In the days after Daddy, she would bend and lower herself upside down through the rails, turn her feet out like a clown so that she wouldn’t roll in (although if she did, it thrilled her to know the skates would make her sink like a stone) and hold Teddy, Teddy who had lost his fuzz in patches here and there and who smelt of straw and sleep; hold him at the end of stretched-out arms over the roar and surge and dare herself to let him fall to the fishy deeps below. She never let Teddy drop exactly. She threw him into the air sometimes, to feel the loss and horror pitch in her belly.
