by Zoë Folbigg
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I can do an Arabian double front flip on a crowded dance floor…’
Tom smiles, relieved at the hint of humour in the air, although he knows Nena’s mood is serious; that he needs to tread carefully.
‘I can look into a camera and talk confidently without panicking.’
She lifts the duvet over her, over the exposed small of her back.
‘I know all the words to “U Can’t Touch This”. And I can do the Hammer dance.’
Tom feels allowed to smile.
‘But I don’t know how to stop her crying; I can’t feed her.’
Nena’s humour shield evaporates around her and she starts sobbing into the bed. Tom rushes over, back to his perch on the edge of the mattress, and puts his arm along Nena’s top arm.
‘Nena, that is not true.’
He kicks off his Mahabis, climbs onto the bed and spoons her.
‘Anyway, look at her now, happy and sleeping and dreamy.’
‘But why can’t I do this? Why do I dread the nights? And then the days after them. She’s six months old and I still don’t know her cues. I should have instinctively known what she wanted when she was born… and I still don’t.’
‘Nena—’
‘I worry day and night. I sob every time I watch the news, so I avoid it. I can’t breathe when I think about the world she didn’t ask to be born into.’
Nena’s body starts to shake and she sobs uncontrollably.
‘Babe, you’re doing brilliantly.’
‘No I’m not. I’m just not cut out for this.’
Tom turns Nena around so they’re nose-to-nose in the bed and holds her face with both hands. ‘Are you kidding me?’
Her tears are flowing stronger now.
‘You’re AMAZING. You carried her with such strength and beauty. Watching you dance with her in your belly was the most powerful I have ever seen a woman. Watching you birth her, I was gobsmacked. And look at you – you’re keeping our baby alive. And happy. Every day! And just because she’s a shit sleeper or a pernickety eater… do not let that make you question the power of you. You’re an amazing mother. You’re winning at this.’
‘You would say that. You need to say that, so I can function, so you can go to work.’
‘No I wouldn’t.’ Tom sounds on the verge of indignant. ‘I would never say anything I didn’t mean. You’re a brilliant mum, Nena. You and Ava are the two most beautiful women in the world. You light up the world for me and for Arlo. You are our world. And you don’t even know how instinctively and naturally wonderful you are.’
Nena shakes her head, as if to make the lies stop.
Tom takes a deep breath. He knew Nena was struggling, but didn’t anticipate this – how low she would still be at six months.
‘But this isn’t you. This is fatigue. And fatigue is breeding self-doubt. This is demanding Little Miss keeping you awake all night. This is me going to work. This is you not leaving the flat. This is you needing to get support – and I will help any way I can.’
‘You think I need help? You think I can’t cope?’ she says with hurt eyes.
‘No! I think lack of sleep and Ava draining you is making life fucking hard for you. I think you need support, help, whatever you want to call it. I think you need a plan. I think we need a plan. And needing a plan isn’t failure. Look—’ Tom releases himself and rolls over, to pull open the drawer of his bedside table. He takes out some leaflets. ‘Tina the health visitor called around when you were asleep on Friday, just after I got home.’
‘What?’ Nena looks suspicious, as if there’s a conspiracy against her.
‘She had been worried and thinking about you since your last visit to clinic and she thought you might benefit from some of these? Some are rubbish, but there are networks and support, and if you feel it’ll take more than that, then we can go see Dr Barratt. Ask for help.’
‘You think it’s that bad?’
‘Actually, no. I think we need to start by getting her off the boob. Cracking sleep. Sleep will make the world of difference. I’ll do a few nights in a row and you go stay at your parents’ – come back in the morning when I go to work.’
‘I can’t be without her.’
‘Then stay here, wear earplugs and sleep in Arlo’s room.’
‘Why didn’t you offer to do this before?’
Tom is silenced by guilt and thinks for a second as he looks out of the skylight and watches a seagull fly over Stoke Newington.
‘I guess I didn’t realise how serious it might be until Tina dropped in.’
‘Tina is a witch,’ Nena says with a half pout.
