Every morning of her life Fleur turned Saffie’s photo towards her; a missing child forever caught in childhood. There was rarely a night when Fleur did not wonder where her daughter’s body lay or worry about the possibility that she might live in some distant, alien culture, brought up with unknown people with little memory of her birth and a long-ago family who loved her.
It was the not knowing. The certainty, as the years went by, that they would never know, which haunted and maimed the lives of Fleur and her surviving daughter.
But it was Fleur that the long, relentless shadow of guilt fell on. She was their mother and her mind and heart had been on other things; on David. She had not taken care of her children. Haunted with misery, she had left them to roam free. She had left them to chance, ignored their safety, and something random and terrible had swooped.
It is this that my daughter can never forgive.
Singapore, 1976
The monsoon was coming. The wind was rattling the shutters, catching the chimes outside Ah Heng’s window. They swung and jumped and clashed in a mad little Indian dance. The strings would get all muddled and Saffie knew she and Nikki would have to untwist them in the morning.
The smell of rain filled the dark room, reaching up the stilts of the house, rising up from the damp earth full of bruised frangipani blooms and dead leaves and small branches of trees.
Saffie lay still, listening for the sound that had woken her. She was facing the open door, staring at the closed shutters that kept out insects and the great blind moths as big as sparrows who threw themselves out of the dark into the light, their fat little bodies hitting the lampshades; their dusty, fluttering wings falling into the twins’ hair, jumping across the surface of their skin like mice.
Saffie could hear the familiar sound of cicadas, but there wasn’t the heavy warmth of a coming day. Her feet touched Nikki’s feet at the other end of the bed. She did not think
her sister was awake, but she could not be sure. Nikki’s breath could be held, like her own; Nikki could be silently listening too.
Suddenly Saffie heard again the sound that had woken her. She saw the shadow of her mother in the corridor that was a balcony during the day when the shutters were thrown back against the house each morning. Fleur had opened a shutter and was leaning out into the dark, listening, looking upwards to the stars that filled the hugeness of the night.
With a lurch of sickness Saffie knew. Daddy was not home yet and she strained like Fleur for the sound of helicopters overhead. She could hear her mother’s voice keening. It was this soft, monotonous sound that had woken her, that and her mother’s fear. It shimmered across the night and reached both children, touched them with cold fingers and they shivered at their mother’s terror.
‘Oh, God!’ Fleur whispered. ‘Oh, God in heaven. Please. Please. Let him come in safely. I beg you, God.’
Both girls sat up abruptly as one. Stared at their identical selves.
‘Daddy!’ they whispered and reached for each other, catching their mother’s panic.
At that moment they heard the aircraft engines. Behind dense cloud came the faint sound of rotary blades. Clear, like knives cutting through the blackness, the sound of helicopters rumbling and whirring their way home. Tail-lights winking and blinking like comforting fireflies through the purple massing clouds, which were growling with thunder and bursting with violent wind and rain.
Saffie and Nikki leapt out of bed and ran to their mother.
‘Hurry!’ they called out into the night. ‘Hurry, hurry, Daddy. Hurry, Fergus…Hurry, everyone…the storm is coming. Hurry, hurry before the lightning comes…’
The sound of engines was louder now, near to them, and suddenly out of the clouds, in formation, five helicopters appeared out of the night.
‘Hurrah!’ Saffie and Nikki shouted. ‘There they all are…hurrah!’
‘Shush, darlings. Shush! I need to listen.’ Fleur’s voice was trembling.
They watched as the helicopters hovered over the airfield. One turned in a circle as if testing the power of the wind and then dropped slowly at an angle to land at the airfield beyond their sight.
The next two helicopters were being buffeted up and down and they too circled quickly, one after the other, well apart, and turned and dropped from sight into the darkness.
‘Three down!’ Fleur let out her breath like a sigh. A violent damp wind wrenched the shutter from her hand and it crashed back against the house, and then the rain came in slanting, weaving arcs, blowing crossways, bringing great suffocating black clouds which obscured their vision.
A white streak of lightning shot into the night making the children jump back. They all heard but could not see the fourth helicopter drop from the clouds. The engine was making a lot of noise as the pilot searched for the airfield lights below him.
The last helicopter emerged from cloud and circled. Daddy. It seemed to the twins to move nearer to the house, as if to say, I know you’re watching…I’ll be home in thirty minutes, Peapods.
Daddy was always last down. It is like being the captain of a ship, he’d told the twins. Your men’s safety comes first.
They saw the red flickering tail-light against the lightning as the helicopter hovered, tried to turn and drop out of the savage wind to land. But it was impossible. It was caught as the eye of the storm lifted and threw it about the sky like a toy. Pilot and machine were suspended and buffeted against a backdrop of lightning shooting and cracking across the sky like fireworks.
The helicopter looked pathetically small as it was thrown about the sky like an unbalanced bee and tossed this way and that. Fleur and the twins held their breath in hypnotised terror.
‘Land, Daddy. Land!’ Saffie cried out into the night. Nikki gripped the windowsill as they watched the tail rising, tail-blade whirring frantically as the engine screamed.
‘Holy Mary, mother of God…Please…’ Fleur was crying over and over. She clutched the twins, held them into her, gripped them so tightly she hurt, and her eyes never left the sky.
‘David…David…I’m willing you down…You can do it. I know you can do it…Come on, David…please, darling, get her down…’
Something terrible was gripping Saffie’s stomach in a cramp so painful she wanted to fall to the ground. Nikki was sobbing, still clutching the windowsill. They were only five but they both knew, like their mother, that their father was powerless to do anything to save himself, because he no longer had control of his machine, which was turning upside down and falling out of the sky and spiralling down to the ground so fast that if they’d blinked they would have missed it.
Already, far away, they could hear the sound of sirens. They heard the explosion as the aircraft hit the ground when it was out of sight. They saw the flames leap upwards into a sky cracking with thunder. They could not move, Fleur, Saffie and Nikki. They stood watching the sky where the helicopter had been a moment ago.
A long way away a telephone was ringing and Ah Heng ran in her little backless slippers to answer it. Still, the three figures stood, unable to take their eyes from the empty sky that was growing light now. The rain blew in great gusts sideways, filling the monsoon drains, flushing the snakes out of the dry collected leaves.
Into the dawn, low on the horizon, there suddenly sailed one small pink cloud. Fleur