by Jo Furniss
The promenade beside the water was mostly deserted in the heat of the day, and she hurried to the taxi stand, her sunglasses sliding down her sweaty nose. But as she passed an alfresco café, ducking for a moment’s relief into a fine mist of water sprayed over the sidewalk, she heard a voice she recognized: “I must be honest, ma’am, I’m an ex-con, ma’am.” The octopus-tattoo guy hawking smiley-face key rings. He launched into a monologue aimed at two tourists nursing iced coffees. Amanda veered into the seating area and took an empty table.
Any day now, Ed would spirit Josie away—the admissions officer at the Institut Zugerberg in Zurich had confirmed there was a place reserved for Josie. What then? Amanda couldn’t wait for the blog to show her the real Ed; she needed to go looking for him.
A shadow slid across the sun, and the ex-con aimed his spiel at Amanda.
“I’m selling these high-quality products, ma’am, to achieve my goal of an honest life.”
She held up her palm. “Don’t want a bloody key ring.”
“It’s only ten dollars, ma’am.”
“That’s criminal!”
“It’s a lot to me, ma’am.” The man’s head and shoulders twitched in the body language spoken by recovering drug addicts the world over.
“I’m going to call the manager.” She picked up her bag as though he might snatch it. His eyes flared, and he lumbered away along the sunbaked waterfront with his face turned from the yachts that nodded like canting clergy at his disgrace. Amanda left the café and trailed him at a distance. To be sure about Ed’s activities—enough to hand him in and give up everything she had in the process—she needed to get close enough to see for herself. She could be in Burma by tonight, but she had to go incognito—she didn’t want to get implicated alongside him—and that would take more than a shapeless dress and sunglasses.
The man stomped on, head down under bent shoulders, and eventually turned into an underpass. Amanda scurried forward to catch up. Her eyes adjusted halfway down the stairs, and she realized he was waiting at the bottom, eyes squinted as she descended toward him. He put the key rings against the concrete wall, as though signaling that they both knew this encounter did not involve smiley faces.
“I had to make you leave,” she said. “I can’t speak to you in public.”
The man rolled his head to one side.
“I need something.”
A flicker of his eyebrows and twitch of a shoulder showed that his temporary stillness was passing, as though he could only hold the pose for a short time.
“I’ll pay you more than key rings.”
“What you need?”
“I need to know you’re trustworthy. Properly trustworthy, I mean. Not this ‘faith in my honesty’ shit.”
“I’ve gone straight.”
“But you know people?”
His eyes flickered to the top of the stairs, where Amanda saw a CCTV camera. She reached down and fingered a smiley-face key ring. Plucking one from the board, she handed him a ten-dollar note. “Let’s walk.” The key rings chattered, but she didn’t talk until they reached a maintenance stairwell, its door ajar. Inside, he settled. The intrigue calmed his agitation like the hair of the dog to a drunk.
“I need a passport,” she said.
“Do I look like an embassy?”
Amanda held out a fan of banknotes, fresh from the ATM. A crisp tang of hope filled the air. “I need a special kind of passport,” she said, and the guy put down his board. “One that doesn’t have my name in it.”
Chapter 45
Ed’s hotel room was a sea of overvarnished wood. Muslin drapes framed the french windows. He threw the shutters open to reveal an ornate Juliet balcony, then sat by his laptop with bars of sunlight lining his back. “Help yourself to a drink.” The curtains began to sway limply against the breeze.
Drugs.
It made sense. Smuggled on and off her parents’ yacht in the trash or wrapped inside the sails, maybe even hidden in the luggage of guests. She could imagine a dozen ways they would have been able to bring packages ashore. She could see them smiling as they sluiced down the deck. Then the sunbaked image whited out.
Drug runners, traffickers, criminals.
Her parents.
“What if they’d been caught?” she asked. “What would have happened to me and Collin?”
Ed didn’t turn around. “Maybe they didn’t have any other option.”
“Getting a job is another option. Something decent.”
