by Rhys Thomas
‘Here.’ He held out a letter to her. ‘It’s from Charlie.’
Miriam stepped into the room. ‘Is he . . .’
David shook his head. ‘No. He left the camp.’
Miriam nodded.
‘He said he couldn’t stay.’
She took the letter from him and looked at the envelope with large, round handwriting on it.
‘He left you this as well.’
David lifted the cardboard box and set it down on the chair.
‘What is it?’
‘They’re the papers the old doctor made. Charlie wanted to make sure they were safe and said to give them to you.’
‘What happened to the doctor?’
‘He was killed.’
‘You should look after them. They’d be safer down there.’
David answered, with a shake of the head, ‘He said to give them to you.’
She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the fireplace. Her face was smeared with dried mud and her hair was thick with it. Her eyes were red and tired and yet she had never felt quite as alive as she did now. It was not a joyous, overwhelming flood of emotions, but a cool, precise, solid feeling that ran deep in her river.
She looked at the box, nodded to David and turned away to face the staircase down which sang the voices of her children.
‘Wait,’ he said.
She paused but did not turn back to him.
‘They said you had it, that you were ill.’
She took her hand from the banister and lowered her head.
‘Is it true?’
Miriam said nothing in reply.
‘How are you here?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was it the baby?’
She remembered the child’s touch as a white flash but it wasn’t that. She felt it keenly. Whatever had cleared her and brought her back was different from that. But it didn’t matter.
‘I don’t know.’
She went up the stairs, slowly, with the sleeping baby light and easy in her arms. Mary and Edward were in their bedroom at the back of the house, sitting side by side on the bed, their backs to her as they looked out of the window at the silver sky. They were singing one of the songs from school. She stood just outside the room, on the soft carpet of the landing, and watched and listened. Edward had his arm around Mary and Mary had her head on Edward’s shoulder.
A great upwelling commenced at the very core of her. A hand touched her neck and she turned. Her mother’s eyes were on the baby and for a moment there was a pause into which was poured a realization in both parties that Miriam, somehow, really was alive, that she had come back, and she had brought in her arms the guarantee of a future.
‘Kids,’ she said.
The children turned their heads.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my parents for their continuing support because without their help, simply, I would not have been able to write this book. Huge thanks to my good friends Ian Worgan and Chyrelle Rayman-Bacchus for reading early drafts of a very long book and offering excellent advice that I badly needed. I would also like to express my thanks to Mair and Mike Cockell who were kind enough to let me use their caravan, where I edited the book in the middle of nowhere, with no distractions; and thank you to Rafe for making the arrangements. Thanks to Shaun Petty for reading very early drafts. Thanks also to my friend Rhodri Thomas for helping me find time to write the novel when I needed it. And to OTR, in whose drunken company many of the ideas in this book were crystallized. Thanks, as always, to Margaret Pearce.
At Transworld I owe huge thanks to Jane Lawson, who really got behind the book at a difficult time and who fed me Lebanese food. Also at Transworld, Manpreet Grewal, Kate Samano, Kate Tolley and Polly Andrews have helped enormously. Thanks to Matt Johnson for his incredible covers and Mari Roberts for her painstaking copyedits. And thank you to Laura Morris, my literary agent; for a more supportive and kind person I could never have asked. Finally, I really need to thank Rochelle Venables, for editing this book, guiding me through, reigning in the stranger parts, and pouring far more into it than she needed to. My debt of gratitude for what she did is infinite.
Rhys Thomas is the author of The Suicide Club. He is thirty-two and lives in Pontyclun, Wales.
