The Astonishing Return of Norah Wells (3 page)

Adam skids round the corner of Willoughby Street, squeezes the brakes and jolts to a stop. He climbs off his bike, lets it clatter to the pavement, slumps onto the ground and presses his back against a brick wall.

He'd talked through the scenario of Norah coming home with Fay.
You'll show her the father you've become. You'll tell her you've moved on.

Breathe
, he says to himself, closing his eyes.

When Norah left, his panic attacks got worse. The tiniest thing acted as a trigger: being alone with Willa in the house, Ella coming out late through the school gates, walking past the pub and feeling the pull to go in. Fay had taught him to breathe, to focus –
identify a safe, happy place,
she'd said.
What he hadn't told Fay was that Norah was his safe and happy place, and that as soon as he thought of her he felt the vacuum she'd left behind and the panic attack got worse.

He breathes out.

Faces flash in front of him.

Ella, a smile he hasn't seen in months, her eyes shining. The one who's never stopped hoping that her mum would come home.

Willa. Dear little Willa who won't understand what's happened but who'll go along with it in her usual jolly way – until it sinks in that she's been lied to all this time.

And then the woman he loves. Who taught him to breathe. What's he meant to tell her?

He wipes the sweat from his brow. His hands shake.

Breathe
Adam,
for Christ's sake, breathe
.

You're an amazing father,
she said to him the other day.

Who'd have thought that the woman who hated him, who thought he was a waste of space, who wasn't good enough for her best friend, would be the one to bring him back to life?

He should go back and tell Norah to leave.

‘Mr Wells?'

A shuffling of feet. A series of high-pitched yaps.

He opens his eyes.

‘Are you okay?' Lily Pegg's skinny face an inch from his own. Her brow folded into a thousand lines.

‘We saw her come back.' Rose Pegg yanks at one of the three Chihuahuas at her feet.

The old Pegg twins who live opposite the Wellses – in their eighties and they never miss a thing.

Maybe they have X-ray vision like Superman,
Willa once said.

‘Does the New Mrs Wells know about the Return?' Rose asks.

They insist on calling her that, even though they aren't married.

Adam stands up and brushes down his trousers.

‘I'd better get to work.'

‘We've been expecting her to come home,' says Lily. ‘We thought it would be around now.'

‘Yes, any day now,' adds Rose.

A year ago, they'd offered to help Ella with her @findingmum campaign. They'd bought a second-hand laptop and asked Ella to help them set up a Twitter account. Adam hadn't had the heart to tell them that they were only making things worse.

‘Is the Old Mrs Wells okay?' Lily asks.

Old
Mrs Wells. It made him laugh. Norah would have to grow up before she grew old.

‘Yes, she's okay,' he says.

‘Has she seen the children?' asks Rose.

‘I really have to go.'

Adam props his bike up against the wall.

Lily stoops down, picks up Adam's helmet and hands it to him. ‘She's very thin.'

X-ray vision. Or binoculars. Whatever it was, they saw too much.

‘And pale,' adds Rose.

Thin and pale. That was Norah's signature style, wasn't it? It's what he'd fallen in love with. That beautiful frailty – everything that Fay wasn't. But the Miss Peggs were right: as he saw her standing on the doorstep, looking up at him, he'd remembered how protective he'd felt of her, how he'd always been worried that, if he wasn't careful, she'd fade away.

He takes the helmet from Lily. ‘Thank you.'

‘Do you think the New Mrs Wells will mind?' asks Rose.

New Mrs Wells? Old Mrs Wells? God, they were like the chorus in a Greek tragedy.

Adam climbs onto his bike.

‘Maybe we can pay her a visit,' Rose calls after him. ‘Welcome her home.'

He pretends not to hear. ‘Bye,' he calls over his shoulder, raising his hand.

More yapping.

‘We've known all along, haven't we, sister?' Lily Pegg says. ‘All along.'

‘But it's still astonishing, isn't it, sister?'

Adam cycles harder.

Lily Pegg's voice, dissolving behind him:

‘Yes, astonishing.'

Ella sits at the back of the classroom, biting the nail of her little finger. Her arms and legs are so full of electricity she can't sit still.

She sends a tweet from under her desk. Her followers are going to be psyched that Mum's come home.

Ella just needs to get through registration, make Mrs Noble think she's here for the day, and then she can run home. She's wearing Mum's old trainers: they help her run faster. When she fitted into them, just over a year ago, she'd felt it was a sign.

