Losing Gemma

by Katy Gardner

  But there are gaps I should fill in, details to provide. My memories merge and blur into a confusion of faces and voices and sensations, with sudden lucid flashes. I can clearly picture myself being carried by Mr. Chakrabarty, his podgy face puce. I remember the way the canopy of trees kept breaking apart to reveal the cloudy sky, the reassuring smell of human sweat, and the labored sounds of his breath. From time to time he put me down, wiped his face with a large white handkerchief, and muttered to himself in Bengali, but most of the time he spoke gently in English, chattering endlessly as if to reassure me. It was lucky he had found me, he said, for he’d only decided to take a hike in the forest as a whim.

  After what seemed like only ten or fifteen minutes, we came out on the track. The main thing was not to worry, he said. There were good doctors nearby; if necessary, he would take me personally to Bhubaneshwar. Was there anyone I would like him to contact? What about my friend who was sick? I think I passed out again after that for I remember nothing more. Even now it still upsets me that I never thanked him for what he did, or apologized for my rudeness the week before.

  After various to-ings and fro-ings with doctors and the police, the British High Commission had me flown to Delhi, where I was made to stay in bed. I was still alive, still functioning; no real cause for concern. My injuries were minor, my treatment slight: I had a bandaged foot; a sliver of gauze across my face; and the temazepam the Delhi doctor gave me to help me sleep. Little yellow capsules of peace, I still hide and hoard them around my flat; adult Easter eggs, deliverers of release.

  They found Gemma’s body a few days later, lying a hundred meters or so from the main path. Despite my impression that I had wandered miles from the shrine, it seems that I’d actually been stumbling around in small circles. It was amazing that I’d got so lost, the British High Commission lawyer told me with an embarrassed laugh, for rather than being deep in some imagined wilderness I’d been only half a mile from a village in the east and even closer to another large track in the west.

  But while I should never have been lost, Gemma’s remains had been more difficult to locate. By the time the police found them the jungle and jackals had both had their turn: much of her head was missing, her torso rotted into the mud. In the end, the only thing to identify her was Steve’s ring. I don’t know the exact details, but they arranged to fly what was left of the corpse back to Britain. She was buried in Stevenage, her mother had insisted; it was where she belonged.

  From the outset the police said the death was an accident. There was no hard evidence of anything suspicious, you see, nothing to back my story up. Apart from me, there were no witnesses to Coral’s strange behavior or her meeting with the man called Zak, just the old cook who swore that he’d rented the room to two girls, not three. The Calcutta flat was owned by a Bengali businessman who claimed no knowledge of foreigners; the jeep could not be traced. All they found inside the bolted bungalow was Gemma’s rucksack, three empty water bottles, and a pile of orange peel, shoved behind the door.

  What could have been the motive, the police inspector asked, for such a senseless death? The traveler’s checks and air tickets had been taken in Delhi, not Agun Mazir, was it not so? There had been no theft from the bungalow, none of Miss Harding’s possessions were missing. And why, if foul play were involved, were those candles found at the scene of her death? Was it not the case that she had been suffering from fever? Left alone in such a state, with no friend to care for her, might she not have wandered into the forest in a state of confusion and lit the candles herself? Surely I was aware accidents involving open flames were very common? Perhaps, in my state of grief and shock, I had imagined the sinister elements. And all I could do was nod, for the way everyone was talking, all my stories of a strange hippie with a silver jeep and his crazed Australian accomplice sounded increasingly outlandish: a fantasy, a delusion, a denial.

  The British press had other theories. In the wake of the Rushdie affair there had been local tensions, a Delhi-based hack reported; British tourists were advised to take care. There were a couple of news stories in the broadsheets, a longer commentary in one of the Sunday papers. During the heightened emotions of the mela a site such as the Pir Nirulla shrine would have been a dangerous place for a lone Western girl to be, the writer argued. It was true that there was no specific evidence of an attack, none of the locals would talk, and for obvious political reasons the Indian police did not want to know. Yet what was clear was that the young women should never have been there in the first place. Backpackers who treated the world as a vast global playground, laid on for their personal thrills and adventure, ran the risk of being violently disabused.

