The house looked peaceful when we arrived home. Bleater Brown heard us, staggered from her bed of straw and screamed as though she was dying of starvation.

'Now Sacha's better, we're going to show her how to feed Bleater,' said Charlie happily.

I trotted towards the kitchen door, intending to make up a bottle. Then I stopped in my tracks, and slowly turned around.

Sacha's car was gone.

I called Bianka.

'What kind of state was she in?' The poor girl sounded ready to keel over.

'Not well enough to come out to a cafe,' I said bitterly, 'but she's miraculously found the strength to clean us out and disappear. She's taken every bottle of alcohol in the house, and the new DVD player. Any idea where she might have bolted to?'

'None,' said Bianka sadly. 'You'll be going to look for her. Please-let me come too.'

Next, I rang the Napier police and fed them an anodyne pack of lies. The man who took my details was polite, rea.s.suring and supremely unimpressed. A teenager stormed off? How old-seventeen? Well-hem-hem- they'd keep an eye out for her car, but it would be hard to spot her among all the other yoofs who didn't fancy hanging out with their families over the weekend.

I gnawed my knuckles. Sacha might overdose. She might be murdered. A 'drug-related killing', the papers would say, making it sound as though she'd deserved it. She might-yes, she really might-have decided to drown herself, like Hinemoana, in her desperation to escape the call of her enchanter. It was on the cards. Anything was possible in her world of wonky mirrors.

Finally, I called Destiny and persuaded her to babysit. I told her I'd been hauled in unexpectedly at work and might be busy all weekend, and I'd pay her well. She and Harvey arrived within half an hour, and I was gone three minutes later.

First, I checked the beach. No drowned girl. Not today. Then Bianka and I combed both Napier and Hastings. We set out with a map and patrolled the streets, sneaking down driveways and into back gardens in the hope of spotting a little Toyota with flowers painted on the bonnet. We stole a few hours' sleep on Sat.u.r.day night but were off again by seven on Sunday morning, exploring the rougher suburbs where pig dogs snarled behind flimsy gates; we even dared to peer through a gap in the high fence of a gang headquarters. We searched parks and beaches, public toilets and churches. We checked ditches and dustbins, fearing to find a naked and mutilated body.

'I can't believe she's done this,' I said, as we parked on top of Napier's Bluff Hill. Sacha's car wasn't there, but we paused for a while. From our eyrie we could see d.i.n.ky-sized cranes unloading a ship in the port.

Bianka rubbed tired eyes. 'P messes with an addict's brain. They don't just want it, they need it. We need air to breathe or we know we'll die. An addict feels like that about P.'

'How d'you know all this?'

She seemed surprised that I should ask. 'When Mum was diagnosed, I learned everything I could about her disease. I go to all her appointments with her and ask questions. When Sacha got sick, I did the same-found out as much as I could.'

'You're a wonderful friend.'

'Sacha's the most amazing person I've ever met. She's got this charisma. It's like having a star drop into your tutor cla.s.s.'

We leaned over the rail, dizzied by the murderous drop.

'Does Anita know what's been going on?' I asked.

'She does. She wanted me to help you. In fact, she's planning to go for a drive herself today, and look for Sacha. Don't worry, we haven't told Dad.'

'How is she?'

Bianka hesitated. 'The oncologist says they're running out of options.'

'I'm so sorry.'

'Don't be sorry,' she said quietly. 'Mum's lived with death for a long time. She says we all do, it's just that most people don't face the fact. She first became ill when I was a baby, and she thought she mightn't see me grow up.' Bianka smiled. 'She reckons she's almost won.'

'How's that?'

'She's determined to stay alive long enough to celebrate my eighteenth birthday. That's her ambition. Once I'm eighteen, she says her job is done and I'll be okay. She turns forty-five a couple of weeks later. It's a bit over a year away, so she's in with a chance.'

This didn't sound like much of an ambition to me. 'You know you're always welcome in our family,' I said, laying an arm around her shoulders.

I felt demoralised as we drove away. Sacha could be anywhere. She could be in Auckland, for all we knew.

'Where's our star, Bianka?' I asked.

By Sunday night the twins were rebelling. Charlie phoned three times, whining for me to come home. Bianka had school the next day, and I was starting to feel sick with exhaustion. I dropped my young friend home.

The Vargas' front door opened as we approached and a figure hurried out, closing it gently behind her. I hadn't seen Anita since that day by the cathedral fountain. She was wearing trousers and a rollneck sweater; the clothes were beautifully cut, but they couldn't disguise the painful fragility of her body.

