her forehead to his, laughing slightly and calling him a ridiculous man.
"Your ridiculous man."
And when they look at each other, they look with such value. Their eyes are full of it.
It is the same value with which they look at her.