Stolen (35 page)

Later, Mum came in with a plastic bag. Inside were hundreds of articles, all clipped carefully from the newspapers.

“I don’t know if you realize how big it’s all been,” she said. “The whole world knows about you.” She placed the bag on my bed and thumbed through the pages of words. “These are just the pieces I’ve collected since we left Britain. There’s more at home. I just thought …” She paused, choosing her words. “I thought you might want to catch up, see how people care.”

I pulled the bag toward me, feeling the weight of the papers on my legs. I pulled out a bundle. The first thing I noticed was the photograph. The last school photograph that had been taken of me was blown up, huge, on the front cover of
The Australian.
My hair was tied up in a ponytail and my school shirt tight around my neck. I hated that shot, always have. I flicked through some more of the articles. That photograph was nearly always with them.

“Why did you give them that photo?” I asked.

Mum frowned, pulled the bag back toward her. “You look pretty.”

“I look young.”

“The police needed a recent shot, sweetheart.”

“Did it have to be a school photo?” I thought of you then, sitting in a cell somewhere. Had you seen all those articles, too? Had you seen the photograph?

I read bits of the stories.

Gemma Toombs, the 16-year-old abducted from Bangkok airport, has been admitted to a remote West Australian hospital, apparently taken there by her captor….

Anxious parents of Gemma Toombs charter a plane from London to be by their daughter’s side….

Mum’s face was blotchy and tear-stained in the accompanying photograph, Dad with his arm around her. Anna was in the crowd behind them, staring worriedly at the camera.

The articles went on and on, mostly saying the same thing. I flicked through the headlines:

Gemma: Found!
Gemma Toombs Released From Desert Drifter!
Is This the Face of a Monster?

I paused at that one. It was dated the day before. In the middle of the article was a line drawing of you. Your head was bowed and you were sitting in a courtroom, your hands in handcuffs … your blue eyes not sketched in. I skimmed for the details. The article stated it was your preliminary hearing, and had lasted just a few minutes. You’d kept your head bowed the whole time. You had said two words only: “Not Guilty.”

At that, I looked up at Mum.

“I know.” Mum shook her head. “He must be mad. It’ll never hold up. The police have witnesses, video evidence from the airport, and you, of course. How can he even think to plead not guilty?” She shook her head again, annoyed. “It just proves he’s insane.”

“What else has he said?”

“Nothing, for now. We’ll have to wait for the trial. But the police think he’ll say you came of your own free will, that you wanted to join him.” She stopped abruptly, wondering if she’d said too much. I could see in her eyes that she still wasn’t sure how affected I was by you.

I smiled, thanking her, trying to reassure her. “You’re right, that is insane,” I agreed quietly.

Mum started fussing then, tidying up the clippings around me before I’d finished reading them. “Would you like to go back to London?” she asked. “Until the trial? Then we can really prepare ourselves. Maybe you’d like some time to sort out your thoughts, to be with your friends?”

I nodded absently. “I just want it to be over,” I said. “All of it.”

We would change planes in Perth before flying back to London. We’d wait there, in our house, until the trial. Until then, the police would gather evidence against you, and I’d work on my statement. I would return to school if I thought I could handle it, and I’d continue talking to the shrinks. Mum made it seem so straightforward when she told me.

“In a few months, life will start to get easier,” she said. “You’ll see. Things will work out.”

I hadn’t found out much about you. I knew you were in a high-security unit, somewhere in Perth. You had a solitary cell. You hadn’t been allowed bail, and you weren’t speaking to anyone. That’s all the police could tell me. Apparently.

I took the window seat on the flight to Perth. It was a small plane, specially chartered for us, and it rattled and shook as the wheels left the ground. It was strange, being the only ones. Apparently the British government had paid. I called the airline attendant and asked for a glass of water. It came right away.

I pressed my hand against the plastic windowpane as we started to gain height. Dad took my other hand and held it tightly. His solid gold wedding ring was cold against my fingers. He was talking to me about life back in London, about my friends who’d sent messages and would be waiting to see me … about Anna and Ben.

“You can invite them all round, perhaps,” he said. “Have a kind of … party?”

His voice was questioning, so I nodded; I wasn’t really listening. I just wanted to stop his questions, however well meaning they were. I shut my eyes as I realized something: No one seemed to have any clue about me, about what I was really thinking. It was like I existed in a kind of parallel universe, thinking thoughts and feeling emotions that no one else understood. Except for you, perhaps. But I didn’t even know that for certain.

