Page 9

Closure?

You?

For you to be out of my head?

But if you leave, what’s left? You’ve been inside me longer than I’ve been without you. I read on through all the articles I know by heart.

Gemma Toombs, the 16-year-old abducted from Bangkok Airport, has been admitted to a remote West Australian hospital, apparently taken there by her captor. Her anxious parents flew from London to be by her side…

Tyler MacFarlane, a desert drifter with troubled past, watched Gemma for years before taking her. He said he was searching for the perfect life…

Tyler MacFarlane met Gemma Toombs in London when she was a child, then followed her years later on a flight she took with her parents. He kidnapped her and took her to his desert home in Australia where he constructed a fantasy…

The tightness in my chest is almost unbearable as I sift through the next articles about your trial. I look at one photograph of you leaving the courtroom, hands cuffed but eyes fierce and clear. Your hair had been cut by then, slicked back. You were wearing a shirt with a loose tie. You could have been an Australian poster boy, a surfer, a stalker.

I miss you.

I slap my face, and I like the sound it makes, the tingling it leaves. Sometimes I hate me more than you. I should be doing anything but this, I know, but I won’t stop. Not until I’ve read everything, every single sentence. Not until this bottle is drained.

Here are the letters I wrote you: another failed closure exercise, suggested by another psychiatrist. Would things have beenbetter if I’d sent them? Would you have replied?

I slap myself again.

Slap.

Slap.

Slap.

Until my eyes water and my cheeks are on fire.

In a gossip magazine, there’s a photo of you as a golden, shaggy-haired child, standing beside a paddling pool in the sun. You can’t have been more than six years old, one leg curled behind the other and mischief in your eyes, on your T-shirt a cartoon duck. The journalist talks about your loveless upbringing: how your mother left you and your sister when you were very young; how your father died from drink and left you too; how you spent time in a children’s home and stopped speaking for months. The journalist says these are the reasons you looked for connection, why you thought you’d find love with me. She writes about your plans to find a soulmate, how you’d been searching the world over. In her article, you are the victim.

Slap.

Slap.

Six charges originally, though only five stuck: abduction, assault, false imprisonment, forgery, stalking. They never proved the last, and I never gave evidence for it: sexual assault.

Slap.

It feels like progress when I drag myself away and check your sites on my phone. Your sister hasn’t posted on Twitter since last April; I wonder if she’s given up. No matter how often I refresh the Australian news sites there’s nothing, no words about your release.

I lie with my stinging cheek against the articles, against your faded face, against you. A sandstorm whirls inside me as I think about Hannah Davies, theFlash Sale. I could be waiting with the reporters. Or in your desert den. I could find it again, couldn’t I? And you’d come back to it. Back to me.

Wouldn’t you?

One move of my fingers and—click—no more drizzle or lying on newspaper beside the cupboard, and—click—it’d be you again, and—click—I’d be gone from here. Easy, really. I could kidnap myself.