They'd been wrong, Dad and Fay and the police and everyone else who said Mum wasn't coming home. Everyone except the Miss Peggs. They never doubted Ella.

Ella closes her eyes and pictures the woman standing on their doorstep, her red hair brushing her shoulder blades, the same length as Ella's, and nearly the same colour. Ella's hair was lighter, but she washes it with a special shampoo for redheads she found in Superdrug, so that when the light hits it she can see Mum's golden reflections.

When Fay took down the photos of Mum, Ella saved them and put them up in her room. She'd stared at them for so long that she knew Mum's face off by heart: her big smile, her brown eyes, the freckles on her cheeks like Willa.

Ella remembers how Mum's long skirts swept the pavement, the jangling of her bangles on her skinny wrists, the dangly earrings that got caught in her hair. So light on her feet she looked like she floated above the ground.
A walking wind chime
,
Fay used to call Mum.

‘Ready for your test in period one?' Mrs Noble asks.

Ella looks up. ‘My test?'

‘Your maths re-sit, Ella.'

Ella bites her lip. ‘Oh – yes. I've been revising all week.' If Ella goes home now she'll miss the test, but tests don't matter. Nothing matters now that Mum's home. And Mum won't mind her missing some school. When Ella was little, she'd take her out for special occasions. She'd call up school and put on a serious voice and say,
Yes, poor Ella has a temperature,
and she'd wink at her at the same time and then they'd go and build a snowman in Holdingwell Park or take the train to London to see the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum.
School's not the only place you get an education,
Mum said.
She's the coolest mum in the world,
Ella's friends chorused.

But they didn't need to say it: Ella knew that Mum was the coolest – and the best – mum in the world.

The bell rings. The class files out. Ella joins the throng of bodies pushing down the corridor and then ducks out through a side door.

‘Willa? Willa?'

Willa picks up her orange pencil and colours in the doorstep woman's hair. It's the same crayon she uses for her own hair and Mrs Fox's fur. Ella's hair is red too, but it's a lighter, blonder red, a bit like someone got a splodge of yellow paint (Dad's hair) and some red paint (Willa's hair) and mixed it all together. Mummy calls Willa's hair copper. She says it's the most beautiful colour in the world, and not to let anyone tell her otherwise.

‘Willa? Are you listening?'

Willa hears her name being called but it sounds like it's coming from the end of a long, long tunnel. Plus, it's usually safer not to answer because sometimes the voices don't come from the outside, where everyone else can hear them, but from one of the stories in her head – and if Willa talks back to them the boys and girls in her class roll their eyes and whisper.

A hand with a thick gold wedding ring lands on her picture. Willa looks up.

‘It's break time,' says Mr Mann.

Mr Mann is married to a man. He was Ella's teacher too.

Willa looks around the empty classroom.

‘You can finish the picture later – I'll keep it safe for you in my drawer.'

Mr Mann knows that sometimes the other girls take Willa's pictures and pin them up on the wall and laugh at them.

You need to defend yourself,
says Ella.
You need to say mean things back. Show them that you're not scared.
But Willa can never think of mean things to say back. Plus, Mummy says that, more often than not, mean people are sad people and that we should feel sorry for them. When Willa explained this theory to Ella, Ella said that it was that kind of thinking that made people walk all over Mummy. Willa didn't think it was fair that the only choices available were (a) being mean, or (b) being walked over.

Willa scratches her scar. She'd like to finish the picture now, while she still remembers the doorstep woman's face and her clothes and her trumpet case and her wheelie suitcase. The woman makes her think of the zillions of pictures of Auntie Norah on Ella's bedroom wall. Auntie Norah used to live with Ella and Mummy and Daddy before Willa was born, but now she lives in Australia and can't afford to come and visit because the plane's really expensive. Maybe she's saved up and come over on holiday as a surprise for Ella. Ella's always going on about Auntie Norah and how much she loves her and how much Auntie Norah loves her back and how alike they are. If the doorstep lady is Auntie Norah, Willa could give her the picture as a gift and then maybe she'd love Willa as much as she loves Ella.

There's just one thing that doesn't add up: if the doorstep woman
is
Auntie Norah, why didn't Ella say hello and give her a hug?

Willa keeps colouring. ‘Are you going to have an African baby soon?' Willa asks Mr Mann. Sometimes if you can get Mr Mann to talk about things he likes to talk about he gets distracted and forgets about the instructions he gave you. Mr Mann is trying to adopt a baby with his husband because two men can't have babies.

