Arlo had never taken a bottle. Everything near us was shut by the time his hunger became the most pressing thing. He had slept most of the afternoon, exhausted by the chaos, then woke and wouldn’t stop his piercing cries. The police liaison woman wouldn’t leave the house. I hadn’t left the house. I had let them take Ann away without me, without Arlo. Andy spoke very loudly at the policewoman. He apologised and drove down to Boots at Liverpool Street station and got his car clamped while he was buying formula. He came back in a taxi with the bottles, the unwieldy steriliser, I remember, like the one we already had been given by Kate, nappies in all different sizes. He had clearly been weeping but I was looking at him through the wrong side of a magnifying glass so there was nothing I could say. The poor baby’s squalling was so desperate he couldn’t take the bottle at first. We made it too hot, then we made it too cold, then we worried that if we warmed it up again there might be bacteria and he would get ill and the thought sliced my head: if anything happens to Arlo …
Kate walked in as the baby was nearly finishing the bottle. He was flushed and drowsy in my arms. She looked at us and walked straight out of the room again and I could hear the sounds of somebody trying to harness a sob. The policewoman who was the community thing or whatever you call it person went into the hallway after her. She was really very nice that woman, although she knew less about babies than I did. I suppose I could have asked for someone else. But I thought of Ann gritting her teeth through the labour even though the med. student had been wearing this stomach-turning perfume, not asking her to leave because she thought the girl had to learn somehow. She would have let the policewoman stay, and so I did.
There were procedures. Identification. Removal to the coroner’s control. A day later the post-mortem. In the booklet that the social worker left behind it said, ‘If you do not want to know more about the post-mortem, you should skip this section.’ A man with springy grey hair and bad dandruff told me, in that pallid phrase, that ‘she never regained consciousness’. Surprising what you can be grateful for.
I hate ‘Death is nothing at all.’ I would like to kill Henry Scott-Holland, if he weren’t already dead. ‘I have only slipped away into the next room’ – he makes it sound like you’re going for a cup of tea. You’re not coming back. ‘Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.’ Except here. Except together. ‘What is death but a negligible accident?’ Accidents can be prevented. I could have prevented this. It was holiday season. We held the funeral until Tonia could get a flight back from Castries.
Ann’s things were still in the bathroom cabinet for a long time. Her claggy mascara, her flat-smelling pregnancy body oil, the citrus soap that goes so rich and foamy in the shower. ‘Sixteen quid it cost,’ she told me in shocked amusement after one of her shopping sprees, ‘sixteen pounds for a bar of soap! I bought it by accident, the shop girl was so sweet and look how she wrapped it up, there was this Notting Hill type behind me and I just couldn’t bring myself to say – er, no, I thought it said six pounds, I’ve made a mistake. Even six pounds! Oh God, what was I thinking.’
No mention of the rest of the spending, which I didn’t know about until the bank statement came. The soap was a bargain compared to the other stuff that needed paying off. Three pairs of trainers because her feet got bigger in pregnancy and never shrank back. Two pairs of Costume National heels, same reason. Hair dye. Hairspray, hair lotion, something called serum, all organic because of the breastfeeding. New maternity bras because the ones she bought just before Arlo was born turned out to be too small. Tops that were easy to breastfeed in discreetly. Skirts and trousers to fit her newly skinny waist. Special cream for stretch marks, oxygen something for her eyes, peppermint foot lotion, and the soap. The soap she started using. Everything else, even the shoes, she drove in black plastic rubbish sacks of remorse to the Marie Curie charity shop in Highbury Corner. I remember watching her from our bedroom window as she loaded the car, I didn’t know with what. Some old crap, I’d thought, impressed by her strong arms, her energy. Then after she was gone the items appeared on the credit card bill.
You can save a lot of time if you don’t shower. It’s hard to quantify, but there are so many little daily routines we perform that just swallow the hours. You might think a solo guy like me, after Ann died, had lots of time on his hands. Baby’s with the grandmother, wife’s gone. It’s the opposite. There was never enough time. There could be no minute away from my desk that felt useful. It wasn’t just that Ann was there, every day, waiting for me on this computer that I never turned off, that gently slept when I slept and sprang to life, Ann in its memory, when I touched the keys, in the morning when I couldn’t lie in bed, in the night when I couldn’t stop being awake. The fear of dying consumed me, the fear of knowing it, as Ann must have known it, somehow, that she would not see her boy again. Her neck broke. I did not want to know more about the post-mortem. I kept thinking that I must not, cannot die. The fear was with me every day and night. Arlo, small Arlo with his cap of reddish hair, couldn’t be any more alone than he already was.
