Half the World Away - страница 47

I look at the photo on the wall. We’re all smiling, even Isaac. ‘What about her camera?’ I ask Dawn. ‘Where does she keep it?’

‘There.’ Dawn points to the tray table. ‘She always has it handy.’

‘And her laptop?’

‘Usually around here somewhere.’

‘The police didn’t say they’d taken anything,’ Tom says, ‘so she must have.’

Clearing my throat, I keep on looking.

Tom is going through all the stuff in the box by the couch. He sits back on his heels, pushing the hair out of his eyes. ‘No phone, no passport.’

‘Why leave her charger if she was going away?’ I say. ‘And she’s hardly taken any clothes. Left stuff in the fridge to go bad.’

Tom tilts his head, raises an eyebrow.

‘OK, maybe that’s not so unusual, the food, but the rest…’

‘She could have forgotten the charger,’ Tom says.

I can hear Dawn on her phone, talking to someone about the meeting tonight.

Stepping back out onto the narrow balcony, I put my hands on the railing, look across to the ring road and gaze at the traffic, silvered in the dull white glare of the day. My fingers are grimy, everything rimed in the fine, gritty dust. What if she walks in now? Comes in breathless from her travels and finds us here, poring over her things, trying to work out where she’s gone. Her dad and me, Dawn and Anthony.

‘OK, so suppose she forgot the charger,’ I say, as I go inside. ‘Look what’s not here: phone, backpack, laptop, camera, passport – all those things she’d pack for a trip away.’ I know the whole holiday explanation, nearly four weeks later, looks a little thin. After so long she should be back in touch with someone, if not here in person. But what else am I to think? Tom looks at me, then leans back, his hair falling away from his face.

Before we leave, I empty the fridge of the perished food and Dawn takes it out with the other rubbish to bins on the landing. Under the sink I see cockroach powder. Two tubs of it and a pack of pink foam sponges. I’ve chucked the cloth from the sink so I break open the sponges and use one to wash out the fridge.

‘We might as well turn it off,’ Tom says.

I check the freezer section – if it’s choked up it may flood, but there isn’t much build-up of ice.

‘I’ll give you these.’ Dawn passes me the key on a fob, a metal goldfish, the body segmented so it appears to wriggle if you shake it.

There is some debate about whether Anthony should accompany us to meet Lori’s friends that evening.

‘We won’t really need a translator,’ Dawn says. ‘Everyone speaks English.’

‘That’s good,’ I say, ‘but I’m not sure we can find our way.’

Dawn says she’ll meet us at the hotel and we can get a taxi or even a bus if we walk along to the ring road.

Anthony looks a little disappointed. He offers his services once more and I decline politely. ‘Tomorrow, though, we should have the leaflets and posters. We’d like you to help us then, when we hand them out.’

I’m suddenly ravenous as we travel back to the hotel and ask Anthony to drop us at the mini-market nearby. I scour the place for something sweet and starchy, peer at the labels, searching for script I can read, try to decipher photographs. Tom exudes impatience from the doorway. I grab a packet of ‘pineapple sandwich cookies’.

Back in my room, the cookies turn out to be like fig rolls with pineapple in the middle, the coating soft, sweet and floury, like undercooked shortbread, cloying. I eat four of them with an instant coffee and feel satisfied for a while. Then queasy again.

When Dawn arrives, I show her the map Peter Dunne gave us and ask her where the bar is. She studies the map for a moment, then points. ‘Near here. This road is where we get off the bus so we walk this way.’ She traces the route. Her fingernails are bitten to the quick. ‘Or we can get a taxi,’ she says.

‘We’ll get the bus,’ Tom says, ‘be good to orient ourselves.’

‘And we’re going the other direction from Lori’s flat?’ I check.

‘That’s right. You’re in between here. It’s two stops either way.’

She guides us along the side streets past the park and to the junction where the ring road is. Tom asks about her job. She’s teaching at an English training school. ‘It’s for kids,’ she says, ‘they come after ordinary school or at the weekends. I asked for the day off today.’