by Zoë Folbigg
James moves his car along the board.
‘Yeah, weirdly she bumped into an old uni friend in Stoke Newington,’ Maya is relieved to counter. ‘Not quite the way I did.’ She rubs her forehead.
‘Twins!’ James laughs. ‘Take two pegs and receive 2,000 from each player. Hang on, is that 2,000 per twin?’
Maya frowns again while James rummages in the small plastic bag. The sound of his fumbling for pegs agitates Maya and she bites her lip.
‘What shall I have? Two boys, two girls, one of each?’
‘I don’t fucking know!’ Maya snaps, standing up to go inside and find a can of Coke on the bedside table. Except there is no can of Coke on the bedside table, they’re detoxing, so she comes straight back out. She wants something, but she can’t face her lymph flush juice yet.
James looks confused and rubs his temple. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing!’
Maya throws the money across the board and James gives a conciliatory look.
‘Look, why don’t you go for a run, you seem like you could do with it.’
‘Don’t patronise me, Jame—’
‘I’m not, you just seem like you need to—’
‘It’s too hot to run!’
‘OK, I was just—’
‘I can’t anyway. I feel awful. I have zero energy. I won’t do sunrise yoga tomorrow.’
James is relieved to hear it as he has no intention of ever doing sunrise yoga again.
‘And I’m so hungry. I need chocolate.’
Maya’s neediness softens her, which in turn softens James.
‘Me too. My head’s hurting.’
Maya and James give each other consolatory smiles and hold hands across the low table they’re hunched over. The sound of Bob Marley coming from the restaurant helps defuse the discord.
‘Let’s finish this, eh, and have a nap,’ James suggests. ‘Sod it, maybe we just sleep through the next few days.’
‘We’ve got colonics at three, remember?’
James scrunches up his face.
‘Your move then,’ he says, a competitive glint in his eye that irks Maya and she lets go of his hand.
She spins the wheel of misfortune and moves her red car along. When they played yesterday she cheerily sang ‘Little Red Corvette’ as her piece wound around the bends on the board. James can tell that won’t happen today.
‘Five,’ she states. ‘One, two, three, four, five.’ Maya cranes her neck to read what’s on the board. ‘Honeymoon over: pay 10,000 for overdue bills.’
James shrinks into his rattan chair.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ Maya says, pushing the board away as she gets back up. There still isn’t a can of Coke in the bedroom.
31
‘Mind if I join you guys?’
Jon stands topless and proud, his strapping legs in stripy tailored shorts and his bare feet beige from the sand. He holds his lymph flush juice in one hand and a wedge of bound paper in the other.
Maya is somewhat thrown. And mortified. It’s day three of their detox and, having just done her third colonic of the week, she and James decided to leave the sanctuary of their bedroom – too close to the scene of the atrocities in the stark en suite (no Matchbox car today for James, just green sludge; Maya’s had a greyer hue) – and escaped to the cafe area with a mural made of shells on the wall behind the bar. Maya doesn’t want to go through the contents of her bowels with Jon. Yesterday’s yoga was awkward enough. Today she’s even less keen for another such encounter, and James has become unusually grumpy.
It’s a good job Maya filed her first column before she Skyped Nena, her head is now way too fuzzy to write anything Amy Appleyard would deem acceptable copy. In fact, all she and James have been able to manage is to lie on the beach or play board games on the terrace by day and watch chick flicks in the common room before an early night, without the energy to even touch each other.
Despite his growing migraine and malaise, James has been trying: gamely attempting the reverse warrior at dawn; lightly chuckling at romcoms with Maya, fifteen women, and Canadian Justin (who is shrinking by the day) at sunset. James even welled up during The Devil Wears Prada last night, but when Maya asked him if he was crying, he blamed the lack of carbs for making him emotional.
Jon hasn’t partaken in early-evening chick flicks. He’s preferred to stick to mindfulness and meditation; using the downtime to read scripts in the bar or have a massage on the beach. He’s always had a charming smile for Maya and James though, as they pass each other in the common room or on the shore. No one has mentioned That Thing They Haven’t Talked About.
