Chapter 9: Small Print

The study guide is a hundred and forty pages long, and Peter reads it the way he reads a supplier's specification: at the kitchen table, with a pencil, every evening from March on.

It downloads from the same pastel website as the visa form. Becoming One of Us, it's called, with a cartoon on the cover of a man and a woman waving from a beach. Inside it is mostly water. The lagoon, its depth and volume and how long a drop of rain takes to pass through it. The nine kinds of fish that live in it, with their native names, which he says out loud to the empty flat until they stop sounding like sneezes. The plastics and chemicals law, with a list of what may go down a drain and what may not, three pages long. Cooking oil, not. Paint, never. Medicines, only through a pharmacy. He is good at this. It's his trade, more or less: rules, limits, who checks what. He makes flash cards and leaves them on the table among the mugs.

Chapter Nine is the Population Act. Eleven pages, and the cartoon family from the website is back at the top, mother, father, two children, dog, all smiling, the dad hardest.

Every man is entitled to father two children. Women are free to have as many children as they wish!

He knows that bit. He reads on. Twins count as two. After his second, a man is free to choose. Visitors are fitted with a device for their own convenience. And then a box with a yellow border, and a little drawing of a smiling man holding up a certificate:

Good news for new citizens! New citizens may apply for a paternity entitlement, the same right to father two children as every man born on the island!

There's a footnote. He has to tilt the page toward the lamp to read it. Entitlements are granted subject to availability under Section 4(2) of the Act. Applications are registered in order of receipt.

Subject to availability. He's seen that phrase on every form he's ever filled in. It means somebody in an office has to stamp something and you wait a few weeks. Registered in order of receipt. Like a passport, then. He underlines paternity entitlement in pencil, because it sounds like something they'd ask, and moves on to Chapter Ten, Our Coastline.

At the back there are practice questions. He does them on Sunday nights against a timer, as he did his exams at twenty.

Question 17. A new citizen wishes to father children. What should he do first?

Apply for a paternity entitlement. He gets it right every time.

Late one night he texts her the question, to make her laugh.

*Q17. Apply for a paternity entitlement. Sounds like a fishing licence.*

*oh the permit. that's just a paper. everyone calls it the permit*

*Then I'll get the permit and we'll go fishing.*

*Peter Lowe. go to sleep*

The work visa arrives in April, eleven pages again, the same Section 7, the same two boxes. He ticks I consent with no more thought than he gives the car tax. It surprises him a little, how little. Then the contract from the plant comes through, with Dale's signature at the bottom in blue ink, scanned slightly crooked, and he hands in his notice at work the next morning.

His leaving do is at the pub across the road on a Friday in June. Dave from purchasing makes the speech, a sausage roll in one hand and a pint in the other.

"Paradise Island," Dave says to the room. "I looked it up. It's a real place. Lagoon, beaches, the lot." He turns to Peter. "Do they need anyone in purchasing?"

"You wouldn't like the airport, Dave."

Everyone laughs. Peter laughs too, and doesn't explain.

---

The flat is the last thing. Peter has put it off for weeks, and when he finally rings Carol, she comes round the same evening and stands in the spare room in her summer jacket, among her boxes, just as she stood there in December.

"Abroad," she says.

"Abroad."

"For how long?"

"For good, I think. The lease runs to next spring. I've asked the landlord. He's happy to put it in your name, if you want it. It'd save you looking."

She looks round the room, at the boxes with JUMPERS and KITCHEN and BOOKS (HERS) in her own handwriting, at the window with its view of the car park. A whole year she's been looking for somewhere. For a while she's quiet.

"It's her," she says. "The island one."

He didn't tell her that. He didn't tell her anything except abroad.

"Yes."

"You've had the face since Scotland, Pete. Since the bloody hike." She sits down on a box. "I told you not to do anything stupid."

"You did."

"Is this stupid?"

He thinks about it honestly. The yellow line. The nurse with her envelopes. The old man on the harbor wall, nodding to him. Jessica on the step below the hammock with her chin on her knees.

"Probably," he says.

Carol laughs, and wipes her eye with the back of her hand, and stands up and hugs him, hard, for the first time since they split.

