The Astonishing Return of Norah Wells (19 page)

The world is waking up. Or it's trying to, anyway.

In the tall red-brick house the big dog lies curled up on the floor beside the little girl. A tremor runs through his paws. He can't sleep.
There are too many people to keep safe,
he thinks.

Beside him, the little girl stirs.
Today's my birthday
. She smiles and screws shut her eyes.
I wish for everyone to forget about all the things that are making them sad. I wish for them to be really, really happy:
Daddy and Ella and the Miss Peggs and Mr Mann and Mr Mann's husband and all the children at school (even the ones who call me Gingernut), and Auntie Norah and Louis and Mrs Fox and her cubs and all the animals in the world. And Mummy. Especially Mummy.

In the room above the little girl's, the father sits on the end of the bed and rubs his bloodshot eyes. He looks out of the window.
Please come home,
he whispers at the lightening sky.
I need you to come home.

Downstairs in the lounge, The Mother Who Left stands by the open glass doors and looks out at the garden.
Today, I'll tell them
…
She hears a rustle at the far end of the garden and then she sees it – a flash of red.

Across town, the teenage girl lies on the couch of the woman who, time and again, she'd pushed away. She's wide awake. She tugs at the dark tufts of hair by her ears. As she stares at the ceiling, her mother's face comes in and out of focus. The most beautiful mum in the world, she used to think. She blinks.
Go away,
she whispers.
Go away
…

The Mother Who Stayed makes breakfast for the teenage girl. She brings it to her on a tray, a rose from the front door tucked into the napkin ring.
You need to keep your strength up,
she says.
For the race tomorrow.
And then she leans in and holds her.

I won't let you go,
she thinks.
I won't let any of you go.

Then the teenage girl and The Mother Who Stayed get dressed and take a taxi home.

Willa's heart beats hard. The palms of her hands and the soles of her feet tingle. Her eyes flutter. She tugs at her nightdress and scratches at the scar under her left eye.

Something's going to happen today, she can feel it.

That's when she remembers. Today Mrs Fox is going to give birth to her cubs, and that means the babies will have the same birthday as Willa and they can all celebrate together.

With Louis trailing behind her, Willa goes from room to room to see if anyone's awake.

Ella's missing, her room turned upside down. Willa knows it's wrong to snoop, especially in your big sister's room, but no one's telling her what's going on. And it can't hurt to look, can it?

Louis stands in the doorway to the attic and refuses to move.

‘It's okay, Louis. If we get caught, I'll tell them it was my fault.'

He still doesn't move, which makes Willa feel even worse about being up here. But then she thinks about how upset Mummy is and how tired Daddy looks and how cross Ella is, and that if she doesn't work out what's happening and do something about it, then no one will be happy – and today's her birthday so they
have
to be happy.

She sits at Ella's desk and opens her laptop. Ella uses the same password for everything:
L0uisArmstr0ng
, because Auntie Norah loves Louis Armstrong and so Ella loves Louis Armstrong and Louis is called Louis after him too. With Ella having gone off Auntie Norah and having torn all the Louis Armstrong posters off her wall, Willa hopes that Ella hasn't changed the password.

She types the letters and numbers into the box and the screen flashes to the desktop of Ella's computer.

Bingo
.

She clicks on Ella's Twitter account and watches it load.

She's asked her so many times to tell her more about her school project, but all she says is that it's about researching missing people, especially missing mums, and that she's hoping that her project will help to bring missing mummies and missing children back together again. Willa can't think of anything worse than Mummy going missing.

She scans the tweets.

It's weird, because Ella makes it sound like
her
mummy is missing. Maybe she's pretending so that the other people with their missing mummies will listen to her and give her information. Willa keeps reading.
Mum's come home
. Weird again. And then her heart stops. There's a tweet from @rosesandlilies. That must be the Miss Peggs – and they've tweeted
we knew she'd come home.
Do they mean Auntie Norah? And if so, how did they know? And why was Auntie Norah missing? And why was Ella calling her Mum?

Willa logs off and looks over at Louis, who's still standing in the doorway.

‘What's going on, Louis?'

Louis tilts his head to one side. She can tell he knows more than she does and that he's not letting on.

She leans back and looks at Ella's special drawer, the one at the top of her desk, which doesn't have a proper handle. She's always suspected that Ella pulled the handle off so that no one would get into her private things. Willa grabs a paperclip from a tin on the desk and folds it open.

Louis barks.

‘
Shhh,
Louis, someone's going to hear.'

