The Astonishing Return of Norah Wells by Virginia Macgregor Page A

anything?’ Sai asks.
    Ella focuses her gaze back on her mum. She’s got bare feet. She said it was the most natural way, that the runners from Kenya, the best in the world, ran without shoes.
    They’d get on, Mum and Sai. Ella’d had that thought more than once.
    â€˜She’s giving me a pep talk…’ Ella hears her Mum’s voice, deeper than most mums’, her words full of breath like when she played the trumpet. ‘Run, Ella…
Run like a song
.’
    â€˜Run like a song?’
    â€˜You know the saying,
run like the wind
, right? Well, Mum changed wind to song. She thought that if you saw running like a piece of music, like getting into a beat and a rhythm, like following a story, you’d run from the heart.’
    â€˜That’s cool.’
    She sees Mum’s hair, lit up and shining like one of those bright copper pots, her skin transparent in the sun, her eyes fixed on Ella as if, at that moment, no one else in the world existed.
    Ella’s chest hurts. She wants to open her eyes but she can’t pull herself from that sunny day in July, a year before Willa was born.
    â€˜Ella?’ Sai strokes her arm.
    Ella opens her eyes and focuses on one of the glow-in-the-dark stars above his bed. ‘I worshipped her Sai. Like, really worshipped her. And now? I’m not even sure if all those amazing things I remembered about her, about the times we had together, actually happened or whether they’re just what my head’s made up for all these years to make her feel close. Maybe she was never that great.’
    â€˜She was awesome.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜I remember her. I remember sports day, how you guys won every year. How I wished Dad would run with me like that in the fathers and sons’ race, but he was overweight and struggled with his heart. You and your mum? You were
both
awesome. Everyone saw it.’
    â€˜Really? You really remember us? You’re not just making it up?’
    â€˜Have I ever made things up?’
    â€˜No.’ And he hadn’t. Sai was the single most honest person she’d ever met.
    â€˜You really miss him, don’t you?’ she says.
    â€˜Every day,’ Sai says.
    It’s one of the things that makes Ella most angry about Dad – that he assumes Sai dropped out of school because he’s thick or got into trouble or something. His Dad died of a heart attack and his Mum couldn’t manage in the post office on her own. That’s why he left school.
    â€˜I love you,’ she whispers. And then realises it’s the first time she’s said it out loud – and that saying it feels like the most natural thing in the world.
    â€˜I love you too,’ he says and then they kiss again, a kiss that goes deeper and further than ever before.

Adam
    Norah’s perfume fills the car. In the days and weeks after she left, he had felt it rising from the carpets and curtains, from their bed sheets. From his clothes. And then Ella had started wearing it, as though he were never allowed to forget.
    He glances at Norah sitting beside him, her delicate limbs, her long fingers resting on her thighs. They used to hold hands.
It’s a sign,
a girl who worked at the recycling plant had once told him.
If you keep holding hands when you’ve married, especially after you’ve had kids, it means you’ll love each other for ever.
    He rubs his eyes and blinks. Through the blur he looks at the blossom drifting off the windscreen, at the markings on the road. He tries to concentrate on his anger at Ella for going against him like this.
    â€˜I learnt to drive,’ Norah says.
    When they started going out he owned a clapped-out Fiesta and he’d spent hours sitting beside her in the passenger seat, teaching her how to change gear, how to get on to a roundabout, how to take a slip road. He thinks about how nervous she was. And how, eventually, she’d given up, said she didn’t