The Trailing Spouse

by Jo Furniss

  In the bathroom, Camille shut herself in a cubicle and gave up. She’d humiliated herself, her boss, and the high commissioner. It took a lot of pressure to make her cry, but when the tears fell they were as heavy as diamonds. Camille caught every one in her hands. Then she lowered the toilet lid and sat down.

  With a wad of toilet paper pressed to her eyes, she considered how she’d run and run—she’d run seven thousand miles to Singapore—but the past followed like a mugger, sneaking along, ready to pounce when she least expected it. Camille had gone from obsessing about her parents to obsessing about helpers.

  She left the cubicle, splashed her face, and went back to her desk. She addressed an email to Sharmila Menon and the board at HELP, apologizing for the short notice but informing them that she had to stop volunteering with immediate effect. Hit “Send.” Then she forwarded the same email separately to Josh to show him she’d resolved the conflict of interest.

  As she handed in her security pass to the receptionist, she looked back over her shoulder to see the pressroom through the glass wall. It was time to sort herself out, get her head straight so she could do her job properly. She’d have one last go at resolving what happened to her parents; she’d track down the paperwork on their yacht and approach Edward Bonham once more. Somehow, he was part of the puzzle. If she applied enough pressure, he’d crack and she might be able to work out from his broken edges where he slotted into the picture.

  Chapter 27

  In the future: Eight Days Until D-Day

  In the past: Thirteen Days That Made Me Me

  Post 5 of 13: Loop-the-Loop

  I’ve got the Cessna on long finals toward JFK when the doorbell rings. Teddy shouts at me to answer it, but there’s a 747 coming up behind me—which is stupid, air traffic control would never order that—and when I try to make a steep bank out of the stack the joystick gets too sensitive in the side wind and I start pitching. The doorbell rings again and I hear a key turning in the lock. I stand up, hit pause.

  Teddy’s bedroom door opens and he comes out, textbook in hand. He’s got air law and meteorology exams tomorrow, that means rules-for-planes and the weather. He looks at the front door and at me and back at the front door. A woman comes in and stops in the hallway. She doesn’t say hello, but she walks forward and stands her suitcase beside the coatrack. She’s wearing clothes they sell at Camden market. She looks at me and starts to cry, not making any noise, just like her eyes are overflowing.

  Teddy turns away and rests his forehead on the doorframe.

  “You’ve shot up, Josie,” she says.

  I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. Teddy might be angry if I’m nice. Or if I’m not. Out of the corner of my eye, the computer goes onto screen saver; a ball bounces from side to side, trying to squeeze itself into a corner.

  My mother is not well, that’s why she went away. She looks fine now, though, apart from the crying. Her hair is as thick and dark as mine. Or mine is like hers. Now I know why Teddy made me cut it. He said it was because he didn’t know how to tie it back, that we had to make adjustments for not having a mother. Teddy comes over. He takes the joystick from my hand and puts it on the coffee table. His hands gather up my shoulders and he bends to whisper in my ear. “Say hello, Jo-Jo Sparrow.”

  So I walk forward a step and she rushes in, her patchwork trousers snapping between her knees, and hugs me so tight I can hardly breathe. She takes a long sniff, as though she has a cold, and I realize she’s smelling me. When she lets go, I wobble on the spot. Something has dug into my chest, and I see her long necklace, with a pendant shaped like a scorpion. There’s an angry red dent in my skin, as though I’ve been stung.

  “You could have phoned,” Teddy is saying.

  “It’s my house.”

  “After all this time . . . think of the child.”

  “My lawyer says I shouldn’t let myself be pushed out of the family home. It can be used against me.”

  “Your lawyer?” Teddy turns around and slaps the joystick off the coffee table onto the sofa. Then he turns back to me and does the shoulder thing again. “Can you play in your room, Jo-Jo Sparrow? I need to speak to her.”

  “But I’m on long finals.”

  He smiles with his nice teeth. “Just half an hour. Then we’ll land somewhere tricky. Tibet.”

  “Saba!”

  “Dicing with death, you are. All right, Saba. I need to sort this out first, okay?”

