LC simply looked confused, but it was our son’s turn to help, Ish calling out, “When I was very little, I had a stuffed rabbit”

“What’s a rabbit?”

Moments like that cut me, for each was a reminder of how much of our child’s life had been stolen by those bastards, along with that of my wife. Ish was still on point, though.

“It’s a little animal, Carolyn. We’ll show you some real ones, but mine was a toy, like your bear, for cuddling. Another name for a rabbits is ‘Bunny,’ and because I was very little, I called mine Bunbun”

“Have you still got it?”

“It’s at home, I think. Would you lie to see it?”

“Is home the place with the man with the smiley beard?”

“Yes. Our home, in Australia”

“Are we going back there?”

“Yes, after we have seen more friends here”

My heart lurched again, as I decoded what she must be thinking, that everything was temporary.

“Carolyn?”

“Yes, Tua—Dad?”

“We’ve met lots of friends, haven’t we?”

She nodded once, but said nothing.

“We have friends all over the world, love. We see them when we can, but when we’re in one place, we can only see the friends from there. They don’t stop being friends when we are somewhere else. We have a plan, though, when we get to one place where we have a lot of friends, and that is to talk to the ones back at home with them all together”

“How?”

How to explain a video meeting to someone who had never used a computer? Bugger it; the times would work. I pulled out my phone and rang Kul, sod the expense yet again.

“Hiya Mike---something up?”

“Not at all, mate. Could you switch to video? Someone wants to say hello”

Once he was on screen, I turned my phone to show the girl, and for almost the first time, her squeal was one of utter joy.

“Say hello, Carolyn”

“HELLO!”

Kul was grinning, that smiley beard in full force, when Carolyn suddenly turned away from the screen. It was a second before I realised she was still wearing her bear-carrier, and a memory of Enfys showing me her sweets came out from hiding. Kul chuckled.

“What’s his name, love?”

“Don’t know!”

“Shall we both think of names, then?”

All of a sudden, she launched into a rush of childish prattle, and it was all for Kul, but I didn’t care. Whatever it took to break through to my daughter’s heart was fine by me. No resentment, no jealousy. Maz was grinning happily, but Kul still had a sensible head on.

“Carolyn, love, I’m getting ready for work, so I have to go. Your Dad has planned some longer chats with us, so you’ll get to see Dal as well. Will you be there for me?”

“Yes!”

“And the bear?”

He caught her confusion, so channelled Maz.

“Ask him tonight, then. We will see each other soon, love!”

He cut the call, Carolyn wide-eyed in real delight, which meant a little delay in settling her down for the night after I had showed her where the loo was. The first time she had used ours in Scarborough, she had asked for permission to leave her room, dear god.

Stay with the joy, Rhodes.

Yes, we walked, Maz reminding me quite sharply that she and LC had ‘enjoyed’ an awful lot of opportunities for physical exercise over the years, which left things a little jagged between us until she saw her first ever European jay in the woods.

Through the carpark and down the little gully to the beach and its concrete blocks, right up to the public hide by the back door to the Minsmere reserve, and then it was with a sigh of absolute bliss that she settled onto a bench with book and binoculars, as well as the flasks of tea that Ish had carried in his rucksack.

She had her bins straight to her eyes, and…

“Avocet!”

The names followed in sequence, as they always had before that awful day, her little notebook filling up quickly.

“Mike?”

“Yes, love?”

“There were birds in Sumatra as well. Ones I knew well, nothing rare, nothing new, but… Carolyn? Remember what I taught you about the birds, back in that place?”

“Yes, Mum”

“These are all new ones here. Would you like to see?”

“Can Kawan look?”

She turned her back so that Maz could take her bear.

“He told me his name last night, like Mum said. Can I go to the water?”

Ish was straight up, yet again, taking the girl out to the edge of a very calm sea after promising to show her how to skip stones, and I settled down by my wife, pouring us each more tea.

“What does that name mean, love?”

“Just ‘friend’, darling. I think that’s the word that is triggering her. We haven’t had any for so long, the whole of her own life, yes? And now, so many, and you just called up Kul, and he was there. Lets her see things exist beyond what she can touch and see. Godwit… which one… black-tailed! Sorry, but the birds, it was a real cliché for me. They were there, they were free, even if we weren’t. We… I had my dreams, Mike, my hopes, but she, I never knew what she held to her. Nothing for her to work from, no past. All I could do was try to give her a future to believe in, even if I didn’t. Green plover… Now we give her friends, love. We give her a real future”

I reached across to take her binoculars, but only so I could kiss her. Outside, I could hear the squealing of a little girl, and later, when we returned to our cottage, she rode on my shouldeRS.

