The Trailing Spouse

by Jo Furniss

  And it had something to do with Edward Bonham. The photo of him beside a black cab. She knew him; she just had to figure out how.

  Camille snatched up her phone. She found the photo she’d taken that morning and zoomed in on Edward Bonham’s medicine bottles. Then she navigated to her browser and typed in clonazepam.

  Clonazepam: Medication for seizures and anxiety disorders with the common side effect of sleepiness. Dependence occurs in one-third of people. Also commonly used as a recreational drug. Increased potency when mixed with alcohol. Clonazepam may be prescribed for social phobia, restless leg syndrome, alcohol withdrawal syndrome, and many forms of parasomnia.

  Parasomnia: a sleep disorder that may include sleepwalking, night terrors, and sleep sex.

  She navigated back to the previous page, then tapped the hyperlink on “recreational drug.”

  Clonazepam is from the same drug family as Rohypnol (roh-HIP-nol—street name: roofies) and has a similar sedative effect. It can induce muscle relaxation, memory loss, or—when mixed with alcohol—blackouts. However, clonazepam is not a common date-rape drug in Singapore, as it is only available on prescription.

  She set down her phone. So . . . Edward Bonham could be taking clonazepam because he was stressed—not surprising, given the cost of running that apartment. But surely if he suffered from anxiety disorder, or restless leg syndrome, or weird sleep sex, or any other credible reason to take clonazepam, he’d simply get a prescription from a doctor in Singapore. Instead, he’d obtained it from doctors outside the country. He might keep a large stash to take alongside alcohol or drugs for kicks. Or even because the pills make an efficient date-rape drug.

  She picked up her phone again, and this time she wrote an email to Sharmila Menon at HELP, asking if they might meet to discuss a case of a young—possibly underage—helper who committed suicide. Hit “Send.” Her attention returned to the kopitiam, and she became aware of icy condensation from her glass dripping off the table and into her toe cleavage.

  This case was a wake-up call. She had left the memories of her parents—and Lani—languishing in a box for too long. Maybe Collin was right, and they’d never know what happened to their parents. But she thought she knew what happened to Awmi; Camille couldn’t bring this poor woman back, but if she could prevent one more needless suicide, it might feel like closure.

  Chapter 5

  Amanda perched on the sofa while waiting to be connected to Officer Pang. Whether it was the afternoon spritzers at book club or the emotional outpouring about her infertility or the sober chill of her apartment, she felt light-headed.

  When Pang answered, Amanda inquired about the death certificate for Awmi. The one instruction she could remember from this morning’s meeting with Joshua MacAlpine was that she had to send the document to the Ministry of Manpower right away.

  “We sent the death certificate to the MOM today, Mrs. Bonham.”

  “I understood that as Awmi’s employer I had to do it?”

  “We sent it along with some other paperwork. The autopsy will take more time, but we were obliged to alert the MOM to the maid’s condition.”

  Condition? “I’m sorry, I don’t . . .”

  “Your maid was pregnant.”

  Amanda sprang to her feet and went to the window, focusing on the horizon as though carsick. “She couldn’t be. Helpers aren’t allowed to get pregnant.”

  Officer Pang gave a huff of laughter and made no comment.

  “If you don’t have the autopsy result, how do you know?”

  “She looked pregnant, so we ran a test. I guess with loose clothing she hid it, but it was pretty obvious once she was on the slab.”

  She winced at his choice of words.

  Pang picked up on her silence. “I’m sorry to inform you.”

  “How far gone was she?”

  “Her last medical examination was in June, so less than five months.”

  “I guess it’s possible that she didn’t know?”

  “It’s probable,” said Pang, “that she knew she would be sent home.”

  After they rang off, Amanda went to the fridge and accidentally dispensed ice cubes over her feet. She got down onto her bony knees to dry the tiles before the floor turned into an ice rink. Only twenty-four hours ago, her toe prints had been exactly here: dried smears of bile. Everything had been washed away, leaving no trace except the smell of bleach. A vision filled Amanda’s mind of a woman standing against the glass, black hair spread into drowning tendrils. There’s nothing there, she told herself, it’s just shock. She wadded the soggy paper into a dripping ball. When she stood, she turned to confront the door, and the wet clump fell through her fingers.

  There was something there. A face.

  A barstool teetered as she slipped on the wet tiles and grabbed for the counter.

  No, not a face. She righted the stool. It was a moth. Huge: the size of a girl’s face.

  Amanda sucked on a fingernail that had ripped to the quick.

  The moth flattened itself on the glass. Legs as thin as thread held up scalloped wings that ended in a swallowtail. Her mouth filled with the earthy taste of blood and bleach from her fingertip. She banged a palm on the glass, but the moth didn’t fly away, just lifted up its flimsy wings to protect itself. Like Awmi.

  Why hadn’t she said something? Amanda had always been friendly, inquiring each morning about her well-being, encouraging her to spend time outside the apartment, to visit Peninsula Plaza—Singapore’s Little Burma, where maids hung out and the shops sold special items that reminded them of home. She knew the girl was vulnerable, that Awmi was away from home for the first time and needed support, and she thought she had anticipated her needs because they were similar to her own: the homesickness, the challenge of making new friends, the kick in the teeth when old friends at home manage perfectly well without you. She convinced herself that she understood, one migrant to another. But in reality, Amanda saw now, all that she and Awmi had in common was proximity: her helper was a pilot fish swimming beneath a shark, earning protection by cleaning up after its powerful ally. But the fact remained that the shark was king of the ocean. And the expat was king of the migrants.

  And Awmi had been pregnant. Deep water, indeed. No one could protect her there, not even Amanda. The choice would have been abortion or repatriation. No third option. But Amanda would have helped her through it.

  Wouldn’t she?

  She spun away. Nausea rose from her stomach, and she needed to wash it back down. She flung open the fridge. Inside, held upright in the egg rack, were glass vials of leftover IVF meds, rattling like the test tubes holding her embryos on ice. Frozen. Cold. Waiting for her to collect them.

  How could Awmi be so selfish? Amanda thought. How could she kill herself when she was carrying a life? How could she waste something so precious, so hard to come by? Awmi, who made Amanda feel guilty if she threw away so much as a ham sandwich. Somebody wanted that child; somebody would have loved it. How dare she be so profligate!

  “It’s not fair,” Amanda said out loud. She kneaded the fat of her belly, the least painful spot for injecting herself. It was ridiculous that she’d held on to these bottles; they were mostly empty. As empty as herself. It was ridiculous that she held on to everything for so long.

  She bustled through the motions of clearing the vials out, throwing them in the trash. As she went outside to the chute, the moth watched, flattened against the glass. “I would have helped you, Awmi,” Amanda whispered. She put her hand out to the animal, but it took flight and careened over the edge of the balcony. I didn’t mean it when I said you were selfish.

  She went to her curio shelf. The biggest Chinese urn opened without a sound, and she found the rolls of notes. Three thousand dollars. It wasn’t enough. She’d had to pay the latest bill for embryo storage, leaving her short of the funds to pay for another procedure. She pulled out her phone. On the Singapore Overseas Wives Facebook page, the usual heated discussion was in full flow.
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br />   Jemima Sassoon I need some advice, ladies. Our maid is with us 5 years. Yesterday I put cotton threads between the doors of my wardrobe (she is not aloud to look at my clothes). Now threads are gone! She is checking out my clothes!!! Do you think she is wearing them? Don’t judge me—I have rights to know!!!

  Jennifer Moran I hope you don’t leave your children with her?

  Fionna Stone My one did this—I saw her on Facebook dressed in my bikini, made me vomit.

  Allison Ghosh You say “don’t judge” because you know this “test” is wrong. Poor girl, living for 5 years under suspicion.

  Florence Breeze Hear, hear!

  Tara Hussein This is called “entrapment.”

  Nina James My helper never cleans my wardrobe. Should I send her back to the Philippines? ;-)

  Gayle Cocktail ROFL!

  Imagine if she posted about Awmi. Need some advice, ladies! I found my helper dead in a puddle of bleach!!! What to do?! Half of them would launch a fund-raising campaign for the maid’s family while the others would suggest having the tiles steam cleaned. There was something pornographic about the forum—womankind exposing itself, red in tooth and claw—and yet she couldn’t resist the titillation. Or the income.