  The author was right. Whatever had actually happened, I should never have taken Gemma to such a place, let alone abandoned her there. I’d behaved worse than foolishly, I realized now: I was reckless, arrogant, hopelessly selfish. I’d ignored the warnings of the receptionist in Bhubaneshwar, slighted Mr. Chakrabarty, treated the forest and its shrine like a theme park. However inadvertently, I had led Gemma to her death. Three weeks later the British coroner might record an open verdict, but as far as I was concerned the case against me was closed.

  After a day or so in Delhi my parents arrived to take me home. I remember Mum sitting next to me in the British High Commission, her face pale, her forehead more lined than before. She told me I shouldn’t blame myself, that whatever had happened to Gemma, it wasn’t my fault. It was just a terrible tragedy, an act of God, she kept saying as she stroked my hand; I should try to forget all these odd theories for if there was really anything suspicious the police would surely be looking into it. It was time to come home.

  The eyes of Gemma’s mother said something else. She flew to Delhi as soon as she heard of her daughter’s death and I met her a few days later at the High Commission, over biscuits and watery English tea. She had always looked a mess, but now her face seemed to have imploded, her red eyes sunken and bruised, her cheeks caved in around her sharp, pinched nose. I remember my shock at seeing her; the chain of events which I’d released when I left Gemma a week ago working its way across the world and into her body, turning her from a disheveled fortysomething housewife into a broken old woman. She held her tea on her lap, staring at my face—but never into my eyes—while I tried to explain what had happened. I told her about Coral and the man in the jeep, but she just looked past me to the wall, her face dead. She’d never liked me, I realized, but now she hated me. I could hear myself drone on, my pathetic, futile excuses falling around me like drizzle in a desert. When I’d finished she shook her head, her bony fingers still clutching her saucer. “But I still don’t understand, Esther,” she whispered. “It was such an out-of-the-way place and Gemma was so ill. Why did you abandon her like that?”

  All those questions; all those blanks I found so hard to fill. What could I say? That I’d stolen the man Gemma was obsessed with, betrayed her in the worst way a girlfriend could? That I’d broken her heart, then dumped her in the jungle? That she’d never wanted to go to Agun Mazir but I’d insisted, that I’d known she was sick but had left her with a raving druggie all the same? I’d done all those things, there was no excuse, no self-justifying story to tell.

  But if those unspeakable truths were embedded deep inside me, there were others I searched for, questions which over the years have become part of my surroundings, endless echoes in the place where I am trapped. The answers I wanted were of a different order from those asked by the Indian police and the British press and Gemma’s mother. They were both more simple and more complicated and they are central to who I am today. How does one gain absolution from an absence? the echoes cry. How is release ever possible when the only person who could set one free has gone?

  Five years later, I lie in my London bed staring across the darkened room, and I still don’t know. All I am sure of is that I’m surrounded by memories that hedge me in and block my every move. They come back to me in fragments: scenes from the crime, pieces that no longe
r fit.

  Stubbed out spliffs and candles and Coral’s manic face. The temples at Bhubaneshwar, the soft fall of morning light across the room. Omelettes and rice and sticky sweet, clay-cupped chai. The dank smell of foliage, brushing against my face; orange pith, bitter on my tongue. The camels outside Delhi; Orissan elephants on the road. A bus with painted tigers; rickshaws, bikes, and cars. And then, glinting through the jostling mela crowds, a silver, Suzuki jeep.

  I was sure there had been something going on, everything pointed that way. But when I started to tell it, my story disintegrated, the fragments of fact hurtling from my grasp like shattering glass. Perhaps if there had been people willing to listen I could have done something, but there was nobody. Gemma’s father had moved to America; her mother had suffered a breakdown and now spent her days drugged and blank. My parents suggested productive diversions and my small and rapidly diminishing group of friends said I should try to move on. So what if our gear was stolen from our locker and we were joined for a while by a kookie Australian hippie, they seemed to imply. What’s new?

