The Last Time Ever I Saw Your Face

The Last Time Ever I saw Your Face

The third time they came around I knew something was wrong. They sat alone on the conveyor belt. Our brand new luggage, bought especially, was splattered with pre-travel stickers. Those put on by the air company and some bought ourselves from a cheap novelty shop. This was our first trip abroad and we’d saved so hard for it. I looked at one of the stickers as it passed across my line of vision before disappearing again into the little luggage house. It read, ‘We’re going to Jamaica and you’re not .. ha ha’. We’d thought it so funny at the time. Everybody else had collected their belongings and had moved through the terminus to begin their holiday. Joanne was grizzling, Ben was leaning heavily against me, already cried out and asleep. He had his thumb in his mouth and his body was sweaty with the exertions of his tantrum. Even in sleep he gave an occasional dry sob, his two-year-old chest heaving against my ribcage. I tightened my arm around him and cuddled him into me.

I wasn’t worried, just irritated. John had obviously gone to relieve himself, I remember thinking that he could have said something. It was the early hours of the morning. I was stiff from the flight. The children had been difficult and were now dog tired. I shook myself out of it. What did I have to be irritable about? This was the beginning of two wonderful weeks in paradise. I was just impatient to get to the complex and sort the kids.

Straining my neck I looked towards the signs for the lavatories. I couldn’t see John anywhere. I supposed that if he didn’t come out in the next few minutes I’d better remove our luggage. If it wasn’t taken off the carousel soon the staff would assume that nobody was going to collect it. That would mean disturbing the children and I didn’t want to do that until we absolutely had to. Joanne’s pushchair was with our luggage so I’d have to carry her. Waking Ben up and dragging him along by the arm would be pretty grim. As I sat ... waiting, all these insignificant little thoughts passed through my mind.

I never saw my husband again.

I have no idea what happened to him.

The last words we spoke were terse and irritable.

“Just hurry up, will you, look everybody else is getting in there first. Somebody might steal our bags.”

“Oh For God’s sake Mel. Take him will you. You sit there with the kids. Look, don’t let him follow me. Jesus.” And with that he was gone. I watched him tussling in the crowd of holidaymakers and then turned my head to try and quell Ben’s Tantrum, “Daddy, daddy,” he was screaming, “Want go wiv daddy.” He was stamping his feet, it would only be seconds before he flung himself to the floor almost ripping the arm that I still had tight hold off, out of its socket, and then we’d have the full on, mega pixel, tantrum to contend with. When I looked back I couldn’t see John.

I had everything, his passport, his money, his luggage.

The six weeks I stayed in Jamaica passed in a blur of police stations and paperwork. How I came to hate Jamaica, the land of Sunshine, the place where everybody smiles. I felt that the place and everybody in it was just one big brick wall. It was with reluctance that posters were hung in and for a half-mile radius around the airport. That is all that they would allow. When I took it upon myself to hand out flyers and put up my own posters, I was arrested.

The policeman with the big teeth and the hard, unpleasant eyes smiled constantly. It was a cold, empty expression. He asked me the same questions repeatedly.

“How is your marriage these days, are you still happy? Any problems?”

Jesus, how many times?

“Did your husband know anybody in the Caribbean…a lady perhaps?”

“Don’t you get it, you bloody moron. He wouldn’t just leave us like that. He’s been kidnapped, murdered, chopped up into little pieces and hidden somewhere.”

They played with that idea for awhile, put a couple of half hearted broadcasts out on the local television station, but they soon tired of it. The British Embassy was very good. They had the children flown home and my mother flown out. They did what they could, but it didn’t bring John back.”

I went back to Jamaica six months later and again the flowing year that was when they closed the case. The same man smiled at me when he told me that John had planned his new life and had taken his opportunity to flee.

And maybe he had.

It’s been six years now. The children don’t talk about him anymore. Ben has forgotten him and Joanne never knew him.

Maybe I never knew him either.