Kate came to the house to pick up some of the hand-me-downs Arlo had already grown out of; another friend of hers was having a baby. It was autumn, four months since the funeral. Arlo was with my parents and I was packing to move down there for a bit. London, living on our own, wasn’t really working. ‘I’m in Islington,’ she said from her mobile phone, ‘how long will it take me to get there?’ Maybe she came from the hairdressers, she had that new-minted look about her. Had definitely dyed the grey from her hair since the funeral, was wearing her denim skirt with the nervy energy of women who drink and don’t eat.
She’d brought a casserole in a Tupperware box. ‘I’ll just put this in the freezer.’
‘Thank you.’
There was no room in the freezer. It was full of soups and lasagnes, things people had made for me. I was grateful. I still ate takeaways. Arlo was just having his first solids, but I couldn’t join him on the pumpkin purée. I had cleared away the worst of the bachelor excesses, the pizza boxes and mouldering coffee cups, and turned some peaceful music up in the living room. She said she wanted tea but when she saw my glass of wine she changed her mind. ‘I’m driving,’ she said, then, ‘oh, fuck it.’ We sat on the kitchen floor. It is easier, ground level. We drank a bottle and she told me about her kids, what they were up to, the new school year and Titus had won some scholarship or other, they had tutors of course, they were being pressure-cooked, it wasn’t a childhood at all. ‘I never know,’ she said, ‘I have no bearings any more. I don’t ever know if I’m doing the right thing.’ A little silty circle had formed in the bottom of my wine glass. It was nice to listen to someone else talking. ‘I keep seeing birds everywhere. That’s something Ann said, she said there’s a bird that perches on the walkway over the railway tracks down the road, a big brown bird. She thought it was watching her. Birds see everything, don’t they? They look down on us and see everything, that’s what I told her. Not just her.’ Kate looked at me, her mouth dragging down at the corners, and covered her eyes with her hand. ‘She said it was more like birds swooping in her head.’ For a minute or two she cried. I held on to her ankle until she took a couple of shuddery breaths and stopped. ‘How’s Arlo doing?’
‘I’m going to Wiltshire. To my parents’.’
‘To live?’
‘No. Tomorrow.’ My mother’s idea; she was worried about me, a vague puffy pressure I dimly felt emanating from the south-west at all times. ‘How’s Simon?’
She laughed, and went on for a bit too long in a slightly unhinged way.
‘I should get the Moses basket.’ It was in the hall. I couldn’t face getting it.
Everything about that day Kate had dropped off the things – the day Ann thought the man broke into the house – came back to me in a flood, as though I was right there again on the landing with Ann, not here on the kitchen floor, drunk. Ann pale, afraid. I said to Kate, ‘I don’t think Hallie was making it up. About Ann.’
She nodded. ‘I don’t think so either.’ Her voice frayed. ‘Tom, I blame myself. I blame myself for what happened.’ The air around her head was coming unstitched.
‘We all did it.’ The silence stretched out. She stood up. She walked towards the door. Not the long way, which she could have taken, round the other side of the table. Past me. I reached for her legs. They flinched and went rigid when I touched them, carved out of smooth brown skin like furniture. My fingers ran up her calves and pressed into the pulpy dip at the back of her knees. She breathed out, a gentle sound. I swallowed the urge to put my mouth on her skin.
‘Ann told me what you like to do,’ she said. What was she talking about? It took me a moment to understand. A black freckle lay right on top of her knee, begging to be wiped away.
‘No.’ I lifted my head. It was heavy as a medicine ball. ‘What she liked to do.’
Kate looked down at me steadily. ‘Oh.’
I heard her walk down the hall. The sound of the door closing. Her car engine as it revved up. The neighbourhood was in the room with me, littered asphalt, chewing gum splodges, infested puddles. Swings creaked on their rusting chains, the bitten black rubber of the seats smelling as strong in the dry air as a hot car tyre. Kate, buckling herself in while behind the chicken wire wall of the basketball court someone watching her thumped a ball against the ground, again and again and again. ‘Be careful’, I wanted to say to her. After the street fell silent I went and double-bolted the front door.
