by Zoë Folbigg
We eventually came down from our kettle-drum- thumping high and checked into what’s becoming more standard Indian accommodation – the mid-range hotel. It’s cheap, yes, somewhat less palatial than our first experience: more Marigold Hotel than Maharajah’s residence – and I admit it sucks a bit having been spoiled. But Train Man has been very gallant about it and is getting stuck into backpacking the way I ought to. And he does a nightly sweep of our past-their-best hotel rooms for bugs, which is both heroic and sexy.
We’re now in Agra, where there seem to be an awful lot of bugs, but one thing has made it all worthwhile: a glimmer of our former palatial existence, in the most beautiful palace of them all, the Taj Mahal.
We set our alarms at 3 a.m. so we could see it before the crowds, almost blue in the serenity of sunrise. ‘A teardrop on the cheek of eternity,’ my dad told me before we started this trip. And that it certainly is. We walked around the shrine built by Shah Jahan as a memorial for his third wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their fourteenth child in 1631. I gazed across at Train Man and wondered if he would do such a thing for me, if we were to ever have fourteen children. It’s a bigger ask than clearing cockroaches from our bedroom, I guess, so we walked around in awe before we went to find some chana from a street vendor and to catch up on our sleep.
But two strange things have happened, dear reader, since we came to India. 1) We’ve both put on weight. This Delhi belly thing is a crock, which means all of the amazing ghee-fried goods we’re eating are clinging firmly to my thighs. And 2) I’m clucky. It happened somewhere between Udaipur and Bundi, on a bus journey that was more traumatic than quaint (I’m still too upset to write up the experience of sleeping in a coffin, the feeling of being buried alive for eight hours, but I will one day, I’m sure). But I looked into Train Man’s warm eyes as I feared for my life, put my earbuds in my ear and turned on shuffle on my battered old iPod Nano. Kings Of Leon, ‘Knocked Up’. First it made me realise I want a baby, then it made me cry all night. Uh-oh.
13
February 2016, London, England
Nena sits in the Nena-shaped hole at one end of the sofa, feeding Ava, and wonders if she’s ever going to get up, its gravitational pull is so strong. Not that she’s going anywhere in a hurry. Her mother, Victoria, sits at the other end, in the space for Tom or guests, draped elegantly as she gazes at her granddaughter, still wearing her cream wool coat and Gucci loafers. BBC News is muted on the television opposite them.
‘Darling, I think you should do whatever you want. It’s your body.’
Nena kicks off her slippers, accidentally pushing her copy of Esprit magazine onto the floor.
‘The health visitor was a bit judgy, said she’s too young. World Health Organisation says six months. Nazis.’
‘Oh, bother to them!’ says Victoria, curling her already slightly upturned nose. ‘You’re her mother, you have to do what’s best for you. Happy mama, happy baby, I always thought. Anyway, I’m sure I weaned you around four months. She’s almost that.’
Hmmm, not really, closer to three.
Nena rubs her brow but doesn’t say anything.
‘What does Tom say about it all?’
‘Well, he can’t even remember how old Arlo was, but Kate says she weaned him at six months.’
‘Oh.’
‘He wants me to do whatever I want, but I feel bad.’ Nena looks at the blue veins running through her light brown breast. ‘I just can’t keep up with production. She always bloody wants feeding, day and night. Mostly at night.’
‘Then don’t.’
Victoria puts a pale hand on Nena’s grey marl pyjama bottoms. Looking at her mother’s elegant fingers, with their familiar lines and rings, gives Nena a sense of comfort. They’re the hands that rubbed her back when she was sick as a child; the hands that clapped proudly – if demurely – when Nena was earning awards in ballet, tap and swing. The hands that softly stroked Nena’s long black hair when she was crying in hospital about the enormity of motherhood.
‘How did you cope?’
