A Bad Bride's Tale (20 page)

“But I don’t have endless time.” Her eyes glinted desperately. “I’ll sign a prenup. Would that change things? I’m not after your money, you know that. I hope you know that.”

“I know.”

“Let’s just forget the marriage thing, Seb. I can live without a wedding, really I can. But if we want children . . .”

Seb’s shoulders sank a little. He softened. “I don’t know. I just don’t know if I
do
anymore. Not yet.”

Katy’s legs lost all their strength. She sank back to the bed, de- feated and, suddenly feeling exposed and self-conscious, she crossed her arms over her naked breasts. “I’ll look after it and everything . . .”

“I’m sorry, Katy. One day maybe, just not now . . .”

Katy stood up and reached for her sarong. She wrapped herself up carefully, concentrating on not howling or hitting him. “Right,” she said, wondering what to do now. “Right.”

Seb reached for her shoulder. “Let’s reassess the situation in a year, yeah?”

Katy bit too hard on her lip. She tasted blood.

TWENTY-FOUR
Æ

the following day, stevie finally managed to pry
her regretful (always regretful
after
the event) husband off his Blue Blossom chaise to tour the rest of the island. He agreed, of course. Out of guilt. Even though he was full of apologies about the Jacuzzi incident, and mitigating excuses of drunkenness and high spirits, something had palpably changed between them. His evident desire for Katy—even if it had been fleeting and unconsummated—was an ugly and treacherous thing that had put a meter-wide stretch of sheet between their bodies in bed last night and had made her self- conscious of her nakedness when she dressed in the morning.

Stevie stepped back off the road as a moped spluttered past, nar- rowly missing shaving off her toes. She wasn’t used to the bustle and traffic after the luxurious sterility of the Blue Blossom. But it felt surprisingly good to be back in some form of urbanity. She was grateful for the distractions—the jugglers, the hippies, the middle- aged western sex tourists, the were-they-were-they-not lady boys. She fully appreciated the chopped pineapples wedges that stung the corners of her mouth; the charred corncobs smoking on road-

side stoves, sweeter than anything she’d had in London; the fast
ack ack
of Thais speaking; and their laughter. Stevie realized how much the Blue Blossom, in all its facilitating luxury, had been crushing her inward. But here, so viscerally distracted, she could almost en- joy herself.

But, as was becoming increasingly apparent, what Stevie enjoyed and what Jez enjoyed did not always dovetail. His quest for repen- tance soon forgotten in the afternoon heat, Jez began to tire of the bustle and noise. They picked up a taxi and ventured out on roads away from town, past huts with tin roofs and children scratching sticks in the dust and gnarled old men smoking and staring at the passing traffic, to a small cove that the taxi driver recommended, and a reggae bar, owned by the driver’s uncle, that sold pancakes and seafood. Rather than discuss Jacuzzi Gate, they small-talked about the scenery, like polite strangers thrown together in a group package tour. Whether out of guilt or embarrassment, Jez seemed distracted now, dreamy even, a little lost to her.

Stevie made her escape, leaving Jez nursing a Tiger beer while she walked down to the ocean’s edge, the water frilling around her feet, the wet sand squidging between her toes like potter’s clay. A teenage jewelry seller approached, offering beads and hair braids and Buddha necklaces. Stevie smiled but turned down his invita- tion to bargain for a fake Prada purse. No, she didn’t know his friend George Armstrong in Hemel Hempstead; England was pretty big, but, sure, she’d look out for him.

Keeping her eye on Jez, a pink figure pulling down his sunhat, nodding his head in time to Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry,” Stevie walked farther along the beach, studying the surrounding landscape—a steep cliff, then a gentler slope upholstered with the roofs of palm trees. She wondered about the tsunami’s legacy. The

Blue Blossom had hardly been touched. But a few miles down the coast, lives had been flooded and smashed. Was this one of those places? Had those buildings been recently rebuilt? It was hard to believe anything had happened here alongside the calm sea.

Stevie sat down, arranging her skirt to protect her bare legs from the blind heat of the sand. How did she get here? How did Jez? It seemed suddenly preposterous that they were together, married, on a honeymoon. None of it made any sense at all. All she knew was that this exotic paradise only served to highlight the failures of a marriage that had barely begun.