“You wanted to dig up the past.”
Camille shifted in her seat. She was parched but didn’t want to drink his bottled water, just in case—she hadn’t forgotten the bottles of clonazepam. “Does your wife know you were a drug trafficker?”
His unkempt hair shook. Camille saw the vulnerable place where the smooth skin of his neck slid inside his shirt. She wondered what would happen if she reached out and stroked him there, which of the Edward Bonhams would respond: the father, the husband, the man who carried date-rape drugs? And which version of Camille would touch him: daughter, lover, an impetuous someone she could feel lurking under her own skin? She watched a pulse beat in his throat.
“And your daughter? Does she know?”
“Oh, shit!” Ed jumped up from his laptop, hand clamped to his nose. He swore again as he turned, blood dripping between his fingers. Camille snatched a towel from the bathroom and told him to tip his head back. It was awkward on the high-backed chairs, so she pushed him to the bed. He lay flat and blood ran down the sides of his chin and over his nape onto the white sheets. She pressed the towel to his face, an archipelago of red islands rising to its surface. She left him holding the cloth and fetched a bath towel. She mopped his face and scrubbed at the sheets beneath his head.
“Don’t worry about the mess,” he kept saying. But she did worry. The blood kept coming. She soaked one corner of the towel with water from a bottle and wiped his face. He closed his eyes, lips pressed tightly together as though he was humiliated by her attentions. After a while, his nose stopped bleeding. But he stayed down. Camille stayed next to him.
“Can you get me a drink?” he said.
“Water?”
“Yuck.”
She got a whisky out of the minibar and poured it over two ice cubes. Ed pulled a pillow under his head, palming blood onto the cotton, and propped himself up to drink.
“I’ve never seen a nose bleed that much,” she said.
“It happens.”
“How often?”
“Too often.” Ed swirled his scotch in a figure eight, creating a storm in a glass. “I may have developed epilepsy.”
“At your age?”
“It can happen even to an old guy like me. I’ve had dizzy spells over the years, migraines. Easy to ignore. I thought it was stress, a hangover, lack of sleep. Didn’t recognize them as symptoms. Until I had an actual seizure, what they call a grand mal. Like you see in movies, fitting, drooling, the works. So it looks more and more like I have epilepsy.”
“You think? Don’t you know?”
“No formal diagnosis.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t get epilepsy in my business.”
Camille drew back from him. “You’re a pilot . . .”
“And if I report it to some well-meaning doctor in Singapore, he’ll have to pass it on to the authorities. They’ll stop me flying.”
“You’ve been flying planes even though you have seizures?”
“I don’t take passengers. Well, only my fucking useless partner, Bernardo, and no one would miss him.”
“But that’s crazy. What if you have a seizure in the air?”
“I haven’t had one for ages. A few slips and falls. Minor injuries: black eyes, nosebleeds. Nothing serious—until last week on the beach. But I’d missed my medication for a few days; the police confiscated the lot, and I couldn’t get more until I saw my friendly doctor in Manila, so . . .” He waved his hand to indicate it was irrelevant, but his eyes flic
ked to hers and away again. “I can control the seizures with medication.”
“Clonazepam doesn’t mix with alcohol. You shouldn’t be drinking.”
Ed’s whisky glass stopped in front of his mouth. “How do you know I take clonazepam?”
“You took something in the bar, right in front of me. And the police found bottles of it in your helper’s room when she died. I thought maybe they were—” She stopped.
“What?”
“Clonazepam can be used as a date-rape drug.”
“Jesus! With all due respect, I don’t need to rape anyone.”
“Rape isn’t about need. It’s about power.”
“Needing that kind of power is a sign of weakness, as far as I’m concerned. No, the medication is for seizures. Our maid hid them in her room so Amanda wouldn’t find out. I paid her to keep quiet.”
“Why don’t you just tell Amanda?”
