The Beach Wedding

by Dorothy Koomson

  ‘I didn’t know how obsessed he could get, not until we fell out about this girl in college. He started a fist-fight with me over her. A proper knock-down brawl, it was. Over some girl who, it turned out, wasn’t even interested in either of us.’

  ‘So why did you stay friends with him then?’

  ‘Because we’ve got a history. You don’t let girls come before your mates. And anyway, afterwards he came up with this pact that, if we both liked a girl, neither of us would go out with her. And we stuck to that. Until you. And when I got with you, he attacked me again. That second time went way beyond anything I’d ever known from him before. He gave me a real pasting.

  ‘Afterwards he said he could have handled it if it was a one-night stand, but me going out with you was all kinds of wrong. He said he was so angry and he wanted to hurt me. I had to beg him to let me keep dating you.

  ‘I was going to tell the police everything, tell them what he did to me, and then we would both be safe. But you didn’t come back for weeks. I thought you’d decided to stay in Bussu Bay with your parents. I knew I couldn’t go back to our old flat until you were home because I wanted Jake to think I was dead so he wouldn’t hurt you. Instead, I went to stay with Ellen and her parents in the countryside. She was so generous. She paid for my flight home and made sure someone looked at my nose properly when we got back. She even suggested I changed my name a bit, so no one could find me. By the time I found out that you’d come back to Brighton—’

  ‘Let me guess,’ I interrupt. ‘By the time you found out that I’d come back to Brighton, you’d realised you had feelings for Ellen and decided it was best all round if I CONTINUED TO THINK YOU WERE DEAD!’ I scream at him.

  ‘No, no, it wasn’t like that,’ he says quickly, trying to calm me down. ‘By the time you got back, I came to see you and he was there. Jake. And you were pregnant. I watched the two of you. I remember it clearly: you had both just come out of our flat and you took his hand and put it on your stomach to feel the baby moving, I think. And I realised that with me out of the way, he’d got what he wanted: you and now a baby.

  ‘I knew there was no way on Earth you’d believe what he’d done, not when you were carrying his child. So I went away, praying that now he had a baby and the woman he’d always wanted, he’d settle down and you two could be happy. I knew that, if I popped up in your lives again, I would be putting you and probably your child at risk.

  ‘I didn’t get together properly with Ellen until months later. I’d started working in her father’s business by then but, when we discovered Marvin was on the way, we had to speedily get married.’ He takes a step forward until he is close to me. ‘I couldn’t believe it when Marvin told us where he and Nia wanted to get married, and that his fiancée’s family owned this place. It was like everything had come full circle. I knew I could finally set the record straight. I could finally see you again.

  ‘I wasn’t prepared, though, for all the emotions that I felt when we got here. And then, when I saw you again …’ He stops talking. Then lowers his voice to say, ‘I still love you.’

  Lies – it’s all lies. But then, there are bits that sound like the truth. Bits that remind me of conversations with Jake that could mean … No. It’s all lies. It has to be. Jake isn’t a killer. And besides …

  ‘There’s only one little problem,’ I say as I push past Drew, making for the entrance to the cave.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asks.

  ‘Nia isn’t Jake’s daughter.’

  ‘What? What are you saying?’

  ‘She’s not Jake’s daughter – she’s yours.’

  Drew’s eyes almost bulge out of his head. ‘But that means …’

  ‘Yes, that means your daughter is going to marry your son. Because you were a coward all those years ago and because you slunk away, instead of confronting Jake like you should have done if your story is true, your son is going to marry our daughter.’

  11

  Now

  It seems a million times worse now I’ve said it out loud.

  It is a horrible, horrible thing that is happening to Nia and Marvin. I don’t know how Nia will deal with it. Or Marvin. The thought of it, all the times they’d … My poor daughter. My poor, poor little girl.

  I run for the cave exit, and stumble as I hit the rocky path that leads down through the greenery to the beach. I stumble on some of the bigger rocks before I hit the sand.

  As soon as my flip-flops make contact with the hot, yellow sand, I start to run back to the resort.