"Well. Send me a postcard. I'll take the flat."

---

His parents live in Chester, in the house he grew up in, and on the last Sunday in July he drives down for lunch. Roast chicken in thirty degrees, because it's Sunday. His mother has made a trifle.

They knew he was going. He told them in the spring, on the phone, and then again in person, and they listened as they have always listened to him, as if he were explaining a gadget they have no intention of buying. His father has looked the place up since. Peter can tell by the way he carves.

"I read the visa page," his father says. "On the computer. What they do to visitors at the airport."

"It's only for the stay, Dad. It comes off when you leave."

"I'm seventy-two, Peter." His father lays a slice of chicken on his plate with great care. "I'm not having a lock put on me to watch a wedding."

"I know."

"And I won't go on my own," his mother says. "Two days on aeroplanes, with my hip. And sit there with nobody." She reaches across and pats his hand. "We'll have a do here, love. When you bring her over. At the cricket club. Your dad'll do a speech."

"I will not."

"He will."

Nobody asks what else the law says. Peter doesn't offer. He eats the trifle, and lets his mother pack him the rest of the chicken in foil for the train, as if they had no food where he's going, and on the doorstep his father shakes his hand and then, unexpectedly, doesn't let go of it.

"Your granddad would've had something to say about all this," his father says.

"Granddad thought you could still shoot a Welshman in Chester."

"Yes, well." His father lets go at last. "Some laws you don't test."

---

Jessica's mother keeps her wedding dress in a box on top of the wardrobe, under two blankets and a sewing basket, and she gets it down herself one evening in July, standing on a chair, while Jessica holds the chair and says Mama, let me.

It's cream, not white, with long sleeves of thin lace and a row of small covered buttons down the back. It smells of the cedar shavings Ruth has put in the box every year. Eighteen years of shavings. Jessica didn't know it was up there. She has lived in this house her whole life and she didn't know.

"You kept it," she says.

"The dress did nothing wrong," Ruth says, and holds it up against her daughter in front of the mirror, and frowns at the hem.

They work on it in the evenings, at the kitchen table, with the radio on. Ruth does the sewing. Jessica holds pins and makes lists. The cousin and her husband, who will bring the twins and a cake. Her friend from school, who was supposed to come to Scotland, with her husband of eight months and the baby. A dozen more from the street, Mrs. Oteri among them, because Ruth says you don't leave out a woman who's been left out enough. Her brother, who writes from the boats that he has asked for leave and will come if there is food, and then, in a second message, how much food.

"And his side?" Ruth asks, without looking up from the hem.

"Nobody."

"Nobody?"

"His father won't come. Because of the device." Jessica turns a pin in her fingers. "And his mother won't come without his father."

Ruth stops sewing for a moment. Then she bites the thread, and doesn't say anything about it at all.

They have rented a flat, three streets away. Jessica saw it on a Saturday and walked Peter round it on a video call, holding the phone up to every window: two rooms and a kitchen, a balcony the width of a chair, a fruit tree in the yard below that belongs to the landlady, who has said they may steal from it. Peter said it was perfect. She heard him smiling.

Some nights, after he has gone to sleep on his side of the world, she lies in her small white room under the fan and lets herself think about it properly. Not the wedding. After. A child with straw-colored hair at a table in that kitchen. Then another. Two, like anybody. She puts her hand flat on her stomach, the way she did once before, in this same bed, and this time there's nothing to be afraid of.

---

The heat hits Peter at the top of the aircraft steps exactly as he remembers it, wet and heavy and smelling of tarmac and the sea, and this time he's ready for it. He is wearing the loose trousers.

He knows the terminal now. The ceiling fans, the single loop of the carousel, the two desks under Welcome to the Garden. He waits for his case, two cases this time, everything he owns that he couldn't leave with Carol or his mother. There are fewer people in the queue than in February. No one is showing a baby.

At the desk the officer takes his passport and his work visa and looks at her screen, and her nails click on the keys.

"Mr. Lowe. Back again! Work visa, very good." She stamps it with a thump. "Now, you'll follow the yellow line on the floor."

"I know," Peter says. "I know the way."