I leaned my head against the window and it juddered against my temple. I watched the land move by below. From up there, the desert was made up of so many colors … so many shades of browns and reds and oranges. White dried-out creek beds and salt pans. A dark river, curling like a snake. Burned-out blackness. Swirls and circles and lines and textures. Tiny dots of trees. Dark smudges of rocks. Everything stretching out in an endlessness of pattern.

It took two hours to cross all those hundreds of miles, all those billions of grains of sand, all that life. From up there, so far above, the land looked like a painting, one of
your
paintings. It looked like your body when you’d painted onto yourself. If I squinted, I could almost imagine the land was you … stretched out and huge, below me.

And then I realized something else: I knew what you’d been doing, all this time, in your outbuilding in the desert. You’d been painting the land as it looked from above, just as a bird would see it, or a spirit, or me … your swirls and dots and circles drawing out the pattern of the land.

The reporters were waiting. Somehow they knew we had to switch from the domestic terminal to the international; they knew we had three hours to wait until our flight back. They crowded around us, closing in on me, their camera lights flashing.

“Gemma, Gemma,” they shouted. “Can we have a word?” They spoke as if they knew me; as if I was a schoolgirl who lived down the road from them.

Dad tried shielding me, tried pushing them all back, but they persisted. Even the ordinary people at the airport—the other passengers and taxi drivers and coffee shop staff—even they knew me. I actually saw some of them snap photographs, too. It was ridiculous. In the end Mum took off her jacket and put it over my head. Dad got angry—well, angry for Dad anyway…. I think he even told someone to fuck off. That surprised me, and I paused for a moment to study Dad’s face. He really did care for me then; he really did want me safe. He held me close to him as we passed a TV crew.

But something was clear: I was no longer just an ordinary schoolgirl. Instead I’d turned into a celebrity. My face sold papers. Millions of them. It made people tune into the news. But, right then, with a coat over my head and all those men in leather jackets yelling at me, I felt more like a criminal. They were like leeches, wanting to suck up every tiny thing that had happened between you and me in the desert … wanting to know it all. You’d made me famous, Ty. You’d made the whole world fall in love with me. And I hated it.

We made it to the other terminal. There were reporters there, too, and onlookers, and police, and noise and noise and lights and noise. My breathing sped up. I just kept thinking of that huge plane, on the runway, waiting to take me back to England and the cold and the city and the gray … waiting to carry me away from you. I felt the sweat on my skin, the way my clothes stuck to me.

I couldn’t do it. I broke away from Mum and Dad. And I ran. Mum was grabbing on to my cardigan, but I slipped out of it, leaving her holding the empty sleeves. I ran straight past the reporters with their flashing lights and noise. I ran past the shops and other passengers and straight into the restrooms. I found an empty stall. I wedged the lock shut. I kicked the door so I was sure it was secure. Then I sat on the toilet lid and leaned my head against the toilet paper roll. I stuck my mouth against it to stop myself from crying, to stop myself from shouting and screaming and tearing the place down. I breathed in its chalky, fake-flowery smell. And I just stayed there. I couldn’t face them, any of them. Everyone wanted answers I wasn’t ready to give.

Mum found me. She stood on the other side of the bathroom door with her red shoes pointing in toward each other.

“Gemma?” she said. Her voice was shaky and weak. “Come on, love, just open the door. There’s no one else coming in. I’ve made Dad block off the entrance. It’s only us.”

She stood there for ages before I pulled back the lock. She came in and hugged me, awkwardly, with me sitting on the toilet lid and her kind of crouching beside me, kneeling in the dirt and scraps of toilet paper and old splashes of piss. She pulled me into her lap, and for the first time since she’d arrived, I hugged her back. She leaned against the toilet bowl, covering me with her jacket, and I wondered something. This Mum, hugging me close, didn’t seem like the same Mum you’d been telling me stories about. For the first time, I wondered if all the stories you’d told me in the desert were even true; all those conversations you’d apparently overheard about my parents moving away or being disappointed in me. Had you been lying all along?

Mum gently stroked my hair. I whispered into her shoulder.

“I can’t go back. Not yet. I can’t leave.”

And she held my head tight to her chest and wrapped her arms around me.

“You don’t have to,” she said, rocking me. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, not anymore.”

And I cried.