The Postcard

by Zoë Folbigg

  ‘Yeah, I come every year. To kick back. Cleanse. Get out of London and all the…’ he waves erratic hands around his face to gesture craziness.

  ‘London? You’re still in London?’

  Maya was relieved that she had never bumped into Jon after he dumped her. Not once. On the late July morning she last saw him, when she packed him off for the final day of his Shakespeare summer school course at RADA with a muffin and a kiss, she didn’t know that he was going home with his Ophelia that night, with just a text to say it was over and that he was sorry. And he never contacted her again. The £5,000 flat deposit was gone; it had paid for Jon’s course. Over the summer he had fallen in love with sonnets and someone else, he had quietly and gradually moved all of the things he wanted out of their shared rental flat in Finsbury Park without Maya even noticing. Maya cried and cried until her hair turned wavy, until she got up, moved back to Hazelworth, started running with her father. And she never saw him again.

  ‘Well, London, Stratford, Toronto, LA… Wherever work takes me really. You could say I’m a bit of a nomad.’

  Maya stands tall and puts her hand to her brow, to shield her eyes from the rising sun. To check if this is actually Jon Vincent standing in front of her on a secluded corner of a secluded beach in a secluded part of another continent.

  Dammit, it is.

  ‘Want to walk?’ he gestures beyond the karst at the end of the beach to the next bay around the cove.

  I need to Skype Nena. She won’t believe it when I tell her I bumped into Jon Vincent.

  ‘OK,’ Maya shrugs, to her surprise.

  This coincidence is definitely worth a conversation, even if she doesn’t know where to begin. Maya doesn’t want to carry on running in front of Jon anyway. He’s never seen her run and she’ll feel too self-conscious in her shorts and vest. Running was something she did After Jon, to cure herself of heartache. Anyway, her forehead is pounding and her knees feel a bit weak. Walking is good.

  ‘Just until I catch my breath,’ she says, giving herself a get-out.

  23

  Maya glances back down the beach, to see if anyone can see her, before walking around the lofty karst to another, even more rugged and undeveloped stretch. She looks up in awe and gasps.

  ‘Wow, gorgeous isn’t it?’

  ‘Stunning,’ Jon says, looking at Maya.

  Maya feels like she’s breaking a rule. Leaving the confines of The Haven and its private beach on day one of the detox. Agreeing to go for a walk with the man who broke her heart. She thinks of James, back in their bedroom, and imagines him scrolling through his digital SLR camera roll looking at pictures; his beautiful concentrating face with his tongue sticking out at one corner of his mouth.

  ‘So, you come here often,’ Maya states, embarrassed by how the words come out. She puts her hands on her hips as she walks, hoping to catch her breath, and feels a trickle of sweat running down her spine and into the top of her shorts. She gazes down at her feet on the sand, stealing looks at Jon and what he’s wearing as she goes. Cream shorts and a tailored pastel-coloured shirt, open at the chest she bumped into.

  ‘Every year if I can.’

  ‘On your own?’ Maya says, trying to sound neither bitter nor hopeful.

  ‘Yeah, I love the tranquillity of this place; I like to come and reset the dials. Escape the intensity of my craft.’

  ‘Your craft?’ Maya tries not to sound churlish.

  ‘Yes. Acting.’ Jon gives a little look as if to say of course.

  ‘Oh, you still do that?’

  ‘Well, I’m making a pretty good living from it, you could say…’

  Maya wonders which drama he might have ended up being a bit part in, because she doesn’t remember seeing him in the Radio Times or Esprit.

  Five thousand pounds well spent then.

  ‘Oh, I’ve not seen you in anything.’

  ‘Most of my TV stuff is in the US; although I do more theatre lately. I’m still recovering from Hamlet at the Barbican, such are the demons of method acting.’

  ‘Oh right.’

  ‘But it’s nice to come out here, do some yoga, read some scripts.’ Jon looks at Maya and winks, as he waves the ream of white paper he’s carrying. She feels a familiar flip in her stomach. ‘And it’s nice not to be recognised.’

  Maya takes her cue to look at Jon’s face properly, to see if she can recognise anything from her past. His delicate features are the same, his little nose and thin lips, but his bright eyes have creases and crow’s feet starting to form, which suit him because he always did look young for his age. Maya hears Nena’s scornful voice in her head and it tickles her; she misses her.