  In the classifieds section, she posted a picture of her ribboned shoes. She liked them—they were Jimmy Choo—but now they would always remind her of the run-in with Ed in the closet. All tied up for me. The condoms in his travel bag. His guilt gifts; he’d brought the Jimmy Choos from Zurich. Amanda priced them to sell and pressed “Post.”

  Another $250: enough to preserve her babies for six months. Some women might use their escape fund to leave a cheating husband. But I’m not wasting my war chest on a battle with Ed, Amanda thought. I’ll come out of this marriage with something I value more than dignity.

  Chapter 6

  Camille observed the receptionist from behind the glass wall of the press office; when the woman went to fetch her afternoon tea, as she always did at this time, Camille seized her chance. Josh was at an offsite meeting. When she lowered the handle of his office door, it gave a squeak that made her wince, but she darted inside. His desk was neat, documents arranged into piles at both ends of the work space, as though two armies awaited battle. She thumbed through manila files until she found one marked “Bonham.”

  Back in the main office—the reception counter still unmanned—Camille placed the entire stack of paperwork from the file into the copier and pressed “Scan.” The white-green beam slid back and forth. As the final sheet emerged from the machine, she slid into Josh’s office with the manila folder just as the receptionist came back up the corridor. She waited until the woman leaned down behind the counter to answer the phone, then slipped out, closing the door behind her, pressing her thumb to her wrist to find her pulse racing.

  The digitized documents were waiting on her computer in the downloads folder. She skimmed the Bonhams’ identification papers and Josh’s handwritten notes. The latter were sparse. In his elegant scrawl, he’d noted significant dates and the details of the maid agency that had brought Awmi over from Burma. She scrolled down the sheet, and there was a copy of the police statement. She zoomed in to read Officer Pang’s blocky handwriting.

  At 0130 hours on 29 October at unit #30-01 The Attica I met with Mrs. Amanda Bonham regarding the death of a foreign domestic worker “Awmi.” Mrs. Bonham confirmed that she discovered a body at approximately 0045 hours on the rear balcony of the property and confirmed it to be her employee. Officers confirmed that the maid was deceased and detected no signs of foul play. The cause of death appears to be chemical poisoning from ingesting domestic cleaning products.

  At 0800 hours I obtained a sworn statement from Mrs. Amanda Bonham: the registered employer of the deceased, as confirmed by the Ministry of Manpower. Mrs. Bonham confirmed that the maid had made no previous attempts to harm herself. Mrs. Bonham had no cause for concern about her behavior or mental health prior to death.

  After conducting routine procedures and removing personal items belonging to the deceased, I provided Mrs. Bonham with a case number and copy of the statement. I also gave her a copy of Leaflet 99/17, “What to Do If Your Foreign Domestic Worker Dies.” I entered the case into the police database as a suspected suicide.

  Camille watched the cursor blink. Pang seemed to have assumed it was suicide. She remembered an ex-boyfriend, a trainee policeman, saying that when a case was first reported as a suicide, officers often made assumptions that led them to miss signs of foul play. But she had to admit that suicide looked likely. Even considering Edward Bonham’s date-rape drugs, it was hard to imagine that someone would kill a person in their own apartment. And by making them drink bleach? Messy method. If Bonham had killed the helper by accident, for example, with an overdose of clonazepam, there had to be easier ways to cover it up. The most common method of suicide in helpers was jumping from a balcony, which would be easy enough to fake when you lived on a high floor.

  No, murder didn’t look likely. But something had driven the girl to suicide. Maybe the unwanted attentions of her employer? If so, imagine the pressure of keeping Edward Bonham at bay while also hiding it from his wife, who was her legal employer and had the power to deport her at a moment’s notice. What a hothouse up there in the penthouse.

  She would show these documents to Sharmila Menon during their meeting; maybe the HELP lawyer could give Ruth Chin an “angle.” The media would sit up and notice a wealthy expat who preyed on his young maid and drove her to suicide. That reminded her . . .

