Free Follow You Home by Mark Edwards

much. I kept opening my mouth to speak but all I could think of to say were stupid questions like “Are you OK?” When of course I knew she was a very long way from OK. And all I could think about was getting as far away as possible.’ I glanced up at Dr Sauvage. ‘I was in shock. We both were. But I remember the same words looping through my head. We need to get home .’
    I paused. ‘Actually, I don’t think it was that coherent, if there were fully formed words in my head. It was more like screaming. Like white noise. Also, Laura said afterwards that she remembered screaming as we ran out of the forest, but I don’t remember that. In my memory, she didn’t make a sound.’
    It was quiet in the office, like it had been back in the forest. A fly crawled up the window and I thought I could hear its footsteps.
    ‘The town at the end of the tracks was called Breva. When we got there it was just getting light, but nothing was open yet. Though walking through the town, it didn’t seem like there was much of anything anyway. There was nobody around. We saw a man walking a dog, a huge thing, like a wolf, which made Laura grip my hand so hard I thought she’d break my fingers. We saw a young guy walking along with a baseball cap on, head down. A few cars went past. After everything that had happened, what we wanted to see was a city. Lights, life. Not this. The whole place had this bleak feel, full of boarded-up windows and cars that looked like they should be in a scrapyard. Lots of signs of a place that used to be prosperous and lively but that was now dying. I don’t know . . . It just had this atmosphere. It felt like a ghost town.’
    She waited for me to continue.
    ‘After we’d walked for ten minutes or so we saw an old lady scrubbing the front step of her house. I said to her, “Police?” and she looked us up and down before coming over and giving us directions, pointing this way and that and babbling away like we could understand every word. But we got the gist anyway.’
    I pictured the old lady now, her milky eyes, her strong arms clutching the wooden brush she’d been using to clean the step. ‘Just before we walked off, she reached up and touched Laura’s face, whispered something in Romanian. I thought Laura was going to start screaming and I had to pull her away.’
    I left out a detail. The woman had also touched Laura’s belly, laying the flat of her hand on my girlfriend’s stomach and nodding to herself. Laura had jerked away like the woman had stabbed her.
    ‘This is good,’ Dr Sauvage said. ‘How are you feeling?’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘Able to go on?’
    ‘Yes. I . . . I want to get to the end.’
    I also wanted a strong drink.
    I told the rest of the story.

Chapter Thirteen
    L aura and I found the police station about ten minutes after our encounter with the elderly woman, a little building with Poliția written above the door. I took a deep breath before trying the door.
    A police officer sat at the desk in the tiny reception area, a smartphone in one hand, a mug in the other. He looked up at us and frowned at me, then smiled at Laura.
    ‘Do you speak English?’ I asked.
    He shrugged apologetically.
    I immediately switched into Englishman Abroad mode, speaking slowly and turning up the volume. ‘Anyone here speak English?’
    He eyed me before drifting to the back of the reception area and vanishing through a door. He returned a minute later with a large man with red cheeks and broken veins on his nose. He took in Laura’s messy hair, the dirt and scratches on our skin. I hadn’t looked in a mirror at this point so had no idea how beaten-up I looked, how the dash through the forest had marked me, how wild my eyes were.
    ‘How can we help?’
    I didn’t know where to start. I gabbled, mixing the whole thing together non-sequentially—the train, the forest, Alina, the border guards . . .
    The policeman held up two huge hands. ‘OK. Slow, please.