‘Tina gives a shit. She was on her way out for her anniversary dinner, all dressed up, when she dropped these off. It’s stuff about support groups, activities around here, something on weaning… Some useful, some bollocks.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I was trying to find the right time. And you don’t need leaflets to tell you how to be a good mother. You already are. Ava is the luckiest girl in the world.’
Nena smiles, and speaks through the snot. ‘Not just saying it?’
‘Not just saying it.’
Ava stirs and Tom pulls his wife in closer and kisses her bare raspberry-red lips.
‘Anyway. You don’t know the lyrics to “U Can’t Touch This”. You always get it wrong, but I think it’s cute.’
‘Huh?’
‘It’s two hype feet, not two tight feet.’
52
April 2016, Luang Prabang, Laos
‘I’ll leave you to settle in,’ says the man with a friendly face and a dragon on his shirt, as he brings two long, thin doors together to close them behind him.
Maya and James look at each other, their eyes excited, as they listen to footsteps peel away on the tiled floor of the old French villa.
‘Wow,’ smiles Maya, stroking the simple lines of the elegant four-poster bed. Fuchsia petals are scattered across white waffle bed linen, giving Maya the urge to jump right through the mosquito net voile and onto it with childlike abandon. ‘If we do ever open that hostel of ours, this is how I want it,’ she says, picking up a china cup with pansies on it from the teak chest of drawers under the window. ‘Not too many frills, yet understatedly fancy.’
James pushes his glasses up his nose and heaves their backpacks onto the chaise longue that divides the bedroom area from the bathroom door.
Maya winces. ‘Don’t put them on there, it’ll ruin the fabric.’
Upholstery plus dirt is a bugbear of Maya’s. It used to bother her when she commuted on the less salubrious seats of the 8.21 a.m. to King’s Cross: years of hair and skin and gum and matter, pressed into blue faux-velveteen seat covers. It feels even worse to contribute to the sullification of such an elegant chaise longue.
James looks over his shoulder, tries not to roll his eyes, and drags the big backpacks down the stripy blue and cream upholstery and onto the tiled floor.
Maya bites her tongue. She doesn’t want to sound like a nag any more than she already has. She particularly doesn’t want to ruin the moment and the feeling of relief to have arrived at their destination and to be staying in a Nice Room.
Maya and James have stayed in so many rooms on this trip, to such varying degrees of hospitable. Some opulent, some squalid. Many in between have been beige and boring and of little note. They’ve experienced so many types of accommodation, bed and bathroom – and they’re not even halfway through their trip – that it’s become a talking point on planes, buses and trains. Maya and James discuss what the dream hostel they’ll never open might be like, in which unspecified location, in a faraway future. Maya likes the sound of Peru. James favours the Alps. It’s an evolving dream. Their hostel will be clean, of course. It’ll have little luxuries like the crisp white waffle bedlinen juxtaposed with rustic antiquities, like the decorative tea set. High ceilings are a must. No carpet. And, wow – a roll-top bath like
the one Maya has just opened the bathroom door onto would be gorgeous.
‘Look at this, baby!’
White brick tiles and a large, round, vintage train-station clock contribute to making the lofty walls, copper taps and long bronze radiator the perfect supporting cast to the large Thai copper roll-top bath, shimmering and golden in the middle of the room. By the time James walks in to check it out, Maya is reclined in the empty tub, fully clothed and smiling.
‘This is it. This is the bath we will have in our rooms.’
James laughs and walks back out again.
‘Come on,’ he says, ‘Let’s get some dinner.’ He closes the sage-green shutters of the bathroom window and looks at the big clock. ‘Before the restaurants close.’
Maya looks at James standing over her with his outstretched hands. Always reliably and dependably there to lift her up. Always reliably and dependably wanting dinner by 8 p.m. Always reliably and dependably changing the subject so as not to talk about their future.
53
Maya digs the flat sharp edge of her oar into the sandy riverbank and leans on its handle, almost hanging over the yellow canoe she’s sitting in. She takes a moment to catch her breath as she watches James battle a patch of white water. His pink canoe is fighting the flow, scared that if he goes down the ramp of a mini waterfall, he will be projected far down the river, too far away from Maya, leaving her alone, hanging on her oar stuck in the embankment.
‘Baby, it’s OK!’ she hollers across the wide expanse. ‘I can catch you up! Just stop further down!’
It seemed a good idea at the time. A great way for Maya and James to orientate themselves with this new part of the world, by spending the day kayaking along the Nam Khan river; the tributary of the mighty Mekong it meets at the top of Luang Prabang. A good way to reconnect after the past few weeks of travelling in Dee and Lenny’s company. A good way to shake off the appearance and reappearance of Jon, which they still haven’t really talked about.
Kayaking has been great fun so far. A guide called Liko went with them for the first hour, to show Maya and James how to negotiate the green and brown snaking river bends and what to do if they rolled over. Maya was scared at first, but by the time Liko left and they stopped for lunch under the Tad Sae waterfall, she felt like she’d found her stride.
Maya and James ate baguettes perched on the edge of a turquoise pool and stole kisses from each other before other tourists arrived to kill the moment and they decided to get back in their kayaks. Now their arms are tired and their faces feel tight after five hours of paddling in the sunshine, past merchants with boats heavy under the weight of rice sacks; past children running along the river’s edge shouting out at Maya and James to wave; past Asian elephants, majestic and curved, wading through the water; past derelict cabins and huts hidden in the tamarind, coconut and mango trees. Now they are ready to go back to their shabby-chic room, to crash out on the four-poster bed, but they’re in a bit of a pickle.
James struggles, his arms rippling in the battle against the break, his teeth gnashing as he fights to not be separated from Maya on this otherwise peaceful expanse of bright water, highlighted green by the reflection of the sunshine in the lofty and lush trees on the riverbank.
‘I will find you!’ shouts Maya, like Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last Of The Mohicans. She laughs to herself, but sees the struggle for James isn’t funny.
‘Arghhhh!’ he grunts and paddles with all his might as he rises upstream, over the top of the mini waterfall and across to Maya at the Nam Khan’s edge.
James wedges his oar into the riverbank parallel to Maya’s, panting heavily as he catches his breath.
‘Shit. That was tough.’
‘Oh, baby, you poor thing. You could have gone over, I’m sure I would have caught you up.’
James doesn’t speak. He just breathes heavily, rapidly. Droplets of sweat form in little bubbles on his olive skin as he regains himself.
‘Are you OK?’
He nods and pants some more. His teeth no longer bared. His black hair wet from the frenzied paddling. Blinking frantically to realign his contacts and regain his vision.
‘Come on…’ he eventually says. ‘Let’s get back to town. I’ve got that Skype call in an hour. I’m wiped out.’
Across the river, in a wooden boat obscured by reeds, a still and silent figure watches.
54
April 2016, London, England
Rosa Samarasekera sashays towards Tom’s table in the Groucho, teetering on cocktail-stick-thin ankles, her royal blue Roland Mouret dress not doing much to restrict her enthusiastic stride.
‘Tommmmmm!’ she gushes, as she outstretches her arms for him to take her.
‘Rosa, hi,’ says Tom, as he stands and smooths down his shirt.
Rosa gives Tom two kisses and takes her Mulberry bag off the crook of her elbow, to place it on the leather wing-backed chair on the other side of Tom. She doesn’t want it to get in the way. He inhales her musky perfume and remembers the other night and then he thinks of Nena, crying in his arms about being a bad mother.
‘What would you like to drink?’ he asks. Businesslike, formal.
Rosa looks around. At the sports broadcaster holding court at the bar; at the theatre director who just won an Oscar; at the former Bertie & Betty presenter who is coked up to the eyeballs and Tom is relieved not to have been spotted by. He leans back in his chair.
‘Cheeky Dog,’ she says with a wink.
Tom looks at the menu. Copper Dog whisky, Appleton rum, apple juice, lemon juice and ginger ale.
‘Sure,’ he says with a smile, as he calls a waitress over.
Rosa’s face is studious. Her gaze intent, as she watches him order, and they both watch the woman walk away.
‘Look, about the other night,’ Tom says, shuffling in his chair against the glossy petrol-blue wall behind him.
