MRS FEATHERBY HAD BEEN HAVING pleasant dreams until she woke to discover the front of her house had vanished overnight.
They had been dreams of when she was younger and more energetic, dreams of a time when she had full use of her knees. She had saved someone in one of them, someone helpless, she thought, but once awake she couldn’t remember who or why or what had happened next.
It was the breeze that woke her, naturally. It wasn’t that it was a cold breeze, or even a particularly strong one, but when a person has gone to sleep in perfect stillness, the unexplained movement of air around the room is a rousing influence, and Mrs Featherby had never been a deep sleeper.
She looked around her for a moment in that state of bewilderment that often occurs in the moments after waking. The light from the street was flooding into the room through the gaping hole that the previous evening had been her bedroom wall. Mrs Featherby blinked hard twice and decided to pull herself together. She stepped out of her bed and walked to the edge of the floor, the wind whipping the hem of her ancient nightgown and pulling at her long, flint-coloured hair.
It was early, barely five o’clock, so there were no people around, but Mrs Featherby knew that when there were people, those people would stare. She knew that they might even approach the house. That they might ask questions. That they might attempt to breach the sanctity of her home, of her fortress. She set her mouth and turned away.
Mrs Featherby, whose first name was Wendy, or had been many years earlier, did not waste time in wondering how a tonne of brick and mortar could have been uplifted and transported away without waking her or leaving a trace of masonry on the road. She did what was practical and called the police. She didn’t particularly trust the police, but she felt that it was the correct procedure.
She was informed that an officer would be sent within the hour, so, thanking her stars that the bathroom was at the back of the house, she performed her ablutions efficiently and impeccably and moved downstairs to the sitting room to wait.
She wondered if she should have anything ready for the constable when he arrived. She’d always considered herself lucky to not have had the police in her home before, but the downside to this was becoming apparent: she had no idea of the correct etiquette.
Indeed, it had been so long since she’d had anyone of any kind in the house that she’d all but forgotten how to go about it. The only person that had crossed her threshold in recent months was the young man who delivered her groceries at nine fifteen every Tuesday.
Was it correct, Mrs Featherby wondered, to refer to the impending officer of the law as a guest? If he was to be a guest she should certainly have, at the very least, a cup of tea waiting, and possibly a biscuit. The cake she’d made on Sunday had been past its best yesterday and she’d thrown it out. She had intended to bake a replacement, but doing so before seven in the morning simply for the imminent arrival of an officer of the law seemed a little extravagant. And he might arrive in the middle of the process, which would be entirely inappropriate. She would make some biscuits later in the day, she decided, as she’d intended. There was no need to rush the process.
Tea would do, she decided. Tea would be enough.
Mrs Featherby sat still and upright in her chair, gazing through her absence of wall into the garden beyond. She sat still and upright and waited.
CASSIE WAS LIT FROM WITHIN, or so she felt. She gloried for a moment in how little she cared about the strangers that surrounded her, that may have noticed her. Let them look, she thought, let them marvel at her secret joy. Let them recognise her as one of the few for whom life holds wonder. For it must be only a few, she thought, who are designed to know this kind of exultation. If it were everyone, the earth’s orbit would be altered by it, forever thrown off course by the collective gladness of its inhabitants.
Her eyes seemed to throb with the smile hidden behind them. The corners of her mouth were set in a curve that any moment threatened to beam.
Cassie ran a hand through her hair and looked at the arrivals board.
IB2202 from São Paulo: LANDED
The letters rearranged themselves: FLOSS IS HERE.
Cassie had been playing this moment over in her mind for weeks. Months. All her life. There were many versions.
There was the one where Floss ran through the gate, paused for a moment on her toes, scanning the crowd like a blithe and confident huntress, until she spotted Cassie and soared into her arms.
There was the version where she walked through slowly and carefully, not even looking at Cassie till they were six inches apart, but smiling all the while.
There was the version where she stopped as soon as she’d come through and the two of them stand there for fully five minutes, for forever, just looking. Staring at each other, right in the eyes, across the space between them, both knowing they have an eternity in which to touch.
Now, though, now it was moments away, she couldn’t imagine anything at all. All she could do was wait and watch.
IB2202 from São Paulo: LANDED
Cassie watched the steady stream of people walking through the gate. She wondered how many planes had recently landed and how many passengers there were on each plane and what the statistical likelihood was of Floss being the next person through at any given point. She knew it was stupid, but it thrilled her to think that the odds were rising with each reunion.
IB2202 from São Paulo: LANDED
There was a child crying. Cassie watched. The girl’s mother was trying to make her hug her father, but she wouldn’t. He was in uniform and Cassie wondered if he’d been away so long his daughter had forgotten him.
The crowd around her thinned and swelled again.
Cassie hadn’t noticed, but the corners of her mouth were no longer curved. She gazed at the gate.
A flight attendant led through a boy of about seven. His mother hugged him briefly, cautiously, and took his bag.
IB2202 from São Paulo had disappeared from the arrivals board to make way for other flights.
A woman jostled Cassie in an attempt to get to a tanned teenage girl with a pack on her back. Cassie planted her feet more firmly on the floor.
She planted her feet and waited.
She gazed at the gate.
DELIA TRIED TO BE QUIET, she tried really hard, but there was that door, that one door, the one into the kitchen, which always, every time, in spite of her best efforts, banged just a little as she closed it.
‘Bloody bollocks,’ she muttered, screwing her eyes closed and waiting.
It was thirty seconds before the tremulous ‘Dee?’ floated down the hall, but it felt longer. Still, it was always going to come, obviously.
‘Morning,