by Tina Seskis
Jamie came out of the bathroom. The sight of him without clothes made her feel odd, as though he were a stranger and she was spying on him, and she averted her eyes. He hopped into the bed, shuffled over, took her in his arms. Jemma buried her head into his shoulder and it felt OK. Her panic subsided a little. Maybe her feelings were entirely normal, after all. Surely she couldn’t have been the first ambivalent new bride? Perhaps it’s just that no-one ever said it.
‘Hmm, you OK?’ Jamie said. He ran his hand up her thigh, squeezed her rump, kissed the top of her head.
‘I feel a bit sick,’ she said.
‘Really? Did you drink that much?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think so.’
‘Poor love.’ He tilted Jemma’s chin up and she tried to resist but it was too obvious. She looked into his pale-grey eyes, and they lacked something, but she didn’t know what.
‘Hello, Mrs Armstrong.’
‘Hi,’ she murmured. Jamie leaned in to kiss her and his breath was minty and beery, and it turned her stomach, although she’d used to love it.
‘Jamie,’ she said, fighting him off. ‘I’m sorry. I … I’ve just got my period.’
His hand was still roving around her upper thighs, but at this he stopped. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Shit. That’s bad timing.’
‘Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.’ She lay still, willing him to remove his hand completely. She felt so bad for him. She could tell he suspected she was lying, and that she didn’t usually mind much, anyway. They were both lost for words. At last Jamie decided to go with it – what choice did he have? – and he moved his arms to encircle her waist, and they lay there together. She rested her head on his chest, and now that the sex issue appeared to have been resolved, at least temporarily, she found it a little easier. And the room was lovely: large and luxurious, with grand swags at the windows, which looked out across acres of serene, bucolic parkland scattered with grazing umber deer. When they’d first come here, she’d known immediately it was the place. She’d loved the faded grandeur, the stateliness, the upholstered seats at the windows, where she’d imagined she would sit and look out, swamped by a fluffy white robe, sipping tea, eating biscuits, after hours of hot newly-wed sex, her body clammy and perfumed by her husband. Jemma closed her eyes. She tried to sleep. The desire to push him away was almost animalistic. Jamie’s breathing slowed and became heavier, and when he fell back into hungover sleep, the relief was momentarily sharp, like a brief sweep of autumnal sunshine as the clouds split apart. Jemma dared not get up again. It was too early. At last she managed to extricate herself from her sleeping husband’s arms, and then she lay there silently, and thought about Dan.
47
Now
My missing husband has been spotted in Colombo. Unfortunately he has also been seen in the bustling streets of Jakarta, deep in the jungle in Venezuela, and, perhaps most improbably, in a service station in Gloucestershire. I suppose it’s inevitable that the sightings have started, but it’s painful, and I hadn’t been prepared for the gut wrench of any proof that it might be true, that he might be out there, walking around, living his life. That he really might have done this on purpose. The comparisons with the Canoe Man are also being made now, and so not only am I a potential murderer, I’m also a possible colluder in the disappearing trick of the century. I have sworn, yet again, that I will stay off the Internet, but in some ways I feel like I should be on top of it, be aware of the latest theories, so I know what the police might accuse me of. It’s hard to know what to do.
The British police questioned me for a third time earlier, in the sunny little room in the sanatorium – about Jamie’s clothes this time, although we’ve already gone over and over it. I repeated that the last time I saw him he was wearing salmon shorts, and a white linen shirt, and flip-flops. He wasn’t dressed up, even though we were in the à la carte restaurant over the water. He was on a beach holiday, he’d said, not at the sodding Dorchester. I don’t know why they had to ask me again. Would he have gone snorkelling in those shorts, they wanted to know. In normal circumstances, no, I’d said – but after our argument, maybe he’d stormed back, grabbed his mask and flippers off the terrace, and plunged into the water. But without his dive torch? I don’t know, I’d wanted to yell, you’re meant to be the detectives round here, but of course I hadn’t.
Anyway, the upshot appears to be that if Jamie did go snorkelling he must have a) been unable to see anything, and b) done it in the clothes he was wearing that night at dinner, as they haven’t been found anywhere either. Or else the mask and snorkel they found on the beach was planted, and he hadn’t gone swimming at all – and that theory seems increasingly likely. But who on earth would plant them? And where are his flippers? None of this makes any sense. I’ve nearly reached breaking point, and I have to be careful in front of the police. Yet the truth is, I’m almost past caring what has happened to my husband, or whether or not I’m pregnant, or how I feel about Dan. All I care about is getting off this infernal island. Now, more than anything else in the whole wide world, I just want to go home.
Dad is struggling with the humidity, and he seems out of place, and older than I remember – and although he tries to hide it, he carries an air of deep sorrow with him. I can’t say I blame him. Last time I saw him, he was proudly marrying off his only daughter. Now he’s stuck on a desert island with her, having to negotiate untold drama as well as the latest headlines. The Sun has excelled itself with the most recent pictures of me, one in which I look as if I’m having a whale of a time lying at the edge of the water, eyes closed, arms flung back in orgasmic release, apparently offering myself to someone. The other shot is one of me and Dan from years ago, arms around each other, at a party, coupled with the headline: ‘The bride and the brother – missing groom mystery deepens’. Someone’s told them all about my history with Dan, complete with pictures, and I wonder who has betrayed us. I am seriously worried now. The circumstantial evidence against me is mounting. Jamie and I were overtly miserable honeymooners; we’d just had a row; I used to go out with his brother, who incidentally has been caught hugging me on my doorstep; and now there are these latest photographs, where I appear to be luxuriating at the edge of the waves in some kind of insouciant celebration of my husband’s disappearance. It’s a PR disaster.
A whole week has passed since Jamie went missing, and he and I should have been flying home tomorrow. But instead I’m here on my exquisite terrace with my father, and although I am grateful to him, it still feels so odd. He gets on with his John Grisham, and I try my best to sit still, concentrate on my latest literary endeavour, but I can’t focus on a word of it. I give up soon enough and instead practise my yogic breathing for a bit, but that just seems to alarm Dad, so I stop that as well. I can’t remember when I last spent any time alone with my father, which is sad, now I come to think about it. Neither of us speaks. We have said everything there is to say. Everything apart from what was really going on in my life.
Finally I capitulate and go back on the Internet. I can’t help myself. It terrifies me to discover that Jamie’s disappearance is still front-page news, and therefore so am I. I no longer care if anyone thinks he did do it deliberately, or does have a secret bank account, or was sleeping with Camille. At least that means they don’t think it’s me. It seems Camille’s a great actress, though, if he truly has disappeared off to South America with her blessing, as she’s been pictured on the street looking distraught, albeit dressed as chicly as ever. I can’t work out why I don’t hate her.
I lie down on the daybed and close my eyes, feeling weak with apathy and ongoing nausea. It’s as if I’ve reached a place where I’m thinking, OK, just sock it to me, tell me what’s going on. If Jamie accidentally drowned then that is tragic, but that makes him definitively dead, and although I will always feel terrible about it, at least there’s nothing that can be done. But if it turns out that he has absconded, I will be glad. Glad that he’s alive, and that I won’t
need to feel guilty, as he will be the villain of the piece, not me. Yet the most likely outcome is that we’ll never know, and the situation is a paralysis, and I don’t want to stay here for a single second longer. I am desperate to leave. But when will they ever let me? And whose decision even is it? Perhaps I should ask Dad to talk to the British police, who surely need to go home soon too. Haven’t they got families, and responsibilities?
Yet here’s the rub: I’m too terrified to risk disrupting the catatonic status quo, as I have reached a new stage in this absurd tragedy. Even more than wanting Jamie to come back, or longing to go home, or wanting to know what has happened, or yearning to find out whether or not I am having a baby, I now care about just one thing. More than anything in the world right now, I don’t want to get arrested.