  I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get there, what I’m going to say, but I have to tell her. Now. I can’t leave it a moment longer than necessary. Listening to Drew talk has shown me what happens when you are a coward. When you decide to put yourself first and forget the possible hideous outcomes for other people.

  ‘Tessa!’ I can hear Drew calling behind me. ‘Tessa! Wait! We need to talk about this.’

  I push my legs harder, force them to run faster. I don’t want to hear what he has to say. I listened to him just now and it has made everything a lot worse. When I first saw he was alive I thought that, perhaps, he’d lost his memory. That he didn’t know about me and had gone on with life not knowing that I was waiting for him. But no, that wasn’t the case. He’d been alive, he’d been well, he’d known all about me and he hadn’t come for me. He had lied, and then he had convinced himself he didn’t need to come back because I was with someone else.

  That was the truth of it. It was easier for him to stay away, to start again, to let me grieve. Drew was a coward. A selfish coward. If it was true that Jake was a thug and capable of murder, then Drew had shown his weakness quite clearly by not even trying to get me away from him. He had just left me to my fate.

  I do not want to talk to him, to listen to what he has to say, because I know it will be the coward’s way out of this mess.

  ‘Tessa! I need to talk to you!’ Drew screams. He sounds closer. He’s faster than me, probably fitter. To my left, I can see the hotel buildings coming up, and I push myself, dig deep to make it. I start to turn towards safety but Drew catches up to me. He grabs me and pulls me to a standstill.

  ‘Let go of me!’ I cry and try to tug my arm free. Which makes him grab both of my arms and grip me tighter. ‘Let go!’ I shout again.

  ‘We have to think about this,’ he shouts back at me. His grip on me increases as I try to wrestle myself free. ‘We can’t just march in there and tell them all this. It will destroy them.’

  ‘Let go!’ I scream.

  I remember once, not long after we got together, Drew and I were on the main bit of Victoria station and he’d been faffing about, which made us miss the train back to Brighton. I made a comment about it and suddenly he grabbed my forearm in a steel-like grip. He whispered in a low scary voice not to talk to him like that. When I told him he was hurting me, he increased his grip and told me to stop making a scene. He only let me go when two guys nearby told him to. Drew had immediately apologised and said he was out of order, and wouldn’t do it again. But I knew, deep down, that I had to be careful when challenging him, that I had to think twice about criticising him – because I’d been given a glimpse of what could happen if I did.

  ‘Let me go!’ I shout again now, which makes him grip me even harder.

  ‘You need to listen to me,’ he snarls. ‘You need to listen to me about what we’re going to do.’

  Using all my strength I try to pull myself away, trying to free myself from him. Suddenly he lets me go and I fall back on to the sand. ‘Will you listen!’ he screams. But before he can say anything else, I see Jake launch himself at Drew and the pair of them crash down on to the sand too. They start to fight, throwing sand up as they roll around. And then Nia and Marvin come running up the beach, closely followed by Kwame and Edward.

  Marvin goes to intervene but Kwame holds him back, rightly not wanting him to get involved or hurt. I’m frozen where I sit, the sun beating down on us, watching
this horror.

  ‘Stop it!’ Nia screams. ‘Stop it! What are you doing? Just stop it! Dad, Dad, please just stop it.’

  That seems to get through to them and they break apart and look at her.

  ‘What are you doing, Dad?’ Nia asks, through her sobs. ‘Why are you behaving like this?’ Jake, of course – she’s talking to Jake. She’s never called him that, not in all the years we’ve been together. I always took it as her way of making a point about me not marrying him. ‘Dad, why are you trying to ruin my wedding?’

  Drew screws up his face as he looks at my daughter. ‘Wait. You know I’m your father?’ he asks.

  Everyone stops moving, probably stops breathing too. ‘What did you say?’ Nia whispers.

  ‘Nothing, nothing,’ Drew says as he realises Nia was calling Jake ‘Dad’.

  ‘Mum?’ Nia says to me. ‘Mum, what’s going on?’

