by H P Tune
“How long has he had this place?” Mia asked, groaning with effort as she lifted her suitcase onto the metal stand. “It’s nice.”
Juliet dropped to sitting at the edge of the bed and then slowly lay back. “He’s managed this one for probably three or four years now. I always stay here when I come back. Before this, though, he worked his way around the world. He starting off with pulling drinks on party islands and moved his way up.”
“Impressive. And he provided champagne and cheese goods, so he’s already won me over.”
It gave Mia a warm feeling to see the way Juliet’s hands folded themselves behind her head, the picture of relaxation. “It’s your job to pour,” Juliet said. It was something between a declaration and an order.
“Really.” Mia arched her eyebrows, crossing her arms across her chest.
Juliet gave her a single, emphatic nod. “Yep, under the logic that you’re standing and I’m not.”
With a chortle, Mia crossed the room. She paused at the end of Juliet’s bed, facing her, and then letting herself plummet onto the bed over Juliet, landing on the bed with both palms on either side of Juliet’s prone body. Juliet smirked up at her, hooking her index fingers over the waistband of Mia’s jeans.
“Don’t think this gets you out of pouring.” She tickled the soft skin and jutted her chin, an obvious request for a kiss. Mia indulged a long exchange of them; they broke apart with wide smiles.
“We haven’t gotten to do that enough,” she said, adding another quick series of kisses to Juliet’s cheek before struggling back into a standing position. “Ooomph.” She could see Juliet’s visible amusement. “Sooo, drink, flights and cheese—somewhat in that order; what do you think?”
“Yep, do you need my laptop?”
Mia shook her head, fishing her phone out of her handbag. “No thanks, I’ll just give a call to my travel agent.” With the phone pressed to her ear, Mia went about uncorking the champagne bottle, giving a sheepish look as the cork rocketed across the room, provoking a giggle from Juliet. Crawling back up the bed, Juliet repositioned two pillows to allow her to sit with her back against the wall. Staring at her phone’s screen, Mia quickly mentioned some flights and various dates, patiently waiting for availability.
With a shrug, she turned to Juliet. “Late tomorrow night or mid-morning the day after?”
Juliet held both palms in the air. “I don’t really mind. Tomorrow night gets us moving, I suppose.”
“True.” Mia’s face tightened in concentration as she turned her attention back to the phone. “What? Are you serious?” She shook her head, more to herself than to Juliet, and huffed into the phone. “Well just start a new account under my details. You have it all on file.”
She paced across the worn carpet. “Yes thank you. You have Juliet’s details from last week as well.” Muttering a curse goodbye, Mia placed her phone on the bedside table and repeatedly tucked little strands of hair behind her ears.
“Everything okay?” Juliet asked.
“Yeah, just the start of many cut-offs from my family, I suppose. It’s not a big deal, but I could do without the attitude from someone I’ve spoken to on the phone probably a hundred times.” Mia sighed heavily, walking back to collect the cheese platter and placing it on the bed next to Juliet. She carefully climbed the bed to mirror Juliet’s position. “Nothing this won’t fix.” She resolved to not let her family’s bullshit ruin this hard-won moment of quietude and peace.
Juliet sagged backward and rubbed soothingly at Mia’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“Eh. How’s the champagne?”
“Mmm, not bad. It was about time the cheese came over, though.” She placed a slice of Brie onto a water cracker and into her mouth.
“Oh really?” Mia asked, taking a few long, very necessary gulps from her glass and placing it back on the bedside table. She rolled onto her side and slid down the bed slightly, taking Juliet’s hand and holding it to her chest. Opening her mouth, Mia waited with a half grin until Juliet dropped a square of Gouda inside. “Mmm, better.”
“You’re beautiful, you know that?” Juliet said suddenly.
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Mia said, swallowing and kissing Juliet’s fingers. “How have your ribs been?” The pads of her fingers pressed at Juliet’s side.
“Mmm, okay.” Juliet glanced down at her stomach. “Still annoying and sore, but okay. They’re not hurting right now.”