48
A week or so earlier
Jamie and Jemma were staying the following night after their wedding at his parents’ house, as it was near the airport and Veronica had insisted. On the trip down the motorway the silence in the car was brooding, inescapable. It hummed along with the rubber on tarmac, burred with the strokes of the engine. It needed curtailing.
‘Can we put the radio on?’ Jemma said.
‘Sure,’ Jamie replied. Jemma pressed the button and Taylor Swift burst through the speakers, telling them to shake it off, and Jemma wanted to laugh. She wanted to laugh hysterically at the predicament she and Jamie found themselves in.
‘I’m sorry about being so quiet,’ she said. ‘I think I’m just a bit hungover still.’
‘That’s all right,’ he said. It seemed he had greater powers of forgiveness than she’d ever had. He put his hand on her knee, and his fingers felt as if they had electricity running through them. It was only when the motorway took a slight leftward turn, and Jamie put both hands back on the steering wheel, that she felt able to breathe again.
‘Are you nervous about flying?’ he asked.
She gave a little laugh. ‘No, that’s you, Jamie, not me. I’m … I’m fine. I think I’m just exhausted.’
‘Well, you’re certainly not yourself. Normally you never shut up.’ He was trying to be jokey, but it came out like a reproach, and a rude one at that. How had they become such strangers? How had they got married yesterday?
Jemma rested her head against the passenger window, and her heartbeat rose through her head and thudded into the hard, unforgiving glass, and she thought of prisons, made of crystal, and sledgehammers. She shut her eyes. The adverts were playing now, and Jemma wished they’d shut up, but even though they were terrible, they were better than the silence. Anything was better than this silence. Her breath still couldn’t escape her body properly, and it felt like she was being inflated, as if there wasn’t enough space in the car for all the air in her lungs, and she couldn’t let it out anyway, and that soon her skin would be pressing against hot metal and cold glass, expanding, ever expanding, as she puffed up like Veruca Salt, or was it Augustus Gloop? She yearned to explode her way out of her husband’s smooth-pistoned, leather-seated BMW like a flesh-and-bone bomb, and be free.
When they finally arrived at his parents’ horrid upside-down house Veronica made such a fuss over Jemma, anyone would think she hadn’t seen her daughter-in-law in months, instead of this morning at breakfast. And then she told Jemma that she looked ill and should go and have a lie-down. When Jemma demurred, Veronica proceeded to ignore her, talking to Jamie as if Jemma wasn’t even there. It was peculiar, and Jemma even wondered whether Veronica had some kind of personality disorder. She shuddered at what effect such a mother must have had on her children. In Veronica’s eyes, her sons were her golden boys. Her boys could do no wrong. Her boys always got what they wanted. Perhaps that was why Jamie had always been so uber-confident – not because his mother had instilled in him a healthy sense of self-esteem, but because she’d given him an unedifying sense of entitlement. Jemma couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it before.
Jemma finally made her excuses and went to her room, after all. She was too scared to ring anyone. She was desperate to ring someone. Her phone burnt a hole in her hand. She stared at it and willed it to dial. She almost asked Siri. But who could she call? She thought of her mother’s ashes, at home on the mantelpiece. She didn’t want to upset her dad. There was only one person she wanted to talk to, but she couldn’t do it here. She couldn’t ring Dan, ask him to come and rescue her, not here in his parents’ house. She’d married his brother. It was too late.
49
Now
It’s night, and a bird squawks, and I can’t sleep. I get up, go to the toilet, but the absence of blood still is like a harbinger. I scrub, to be certain.
