Half the World Away

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

It has been raining and the air is gin clear, everything rinsed bright. The red-brick buildings seem to glow, the trees are a riot of lush vivid greens, the sky a high, aching blue.

And it is so quiet. The streets look empty, only ever a scattering of pedestrians. I had never thought of Manchester as a peaceful place before. I notice the litter, though, cigarette butts and chewing gum on the ground, plastic bottles and takeaway trays at the edges of fences and walls, carrier bags snagged on bushes. The only street sweepers we have here are little trucks with revolving circular brushes that hoover the pavements and gutters on a seemingly random basis.

‘What do you want?’ Nick asks us, when we get home. It is four o’clock in the afternoon. ‘Shower? Food? Sleep?’

I don’t know. I look outside to the garden where the grass has grown long and the bedding plants are thriving, a froth of fuchsia and lavender, red geraniums and blue lobelia.

The air is full of insects, flies and gnats, and I recall the tiny white moths, that night of the kites. Before we knew. Before we found her.

A surge of relief, euphoria, rushes through me. We are back. Home. Safe.

‘Lori?’ I say. ‘What do you fancy?’

She hesitates.

‘Tea and toast?’ Nick suggests.

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘Me too,’ I say.

Nick asks about the flight, the weather in Chengdu. Small talk that we can cope with.

The toast is thick and crunchy, soft in the middle. Homemade white bread. Smothered in salted butter and dark tangy marmalade.

‘Penny’s bread?’ I guess.

‘She’s done us a few meals too,’ Nick says, ‘in the freezer, one in the fridge for tea.’

Benji sits at Lori’s side, his eyes on her, ears pricked up, tail thumping, waiting for crumbs.

I drink my tea. It’s perfect, strong and full, nothing like the tea I had over there.

Penny brings the boys home.

They are overjoyed to see Lori, both grinning from ear to ear, eager to tell her their news, show her their latest toys.

Isaac looks wiped out. He shows us his scar. I pat my knee and he climbs on.

‘I’m so glad you’re better.’ I hug his shoulders. He relaxes back against me, one hand tracing round and round my knee.

‘You look funny,’ Isaac says to Lori, when there’s a break in the conversation.

‘Yes,’ she says. She pulls a face, eyes crossed, and the boys laugh.

‘Lori’s been poorly, too,’ I say.

‘Did he have a gun?’ Isaac says. We all know who he means. Finn stops patting Benji and watches to see what she’ll say.

‘No,’ Lori says.

‘A knife, then?’ Isaac says.

Lori looks upset, so I say, ‘What happened to Lori was pretty scary and she doesn’t want to talk about it.’

‘Who’s hungry?’ Nick says, and the boys shout out. Attention turns to the food that Penny left us.

‘Shall we eat outside?’ I say. ‘If we dry the seats, is it warm enough?’

Lori makes it through the meal, then wants to sleep. I carry her case up to the little room. Penny has lent us a single bed – Lori’s double might fit into the small room at a pinch but there’d be no space for anything else. Lori has to take the stairs slowly, bent like an old woman, pausing every couple of steps.

‘Do you want to sleep downstairs?’ I say.

‘No,’ she says quickly.

Of course not. She doesn’t want to feel alone.

Isaac sits with me while Nick clears up and Finn leaps about on the trampoline, calling to us to watch his moves.

I am raw with fatigue, eyes dry, muscles aching, and close to tears of joy at being here.

‘Does your tummy hurt now?’ I ask Isaac.

‘Only if I jump or stretch it.’

‘What was it like in hospital?’ I say.

‘It was really noisy and they kept waking me up.’

‘With the noise?’

‘And a fermometer.’ His voice is growing drowsy, his eyelids drooping.

‘I think you’re a tired boy.’

‘Am not,’ he says, but he seems to grow heavier on my lap. I call Nick, who takes him up to bed.

Lori is still awake when I go in to check on her. ‘Do you want anything?’ I ask.

‘My tablets. I think they’re in my bag downstairs.’

She’s still taking oral antibiotics, she has to finish the course, and she is on the last week of lower-dose sedatives.

I bring them up and she takes them from me. ‘Leave the door open,’ she says, ‘and the light on.’