* * *
Under the clean skies of Wiltshire I had time to myself while Stella took Arlo off for walks in his buggy, to show him what life was truly like (no one raised in London had a real childhood, she declared) and to meet various local eminence grises. Once I went with them and we passed a drunk man lying in a ditch beneath a giant camellia hedge and as I slowed down to check if he was alive my mother said through her teeth, ‘Keep moving.’ In the hours at my disposal, having called a halt to anything that looked like work, I cruised the Internet in dad’s freshly painted study. They didn’t have broadband – searches were excruciating. But I was in no hurry. There were nearly three million entries for ‘Ann Wells’. School reunions, family gatherings, I looked at as many as I could. She wasn’t hiding there.
When everyone was asleep I stayed up late watching television. Cried in front of a documentary on Australia. Their Prime Minister, a grey man refusing to say sorry. Guilt and blowflies. In the ad break my mind drifted to a trip through Tuscany with Ann and Tonia and Andy. Ann floating through this walled town or that piazza, hips and knees jutting like a racehorse, her whole body sensitised, eyes unfocused in a sort of post-fucking glaze. Then I thought of the lone women standing on the outskirts of town, maybe five minutes’ drive away by a lay-by or a wood, Moroccan women standing there alone beside their portable stereos, waiting to be picked up.
‘When you think,’ Tonia had said, ‘that they wouldn’t let me in to St Peter’s because my sundress was above my knee.’
‘You see,’ said Andy, repeating two of his favourite sayings, ‘the bigger the front, the bigger the back. No heart, Catholicism.’
On a concrete wall down some street in a suburb called Botany the Australian telly programme showed the burned-out aftermath of a race riot, a concrete wall stained with graffiti, the Nazi-style SS. The letters were faded to grey. Like Ann’s scar, except there were two of them. The vandal must have been interrupted from the far end of the alleyway. The tail of the second S tapered off at a leftward angle and in a dying line it connected with the tail of the S before it.
N.A.M.W. 07.07
She lies on the bed in Fiji. There is the persistent turning sound of a doorknob. There is a girl in the room. The girl sits on the bed and listens to the sounds on the other side of the door. Her body is stiff. She needs to pee. Fourteen years old. Face puffy with forming, spotty, red. The laughing drawling voices of her brothers outside the door, her brothers’ mates. She scrapes a fingernail down the cut mark on her leg. It’s funny because a while ago she was drunk and slid down the stairs to the landing showing the holes in her tights to everybody and now she doesn’t feel drunk. There’s that boy, the one they call Horse, the one she likes. That boy asking if she knows what ablowjob is. Everyone laughing. Making her show them on the bottle. She doesn’t know his real name, just the name they call him, and she repeats it to herself, inside her head, so conscious of her itchy poisoned skin. She picks at the raggy bits around her fingernails. That boy might like her.
Ann crawls from the bed to the bathroom and throws up into the toilet bowl. When there is nothing left she retches. She takes the nail scissors and drags them across an old scar on her leg. Breathes. Her head clears. Her body that knows what it knows stays there and her mind rises up like burning paper into the world without memory. She pulls apart.
Desjardin unlocks the door with the master key. He stands aside to let Tom into the cabin. Tom thanks him and closes the door behind, hears the crunching of footsteps as the Frenchman walks away. The room is hot and dark. He says, ‘Ann?’
She’s in bed, muffled beneath the sheets. Twitches away at his touch.
‘You’re boiling.’ He crosses to the air-conditioning unit on the other side of the room. When it clicks and hums she hunches further beneath the sheets. ‘Cold.’ Her voice is croaky.
‘Are you ill? We only got hitched! You don’t have to take to your bed.’
She doesn’t say anything.
Calmer now, gentle. ‘What’s the problem? Let’s go and see the nurse. You knew I’d have to work when Hallie showed up.’ He’s by the bed again, stroking her leg. It’s rigid under his hand.
‘I want to go.’ Her breath smells viral, metallic. He puts on the bedside light and sees scabs around her mouth, cold sores that have come up in the night.
‘Let’s go to the nurse.’
‘We have to go. We have to leave.’
‘Don’t be mad. We’re going in a couple of days. I’ve got to work. Come on, they must have some kind of flu medicine here.’ She’s floppy when he pulls her arm. He shakes her. Her head lolls around. ‘Ann!’ He throws her wrist back down on the bed and walks away, frightened by the heat rising in his chest.
