The Astonishing Return of Norah Wells Read Online Free Page A

keeps colouring. ‘Are you going to have an African baby soon?’ Willa asks Mr Mann. Sometimes if you can get Mr Mann to talk about things he likes to talk about he gets distracted and forgets about the instructions he gave you. Mr Mann is trying to adopt a baby with his husband because two men can’t have babies.
    Mr Mann sits on the edge of the desk and sighs. ‘I don’t think we’ll get a baby.’
    â€˜Why not?’ Willa draws a few grey streaks in No One Woman’s hair.
    â€˜They don’t give babies to people who are too old.’
    â€˜You’re not very old.’
    â€˜I’m afraid I am.’ Mr Mann tugs at a bit of his hair ‘I have some grey bits, like the woman in your picture.’ Then he leans in closer and gasps. ‘Who’s in the picture, Willa?’
    â€˜No One Woman.’
    His brow goes wrinkly. Maybe he
is
too old to have a baby.
    â€˜She turned up this morning.’
    â€˜She did?’
    â€˜Yep. Ella wouldn’t let me stop to talk to her.’
    â€˜Oh.’
    Mr Mann frowns a serious frown like when he’s explaining something hard in maths or reading a sad bit from a book at story time.
    He looks more closely at the picture and blinks. And then he stands up.
    â€˜It’ll do you good to get some fresh air,’ Mr Mann says. ‘Why don’t you run along? You can finish your picture later.’
    Unless it’s snowing or there’s thunder and lightning, Mr Mann doesn’t let them stay in for break. He thinks that fresh air makes their brains work better.
    Willa packs up her crayons. She takes an envelope from a pile in her backpack and hands it to Mr Mann along with her picture.
    â€˜You can open it later,’ she says.
    As she skips out into the playground, Willa glances back into the classroom. Mr Mann hasn’t even looked at the envelope she gave him: he’s too busy staring at her picture of No One Woman.

Norah
    At the top of the house, Norah opens the door to the attic, which now has a nameplate:
Ella’s Room
. Norah had spent hours up here with Ella: the floor covered with watercolour paints and brushes, manuscript pages with half-written songs, Louis Armstrong singing of clouds and skies and roses. They would paint and dance and spin round the room as though nothing existed beyond this place.
    Something soft brushes Norah’s legs.
    â€˜Louis!’ She kneels beside him and folds her arms around his neck.
    Like Adam, Louis has got skinnier, and his caramel coat is turning silver. But he smells just as she remembers: of earth and sun and rain, of the house, of Adam and Ella and Willa.
    Louis nudges the attic door and settles on the bed Norah had put in for the nights when she stayed up late composing.
    She looks around the room.
    On the bookcase lies the yellow plastic trumpet Ella played as a little girl.
    Norah’s Louis Armstrong CDs stand in the same rack in the same corner, and next to them, her old vinyls and her record player. She closes her eyes and remembers the evenings she spent here playing and writing and listening to music.
    Her old music stand is full of Ella’s pieces. Scales. Jazz solos. And then the notation for a song called ‘Mr Fox in the Fields’.
    A bottle of Shalimar stands on the dresser. Norah opens it and breathes in the sweet fug of the perfume she still wears.
    The wardrobe is stuffed with Norah’s old concert clothes. When she was little, Ella enjoyed trying them on, her skinny limbs drowning in the long silk cuffs and velvet skirts.
    There are only a few signs that the room belongs to a teenage girl. Textbooks, highlighters, bits of paper covered with maths problems on the floor by the bed, a stack of running magazines on the windowsill and, on top of those, a poster for the Holdingwell 10k in two days’ time, the race Norah used to run every year.
    Norah picks up a sponsorship sheet stapled to the poster, with words scrawled