“Robin was not a rebound,” I say gently. “I met him years later. And I didn’tsettlefor him—he was my first choice. He still is.”
But I’ve played it all out in my head, of course, and she knows it. Johan and I somehow bump into each other in January, in a city of two and a half million people. I just walk around the corner and he’s there.There.A free man, walking down a street. How would I feel?
The truth is: I have no idea. I haven’t cared about him in a very long time, but she’s right: the body remembers, even if the mind’s moved on. Last week I had a sex dream about him. I think I might even have orgasmed in my sleep. I was devastated when I woke, but no matter how great my shame, my regret, I still cannot be sure what would happen in my body if I saw him.
“There are no grounds whatsoever for concern,” is what I tell her now. “If there were, I wouldn’t be going.”
A wall of wind punches us suddenly, flinging my hair sideways and slapping my cheeks. Maya sinks her face into her scarf. “OK,” she says. “If you’re sure.”
“AreyouOK?” I ask her, as we turn to pick our way back through the bracken. Stiff graphite-colored clouds are packing in across the pink sunset and the temperature is dropping rapidly.
“Me? Yes. I mean…the situation with Dad is eating me alive. But when I can see past that, I’m essentially fine. Why?”
“I don’t know. Sixth sense.”
“I’m fine,” she repeats.
“You can talk to me,” I remind her. “I’m your sister and I care. I can even speak a bit of therapy language these days.”
She laughs but doesn’t say anything, and I decide to leave it for now. This woman is more in touch with her feelings than anyone I’ve ever met.
It’s only twenty minutes later, when we climb back into her borrowed car, that she says, “I won’t bring this up again, Carrie. But you’d better be sure about your motives for this trip. Fool me, by all means, but do not fool yourself. It never works out. I for one should know.”
Twelve.
Thailand, September 2010
It’s impossible to limit Thailand to just words,Johan emailed the night before I flew out to meet him.
Thailand is a feeling. It’s all your senses working at once. Even when you’re far away from the smell of cooking, or flowers, or drains, or exhaust fumes, it has its own unique smell. You’ll see things you’ve never seen before and you’ll hear things you’ll never hear anywhere else. And the things you will taste! It’s the finest food on earth. I love you. Fly safe.
We had been together three months, and I was intoxicated. Much to my mother’s disappointment, I’d shelved plans to work abroad in favor of a surgical reg job at St. Mary’s in Paddington and I’d moved in—officially now—to Johan’s flat. My core training was over and I had three weeks of total freedom before I began my specialist training. Life felt very sweet.
The taxi ride from Bangkok airport was everything Johan had said it would be. Illuminated signs and video screens blazed through tangled cables, dank alleys, traffic lights clogged with tuk-tuks. On the radio, the Black Eyed Peas and Eminem segued into Thai folk with quivering, melancholic female vocals. At a busy intersection I opened my window and damp heat rolled in with the smell of sewage and burned sugar. An advertising screen across the road showed a bunch of men dressed as chickens. Behind them, high-rise blocks reached upward, holding balcony after balcony of clothes drying on hanging rails.
The advertising screen changed, offering sweets, then beauty products, then something unidentifiable in a carton. Everywhere, rainpools steamed. It was monsoon season and the bloated sky seemed ready to explode.
We’d booked a midrange hotel two streets back from the river, somewhat misleadingly named the River Paradise Lodge. It was a nice place, though: a terra-cotta low-rise centered around a pretty courtyard where signs instructed me to “deeply relax and enjoy the bounty.” I tried to enjoy the bounty for a while, but within fifteen minutes I was on my feet. The afternoon was burning on toward evening and I wanted to see more, to get some sense of scale. There was still time to kill before Johan arrived.
After a short walk I found myself at the edge of the Chao Phraya River, in the shadow of a five-star megahotel. I stood by the brown mass of water for a while, watching tourist boats, army barges, river taxis plow slowly upstream. The sky was covered in thick, ominous cloud and the air so humid my clothes were already damp to touch.
I felt small, standing there. As a core trainee that feeling hadn’t been unusual, but I’d still been on the front line, making a difference to peoples’ lives. Here, I was no more than a speck.
I went back to the River Paradise to check if Johan’s flight had landed. It had, twenty-seven minutes ago, which meant my wait would soon be over. My body began to hum with anticipation.
I walked to the backpacker area, down Soi Rambuttri and into the Khao San Road. I wandered in a daze through stalls of belts, T-shirts, friendship bracelets. There were kiosks selling pad thai for seventy pence and massage shops full of seemingly enormous European girls being massaged by petite Thai women. I hovered next to a bar with free Wi-Fi to check my phone but there was nothing from Johan yet, just a string of emails from Imperial College Trust about my contract and an offer of sex from a friend at medical school who went through his little black book of commitment-phobic women on a monthly rotation. I ignored it. I’d be with Johan soon. I couldn’t stop smiling.
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. Wherewas 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.
