her nose against the window, she watched London disappearing beneath the white wings of the plane. They rose through a layer of cloud and suddenly the view was swallowed. She sank back in her seat, her heart rate gradually slowing. She had left.
On her lap rested her travel journal. She’d bought it at Camden Market from a stall that sold weathervanes, maps and antique pocket watches. She’d been drawn to the sea-blue fabric that bound the cover and the thick cream pages that smelt like promises.
She opened it, clicked her pen against her collarbone, and wrote her first two lines.
People go travelling for two reasons: because they are searching for something, or because they are running from something. For me, it’s both.
She tucked the journal into the seat pocket alongside the laminated flight-safety procedures, and then closed her eyes.
*
As the plane descended over the Sierra Nevada range, Mia gazed at the clouds drifting below. They looked soft and inviting, and she imagined diving into them, being caught in their fleecy hold and floating with the air currents.
‘Not as comfy as they look,’ Finn said, as if reading her mind.
Finn Adam Tyler was her best friend and had been since they’d met aged 11 on the school bus. Four weeks ago she’d called him at work to tell him she was going travelling. She was sitting on the kitchen worktop, her heels dangling against the fridge door. When he answered, she said only, ‘I’ve got a plan.’
‘What do I need?’ he’d replied, a throwback to their teenage years when a plan, if conceived by one of them, had to be adhered to by the other.
She grinned. ‘Your passport, a resignation letter, a backpack and a typhoid jab.’
There was a pause. Then, ‘Mia, what have you done?’
‘Reserved two round-the-world tickets: America, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, Vietnam and Cambodia. The flights leave in four weeks. You coming?’
There was silence. It had hung between them long enough for her to wonder whether her impulsiveness had been a mistake, whether he’d say of course he couldn’t just up and leave his job.
‘So this typhoid jab,’ he’d said eventually, ‘is it in the arm or the arse?’
She looked at Finn now: his knees were pushed against the seat in front, a newspaper spread on his lap. The mousey curls of the schoolboy she’d known had now been cut short and rough stubble shadowed his chin.
At the end of their row a voluptuous woman with dangling gold earrings unclipped her seat belt and stepped into the aisle. She moved towards the toilets, gripping the backs of headrests for balance. Mia turned to Finn. ‘I need to talk to you.’
‘If it’s about that last meal, I swear, I thought you wouldn’t want to be disturbed.’
She smiled. ‘It’s something important.’
Finn folded the newspaper over and gave her his full attention.
A few rows in front the faint grizzling of a toddler started up.
Mia tucked her hands beneath her thighs. ‘This may sound odd,’ she began uncertainly, ‘but after I booked our tickets, I realized that there was another place I needed to visit on this trip.’ She should have talked to Finn about it sooner, only she was afraid to voice the idea in case she set in motion something she wasn’t ready for. Sometimes she wasn’t aware that an idea was brewing until it suddenly popped into her mind and she acted upon it. ‘I’ve booked us an extra stop.’
‘What?’
‘After San Francisco, we’ve got a flight to Maui.’
‘Maui?’ He looked blank. ‘Why?’
‘It’s where Mick lives.’
She waited a beat for him to place the name. It had been a long time since he’d heard it.
‘Your dad?’
She nodded.
The grizzling child had found its stride and a captive audience; the crying grew louder and something was tossed into the aisle.
Finn was staring at her. ‘You haven’t talked about him in years. You want to see him?’
‘I think so. Yes.’
‘Has he … have you been in contact?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Neither of us.’ Mick had left when she and Katie were young children, leaving their mother to bring up her two daughters alone.
‘I don’t understand. Why now?’
It was a fair question, but one she wasn’t sure how to answer just yet. She shrugged. Ahead, she heard a taut whisper from the toddler’s parent: ‘That. Is. Enough.’
Finn ran the knuckle of his thumb under his chin, a habitual gesture when something was worrying him. ‘What does Katie think?’
‘I haven’t told her.’
She could see Finn’s surprise and sensed he wanted to say more, but Mia turned to the window, ending the conversation.
She willed her thoughts to drift away with the clouds, knowing it wasn’t the only thing she was keeping from her sister.
Cornwall/London, March
Katie sat pin straight on the church pew, her feet pressed together. Biting sea air crept through the cracks in the stained-glass windows and twisted beneath the heavy oak door. Her fingers were curled around a damp tissue, Ed’s hand resting on top. Eighteen months earlier had seen her seated in this same pew when they buried her mother, only then it had been Mia’s fingers linked through her own.
Her gaze was fixed on the coffin. Everything about it – the polished shine to the elm wood, the brass clasps keeping it sealed, the white lilies arranged on top – suddenly looked wrong. Why had she chosen to bury Mia beside their mother, when her sister had never once visited the grave? Wouldn’t cremation have been more suitable, her ashes dispersing on a breeze over a wild sea? Why don’t I know what you’d have wanted?
It would have been almost impossible to conceive that Mia was inside the coffin had Katie not decided, two days ago, that she needed to see the body. Ed had been cautious on her behalf. ‘Are you sure? We don’t know how she may look after the fall.’ That’s what people were referring to it as:
