by Tina Seskis
Jemma’s feet went from beneath her, and she staggered. Even though Jamie caught her, her princess heels dug into the turf and ripped through to the dirt, and they were ruined. Her shoes were ruined. Her wedding day was ruined. She’d planned every last detail to the nth degree – apart from the little matter of the identity of the groom. How had it got to this?
‘Careful, Jem,’ Jamie said. He laughed. ‘There’s no need to swoon.’ She felt hot breath and the spittle wet of Jamie’s mouth as he kissed her on the cheek.
‘Perfect!’ said the photographer.
Click, click, click. Sick, sick, sick. That was the word that was looping through Jemma’s head now, and she was unsure of its meaning in this context. Did she feel physically nauseous? Or was it sick as in depraved, terrible, that it seemed she may have got married purely because it was too late to turn back? But when would have been an appropriate moment to change her mind? A month before? The night before? At the altar itself, in front of Jesus?
The wind whipped through Jemma as the photographer kept prodding and cajoling the smiles out of her, as her mind kept drifting back to eighty or so minutes ago, in that other life. If only she’d listened to her innermost feelings then, and had refused to get out of the car. They wouldn’t have been able to force her from a vintage Rolls Royce – a gentle prod from her father wouldn’t have been enough to propel her towards her doom. She could have just sent him in, without her, to have a quiet word, try to minimize Jamie’s humiliation. Then the driver could have taken her back to the house, and she could have taken off her beautiful dress and kept out of the way until everything had died down. It would have been awful, certainly, but the long-term consequences might have been better for everyone.
But was that even what she wanted, Jemma thought now, as Jamie leaned in for another choreographed kiss. Didn’t she love him?
Jamie’s lips were soft beneath the fuzz of his stubble, but when he tried gently to prise open her lips she was having none of it. As he gazed into her eyes, he looked confused for a second, and Jemma ached for him. It was as if he’d made a decision that had felt agonizing for so long, but now felt so right he was wondering why he hadn’t made it years before, and his puzzlement at her resistance was pathetic, in the true meaning of the word. Jemma felt such sympathy for Jamie at that moment, that the graphs of his emotions and hers seemed so uncalibrated, it made her kiss him back suddenly – and the photographer said, ‘Ooh smashing, that’s what we’re after,’ and afterwards she felt a teeny bit better.
45
Now
It’s mid-morning, and it’s breezy, and the waiting is torment. Finally I hear the seaplane from my terrace, and knowing Dad’s on it makes me feel faint with relief. I wonder how we’ll be with each other. It is just so unlikely for him to be here, and he sounded anxious when he called me from Malé to let me know he’d made it that far. The one thing he and my husband always had in common was their fear of flying – and it seems strange, now I think about it, that Jamie endured the journey to this particular resort. There are plenty of other islands in the Maldives that we could have just got a boat to. I am so addled by the trauma that I can’t even begin to guess what his true motivation was.
I search in the sky for the plane, and although I can’t yet see it, the droning is getting louder, and I find I cannot wait any longer. Although I wasn’t planning on going to the pontoon, I just have to see my dad. My trusty sand bike whizzes me there in five minutes, and as I carefully get off it, I feel so many eyes on me. I move along the pontoon as though I am walking to my death. I arrive just in time to watch the plane land, and it skids all over the choppy water, and I wonder how my poor dad is coping. Finally I see him climb out onto the landing pontoon, and although he seems a little wobbly, he looks debonair in beige linen trousers and a white shirt, and his outfit surprises me. It’s almost as disorientating to see him here as it was to see Veronica and Dan.
The sun is burning fiercely, and the sea is blinding as I watch the dhoni chugging towards us. And now Dad is getting off the boat to say hello, and as he hugs me I feel so nauseous my head swirls and shimmies and my legs almost give way – and I don’t know if it’s the heat, or the shock, or the food, or whether I really am pregnant, but I don’t care. It feels like the least of my worries. Yet, whatever the cause of my condition, when we get in the buggy to take us to Dad’s bungalow I have to make Moosa stop so I can throw up at the side of the path – and my butler seems so pissed off, anyone would think that he’s the one who has to clean it up. But I can’t help it. I’m sick of this island. I’m sick of waiting for Jamie. I’m sick of being sick. I’m sick of worrying that I’m pregnant. It is sending me crazy.
After Moosa has shown us in and taken his laconic leave, Dad just stands there, looking helpless, and I realize he’s not young any more, and Kay’s not with him, and he must be exhausted. I feel so bad for him. I take two glasses and some water from the fridge and lead him out onto his terrace. We sit down across from each other at the table, and the water tinkles daintily as I pour. Neither of us speaks. Ambient jungle noises fill the void.
‘Jemma, do you want to tell me what’s going on?’ Dad says at last.
‘Nothing. There’s nothing going on, Dad. I don’t know where he is.’
He stares at me. I haven’t seen him since my wedding day, when he gave me away. I don’t like the look in his eyes. ‘I miss Mum,’ I say, and I’m not sure of my motivation. Maybe it’s simply that, when you think you might be pregnant and your husband is missing on your supposedly dream honeymoon, that’s when you need your mother. Or maybe I’m trying to deflect my father from the truth.
‘I know you do, love. It must be hard for you without her.’
I start to weep. ‘That was my fault, too.’ I have no idea why I’ve brought this up. It’s really not helping.
‘Oh, Jemma, of course it wasn’t. It was no-one’s fault. And I’m sure this isn’t your fault either.’
Dad and I look at each other, and neither of us knows whether he’s right. I still feel the need to broach it. I can’t cope with not knowing any more.
‘Dad,’ I say. I try not to adopt that little-girl whine. He makes me feel like a teenager again, but maybe all parents do that. ‘Why did you leave me with Mum?’
The look that crosses Dad’s face is one of guilt and sorrow and shame. I can see every single nuance of his regret.
‘I just couldn’t take any more, love,’ he says at last. ‘And when you refused to come with me, I didn’t know what else to do.’
I want to tell him I understand, and in a way I do, but it still makes me mad, enraged, that he’d thought it was OK to take the risk of leaving me with her. I remember my mother now, drunk, her eyes dancing with derangement, launching herself at my father. Over the years I’d seen her kick him, punch him, pull his hair, and he never, ever retaliated. He’d just packed his bags one day and walked out for good.
There is quiet, filled with the breeze and the crickets and a single low call – from a bird, I presume. I have to say it. ‘Dad … I’m worried I’ve taken after her.’
‘Oh, Jemma, love,’ says Dad. He looks grey. ‘What happened? Tell me about that last night with Jamie. What went wrong?’
‘I just can’t remember.’ I’m crying and he stands up and comes over to sit next to me, and the feeling of sobbing into his arms is almost as alien as this tragic mystery we find ourselves at the heart of. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, but Dad just shushes me and strokes my hair. I feel myself regressing to the last time we were like this, when I was eighteen, with a punky art-student haircut, and Dad’s own hair wasn’t grey yet. He’d sat me down and told me that of course I should go off to university – but I hadn’t wanted to leave Mum. Somehow I’d known it would end badly.
‘You need to put your future first,’ Dad had insisted. So had Mum, to be fair. Mum had always wanted what was best for me, even if she was a little misguided at times. She’d assured me over and over that she’d be fine
, and that I wasn’t responsible for her anyway. She’d been drinking less, definitely, and she looked good – like my sister, the postman used to joke.
‘No-one could have predicted it, Jemma,’ Dad says now.
Perhaps. But when I’d got the knock on the door of my first-year halls’ room, and opened it to find a woman in a skirt-suit, accompanied by my tutor, I’d known it was something. I’d found it hard to follow what they were saying. I hadn’t even known back then that people could die from asthma, and the fact that my mum had done so felt discordant, impossible, as if reality had been shunted, barged out of the way … and then the earth was turning, and twisting, and turning, and twisting, until my throat was constricting, and I’d had to sit down.
And so that had been it. Dad had come up to Warwick to collect me and I’d gone home to his and Kay’s, and they’d been marvellous, but I’d lost the one person who, in her own way, had been there for me through everything. Nothing can change it, of course, and maybe it wasn’t directly my fault, yet I still feel so guilty. She needed me, and I wasn’t there. But who knows – maybe that’s why I’m so fucking furious all of the time.