“Because”—Ed adjusted himself on the pillow again, smearing more blood—“because my business is going to fail when I lose my license, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. And we’re all dependent on the business. Not just the income but the school fees, our apartment, our health care, even the right to stay in Singapore. We live in this bubble and I’m about to pop it.” He drained his glass, losing most of the scotch down his chin, where it spread the blood onto the sheets. His head dropped back onto the sullied pillow.
“Maybe she deserves to know.”
“And maybe she deserves not to be dropped on her arse by a man she trusted with her whole life. It’s not easy letting someone down.” He held his drink out, nudging Camille off the bed toward the minibar. She refilled the glass, which he accepted, and he patted the sheet for her to sit. “My wife worries that she’s dependent on me, but she has no idea how dependent I am on her.”
“Because you love her?”
“But does she love me enough to be the wife of a failure?”
“For better or for worse?”
He gave a grunt of laughter. “In my experience, wives prefer better.”
“You’re very cynical.”
“You know what they say: when a cynic smells flowers, he looks around for a coffin.”
“It’s intellectually lazy,” Camille said.
“It’s experience.”
“It’s a cop-out. It means you don’t have to bother trying.”
He rolled up into a sitting position. “Your youthful optimism is delightful, but you’re the one being intellectually lazy.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you’re ignoring the fact that you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
She got up and went to the window, wrenching the window wide open, its latch scraping in a well-worn groove.
“When is your contact going to arrive?” she said.
“I’m waiting for his call. Be patient.”
Outside, it was unnaturally quiet. Car horns were once banned in Yangon, and Camille wondered how long people went on obeying the rules out of habit. She heard Ed move off the bed and stand behind her. Her eyes stayed on the street, but the tiny hairs on her nape rose toward him like coral on the tide.
“I remember you,” she said. “You came to our house once, to a party in the garden.”
Ed didn’t say anything, so she turned, the muslin curtain slipping over her arm as soft as a bedsheet. She took a step backward so she could study his face, the ornate railing of the balcony a hard line against her back.
“I remember you too,” he said. “You nearly drowned me.”
“It was just a splash.”
Ed squinted. “How much do you remember?”
“I was in the pool. You put your feet in—”
“You soaked me.”
“And I remember thinking Mum would be angry. And I would have to tell her what I’d done . . .”
“And the bear? Do you remember the bear?”
“Oh yes! You brought us teddy bears. Even though we were too old for them.”
“Single bloke. I had no idea what to buy for kids.”
“I really liked it.” Camille saw again a handsome bear, its silky fur and chubby thighs, and a scarf around its neck. She remembered how it was so perfect she couldn’t believe it was for her—wouldn’t even let herself wish for it, because she couldn’t stand the disappointment—so instead of saying thank you, she handed it back to the guest, Daddy’s work friend, and felt silly when everyone cooed. She loved that bear at first sight. “Teddy brought a teddy. We thought that was hilarious.”
Ed smiled, and Camille realized again how beautiful he could look. “No one’s called me Teddy for years.”
“Was it your code name?” said Camille.
He laughed. “You’ve watched too much TV. Everyone called me Teddy back then; it was a nickname.”
“And now?”
“Just Ed. I came home from Singapore and changed my ways. I wanted to distance myself from that boy who made childish decisions. So I went back to Edward. Ed. And my wife hated the name Teddy. It drove her crazy later when Josie picked it up again.”
“But in my garden you were still Teddy.”
“That party was the death of Teddy. Do you remember what happened after you drowned me?”
She turned her back on him, and the balcony pressed into her stomach. He slid sideways onto the narrow ledge beside her, his hand encircling her wrist as though they might jump. She smelled a hint of woody orange, from either Ed or the gardens, and closed her eyes as she leaned a shoulder into his chest.
“What do you remember, Camille?”
The water refreshing me like cool voltage. But after she soaked their guest, the shame burned her up. She ran toward the patio—calling out that she was sorry—but her mother was gone. She followed voices through the house. With her hand on the cold metal latch of the window frame, she edged it open until she could make out words from the road out front.
