We are just leaving the dining room after breakfast when the campaign leaflets arrive. A box of five thousand, A5 size, and five hundred A4 posters. Tom takes delivery and pays the man. We check them and everything looks as it should. I feel a moment’s dizziness, page after page of Lori’s face, the grim fact of us being here – without her.
When Anthony comes we have coffee in the lounge bar and bring him up to date. We try calling Oliver again, hoping to ask him about the photography project, but there’s no reply so Anthony leaves a message in Chinese, explaining that we’d like to talk to him as soon as possible.
The car drops us at Lori’s street.
‘We don’t need the driver to wait,’ Tom says. ‘We can let him know when we’re done.’
The three of us call in at each of the units along the street, cafés, a fruit shop, liquor store, mobile-phone shop, tea shop and mini-market, and hand out leaflets. Each time Anthony asks them to display a poster. Outside one of the cafés, the proprietor talks excitedly, nodding, and two of the other staff gather around to join in the conversation.
‘Lorelei ate here sometimes,’ Anthony says. ‘She was a good customer. They can’t remember when she last came. Not for a while. I’ve asked them if she was here in the last month. They don’t think she was.’
I look at the trays of raw food set out to entice diners, rows of duck’s feet – scrawny claws with barely any meat on them – red crayfish, pigs’ trotters. Flies circle and land on the meat and one of the girls waves them off.
The older woman leans in close, speaking rapidly, touching her chest.
‘She wishes you luck, for your daughter to be safe and back soon,’ Anthony says.
The woman talks some more.
‘She says you must have good fortune. That luck will come to you.’ The woman reaches out and pats my hand. She nods to Tom. My throat tightens.
‘Please – say thank you,’ I say.
‘Xiè xie,’ Anthony says. Shay shay.
I echo him and Tom does too.
We have a similar reception from the women in the mini-market. They even remember what Lori used to buy: honey and orange juice, eggs and nuts and tea and beer. While we’re there they put up the poster, on the wall by the till.
Then we start leafleting on the street. We quickly discover that we are ill-prepared. With a break in the cloud and patches of blue sky, the temperature is close to thirty degrees and we have no shade. We have nowhere to keep the leaflets either, nowhere to sit if anyone wants to find out more, no table to rest on if they want to give us any information. There is a low wall next to the entrance to Lori’s block and the shop beside it is shuttered, so we put our things there. Tom goes across the road with a bundle of leaflets and Anthony and I stay together.
