Chapter 4: The Form

One line.

Jessica holds the test in her fingers and stares at the little window, and there is one pink line in it, and next to it, where the second one would be, nothing. Clean white nothing. She tilts it to the light. Still nothing.

"One line," she says.

On the phone Peter breathes out. It goes on and on, like a tire going flat. Then he laughs, a cracked sound with no breath left in it.

"One line is good? Tell me one line is good."

"One line is good." She sits down on the closed toilet lid because her legs have decided to. "One line is nothing. It's nothing, Peter."

"Oh, thank God. Oh, Jess."

She's laughing too now, and then crying, quietly, with her hand over her mouth so her mother won't hear through the wall. It all comes out at once, the whole week of it. He keeps saying her name. She keeps saying it's nothing.

Two days later, in the middle of a spelling test, she feels the first cramp, and at lunch she sits on the floor of the staff toilet, laughing at nothing, until a colleague knocks to ask if she's all right.

She is all right. She's more than all right. She walks home that afternoon under a sky so wide and white she feels she could fall up into it.

It's only that night, lying in bed, that she notices what lies under the relief, small and quiet. A hollow, about the size of a hand.

She knows what it is. She has wanted children since she was a child herself. She looks at her pupils every day and thinks of their fathers and the stories behind them. For a week she carried a story of her own, a terrible one, and now it's gone, and some stupid part of her misses it.

She picks up her phone. There's a message from him, from an hour ago.

*I meant what I said. That I'd be there.*

She reads it for a long time. Then she turns the phone face down on the pillow, and lies with her hand flat on her stomach, the way his was in the shelter, and doesn't sleep.

---

Peter thought that would be the end of it. A scare, a lucky escape, a story he'd never tell anyone. It isn't.

The messages don't stop. If anything there are more of them. Autumn comes in over Manchester the way it always does, grey and then darker grey, and every evening his phone fills with her island. Sunsets. A lizard on her windowsill. A video of rain falling straight down outside her classroom so hard it bounces, and then thirty seconds later the sun, and steam coming off the playground like a kettle. The water tower on its hill, the highest point, which she sends him captioned "my mountain" with three mountain emojis.

He sends her back the canal in the drizzle, the bus stop, his desk. "My mountain," he writes under a photo of his in-tray.

They start calling. The hours don't line up, so it's his late night and her early morning, or his teatime and her bedtime, and one of them is always yawning. She talks from her bedroom with the door locked, in a low voice, because of her mother. The room behind her is small and white with a ceiling fan turning slowly over her head, and once a gecko walks right across the wall behind her and she doesn't even turn round.

One night in November she's quiet for a while, looking at him.

"What?" he says.

"I'm thinking about the shelter."

"Yeah?"

"The fire. The second night." She pulls her knees up and rests her chin on them. "I think about it a lot, Peter. In class. In the shower. My mother asks why I'm smiling at the dishes."

His mouth goes dry. "I think about it too."

"Show me what you think about."

So he tells her. Haltingly at first, embarrassed, then less so. The firelight on her skin. The sound she made. She listens with her eyes half closed, and after a while she reaches down and slowly pulls her T-shirt over her head, and she isn't wearing anything under it, and he forgets every word he was going to say next.

It becomes a thing they do. Not every night. Often enough. Her voice going low and uneven on the tinny little speaker, his hand, her hand, two screens and two days of travel. Afterwards she lies with the phone propped against the pillow, flushed and smiling, and he lies on his side of the world and feels about nineteen years old and very, very far away.

It isn't enough. It's a picture of a meal. He starts waking up with her name in his mouth.

In December Carol comes round for a box of winter clothes. She stands in the spare room in her coat, among her own stacked boxes, while he hunts for the one marked JUMPERS in her handwriting.

"You've got a face on," she says.

"What face?"

"That face. You keep looking at your phone and going soft round the edges. Who is she?"

"No one. A girl I met on the hike."

"Where's she from?"

"An island."

Carol snorts. "An island. Course she is." She takes the box from him, balances it on her hip. "Well. Don't do anything stupid."

"Like what?"

"I don't know, Pete. You've got the face." She looks round the spare room. "I'll get the rest out of your way soon. Promise. The flat on Wilmslow Road fell through."

"No rush," he says, and means it. She goes. He stays where he is for a while, among the boxes.

Don't do anything stupid.

---

The parents' meetings come round in January, ten minutes each, in Jessica's classroom after school. The fathers sit on the children's chairs with their knees up near their ears and try to look serious.

Dale is her last on the Thursday. He works at the water plant, she knows, something technical. A big man, careful, with a wedding ring and the patient look of a man with one child to go, who lives by the calendar. His son is in the third row, the one who draws fish on everything.

"His reading's come on a lot," she says, and shows him the exercise book. "He's still drawing in the margins."