“Just when you move, huh?” Mia walked her fingers slowly down to Juliet’s hip, focussed on finding the soft skin under her shirt.
Juliet watched her quietly. “Yeah, something like that.”
“So,” Mia said, “if you weren’t to really move, then they might cope okay. Am I interpreting that right?”
Juliet chuckled. “I’m sensing you have some ideas, Mia?”
“Mmmm, maybe a few.” Mia continued to crawl her fingers up Juliet’s abdomen now, under her shirt, hand splayed out so her thumb just scratched the underwire of her bra. “But we did say we would take things slow.”
“We did.” Yet she slipped her leg to fall over Mia’s, calf running over Mia’s shin. “But, that said, we’ve hardly had the smoothest start.”
“True.” Curling her upper body, Mia pressed a kiss to the curve of Juliet’s shoulder through her shirt’s fabric. “And there has to be a limit to our self-restraint, doesn’t there?”
Juliet hastily turned her head, her lips moving towards Mia’s mouth. They kissed deeply, warm tongues pressing into each other, fighting for space. Mia’s hand gradually edged further until she breathlessly palmed Juliet’s breast. She moved her hand under Juliet’s arm and gripped tightly, breaking away and nuzzling into her neck. Panting, Mia chuckled, and Juliet smoothed some dark hair away from her face. “I think we spilt some cheese,” Juliet whispered, and Mia jumped back.
“Whoops.” Mia rebalanced the plate and swiftly picked up nuts and cheese that had spilled onto the duvet cover. “Here,” she said with a smile, spreading some Brie over a cracker and handing it to Juliet.
“You taste better.” There were traces of a petulant whine in Juliet’s voice. Mia needed no further enticement. She moved the plate from the bed, and they both took a few more mouthfuls of champagne, finishing off their glasses.
Settling onto her stomach, Mia tugged Juliet down the bed. “I want you down here,” she said as Juliet shuffled down, hands slipping around Mia’s waist. “But, so you know, I’m happy just being here with you. We don’t need to…”
“I want to.” Juliet had one hand pressed to the small of Mia’s back, whilst the other traced the neckline of her shirt. Mia shivered. “It’s just been a crazy few days…weeks even.”
“And waiting is perfectly okay.”
“What I actually want to do is tear your clothes off.” Using her little finger to pull Mia’s shirt away from her skin, Juliet made no bones about peering into Mia’s cleavage, offering an overwrought groan that smacked of frustrated desire. “But can you put up with waiting just a little longer? ’Till we get back…back home?” She went quiet.
Mia nodded, kissing the corner of Juliet’s mouth and lingering there, feeling Juliet’s fingers dance over the bare skin of her chest. “Oh honey, anything you need.”
“I have a bit of a track record of jumping into bed with people whom I don’t care about, usually in the midst of some crisis. But you…” Juliet said, fingers curling around the pendant at Mia’s neck until she formed a fist, “you I care about.”
“So the ones you don’t care about get to sleep with you, and the one you do doesn’t?”
But Juliet was already shaking her head before Mia finished her sentence. “No, that’s not it. And that makes me sound fucked up. When you and I, well, when we get together, I don’t want to be distracted. I don’t want to be thinking about anything else but you, because you are amazing.”
“I was only teasing,” Mia said. “Good things come to those who wait.”
“Yeah
, something like that.” The kiss Juliet planted on Mia’s lips came in slow and deliberate, like Juliet wanted to savour it. “Or rather, an ability to move comes to those who give their body time to heal.”
“And hurting you is not on my list of things to do.” Gripping Juliet’s hand, Mia leaned forward and kissed her back softly. “We have a half of a bottle of champagne left and the cheese that didn’t end up all over the bed. Maybe we can order some room service too. What do you think?”
Juliet nodded, but she held Mia in place, the pads of her fingers on one hand creeping inside the waist of Mia’s jeans. “You always wear this, don’t you?” she asked, carefully rolling a thick gold pendant between her other fingers.
