I’d hesitated a moment before stepping into the spare room she was using as a studio. Our house was just a small three-bed semi but my father had insisted on turning the largest room into a studio for Mum. It had always felt off-limits to me. But she’d beckoned me in that day, gesturing towards her paint-splattered chair, a bright blue leather one she’d found in the local charity shop.
‘Tell me everything,’ she’d said, kneeling in front of me and taking my hands, getting green paint all over them.
‘I don’t want to go into school tomorrow,’ I’d said, resisting the urge to pull away from her and clean the paint off my hands. I’d never got on well at the private school Dad had been so keen to scrimp and save to get me into, the teachers always seemed to regard me as inferior to the other, richer kids. Mum had warned him it would happen. ‘There’s nothing worse for a snooty bourgeois than an aspiring bourgeois,’ she’d said. Is that what she’d thought of me when I married a company director – a snooty bourgeois?
‘Why not, darling?’ she’d asked.
‘My teacher told me off today.’
She’d raised an eyebrow, smiling slightly. I remember thinking that mums aren’t supposed to smile about things like that and part of me was annoyed. Why couldn’t she be like other mums?
‘Why’d your teacher tell you off, Lou?’ she’d asked.
‘I told the truth.’ Her smile had widened. ‘She read out a poem she’d written to help us with our poems and I said it was rubbish.’
Mum had laughed then, those big white teeth of hers gleaming under the light. ‘You told the truth, that’s wonderful! “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know”,’ she’d added, quoting her favourite Keats poem.
‘But she hates me now.’ I’d crossed my arms, turning away. ‘I can’t go into school.’
‘Of course you can! You can’t let fear rule you, Lou. You have to fight against fear, stare it right in the face.’
‘You okay?’ Sam asks, pulling me from the memory.
I open my eyes, Mum’s words echoing in my mind like she’s right there with me.
You can’t let fear rule you, Lou.
‘Can I see the bag please?’ I ask Sam.
‘Of course.’
He hands it to me. It’s dirtier than in the photo, caked with dried mud, and there’s a grotesque tear across the child’s face. I imagine Mum shopping in one of Thailand’s markets with it, reaching into it for a purse to buy some odd Buddhist ornament, half a smile on her tanned face.
I take a deep breath then unzip it, peering in. There’s a hairbrush in there, a bright red lipstick and something wrapped in a plastic bag. I pull the brush out first, examining the hair on it. It looks dark, just like Mum’s.
But then lots of people have dark hair, right?
I place the brush gently to one side and look at the lipstick. Mum sometimes wears red lipstick. She’s not alone in that though, plenty of women do.
But what about her passport? That can only belong to one woman.
I clench my fists, driving the surge of grief away. It’s not over until it’s over.
I reach into the bag again for the item wrapped in plastic. It’s square-shaped and feels heavy, its surface rough beneath the material of the plastic. I pull it out and lay it on top of Mum’s bag. Its front cover is made from strips of thin wood interweaved with each other and an image of the earth is etched in bright turquoise into it with four words painted in gold over it.
The Atlas of Us.
There’s a bronzed key lock on the side but it looks broken. I open the heavy front cover, see two lines written on the inside page, the ink only a little blurred – amazing considering how much it must have been thrown about in the water:
To my darling, my life, my world. The atlas of my heart.
Your love, Milo
It feels impossibly romantic. Maybe Mum had met someone? And yet she still hadn’t got in touch with me to tell me about them. I can imagine what Will would say if he were here. ‘Accept it, move on. Your mother doesn’t want to involve you in her life any more.’
I flick through the atlas. On the first page is a hand-drawn illustration of the United Kingdom and Ireland. Opposite is a paper pocket. I run my fingers over it, surprised to feel something inside. I reach in and pull out a dried purple flower encased in cellophane. There are other items too: a yellowed tourist leaflet from a place called Nunney Castle, a ticket to an awards ceremony in London, a photo of a cobweb flooded with light and a business card belonging to a journalist called Nathan Styles. There’s a crumpled piece of notepaper too with a pencil sketch of a sheep teetering on a tightrope, its eyes wide with comical fear, a note scrawled in handwriting I don’t recognise above it:
Exmoor by Claire Shreve
A watercolour of grey pooling around the edges of moss green valleys, ready to plummet downwards and destroy everything below.
I’ve never heard of a Claire Shreve. Is she one of Mum’s friends? I flick through the rest of the atlas and see more illustrated maps – including one of Thailand – and pockets too, some bulging with items.
‘Do you recognise any of it?’
I look up at Sam. ‘Just the bag. And the passport of course. I’m not sure about this atlas, I’d have remembered it if I’d seen it. It’s quite unusual.’
‘Okay. Shall I see if I can find a photo on the boards? Or …’ he hesitates, ‘… you might prefer to see her?’
My head swims at the thought. Then I remember Mum’s words again: You have to fight against fear, stare it right in the face.
‘I’d like to see her please,’ I say.
‘I’ll take you.’
I follow Sam towards a pair of bright blue gates to the side of the temple, criss-crossed with red stripes, the spikes on top gold. The smell instantly hits me: meaty, horrific. I tuck the note back into the atlas and place my sleeve over my nose as I follow Sam towards the temple. A Thai woman is standing in front of the gates, a clipboard in her hand, a bucket of surgical facemasks next to her. Beyond the gates is a temporary trailer, people milling around it. I’m thankful it’s blocking the view of whatever’s behind it.
Sam nods at the woman, who hands me a surgical mask. I put it on, gagging at the TCP smell.
‘Brace yourself,’ Sam says as he leads me through the gate.
I walk around the corner of the trailer towards a large area fringed by spindly green trees, the hill darting up behind them. At first, I think it’s dirty clothes spread over the plastic sheets in the middle. But as I draw closer, I see a bloated leg sticking out of one mound, a tangle of black hair fanning
