The One Day You Were My Husband (38)

Darkness began to settle, although if the air had cooled I couldn’t feel it. Under strings of fairy lights there were stalls of sliced fruit tightly cling filmed in ice carts, marinated balls of unidentifiable meats on sticks, piles of knockoff designer handbags wrapped in cellophane. Above me twisted the same filthy tangle of cables and wires I’d followed on every street from the airport. The air smelled of meat, unfamiliar herbs and spices, incense.

I needed to eat. I wandered back to Soi Rambuttri, where I’d feel less conspicuous eating alone if Johan didn’t turn up. I sent him a message from a pretty restaurant under a spreading tree, sharing my location.

I was still heavy with exhaustion and brain fog. It had been many years since I’d given up caffeine, beyond the occasional cup of tea—any kind of stimulant impeded my steady-handedness as a surgeon—but in this moment I could readily understand why many of my colleagues survived on coffee, Red Bull, even the odd recreational drug.

The humidity thickened in my lungs. I couldn’t think straight. Where was he? It was out of character for him not to message me. He’d been messaging nonstop from Yangon Airport.

At the end of the street, some fifteen meters away, there was a kebabed alligator on a cart. I watched the customers—mostly male tourists—as they laughed, fascinated, terrified, watching their dinner being carved into a plastic box.

A slim girl gave me a laminated menu full of amusing English translations and photographs of food.

Across the road, two meaty-armed men made short work of long glasses of Chang, filmed with condensation. Between them sat a local girl of indeterminate age. They both had a hand on her thighs. Revolted, I turned back to my menu. The time difference, the adrenaline, the sheer otherness of this place was making me panic. Where was he? Had something happened? It was nearly eight thirty.

The waitress came back and I ordered green curry, because it felt like an obvious thing to do. She brought me a vodka and Coke, which I knew to be a mistake the moment I smelled it.

I leaned forward on my knees, trying to clear my head. Maybe I should go back to the hotel.

Then, suddenly: him. Kneeling down in front of me, brilliant eyes smiling. His hand, so familiar, on my hot, tired leg.

“I’m sorry, Carrie. It took ages to get my dive kit through customs. Then I had to get it into a storage place.”

He kissed me, asked how I was feeling, and I reflexively answered, “Good.”

“Really?” He laughed gently.

I shook my head.

He didn’t need to ask what was wrong. He’d done jet lag before, many times. He just came and sat beside me at our little pink table.

“I ordered food,” I said, pathetically. “I should have waited, I’m sorry. I just felt…”

“Hungry and tired,” Johan offered, and I nodded.

He took my hand. On the screen across the road Robbie Williams was riding a black horse through a snowy mountain range, looking brooding and ridiculous. I could vaguely hear the words of his song above the voices around us, the sounds of people from around the world coming together to eat and drink. A stray dog paused to look at us for a moment before moving on to eat some spilled rice.

“We’ll take it easy,” Johan said, smiling right at me, and I had never loved him more. “Food, sleep, some carefully considered sex, minimal sightseeing. Until Carrie Cole is back in the saddle, and then I imagine she’ll have her own agenda.”





Thirteen.




The next morning Johan tried to go to Chinatown without me. One of his dive team in Myanmar had a relative who owned a shop there, and Johan had promised to deliver jaggery balls to the owner’s five-year-old son.

I should have been suspicious—he never normally tried to do anything without me. But I wasn’t looking for signs. I was just on holiday in Bangkok, absurdly happy to see him after an absence of nearly three weeks.

And so, when he suggested I go for a massage or even a sleep while he made the delivery, I refused. “Since when was I someone who gets massages?”

Johan laughed. “You need a massage more than anyone I know, Carrie Cole. But that aside, Chinatown is intense. And the first thing you said when you woke up was, ‘I am jet-lagged to all hell, go away and stop talking to me.’?”

That silenced me. I loved the way he quoted my own unreasonable words back to me. I loved that nothing seemed to disturb him the way it did me, nothing seemed to linger for long. “OK,” I conceded. I tried and failed to stop myself smiling. “But I’m here to see you. Let’s go to Chinatown together now. Then get a massage together later.”



* * *



—

He was right, of course. I wasn’t ready for Chinatown. I was still suspended in the woozy chamber of jet lag, unready for a place in which nothing—absolutely nothing, not one sight or sound—was identifiable. It was an entirely foreign world within an already foreign world, nothing like the orderly Chinatown I’d visited in London with Maya and Mum. This place was teeming, the streets lined with shops selling items I couldn’t ever hope to recognize, the air perilous with new, strange smells. Dead, plucked ducks hung in windows with their beaks folded and clipped down; intestines were coiled next to birds’ nests made of swallow saliva. Unfamiliar vegetables were being chopped on aluminum tables out in the street while black pigeons fought over the spills. People, people everywhere, eating bowls of noodle soup, dried fish, white sticky globes in stews.