The One Day You Were My Husband (46)

I went straight to the British Embassy, because I had no idea what else to do. I was not a surgical registrar; I was a girl again, a girl longing for a parent to take charge of the situation.

My body calmed a little as the taxi drove up to the embassy entrance, its driveway flanked by pink flowers and tropical trees. Around us in every direction the city shot up hungrily, noisily into the sky: office blocks, shopping centers, and the enormous stilted bulk of the Skytrain. This quiet old colonial building tucked away next to a giant intersection, all white stucco and ornate shutters, was a small oasis of hope.

I will get help here, I thought, dragging our bags out of the taxi. The heat pressed in from all directions but I hauled the bags across the entrance veranda with renewed energy. Someone will tell me where Johan is and what I need to do to get him back.



* * *



—

Nobody was able to tell me where Johan was or what I needed to do to get him back. When I was finally seen, which took two hours, I was told that I needed to go to the Swedish Embassy instead.

I took another taxi to the Swedish Embassy. The journey took forty-five minutes and cost more than three hundred baht. When I was dropped off I realized I was about five blocks down the road from where I had begun. As I dragged our bags up to another entrance hall, I began to cry.

This time yesterday we had been dressing to get married.

“Can I help at all?” a man’s voice asked. I looked up sharply. He sounded just like Johan.

He was not Johan, of course, just a consular official, but he took me inside, sat me down in a small room, and went straight off to get help. I don’t remember his name anymore. He was the first of dozens of people whose names I knew for a few minutes, a few hours—days, in some cases. A wearying procession of people who wanted, but were unable, to help.

This man came back and told me that the embassy had already been informed of Johan’s arrest, which was a good start. Sometimes it took days or even weeks. A more senior consular official was due to visit him tomorrow.

“What? Where? Where is he?” I was high on sudden hope. “I have to go there! The diving permits were nothing to do with him—it’s his fixer they should be talking to! Johan didn’t even know about it until the other day!”

The man considered this. “Johan is at Chakkrawat Police Station,” he told me, “In Chinatown. May I ask…Can you tell me what you mean? About permits? And what did you call this person—a fixer?”

“There was some trouble with his permits in Myanmar,” I said, although something was feeling wrong now. “Someone was bribed or something, but Johan had no part in it. It was his fixer. Who’s since sorted it all out.”

The man went silent for a while. He had a kind, round face with a curious shamrock-shaped birthmark on the side of his neck, and a tendency to pause before talking that reminded me a little of Dad.

“I need to check my notes,” he said eventually. “Make sure everything we know matches with what you know.”

While he was away I googled the police station Johan had been taken to. It looked clean and orderly, which I found comforting. But it remained incomprehensible that this was where Johan was. That they could have coordinated a major arrest all the way down on Koh Samui for a man who’d done nothing more than dive on a dodgy permit someone else had organized. His very presence there was to help preserve Myanmar’s heritage.

The man came back. Johan had been taken to the police station in Chinatown because his alleged crime was committed in the vicinity, he said. It was meant to have happened just over a week ago.

I’d been pacing until that point, but at this news I sat down. Something behind my eyes felt fizzy. “I…In Chinatown? What crime?” I asked. “Do you mean…Do you mean unrelated to the permits?”

The man pursed his lips. “We do not have any information about an issue with permits,” he said. “The information that we have here is that he was arrested for drug trafficking.”

“I…What?”

He repeated himself, this time so quietly I could barely hear him. I couldn’t hear any of the sounds of this busy consular office now. Only the buzzing in my head, the placid gurgle of my empty stomach.

“That’s impossible,” I told him. “We…got married yesterday. He doesn’t take drugs.”

The man pursed his lips sympathetically and tilted his head to one side. He handed me a bottle of water, and I wondered how often he’d had to have these sorts of conversations, how many sympathy bottles he’d handed out.

I tried again. “Are you sure? Drug trafficking is…well, it’s just a no. Impossible. I’ve been with him the whole time he’s been in this country.”

Only I hadn’t, I realized, as the ground underneath me began to tilt.

The man spoke up. His voice was gentle. I registered the beginning of cramping in my abdomen.

“If that is true, then you should go to the police station and make a statement. You could help him.” He watched me for a moment. “You have been with him for all of the time he has been here in Thailand? He has not been on his own at all?”

I am a doctor. The words slid into my consciousness as if on a screen. I couldn’t lie. Especially in a situation like this.

“Apart from when he was traveling in from the airport,” I said. “That was the only time I wasn’t with him. But he was not doing a drug deal. He was getting his kit through customs. He’s a diver, you see; he had to bring some of his diving kit with him. There wasn’t anywhere he was willing to leave it in Myanmar, plus he was hoping to dive here…” The man was watching me sympathetically. “He was just getting his kit through customs and storing it in a lockup by the hotel. He told me,” I added, childishly.