When he comes back he has brought the nurse, a middle-aged Fijian woman who feels Ann’s forehead and says, ‘Oh yeah, oh yeah.’ She gives Tom a bottle of powdered antibiotic and tells him how to make it up. He thanks her and when she goes he puts the powder in the bathroom. Ann doesn’t move from the bed. She gets hotter and hotter. The antibiotics have no effect. When Tom says he’ll bring Hallie to see what’s wrong she says ‘no’ over and over again. Desjardin calls by. ‘Everyone’s concerned,’ he says. Ann sleeps. Tom tries to go back to work in Hallie’s bure but can’t concentrate. He should get Ann home. Not to Suva, their next scheduled stop, three days there with Hallie. To London. Hallie makes no effort at sympathy. He’s fucked off and he lets Tom know it. Man’s wife’s a time waster. A distraction.
Two days after the wedding Tom steps out of the shower and startles. Ann is in the bathroom, naked, a thin red line running down one long thigh. The scissors are on the glass bathroom bench.
‘Did you cut yourself?’ He reaches down. Touches it gently. ‘Ann.’
‘Please. I want to go.’
He shivers from a drip of fear. For her? Everything he has worked to set up? Could he do this? He holds her, suspicious of the rising excitement inside, the thought that he could abandon everything to prove how much he loves her. He breathes out, strokes his hands over her hair.
They don’t talk on the plane. One day, Tom thinks, he’ll probably laugh about how he went to Fiji with his girlfriend to write a hit film and came back married, sacked and in debt. He’d told Hallie he was leaving early with Ann and as he expected Hallie had fired him. Part of Tom thought, fair enough. Man can’t handle his wife. Part of him felt sorry for every poor fucker who didn’t have Ann to handle. Beside him, she sleeps in a lorazepam cloud.
The girl sits on the bed worried that she might wet herself. Her brothers and their friends laugh outside the door. The one she likes has told her to wait there. He’s going to come in soon. She fingers the side of her cheek, a painful spot there, and waits.
The doorknob turns, it turns and it sounds like a cork slowly being pulled from a bottle.
It was tough taking Arlo back home to Daley Street. I had put it off for weeks, just lying for hours on my parents’ conservatory floor with him, rolling balls across his line of vision as he giggled and squeaked and the cardboard world gradually suffused again with life. He changed so quickly, coming more and more into himself, his eyes clever and dark like Ann’s, her same habit of gazing into the middle distance, in conversation with things we couldn’t see. I brought him into bed with me whenever he cried at night, a pillow on one side of him to stop him slipping off the edge. On the nights he didn’t cry I woke him up and brought him into bed anyway.
I wasn’t drinking any more. I rang my agent and told him I had quit Hallie’s project and that I needed another job. Maybe scripting wildlife programme narration, that would be about my speed. Hallie was away, nobody knew where. There was one rumour about cancer and another one that he’d been asked to head up one of Australia’s main television channels.
Arlo batted with his legs at a second-hand baby gym my mother had wheedled out of the parish toy library even though we weren’t members. Birds wheeled over the garden. I watched my father through the conservatory glass. He was shaking his foot around to try and get something off the end of his shoe. Yes, wherever he was, Stella wasn’t far behind, and she appeared now in her long blue dressing gown, talking to him in dumb show, probably remarking on his stubby little legs. ‘Short men must never sit on tables,’ she had said the night before when I was doing just that, waiting for Arlo’s bottle to cool down. ‘Your feet don’t reach the floor.’ She had also said, ‘You can’t stay here for ever, Tom. You have to go back to London at some stage.’
‘Well actually, Dad and I saw a house for sale in the village this afternoon.’
We had, on the walk back from showing Arlo the ducks, stopped to look at a low, pink-plastered cottage next door to the chemist, prettier inside than the front led you to believe, with a flat lawn at the back and views from the bedroom windows over that lawn and down to the river. Dad stayed downstairs with the unwieldy buggy and the bouffanted estate agent while I stood at the window in the double bedroom and watched the sky for a minute. Neither of us said anything about it on the way home. When I told Stella the look on her face made me laugh.
‘It’s all right. I’m not going to move here.’
‘You know we’d love it if you did, I just don’t know that you’d be happy here, you’re such a city person really.’
‘Mum.’
She softened then. I realised I should call her that more often. ‘We’re going back to London. I’ve just been thinking, that’s all.’
My father had the shoe off now and was still shaking it, his stockinged foot held delicately. Poor dad, something nasty from the birdbath had got on to his fingers. He kept trying to throw his hand away in slow flicks but the desperate semaphore wasn’t working. Then he leaned right over, delicate as a ballerina, the leg without the shoe pointing up into the air, and wiped his hand on the dewy lawn. It was coming up that was hard, and there was a windmilling wobble at halfway, but he regained his balance and when he’d got upright again he looked around and smiled at the garden. He couldn’t get the smile off his face.