‘I gave you bottles, darling. I was back at the Ballet within three months; I had to be fit enough to perform, mentally agile enough to memorise five shows at a time. I couldn’t be up all night, surrounded by… this.’ Victoria gestures to the mountain of baby paraphernalia, swamping the light symmetry of the Edwardian flat. ‘Why don’t you give her formula? It really isn’t a crime and you’ve done so well to feed for this long.’
Nena looks down and strokes the eyelashes of Ava’s closed eyes as she suckles.
‘Formula is much better these days than it was in the eighties, and you turned out fine. I mean, I couldn’t have functioned without formula and without help. That’s why your father sent for Avó. She was a pain in the backside, but by golly she helped with you.’
Nena thinks of her grandma. Her shapeless floral dresses. The folds on the tops of her arms. Her round tummy and little thin legs beneath it. How she, a Brazilian peasant, and her mother, principal dancer at the Royal Ballet, couldn’t have been more different. She smiles and remembers her fondly.
‘Ahhh, Ava would have loved her,’ Nena says with a wistful smile, as she lifts her baby to her shoulder and tries to bring up a burp.
‘Avó would have loved Ava!’
Nena rests Ava on her back against her lap and moves her legs gently in circles, to help ease the wind in her stomach. ‘You’ve got teeny-tiny legs like Avó!’
Ava looks up at her mother, smiles and farts, making Nena jump, but not laugh.
‘You surprised me!’
‘Good girl, bravo!’ applauds her grandmother, still not that keen to get stuck in.
Nena looks at the digital clock on the tickertape on the TV. It’s 4.48 p.m. and there’s brand new Real Housewives of Orange County at five, although Nena is too embarrassed to admit to her mother, either that she watches it or that she punctuates her day by it. Real Housewives is her cue to throw on some clothes, to make it look like she’s been up and doing, so Tom doesn’t worry about her when he gets home.
‘Come on, why don’t we go for a walk, darling? We could go to the park.’
Nena doesn’t want to go for a walk. It’s almost 5 p.m. on a cold February afternoon, and the eternal darkness outside is not worth getting changed or a change bag packed for.
‘It’s OK, Mama. Tom will be home soon. He’ll want to hear all about our day, won’t he sweetcheeks?’
Victoria arches an eyebrow as she looks around the flat with disappointment and Ava’s cheeks flush red as she passes more than wind.
Nena wonders how she can flip from BBC News to ITVBe without her mother noticing. She looks along the green sofa, but Victoria is gazing at the silent news. Another story about the French researcher who’s gone missing in Thailand or Laos or Vietnam or wherever it was she went missing around Christmas. When she didn’t make her flight home.
‘Ghastly news,’ Victoria says to herself. ‘Her poor parents.’
Victoria looks away from the television and catches sight of Esprit peeping out from under the sofa and picks it up. Emma Thompson exudes confidence on the cover under a cool crop of white-blonde hair and Victoria wonders if she’s had any work done.
‘Oh, how’s Maya getting on?’
She starts flicking through the magazine with purpose.
‘Good, I think. We haven’t Skyped in a few weeks, but it all sounds like a hoot according to the column.’
‘Bravo, Maya!’ says Victoria, as she flips past Golden Globe beauty, recipes with aubergines, and handbags shot in an American desert before she gets to My Travels with Train Man, three quarters of the way back.
‘Although according to that she’s got clucky,’ Nena adds with a doubtful brow. ‘Don’t know why she wants a baby now, not when she’s got the world at her feet. Maybe she just made it up for drama.’
‘Must be Ava’s influence,’ says Victoria, looking from the magazine to her grandchild. ‘I know I’m biased, but she is ast
onishing. And definitely the most beautiful baby that was ever born.’
‘Fancy changing her nappy then?’
‘No, darling, don’t be ridiculous.’
14
February 2016, Kerala, India
‘It just would have been nice if you’d warned me,’ James says, before sipping through a straw that’s jutting out of a raw coconut. ‘I thought you weren’t going to write anything too… personal… in there. You know, keep it light.’