I leave Dad on the terrace and walk out onto the sand and shift my gaze upwards. I can feel more angry tears threatening, but I don’t want my dad to have to see them – he’s done his best to make his own amends over the years. I watch the loss expand up and outwards, until it’s filling up the sky, and I can see Mum’s face in the faint wisps of cloud, and then somehow it turns into my husband’s, and I know for sure that Mum has gone, but I don’t know about Jamie.
Jamie, where on earth are you? The regrets balloon and billow as I pray for him to come back. My heart rate slows. Jamie, please come back, I whisper. I’m so sorry for what I’ve done. I’m so sorry for everything.
Oh God. The status quo has ended at last, and the timing is almost comical. Just a few hours after Dad turned up to save his innocent little girl, all hell breaks loose. Here I am, as good as shipwrecked, stranded in paradise, and the world has outed me. Twitter, that master snowballer, has done its work. Its democratic machinations have taken a sand-sized grain of truth and made it a lie as big as the Earth in an instant. Thanks to the photographic prowess of one of my fellow holidaymakers, my fears have come true – the picture of Dan giving me an innocent goodbye hug has gone viral, and it looks a million times worse than I thought it might. Even the tabloids have picked up on the story now, and according to them not only am I a brother-swapping harlot, but perhaps I’m a murderous witch too, with devilish trickery that makes husbands vanish in the night-time. I would laugh if it weren’t so tragic. But they have dug into all of our backstories and found gold, and it’s as if we truly are on a real-life treasure island now. X marks the spot, folks. Even a media ingénue like me knows this story is going to run and run. The chronic anxiety feeds on my innards, as if I am eating myself.
It’s early evening on the day Dad arrived, and after a brief sortie with him to Reception, for another fruitless yet increasingly uncomfortable meeting with the manager, I have excused myself for the day, pleading a stomach bug. Dad didn’t mind – he’s jet-lagged anyway. So here I am, lying in my honeymoon bed, in my honeymoon bungalow, and I don’t care how comfortable or opulent it is any more, I despise it now. The curtains are shut and it is completely dark. The low thrum of the air conditioning drowns out the soft wash of the sea. I could be anywhere. Yet again, my mind starts to dredge through past events, tries to make sense of what is going on – of how everyone’s lives have been turned upside down so brutally, and seemingly irreversibly. A week or so ago I was a supposedly blissful bride at the threshold of a flower-scented church. Now my husband is missing, and my father and ex-lover and mother-in-law are all here on my honeymoon, and the police almost certainly suspect me of something, and the dregs of my private life are being disinterred by the media. Guilty, they might as well splash across their mastheads. Sasha has rung me, close to tears, but her voice sounded so far away, and at least here on my island of nightmares, marooned in the midst of this impossible ocean, there are only a hundred or so people, and I can hide away in my bungalow, protected from the furore. As long, of course, as I stay off the Internet. And then hopefully by the time I get home the fuss will have died down, and someone else will have taken over the weary mantel of world notoriety.
Not if Jamie’s not found, a voice whispers through the chill artificial breeze of the bedroom. If he’s not found it will be an eternal unsolved puzzle, like Lord Lucan, or that estate agent. I will live out my days under the taint of suspicion. I will forever be looking over my shoulder, just in case.
I lie completely still. My stomach is hollow, and yet it feels full of something indescribable. Wakeful hours pass. The sun rises, inevitably, although I don’t see it. Instead, I continue to stare up at the fan as it whirrs and circles, pernicious like rumours. At last I get up, open the curtains a slice, peer out to the endless deep sea, look hopelessly for my husband. Dark clouds are ganging up on the blue again today, and fat drops are pock-marking the ocean. I welcome the rain, am glad of the temporary interruption in utopian service. Thunder clatters above me, and I can hear the thudding jungle-drench on the roof. The violence of it is comforting, but still my mind is flighty, can’t concentrate. It’s the shock of exposure, perhaps. Or is it the effect of a baby, growing inside of me? I would have been happy with a honeymoon baby once, in fact had deliberately been letting nature take its course the last few weeks, but not like this. Never like this.