Mr Mann sits on the edge of the desk and sighs. ‘I don't think we'll get a baby.'

‘Why not?' Willa draws a few grey streaks in No One Woman's hair.

‘They don't give babies to people who are too old.'

‘You're not very old.'

‘I'm afraid I am.' Mr Mann tugs at a bit of his hair ‘I have some grey bits, like the woman in your picture.' Then he leans in closer and gasps. ‘Who's in the picture, Willa?'

‘No One Woman.'

His brow goes wrinkly. Maybe he
is
too old to have a baby.

‘She turned up this morning.'

‘She did?'

‘Yep. Ella wouldn't let me stop to talk to her.'

‘Oh.'

Mr Mann frowns a serious frown like when he's explaining something hard in maths or reading a sad bit from a book at story time.

He looks more closely at the picture and blinks. And then he stands up.

‘It'll do you good to get some fresh air,' Mr Mann says. ‘Why don't you run along? You can finish your picture later.'

Unless it's snowing or there's thunder and lightning, Mr Mann doesn't let them stay in for break. He thinks that fresh air makes their brains work better.

Willa packs up her crayons. She takes an envelope from a pile in her backpack and hands it to Mr Mann along with her picture.

‘You can open it later,' she says.

As she skips out into the playground, Willa glances back into the classroom. Mr Mann hasn't even looked at the envelope she gave him: he's too busy staring at her picture of No One Woman.

At the top of the house, Norah opens the door to the attic, which now has a nameplate:
Ella's Room
. Norah had spent hours up here with Ella: the floor covered with watercolour paints and brushes, manuscript pages with half-written songs, Louis Armstrong singing of clouds and skies and roses. They would paint and dance and spin round the room as though nothing existed beyond this place.

Something soft brushes Norah's legs.

‘Louis!' She kneels beside him and folds her arms around his neck.

Like Adam, Louis has got skinnier, and his caramel coat is turning silver. But he smells just as she remembers: of earth and sun and rain, of the house, of Adam and Ella and Willa.

Louis nudges the attic door and settles on the bed Norah had put in for the nights when she stayed up late composing.

She looks around the room.

On the bookcase lies the yellow plastic trumpet Ella played as a little girl.

Norah's Louis Armstrong CDs stand in the same rack in the same corner, and next to them, her old vinyls and her record player. She closes her eyes and remembers the evenings she spent here playing and writing and listening to music.

Her old music stand is full of Ella's pieces. Scales. Jazz solos. And then the notation for a song called ‘Mr Fox in the Fields'.

A bottle of Shalimar stands on the dresser. Norah opens it and breathes in the sweet fug of the perfume she still wears.

The wardrobe is stuffed with Norah's old concert clothes. When she was little, Ella enjoyed trying them on, her skinny limbs drowning in the long silk cuffs and velvet skirts.

There are only a few signs that the room belongs to a teenage girl. Textbooks, highlighters, bits of paper covered with maths problems on the floor by the bed, a stack of running magazines on the windowsill and, on top of those, a poster for the Holdingwell 10k in two days' time, the race Norah used to run every year.

Norah picks up a sponsorship sheet stapled to the poster, with words scrawled across the top:

Running, playing the trumpet, keeping Norah's clothes.
She's been waiting for me
, Norah thinks
. She still loves me.

Then she notices the pinboard filled with Adam's portraits, the ones missing from the stairs – and others too, pulled from their frames, ripped out of photo albums, pinned up, one overlapping the other, dozens of them staring down at Ella's desk.

Norah recognises the one of her and Ella with medals round their necks after the mothers and daughters' race at Holdingwell Primary Sports Day. And there's another photo she remembers too, from Ella's naming ceremony. They'd held it in a field outside Holdingwell; she'd wanted to be outside, under the bright blue sky – no rooms, no walls. Norah scans the faces: Fay, Ella's godmother, stands in the middle of the group wearing a pale pink dress; she's holding baby Ella in her arms, looking at her as though no one else in the world exists. Fay's love for them all – it's why Norah gave her Willa to look after on the day she left. She hopes her best friend has stayed in their lives.

Norah takes the picture off the pinboard. There's something not right with the image. She holds it up closer. A mark, so faint you don't see it at first. Someone has scratched a black cross over Fay's face.