  Camille googled Amanda Bonham but got only a few hits on social media. Nothing to explain her comments about being on the receiving end of paparazzi interest; maybe something had occurred before she married? She googled Edward Bonham too. For several minutes she read about his business, GetSetJet. From the minimal text amid blue-sky shots of aircraft, she worked out that Bonham brokered sales of private jets. A glamorous lifestyle would play well in the press.

  She clicked on an image of Edward Bonham, studied it for a moment, and flicked her thumbnails together while her brain realigned its assumptions. Amanda Bonham so fit the mold of the trailing spouse that Camille had anticipated Edward Bonham to be a typical fat cat. She hadn’t noticed on the small wedding photo, but in the pictures online he appeared more fit than fat. She clicked on a snap taken recently on a runway in China, where Edward had delivered a Gulfstream to a billionaire. He was a pilot too. What a guy. Camille zoomed in on the picture. She tapped the screen with her fingertip. Right on his handsome face.

  The Bonham smile drifted in and out of her mind as the afternoon wore on, Camille watching the clock until she could wish her boss a good evening and head out into the ebbing heat. Finally, she set off down a side street and picked up the pace. Two Filipino helpers, chatting at machine-gun speed, were tugged past by panting dogs. Camille didn’t understand Tagalog, but its pattern was as familiar as a lullaby. Lani used to sing to her as a child; the words had long since slipped away, but the cozy feeling remained.

  Camille thought of her memory as one of those kitchen drawers where you throw odd bits that don’t have a rightful place. Every so often, she opened it up and something glinted, but it was only a broken thing, a fragment, a useless recollection without context or meaning. Lani’s face, her voice, even her full name: that knowledge was as faded as the colors of a photo left in the sunlight. Like the items in the kitchen drawer—a single cuff link or a stopped watch or an obsolete cable—her memories were incomplete. But she hoarded them nonetheless, hoping that one day someone might put them in order.

  As she pushed herself up the hill, the high-rise condos retreated, and the houses grew larger and more private. The soundtrack of traffic turned into the tune of cicadas. After a few minutes, she reached a long metal fence and stopped. Behind the cracked and peeling posts was Tanglin Green, where she had lived until the age of ten. The jumbled drawer of her memory didn’t seem deep enough to account for that length of time. Her hands slipped
through the fence and gripped the metal. Rust pierced her skin, but she squeezed tighter. The former army barracks, which had been converted to private homes long ago, was arranged in rows of squat terraces like a small village. Everywhere were the lipstick palms and rain trees and dangling epiphytes that she loved. One tree had a long rope swing hanging from a vast bough, just like they’d had in their garden. The climate would have eaten away her rope swing by now; it was fifteen years since she’d lived here.

  She released the fence and brushed metallic flakes from her hands.

  Tanglin Green drew her back time and again. Sweaty walks that necessitated cooling herself under the air-con vent when she got back to the office. Sometimes, as today, she walked here after work and stood outside, watching through the bars. Smelling leaf mold and jungle pepper, and listening to maids sing power ballads while baking cookies. The place hadn’t changed since Camille had raced up this road, knowing that Lani would have fresh gingerbread waiting for her. Poor Lani, who got sent away not long after Camille and Collin got sent away.

  The image of Edward Bonham surfaced. She could imagine Collin mocking her—she’d call him later to give him the chance to do so for real: So what was it, Camille, that first attracted you to the handsome millionaire? Would Collin understand that something about Edward Bonham chimed, faint but distinct, like a harbor bell through the fog? She didn’t know why, but her pulse beat with a nagging insistence that was impossible to ignore.

  Edward Bonham might be out of the country, but there were other Bonhams who were available. And while Amanda had “lost track” of her husband, the daughter might be more attentive. Josie’s school resembled the headquarters of the United Nations, impressive and forbidding with its array of national flags. Of course, Josie was only seventeen; Camille wondered if she needed parental permission to interview her. Probably. Technically. But she shook off the qualm. She only wanted a chat. She came in peace. Besides, she was closer to Josie’s age than to her parents’, a fact that was underlined by the ease with which she strolled onto campus amid the end-of-the-day throng. It helped that she was smaller than the oldest kids, and her freckles gave her a youthful air.