Arlo and I got to Daley Street at night. The place was lonely, its big FOR SALE sign posted outside. Andy had been fielding all that and it was about time I took over. The wolf’s head looked grave, the enemy’s relic of victory from a battle the house had lost. I kept up a one-sided conversation with Arlo as we entered the hall, switching on lights, grateful for his beating pulse in my arms. Dust lay over the table and the mantelpiece, over the kitchen benches. There were small leaves around that must have blown under the back door. This I kept locked, despite an old fruit smell that hung sweetly and unpleasantly in the air. Cats scrambled and yowled outside. I should have let the place out before I went away. Not for the first time I thought of Ann’s father, the elusive Mr Wells, who I had not tried to trace. One day Arlo will want to know him. I can wait.
We watched television until he fell asleep on my chest. I kept the set on low all night, lying there on the sofa not sleeping, feeling that Arlo’s easy breath was the pump that kept my breath going, that his little body starfished over mine was a form of protection. Above us the second storey of the house loomed cavernous and black all the way up into the wild dark sky. I watched the closed living room door.
N.A.M.W. 07. 07
On the bed the girl waits. She likes this boy, she doesn’t mind waiting. She waits. She waits. Fourteen years old. She sits on the side of the bed and waits. Picks at a cold sore. Shaves her head. The doorknob squeaks as it turns.
She sits on the bed and watches herself burst through the door and into the room. The speckle-headed blank girl with unsaid words behind her face is in a mood to hurt somebody.
B; lfds; l,, v, 1,. cfcvf.x..x.[
I took Arlo to Borough Market to see Tonia. In a corner of a large shared table at the coffee place she bounced Arlo on her knee, her gaze glued to his face, a tissue bunched up to her mouth. Christmas was coming, with a chill in the air that brought edges, shapes and colours into focus. I’d spoken to Andy that morning; one of his college mates had a private drama school; there was a new part-time position teaching script work that he wanted me to apply for. It was too early to be away from Arlo, though I was grateful to him for thinking of me. Things weren’t going well with Karma, he said. ‘Well then,’ I told him, ‘stop wasting your fucking time.’ Tonia held Arlo by her cheek and was talking to him in a low, secret voice, and he was smiling.
‘You should have a baby,’ I said.
She pretended not to hear. I thought of Bridget. There was a tender spot there, a sore tooth of guilt or affection. I owed her an apology, perhaps. Down the table a little girl swore at her mother and pushed her hot chocolate over. ‘You are a horrible child,’ said the woman beside them, whose trousers and bag were covered in brown milk. Tonia passed a pile of paper napkins towards them but the mother was in a paralysis of embarrassment and the little girl was still shouting. People in the queue stood and stared and the order taker was frozen in the gesture of handing somebody his change while she was staring too. A wave of missing Ann roared up my body. She would have loved this, she would have laughed and felt compassion for the mother and been appalled by her all at the same time. Her slanted glance next to me. Its absence was almost as hot as its reality. Her elbow, sly at my ribs. That Ann.
‘Excuse me,’ I said to Tonia, reaching for the baby. ‘Sorry. I’ve got to go.’
‘Are you all right?’ Everyone standing now, making way, the spilled flood still being mopped up as I pushed past.
Because of the Olympics I sold Daley Road for a stupid amount of money and we lived for a while in a rented place near Tonia and the river. Somewhere around then Andy moved back in. About a year after Ann died (a year that, aside from Arlo, passed like featureless linoleum under my feet as I stood doubled over by the freezer section in the supermarket) I bought this place in Muswell Hill; my parents helped me out. Good schools. I ran into Kate outside the vegetarian café and she told me her news, loudly, in the way of people who have had enough of keeping their voices down. I kept expecting her to remember the children and check herself but she didn’t, and they looked bored and fake-tough as though they’d heard it all before. Simon was usually in the States. He wanted to marry someone out there. He and Kate had never married so everything happened very fast. He used to think marriage was a bourgeois conspiracy. Now he wanted his children to be ring-bearers while he exchanged vows on a beach with a barefoot script development girl called Tamara. He told Kate one night when she was in the bath. She stood dripping and threw an electric toothbrush at his head.
‘Didn’t I darling?’ she said to Ruby. ‘At Daddy’s head!’
‘Mum.’ Titus tugged at her arm. ‘Come on.’
‘Got him right here!’ She smiled at me manically and said, ‘That’s our bus! Call me!’ And she hitched up her skirt and with the children ran between the North London shoppers as if darting through trees in a forest.
