‘Me being away won’t make things any easier for him,’ I say.
‘Maybe not, but kids are resilient. He’s in a loving home, well cared for. You can’t not go.’
We embrace again as I leave and she wishes me luck, adding, ‘Please ask Nick to let us know when there’s any news.’
‘Of course,’ I say.
‘Lori’s a great girl,’ Grace says. ‘I do hope everything’s OK.’
I’m glad she hasn’t told me everything will be OK and pretended false hope. I wake each morning and there’s a new number in my head, so many days. Today it’s twenty-four. I’d be a total idiot to imagine everything is all right.
So we have to fly to China but perhaps, if we’re lucky, it will all come right again.
The nurse at the travel clinic checks my destination on the computer and tells me I need hepatitis A and a booster for diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus.
‘Is it a holiday?’ she says, as she cleans my skin with a special wipe. ‘That’s where they have pandas, isn’t it? My neighbours went there.’
I swallow. ‘No, my daughter’s gone missing out there.’ It sounds so blunt in the small, neat room.
‘Oh, God,’ she says. ‘I am sorry.’
At this moment all I want is for her to give me the jabs so I can escape. But I have already learned to talk about Lori at each and every opportunity. Word of mouth, the best publicity. So while she prepares the vials and administers the injections, I go through it all and ask her, please, to tell people about it. She gives me the travel medical card, which lists what I’ve had done, and wishes me luck, her manner subdued.
It’s something I’ve read online, my eyes skimming over the columns of advice, what to do next, the bullet-pointed lists of What We Can Do, What We Are Not Able to Do but I must barely have registered it because when Peter Dunne, from the consulate in Chongqing, speaks to me on the phone, when he says it near to the close of our conversation, adding, ‘Just in case,’ I feel as though I’ve been electrocuted. A jolt that sears my heart and sends currents fizzing through my veins to the tips of my fingers and the backs of my thighs.
I grit my teeth and agree I will do as he suggests. After that I put the phone down and rest for a few seconds, arms braced on the table, eyes shut. I stir, pick up a pen and add to the growing list of things we need for our trip to China: bring something with Lori’s DNA on.
It is macabre, sorting through the boxes that came out of Lori’s room for something that will carry strands of her hair or skin cells or whatever else they might use. I’m looking through scarves and belts, bags and necklaces. I stop and say to Nick, ‘Does that mean her toothbrush isn’t there? At the flat?’
