This mesmerising character driven drama is the twisty tale of two women's obsessive search for the truth. For Amanda the answers to her questions could result in the lose of everything. For Camille it's the key to all that she lost years ago.
The chapters are written in varying lengths and alternate between Amanda and Camille.Amanda's perfect ex pat life in her high rise condo starts to unravel when her helper Awmi dies in an apparent suicide.Some prescription drugs belonging to Amanda's husband Edward are found in the maids room and then Amanda is informed that Awmi was pregnant. Amanda begins to have doubts about her handsome husband. If he can't resist temptation under their own roof then what does he get up to when he is away on his travels for work. When she starts to uncover the possibility that Edward might be involved in a series of terrifying crimes,Amanda finds herself feeling more and more isolated. Trapped in her luxurious apartment with its stunning views of the ships in the harbour,she is like a bird trapped in a gilded cage. As a trailing wife she has no rights and can't even get access to her own money. She also doesn't want to leave her seventeen year old step daughter Josie. The poor girl has had enough trauma in her life,her mother committed suicide three years ago and now their maid has just killed herself. It's no wonder that the poor girl's behaviour has suddenly gone off the rails. With her father always away,she needs to know that she has the support of at least one of her parents. Our second protagonist Camille is a press officer who works for the British High Commission as well as being a volunteer at HELP,an organisation that campaigned for the rights of foreign domestic workers.Camille grew up in Singapore but was sent away to boarding school after her parents mysteriously disappeared when she was ten years old.She has just returned after fifteen years and is determined to solve the mystery of what happened to her parents all those years ago. When Camille is sent to Amanda and Ed`s apartment after Ahmi`s body is discovered,she is shocked to discover that she recognises Ed. She is certain that he knew her parents and therefore has the answers to some of the questions that have plagued her for so many years.Although I had mixed feelings about her character and didn't like her at times,Amanda's chapters were my favourite parts of the story. Ed certainly had issues but was he really capable of committing the crimes that Amanda suspected him of committing? What was the significance of the mysterious countdown on Josie`s blog? So much mystery and intrigue whereas I wasn't drawn into Camille`s story. I enjoyed her parts of the story enough that I wasn't tempted to skim read or skip any of her chapters,I just didn't care what the outcome of her story was going to be.
This is a well written,character driven,twisty,thought provoking drama that culminates in a conclusion that is shocking and intense. Although I personally enjoyed some parts more than others,I did enjoy this book and would gladly recommend it to other thriller readers.
Amanda Bonham watched an infinite number of Edward Bonhams shrink to the depths of the mirrored walls in the elevator. She jabbed the button and the lift rose with a shudder. When the doors opened, she followed a single Edward Bonham into their apartment, and the elevator made a silent retreat like a well-trained servant.
Ed weaved toward the bedroom, shunting a console table with his hip as he steered himself into his en suite. Amanda hurried to catch a teetering ginger jar, her heels squeezing mewls of pain out of the marble floor. She straightened the display and turned into her own bathroom. Jasmine scented the air from a sprig of cuttings by the sink. For the first time that evening, she broke a genuine smile; Awmi, their maid, always brought flowers from her evening walk in the condo gardens.
After washing, Amanda sat on the bed to undo the ribbons of her shoes. With no curtains to obscure the view of Singapore, copper light lapped the walls, swelling with the same perpetual motion as its source—hundreds of container ships moored off the island. The boats lolled in the dark waters, lit up like jovial taverns, as though a ghostly vision of the raucous old port rose from the waves every night and burned itself out again by morning.
Ed’s bathroom door opened. The bed rolled beneath his weight. If she let him, he would start singing “When My Ship Comes In.”
“There’s an art exhibition coming up at the Sentosa Club.” She glanced over as she spoke and saw him grimace while swallowing a sleeping pill. “Breakout painters from Southeast Asia.”
He settled against the pillows; his crisp profile caught the light, creating a high ridge amid a valley of shadows. “I like the apartment minimalist,” he said, with the verbal precision of a drunk man, then scowled at a portrait of Chairman Mao rendered in pixels made of painted fingernails, which hung beside the doorway. “Are they human nails?”
“Acrylic.”
“Human nails might justify the price tag.”
“He watches me when I undress,” Amanda said. “I hate the thing.”
“So why did we buy it?” Ed asked.
“You bought it. You were hammered at a charity auction and got into a bidding war with another dad—”
“Who called Josie a prick-tease.”
“He didn’t say that—”
“He said she’d been leading his son on. Like a seventeen-year-old boy ever needs leading on. I won’t let some limp-dicked kid talk about Josie like that.”
“So you defended your daughter’s honor by outbidding his father for artwork? Every day I’m with you, Ed, I learn vital lessons in parenthood.” Amanda slapped his bare thigh and held up her palm to display the red oblivion of a mosquito.
