Thursday, September 15
Customs
Our flights are booked, first-class back to Heathrow. Our last burst of luxury. The last of the honeymoon.
I packed our bags last night. Broke open the seal on the vacuum-packed cash and cut open the lining of my suitcase carefully along the seam with my nail scissors. We fill my lining and Mark’s lining with half each and slot the iPhone and USB in mine too. I fold a towel over and under the layer of money so it feels like lining padding; I pack it in tight so it won’t budge no matter how much the handlers throw the cases around. Then I sew the lining back up using the hotel mini sewing kit. We have to call for another one for Mark’s case.
I pack the diamonds into five separate little baggies, the ones the shower caps come in. Then I slice open five sanitary towels, remove the filler and place thebaggies, one each, into the absorbent lining, slip them back into their purple wrappers and back into their cardboard sanitary-pad box. The customs guys will have to be damn thorough to find this stuff, especially considering customs doesn’t tend to open up first-class suitcases anyway. Sad but true—they just don’t.
But even if they do, I think we’ll be okay.
The main problem is the gun. Although part of me wishes we could keep it just in case this all goes wrong, there’s no way we’d get it through customs, and we definitely don’t want to draw any attention to ourselves, given what else we’re carrying. So last night we bundled the gun up in a pillowcase with rocks from the beach and dropped it into the choppy water on the ocean side of the resort. Into the murky darkness.
Leila comes to collect our bags in the morning and see us off to the jetty. She’s all smiles and get-well-soons. Mark hands her two hotel stationery envelopes. One has her name on it; it contains five hundred U.S. dollars. Not an unusually high tip for a resort of this sort; I’m sure they’ve had better. But it’s big enough that she’ll be pleased yet small enough to ensure we’re not particularly memorable.
And we’re off. Off to Tahiti, then LAX, then London. Then in a car to our house. I miss our home.
—
There’s a moment when we’re checking in our bags in Tahiti that I feel the check-in clerk’s eyes catch mine. Just a fraction of a second, but I thinkshe sees. She sees the way I’m looking at the bag, at her, and I know she knows. But then she shakes it off. A brief toss of the head. She probably thinks she’s imagining things. Ormaybe I imagined it? After all, what on earth could a honeymooner be smuggling back from Bora Bora? Hotel towels? I readjust my face to the way it’s supposed to look and she hands our passports back over the counter with a smile.
At Heathrow we collect our bags again. Another lovely flight. And we’re almost free. Almost home now. Just customs to walk through. I nip to the toilet before we go through. I check the lining inside my case; it’s all still neatly stitched up. Safe. I zip it back up and head back to meet Mark by the luggage carousels. Then I feel my phone vibrate against my leg. I stop halfway out of the ladies’ toilet. Something has happened. I freeze, then try to subtly make my way back into the washroom. I lock the cubicle and grab my phone.
But it’s not Mark calling to tell me to flush the diamonds or run. It’s just life flooding back in. Real life. Our real life. Emails from friends about the wedding, work, two missed calls from Phil. No emergency, just life-as-usual.
Mark senses my mood when I find him. He keeps me chatting. I know what he’s doing and it works. And, thankfully, by the time I look up, we’re through the “Nothing to Declare” aisle and out into the terminal concourse.
We did it, and it really wasn’t that hard.
I look around at the brightly dressed, tanned people returning to the gray. Out through the giant glass panels of Terminal 5, damp England lies in wait for them. For us. God, I’m glad to be back. Outside, the scent of rain hangs in the air.
21
Friday, September 16
Home
We’re back. The house is pristine, just the way we left it. Ready for our new married life. Lovely Nancy popped by and filled the fridge with a few essentials before we got home. She left our spare keys and a little note welcoming us. That was nice. I have to remember to call and thank her. I’ll need to write it down or I know I’ll forget, and it’s important I don’t. It’s important I get back into my real life and I don’t act differently. We all need structure.
I slept like a log last night; I wouldn’t have predicted that at all. It’s funny how the body seems to work completely of its own volition at certain times in our lives, isn’t it? By rights I should have tossed and turned all night waiting for everything to come crashing down around us. But I didn’t. I slipped back between ourfresh sheets and sank into our mattress and slept the sleep of the righteous. Mark did too. I think he barely moved all night.
He’s made us breakfast. Eggs and tomatoes on toast with warm butter and a tall steaming pot of coffee. The coffee we like. Everything the way we like it, so reassuring, so wonderfully familiar. The sun is shining through the windows onto him as he potters back and forth with tasty things. He looks calm, contented, shuffling about in his boxers and dressing gown. He sits down opposite me finally and we eat in silence as we sate ourselves with our less exotic but equally satisfying British food.
He reaches for my hand across the table as we eat, an unconscious gesture. We loosely clasp each other, our bodies seeking something to hold on to in this strange yet familiar new world.
After we finish I look out of the window at the trees outside, where the branches meet the clear blue sky. A clear crisp day. Mark squeezes my hand. He smiles across at me.
“I suppose we should get started then, shouldn’t we?” he says.
I smile. We both don’t want to. Get started, I mean. We don’t want reality just yet. We’d rather sit here together and hold hands. But we’ll do it together. We’ll make it fun. Mark and I.
“Let’s do it,” I declare, and rise from the table. “Let’s do it.”
The first job is to unpack the bags, and by that I don’t mean the clean and dirty clothes. We take scissors to the suitcase linings and remove the bundles of notes. Mark fetches an old weekend bag from his wardrobeand I begin to pack the bundles away into it. Of course, the original bag is gone now. Probably in a wheelie bin in the basement of the Four Seasons back in Bora Bora, torn and empty, its contents safely removed.
Next I remove the diamonds from their sanitary towel packaging. We empty them all into a thick plastic freezer baggie. Somehow they still manage to sparkle through the thick clouded plastic. Mark drops the phone and the USB into another freezer bag and then I place both of the plastic bags in the attic. I hide them under some loose insulation in the far corner of the eaves. They should be safe there. I remember when we first bought the house, all the forgotten things we found in the attic. Things can go unnoticed in lofts for decades, and no one really puts anything they actually care about in the attic, do they? They’ll be safe there. As I climb down the ladder a wave of nausea rolls over me. I don’t know why, maybe it’s been bubbling away at the back of my mind, but I have a feeling I know what it is, instinctively.
I head to the bathroom and find what I’m looking for at the back of the cupboard. A pregnancy test. I keep a standby pack in the cupboard, just in case. I’ve always hated the idea of having to trudge to a shop and furtively buy one in an actual emergency situation. I like to be prepared, which I’m sure you’ve gathered by now. There are three sticks. I unwrap one and pee on it. I place it on the edge of the bathtub and wait. Sixty seconds. I think about our plan. About what comes next.
