Stepping back out onto the narrow balcony, I put my hands on the railing, look across to the ring road and gaze at the traffic, silvered in the dull white glare of the day. My fingers are grimy, everything rimed in the fine, gritty dust. What if she walks in now? Comes in breathless from her travels and finds us here, poring over her things, trying to work out where she’s gone. Her dad and me, Dawn and Anthony.
‘OK, so suppose she forgot the charger,’ I say, as I go inside. ‘Look what’s not here: phone, backpack, laptop, camera, passport – all those things she’d pack for a trip away.’ I know the whole holiday explanation, nearly four weeks later, looks a little thin. After so long she should be back in touch with someone, if not here in person. But what else am I to think? Tom looks at me, then leans back, his hair falling away from his face.
Before we leave, I empty the fridge of the perished food and Dawn takes it out with the other rubbish to bins on the landing. Under the sink I see cockroach powder. Two tubs of it and a pack of pink foam sponges. I’ve chucked the cloth from the sink so I break open the sponges and use one to wash out the fridge.
‘We might as well turn it off,’ Tom says.
I check the freezer section – if it’s choked up it may flood, but there isn’t much build-up of ice.
‘I’ll give you these.’ Dawn passes me the key on a fob, a metal goldfish, the body segmented so it appears to wriggle if you shake it.
There is some debate about whether Anthony should accompany us to meet Lori’s friends that evening.
‘We won’t really need a translator,’ Dawn says. ‘Everyone speaks English.’
‘That’s good,’ I say, ‘but I’m not sure we can find our way.’
Dawn says she’ll meet us at the hotel and we can get a taxi or even a bus if we walk along to the ring road.
Anthony looks a little disappointed. He offers his services once more and I decline politely. ‘Tomorrow, though, we should have the leaflets and posters. We’d like you to help us then, when we hand them out.’
I’m suddenly ravenous as we travel back to the hotel and ask Anthony to drop us at the mini-market nearby. I scour the place for something sweet and starchy, peer at the labels, searching for script I can read, try to decipher photographs. Tom exudes impatience from the doorway. I grab a packet of ‘pineapple sandwich cookies’.
Back in my room, the cookies turn out to be like fig rolls with pineapple in the middle, the coating soft, sweet and floury, like undercooked shortbread, cloying. I eat four of them with an instant coffee and feel satisfied for a while. Then queasy again.
