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she wouldnever meet or hear of, in landscapes quite unlike her own, yet all of them doing the same things, growing up, finding mates, starting families, raising kids. And though the plane was travelling at however many hundred miles an hour it seemed only to crawl across this landmass, this lump of territory that someone down there called home and thought was all in all.
    And when the best part of a day later, a day spent in the limbo land of long-haul air travel, Annie saw the mountains of the South Island rising out of the ocean, she had only a sense of how impossibly remote, how pin-prickishly small amid all that water was the place that she called home. Slivers of rock thrust up by the meeting of two crustal plates, slivers we think of as static and permanent only because we measure time against our own brief lives. These little islands owed their very existence to the same forces that had just afflicted Christchurch, that had ended two hundred human lives and disrupted perhaps half a million more and all in geophysical terms without doing very much at all. It made the whole of life there seem as contingent, as arbitrary and as opportunistic and as meaningless, as it obviously was. But at the same time it had to be lived. ‘When you get down,’ and Annie could hear Mrs Fernyhough’s quavery voice, ‘the house is a maelstrom of loves and hates, where you, having got down, belong.’
    Annie knew she belonged, could feel it from 40,000 feet, could feel herself being drawn, pulled by a sort of emotional gravity as the plane passed over the green ribbon of the West Coast that looked barely touched by the human beast, overthe impossible white beauty of the Southern Alps, the snow of their peaks and flanks ironed by the air, then down over the foothills, the rivers of the plain gathering strength as the tributaries nosed from the countless valleys and merged in their push towards the sea, the whole thing laid out like a geography lesson. And then the great alluvial plain of Canterbury, the human presence everywhere in the quilt of paddocks, the dots of sheep, the squares of ripe wheat or barley, the toy farmhouses governing all this farmed fertility.
    The plane swung out over the ocean and came in across the heart of the city. Everyone craned to see destruction. From her aisle seat Annie caught only glimpses of seemingly undamaged roof. And then the wheels hit tarmac and the brakes gripped and suddenly the plane was a beast of the land again and Annie was home.
    The air bridge had been lined with photos of bush and was loud with recorded birdsong. Though Annie had rarely set foot in bush and had never heard such a chorus of birdsong, her heart still rose to the sound and the sense that here in the South Pacific this wasn’t Europe. It was unique, different, small but brave. And unlike Heathrow it hadn’t forgotten how to smile. Maybe it was a gimmick, but the grin and the ‘Welcome home’ from the man in passport control did something to Annie’s heart.
    She emerged into the arrivals hall through sliding glass doors that she had seen on the internet earlier that week as search and rescue teams arrived from around the world and were met withapplause that had brought a lump to Annie’s throat 12,000 miles away. And there was Jess, squealing and bouncing with welcoming delight, with that overflowing vitality that had always been her trademark, her signature, her self. It was this irrepressibility that had attracted Annie in school, and the friendship, unlikely though it was, had endured. Big, forthright Jess, and she was bigger still now, whom Annie thought of as a force of nature. And now she burst around the barrier and hugged Annie with an intensity that brought smiles, Annie noticed, to the faces of the others waiting to meet the newly arrived. Had anyone ever hugged Annie with quite such absence of reserve, such commitment? Her mother? No. Paul? Rarely. Her father? Oh, it had been so