Now she comes over sometimes, with the kids, to my house. Arlo always likes that. I like Titus and Ruby too – they have a heavy burden in life, what with their fruitcake of a mother and a narcissist father who rocks up every few weeks with basketball-coloured skin and the latest Playstation. They were visiting last week when, for only the second time since Arlo and I moved here, Tonia popped in. She phoned from outside the house. I opened the door as she was locking up her bike.
‘You look great.’ I kissed her cheek. ‘Really well.’
In the kitchen she kicked her shoes off and we made small talk about the revamping of the canals, the prices at Fresh & Wild, the new bar across the road. Kate made tea, and I saw Tonia pause for a minute, noting how familiar she was in my kitchen. She dropped her eyes to mine. I shrugged. It’s nothing, but I couldn’t help smiling.
‘So we saw that new film the other day,’ she said. ‘By that guy you know. Joe Baxter?’
‘Yeah, I heard that was out.’
‘Not very good.’
She was just saying that, but I loved her for it. ‘How’s Andy?’
Tonia nodded. ‘All right. Good, actually. More on top of things with work.’ He was deputy head now.
‘I’d love to see him.’
‘Yep.’ She tugged at her hair. ‘He misses you.’
‘And you guys?’
‘Yeah, fine. You know, it’s always … Oh my God.’
‘Dad?’ Arlo was in the doorway, his face quivering. ‘My thing from the Aquarium broke.’ His eyes went from me to Tonia, his chin crinkled and I could see he was deciding whether or not to cry. He liked to cry, lately, which someone told me was normal in five-year-old boys. Not that that stopped me worrying.
‘Hello Arlo,’ said Tonia. ‘Do you remember me?’
He glued himself to my legs. The rims of Tonia’s eyes had reddened. I forget how like Ann he is.
‘We’re having a party next Sunday,’ I told her. ‘Whose birthday is it?’ Arlo said something muffled into my leg and held up five puppety fingers for us to count.
‘Then we’re going to Australia,’ he said.
Tonia looked at me, her hand to her mouth. ‘Really?’
Kate opened the French doors on to the small overgrown garden. ‘Titus, Rubes, we’ve got to get going.’
‘Just for a visit.’
Slowly Arlo wandered over towards Tonia’s chair. He stopped a foot or so from her. The wind chimes Ruby had made at school started their pretty clonking sound as a breeze blew in from the garden. Kate began to pick up her children’s stuff, which was strewn everywhere, and I went up to my study for a photograph I wanted to give Tonia. Ann’s head is still there but I’ve moved it to the top of the bookshelves, where it gathers dust. In the absence of trophies and awards it will have to do. I’ve stopped trying to know how to remember Ann. I had the chance to find out and I didn’t see it and despite what I seem like, I know what that makes me. Now on a good day it seems enough just to remember.
The sea surrounding Sydney is a thick rich blue, the odd rusty freighter sitting low, like a giant canoe, on its surface. The cliffs dwarf you even from the air; they must have towered sickeningly over the convict ships. There are the city’s towers in the distance and, closer, a huge ugly oil refinery, giant vats crouching on the land, flames leaping from pipes. Arlo and I staggered off the plane half dead from the flight. It was bliss to arrive in this foreign place, papery as ghosts, shabby with the stains of airline food, anonymous. The birds outside, rosellas, sounded like chattering Italian kids welcoming the dawn. The eucalypts were lofty as the umbrella pines in Rome but larger, those trees that in the summer crackle and ignite. Out through the glass walls we could see lush crimson and yellow flowers, rhododendrons, sprinklers hosing showers of light.
I sat Arlo on our suitcases on the trolley and wheeled him laughing through the glaring white terminal till he spied the bright orange car-hire logo. We waited behind a young couple who couldn’t decide whether or not to pay the higher daily rate for the insurance. It was morning and the black glove scent of espresso beckoned through the air from a coffee stall across the way. On the wall behind the car-hire man a large round clock with a red second hand ticked. ‘Dad?’ asked Arlo and I realised that the honeymoon couple had gone and the man, a young man with his black hair gelled in many different directions, was waiting for me to speak. Behaviour was required. Passport, credit card, driver’s licence, name. Arlo was hooked somehow around my neck, his fingers hot down the back of my T-shirt. I unpeeled them and lowered him to stand on the floor. The car-hire man was still waiting. Dumbly I shook my head, unable to let go of his bewildered gaze or to find words through the overpowering sense that something was missing. I had expected Ann to meet us off the plane.