  The shock and pain in her voice make me stand up. I go to her, try to take her in my arms, but she steps away. ‘What’s going on?’ she asks again.

  I can almost hear Drew silently willing me to make something up. To spare him this by lying for him.

  ‘Nia, I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t want you to find out like this.’

  ‘Are you trying to ruin it for me because your wedding went so wrong?’ she asks me.

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ I reply.

  ‘I don’t believe you. You’ve been weird ever since I told you we wanted to get married here.’

  ‘Nia, it’s not that, I promise you.’ I try to take her hands in mine but she snatches hers away. ‘I didn’t want you to find out like this,’ I state.

  ‘So it’s true? He’s—?’ Her voice cuts out.

  ‘Nia—’ I begin but she stops looking at me. She is staring at Drew.

  She takes a step backwards. Then another. She shakes her head, all the while taking steps away from me and away from the truth. ‘No, that can’t be true,’ she says. ‘No. No. It just can’t be.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Nia,’ I say.

  Drew says nothing.

  ‘No, no, no—’ Nia turns and takes off up the slope from the beach to the resort, her sundress flapping in the breeze behind her as she runs.

  Marvin is standing stock-still staring at his dad. His horror is clear on his face. He’s waiting, I think, for his father to deny it. Drew is completely focused on his son but he doesn’t say a word. Jake is staring at where Nia has just run off, clearly wondering if he should follow her.

  Kwame and Edward look awkward and embarrassed. Working and living in a hotel, I’m sure they have heard all sorts of gossip over the years, but there’ll be nothing like this. I can’t worry about anyone else right now, though. I have to find my daughter.

  Now

  I expected to find Nia in her bedroom, crying or throwing up in the toilet. That is what I would be doing if I were her. Instead, she is in my bedroom. When I enter my room, she is tugging open a drawer from the dresser, reaching in and throwing everything in it on to the floor.

  She does the same with the other four drawers in that chest – opening them, throwing things out, slamming them shut to get to the next one.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask her.

  ‘Where is it?’ she screeches as she opens my wardrobe and begins pulling out shoeboxes. She empties them and then throws them aside when she doesn’t find whatever it is she’s looking for.

  ‘Where’s what?’ I ask.

  ‘The picture of him. My father. I know you won’t have got rid of it. I know it’s here somewhere.’

  Then she gets to the bedside table and opens those drawers – one, two, three. In number three she finds it. The furniture had come with us from Brighton and that is the place where I have always kept the picture of Drew. Waiting for the time when Nia would ask about him. I never could have imagined she would be looking for it in these circumstances. She takes out the photo of her father and me. It was very rare to get a photo of him, even rarer to have one of us together.

  Nia looks at the photo for a few seconds, her eyes searching every inch to try to find something, anything, that will tell her he isn’t related to her by blood. After she finds nothing to prove Drew isn’t her father, she drops it. ‘No, no, no,’ she says. ‘No.’ She sinks to the floor and covers her face with her hands. ‘No, no, no,’ she keeps sobbing. ‘No, no, no.’

  I go to her, put my arms around her and hold her as she cries. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say to her over and over. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Jake arrives and is about to come in, but I hold my hand up and then wave him away. This isn’t the place for him or anyone else. Right now, it needs to be just Nia and me.

  Jake steps out of the room and shuts the door behind him. I take my daughter completely in my arms, then rock her back and forth, just like I did when she was a baby.

  12

  Now

  ‘What on earth is going on?’ Ellen, Marvin’s mother, asks angrily when I wander out on to the patio outside the dining room.

  The sun is coming up over the horizon and its heat on my skin is like a warm bath after a long trip to the Arctic. I have spent the night holding Nia while she sobbed. She couldn’t speak, just cry. I hushed her, hugged her, tried to think of a way to make it right.

  Now she is asleep and I need to move my body, to feel the sun on my skin to feel alive again. Part of the patio has a large corrugated roof, and part of it is exposed to the sun. Jake sits at the end that is exposed, staring at the sea and taking sips from a bottle of beer.