'You haven't found her?' she asked.

Miserably, we shook our heads. Anita stepped closer and I felt her arms slide around me. The last woman to hug me was Louisa. Perhaps that's why it made me cry.

'You'll find her,' she whispered. I felt the strength of her will. 'Don't worry. She'll come home.'

It seemed a long drive back through the dark hills. Near Torutaniwha I saw a motorcycle gang parked in a layby. Some of the men watched as I pa.s.sed, their heads turning.

Destiny was off like a shot when I arrived. I fed the boys cheese toasties then let them pile into my bed with me. Among so much separation, so much anxiety, we needed to be close together. They were asleep within minutes. I was not.

Sunday night. Kit would be well on his way by now. My brain spun like a fruit machine, trying to calculate. Perhaps he'd landed in Hong Kong? He would drive home on Tuesday after his interview with the paper, and then I'd have to tell him that Sacha had gone.

Sacha. Sacha. Once upon a time, I used to lie awake fretting about whether my daughter would be made a prefect, or get a distinction in her flute exam, or whether her boyfriend was good enough. Now my ambitions were more modest. I merely hoped she was still alive. Lord, what a silly cow I'd been back then. Perhaps this torture was my just deserts.

I wouldn't wish it on any parent.

The next morning-Monday-I dropped the twins in Ira's cla.s.sroom before heading back into Napier. Forcing myself to think logically, I reasoned that Sacha would probably still be there, near her contacts and her dealer. I searched all day. I rang the hospital to ask if she was there, but she wasn't. In the end I walked into the police station, desperate for some kind of action. I had to queue. The officer at the desk was having a busy afternoon and the more hysterical I became the less seriously he took me. She was seventeen, right? And she'd set off in her own car? He put down his pen. Yes, they'd circulate her details again. Yes, they'd let me know if they heard anything. He was sure she'd be in touch.

I was late collecting the twins from school, and sprawled with them on the sofa while they watched Ice Age. I was finished. The computer of my brain had performed an illegal operation and would be shut down. The boys, sensing that I wasn't capable of putting up any resistance, filched packets of contraband and gorged themselves as the images on the screen faded into a buzzing oblivion. I drowned in it.

The phone was ringing. The film was over, the boys gone. It was dark outside. Sleep clawed at me as I struggled to my feet and staggered to lift the receiver. It dragged at my consciousness and numbed my tongue.

''Lo?'

'Mum.'

She was alive. It was the best news I'd had, ever. I was awake, alert, babbling with joy. 'Thank G.o.d. Thank G.o.d. Where are you?' I heard a strangled sound. 'Where are you?' I repeated urgently. 'I can't hear you.'

'Outside the cathedral.' Coughing. 'Can you come and get me?'

Thirty-four.

It wasn't Sacha I brought home. Not my little laughing girl, not the confident bombsh.e.l.l people adored at first sight. It wasn't her body, and it wasn't her soul.

This was a sallow corpse with disgusting clothes and few words. There was n.o.body home inside this head. The flesh had fallen off her face with terrifying speed, her eyes had sunk into their sockets. Open sores defaced a drooping mouth. I don't believe she'd slept for three days. She had been fuelled by meth, not by food or sleep. She looked and smelled repulsive- putrid, like something I might have dug up in a graveyard.

I once had a cat who was a magnificent hunter. He was bitten by a rat and developed an abscess at the base of his tail. The poor creature was driven half mad before I got him to the vet. He licked furiously, walked a few yards, stopped, licked furiously. That was Sacha, slumped beside me in the car. Scratch scratch. Pick pick.

'Stop,' I implored, reaching to pull her hand away. 'You're tearing right into the muscle. Where's your car?'

'I owed a s.h.i.tload of money.' She spoke in a low monotone.

'You sold it? How could you?' I heard myself raging on and on in an uncanny imitation of my own mother, forgetting that Finn and Charlie were sitting subdued in the back seat. I was wasting my breath. Sacha wasn't beside me at all; she was in some h.e.l.l of her own.

Once we were home, the boys hovered around their silent sister with worry drawn across their foreheads. 'Bleater's calling, Sacha,' said Charlie. He pointed over at the woolshed. 'D'you wanna cuddle her?'

'You can feed her if you want,' wheedled Finn.

