The Trailing Spouse

by Jo Furniss

  “Don’t jump.” Ed was behind her. “Mozzie bit your face.” Amanda raised her hand to the spot, like covering an exposed breast. “You’re up early,” he said, pouring milk into a cereal bowl from a great height without spilling a drop.

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  Ed watched her from across the kitchen while he ate. “You look a bit . . . puffy.”

  “I don’t feel good.”

  “And you’re quiet.”

  She shrugged.

  “Are you pissed off with me? About Josie? Or the window? Or the balcony? Or am I under suspicion because what’s-his-name, Arnault, is dicking about with a schoolgirl? Have you had one of those dreams where I’m shitting in your best shoes?”

  Amanda felt her arms fold, then realized how defensive she looked and unfolded them. She looked out the window for a long moment, and when she looked back at Ed, he said, “You are pissed off with me.”

  “You seem to think this is funny.”

  “None of it’s funny.” He got up and clattered his bowl and spoon into the sink. “I feel like we’re in free fall.” He came and stood in front of her, spreading his legs on either side of hers and gathering her torso into his arms. He pressed his face against her lank hair and spoke right into her ear. “We’re not like Willow’s parents, Amanda. Their problems are not our problems. I know I’m away a lot, and it takes a leap of faith to trust each other, but it’s worth it, isn’t it, for what we’ve got?” He levered himself back so that she was at arm’s length and locked eyes. His intensity made hers water. “Me and you. And Josie. Don’t cry, for Christ’s sake, I’m telling you I love you here.”

  Amanda looked down at his feet bracketing hers. Questions burned inside her throat. She couldn’t hold them in. Something had to come out. Anything.

  “Do you go to strip clubs?” Her throat contracted around the last word, trying to swallow it back.

  “What?” His hands were on her upper arms again, paining her subterranean bruises.

  “There was this photo posted on Facebook the other day—”

  “Not Singapore Overseas Witches.” Ed turned away to the counter, snatching up his key fob.

  “There was a photo of a bloke dancing with a stripper. Someone’s husband. It got me thinking . . . I’d rather know if you go to that kind of place, then there’s no misunderstanding if someone spots you and—”

  “You women! You’re like the Taliban morality squad.”

  “That’s—”

  “It’s not. Whatever you’re going to say, it’s not justified. It’s shit. Sometimes my clients want to go out. They’re spoiled, rich bastards—99 percent men—who flash their cash. If there’s one thing these people teach me, it’s that money does not buy taste. They want to drink whisky in the Four Floors.”

  “Is that a club?”

  “Four Floors of Whores. You know it—Orchard Towers—we went there once.”

  Orchard Towers. Four Floors of Whores. She forgot people called it that.

  “I bloody hate the place.” Ed’s face twisted as though his words made a bad smell. “All these women swarming me as if I’m a wallet made of meat. It’s . . . degrading.”

  “So why do you go?”

  “Where do you think all this comes from?” He threw up his arms like a worshipper. “This is what it takes. A bit of sacrifice. From both of us.” His arms slapped back down to his sides.

  “I wasn’t accusing you.”

  “Yes.” Ed took three strides across the white floor and kissed her, crushing her lips against her teeth. “You were.” He strode out into the lounge without looking back. “And for fuck’s sake, call the management office and get them to replace that broken window before it shatters and tears you to pieces.”

  She washed the breakfast things, feeling the world’s dank morning breath through the hole pierced in the window. With soapy hands, she chased ants across the work surfaces until she lifted the coffee machine and found a writhing mass of them underneath. Her phone buzzed with Ed’s number. She took a breath and picked up.

  “Hey.”

  “I booked us a last-minute trip. Let’s get Josie out of Singapore and give us some time together.”

  “Doesn’t she have school?”

  “She’s suspended until Friday. But exams finished today and there’ll be a party, and I want her out of that scene. So I got us a lovely suite at Cuti Island, overlooking the South China Sea. Just us. No strippers. Car coming at four. All right?”