She could see that Jez was chatting to the bar owner now, slump- ing back in the chair, laughing. He made friends easily. She’d al- ways loved him for his readiness to accept people from all walks of life. He had a certain generosity of spirit. Perhaps the Jacuzzi inci- dent actually came from the same guileless place. You couldn’t edit your lover and marry only the good bits, could you? Wasn’t that what marriage was about—compromise and acceptance? Stevie gazed across the ocean. As she watched it darken and roughen, con- secutive lines of peaked waves moved across its surface like a rough weave.

Was Jez waving? Feeling the temperature of the air drop, Stevie got up quickly, creating two little potholes in the sand with the balls of her feet, and walked toward him across the beach.

after lunch the next
day, a cool, polite lunch, Jez dropped off to sleep in the villa. Things felt even more awkward now. Stevie pottered, pleased to have space to think and do all those necessary little tasks such as washing out her bikini and emptying the sand from the bottom of her handbag and trying not to think too hard

about her marriage. Her mother called to tell her that Poppy’s little boy had stopped breathing again and had been resuscitated. It re- ally wasn’t good news, she said.

Stevie clicked her phone shut and, before she could react to the news, was startled by a loud groan coming from the bedroom. She walked through the villa, bare feet slapping the cold tiles, to find Jez sobbing into his pillow. “Jez? What’s the matter?” Cradling him in her arms, she felt her anger dissipate and the sad tenderness she felt toward Poppy’s baby projected onto him. She suggested that they walk down to the beach, but Jez preferred the idea of a stiff drink at the pool bar.

“I can’t see his face when I shut my eyes,” Jez explained quietly, twizzling two pink plastic straws in his cocktail. He splashed his feet, which dangled from the pool-submerged bar stools. “I can’t remember my poor dad’s fucking face.”

“Did you bring a photo?”

“I didn’t think of it.” Jez gulped his cocktail, the more fibrous parts wedged within the pink straw, demanding a noisier suck. “I can’t believe I’ve forgotten what he looks like already. It’s shit. It really is fucking shit.” Jez gave his balls, which were being nipped at by the trunk elastic, a nudge with his glass. They sat in silence for a few moments. Someone was waving from the poolside.

Stevie looked up. Christ. Katy. She waved, hoping her old “friend” wouldn’t come over. Jez just stared. Katy walked past the pool and back into the main atrium, disappearing from view. Jez turned to Stevie.

“You’re still angry, aren’t you, babe?”

“Yes.” Why lie? Stevie ran her hands over her neck, noticing that the pre-wedding rash was still there, faint pink bumps under the skin. “It doesn’t bode well.”

He shrugged and raised his glass. “Nor does the sky.”

Stevie looked up. The rain hit almost immediately, huge fat droplets. The pool area erupted with activity as sunbathers grabbed their towels and dived for cover, and the neat Thai staff, running af- ter them, picked up the seat cushions and the trays of cocktails. They sat in silence for a while, awed by the thundering rain, relish- ing the rare cold.

“How many times do I have to say I’m sorry?” asked Jez quietly. “It’s not what you say, is it?”

“Really, pumpkin, I am sorry.” Jez, moved by the sincerity of his own apology, felt his eyes water. “I’ll make it up to you.”

“Another drink, madam?” The waiter smiled at Stevie. Stevie shook her head.

“Why you sad?” The bartender asked kindly, as if he knew the answer.

Because this is not how I wanted my life to turn out . . . Stevie shrieked silently inside. Because I am on an island paradise wishing I were somewhere else. Because I always imagined that one day I’d get married and it would complete me, make life more meaningful. And it hasn’t. She smiled at the bartender and sipped her beer.

“Don’t worry, mate. The missus is prone to moods,” said Jez, try- ing to keep up his bar banter so that everything would return to normal and they could get on with the tricky business of having a romantic honeymoon, like normal couples. He leaned into his wife, shrugged an arm around her shoulder.

Stevie nodded, suddenly feeling like she didn’t care anymore. “Jez,” she said, quietly. “I need to go home.”

TWENTY-FIVE
Æ

stevie stared, transfixed by the veins in tommy’s
hand. His skin was as translucent and delicate as the membrane that separates the shell from the white of an egg. She put her arms into the gloved hole in the incubator and reached out to her new nephew with giant, rubbery hands. Tommy’s fingers, his impos- sibly tiny fingers, closed around her thumb, covering her one thumbnail. Despite appearing as fragile as a featherless newborn bird fallen from its nest, he had a notable grip, an instinct for con- tact. His chest—covered with round electrodes, like medals— inflated and deflated quickly. Oh, God. Poor thing, little creature. She wiped a tear from the side of her nose before Poppy or her mother could see it. She’d never really imagined anything could go wrong with baby-making before—not to her, not to anyone she knew. She’d only ever worried about finding the father of a poten- tial child. That something could go wrong after this enormous ac- complishment was too cruel for words. “He’s beautiful.”