  So many, too many thoughts to hold together; as I lie beneath my covers, it all comes pouring out. Sitting on the Bengal Express, chatting as the sun came up; that roof in Delhi, looking at the stars. The pub at home: Gem, fag in hand, vodka and lime in the other, taking the piss out of everyone except herself. Did we really spend every weekend and evening together, or am I remembering it wrong? My bedroom was our lab, our secret lair, where we experimented and schemed before breaking out on the world. Our first secret ciggie, puffed from the window when my mum was at Sainsbury’s; the afternoon we discovered The Joy of Sex hidden under my parents’ bed; the night—some years later—we got so drunk we could only crawl across the room. Gossip, bitching, dreams. Later on there were boys, and sometimes other girls: a shifting crowd of hazy faces whose names I’ve long forgotten. I know there were discos and drinking, other relationships and alliances which at the time seemed important. But without Gemma it is meaningless, my adolescence a burned-out, abandoned set. She was my mirror and now she has gone I can’t see myself anymore.

  I miss her so much, you see, and part of me still can’t accept that she’s dead. One day she was there—my old mate Gemma, the girl I grew up with, the person who knew me better than anyone else. Then suddenly she was gone: frazzled to a cinder, all that was left, just ash and bone. I try to get it straight in my mind, but it still doesn’t make sense. Is life really as fragile as that?

  22

  BUT life does not stop, however much one wants it to. Even in the most desolate of places, where it seems that all feelings have been bricked up and nothing more can ever grow, those bright green shoots still push their way through.

  Steve came to visit the day after the funeral. I remember hearing the doorbell ring downstairs and his calm, polite, young man’s voice in the hall, but I still couldn’t force myself to get out of bed. I was afraid to face him, I think; convinced that like everyone else he would blame me for what had happened. Downstairs I could hear Mum telling him that I was too ill and too upset for visitors, then a few moments later the roar of his bike on the road.

  After that he returned every day for a whole week. Each time I heard his bike I’d hide in my room, peering out from behind the curtains, desperate and yet dreading to see him. Sometimes he didn’t even bother to ring the bell, just left his offering on the doorstep: sweet peas picked from his granddad’s allotment, pink stocks, wildflowers from the high-banked village lanes, all the flowers that I loved.

  Eventually Mum persuaded me to get out of bed. After she had left the room I stood in front of my long bedroom mirror, the place I’d posed so many times with Gemma. My body seemed different from before: thinner, certainly; no longer clearly mine. When I pulled on the jeans and jumper Mum had laid out on the chair for me, it was like getting dressed for the first time. The clothes didn’t fit the same, for they belonged to a stranger, discarded from another life. After that I went downstairs and sat in the dining room window, waiting for Steve. When he arrived, I answered the door myself.

  He was obviously not expecting me for he blinked in surprise, his face flushing. He looked different from how I’d pictured him in India: younger and less self-assured, his skin pale and slightly blemished. Perhaps, like me, he’d been unable to sleep over the last few weeks, for his eyes were surrounded by dark rings, his face drawn. He was just a boy, I remember thinking: a twenty-four-year-old lad with a rusty motorbike and a passion for Arsenal, whose main ambition in life was to be a psychiatric nurse. And yet as I stood on the doorstep and stared speechlessly into his face, I knew that my need for him was infinite, that although he wasn’t the arty, globe-trotting anthropologist I’d once envisaged for myself, I couldn’t imagine being apart from him. Given what had happened, perhaps it was paradoxical, but in a strange way he was my last link with Gemma. And although in India the mere mention of his name made my stomach rock with guilt, now that he was standing before me I realized what we’d started was quite different from anything I’d had before and despite the terrible thing that had happened, I had to see it through.

  “Hello there,” he said, and then he leaned across and kissed me on the cheek in a way that seemed to say: Relax, don’t worry, I love you: everything is going to be just fine.