Even though Ella's a bit mean to Mummy with her big
KEEP
OUT
sign, Mummy understands. She says that they should respect Ella's privacy. Willa gulps. Mummy would be upset if she found Willa here.

But then there's something else Mummy says, especially when Willa can't make up her mind about something:
Listen to your heart,
Mummy says.
Your heart never lies.
And, right now, her heart's telling her that she has to find out what's going on.

Willa pokes the end of the paperclip into the lock.

Louis barks. She loves Louis, but he can be a nuisance.

She twizzles the paperclip until the lock clicks and then she opens the drawer. There are scrunched-up papers and elastic bands and flyers for concerts and letters from Sai (which Willa wants to read, but knows that would be really bad). Then she spots a weird plastic stick with a purple handle and a window with two blue lines.

Yuck.

It's probably to do with having periods. Periods sound gross; Willa hopes she never gets them.

Before closing the drawer, she flips through a few of the bits of paper and uncovers a photo. It's one of those small passport photos, and it's of a little boy.

Louis barks.

Willa drops the photo.

‘Shhh!
' she hisses at Louis.

But he keeps barking and barking and barking until she's put the photo down and closed the drawer and locked it again with the paperclip and come back out onto the landing.

‘Everything's weird, Louis,' she says. ‘Weirder than weird.'

 

Willa walks down to Mummy and Daddy's room. Daddy's sleeping, his arm thrown across Mummy's side of the bed as though he's forgotten she's at work dealing with the emergency.

Downstairs, Auntie Norah's missing from the camp bed.

Willa flicks her tongue against her wobbly tooth. The taste of blood. She pushes again and this time the tooth comes loose. She puts her fingers in her mouth and pulls. A sharp pain as the last bit of gum lets go of the root. She places the tooth on Auntie Norah's pillow.

As she walks past the downstairs loo she hears Auntie Norah brushing her teeth.

She goes into the kitchen and fills up Louis's food bowl and glances out of the window. A guy with floppy brown hair is running down the street carrying a red parcel. It's Sai!

He stops next to three people huddled on the pavement. They talk to him and point to the house, and he nods.

Who are those people? And why are they standing outside the house?

One of them's got dreadlocks and dark skin, darker and shinier than Sai's. He's got a smile that looks like it's going to burst out of his mouth, a big wooden cross on a leather string hangs around his neck and a guitar is strapped to his chest.

Next to him stands the girl she met with Mummy on Friday night when they nearly went on their adventure: black lipstick and black eyeliner and black earrings and her hair is long and straight and black and so are her clothes and her boots. She looks especially black next to the third person, who's wearing a woolly rainbow jumper. He's got a trumpet case, like Auntie Norah's. And a big camping rucksack. It's the busker from outside school. And it's strange, because he's typing something into his phone, and Willa thought that you weren't meant to have a phone when you were poor and homeless. He looks up at her and smiles, and Willa smiles back and it's like they've known each other for ages.

Maybe they're all here for her birthday.

Maybe Mummy or Ella's invited them because they know how much Willa likes meeting new people.

And maybe the man with the guitar and the man with the trumpet are going to play at her party.

Willa can't think what the girl dressed in black's here for, though.

Across the road, the Miss Peggs' lace curtains twitch. Lily holds up one of the Chihuahuas to the window.

Sai leaves the three people behind, jogs up to the house and rings the bell.

Willa runs to open the front door. Louis abandons his bowl in the kitchen and comes to stand beside her.

Sai's wearing a shiny blue suit with a woolly red tie that looks like a sock; his trousers are so short you can see his hairy legs in the gap between the hem and his trainers. His trainers look weird with his suit.

‘What are you doing here?' Willa asks. She can't help looking at the red parcel he's carrying.

‘I'm here for your birthday.'

He sounds wheezy and out of breath. He must have run all the way from the post office.

‘You're really here for me?'

He nods. ‘Here.' He hands her the parcel.

Willa hesitates. Daddy wouldn't like her taking a present from Sai.

‘If you don't want it…' says Sai.

Willa holds it tighter. ‘No, I definitely want it!' She looks up at him. ‘Daddy'll kill you if he finds you here.'

‘It was your dad who invited me.'

‘Daddy invited
you
?'

Sai laughs. ‘He called last night.'

‘Weird.'

‘That's what I thought. But then I'm not one to turn down a good party.' He ruffles her hair, which she finds kind of annoying because it's what people do to little kids, but she doesn't really mind because he's Ella's boyfriend and if he ruffles her hair that must mean that he likes her. ‘And if I'm on my best behaviour, maybe he won't be so cross at me.'