  I go to my bedroom, close the door, and then let it open an inch.

  “Josie, close the door.”

  I close the door. Then I jump onto the bed, climb out the front window, run around the side of the house, and hunker down underneath the living room window, which is wide open.

  “You’re fucking kidding me.” Teddy’s voice. “No contact for a year and then custody?”

  “I’m not supposed to discuss details with you. My lawyer said.”

  “Let me get this straight—your lawyer thinks you should move back into my home—”

  “It’s our house.”

  “The house currently occupied by your estranged husband and abandoned daughter—”

  “I never abandoned her—”

  “Maybe you should have told her that. So, your lawyer wants you to move back into this house, with me, but we’re not allowed to discuss what’s happened? Where you’ve been? Who you’ve been with? Josie had her birthday and Christmas without you, with no idea where you were—”

  “I sent postcards.”

  “Yes, the postcards—very dramatic . . . We read them over breakfast, when I was getting her ready for school each day.”

  “How is school?”

  “Just fuck off.”

  There’s a crash, a splintering crunch, that sounds like a plate or a mug smashing. Then it goes quiet. Maybe they’re looking for the dustpan and brush? I should tell them it’s under the sink. I wonder where they’re standing. Is Teddy pulling his hair like he does when he gets angry? Saying “fuck off” means he’s angry. I get onto my knees in the flower bed and inch upward.

  “Where are you going to sleep? We only have two bedrooms,” Teddy says.

  “I’ll move in with Josie,” my mother says.

  “She can come in with me.”

  “She’s too old to sleep in a bed with her father.”

  “Don’t you dare insinuate—”

  “I’ll sleep on the sofa then.”

  The paint on the windowsill splinters under my fingertips as I pull myself up to peep inside. Teddy sits slumped on a chair at the dining table, his thumbs sticking through his hair like goat horns. My mother comes to stand at the window. She lowers her eyes and sees me, crouching in the roses. Her mouth smiles. She reaches through the window and pulls me to my feet, hugs my head to her belly. She smells strange, foreign, like one of her postcards; touched by other people’s fingers. When Teddy sees me peeking around her stomach, he makes a droning noise in the back of his throat, like the little Cessna fighting the wind on its long finals.

  Amanda stood on the back balcony, phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Once upon a time—in her London life—she allowed herself one a night. Back when she thought she knew stress. Now, she gulped the first hit to her core—almost whooping into the night with the rush of it—and found herself taking drag after drag until she flicked the butt into the darkness in an arc of orange sparks.

  There was a part of her—she had to admit—that wanted to eavesdrop on Ed’s relationship with his first wife. He never mentioned her, except in curt confirmation of the facts. As clinical as a surgeon reporting the condition of a patient. My wife died. Emotion so deeply buried, it had compacted to coal that fueled Amanda’s curiosity.

  If she confronted Josie about the blog, she might stop writing it, and Amanda would lose these insights. There was a new drawing today. A goat, so intricately shaded it looked alive. Josie promised eight more installments about “Teddy.” Just over a week until Amanda knew what Ed had done to his w
ife, the mother of his child. Amanda stroked the goat’s horned head with a fingertip.

  She looked up from the screen and let out a startled scream—a figure in the doorway—her cigarette packet slapped to the tiles. Ed stepped over the threshold from the kitchen with an advance that pushed her back against the parapet. He caught her by the biceps.

  “Did you know about the photos?” His eyes and teeth were white in the darkness.

  “She didn’t want me to tell you—”

  “You knew?” Spittle flew.

  “Yes, but—”

  “How dare you!” Ed leaned against her, and the edge of the parapet slid from Amanda’s shoulder blades to beneath her ribs. She teetered for a moment before he loosened his grip. Her feet found the tiles as he stepped back, kicking her cigarette packet aside.

  “You stink,” he said. “I never married a smoker. Or a liar.”

  “Did Josie tell you?” she asked.

  “Erin. In the lobby. My fucking neighbor told me there are photos of my daughter all over the Internet—”

  “I was going to tell you as soon as you got home—”

  “Where is she?”

  “She went to the library.”

  “You let her go out?”