Maya and James look up at Jon with slow moves and sallow cheeks. They feel so tired and listless that their eyeballs hurt. Even the turquoise sea at sunset isn’t lifting their spirits: James has the worst headache he’s had in years. And it’s not even alcohol-induced.
‘You said it got better by day three,’ Maya scolds. ‘My chocolate cravings have never been worse.’
James gestures for Jon to pull up the vacant chair, even though he doesn’t want him to.
Jon laughs as he puts his glass on the table and pulls the chair back, not realising that the scraping sound of wood on wood is boring into James’ head.
‘Yeah, sorry about that.’ Jon turns the chair the wrong way around so he can straddle it. ‘Works for me by day three. I’m a day behind you, so just you watch. Tomorrow I’ll be cartwheeling through here. Maybe it’s tougher your first time, I can’t remember.’
Maya studies the menu wedged into a wooden block on the table. One side has raw food delights, the other is Thai vegetarian. There is no menu of course for those who are fasting, so they both nurse a bottle of water, wishing they could order a ‘rawsagna’ – even though layers of courgette, fermented almond cheese, aubergine mock bacon and fig pâté would ordinarily make them heave.
‘Well, in two days’ time we can move onto the raw menu, baby,’ Maya says, as she clumsily leans into James’ arm, just to make it clear it were he she were calling baby. The impact of Maya’s nudge makes James look like he might fall off the table. Or throw up.
‘I can’t look,’ he says, slumping his head into his hands. ‘I don’t think I can even face broth tonight. I might just go to bed.’ He rubs his hands up through his brown hair, making him look more despairing.
Maya feels panicked. She doesn’t want to be left alone with Jon, but she doesn’t want to miss her broth. She’s looked forward to it all day, which is saying something.
‘But what about Moon’s lecture?’
James shakes his head gently.
‘And Miss Congeniality starts in twenty minutes, you’ll like that one.’
‘Nah, I can’t, honey. You have my broth. Double helping; you’ll need it. I feel like shit.’
James stands and scrapes his chair back, cursing himself internally for doing the exact same thing Jon did and making his head even worse. He goes to kiss Maya on the lips but misses as she turns her head up at the same time. They are both self-conscious under Jon’s gaze, but James is too poorly to care.
‘Shall we catch the news?’ Maya asks, but James looks puzzled.
‘Huh?’
‘Want me to come with you?’ Her eyes widen as if she’s trying to tell James something.
James frowns. Now he’s irritated, as if there’s a reason he shouldn’t leave Maya alone with Jon.
‘No, you’re fine. See you in a bit.’
James snakes down the path from the bar to the sea and turns left up another path to find their room between the trees. He feels so wretched, he walks slowly, swaying like a man trying to conceal he’s drunk.
‘Poor guy,’ Jon shrugs, throwing his ream of paper onto the table with a thump. He rests his chin on a palm, propped on his elbow on the table, leaning further in towards Maya, who is still watching James walk away. ‘I guess some people can’t tolerate it as much as others – it’s insane how every person’s detox journey is different.’
Maya gazes, from the trees in which James disappeared, back to Jon, to the stack of paper on the table.
‘What are you reading?’
‘Oh, it’s something I’m writing actually.’
‘Writing?’
‘Yeah, a script I’m writing. I had Hiddleston in mind for it at first, but then I thought fuck it, it’s perfect for me.’
‘Oh right.’
‘Weird isn’t it – I was writing this character – a slightly damaged spy, gone a bit rogue but finding the right path – and I connected with him so much I thought “Dammit, this can be me!” It’s so good, I can’t give it up. So I have to go back to the producers to drop the bombshell, persuade the heavies in Burbank to take a chance on me. I’ll do it when I’m back.’
‘Oh, OK, good luck with that.’
Jon picks up his lymph juice and takes a sip. ‘Thanks,’ he says with a deep green moustache, before he wipes it away on a bare arm. ‘Hopefully I can make them understand. My passion will speak volumes.’
Maya looks at his arms and remembers how they held her.
‘I’m sure it will.’
Jon looks at Maya, her kind and encouraging eyes, and smiles.
She smiles back, ruefully.
‘Strange isn’t it? Sometimes the best and the most obvious thing is right under your nose. It takes a while to see it.’
