Excerpt from Chapter One

The night she learned of her daughter’s disappearance, Alida’s head was full of the past.

Sleep had eluded her for hours, and although she was still in her bedroom, she was sitting on the swivel chair at her desk in front of the bay window, her hair falling forward in loose, dark spirals as she looked at the object she held in her hands. Her slender knees were drawn up to her chest and she had pulled on her oldest cardigan, which was made of raw silk fibres knotted together in shades of red. Years ago, she had slipped it on to keep her warm while she breastfed. Wearing it reminded her of simpler times. The bedroom was filled with amber shadows from the bedside lamp, and through a crack in the curtains the sky was beginning to lighten. Three floors down, the occasional car rumbled past as London began to stir. In her hands, Alida was holding a four-inch long treasure chest originally made of cardboard, but unidentifiable as such due to the profusion of sequins glued to every surface; gold, silver, green, so that even after more than a dozen years, the little box shimmered. Mia had presented her with it one Mother’s day before she turned six, before their world changed beyond recognition.

Alida recalled Mia’s stripy scarf trailing to the ground, her smile almost too wide for her small face as she ran towards her across the playground and thrust the treasure chest – still sticky in places – into her hands. “These are the stars we catch before I go to sleep,” Mia had announced, her eyes ablaze with pride as she pointed at the sequins. “When the pink ones sparkle, they fizz in my mouth like sherbet.”

Her talented, multi-sensory daughter. Whenever a sequin dropped off, Alida would stick it back on with superglue so that now the chest had a smooth, tight carapace, broken by the protrusion of sequin edges when she ran her finger over it. The chest, more superglue now than cardboard, had become a permanent feature on Alida’s desk. More than any other object, it evoked the happiest moments of her life; the time when she, Ian and Mia had formed a tight circle of love and anything had seemed possible.

As usual, Alida tried to shift her thoughts away from the event which had destroyed their happy balance. Closing her eyes, she tipped her head back to ease her neck muscles. In her mind’s eye, she saw an image of a man with a silver disc in place of a head standing in a yellow desert. The sun flashed off the disc. It was something she had dreamed earlier that night; one of the many disconnected but highly real dreams she’d had before emerging from sleep altogether. The disc-headed man had been holding Mia’s treasure chest in one of his hands, she remembered now. And in the open palm of his other hand had lain a baby with curled fists and carved, still features. He had stretched both arms out to Alida in invitation, as if asking her to make a choice.

The telephone shrilled; a shocking sound in the silence which caused Alida to swivel quickly around in her chair to stare at it. Instantly, she thought of Mia. She had only telephoned once in all the many weeks that she’d been travelling in India, but Alida was ever hopeful. Perhaps Mia had mixed up the time difference and that’s why she was calling so very early.

Or perhaps she was in some kind of trouble.

Putting the treasure chest hastily back on her desk, Alida jumped to her feet and scrambled across the bed, picking up the phone on her bedside table on the second ring.

“Hello?”

At first, the only word she even half understood was ‘madam’. Her first confused thought was that if the disc-headed man had a mouth to open, he too would speak in this exotic jumble of sounds and call her madam in a voice as rich as treacle. But as the plastic casing of her phone pressed coolly against her cheek, the caller’s words separated from the accent which wound around them, and hung in the air like a threat.

Alida jerked her body upright.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “What’s happened?”

Now the man’s voice scraped through her ears like gravel. As Alida listened, the hand holding the telephone tightened until the knuckles strained at the skin.

“India, you say?”

Her voice was high and anxious. “Yes, Mia Salter is my daughter, but what..? Her passport? Gone missing? I’m sorry, you’ll have to speak more clearly, there’s such a bad echo. Which is missing, the passport or my daughter? Oh my God. Eight days? No, no, she hasn’t contacted me… The morgue? What are you suggesting? Are you trying to tell me you think my daughter is dead?… Dead, I said… My God, do you really think she… A pen, yes. Wait, let me just… OK, ready. Case file number… got it. Madurai, southern India… Guru? That’s the name of the hotel? Hotel Guru. Room seven. I’ll take the next possible plane… Yes, I realise that, but she could be hurt, she might need help, she might be lying senseless in a ditch somewhere… I am calm, but how would you feel if it were your daughter?… I said how would you… I understand. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll find her.”