But Ed was still trying to stare down Mao. “Josie went on and on about this picture. The fingernails represent the eternal spirit of humanity.”
“Why?”
“Because your fingernails never stop growing, do they? Even after death.”
“That’s a bit literal,” Amanda said.
“Yeah, well, that was before she decided it was creepy and we got lumbered with it. But at least I got to show that dad who has the bigger dick.”
“It was pretty clear to everyone who was the bigger dick.”
A slow smile pushed aside Ed’s scowl. “What’s got Mrs. Bonham so crabby? Is Mr. Bonham less attentive than Mr. Mao?” He rolled toward her, but she slid out of his grasp and off the bed. His attempt at a light touch chafed her raw feelings. Any reasonable person would have smelled the acrid perfume of hurt and anger that she’d worn all evening. In her dressing room, she struggled with a zipper, then gave up and tried to pull the dress over her head, ending up with a tight bundle around her face.
“Stay exactly like that.” Ed’s knees buckled hers from behind. “I’m going to fuck you in the closet.”
“For God’s sake, Ed. Who wants to do it in a wardrobe?” His hand wrenched her bra so that one breast stuck out, treacherously responding to the chilly air con.
“All tied up for me.” The other hand enclosed her wrists in the air above her head.
“Since when have you tied me up?” She bucked him away with her haunches and tugged at the fabric until the dress landed on the floor with a huff. Ed had retreated with his hands raised in submission. Warm light from the bedroom cast him in copper. He invested an hour a day in the pool or gym because “no one wants to be the clichéd ang moh”—the overweight, sweaty white guy. Normally, she delighted in his efforts. Even now, through her indignation, she detected his resinous scent of whisky and amber, a strumming base note that reminded her of the first time they’d met, on New Year’s Eve in Switzerland, three years earlier.
Of course, Ed had been fully dressed then, wearing an open-necked shirt when everyone else was trussed up in black tie. He’d made eye contact from his high stool at the bar, and she’d let herself rise the length of the room like a bubble in her champagne glass, carried by an inevitability that relaxed her, made her feel that what was happening was as natural as gravity. Other women approached him—but it was Amanda he watched over their naked shoulders.
“Since when have you been into bondage?” she asked.
“It was a joke. I thought everyone tied each other up these days. And you’ve been wearing those hooker shoes all night, with the ties—”
“Ribbons.” She slid her feet into the shoes again, wrapping the black silk up around one calf and then the other, before facing him again, hands on bare hips. “You like the shoes?”
“Of course I like the shoes. And the underwear.”
“You like this?” She turned her back to him and bent over to lay her palms on the seat of an upholstered chair.
“Of course.”
She hooked her thumbs in her knickers. “What makes you want to fuck someone, Ed?”
“Not someone—you.”
“So prove it’s me that you want.”
As soon as skin touched skin, she tugged down the front of his boxer shorts.
“Give me a minute,” he said. “I’ve taken a sleeping pill—”
“You won’t last a minute.”
Ed gave a pant of laughter and took hold of her hips, and Amanda had to lay her palms on the seat for support. When they parted, a minute or so later, he dropped his underpants into her linen basket while she punched her arms into a bathrobe.
“What was that about?” he said.
“I’ll be ovulating soon. Just getting the party started.”
“You’re angry.”
“I’m speeding things up. Milking the cow.”
“Charming.” He walked into the bedroom. “I’m off to Manila tomorrow with Bernardo, did I tell you?”
“So that’s another month down the drain.” Amanda undid the shoes’ ribbons and they tumbled to her ankles.
“I thought we agreed to take a break, give you time to recover from the IVF and the rest of it.”
“The rest of it? We can say the word out loud; it was a miscarriage, not the return of Voldemort. And anyway, you agreed, not me.” She kicked the shoes into the bottom of her wardrobe and threw the dress on top. “Will you be back in time to take Josie to the Cold Sister gig? She’s been looking forward to it.” She didn’t remind him that she was the one who’d made an early-morning dash halfway across the island to queue at the venue for tickets that sold out in record time. Because it was her husband and her stepdaughter’s favorite band.
“Can you take her?” Ed said. “I can’t leave Bernardo to close this deal. You know what happened last time. I can’t lose another client.”
Amanda heard the bedsheet brush his body. A gig might be fun, but Josie should go with a friend. Or a date. Like a normal teenager. Ed’s daughter was pretty and droll and cool in an unplucked-eyebrows kind of way. Not passive enough for boys her own age, that was the problem. Amanda would never say it to Ed because he would huff and puff, but Josie needed an older boyfriend—not weird older, just a handful of years. Like her and Ed.