  “What do you mean ‘let her’? I have no authority. And you’re the one who lets her do whatever she wants. Do you want me to mother her or not mother her? I have no idea what you want.”

  “Sometimes, Amanda, I don’t want any of it!” And he was gone.

  Amanda peeled her back off the parapet and picked up her crushed cigarettes. He was angry, she told herself, he wouldn’t have let me fall. But there was a thin line—so thin it was invisible—between falling and not falling.

  Chapter 28

  Camille made her way through Chinatown’s night market toward a kopitiam she wanted to visit. Her thumb flicked the phone ringer. Was it too late to call Edward Bonham? She’d been trying him all day; he must be flying. Busy, unlike Camille, who was dangerously underemployed after being sent home by Josh.

  At the old-time café, she got herself a green tea and a seat. From her Filofax, she pulled out the photo of her parents. The doorway was key—the alignment of arch and pillar. This was not the place. She slipped the photo away and sipped her bitter drink. Then she picked up her phone and dialed before she could change her mind.

  As soon as Edward Bonham spoke, his clipped speech told Camille he was drunk.

  “Where are you?” he said.

  She hesitated. “Chinatown. I’m on my way home soon. I wanted to ask you—”

  “I wanted to ask you something too. But tell me, where’s home?”

  “River Valley.”

  “I’m on Mount Faber. I can see all the way to the ships. Lovely night for a walk.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Don’t imagine. You should see it for yourself. Did you know some plants release perfume at night?”

  “I didn’t know that.” Camille smiled behind her hand. A long pause was filled with the noisy fervor of nighttime insects. She added: “Watch out for snakes.”

  “Why did you call me Teddy?”

  Camille shifted in her seat. “Slip of the tongue.”

  “Why don’t you come for a walk and tell me?”

  A walk? At night? Was he serious?

  “Are you there, Cami?”

  Her brother called her Cami. The familiar name flaked away a layer of intimacy like cheap varnish.

  “Walking in the park at night doesn’t sound safe.” She glanced up and saw an old lady at the neighboring table, watching her with open interest. “I saw a cobra the other day.” She was babbling now. “Jumped right over it.”

  “I’ll look after you.”

  She adjusted the phone closer to her mouth. Under the marble table, her feet pressed onto the tiles, gaining purchase. “I’m heading home,” she said.

  “You could stop off on the way.”

  “It’s not on the way.”

  There was a long pause during which she wondered if Ed was really worried about her calling him Teddy or if—

  “I can come to Chinatown,” he said. “There are places we could meet.”

  Ah, she thought, wondering when Edward Bonham had pegged her as a woman who might be interested in a dangerous liaison. “No, thanks.”

  “I won’t ask again. But if you ever want to—”

  “Good night, Ed.”

  Camille ended the call and snatched up her drink, shouldering her way into the crowd. It must have been the first time he unleashed his smile, when he startled her into taking a moment too long to reply, a moment during which her eyes slid to his shoulders, and she could almost feel them bunching beneath her palms. Edward Bonham was the kind of man who missed nothing that might be to his advantage. He had slipped that moment into his pocket for later. He was patient, she had to give him that. And confident. He’d derailed her from what she wanted to ask: if he had really recognized her parents; if they had met before.

  She wondered if this kind of invite worked in business hotels, if that’s where he honed his skills. And she considered what a hookup in the park would entail. She drained the iced tea, chilling herself with every gulp and every thought of what Ed planned to do to her in the dark of the forest.

  Chapter 29

  Interpol. Amanda struggled to remember the name but then grasped it like a mosquito in the air. International crime is investigated by Interpol. Unlike Ed, who never suffered jet lag, she was wading through treacle after losing last night to Josie’s antics. Ed and Josie were finally home, tired from either reading or whisky. But Amanda couldn’t bring herself to lie next to her husband. Not even after he apologized for the “scene”—as he called it—on the balcony.