  Baby-faced Assassin. I’m going to kill him.

  Jon’s skin is pale, his face not yet tanned. His hair isn’t golden blond, the way it turned when they holidayed in Mykonos and Ibiza. She figures he must have recently arrived too.

  ‘Are you doing the detox? I start today.’

  ‘I’m in pre-cleanse phase. Landed late last night, so I start tomorrow. It’s intense, I can’t lie,’ he says authoritatively. He doesn’t know that this is Maya’s first time at The Haven, but he assumes it is. He rubs the soft hair at the back of his neck. Maya remembers the feeling of rubbing her cheek against the tennis-ball fuzz. It looks better longer. ‘I always drop about six kilos here, and I’m pretty lean to start with.’

  ‘Wow.’

  Maya is suddenly aware of her softer frame, although Jon has never seen her so fit.

  They carry on down the beach, away from The Haven, away from James.

  ‘So, what do you do?’ asks Jon, putting his script into a plastic bag from 7-Eleven.

  This is it. This is Maya’s time to shine. To prove that she got over Jon and fell in love again. This time with the love of her life, and that her new career as a trained patisserie-chef-slash-travel-writer is pretty amazing thankyouverymuch. In the panic of her nerves and the racing of her heart, she doesn’t realise that that’s exactly what happened. Her life doesn’t need polishing.

  ‘Oh, so you know I went to work at Walk In Wardrobe?’

  Jon looks a bit vacant but nods.

  ‘Well, I was there a couple of years, then I went to FASH – you must know FASH – and then…’ She wonders whether to tell Jon about Fifi Fashion Insider, or assume he already knows. Her face was everywhere for a week around the big reveal. That it was a girl called Maya Flowers writing an anonymous newspaper column about life on the inside at FASH. People were talking about her on Question Time and Woman’s Hour, surely Jon would have noticed. ‘Do you remember about eighteen months ago, there was this story…’

  As they stroll in the morning sunshine, Maya loosely explains and Jon looks slightly puzzled.

  ‘Maybe that’s when I was Stateside. I did a legal drama most of 2014. On location in Canada.’

  Maya feels a little crestfallen and can’t be bothered to go into more detail. Nor is it worth mentioning My Travels with Train Man; she doesn’t want to give Jon the satisfaction of saying he’s never heard of that either. ‘Ah, well long story short, I left fashion and moved into baking.’

  ‘Baking, wow? What do you do, like, little cupcakes?’

  ‘Patisserie.’

  Maya feels a puff of satisfaction from saying that. Rustic Maya and her rough-around-the-edges bakes are now polished and refined – and she worked bloody hard at refinement too.

  ‘But I’ve packed away my KitchenAid and my palette knife. James – my boyfriend – he and I are travelling. For a year.’

  ‘Wow, Maya, you sound really happy. I’m glad you’re happy.’

  They stop again and turn to face each other on the sand as the waves gently lap Jon’s bare toes and Maya’s trainer heels.

  Maya looks at Jon’s face. Half of her is like jelly. The other half of her wants to punch him for sounding so bloody patronising.

  Maya wants to ask Jon whether he has a girlfriend. An actress wife or a poor Juliet or Rosalind back in Blighty, waiti
ng for him to get back from Thailand or wherever he buggered off to go and find himself again. He doesn’t have a ring on his wedding finger; there is no tan line from where he might have taken it off.

  As they approach the end of the next cove, Maya feels relief. Relief that her forehead has stopped hurting, relief that there is nothing else to say right now, relief that this walk has reached a natural end. All she wants to do is run and get back to James. Her dark, tanned, reliable boyfriend, waiting in the bed they made love in last night – before self-administered colonics in a shared bathroom kill any chance of romance thereafter.

  ‘Look, I’m going to get going – I was meant to drink my first clay shake at seven, and I’m worried I’ll lose any power left in me once I stop eating actual food.’

  ‘It’s really not as bad as you think.’

  ‘OK, well, I don’t believe you, but thanks,’ Maya smirks, before turning around.

  ‘Nice to bump into you, Maya. Literally.’

  ‘Weird to bump into you, Jon.’