  What could she say? “All right.”

  “Thank fuck for that.”

  Chapter 30

  Amanda stood on the end of a wooden jetty, two hours’ drive into Malaysia, its planks shifting under the weight of passengers as they boarded the last launch of the day. A sea breeze pawed her skirt. Diesel on the water made greasy rainbows.

  “Coming?” The plank bucked as Ed arrived with a weekend bag in each hand. “Josie left her book in the car. I sent her back for it.” He slid one hand around Amanda’s hips. “Hoping we can snatch some romantic time.”

  Amanda raised a hand to block the sun from her eyes as she looked into his face. “Josie’s struggling. You need time together.”

  “She’s all right now; she’s away from those boys.”

  “It started before that party. The suspension from school—”

  “That was nonsense.”

  “She’s either locked in her room or at the library. I know what it feels like to be alone—”

  “She’s coming.” Ed smiled down the jetty as his daughter ran toward them, her little weight sending the structure into a precarious dance.

  “We’re about to crumble into the sea.” Josie grinned behind cat-eye sunglasses. Ed gave Amanda a significant glance: She doesn’t seem to be struggling.

  “Then let’s get off this jetty and onto the boat.” He took Amanda’s shoulder and turned her toward the launch.

  “Yeah, let’s get going,” Josie said, “so I can be a gooseberry all weekend.”

  Ed pinched Josie’s bottom as she walked past. “Goose for a gooseberry!”

  The jetty pitched Amanda forward. That pinch was a rare moment of physical contact between Ed and his daughter. They didn’t cuddle or kiss good night or hold hands. In the kitchen they took opposite routes around the island counter, like two figures in a cuckoo clock who emerge daily to dance. Was it weird that father and daughter never touched? She thought of Erin’s insinuations. Could such an absence be evidence of something else being present?

  The launch chugged out of the harbor. The Malaysian rain forest hung in a long, brooding fringe—like Josie’s bangs—that flopped up the coastline as far as the eye could see. Singapore was tucked around one corner, out of sight but not out of mind. They reached open water, and the driver gunned the engine so they skittered across the flat sea. Soon, an island arose, a green mass of trees and a pale curve of beach. Finally, another wooden jetty belonging to the resort, in better repair than the one at the government-run port.

  “Welcome to Cuti Island!”

  Children stampeded ashore. Several men in batik uniforms jumped down to relieve them of their luggage. Ed threw his shoes onto the pile of bags and said, “I don’t intend to wear them again for the next two days.”

  Josie pulled off her Converses. “Race you to the beach!” They clattered along the pier and jumped onto the sand. Amanda gathered the last of their belongings, allowed the captain to hold her elbow as she stepped onto the jetty, and followed a plump receptionist who inquired after her crossing, her car journey, her credit card. She was led away to take care of formalities, feeling like the mother of two kids playing in the sand while the sun went down.

  Amanda woke the next morning to find herself alone. The ceiling fan lumbered around with a whine that in the night had sounded like a baby’s cry. Ed had been restless too; in the darkest hour, he flung his arm onto her neck so that she jerked away and slid to the floor. She’d stayed down on the gnarled floorboards, ear pressed to a gap thro
ugh which she could hear the ocean. Instead of relaxing her, the seawater moved in surreptitious rushes, and she imagined it eroding their stilts until the whole lofty house fell.

  When Ed settled, she’d curled fetal on the mattress. At some point, she slept. Now, the sun was high. Wrapping herself in the sheet, she saw a double kayak slide past the window with Ed and Josie paddling in sync.

  Their breakfast was being picked over by mynah birds. As she poured coffee, the kayak thumped the stilts. Ed and Josie climbed onto the deck and shook themselves off like puppies.

  Ed sat, and the birds scattered. “Happy?”

  “Feels like a different world to Singapore.”