Alida’s hands were shaking too badly for her to slot the cordless telephone back onto its stand. Instead she slid it onto the bedside table and stared frozen-eyed into the orange glow of her nightlight. Her mind flashed with accident scenes: concertinaed train carriages, turned-over buses. Bloodied tarmac. In the warm light, the worry grooves on Alida’s narrow face were softened and her eyes, deep and dark, were Mia’s.

“Daughter is lost,” the Indian policeman had said with a shrug in his voice as if advising her not to waste her airfare. “Find her cannot guarantee.”

Alida could taste bile at the back of her throat. The bedroom around her seemed vast; she felt shrunken. “Not again,” she whispered.

“Many foreigners go missing,” the policeman had said. “Often we find them well and alive. But accidents also are possible. Then unhappily we find them in the morgue.” In the aching space behind her eyelids, Alida could feel the memories escalating into grief and rage as they had done before.

Her bedroom was steeped in expectant silence. “I’m not going to cry,” she muttered. “It can’t be too late.”

The curtains were momentarily parted as a waft of air tumbled in from the night and rolled across the wooden floor. Its coolness enveloped Alida like a shroud as she sat on the bed, so that she curled her toes up and shivered.

I’m going to India, she thought, and in one smooth motion she gathered her limbs and leaped from the bed.

Excerpt from Chapter Two

Mia

Thursday 15th May, 2008

This is quite a daring thing I’m doing – travelling alone aged eighteen and a half through a country so full that it reminds me of my first time in the sea as a three-year-old in a floppy sunhat and my Pink Panther swimming costume. I waded in up to my waist holding my father’s hand, and I gasped and gasped at the cold salt pushing into and around me, the gelatinous seaweed sliming up through my toes, the sunlight splashing so brightly on the tips of the waves that I heard musical notes as I watched. My father asked if I was enjoying myself and I couldn’t respond. The velveteen foam, the thorny cries of the gulls, the cold potato grasp of his hand; these things took up all the spaces of my mind. Entering the sea was all-round sensory submersion and it turned me into a walking jelly. Being here is the same. I feel that no part of me can close itself off from India; it enters me from all around and, wholly submerged, I float in it, drown in it, sleep and dream and cry in it.

I’ve been here for three and a half weeks, and for the past ten days I’ve been having astonishing dreams. The dreams are full of the past. They show me in bright, alive images things that have been holding their breath in a corner of my mind for most of my life. The memories are different weights and shapes, and almost all of them scald me. I want to nail them to the page so that I can look at them without flinching. That’s what this notebook is for.

Christmas 1995

Their voices slice up through my bed until the mattress is studded with pins which prickle my skin. She is half crying, half shouting. His chocolaty voice is trying to cram her words back into her mouth but they spill out in shards. I climb down onto the floor. Now the pins are in the carpet, puncturing the soles of my feet. I tiptoe painfully onto the landing. Here, it is much louder. “… not in control anymore. The whole thing could just fly apart, don’t you get it?” she cries.

I kneel silently on the carpet and push my face between the banisters to hear better. The cool wood on my cheeks makes a comforting frame.

“You’re collapsing into yourself, Alida. Who’s that going to help?”

Her low, furious reply drills the air and turns it smoky grey. On my tongue, there’s the faintest taste of ashes. I look down so that my eyes are almost closed, and swivel my gaze to the left. I can see the bottom of the sitting room door. It’s half open, but they are beyond my vision.

“…no support. All you’re interested in is getting our sex life back on track, as if that’s the answer to everything.”

I edge further forward and my ears burn against the wood.