  Instead, she went to the balcony, the night air bloated by a downpour. The glare from the skyline turned low clouds red and yellow, like a highway at a standstill, blurred taillights in the rain. She’d read an article claiming that air con was heating up the island and, like the apocryphal frogs in hot water, everyone was boiling without complaint. Was that what had happened to her too? Like a domestic abuse victim, she had accepted the incremental advances of Ed’s bad behavior? It would explain why she’d become so inert. That and the fact she had nowhere else to go. A nasty voice teased as though she were her own playground bully: No one would miss you. Unlike Laureline Mackenzie, whose family went looking for her in Tokyo, no one would notice that Amanda Bonham was gone.

  She let her self-pity burn off and rubbed her upper arms, still tender from where Ed had grabbed her, here on this balcony, the place where another woman had died. A woman who had Ed’s pills in her room, who might have been pregnant with his child.

  Enough.

  Amanda went back to the chill of the kitchen and let the glass door slam. Her bag was packed and ready to go. But running away was also a risk; abusive men don’t let women leave. And Josie would be left alone. Their embryos would die. She had to stay until she knew for sure what Ed had done. Who he really was.

  So, Interpol. International crime is investigated by Interpol.

  She got her laptop. Opened their website. Terrorism. Cybercrime. Drug trafficking. On the top right of the page was a link to Missing Persons. There on the front page: Laureline Mackenzie. Amanda read the facts she already knew by heart. Below the headline were thumbnail pictures of hundreds of other people. She clicked through to the search page, selected “female” and an age range of 17–20. Search: 159 results. Eighteen pages of lost women. If she called Interpol with a handful of suspicions, what would they say? We’re drowning in lost women; come back with evidence. Or maybe it would be like calling the police when Josie went missing, and she only brought down a whole heap of trouble.

  Interpol sought a woman in Jamaica, aged eighteen. A woman in Chile, aged eighteen. What was it about eighteen? Laureline Mackenzie and the Brazilian dancer had both been eighteen. She picked another page. More women in Jamaica; Ed never went there, thank goodness. Why didn�
��t the authorities do something about their missing women? Or had they grown used to it too, like frogs in hot water? And then she had it, the thought bubbling up from her mind: Awmi’s real age was eighteen.

  Amanda’s spine bristled as though someone was behind her. Ed was in bed, asleep, but she felt his darkness enter the room. The attacks she’d read about online were remote events in exotic locations. But Awmi had been here. Amanda had found her ruined body.

  Her feet made kissing noises on the marble as she walked to their bedroom. Ed was dead still. Even defenseless and prone, he looked forceful. His limbs bronze against white sheets. She watched his skin writhe with perpetually moving shadows thrown by the tide. The death of Awmi—if Amanda were to add her name to the list—meant that Ed had brought his violence home like herpes from a hooker. Amanda had detached her husband from the other Ed who existed abroad. But they were one and the same.

  Ed, whose wife died. Whose helper died. Whose visits to foreign cities coincided with more deaths. Whose daughter was taking a slow swan dive. Whose second wife was nursing bruises and questioning if it was safer to stay or go. Who knew she ought to report her suspicions to the police . . .

  But what would happen then? Would the Singapore police arrest him? Or wash their hands of it and deport him? How long before they ejected her and Josie—their residency dependent on his work permit?

  She hugged her goose-bumped shoulders. The marble floor felt cold even though the air outside shimmered with heat. Everything in Singapore felt artificial, fake, a distortion of nature. She returned through the massive lounge, where long windows that didn’t open kept her trapped: outside while inside. She threw herself onto the sultry balcony, where heat beat around her like a pulse. It was uncomfortable, but it was real. She curled onto Awmi’s bare mattress, a hint of bleach acrid in her throat, and finally slept . . .

  . . . Badly. A mosquito found her at dawn. She clapped it between her palms and drew the hollow victory of her own blood. Cold pricks rose up around her ankles like echoes of its last laugh. The hair around her forehead crackled with dried sweat as she pushed her torso up from the sagging bed. A mirror over the sink showed a face so puffed up by humidity it looked like a pink frog. Amanda let herself into the kitchen and watched the sky, awash with watery clouds like soapsuds sluicing the deck of a ship. Way below, the blue envelope of the swimming pool opened up like an invitation, and she felt a pull to freedom. She put her flat palm on the smashed glass and found it as cool as water.