She went through her bathroom to the hallway, listened for a moment at Josie’s door, then continued on to the curio shelf in the living room. Shrouded in a pocket of shadow amid the ambient light, she lifted the lid of a blue-and-white urn and felt around its copious belly. After she counted three fat bundles of plasticized bills held tight by hair bands, she replaced the ceramic lid with a low chime. She glanced over both shoulders, first along the hallway toward the family bedrooms and then to the maid’s quarters beyond the kitchen. Then she picked up a much smaller ginger jar from the shelf, cupping it in one palm as she adjusted her wedding photo: a candid shot of her and Ed beside a London cab, the flash picking out Josie’s pale face and chalky gown in the interior. They’d married just six months after that New Year’s Eve party; not, as some people said, because Ed planned a move to Singapore—although a marriage certificate did make their paperwork easier—but because they knew it was right. Sometimes, Amanda thought, you just know when something is right.
Or wrong. She bounced the ginger jar, hearing its contents bristle. Sometimes you know when something is wrong.
She felt all Blade Runner, beautiful and tragic. The mood made her wish she could smoke while looking at the view, but none of their huge windows opened. Instead, she went to the deep-red kitchen and put the ginger jar on the island counter. There was no movement in the apartment. Only the ceaseless expiration of the AC, as familiar as her own breath. Her thumb and middle finger encircled the lid of the pot, and she lifted it away. Turning the jar upside down, she shook out a stiff strip of packets, neat rubber rings visible through the transparent squares.
Amanda ripped one square off at the perforation. The packet opened easily. She supposed it would be a design fault otherwise; no one wants a delay while opening a condom. The rubber ring slopped onto her palm. A tart smell hit the back of her throat and she remembered the taste of lubricant. It had been years since she’d encountered a condom. They didn’t use them anymore, she and Ed.
Well, she didn’t.
As she held the teat aloft, the condom unraveled to the shape of a dead squid, as sticky and wrinkled as an empty scrotum. Amanda dropped it into a paper towel and poked it to the bottom of the waste bin. She washed her fingers. The remaining condom packets she pushed back into the ginger jar, wondering when Ed would miss them from the travel bag where she’d found them hidden inside a pocket. Once he noticed, would he worry that she knew? Would she be able to tell when he realized? Would either of them show their hand at the marital poker table?
His sleeping pill must have kicked in by now. She should go to bed too. But her intoxicated blood hummed through her veins. Her mind also hummed with the effort of not freaking out about the condoms and the encounter in the wardrobe, Ed grabbing her bound wrists. I’m going to fuck you in the closet. Since when did he talk like that?
Don’t rush to conclusions, she told herself.
So she focused on the sound, the external hum she heard. Not the perpetual whine of the fridge, air con, lights: their life-support system. Something else. She swung around and saw that the glass door leading to the rear balcony was ajar. The maid’s quarters lay at the end of the balcony, and although Awmi would be asleep and the streets below would be quiet at such a late hour, the open door broke the seal on the sterile vacuum that passed for her home.
Amanda got up to close the glass door. But as she gripped the handle, she saw that the door to Awmi’s bedroom was also open.
Amanda called out to her. She hesitated on the threshold of another woman’s territory; what little privacy Awmi had she tried to respect. “Awmi? Are you awake?” She pushed the balcony door wider; night air, as dank as a wet towel, engulfed her.
Her shadow stretched away, a path leading to darkness and a black shape on the floor. The humid air clotted with the brute fumes of bleach, making her eyes tear up. A rattle from Awmi’s room told her the air con was switched on, melting through the open door into the heat of the night. It made no sense: Awmi was frugal with everything but especially air con, which was a luxury for a Singapore maid. Amanda took baby steps toward the black shape. Something warm mashed between her toes. The bleach clutched her lungs and a scream scorched her throat.
Stumbling backward over the threshold into the kitchen, she slammed the door shut with both hands flat on the cold glass while she gasped for breath. She had almost touched the black shape before it registered as Awmi. Her broken body lay in a puddle of blood and vomit that crept like a living organism, reaching out to touch the polished tips of Amanda’s toenails.
AUTHOR BIO
After spending a decade as a broadcast journalist for the BBC, Jo Furniss gave up the glamour of night shifts to become a freelance writer and serial expatriate. Originally from the United Kingdom, she spent seven years in Singapore and also lived in Switzerland and Cameroon.
As a journalist, Jo worked for numerous online outlets and magazines, including Monocle and the Economist. She has edited books for a Nobel laureate and the palace of the Sultan of Brunei. She has a Distinction in MA Professional Writing from Falmouth University.
Jo’s debut novel, All the Little Children, was an Amazon Charts bestseller.
Connect with her via Facebook (/JoFurnissAuthor) and Twitter (@Jo_Furniss) or through her website. www.jofurniss.com.
PUBLICATION DATE : 14th Ausust 2018
PUBLISHER : Lake Union Publishing
GENRE : Psychological Thriller
Purchase Here....
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trailing-Spouse-Jo-Furniss-ebook/dp/B0746KL1F5/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1527368939&sr=1-1&keywords=the+trailing+spouse
No comments:
Post a Comment