I go back to bed, in the absence of any other options. I’m tired. I’m bored. I’m racked with neuroses. My fear is as deep as the ocean. Memories flit at the edges of my mind, and I try to hold them back. I refuse to acknowledge them. I shut my eyes, will away the images. I must be like my mother, unbalanced, imagining things. But still the recollections swarm in, as relentless as the returning tide, and they are just so dreadful that I long to get up, run across my terrace and onto the beach, swim out into the waves, and, like my husband, never ever come back.
It did not happen.
Or did it?
46
A week or so earlier
When Jemma first woke up she wondered where she was, and she felt hot and confused, and momentarily fearful, as if there were a murderer lurking. And then she heard the soft rasps of her new husband’s snores, and she remembered. She remembered the church, and the vicar, and the photos, and the reception, and the speeches – the excruciating nature of the speeches – and she recalled trying to smile herself out of it, as though, if she smiled hard enough, the feelings of remorse would go away. Jamie had got drunk, and she’d got near-suicidal, but she’d smiled and she’d smiled and she’d smiled, like the damned villain she was, and now the whole of her jaw ached and her head was pounding from the sustained effort. She would have congratulated herself on her acting skills, if the situation hadn’t been so nightmarish.
Jemma managed to creep out of bed without Jamie stirring, and the sheets were so crisp and yet soft, and the thread count must have been sky-high, and she should have been the happiest girl in the world and the fact that she wasn’t was an insult to this room, to the very institution of marriage. She tiptoed in her silk nightgown past her wedding dress, which was discarded and inert on the sofa, like a dead person, and she couldn’t believe she’d ever worn it. Its bodice was stiff and its skirts were foamy, and it was an interloper, an imposter. She continued on to the bathroom, turned the key in the lock, and then sank down onto the black-and-white tiled floor, her back against the door. She stared at her pale bare legs, the muted pattern of their freckles, and she put her head on her knees and tried to calm the feelings of panic and confusion. She longed to go for a swim or a bike ride, clear her head, but she knew that she couldn’t. She couldn’t exit this room alone, not without Jamie. She might bump into someone, even at this hour. People would ask her what she was doing, where her husband was.
Jemma shifted her weight, and her bones crunched against th
e tiles. Did Jamie know how tormented she felt? She was pretty sure he didn’t, and the way she’d fallen into bed last night, pretending to be as drunk as he was, she thought she’d got away with it. And anyway, apparently no-one had sex on their wedding night. Sasha had told her, and Sasha knew everything.
There was a knock on the door. ‘Jemma,’ Jamie said. ‘Are you in there?’
‘Oh, yes, sorry,’ she said. She sprang silently to her feet and tiptoed across the room to flush the toilet. As she needlessly washed her hands at the art deco basin she called out for him to hang on, and when she finally opened the door she was so fraught her heart felt as though it might explode out of her chest, like a Tom-and-Jerry comedy clock on a spring.
Jamie swept past her into the bathroom, naked, looking rough, his broken-straw hair cute and mussy. He came within half an inch of his wife, but their skin didn’t quite touch. She sleepwalked across to sit on the edge of the bed, unsure what to do. If she got back under the duvet he might get in too and try to have sex with her. If she perched on the edge he’d know something was wrong. She wanted to absent herself, and be regenerated somewhere else. What could she do? Should she tell him how she was feeling? No. Not now.
Jemma stared at her hands, at the shiny, winking ring. Perhaps these feelings would pass. Maybe she just needed to give it time. She felt so confused and exhausted that she got into the bed, after all. She hugged the duvet to her. She waited. She heard the sound of the toilet flushing, and then Jamie brushing his teeth, and she knew that was a bad sign. He only brushed his teeth at this time of the morning if he wanted sex, and she pulled the covers tighter to her, as if she were a little girl again, scared of the dark. She tried not to acknowledge that conjugal relations were what was expected of her. The world felt as if it had become unstable, and everything was in the wrong order, and she cared about all the wrong things. Was it possible to keep a thought so tightly bound inside yourself that you could spend ages, years if needed, pretending it wasn’t even there? Could she really have deceived herself so assiduously?