Maya unscrews the lid of her water and takes a sip, looking out to sea beyond her bottle, as if it’s a telescope scrutinising the horizon. She doesn’t notice Jon looking at his fancy watch.
‘Anyway, shall we head over to the common room for the movie?’
‘I didn’t think you liked chick flicks.’
‘No, but I love Sandy.’
‘Sandy?’
‘Bullock. Met her at an amfAR event in New York. She’s a hoot. I’d watch anything with her in.’
Maya shrugs as if to say OK.
‘Come on then, better get a good position…’
32
Three hours later, Maya and Jon are back at the bar, dimly lit with twinkling fairy lights, only this time they’re sitting on stools facing the shell mural behind the bottles. The sea laps gently beyond the open-sided restaurant behind them, and Aphex Twin piano notes plink plonk through the stereo. Maya’s not sure if it’s the music pulling at her heart strings or the tequila – they are pissed after their third of the evening. They stayed on after Miss Congeniality, to listen to Moon’s lecture and to drink their broth – double helpings in Maya’s case. Jon suggested they go for a chat and Maya couldn’t help herself, so when Mabel, a young Kiwi worker with purple and grey hair in two buns on the top of her head, flashed them a bottle of Cazador from under the counter, Maya thought it might be what she needed to brace herself for battle.
‘Is this a test from Moon?’ she asked, before turning to Jon. ‘Does Moon always do this? Am I being tested?! Are you his spy?’
Maya already felt a bit drunk and giddy and couldn’t work out if it was the delirium or something in the broth.
Jon shrugged.
‘I’ll cheat if you cheat,’ he said, with a twinkle in his eye that roused an anger and a sadness in Maya. So she sat up on her stool, nodded to Mabel, and met him at his challenge.
Three shots later and she’s got the giggles, as they reminisce about their university days.
‘No, but do you remember that night in the Bombay Express when Dave Mitchell went CRAZY because you ate a bit of his naan?’ laughs Jon.
Maya throws her head back and cracks up. She’d forgotten all about the twenty-year-old man having a temper tantrum because someone took a tiny bit of food from his plate. Maya grew up with a family for whom everything was a free-for-all at the dinner table. Everyone dug in and shared. She soon learned not everyone came from a Flowers type of family, where you had to be robust and you had to accept that someone might just steal a bit of food from your plate. And Dave Mitchell lost his temper.
‘Oh yeah! He said he didn’t like sharing because of the whole germ-spreading thing, so in my defence you picked up the rest of his naan and licked it.’
‘Funny. As. Fuck,’ says Jon proudly.
‘’Cause that helped!’ Maya laughs, then stops when she has a thought. ‘Oh, hang on, what if he had OCD or something? Shit, actually were we really mean?’
‘No, he was just tight-fisted. Should have learned to share, the elf-skinned bull’s pizzle.’
Huh?
Jon laughs about how funny he is and his glacial eyes gleam in the fairy lights reflected on the shells and the shards of the glass in the mural. Then it hits her. Maya finally realises where that colour comes from. Jon’s eyes are the same colour as the water around the Thai coast. She’d never realised it until now. How funny to bump into him then, here of all places.
They giggle at the memory of Dave Mitchell losing his shit in the curry house and pause, looking at each other in the dimly lit bar, only to be interrupted by the screen lighting up from a notification on Jon’s phone. Maya jumps, like a rabbit caught in headlights. Jon scrambles for his phone, as Maya sees the backlit wallpaper, a photo of a baby.
Shit.
Jon reads out a news update.
‘Police investigating Manon Junot disappearance say they have reason to believe she was suffering paranoid schizophrenia in the run-up to her going missing.’
Maya’s eyes widen.
‘Not really news. Not worth a push notification anyway,’ says Jon, turning his phone face down on the bar.
‘You have a baby?’ Maya asks coolly.
‘No, not mine. It’s Charlie’s boy. My nephew.’
‘Charlie’s a dad?! I can’t imagine!’
‘Yes, he’s still a twat, he’s just a twat with a kid. Not sure how he had such a cute baby. His partner is pretty hot though. All comes from her.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Geronimo.’
‘Geronimo?’