  “It used to take people time to travel. Three months sailing from London to Singapore. Time to adjust.” Ed sipped coffee, watching fishermen putter past the reef. “Nowadays, we step through a door from one reality to another—summer to winter, east to west, the wardrobe to Narnia. Our bodies can take it, but the mind . . .”

  Amanda held her cup to her lips, breath rippling the surface as she watched Ed’s profile against the crisp ocean. He might have been addressing the horizon for all he seemed aware of their presence.

  “Every time I fly,” he went on, “I feel like I leave part of myself behind. A shadow that carries on living my normal life.”

  “That’s creepy,” Josie said.

  He spun on his seat to face her. “The view made me poetic. This is fucking paradise. Isn’t it, Jo-Jo?”

  “It’s fucking paradise.” She wrapped a towel around her and tucked in the end. “Is there Wi-Fi?”

  “Over by the bar.” Ed picked up a croissant and pointed the sharp end along the beach. “But the villa’s refreshingly unplugged. So we can talk instead.”

  Josie reached for her phone and ostentatiously switched it off. “Should we be poetic, like . . . I am the eye of the hurricane, moving in silence, hidden amid the distraction of the storm? Or however it goes.”

  “I’d rather talk about your birthday.” Ed followed this statement with a long draft of coffee, pleased with the effect of his drama as Josie bounced in her chair.

  “You’ll be eighteen,” Amanda said, her voice as hollow as the kayak bumping in the waves.

  “If you’re thinking about my birthday already, you must be planning something big.”

  Ed picked a lychee and ripped the spikes apart to extract its gonad-shaped core. He popped it into his mouth and said around its bulk, “It’s secret. Amanda doesn’t know.”

  “Will she be there?” Josie glanced between them.

  “It’s something you and I have to do alone.”

  “In Singapore?”

  “I’ll take you to my special place.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “It’s worth the risk. You’ll be free from this earthly realm.”

  “Sinister . . .” Josie scrunched up her shoulders. “Please tell me it’s scuba diving?”

  “Not down. Up.” Ed split the red flesh of another lychee. “To the heavens.”

  “What is it?” She pulled her legs up to her chest and rocked on the chair.

  He spat a seed on the deck and rolled his eyes. “Come on, Josie. I’ve been looking forward to this moment. Try to keep up. It’s something you’ve been asking for. Our guilty pleasure since you were little.”

  Josie’s feet slammed onto the planks as she clutched the table.

  “Something I’ve been practicing a lot recently . . .” he prompted.

  “Flying? You’re giving me flying lessons?” Josie threw herself back in her chair. “What do you think about that, Amanda?” She looked triumphant.

  “I think”—Amanda watched Ed hold slippery fruit between his teeth—“your father has been plotting meticulously for some time.”

  “True.” He spoke out of one side of his mouth, staring out to sea again. “I’ve tested a few locations, and Zurich is perfection. We’ll do it there.” He pointed to a distant aircraft scratching a white line across the sky. “I feel like a priest before a baptism. It’ll be exhilarating.”

  Wooden footsteps sounded, and two waiters in batik uniforms arrived. “Clear for you?” They indicated the breakfast things.

  Ed got up and dived from the terrace into the sea. “You coming?” he called out when he surfaced, water quivering in his hair. Josie threw down her napkin and went after him. Amanda picked up a silver dome and placed it over her breakfast plate.

  “You don’t like?” The waiter’s eyebrows crossed in concern over her untouched egg.

  “It’s gone cold.” She picked up a drinks coaster, flicking the edge of the cardboard just like she’d done earlier that week to the hotel key card from Zurich that she found hidden in Ed’s suit.

  Chapter 31

  Neuroscience is a detective story, Camille read on her smartphone while hanging on to a leather strap on the bus. As we try to regain memories, we look for clues to uncover the background to a case. Except it wasn’t a “case.” It was her life, her childhood. The more she could glean from the primary source of her own memory, the more she could get out of Edward Bonham.