  Maya gives him a salute and breaks into a gentle jog, to get back to her thoughts, her column, her love.

  That was weird.

  There were so many levels of weird about the encounter that Maya can’t think about what her next column should be, or how much she wishes she could have mango for breakfast. She’s not even panicking about the colonic later. All she can think about is how weird that was; to physically bump into Jon Vincent; to see him after all these years; that neither mentioned the elephant in the room or on the beach: how Jon took Maya’s flat deposit and broke her heart.

  ‘See you in yoga!’ he shouts after her.

  Fuck it, Maya thinks, as she breaks into a run on the sand towards the karst that separates this cove from the next, aware that Jon is watching her. She feels the slight wobble of cellulite in the back of her thighs, sees the curve of her upper arms in her peripheral vision. She runs like Beyoncé.

  I am strong.

  24

  ‘Our correspondent, Clarence, is live in Bangkok with the latest. Clarence, there’s been a slight change of tone in the investigation, hasn’t there?’

  ‘Yes, Anna, it’s now been three months since Manon Junot was last seen in Thailand, and yesterday – what was her twenty-eighth birthday – was seen as an opportunity for the family, who have met with the police in Thailand, to make a fresh appeal. They released some interesting new information pertaining to Manon’s well-being that they hope will help the public and in turn help the investigation. Her elder brother, Antoine, and sister, Valerie, joined the now-familiar face of Police Chief Kongduang in Bangkok, to plead with the public for help again. Here’s what they had to say.’

  CUTS TO A PRESS CONFERENCE FROM BANGKOK WITH A SAD-LOOKING MAN IN HIS THIRTIES AND A YOUNGER WOMAN IN HER TWENTIES, SITTING ALONGSIDE POLICE CHIEF KONGDUANG. THE FRENCH MAN TALKS TO A BANK OF MICROPHONES.

  ‘The police are aware that our sister does have a history of mental health problems, for which she has been treated and we have cared for her for many years. She was managing with this and able to lead a very normal and fulfilling life around this with her work in London, but we are mindful that Manon might have had a relapse.’

  CAMERA CUTS TO THE SISTER.

  ‘We just want to say to Manny if she’s watching, or if anyone is with her and can tell her, that we love you, we’re thinking of you on your birthday, and we will celebrate you – and keep celebrating you – until you are home. Until you are safe back with us. We love you.’

  THE GIRL BREAKS DOWN IN TEARS AND COLLAPSES ON HER BROTHER’S SHOULDER.

  CAMERA CUTS TO THE STUDIO WHILE THE ANCHOR TALKS TO THE CORRESPONDENT ON A SCREEN.

  ‘Clarence, what can the police tell us about Manon Junot’s mental health, and what effect does that have on the investigation?’

  ‘Yes, it’s strange that the family and the police chose to release this information now and not before, but they didn’t go into any detail – and we’re not sure what Ms Junot’s mental health history is – but it does throw a new sensitivity to the search: might she be suffering depression and could that be the cause of her disappearance? Are the police looking into suicide, for example? Police Chief Kongduang wouldn’t be drawn on that – but it feels like this investigation has changed tack. The conversation seems to be less about an abduction or random attack and more about whether Manon Junot had a relapse in her health and whether her state of mind affected choices she made, where she went and what she might have done. Her sister, Valerie, alluded to her being with someone, in asking people to pass on a message. Might they think she’s been kidnapped or being cared for? It’s hard to tell. For now, they hope their latest appeal will be enough to find Manon safe and well and to bring her home.’

  ‘Clarence, thank you.’

  25

  March 2016, The Haven, Thailand

  James turns off the TV from his position propped up in bed and continues scrolling through his photos. One arm is raised behind his head, the other is holding the camera and pressing arrows on a circle while he zooms in on a shot of Maya diving into the sea. Her white bikini bright against her tanned skin.

  Beautiful.

  The moment of peace is broken however when Maya bursts through the door, sweaty and bothered, with a red mark and a small lump, slap bang in the middle of her forehead.

  James looks up through his black rectangular glasses. Sexy as hell, but for the empty long glass of grey sludge he’s just picked up.

  ‘I made the clay shakes – yours is by the TV.’ He winces. ‘You OK?’