‘Yeah, he is just awesome. So funny. Makes me proper clucky.’
‘Clucky?’
Maya’s heart starts to race. She really shouldn’t have downed three tequilas on an empty stomach.
‘Yeah,’ Jon nods, regretfully, looking into Maya’s hazel eyes.
The shell mural on the wall behind the bar starts to mutate and the room around them begins to spin. The emptiness in her core and the racing of her heart makes Maya feel somewhat bilious.
He wants a baby.
Her eyes narrow, her moves become lumbering, and she leans into Jon, their foreheads almost touching.
‘Why did you do it?’ she whispers.
Jon leans away slightly, taken aback by the sudden change of topic; surprised by a blunt and candid side of Maya he doesn’t remember.
‘Why did I do what?’
Jon shifts on his bar stool.
‘You know.’
He shrugs his shoulders, then leans back in. Their temples almost touch now.
‘I suppose it’s because I wasn’t good enough for you. I felt inadequate.’
Maya inhales sharply.
‘So why didn’t you just break up with me? Why didn’t you just end it? Say you weren’t feeling it.’ Maya goes to twist the ring on her right hand but remembers she took it off earlier – it was getting a bit loose and she didn’t want to lose it. ‘Why did you piss our money up the wall? My money? I had to move back to Hazelworth. Shelve my dream of buying a home for another, I dunno, five years…’
Jon puts his hand to his other temple, to create a shield from the bar, make a bubble for he and Maya, and he looks remorseful. ‘I genuinely don’t know what to say.’
‘There’s nothing you can say really, it’s done. I just never understood why you did it so callously. Taking your things little by little. Sending me that text. I was so good to you.’
‘You were.’
‘It was a total dick move.’
‘It was.’
Mabel comes back to top up their tequilas with a wink and some added green
juice, so their glasses look like wheatgrass shots. She gives Jon a knowing smile and walks off to flirt with another customer.
‘Looks like it worked out for you though, you and…’
‘James.’
‘Yeah, that’s right, James.’
‘It did.’
Maya thinks of running behind her father, looking at the criss-cross lines of the back of his pineapple neck. Of her brothers helping her move into her new flat. Of the day she first saw Train Man walk up the platform to get the 8.21 a.m., and how she fell in love at first sight. She smiles with heavy lids but just can’t help herself from picking the scab.
‘But why? Why did you do it? Why did you cheat? If you felt so inadequate – you could have just told me.’
‘Because it was easier to break up with you if you hated me. I was so in love with you, Maya. Talia meant nothing to me, we didn’t last ten minutes, but I just knew I wasn’t good enough for you. I wasn’t enough for your amazing imagination, for your brilliant, crazy family. For your career dreams. I was just an actor bum. I didn’t know I was going to make it big then. I thought I’d do you a favour and set you free, and I knew I had to make you hate me or you would never get over me.’
‘I did hate you.’
Jon looks sad. And uncomfortable. He looks very uncomfortable in their bubble, but he’s trying.
‘I’m just so fucking sorry, Maya.’
33
James kicks his legs out in discomfort and rolls over. Nothing feels right. Without a sheet, he shivers; with a sheet, he sweats – and when he’s underneath it, he feels stifled by frustration and the toxic hum of a sickly scent.
Where is she?
He turned CNN off an hour ago. Even with Anderson Cooper on mute, to keep him company and to prevent Maya from having to turn on the stark, burning light when she came in, so she could see where her things were and find her way around, James could hear a high-pitched buzz of electricity that tore into his brain like a drill going through his eyeballs. The tickertape on the TV said it was midday in New York; 11 p.m. in Thailand, so James decided to not be so considerate, to not leave a gentle light on. He turned off the TV and rolled over. Sweat, roll, roll. Taunted by the rattling of the air-con unit until he turned that off too. Taunted by the sound of the water gently lapping on the shore through the open window. Taunted by the sounds of digital dance, jazz and low laughter coming from the restaurant bar in the corner of the cove. He stopped fidgeting for a second so he could listen, and see if he could place Maya’s laugh out there. He wanted to work out if she were in the bar or the common room, with new friends or old, and listen for clues to see if she’d gone to late-night yoga with Jon.