Rosa’s face lights up. She was hoping she could get his attention, to see him again, in another intimate corner of London. To be close to him again.
‘You made a mistake?’ she asks, raising one eyebrow and giving a little laugh.
‘No, really. I didn’t,’ Tom says, looking seriously into Rosa’s knowing eyes.
Rosa sighs and decides not to beat around the bush. She lowers her long hand and strokes Tom’s crotch. He feels her imprint and looks at her with pleading eyes.
‘I meant what I said.’
‘Come on. Don’t be such a tease, Tom. Honestly! Making me beg…’
‘I don’t want you to beg. In fact I don’t want any part of it.’
‘What?’
Rosa leans back and checks Tom’s face to see if he’s joking.
‘I meant it at The Savoy and I mean it now. I’m a happily married man and I don’t want to have sex with you.’
Rosa is so shocked, she lets a little gasp escape out of her glossed lips and removes her hand. Her face looks as wounded as her ego. She has never met a man who hasn’t wanted to sleep with her. Whether it’s the men she’s set up with on blind dates, enthusiastic junior doctors taking her from behind during a night shift, or consultants who shower her with luxurious gifts. She has never been turned down before. It is Rosa who says no. This has never happened, and she’s completely thrown. She tucks her neat hair behind her ear.
‘What are you talking about? You know we both want it. I can feel the chemistry, Tom, I know you can too.’
‘Rosa, you’re a beautiful woman, and I’m sure I’m extremely lucky – in fact I’m flattered that you would even look at me like that, but I’m just not interested.’
‘I thought you dragged me here—’
‘I hardly dragged you.’
‘Invited me here to put the other night right, to have me slide onto you. We could be doing that, Tom. I thought we had a connection.’
Rosa tries again, pressing her hand into Tom’s crotch under the table, stroking it more vigorously, more aggressively now.
‘Well, you thought wrong.’
Rosa’s face becomes petulant as she realises it’s not working.
‘And if you don’t take your hands off me, I will speak to HR about unwanted sexual attention and harassment.’
Rosa backs off sharply and laughs. ‘Are you serious?’
The waitress arrives with a Cheeky Dog and a sparkling water.
Tom picks up his glass and looks into it.
‘When was it a crime to tell someone you find them attractive? I can’t help the passion I feel for you.’
‘I didn’t invite you to touch me. I wouldn’t expect to touch you uninvited.’
‘You can! I won’t tell if you don’t…’ Rosa gives a sultry smile.
‘Please, Rosa, let’s not make this any more awkward than it already is. You’re doing a great job on My Brilliant Body, I don’t want this to get in the way of a bright career you have in broadcasting.’
Rosa stands, leans over the table and grabs her Mulberry tote, before throwing her Cheeky Dog in Tom’s face as she strides out.
‘What the—’
‘Bastard,’ she sighs under her breath.
As Rosa Samarasekera storms out through the low-lit and opulent bar, she makes eye contact with the sports presenter who’s holding court.
He wants me.
55
April 2016, Luang Prabang, Laos
‘Hi James. Looking good.’
Brooke, the bookings editor from the Kaye-French picture agency, is peering into the camera, her piercing blue eyes surveying James from under a heavy black fringe as she marvels at his tan. The last time she saw him, at their offices in Shoreditch, James had a winter pallor; he looked thin and slightly sallow. Now he is bronzed, his hair a bit longer, and he has the look of a man who is enjoying life out of the rat race, even if his kayak-tender arms are drooping at the keyboard.
Last night, after eating river fish stuffed with pork and herbs on a lantern-lit veranda, followed by ambling around the night market to orientate themselves, James checked his emails. He was too intrigued to see what the message from Kaye-French was about; even more so when Brooke said she had something super special he wouldn’t want to turn down. James replied straight away, hoping to catch her there and then. When she didn’t reply, he suggested a Skype call the next morning – 10 a.m. for her, 5 p.m. for him. All night in the four-poster bed, and all day on the Nam Khan, James couldn’t shake the feeling of intrigue, the seed of excitement, wondering what this job could be, hoping it might be something out in the field, to conveniently coincide with their travels.