—
There’s a moment when we’re checking in our bags in Tahiti that I feel the checkin clerk’s eyes catch mine. Just a fraction of a second, but I think she 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. Or maybe 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.
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 our fresh 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 wardrobe and 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 a 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.
The hardest part will be the diamonds. Selling the diamonds. Converting the diamonds from beautiful sparkling possibilities into cold hard cash. That’s going to take time and a certain amount of finesse. And of course a whole lot of Internet searches.
I have no idea how to sell diamonds or who to sell them to but we’ll get to that. First we’ll tackle the money. We’ll get that dealt with and then we’ll go from there. But even dealing with the money isn’t a simple task.
You can’t just wander up to a bank and hand the cashier one million U.S. dollars in cash unfortunately. It tends to raise concerns. Where you got it tends to be an issue. Tax is an issue. Hell, even currency conversion rate is an issue.
Luckily for us, Mark knows banks.
* * *
—
Sixty seconds up. I peer at the stick. The cross is blue.
Huh.
I try another one. Place it on the edge of the bathtub and wait.
It’s probably faulty. Could be faulty. Best not to get too involved in that result just yet. Think about the plan. Yes. The plan.
According to Mark, here’s what we need to do: we need to open a bank account where people won’t ask questions, where that’s the whole selling point of the bank. Not asking questions. Banks like that exist and Mark is going to find us one.
I’ll give you one guess as to the type of person you don’t ask questions to. Correct. Rich people. Very rich people. You’re probably noticing a theme here. I’m beginning to realize that being rich doesn’t really mean having money to buy nice things; it means having money to avoid the rules. The rules are there for the other people, the people without the money, the ones who drive you about in your cars, fly your planes, cook your food. Rules can be bypassed with money or even just the mystique surrounding money. Flights can vanish, people can find people, people can live or die without the hassle of police or doctors or paperwork.