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later.”
    Exhausted, Mee Hee slid back beneath the sheets. She was asleep before the doctors had closed the door.

4 / The White Line
    All Damien wanted was a stiff G&T, but Jake had warned him on no account was he to get pissed. He had to breathe deeply instead: breathe deep . That counselor, years ago, had once said: Jessica’s still connected to you, she’s part of you: like oxygen, like all the atoms that make up the universe . He’d done visualization exercises in their weekly sessions, which, amazingly, had eventually worked. He’d started to be able to nip his flashbacks in the bud, and one day he realized they just weren’t tripping him up anymore. Now, when he thought about his sister he imagined her just floating out there, like some black hole he’d one day get sucked into but didn’t need to worry about now. He hadn’t felt this burning, bottomless fear for a long time, not even when Dad died.
    Gradually the lungfuls of stale cabin air diluted his panic and the memory emerged: hide-and-seek in the cemetery after church, Jessica in a blue dress, hiding behind a tombstone, laughing, just a bit of her blue dress visible. He hadn’t remembered any of that before. No, that wasn’t exactly true: he remembered the graveyard clearly, and he knew they used to play in it, but only because Dad had talked about it once. But he’d forgotten so much of what happened before Jessica disappeared.
    Dad. Jessica . Was he thinking about them because of the argument he’d had with Mum before he left?
    “You want me to pay your airfare to Korea?” she’d asked, incredulous. “Damien, you’re thirty-five years old and you’ve done nothing but drift around your entire life. When are you going to grow up?”
    He’d held the MoPho away from his ear and tried to keep his cool. “Mum, once I get there I’ll be earning good money—I’ll pay you back before Christmas. Plus, I won’t be on housing benefit anymore, so you’ll have one less thing to complain about, okay?”
    “That’s what you said when Gordon and I paid for that sound engineering course. A year later you were on the dole again.”
    He couldn’t stop himself then. “Christ, Mum, I graduated at the start of a fucking world-wide economic collapse—which, frankly, Gordon helped cause!”
    “Oh, Damien.” Here it came again: the heavy sigh, the catch in the voice, the tears and then the simmering incrimination rising to a crescendo to finish him off: “Why is it always like this? What happened to you? Where did my lovely, talented, bright little boy go? I can’t just keep giving you money, Damien—I’m not helping you, really I’m not. You need to stand on your own two feet, make something of yourself, to honor Jessica if nothing else. What would she think of you now? Wasting all your precious gifts.”
    She’d never gone that far before. “Shut the fuck up about Jessica,” he’d demanded, and hung up without saying goodbye.
    Damien opened his eyes. There was a reason he spoke to his mother twice a year and thought about his family as little as humanly possible. At least his temperature felt normal again now, and his stomach was back down at Quease Level 3. But Christ, no Tomb Raider , no Spore , no spirits, no lager; plus his dead sister haunting him, six double-bagged condoms of hash in his guts and a cement-filled case of self-inflicted constipation. This was going to be a fuck of a long flight.
    “You like water?”
    The stewardess had reappeared with a bottle of IceCap and a corn-plastic cup. He didn’t like the fact he was drawing attention to himself, but water was a good idea. He nodded thanks and took the cup—desalinated Atlantic, not his favorite H 2 O, but they all had to do their bit to lower sea levels.
    The stewardess poured the water. “Thanks,” he mumbled as she twisted the cap back on the bottle.
    “Why you come Korea?” she asked.
    Afraid he would blush again, he avoided meeting her gaze—but hey, maybe a little