  She scanned the article until she got to a part about childhood amnesia. The phrase “parenting style” caught her eye. While “pragmatic” mothers focus on instructions that help a child perform a task, “elaborative” mothers construct narratives around childhood experiences. She wondered what kind of mother hers had been, although she might as well wonder about Lani because she’d spent so much time with the helper. Research shows that an “elaborative” style results in enhanced long-term recall of detailed memories. The article didn’t state what happened when any style of parenting stopped at the age of ten.

  Blank condo windows blurred past until Camille pressed the red button to request her stop. The bus released her into midday air as stodgy as muffin dough. She hurried along the pavement past the British High Commission, stepping into the road where rain trees burst through the concrete. Along the side street that led to Tanglin Green, the sun stabbed down. She wrestled free a giant leaf of a taro plant and held it over her head like a parasol. She and Collin had loved hiding under these plants; elephant ears, Lani called them. You see, Camille thought, memories are there if I can catch them.

  She chased other moments around her mind. A garden party when she drank gin by mistake, an older girl who didn’t want to play, a nest of baby cobras that someone took away to release in the forest. She drew in a sharp breath, as though one of the snakes had turned on her; no one rescued cobras. They must have been slaughtered. Here was another invisible layer between herself and the truth: childhood ignorance.

  She was too unreliable a witness to shed light on what had happened to her parents. And yet a sputtering light bulb was all she had to go by.

  That, and Edward Bonham.

  The problem was, Camille thought as she flung aside the jungle umbrella when she reached Tanglin Green, she didn’t trust Edward Bonham. And she didn’t trust herself around Edward Bonham.

  At the compound gates, a thin gruel of sweat trickled down her spine. She closed her eyes. Smell, she’d read, was the best trigger for memories. Fish out a smell and it should come with a memory attached, like a dancing minnow on a line.

  Camille breathed. She smelled traffic fumes and the drainage channel. She drew Singapore in deeper. Pool chemicals, rain-soaked earth, roti prata. Smells flitted through her mind in a zoetrope of sensation, but she might as well be illiterate because she didn’t have the words to describe the effect—to describe her own life. When she opened her eyes again, they were wet.

  At the gateway, she stopped before the barrier. An elderly man in uniform got to his feet in the guardhouse and came out.

  “Good morning, miss. Are you visiting?” His eyes were very bright.

  “Good morning, uncle. May I ask how long you have worked here?”

  “I been here one year, miss.”

  Camille looked over the red barrier to where the neat-edged tarmac ran between the houses to a stan
d of rain forest beyond.

  “Can I help you with something?” There was a slight edge of impatience in his voice now. He was an old man forced into the midday sun. “Visiting a friend, is it?”

  If Camille could get inside and walk around, she knew she would recognize her house. “She lives in this block to the left . . .”

  “Okay, you find her. Just go.” The guard turned his bent back and pressed a button inside the hut to raise the barrier even though she could easily walk around it. With the guard’s eyes on her back, she strode down the road and veered confidently off to the left. Once out of sight of the gatehouse, she stopped. Road noise receded behind the mass of trees. The houses were built around a kind of village green, which boasted a communal swimming pool. That was new. In the middle of the school day the pool lay undisturbed, swimming only with clouds. Forest cicadas greeted her with a squee of delight.

  The new pool disoriented her, but she knew her childhood home had backed onto the rain forest, which put it on the other side of the green. She walked quickly under the covered walkway, not wanting to be approached by residents. The houses were the same as ever. She could feel the cool metal of the window latch in her palm, wrenching it open to yell at Collin. She knew instinctively that it was possible to drop from a bedroom window onto the corrugated iron roof of the covered walkway and shin down the pillar to the ground. And then she knew that her house must be at the end of the row: the only place where the walkway ran directly beneath a bedroom window. So there it was. Her old home. Lani should be crouched on the stoop, waiting to pick up the schoolbag that Camille would fling aside in her haste to beat Collin to the fresh gingerbread biscuits cooling in the kitchen. How they’d taken Lani for granted! Her patience with their impatience, her sweet nature, her affection.