“You can’t shut yourself off from pleasure for the rest of your life.”

“Pleasure? Do you really think pleasure still exists for me in any way or form?”

My head pops through the banisters and the pressure eases off my ears. I can see further into the sitting room now. I can see the crackling green branches of the Christmas tree. The fairy lights are switched off. I can see the lower half of my mother as she sits in the armchair by the window. Her pale shins protrude from her dressing gown. Her hands are twisted into a bony sculpture which rests uneasily on her lap.

“Don’t let what happened distance you from Mia.”

I listen intently, but I don’t catch her murmured reply. There’s a long pause. Too long. They must be getting tired. Any minute now they’ll leave the sitting room and discover that I’m not in bed. I pull my head sharply back but the banisters grip it from either side. I push forward, pull back. How could my head have grown bigger so fast? I pull until it hurts but still I can’t get back through.

I’m here for good.

They’ll have to feed me through the banisters, bring me a potty to wee in. Tears cut across my eyes and I consider calling down to them for help but my mother’s voice wobbles through the door.

“…nonsense she comes out with, Ian. Recently she insisted that when the blackbirds sang in the garden, she could see golden bubbles coming out of their beaks. She’s six years old and she talks as if she’s taken LSD. If she weren’t so caught up in her own little world, then perhaps –”

I scream, loud and wide. My scream tastes of vomity burps. It fractures the air in the hall.

They come running, orange and blue bounding up the stairs side by side. “Stuck!” I screech, and blood slams through the veins in my head.

My father puts his hands on his hips and laughs in a shower of colour, but she pauses on the stairs with her hand at her throat. Her eyes are fixed on my face. She knows I heard her unfinished sentence. She knows I completed it in my mind and that it has already become part of me.

I continue to wail while my father soaps my ears to make them slippery and coaxes my head back through the banisters. When my mother moves forward to fold me into her arms, I don’t let her touch me.

Spring 1996

I can be invisible. I can disappear along the thin sigh of my breath, grow so quiet and still that I am not even sure I exist anymore.

The gap between the double bed and the floor was just wide enough for me to slide into, shifting crab-like until I reached the centre. My chest grazes the underside of the bed at the crest of every breath. I am a star-shaped spy, my fingers and heels making friends with the dust. How long have these soft balls of fluff lain here and what secrets have they heard my parents whisper? Alida – that’s what I call her nowadays, because the word mummy flays her face open like a slap – Alida is making the bed.

I drop my eyes sideways and watch her bare feet step nimbly as she tweaks and plumps. The cherry red polish on her toenails is chipped. Her thoughts are far away from me, struggling through memories she cannot bear to remember or forget. She doesn’t sense the tickle of my fingertips on the carpet. She doesn’t hear the muffled booming of my heart.

Very soon I will be nothing more than a star-shaped scattering of fluff.

When I was a baby, my mother was a carousel of colours, the most dazzling thing I had ever seen. She smelled of milky vanilla love. She bounced and turned like the clown mobile above my cot. She spread warmth around me in orange layers and her hands comforted and played. If she vanished from sight for too long, I screwed up my fists and eyes and screamed myself purple. When she reappeared, relief would flood my nappy in a lava spurt of urine. She was everything to me, a giant with a giant’s strength.

Now she is different. She has shrunk and her eyes don’t laugh in streams of sparks. I want to be small again, but every day I grow bigger and she grows further away.

When he knelt by my bed to kiss me goodnight, Daddy said he might have to go away soon. His tie flopped onto my chest and I held it with both hands. It was slippery red and green stripes.

“Where away?” I asked. When he sighed, I tasted ashes on my tongue. I stared at him then, wide awake. Thin red threads trembled across the whites of his eyes. “Don’t go away,” I said. He laid his head on my chest and seemed to fall asleep. I clutched his tie and tried to count the hairs sprouting from his ear. His head was heavy and I didn’t know what to do so I just said it again and again in a smashed glass voice.

“Don’t go away.”

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