Mia nodded but didn’t elaborate. “Mmmm, I do.”
Juliet continued to examine the piece of jewellery. Mia watched her finger it lightly, the smooth edges of the cylinder-shaped pendant warm as Juliet let it fall back to her chest.
“It’s pretty,” Juliet said eventually, her eyes narrowed. “Different but pretty.”
Mia sighed. “Don’t freak out.”
“What do you mean?”
“No one knows about it—what it means, what it is—and I don’t want to freak you out.”
“Lucky I don’t freak out easily then.”
Mia smiled, brushing some blonde hair away from Juliet’s temples. She smoothed the messy curls back with her thumbs. “It’s a memorial pendant,” she explained softly. “It has some ashes in it.”
Juliet exhaled heavily.
“I know,” Mia muttered. “Weird, right?”
Gripping Mia tighter as she moved to untangle herself, Juliet stopped her with a shake of her head. “Not weird,” she whispered, carefully resting the cylinder in her palm and bringing it to her lips, where she kissed the smooth gold before falling back to the pillow and pulling Mia along with her.
“Definitely not weird.” Juliet’s voice was barely audible as she smoothed Mia’s hair and curled into her.
“Thanks.” Mia rested her face on Juliet’s shoulder, her temple settled just below the collarbone, while Juliet picked up a rhythm as she ran her hand back and forth over Mia’s hair, soothing her. Mia wasn’t sure why words escaped her, but she couldn’t manage to identify to Juliet the important person whom she carried every day around her neck. Of course, she knew that Dubai would offer the context and the detail, and even if she lost the words, everything would be obvious then anyway. Her loss would be raw again, exposed.
Death had an uncanny ability to do that.
CHAPTER 15
Everything I wanted that never was
Just dust and shattered dreams
Amongst the grass.
Mia talked more than Juliet when she was nervous and stressed. Where Juliet had a tendency to withdraw, to disappear into her own thoughts and the revolving door of her own mind, Mia seemed to externalise her anxiety. As the flights progressed and their day of arrival ticked over, Mia talked more and more, about her childhood and her family, about the schools she went to, and about the friends she’d had. She pointed out the best shopping malls in Dubai, giving Juliet a rundown of which shops were which and in what order she should visit them.
She talked about anything except the reason they were in Dubai to start with.
That is, until they were standing in an air-conditioned room—a quiet comfortable and reflective space that would have been a pleasant reprieve from the heat had it not been adjacent to a crematorium and a memorial garden.
“You want to sit for a while?” Juliet asked gently, leaning her body into Mia’s so that their arms pressed together.
“Mmm-hmm,” Mia murmured, nodding. Juliet would have liked to hold Mia’s hand tightly were it not for the conservative culture.
Juliet led her to the corner of the room, where there was just one other couple at the opposite side quietly talking to each other. It was a waiting room of sorts, a place for grieving people to gather their thoughts and energy. Fortunately for Juliet, the environment was different enough from the army burials she had experienced to not be a rush of overwhelming sensory cues. Mostly. The flowers at these kinds of things always made her chest feel heavy. There were the same boxed arrangements in funeral homes the world over. Always the same.
“Sometimes,” Juliet said softly, sitting down next to Mia with one arm draped along the back of the two-seater chair and the other resting in her lap, “I think we don’t really do death that well in western cultures.”
Mia raised her eyebrows. “Why do you say that?”
“Do you often wonder what I’m going to come out with next?” Juliet chuckled at herself. “Who starts a conversation like that?”
“You do.” Mia’s head rested back against Juliet’s forearm, her thick hair loosely bunching over Juliet’s arm “And I like it…so keep going.”
“I know everyone experiences mourning differently. And of course, there are differences from family to family, and there’s religion and all that. But I think that generally, western cultures are more removed from death. When someone dies in our culture, they’re taken away and, I suppose, dealt with, and everything else is planned away from that. Sometimes we don’t even see someone after they’ve died. That’s not really unusual.”