  AFTER that, we went out walking every evening, like an old-fashioned courting couple. It was May now and the countryside was overtaken by the wild optimism of early summer, each day dawning as warm and bright as the next as if that was the way it would always be. It should have been pelting with rain, for what I deserved were gales or freezing fog, but for long weeks the skies remained blue, the breeze warm. We wandered endlessly up and down the village lanes: each hedgerow crammed with cow parsley and buttercups and forget-me-nots, the trees heavy with delicate blossom, bluebells spread across the cool, scented woods. I can’t remember what we talked about, only the route we always took: across the fields, past the church, and down the lane, every summer evening. It was as if I was walking my way back to England, very slowly coming home. And each time Steve delivered me back to my front door, just as the light was finally fading and the sparrows were roosting in the trees, India was a little further away.

  At some point during those warm, hazy months we became a couple. There must have been a moment when he kissed or touched me in a way that sealed our relationship, but I have no memory of it, only of a gradual drift toward intimacy, and the sense of inevitability that followed. Whatever it was, it was different from before, when we had laughed and fancied each other so much. My stomach wasn’t gripped with excitement and nerves; I didn’t spend the whole night imagining his hands on my body. In fact I was disarmingly able to put him from my thoughts. Did I desire or love him? Was he “the one”? All I know is that I reached a point where I could no longer imagine it any other way. He was so calm, you see, so rooted in his English male matter-of-factness that I came to rely on him, became dependent on his company as my crutch.

  We never mentioned Gemma, yet her memory was the foundation of our relationship: something intrinsic that we shared; something which would forever drive us apart. Like everyone else, he believed that her death was an accident, some weird freak that we would never understand. He never asked me about it. Like most men his age he thought courage meant staying silent, believed we should move on and away from the past. He wanted to be a nurse, not a therapist; his faith was placed in medical science, not talking things through. And so Gemma’s name became taboo: our black box, that we never dared to open up.

  As for me, guilt lay like thick dust over everything, obscuring each color and texture of my life until before long I barely registered it was there. I was bad, and to blame, and there was no point trying to prove otherwise. Even as I uttered them, I felt that my stories of Coral and the man in the jeep sounded preposterous, the lame excuses of someone who didn’t wish to face the truth. It was ridiculous to believe they had killed her, I realized as I watched the nonplussed expres
sions of my audience. There was no clear motive and no evidence, just my muddled account of a shrine, a stolen money belt, and a young woman traveler who was not everything she seemed. The real facts were these: poor Gemma, who had never traveled before and was so famously unable to cope, had been suffering from fever. For whatever reason or post-hoc justification, I had left her in the jungle. And there, alone and afraid, she had met a terrible death. There was no point in telling stories or putting the blame on others. I’d been responsible for her, and now she was gone.

  THAT autumn Steve and I moved to London together. Steve had a placement at one of the big teaching hospitals, and there was no reason for me to stay at home. We found a one-bedroom flat on Holloway Road and when I could motivate myself I managed to go to work: temping, useless PA jobs at faceless multinationals, a stint selling advertising space for a trade magazine, all the crappy low-paid jobs one is supposed to do in one’s early twenties before moving swiftly on. The years slipped slowly past. Not better, but surviving. Not forgotten, just processed and stored: my file of regrets. Gemma was gone for good, that much was clear. And me? I was found, but still lost.

  23

  Five Years Later:

  Heathrow Airport

  AND so here we are, almost full circle, only a small part of my story left to tell. This part I remember in perfect detail, for it was only four days ago. Once more I was about to embark on a journey, but instead of imminently landing, I had not yet boarded the plane. And this time, rather than being with Gemma, I was accompanied by Steve. And of course I was no longer Esther the intrepid explorer, who always got what she wanted and whose life was so charmed. I was just another Thailand-bound tourist, Esther Waring (age: nearly twenty-nine; interesting passport stamps achieved in last five years: nil; number of crap jobs resigned from in last five years: eight) about to go on her holidays.