  ‘I have just spent the whole night sitting with my sobbing son,’ Ellen says, the anger still soaking her voice. I would be as angry as her if my child was in the state he was in, and I had no idea why. ‘Marvin couldn’t speak for crying, and every time I tried to leave him he started wailing. Actually wailing. I had to tuck him up in my bed and he’s only just cried himself to sleep.

  ‘On top of all that, I have no idea where Andrew is. Your staff refuse to answer any questions and keep offering me cups of tea. And your husband hasn’t said a word in the half an hour I’ve been out here. What is going on?’

  I drop into a chair facing the ocean, and throw my head back, trying to stretch my poor aching neck muscles.

  ‘Has everyone around here taken leave of their senses?’ Ellen asks.

  ‘We need to find Drew,’ I say. ‘Once we do, we can sit down and talk about what to do next.’

  ‘What to do next?’ Ellen comes to stand in front of me. ‘Has something happened with your daughter and my son?’

  ‘We need to find Drew,’ I repeat quietly. ‘Then we can all talk.’

  ‘Why do you say Andrew’s name like that?’ Ellen asks.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like you’ve known him from before today. Nobody shortens his name – he doesn’t like it. But you do it as if you’ve been given permission.’

  I frown at her. Maybe she has blanked it out of her head. Twenty-four years is a long time. Maybe she has truly forgotten how she helped Drew leave here, how she had this place robbed. I suppose she had to have forgotten all about that to be able to come back here and act normally. ‘When we find Drew, we can all sit down and talk,’ I repeat.

  ‘I’m right here,’ he says from the doorway that leads into the dining room.

  My stomach flips at his voice, at his arrival. Drew used to frighten me. I can admit that, now I know he is alive. I seemed to have forgotten that over the years of missing him. Over the years when he was dead to me, I tended to focus on remembering the good things about him. Every time something bad about his behaviour came up in my memory, I would shy away from it, bury it, pretend it wasn’t as horrible as it was.

  Yes, he was nice most of the time, and I loved him no matter what. But when it was bad, it was horrific. And it would have got worse. I can admit that now, too. I had put all those worries about his treatment of me to one side, especially when I found out I was pregnant and in the run-up to the wedding, because I didn’t
want to let anyone down. I wanted to believe that he would change once we were married and he’d become a dad. But he probably wouldn’t have. Actually, he probably would have become more terrifying, once marriage and a baby had made it harder for me to leave him.

  ‘Stay well away from me,’ Jake warns from his place at the end of the patio, without looking around. ‘Well away.’

  ‘Where have you been?’ Ellen asks Drew.

  ‘Trying to clear my head,’ he says to her. He definitely talks differently to her. He doesn’t seem to be as confident and sure of himself with her. I can’t imagine him ever screaming at her that he’d make her sorry if he ever caught her even looking at another man.

  ‘Right, now we are all here, would someone mind telling me what is going on?’ Ellen says as she takes a seat on the opposite side of the patio.

  ‘It’s all right, you can drop the act now,’ I tell her. ‘You can stop pretending.’

  ‘Stop pretending about what exactly?’ she says icily.

  ‘Drew told me how you paid a couple of local boys to rob this place to get his passport back all those years ago.’

  ‘I did what?’ she says. She turns to her husband who is still standing by the doorway to the dining room. ‘I did what?’ she repeats, raising her voice.

  ‘Tessa has got it mixed up,’ Drew says quickly. ‘Totally mixed up.’

  ‘What about the part where Jake tried to kill you? Did I get that mixed up too?’ I ask him.

  ‘Is that what you told her?’ Jake says, shaking his head without taking his eyes off the sea. ‘You’re creative, I’ll give you that.’

  ‘You, shush,’ Ellen says to Jake. ‘We are talking about me.’ She looks at her husband again. ‘I did what?’

  Morning heat is my favourite type of warmth. It feels like someone is turning on the sun like they would an oven, getting it ready to do everything it needs to that day. I close my eyes, heavy and gritty as they are, lift my face to the sun, and wait for Drew to speak.