One.
Thailand, September 2010
They came for him when night had fallen, when the sea and the sky were one black spread, broken only by the light of a squid boat somewhere far out.
Over the soft reggae playing behind the bar we could hear the half-hearted collapse of tiny wavelets, exhausted after the storm. Lingering smells of briny seaweed, meat cooked in galangal and chili. It felt as if we were the only people in Thailand, me and him and our handful of ad-hoc wedding guests. There was a well-being retreat further down the beach, but their lights had gone out hours ago.
A short while before they came for him, someone started playing “Something About the Way You Look Tonight,” and although neither of us really loved the song—knew the words, even—we knew it to be the cue for our first dance. We walked down the wooden steps onto the sand and swayed slowly on the beach like the couple in that picture on my wall at university. Johan and me, a rain-puddled beach, Kulap and Than holding umbrellas over our heads, even though the storm had long passed.
In the years that followed I would wonder about that storm. What might have been if it hadn’t come; if we’d married earlier in the day like we’d planned. Might we have taken a ride to the nearest town for some drinks at sundown? Gone to a remote beach for a twilight swim? What if they’d come looking for him, found nobody, and given up?
Perhaps we’d have managed to take the boat back to the mainland a few days later. Perhaps we’d have gotten back safely to Bangkok—home to Europe, even.
Perhaps I’d have started out as a surgical registrar with Johan Kullberg, my husband, next to me in bed when I woke before dawn to get to the hospital. Although, who knows, perhaps we’d have been divorced by the time I was thirty.
But I think we’d still be together.
We could have lived anywhere in the world: Singapore, Dubrovnik, Boston—the world was our oyster, with our careers; nothing would have been off the table. Children? No children? It could have gone either way. What I’m certain of, though, is that we’d have been happy even if we’d continued as we had begun. Just two people living together in that sweet little flat in London.
One of us could have died early, I suppose, although I’d like to hope not. But what might our lives look like now if the storm hadn’t come and we hadn’t been on the beach that evening? Who would he be to me?
—
But the storm did come and we married hours later than planned. We drank Singha, cocktails, something unsanitary from a backpacker’s hip flask. We danced, we kissed, and every time we did I smiled into his smiling mouth, because I loved him so much. I hold the sense memory of his solid body under my hands even now. The width of hisback. A khaki-striped T-shirt was his morning suit, while I wore a dress I’d bought for a few baht in the night market. Somebody had put a flower garland on one of the beach dogs.
Elton John stopped playing but we continued to dance, holding each other: two ripe young fruit. We moved slowly, his hands warm on my body, and I could happily have left our wedding party right then, at eight o’clock, to be alone with him. But I stayed and danced, because I wanted that too, and for those last few moments it was beautiful.
Until our wedding was swarming with armed men, suddenly, white light and rough black shadow. Unknown sounds, moving bodies, loud yells. Limbs being grabbed, more yelling.
Himbeing grabbed, violently.
Screaming—me—Stop, stop, someone call for help! Please, leave us alone, we’re just tourists!
Then more screaming as I began to realize theywantedthis tourist, this man who’d just married me on the beach. He was the one they had come for.
For a hopeful, stupid moment I even tried to protect him physically, to get between him and their guns.Stop it! Don’t do this! Stop!
If any of them could understand what I was saying, they didn’t show it, nor did they stop what they were doing. One of them simply pointed a gun at me, yelling. Then I heard Johan screaming at me to get down, to get out of danger.
In my flashbacks I recall short bursts. His face, angled against a wall while armed men held him down. The slam of the van doors as they stole him from our life, our future. The speed with which I followed the convoy, sprinting up to the main road, where a man in a strip-lit kiosk was selling pieces of grilled chicken on sticks. Ghostly reality: cars buzzing past, a festering mountain of coconut husks, two buffalo tiedto a stake in a sparse plantation. My cries interrupted by the toot of a moped and the somnolent drone of a bullfrog in the seething undergrowth. Cheery music from the chicken kiosk.
And then the impossible: he had gone and I was standing alone on a road on a Thai island, a brand-new bride at twenty-seven years old.
—
I still think about that lone squid boat. Moving silently across the horizon that night, where black met black.
I googled “squid boats” not long after I left Thailand, sleepless with grief and shock. There are beautiful photos on the internet. Those bright lights we could see from the shore are actually green: they’re shot straight down into the water to attract plankton, which attract squid. But there are so many of these boats, so many lights, you can actually see them from space at night. Jade glitter clouds in the black hands of the Andaman Sea, a tantalizing welcome to anything extraterrestrial skimming the edge of our solar system.
That’s what I used to do when I was back in our London flat, alone at night, and it played on repeat: the machine guns, the bullfrog, the betrayal of all he had promised. I would get out of my bed and sit at the kitchen table as London grumbled gently in the background, and I’d look at those light clusters photographed from space.
For a few moments I would mute my rage, my loss, and just think about him, remember how it felt to be his wife. Just for those few hours before he was taken and I found out who he really was.
Two.
Now: Devon, December 2022
I step outside the front door most nights at ten o’clock, which is really the time I should be turning off my light. But I’m never in bed by ten because of this: this deep lungful of moorland air. This wild space under the stars, thatch creaking above, bats zigzagging like demented bullets overhead and owls calling through the darkness. This time is for me.