"Fish?"

"Fish."

Dale laughs. "That's my fault. I bring him to work in the holidays. He's seen the tanks." He turns the pages slowly. Then, lightly, as he hands the book back: "You've got relatives abroad, haven't you? Someone told me you went to Scotland."

"Not relatives. A holiday." She hears herself add, "I made a friend there. He's English."

"Ah." Dale nods, as if that explains something. "Only, we're trying to fill a post at the plant. Quality control, the lagoon monitoring side. Somebody who checks that the measurements are right, the procedures, all that. We can't find anybody local with the training, and it's been open since spring." He shrugs his big shoulders. "If you hear of anyone. They'd need to be properly trained. Abroad is fine, if they'll come."

Somebody who checks that the measurements are right. Making sure the bits fit.

"I'll think about it," she says. Her voice sounds normal. She's quite proud of it.

She doesn't tell Peter. She walks home along the main street past Mr. Tane's pharmacy and argues with herself all the way. You don't ask a man you've known for three days and a handful of months to move across the world. And if he came to stay, the law would be his too: the airport, and after it, everything she told him in those texts. She puts the job away in the back of her mind like a stone in a pocket, and her fingers keep finding it.

What she does instead, that night, is ask him.

"Come here," she says. "In the break. Come and see it."

He's quiet on the screen. Then: "Why don't you come here instead? I'll pay for the flight. You can see the real Manchester. The dark bits."

She's thought about this. "It's not the money only." Though it is the money too. Scotland took two years of saving on a teacher's pay. "My mother. A woman going alone to a man's flat abroad. Scotland was already a scandal at the market, a girl alone in the hills, what was she thinking. And." She stops.

"And?"

"I want you to see it. Where I'm from. I want you to meet my mother, and see my mountain, and eat the fruit off the tree." She looks at him. "I want you here, Peter."

"Then I'll come," he says. Straight away, no pause at all. "Tell me when."

She tells him the dates. He's already writing them down.

"You need a visa," she says. "It's online. Read everything on the form. Everything. And then call me."

---

The visa application is eleven pages long and has the same pastel colors as the FAQ, the same rounded letters. Peter does it on a Sunday afternoon with a mug of tea, passport open on the table beside the laptop.

Name. Date of birth. Purpose of visit: tourism. Address on the island: he types the name of the guesthouse Jessica found him, near the beach, the one with good reviews and a photo of a hammock. Have you ever been refused entry to Paradise Island? No. Have you ever been convicted of an offence under the Population Act? He has to read that one twice. No.

Page nine is headed Section 7: Male Applicants.

In accordance with the Population Act, all male visitors are fitted with a visitor device on arrival. The device is fitted by trained staff at the Border Office and removed on departure. The key is held by the Border Office throughout your stay.

Below it, two boxes.

I consent.

I do not consent (your application will be withdrawn).

And below that, a small blue link. What to expect (PDF).

He clicks it. It's a single page with a line drawing, the clean flat style of airline safety cards: a pictogram man in outline, and in front of him, in a little circle like a magnifying glass, the thing itself. A curved tube with a ring behind it. A tiny padlock. Arrows. Made of surgical steel, it says. Comfortable for short-term wear. Showering is possible. Please inform staff of any medical conditions.

He sits and looks at it. Then he picks up his phone.

She answers on the first ring. She's been waiting.

"You read it," she says.

"There's a drawing, Jess."

"I know."

"A drawing of a cock in a cage."

"It's not a cage. The visitor one is a device. The cage is for life." She says it the way he'd explain the difference between a Railcard and a season ticket. "It's only for visitors, so there are no accidents. Like Scotland."

That lands. He doesn't say anything.

"Every man who comes has one," she says, gentler. "Men who come to work. Tourists. Businessmen. It comes off at the airport when you leave. It's normal, Peter."

"So when I'm there." He can hear his own voice, careful. "We can't."

"Not that." A pause. Her voice drops. "Other things, yes. You can still touch me. Everywhere you want."

He closes his eyes. He thinks of her on the screen with her T-shirt in her hand. Of the fire in the shelter. Of Carol in the spare room saying don't do anything stupid.

Two weeks. People wear braces on their teeth for two years.

"Peter? Are you still there?"

"I'm here."

"Are you coming?"

He looks at the laptop. The two little boxes. The pictogram man with his arrows, standing there like he's waiting for a bus.

"Yeah," he says. "I'm coming."

He clicks I consent. He pays the fee. The screen goes pale green, and a message comes up in the rounded letters:

Thank you! Your application has been received. Welcome to the Garden.

The confirmation email arrives a minute later. Visa number, dates, the address of the Border Office at the airport. At the bottom, under a heading that just says Tips for Your Arrival, there is one line.

Please wear loose trousers.