  Maya rubs her forehead and furrows her brow. ‘Just about. I wasn’t looking where I was running, but I’m OK.’

  James sits up. ‘You want some ice? I could get some from the kitchen block, I’m sure.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. I was rather hoping for a mango lassi or a banana milkshake.’ Maya rolls her eyes.

  ‘Sorry, honey, you got us into this mess. If I’m drinking it, you have to.’

  ‘What does it taste like?’

  ‘Clay.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s gross. But think of it acting like a magnet and sloughing out all the shit as it passes into your tummy.’

  ‘Have you been talking to Moon?’

  ‘Hahaha, no, but I think visualisation is the only way to get through this. Imagine its healing properties. Or that it tastes of mango lassi.’

  ‘Oh, the mango lassis!’ Maya sighs. ‘OK, visualisation… Does that help?’

  ‘No, I gagged.’

  Maya picks up and examines the tall glass of grey sludge by the television and contemplates one last treat before she dives in. Except she doesn’t have any treats. The last sweet treat she ate was a Crunchie on the boat from the mainland, which tasted like it was way past its sell-by-date. She’s been craving Green & Black’s since they left home in December.

  Maya plonks herself down, sitting next to James on the bed, and takes the cocktail stirrer from his glass to awaken the sludge at the bottom of hers. She looks down, into the grey abyss, then raises the glass to her mouth.

  I have to do this. The column depends on it.

  ‘So, here’s a weird thing,’ she says, stopping before her lips touch the liquid, hoping to delay one uncomfortable thing by mentioning another.

  ‘That looks really sore.’ James beat her to it. He rubs her lightly freckled forehead with his thumb.

  ‘Ah, well there’s a funny story there…’

  Maya looks nervous. James sits up higher and concentrates, he’s not used to seeing her like this and has no idea what she’s about to say.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Well, you’ll never guess who I literally bumped into on my run?’

  James pauses. He has no clue. They are on the other side of the world and they haven’t made any new friends here. They mainly have no friends because they’re antisocial buggers who tend not to mingle with other, younger backpackers. They prefer private rooms to dorms, rummy for two to nake
d Twister at a Full Moon party, and quiet nights drinking Singha and SangSom on their terrace to Kumbaya around a campfire with travellers who are ten years younger, teens who like to hop in and out of each other’s bunks at night – although thankfully none of that is happening here at The Haven.

  ‘Wasn’t Manon Junot, was it?’

  ‘What? You’re obsessed! The media are obsessed. I bet they wouldn’t be so obsessed if she wasn’t so gorgeous. Anyway, I reckon she’s in China by now.’

  ‘Why China?’

  ‘I dunno. Thailand, Laos, Cambodia… why not China?! And I dreamt it the other night.’

  James looks baffled.

  ‘But anyway,’ Maya is suddenly worried that she sounds too excited about this gossip, so she checks herself and looks back at her clay shake, stirring it three times clockwise. ‘It wasn’t Manon Junot, silly.’

  ‘Who did you bump into then?’

  ‘It was Jon,’ she pauses. ‘Jon Vincent.’

  James looks a bit blank. Jon and Vincent next to each other are two names that don’t mean that much to him.

  Maya feels even more awkward having to spell it out. ‘Jon Vincent, my ex-boyfriend. You know, the twat who squandered my flat deposit on acting lessons and ran off with Lady Macbeth.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ James says, a bit disinterestedly, although he really wants to ask loads of questions. ‘What’s he doing here?’ is the only one he has the courage to ask.

  ‘Same as us. Detoxing. Loafing. Not writing about it, mind, like I have to… He has a pile of scripts. Apparently he made it as an actor. Which is a bit annoying really, giving he stitched me up, surely he owes me fifteen per cent of everything he earns. On top of that five grand. And there’s seven years of interest…’ Maya laughs nervously, seeing that James is disconcerted by her wittering.

  ‘What was his last name again?’

  ‘Vincent. Jon Vincent.’

  ‘Nah, never heard of him.’

  ‘He probably uses a stage name. Jon Vincent is not the kind of name to go stellar. Actually, did you know Vin Diesel is called Mark Vincent? Jon probably took his cues from Vin and has a much more exciting stage name.’