James sits at the round rattan dining table in the living room of their houseboat, moored into a siding of the Keralan backwaters. Palm trees trim the thin pathways along the wide, flat expanse of dark water. On one side, a red flag with a white hammer and sickle is tied to two posts like an advertising billboard. Frogs leap from lily pad to lily pad; a cormorant airs its wings on a branch.
For three days, Maya and James have been holed up on the Arayil, a houseboat slowly navigating the canals and lagoons of the backwaters. It would have been romantic were it not for Arayil’s captain, Sumon, drivers Jineash and Manoharam, and chef Pradeesh, all keeping them company and wanting to learn more about Maya and James: what life is like for them in England, whether they also love cricket, what they eat for breakfast at home, whether Leicester City really can win the league. In the evenings, Sumon moors the boat and the crew leave Maya and James to it, not before they roll down the plastic sides of the back deck, in order to minimise the mosquito bites at night.
Pradeesh is such a fine chef, James and Maya were almost tempted to take him up on his offer of moving in with them back in Hazelworth.
‘We don’t really do that in England,’ said James apologetically. ‘Not us anyway. Although we wish we could.’
Now the crew have disembarked for the final night, and James and Maya are feasting with their fingers on fried fish, curry, rice, sambal and porotta from banana-leaf plates. They each have a large coconut that Pradeesh proudly hacked down from a palm tree as they moored, from which they’re drinking the sweet watery milk.
Maya’s face gets hot as she works out how she can keep this conversation light – everything felt so dark that night on the bus – so she shields her eyes with her own large green coconut as she takes a sip.
Maya had been completely blindsided by her overwhelming desire to be a mother. It’s not that babies weren’t part of her plan: she’d mothered Jacob and Florian and changed their terrycloth nappies when she was just a little girl. She adored her nephews and felt happiest blowing raspberries on their chubby stomachs. And she was nothing but over the moon for Nena when Nena told her she was pregnant – and loved Ava from the first moment she met her. But that all seemed safely stored under ‘save for later’. Something she and James might think about if their trip went well. Not once, as she packed and prepped, did she think it would be an issue on a trip she pushed for, and she surprised herself as much as she surprised James during that bleak journey to Bundi.
While she tried to forget about her wobble, she forgot that James is her biggest fan, and when he’s in an internet cafe, emailing Dominic or Petra, or his mum and dad, he visits Esprit online, to see how the columns look when they’re published, given they can’t see a hard copy of the magazine on their travels.
Maya had conveniently forgotten to show James that column before she sent it.
‘It’s not that personal,’ she says, putting down her coconut and scooping chutney to her mouth from a papad. ‘I didn’t fully tell the readers how I lost my shit about it on the bus.’
‘But you’ve put it out there, in black and white, that you want a baby; that I don’t want one.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You may as well have.’
‘But you don’t.’
James doesn’t argue with that.
Maya can feel beads of sweat forming on her freckled nose. Perhaps it’s the chutney Pradeesh warned her about.
‘But you make me look like a bit of an arsehole.’
‘No I don’t. I said you’re a hero who gets rid of cockroaches and you have a tendency to make everything right with the world. And you’re not an arsehole, I would never say you were.’
James shrugs.
‘It was just a blip. I was just inferring that we are unaligned. We were unaligned.’
‘Unaligned?’
James’ eyes look wider and glassier. There is an exasperation in his face that Maya has never noticed before.
‘We’re travelling, Maya, you wanted us to come on this trip. I cancelled all my bookings so we could do this.’
Maya wonders why James is so upset, when really it should be her who’s feeling cut up.
‘It’s fine, we went through this in Bundi,’ she says placatingly. ‘It was just a wobble.’
‘Just a wobble? Honey, you listened to your iPod and you cried all night.’
‘I was panicking in that coffin. Look, you don’t want a baby and I don’t want a baby, so we’re all good and all aligned now. And I won’t write anything too personal from now on. Not without checking with you first, yeah?’
Maya tries to sound breezy as she studies James’ face.