Willa thinks Sai is nice and that Daddy should stop being angry with him. Maybe one day Sai will pick her up from school with Ella: then no one would dare call her Gingernut again.

She looks past Sai, out to the street. The man with the wooden cross unfurls a paper banner with big spray-painted words:
Forgiveness Heals!
Weird.

Along the bottom of the banner there's another line of writing, neater than the spray-painted bit:

@findingmum

Finding Mum. That's the name of Ella's website and the Twitter account she set up for her school project. Maybe now that Willa's seven, Mummy will let her be one of Ella's followers. She could ask Rose and Lily Pegg to let her use their laptop.

‘Do you know those people?' she asks Sai.

Sai tugs at his woolly tie. ‘Not really.'

No one seems to be giving Willa proper answers. Either he knows them or he doesn't.

‘What are they doing out there?'

‘I think they know Ella.'

‘Oh.' Ella doesn't have any friends her age, so maybe Sai's right. But that doesn't explain what they're doing standing outside their house.

Willa closes the door.

‘I guess you've had quite a weekend,' Sai says as he takes off his trainers and lines them up on the mat as though he's had direct instructions from Mummy. ‘With your mum being back and everything.'

Willa blinks. ‘My mum?' Her scar feels like it's on fire.

Louis presses in against her calves.

Before Sai has the chance to answer, Willa hears shouting from the street. It sounds like Mummy, but Mummy never shouts.

She yanks open the front door again.

Ella's standing by the gate, and Mummy's holding her hand! And she's carrying a big cardboard box.

They're surrounded by all the weird people Willa saw out on the street.

‘How does it feel to have your mother home?' asks the guy in the rainbow jumper.

‘Have you made your mind up yet?' yells the girl dressed in black.

‘Have you forgiven her?' asks the guy with the sandals and the big cross around his neck.

‘Where's she been all this time?' asks the girl dressed in black.

Mummy places herself between the people and Ella and puts her hand up like a traffic policeman. ‘Not now,' she shouts. Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes are really wide. ‘Step away!' she orders.

Willa can feel Sai standing beside her on the doorstep.

‘They don't mean any harm,' says Miss Lily Pegg.

‘They've come to see you, dear,' Miss Rose Pegg says to Ella. ‘Like they told us they would.'

Ella runs up the steps to the front door. Mummy follows, carrying the big cardboard box.

‘Ella! Mummy!' Willa jumps up and throws her arms around Mummy and then jumps up and kisses Ella. Louis joins in with the jumping. ‘What's going on outside?' Willa asks.

Mummy shakes her head and closes the door behind Ella. ‘It's nothing, Willa,' she says.

If there's one thing Willa's worked out recently, is that nothing doesn't mean nothing: it means something – a big something.

‘Happy birthday, Willa.' Ella lifts Willa off the ground and spins her around. And then Ella puts her down at looks at Sai and smiles. At least she's happy, thinks Willa.

Mummy puts the big cardboard box down on one of the tables in the hall and takes Willa's hand.

Then Auntie Norah comes out of the lounge, rubbing her eyes, and everyone goes quiet for a bit.

‘Daddy invited Sai to my birthday, isn't that cool?' Willa grins.

‘Dad did what?' asks Ella.

‘I thought maybe we should get to know him,' Daddy says, coming down the stairs. ‘Isn't that what you keep saying, Ella?'

Sai steps forward. ‘We've just been explaining that to your mum —'

Everyone goes quiet.

Sai goes red, which doesn't usually happen to people with tanned skin.

Willa doesn't know why he keeps calling Auntie Norah Ella's mum. Maybe it's because they're really close, but when Sai said
your
mum the first time, he was talking to Willa. She wishes someone would explain, but at the same time she doesn't want Sai to get in trouble, so she decides to change the subject.

‘It's going to be the best birthday ever!' Willa claps her hands and jumps up and down. ‘Isn't it, Mummy?'

Mummy smiles a tired smile. ‘Yes, my darling.'

‘And everyone will be here: you and Ella and Daddy and Louis and Sai – and Ella's friends outside, we could invite them to the party too, and —' She turns round and stares at Auntie Norah standing there with her face puffy with sleep in her big, baggy T-shirt with her weird boob sticking out. ‘And Auntie Norah.'

Auntie Norah's eyes go misty like last night.

Willa looks round at everyone standing in the hall. ‘And all being together – that will make everyone happy, won't it? Really happy!'