Poppy smiled, exhausted but proud. “I know.”

Patti interrupted, “He looks like a little red Indian, darling.

Look at that olive skin, what a throwback!”

“Grandma Yates’ Apache genes at last,” said Stevie dryly. “And he’s got the prettiest nose I’ve ever seen.”

“Not his granny’s hooter, that’s for sure,” said Patti, trying to bring a little laughter into this ward where the battle for life or death was played out in rows of clear plastic incubators that resem- bled fish tanks. “Is he smiling?”

Poppy shook her head. “Gas.”

“No, no, look! He
is
smiling. Oh, Poppy. He’s such a gentle, happy soul, you can always tell, even at this age. He’s your own lit- tle Buddha,” Patti said wistfully.

Poppy nodded blankly, her sky-blue eyes someplace elsewhere. “He’s been okay today?” asked Stevie, trying to engage her sister.

Poppy nodded. “Yes. Knock wood.” She reached for the wooden legs of a medicine cabinet and tapped them. She was familiar with those wooden legs. “The doctors say he’s stable. The milk is doing its job.” Poppy spent half her time in the hospital “milk bar,” ex- pressing breast milk via an industrial milking machine, then feed- ing it via a tube into the pinprick of Tommy’s nostril. “He’s going to be fine. I just know it.”

Stevie exchanged a fleeting glance with Patti. They desperately wanted to share Poppy’s faith. But it was hard to believe anything this small could survive. Tommy turned slightly, his skinny limbs shifting awkwardly from one side to the other, as if backing off from the invasion of the giant gloved hand. Stevie withdrew from the incubator carefully.

“Stevie, darling, why don’t you pick something up from the café for your sister?” Patti squeezed Poppy’s knee. “You must drink lots

of fluids, if you’re feeding. You need to keep that dairy well- stocked.”

“Tea? Coffee?” asked Stevie. “Tea. I’d like that.” “Mum?”

“Oh, chamomile, something mainstream.”

“You’ll be lucky to get Earl Grey.” Poppy sat back in her chair, watching the incubator intently. “When is Jez back?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

Poppy acknowledged the information with a nod, but didn’t look like she’d processed it. Stevie was grateful that she and her mother were too preoccupied to probe any further right now. She’d only been back four days and was already sick of having to explain the situation to friends, with all the embellishment and the spin. Her story went like this: Her sister’s baby was dangerously ill, so she’d decided to cut short the honeymoon, wonderful as it was, to support her sister. They’d agreed that Jez—who’d obviously booked time off work and didn’t want to waste it—should stay in Thailand for the remaining five days. Hell, what was the point of
both
of them losing the luxury holiday? In truth, she’d insisted that Jez stay. She couldn’t face the thought of more time with him, and she wanted to see her sister alone.

But as Stevie’s plane had plunged through cotton clouds into the gray skies over Heathrow, the salty smell of the Andaman Sea still hovering incongruously in her hair, Stevie was less convinced about this solo return. It made rational rather than emotional sense. It felt as if she and Jez were running away from each other. Consequently, she’d not been able to face going back to their flat—even if it was only a fifteen-minute hop on the Heathrow Express—to drop off her

luggage as planned. Instead, she got straight on a coach to Oxford, to her parents’ house, where she’d found a stoic but exhausted Poppy and her family huddled around the kitchen table discussing steroid jabs, and her mother reluctantly accepting that her grandson’s predicament was beyond the help of arnica and positive thinking.

“You must miss Jez,” said Poppy quietly, caressing Tommy’s bony spine with the tips of her fingers.

“Oh, I’m surviving.” Stevie stood up, tugging her T-shirt down over her barely tanned tummy. “Right. I’ll go get that tea.”

A nurse buzzed Stevie out of the ward—security was reassur- ingly tight. She picked up her handbag from the hook outside, and followed the signs to the café, through endless pale green, unset- tling corridors. What shall we paint the corridors in a place for sick people? Pale green. And if the color didn’t make you sick, the smell—bleach, cheap municipal disinfectants, dressings, and toilets—would do the job nicely, she thought. The odors hit the back of her throat with a sharp snap like an elastic band. She slowed her march. She really didn’t feel too good. What the hell . . . Right. A toilet. The closest one will do! Mouth salivating, stomach churning, she ran, hand over her mouth, to the bathroom and vom- ited into a sink.