She fell into a pit of silence for a few kilometers. After a while, she said, “Obviously they’re better than English trees.”
“Obviously. I’m just going to check my phone—Dan wrote me some notes. Oh, we’re so close, hold on.” He pulled off the road andthey bumped and crunched along a track, first gravel and then dirt. “Here we are.”
“Can you take a photo and bring it to me in the car?”
“Let’s walk very slowly. Come on.”
She thought they were in the middle of nothing and nowhere. But, as they kept walking, the track turned into a boardwalk and a wide green space opened up—that vast blue sky again, almost eerie—and soon there loomed into view something even spookier, a mass of tall, sand-colored shapes that could hardly be part of nature, being evenly spread over a large distance and all facing the same direction.
“Like your books—in the Broadway Market flat, remember?” Adam said. “Termite mounds.”
“They’re so big.”
“Two meters tall.” He looked at her slyly. “My height.”
She laughed out loud, just briefly, for the first time since her mother had died.
“Have some water,” he said back in the car. “We’re going to one other place.”
“Are you going to be watching me? For my reaction? I don’t think I can act surprised.”
“You don’t have to be or do or say anything at all.”
After a while, they pulled into a car park. As she readied herself for the effort of getting up, she could sense him hustling and fussing in the boot for whatever he had stowed there. “A little walk—it’s worth it,” he said. “According to Dan, and Google.”
The path became a raised boardwalk taking them down, down, deep into thick, green rainforest. “I don’t think I’ll be able to get back up.”
“I’ll help you. We’re nearly there. Look.” In the thickest part ofthe monsoon forest, water plummeted down a sandstone gorge. “Florence Falls. That’s where we’re going, where the water ends.”
She leaned over the safety barrier and gazed down to where, far away, through the canopy, there was a hint of navy blue.
“I’ve got your swimsuit in the bag,” Adam said. “And my swimsuit. And some for any crocodiles who’d like to join us. Don’t worry, there aren’t any around here. That’s a fact.”
At the bottom of the gorge, she nearly cried at the beauty of the water. Almost all in shade and so clean it smelled like rain. Only a few other people were swimming, slowly breaststroking to the misty haze where the waterfall met the pool. Coralie and Adam changed into their swimsuits and piled their stuff behind a tree. Closer to the water it seemed to change from navy to green. The sandstone in the shallows glowed gold. They crept carefully to the edge, holding hands to balance on the rocks. They sat down, dangled their legs, and pushed off into the pool.
Afterward, she couldn’t remember what they’d talked about in the water, or if they’d talked at all. But after their swim, she was able to smile, and to eat a bit again, and (when they got back to London) to unpack her bags, place an Ocado order for groceries, inhabit the new kitchen, cook, and properly eat. She could touch Adam, be touched, kiss again, have sex, laugh.
She had to remember—it was her mother who’d died, not Coralie. Coralie was still alive.
•••
It was strange,though, to empty all the boxes in the sitting room and make order from their jumbled contents, to flatten them out, and to line them up for Adam to take to the big recycling bins near the cake shop, because the box (inside) where she kept her feelingsabout her mother also felt empty, and had felt empty for a long time, and if she weighed it, it felt like nothing, and if she looked inside (this was all metaphorical), itlookedlike nothing, but still the box refused to be broken down or gotten rid of; it remained a fucking useless void in a box, so she did what any normal person would do: put it in the attic (still a metaphor) to deal with it some other time.
8
2015–2016
She impulse-booked a gender scan on Ultrasound Direct as soon as her pregnancy app said “Baby” was sixteen weeks.
“See those three lines?” the sonographer said.
Adam was beaming.
“What do theymean?” Coralie almost shouted.
“It’s the vagina!” the woman said. “It’s a girl.”
It was a beautiful autumn day. They walked for a while, elated, then went for ramen in a chain restaurant near Bank. In the bathroom, she took out the printed scans to look at them in private. Inky black, a ghostly white outline, her daughter’s perfect nose. Then she cried because her dream had come true. Her baby, her girl. Florence, like Florence Falls—they decided the name before they’d finished their lunch. Walking back from the Tube that afternoon, they stopped off at Cotters’ Yard, the most highly reviewed nursery in London Fields for ages six months to five, and put the baby down to start in March 2017, the week she was due to turn one.