“We have a warrant, Mr. Kemble.”
The police officers—two of them, with two more beside patrol cars on the drive—waited while her father inspected the paperwork. Her mother appeared in the doorway, ushering Collin toward the back garden with a football in one hand and a teddy bear in the other. “Quickly, Cami,” her mother ordered, and she followed.
In the back garden, her mother spun her by the wrist so that Camille folded in a curtsy onto the blanket. Her mother snatched the teddy and flipped him onto his tummy on the tartan wool. A zip along his furry back ripped open, making Camille wince, and mother wiggled a white package inside. She zipped the bear up and pressed it into Cami’s hands, and repeated the same with Collin’s teddy. “Sit. Stay. Do not say a word to the police,” her mother ordered. “You’re having a teddy bears’ picnic. Understand?”
“Yes, mummy.”
“Look natural.” Their mother whirled into the house. Teddy stood alone on the patio. His eyes moved between Cami and Collin—he looked upset—and she felt a jolt in her tummy; they weren’t doing what Mother told them. They weren’t looking natural.
“Come on, Col,” she said. And she started singing “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” in a wavering voice.
“You’re in for a big surprise,” said Collin.
She looked up at Teddy and saw his eyes wet with tears. She had to try harder. She sang as Teddy strode past them, down the path into the woods, where he vanished between the trees.
Camille released her hands from the metal balcony of the Oriental Hotel. “We played teddy bears’ picnic until the police left,” she said. Sharp slivers of lead paint were embedded in her skin.
“I couldn’t watch,” Ed said.
“It must have been terrifying. You know what happens to drug smugglers in Singapore.”
“It wasn’t that. I was too cocky or nihilistic to think about consequences. But I couldn’t watch your parents do that to their children. They behaved more like addicts than dealers; there was nothing they wouldn’t do. It was—” He released her wrist. “It woke me up.”
“They hid drugs inside our teddy bears?”
“I started to wonder what else they might be capable of. Would they use you two as mules once you were old enough? Or force you to swallow packages?”
“My parents never hurt us.”
“I’m relieved to hear that. I felt guilty about leaving you. That stayed with me for a long time. I shouldn’t have left two kids to fend for themselves with parents who weren’t responsible. Later, when Josie came along, I—” Ed went to the bedside table and downed the dregs of the whisky before coming back to the balcony. “I guess they sent you to boarding school after that. Maybe it was a wake-up call for them too.”
“So what happened after your . . . epiphany?” Her voice sounded as spiky as the lead paint on her hands.
“That’s what it felt like when I stood in that rain forest with the sun throwing down spears through the trees. The cicadas stopped, and all I could hear was your teddy bears’ bloody picnic. I knew drugs ruined lives. That there were junkie mothers. Broken homes. Innocent people killed by dealers. That I was the seed that rooted these problems. But out of sight is out of mind, right? And I really was a cocky little shit. But standing in the rain forest, with your voice and those pointing fingers of sunlight, I had a fucking epiphany. That’s the exact right word for it.”
“So you stopped being Teddy?”
“I did. Well, almost. Until Josie picked up the name. Infuriated her mother.”
“What happened to her?”
“Different set of problems. Depression she struggled with for years. It got worse after Josie arrived. It consumed her. I tried to keep Josie away from the worst of it, but . . . I often thought of your parents during that time. Guess I understood them a little better. Parenting is easy until you have kids.” His hands landed softly on her shoulders for a moment and then slid the length of her arms to her wrists. Camille turned to face him, a foot of dying sunlight between them. His face blushed with watery blood. If he were to lean down a few inches, he might kiss her on the forehead.
“Do you cheat on your wife?”
He released her wrists. “It would be simple enough, the amount of traveling I do. Women approach me quite often in hotel bars, we have a drink, and they talk. Maybe it’s the darkness or the booze, but I’ve heard it all—secrets, disappointments, affairs. It’s more intimate than a hookup in some ways. I’m like a priest.”