We spent some time at the Wetlands Trust reserve at the Ouse Washes on our way north, Maz slightly disappointed not to have been there for the mass Winter invasion of various types of swan, but she was still happy with what she saw. My target was York that day, by way of the long bridge over the Humber, but we weren’t staying in the city. I had spotted a campsite next to a village called Acaster Malbis, for some reason the name stirring a vague memory, and it was small enough to let me try out how Carolyn felt in a tent while still having the possibility of somewhere more solid nearby if she were unable to cope.

“Welcome to Moor End, Mr Rhodes. This your first time staying here?”

“First time in this part of Yorkshire, to be honest”

“Can I ask how you found out about us, just so we can tweak our marketing? Internet? Word of mouth?”

I laughed at that question, as I had no idea at all.

“I don’t know, my friend. It was something about the village name; seen it somewhere before”

“Ah! I suspect I know the answer, then. Any canals or other inland waterways near where you live?”

Ish snorted.

“We live in Australia, mate”

I held a hand up.

“Yes, but I used to live near the Grand Union”

The camp site man was nodding happily.

“That’ll be it, then. We have a lot of hire centres here, boats that is, like Dobbs and Barker, even though Old Man Barker followed Mr Dobbs a few years ago…. Lovely man, Gerald Barker, absolute gent. Anyway, I know they do one-way hires down there. Other yard fettles them and then hires them out for the trip back”

Maz almost snorted up her breakfast at that one.

“Sorry, but, well, we do, my husband and I, we do business consultancy in Australia and--- Darling, those must be the people you got the idea from”

She quickly explained about our Canning Vans solution, and our man was chuckling away.

“All the way to Australia, eh? I shall have to let them know, if that’s okay. They’ll be chuffed, though Susie might want a cut, woman as now runs the place. I’m joking! Right. Two nights, two tents, then, three adults and one child, and the car?”

I paid, he showed us the pitches, and then the facility that had really caught my eye: a family shower room, where Maz and Carolyn could shower together without risking terrifying our daughter. We pitched our two shelters, and that evening ate in a pub, also called the Ship, where the ale was Timothy Taylor’s rather than Adnam’s, and a little girl fell asleep after her ice cream was finished.

We did the City the next day, walking its walls and wandering through the Shambles, with time in the museum by Clifford’s Tower, both girls fascinated by the reconstructed rooms and period streets, and as LC had seemed to settle easily on her first night in a tent, I booked us an extra one, just so she could spend more time feeding the swans, ducks and geese by the marina.

More and more the inner child was emerging from the victim, and Maz seemed to kick far less in her sleep when under canvas. I mentioned that as we sat on a convenient bench while LC insisted on listening to a busker, music clearly calling to her more and more with each day. Maz was pensive when I mentioned her bad dreams.

“Darling, I think.. It’s memories, love. The tent… It’s Gracetown, yes? The Bibbulmun as well. It’s… I had to wash so much when we got home, wash that place off me, and this, it’s like being back there”

She barked out a laugh.

“Just a bit wetter, fewer nasty biting things… Oh! Is that a skylark?”

One more day of healing.

We headed off after that third night of Maz as close to me as she could get, LC clasping Kawan while still pressed against her mother, and we took lunch in Durham City before a break at Marsden for the seabirds I had researched on the net, and then into Newcastle and a couple of nights in the Station hotel, the first of which included the folk club at the Bridge hotel. As we walked down from our hotel, Ish dropped in beside me, his voice soft.

“She’s healing, Dad. It’s two things, really, and one of them’s the music. I mean… well, how could it not be, in our family?”

“The other?”

“She keeps asking about friends, Dad. She’s very…. Look, you said it to me, once, about linear maps. When you were explaining about where the Hiatts live”

“Eh?”

“You told me you only knew Bethesda as the road through it, a linear map, not all the places to the sides, like where they lived. I think Elsie’s like that: sees friends as, well, she meets them, then they’re gone, and that’s it. What she can no longer see is gone”

He paused for a moment, then smiled.

“When you called up Kul the other night, when she saw he was still there, still her smiley beard, I think you broke a hole in her shell”

Before I could embarrass him by saying something soppy about pride, he changed the subject, asking, “So who’s on tonight?”

I still hugged him before replying.

“Oddly, Jimmy again, but as a support. Jez is headlining”

“Jez Lowe?”

“Yup”

“Ripper, bonzer, she’ll be right!”

Jimmy was waiting at the bar, and to her delight, as soon as he saw LC, he waved, saying something I only half understood, which still made her laugh, and that was the start of her best evening since her rescue. Jimmy was funny, Jez was Jez, and I made sure I spent a decent sum on their discs before the walk back to our rooms, for I was determined my girls would have something more than fading memories, something to fasten the good times to them. There was, after all, a CD player in the car.