Juliet articulated her words slowly and deliberately, since she didn’t know Mia’s exact experience with death. But Mia was nodding at her words. “When I’ve travelled to other places,” she said, “I’ve been kind of lucky to see how other cultures experience it.”
“Like what?” Mia asked.
“I don’t know exactly, and I don’t mean to generalise…But when I was in Nepal, I was there to do the Everest Base Camp hike and ended up staying a little while, going into some towns up in the mountains. I stayed in Kathmandu for a few weeks. They have all these rituals there when someone dies, and it was just the most amazing thing to see.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, the family stays with someone, and there’s this process of getting the body ready for cremation. The rituals happen along the river in this really public place. The family does washing rituals, and it’s all very hands-on. They even carry the body from wherever the person died to the river, and there’s a totally normal outpouring of emotion from the family and friends. Everyone is supportive, almost like a group grieving.”
“As compared to us. We’re just pretty much expected to just hold it together,” Mia said, “because God forbid we make anyone else uncomfortable.” She sounded enthralled by Juliet’s descriptions.
“Right,” Juliet said. “We’re expected to be able to deliver eulogies with no more emotion than a contained tear or something. We’re criticised for being cold if we don’t cry, but then we’re melodramatic if we cry too much. It’s crazy.”
A bitter-sounding laugh ejected itself from Mia’s throat. “Yeah, my ex-husband used to tell me all the time that I was a drama queen.”
Rolling her eyes, Juliet gave a quick glance to ensure they were unobserved and pressed a kiss to her temple. “Ridiculous.”
“Mmmm, maybe. But you do recall that Christmas phone call, right?”
“And what was melodramatic about that? Completely normal,” Juliet soothed. “What I really like about the Nepalese way though, is their post-death stuff. I can’t quite remember the exact days, but I think when someone dies, their wife or child or whoever it might be, gets maybe something like twelve days off, or is it seventeen? I don’t know, something like that. And then they have these rituals that start off as daily for those days, and then it goes to monthly, for up to one year, and then yearly for, well, forever, I guess. So on those days, they do particular things and remember or celebrate the person that has died.”
“Really?”
“Yep, so there’s a real connection to the person. While we’re just expected to almost forget that they even existed. Like I spoke about my brother when I was planning Dad’s funeral with the chaplain, and my Aunt just about threw something at me. She asked me why I w
ould want to remind everyone that Ben had died too.”
Mia shook her head. “Are you serious?”
“My aunt is a little eccentric, but still, that’s not exactly surprising. My point in this very long story is that we don’t give people an opportunity to grieve, to talk about this super important person that has died. We’re all so desperate that everyone move on that we don’t let them move with.”
Juliet stilled for a moment. She could feel herself getting slightly fired up. It was something that completely frustrated her, and if Mia wasn’t so distracted, she probably would have made the links with some parts of her book.
“I like it,” Mia said softly, hand falling to rest on top of Juliet’s, fingers brushing together. “We should do it, start some rituals.”
“We should,” Juliet agreed, “we definitely should. Starting with you not feeling all this pressure to not be upset.”
“Although, that said, maybe it would be good, if people we loved stopped dying.”
Juliet nodded, jutting out her thumb to scrape softly over the back of Mia’s shoulder. “Yeah, that would be good too.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, just the soft sound of doors opening and closing in the background. “When we were back home, did you go into the spare room at all?” Mia asked.
Juliet jumped slightly at the sudden break in quietness.
“Sorry,” Mia said.
“No, no, I was miles away. Umm, no, not at all.”
“Oh,” Mia said. “Well, it’s a nursery. A little girl’s room.”
Images of the brief opportunity she’d had to see into the room came flooding back. The large teddy bear that had disappeared from view as the door closed. She felt a fleeting wave of nausea. Juliet stilled and calmed her voice deliberately, containing her emotion. “Mia…you had a baby girl? Is that…is that who we’re going to see here?”