James smiles gratefully, his dimple sinking into his left cheek. Maya can’t resist getting up out of her rattan chair and walking round to him. She plonks herself across his lap and kisses the dimple repeatedly, as if she expects to fill it with kisses; to smooth it out. Smooth everything out. James’ arms hang down by his side, his topless torso is warm and his skin smells sweet, so Maya kisses that too and looks at him cheerily.
‘Anyway, look, mosquitoes aside, we’re in paradise, and I’ve found my stride with this travelling malarkey. Nothing can ruin it for us now.’
15
‘It’s been six weeks since 27-year-old French national Manon Junot went missing in Thailand and authorities are under increasing pressure to make arrests after releasing Vorapat Tanakrit, the caretaker at the Lemon Tree Hotel in Chiang Rai, where Ms Junot was last registered, without charge. Tanakrit was the last person to be spotted with Ms Junot, after he was filmed on CCTV comforting her in an alleyway in the town on the twentieth of December. There have been no other leads since. Her anguished father and stepmother, who first became concerned when she didn’t make contact at Christmas, raised the alarm when Manon didn’t make her flight back to Paris on New Year’s Day. Today the family made another heartfelt plea at a press conference in their home town in the Alsace region of France.’
A BANNER ACROSS THE SCREEN READS ‘ANDRE JUNOT, FATHER’.
‘We ask anyone who might have been staying at the Lemon Tree Hotel between the eighteenth of December 2015 and the first of January 2016 to think about whether they saw Manon in or around the hotel, the gardens, or even the town. Whether it was an interaction in the kitchen, or a drink in a local bar… she’s a memorable girl, she has a charm and a great way of making people feel special, so we would like to think some other tourists or workers in Chiang Rai or elsewhere along the tourist route might have remembered where she was, what state she was in. My beautiful Manon has a face you don’t forget.’
THE MAN BREAKS DOWN IN TEARS. THE SCREEN CUTS TO A BLONDE CORRESPONDENT IN THE FIELD.
‘The family are also urging police in Laos to get involved after tourists in the capital, Vientiane, reported a French woman “behaving erratically” in a bakery in the city in December. Thai police chief Somsak Kongduang, who is leading the investigation, believes Junot had left Laos and re-entered Thailand overland at the Chiang Khong/Huay Xai border in the north on December fifteenth but would like to talk to police about her time there.’
THE SCREEN CUTS TO THE FACE OF POLICE CHIEF KONGDUANG.
‘Our friends in Laos are reluctant to get involved because Miss Junot had already re-entered Thailand, and border authorities have no record of her leaving the country again, so I understand they are not keen to open up a grand investigation there. But we do ask for help with information and CCTV, to see if we can learn anything about her time there.’
CUTS BACK TO BLONDE CORRESPONDENT TALKING TO CAMERA.
‘With so little help and so few sightings, the Thai police now have to unpick what happened on the days between Ms Junot arriving back into Thailand and her arrival at the Lemon Tree Hotel in Chiang Rai three days later.
‘In a transient route that’s full of Western backpackers, someone must have befriended a French woman travelling on her own. Who did she meet? And what information might they have about her plans to get from Chiang Rai back to Bangkok? If indeed, she planned to at all. This is Heidi Adler, for CNN, in Bangkok.’
16
February 2016, London, England
Tom walks through the revolving glass doors of New Broadcasting House, a vertiginous curved glass building that looks like it might spin into orbit, swipes his ID pass and saunters through a second set of glass doors. The security guard gives him a nod.
‘Morning, Steve.’ Tom flashes his friendliest smile before walking briskly up a flight of stairs, two at a time, past a newsroom, where a man sits at a desk talking to camera, through three sets of doors and along a labyrinthine corridor, past soundproof booths and tiny studios, glass offices and along another higgledy-piggledy corridor, out into an open office of hot desks where the Children’s department tend to convene. There’s a small kitchen area at one end of it, that looks out onto the cul-de-sac of the BBC entrance, and Tom has a quick glimpse out of it, to see the view he so loves in this corner of central London. He looks at his watch and walks back to the kitchen.