Sacha ignored them. She limped inside, to be greeted by a tail-waggingly rapturous m.u.f.fin. Dog and boys followed us like a funeral procession across the hall and up the stairs.

'She's just tired,' I told them. 'She stayed up all weekend, silly old girl.'

'She smells,' said Finn, holding his nose. 'It's yuck.'

'Can we watch Mary Poppins?' asked Charlie. It was a sure sign of anxiety. After all, Mary Poppins was unfailingly fragrant.

'Yes, while I make the supper.'

They loitered, casting worried glances at their sister's departing back. 'Has she got the yucky snotty cold again?' asked Finn.

''Fraid so.' I gave him a little push towards the sitting room. 'Off you go.'

Sacha was contorted on her bed, shaking and sweating. 'They're coming,' she said, very loudly.

'n.o.body's coming,' I soothed, trying to cover her with the duvet. 'You're safe at home.'

'Can't you hear them?'

I listened intently, afraid I would hear the shattering roar of motorbikes on the drive. I imagined men with balaclavas and baseball bats and cruel, crazed eyes, coming to collect a debt or exact revenge. Rival gangs . . . life is cheap to these people. But there was only the chickens, clucking and squawking at some menace.

'It's those chooks. Something's upset them.' I reached out my hand to lay it on her forehead.

She shrank away, staring wildly around the room. 'We have to run.'

'This is all in your mind.'

'I wish it was.' She began to sob with fear.

I walked downstairs in a daze. I knew, now. There were no choices left. I had to save Sacha, even if it meant the end of my marriage, our adventure, the end of everything. We had to go back to England. The boys would not grow up in this extraordinary landscape, with s.p.a.ce to breathe and play and live. Kit and I would never again sit on the verandah steps and watch the sun rise. It was over. I felt a desperate sense of loss, worse than when we left our home in Bedfordshire.

Finn was chasing our poor chickens. 'Fly!' he screamed, harrying them in a raucous mob around the yard. 'Fly, my hordes of darkness!' His hordes of darkness fled under the house, just as I bisected their tormentor's path and frogmarched him inside.

He was rattled; up and off, ferreting in the toy box, scattering chaos. During supper he used his fork as a trebuchet-inspired by a computer game, I suspect-and Charlie's face as a target. Then he refused to get into the bath.

'Daddy's coming home tomorrow,' exulted Charlie, rolling around under the tap.

'That's right. Tomorrow. Finn, will you please get in?'

'Jussa minute!'

'No, now.'

'Mind out!' he screeched, vaulting into the bath fully clothed. Charlie called his brother a no-good nincomp.o.o.p. Finn grabbed Charlie by the hair and pushed his face under the water where he held it with fratricidal determination until I came to the rescue.

'That's it!' I growled. 'Straight to bed with no story for you, Finn McNamara.'

Eyes blazing, he stood up and grabbed the plastic jug we used for washing the boys' hair. It was full to the brim, and he emptied it over my head. The next moment he'd slipped on the soap, fallen face first, and had blood spurting out of his nose.

Pandemonium. Blood and water everywhere. I was still cleaning up when the phone rang. I ran down to the kitchen to find Finn holding the receiver close to his mouth, squinting censoriously up at me with a bloodied towel pressed to his face.

'Yes, she did,' he was insisting self-righteously, head bobbing up and down like a nodding dog. 'Yes. Would you believe that? She did! And now my nose is bleeding . . . Daddy wants a word with you, Mummy.'

I s.n.a.t.c.hed at the phone.

Kit's laughter. 'Witch! Have you been battering my son?'

'Whatever he's accusing me of, it's all true. Are you in Auckland?'

'Better than Auckland. The interview was postponed.'

'No!'

'The reporter broke her femur. s...o...b..arding. I'm driving home.'

'Is that safe?'

'I'm already halfway. If I start to nod off, I'll find a motel. Otherwise I'll see you about ten.'

'I can't wait,' I said, and meant it.

'How's Sacha?'

'Sacha?' Now was certainly not the time. 'Fine.'

I read my boys a story. It's one thing to impose penalties; quite another to stick to them when your five-year-old has fallen and b.u.mped his nose. I slid under Charlie's duvet and Finn climbed in too, with his hot water bottle. They lay curled close to me, just their beady eyes showing like a couple of cartoon clams.

We were reading The Secret Garden. The boys seemed captivated by the description of young d.i.c.kon and his pet lamb. When I closed the book, I felt Charlie stir.