‘Yes. Do you want a bedside lamp?’ The ceiling light is very bright.

‘No, it’s OK. And tell Nick, too, about the door,’ she adds, a hint of urgency in her voice.

‘I will.’

Finn wants me read him a story.

He’s on the top bunk. ‘Isaac couldn’t climb up,’ he says. ‘We swapped.’

‘So, do you want a book or a made-up story?’

‘About my panda playing football!’ He wiggles the bear at me.

I sit on the chair in the corner, close my eyes and invent a story about a panda who has lost his football, his search in the woods and the stream, and all the creatures he meets who help him look and how he finally finds the football under a giant stork who thought it was an egg and tried to hatch it. I rattle through it but Finn seems happy enough.

‘One more?’ he says.

‘Not tonight, darling. I’m really tired. I’ve been on an aeroplane for hours and hours.’

‘Can we go and get my rocket tomorrow, Mummy?’

‘I’m not sure, but soon,’ I say.

‘What happened to Lori?’

‘She was taken away by a nasty man,’ I say.

‘And you and Tom found her?’

‘We did.’

‘You went and got her?’ His eyes, dark blue with those glints of gold, are wide, fixed on me.

‘Yes.’

‘And the man’s in prison now?’

‘He’s in the police station, locked up.’

My heart feels swollen, tender, as I answer his questions. I want to shield him from it all but I know that’s not possible.

Dizzy with exhaustion, I have a quick shower and find Nick still outside in the last of the daylight. He’s drinking wine and offers me some.

‘God, yes,’ I say, ‘and then I’m going to collapse.’

He pours me a glass, tops up his own and joins me on the bench.

‘Home,’ I say, and touch my glass to his. ‘Oh, and before I forget, Lori wants the light on and the door left open.’

I take a sip of wine: it’s cold, lemony, delicious.

The sun is setting, brazen, a ball of fire in a wash of peach and rose. I look away, blindsided, and see black discs rimmed green with each blink.

‘We need to sort out some follow-up with the GP,’ I say. ‘Maybe physio too. They suggested counselling.’ It is suddenly all too big, too weighty. My head spins. ‘I don’t know how we do this. How do we help her? I keep thinking, all those days, tied up on the floor. What he did to her…’

‘Don’t,’ Nick says. He puts his hand on my arm.

Sadness pours through me as if a dam has burst. I start to cry and he takes me in his arms and lets me weep until I am spent and his T-shirt is soaked and the dusk has come down.

‘There were no stars in Chengdu,’ I tell him, making out a few in the darkening sky. ‘Too cloudy. Worse than here.’

Something rustles in the shrubs near the wall. A bird roosting, perhaps, a mouse or a frog. Silence falls, and it’s a couple of minutes before the murmur of a car engine interrupts it.

‘Finn wants me to take him to the museum to get his rocket.’

‘He can forget that,’ Nick says.

‘I promised… maybe not tomorrow. But it is Sunday so he’ll be off school.’

‘We’ve Isabelle coming at ten. She needs to talk to us about the media strategy,’ he says.

I groan. I wanted a normal day, mooching around the house, to the park with the kids, washing clothes, and it strikes me that nothing will be normal again, at least not for the foreseeable future.

‘Is she from Missing Overseas?’ I say.

‘Freelance.’

‘So we have to pay her?’

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘Can we afford it?’

‘The way they tell it, we can’t afford not to,’ he says.

The air feels softer, moist, as night sets in. An aeroplane flies overhead, red and white lights winking, and I realize I never saw planes in Chengdu, didn’t hear any either. Among that barrage of sound, no jet engines.

‘What about you?’ I say. ‘How are you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nick says wearily. He gets up, crosses to the picnic table for more wine. ‘It’s unbelievable. Just seeing her…’

‘I know.’

I wish Tom were here to talk to. Everything we shared in our search for Lori, he’s the only one who knows what it was like, who understands.

My own bed is blissfully soft after the punishing density of the ones in the hotels. My head is still full of the drone of our plane and I have the sensation that the mattress is vibrating.

My sleep is dark and dense and dreamless. Black velvet.