Simi adjusts her chair a little, and rereads Marybelle’s email. This time, with concentration fixed, she is jolted back instantly to the lodge, and to the battered land that lay beneath her as she was flown out of the Eastern Highlands. The words on the page cluster in her brain – ‘whole village flooded’, ‘swept away roads’. It is as though she is in the helicopter again, swooping low then up, with the pilot’s dry, staccato voice detailing the damage in her ear, logging the broken homes and bridges, the small businesses lost, the dangerous surge of the rivers flooding free of their banks.

So much gone, and so quickly.

She shuts her eyes, and tries to slow her brain, to steady it for the news that she knows is coming next.

 “ …Tonderai’s brother and family are safe, but sad news about the school. Caught in a landslide. Terrible. Ten children and one teacher dead. Another teacher still missing.”

The words chisel into Simi’s guilt, carving out the question she asks herself again and again – whether she could have done more? Whether she really was too ill to stay? She re-reads the paragraph about the school.

“… school … landslide … Another teacher still missing …”

Again the horror of it shocks through her. She pauses, and looks up from the email, staring out on to the street, eyes stiff.

A school. Those ten and the teachers must have been sleeping at the school. Staying over night because of the weather. Staying to avoid the worst of the rain and storm.

She is sure the school is the one that Precious attends. The Precious she has never met. The Precious she feels she knows well. The child of Tonderai, sharer of the story. A police siren wails down the road outside, snapping Simi back to London, back to her reality.

What am I doing? Sitting here dreaming. Stuck in a nightmare. Like I’ve been sucked into some kind of never never land. Their problems are not my problem. Only thing is, I can’t get out. Can’t just walk away. It’s like there’s a part of me still there. A part that needs to know their lives are getting better. That the chaos is clearing. Healing. Like my hand.

She turns her palm over and runs a finger along the scar. It is no longer sore to touch. All infection is gone.

They fixed me well out there. I have to give them that.

Then she thinks of Marybelle, hungry as the homeless, and of Tonderai and Rudd, their homes broken. Fixing themselves.

She shakes her head, and forces her senses back to the world on her own street. She holds herself there, soaking up the smells of the curry takeaways being prepared down the road – letting the noise of the traffic fill her head, like an orchestra that keeps interrupting itself. As she listens, her ear is caught by the bright singing of a bird from the tree behind her shop. Its voice is clear and pure. It lowers her sense of dread.

Nobody steals your sun.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023