They have finally called off the search. It seems I’ll be going home soon, but without Jamie. The unimaginable really is happening. I will be going back to a different life. One without a husband. A new life, of notoriety and suspicion and doubt. I lie still, on my back, and I imagine I can feel a baby kicking, but that’s ridiculous; it would be far too early, even if there is one. As soon as I get home, I will take a test, and I’m still not sure what it will say. Maybe my failure to menstruate, my near-constant nausea, is simply due to this horrific situation. But whatever the reason, I can barely face even eating now, no matter how delicious the food that’s delivered to me. Chati doesn’t seem to mind, though. Sometimes he just waits quietly, as I pick at his offerings, and we don’t need to say anything to each other. His assiduousness helps somehow. His kindness is like balm. And besides, feeding someone is the most primal response to grief that there is. Maybe that’s why people deliver lasagnes to bereaved people. Or even why babies cry to be fed: their hungry wails make the mother feel too bad not to oblige, and I have to say it’s an ingenious survival mechanism. The thought makes me picture a baby growing inside of me again, and I’m pretty certain I need to be strong.
I get up again, visit the bathroom again, lie back down again. I have endured so many hours here in this room, there on that terrace, but now it seems I really can’t bear these last several. It feels like I may as well be in an actual cage, with strong, thick bars and a giant, gleaming padlock. I put my hands on my stomach and breathe, and I feel my gut balloon up, and down, up, and down. I’m hopefully leaving, at last. But going home to who? To what? Nothing matters.
Eventually I drift off into a beautiful, luscious sleep, and I am so grateful to the universe, for allowing me this respite, this escape from the nightmare. I can feel water lapping at my ankles, and then my thighs, and now it’s over my head, and I am fighting it, I am fighting so hard, but it’s so strong, and the waves are like arms. And now I’m fighting Jamie, and we are thrashing about in the sea, and he tells me I’m drunk, and a nightmare, and I fucking hate him, I hate him more than the worst corner of my memories. I wish so desperately that I wasn’t here, here with him. I wish he would just fuck off and go away, and I tell him so. I shriek it as loudly as I can, such is my hysteria – and now I can hardly breathe, and I am drowning, I’m drowning, I am going to drown. And then, suddenly, it is quiet, and the sea is calm, and I walk out of the water and my dress is sopping and my eyes are stinging and so I screw them up as tight as I can, and when I open them again I am in bed, and I am going home soon, and I am burning a fever that’s soaking into the sheets … and at last, at long last, I remember.
50
A week or so earlier
The dog was looping through the grass, backwards and forwards, in and out, sniffing, ever sniffing, and just watching him run exhausted Jemma. She’d said she wanted to get some fresh air, and apparently Samson had needed a walk, and so she’d offered to take him, just for twenty minutes or so. Jamie hardly ever went with her, indifferent to both dogs and country walks, so it hadn’t seemed too odd that she’d gone alone. Veronica had still given Jemma one of her looks, though, and it had frightened the life out of her, even more so than usual.
Jemma soon reached the other side of the meadow, and instead of continuing along the public footpath towards
the village, she skulked along the hedgerow until she found an opening into the field beyond. Only once she was certain that no-one could see her did she take out her mobile. She wasn’t one hundred per cent sure who she was going to ring until she did it. She handled the phone as if it were a grenade.
‘Hello.’ His voice was dull, muffled.
‘It’s me.’
‘I know it’s you. What are you ringing me for?’
‘Dan … I’ve made a mistake.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I shouldn’t have married Jamie.’
Silence.
‘Well, it’s a bit late for that.’
‘I don’t know what to do.’ Jemma could hear her voice crack.
There was more silence. And then there was muffling and scuffling. She hunched into her coat, the phone clamped to her ear.
‘Dan?’
‘Yes?’
‘What should I do?’
‘Jemma, I have no idea. Where are you?’
‘Walking Samson.’
‘Where’s Jamie?’
‘At the house.’
‘Jemma, I’m sorry, but you’ve made your bed. What you do now is up to you.’
‘Please … Dan …’ She was shocked at how hostile he sounded, and she didn’t know why she’d rung him. It seemed there was no point bringing up their last conversation.