Free Snow Garden by Rachel Joyce Page B

other, trying to contain the pain. Johanna forgets all about the ambulance. People are beginning to turn and look. ‘I can’t walk any more. Jo, I am going to have our baby here. Find a trolley. Get me somewhere quiet.’
    ‘I can’t leave you. I’ll carry you.’ Johanna tries to put her arms around Magda, but Magda shrieks as if her touch is a vice around her stomach. Several more people turn to look.
    Magda whispers through clenched teeth, ‘I’ll be OK. I’ll wait. I won’t move from here. I promise.’
    ‘You’re sure?’
    ‘Yes. It’s OK so long as I don’t walk. Find me a trolley.’
    There is no sign of anyone in the departure lounge who looks vaguely official, let alone a person with a trolley. Maybe the staff are all involved in trying to sort out the unforeseen circumstances. Or maybe they are in hiding, afraid that if they go out and try to explain the situation they will be torn apart with questions and complaints. The only staff to be seen are the two at the information desk dressed as Christmas angels, as if to say,
No, no, don’t ask us for help, we are only jokes!
The six Father Christmases are now disco-dancing as the Stroud Girls’ Choir performs its entire Christmas medley.
    Johanna asks the girl in Duty-Free, and the angel-woman cleaning the toilets; she asks families, women who look like mothers and should surely understand, but no one can offer her a trolley on which to transport Magda somewhere more private.
    She spots a small building at the other side of the concourse. Before anyone can stop her, Johanna blunders through a door clearly marked
No Entry
and finds herself outside. The door slams behind her.
    ‘Apparently a little girl has rung. About the goat.’
    ‘The what?’ says Mrs Pike. She is trying to work out where to put the donkey. She has taken it for a walk around the concourse, and now that she wants to put it back inside its cage it keeps baring its teeth. It is definitely upsetting the four cheetahs. They whip round and round their cage, snarling.
    ‘The goat.’
    ‘Oh, that,’ says Mrs Pike.
    ‘The little girl says she wants to adopt it. But not the terrapin. Her mum has a van. Also there’s a woman in reception. She’s looking for a stretcher. Her wife is having a baby.’
    Mrs Pike gives a laugh that verges on the deranged.
    Tracey and Christina King pass the time discussing other travellers. It’s a game they always used to play when they were children. Questions like: Where do you think that family is going? Then they move on to other stories. ‘There’s this kid at school,’ says Tracey. ‘He wants to be a girl …’
    ‘What’s that?’ asks Mrs King, passing her daughters the sandwiches she has queued for and also the free bottled water.
    On noticing her mother, Tracey appears to clam up. ‘Nothing,’ she says. Christina opens the packaging on her sandwich. Her nails are pale-blue talons.
    Sometimes Mrs King feels she is searching for something without even knowing what it is. Something that will put things back together with her daughters. She wonders if she’ll ever find it, whether the search will always hurt the way it does, not exactly painful but always there, like an ache in a joint that comes with age. A miracle. That is what she is looking for. Never mind the Northern Lights.
    ‘What’s going on over there?’ says Tracey, pointing to the other side of the departure lounge.
    Johanna puts her arms around Magda and walks her slowly through the crowds. ‘You’re just going to have to let me help,’ she whispers. ‘I know this isn’t how we planned it.’
    Magda grips Johanna’s hand but she can’t do words any more, only guttural sounds that are more like animal cries. She wants to say it doesn’t hurt, not in the sense of pain that comes from the outside, but the baby gives a kick, a really hard one, as if it is thinking of booting its way out through her belly, and she stops still, her shoulders hunched, her face creased, her