‘Fasten your seatbelt!’ A flight attendant stood in the aisle, glaring down at Lucy. Lucy saw his lips opening and closing. Still she couldn’t fit the sounds he made into words. She could hardly believe the other travellers were still there: the man across the aisle blowing his nose, the woman in front of him lost in a book; the world whirring away, just as it had been.
‘I said, fasten your seatbelt! We’re about to land.’
‘Maybe not all here,’ said the man across the aisle, gazing at Lucy and tapping a finger against the side of his head.
‘The parents ought to warn us,’ said the flight attendant, seizing Lucy’s seatbelt and fastening it himself.
Lucy barely noticed. She was so stunned her mind kept fixing on random details: the way the flight attendant combed oiled hair across a bald patch on his head. ‘I can’t think,’ she whispered to herself, pressing her hands against her eyes. A moment later, the plane thumped down.
‘England!’ breathed the man across the aisle, pressing his plump hands together.
In a daze, Lucy followed the other passengers off the plane, down a long corridor with fluorescent lights that made everyone look queasy and tired. She was moving so slowly people kept shoving past. When she stepped out of Customs at last, Lucy tried to force herself back to reality. She told herself that she had arrived, she was in London – but the whole set-up seemed bizarre. She had never seen the airport so empty. Everything looked toy-sized under its high steel roof, and people’s teeth seemed too big for their faces.
Lucy pushed through swing doors into the Arrivals Hall. Searching the crowd of expectant faces, she felt that old familiar click of disappointment: her mother wasn’t there. Lucy put her suitcase down and stood watching families hug each other while couples shared out bags. The hall emptied out. The quieter it got the more Lucy could hear: trolleys rasping over the linoleum, the flurry of different conversations. Finally, Lucy was the only one left.
After what seemed like an age, a man in a blue shirt, straining at the buttons, came down the escalator and waddled towards her. ‘Lucy Wetherley?’ She nodded. ‘We’ve been calling you over the PA,’ he said accusingly.
She had barely registered the announcements, their words lost in noise and static.
‘A message from your mother,’ he added after a pause, passing Lucy a sweaty scrap of paper with BUS 98 written on it in thick red texta. ‘She called to say the little one’s poorly and would you mind catching the bus?’
Lucy could almost hear her mother’s pretty, gasping voice, her flustered charm persuading this official stranger to leave his comfortable chair and find her precious little daughter.
He laid his fleshy hand on Lucy’s shoulder. ‘Do you need help, love?’ He was bald but he had a bristly moustache, which made his lips look like fat worms. ‘It’s not safe these days …’
‘I’ll be fine on my own.’ Lucy shrugged him off, grabbed her suitcase and walked outside to the bus shelter. She felt she was watching some news footage about a girl, tired but otherwise ordinary, who stepped out of the airport through sliding doors and faded, step by step, into thin air. It was raining, of course: the kind of rain that leaves you soaked before you notice you’re getting wet. A boy about Lucy’s age huddled in the bus shelter. He was all in black – black jeans, black Converse sneakers and a black jumper – and so skinny he looked like a fold-up person.
Lucy sat at the far edge of the bench. The boy’s eyes slipped over her. ‘Good to see someone else isn’t wanted here either.’ He had a posh person’s way of speaking, as though his mouth was rounder than other people’s, but his voice didn’t seem to belong to him. The rich ones at school had money in the way they looked at people, as though they were judges awarding marks out of ten. This boy was looking at Lucy in the pleading way of people like Katrina Timms, who had to eat her lunch in hidden corners of the school, chewing endlessly on her sandwich.
Lucy hadn’t told anyone about her parents’ divorce. She felt almost humiliated by the intimacy of it – all their tears and squabble. ‘My mum’s held up, that’s all,’ she said. ‘Because of the weather.’ That was how people spoke of it now: the weather – as though that word held all the mystery of what was happening to them. They never spoke of the rain.
The boy took a box of matches from his pocket. She heard a match strike. He slid an envelope into the flame.
‘I’ve been waiting here an hour. They say they’re running emergency schedules, which means they’re hardly running buses at all.’ As he spoke, the boy kept turning the envelope, watching its flames run from the wind. It was one of those official envelopes; its plastic rectangle caught fire with a popping sound and left a chemical taste in the air.
‘So how come no-one’s meeting you?’
He smirked. ‘They haven’t the slightest idea where I am. I’ve just burnt the letter telling them I was kicked out of boarding school, meaning I’ve got a week to kill before they expect me home.’ He shook the last fragments of envelope into the air and watched the ashes float, spinning, out of the bus shelter until they fell straight down under the soft weight of rain.
‘You flew here? How did you get a permit?’
He shook his head. ‘I caught the bus. I was hoping for a flight to Paris but they wouldn’t let me on the plane.’ He pursed his lips and blew out a sigh. ‘I’ve decided I’ll give myself a little London break instead. No uniform, no muscle-faced rugby heroes …’
His self-pity sounded like boasting. Lucy shrugged and let his voice lose itself in the sound of rain. She noticed they had built a sandbag wall around the airport, plastered with neon-coloured advertisements for dinghies and water purifiers. Around it, the floodwaters made a black lake.
Lucy shivered suddenly, remembering the dark creature in the clouds. She jerked her head sideways and looked down the road. The bus should have been here by now. Her jeans kept sticking to her legs and she could feel water dripping from her hair, making runnels down the back of her neck. As she watched, the rain paled and thickened. She was looking into the shimmering vagueness of mist. The silence was so strange it made a gap in Lucy’s mind. The rain had stopped.
The boy pointed: ‘Is that your mother?’
An old woman stepped out of the mist onto the pavement. For a moment, Lucy thought the woman was made of mist. Enormous sunglasses hid most of her face, which was narrow and pale. She was in gumboots, and her dress looked like an old tartan blanket. Her silver hair was tangled in a brown knitted scarf so long it went twice around her neck and still trailed in a puddle.
Ignoring the boy, the woman stopped in front of Lucy and peered at her down the crooked length of her nose. ‘Hurry up. I can’t hold off this rain forever.’