11

Washing Away the Bad Juju

Dominica’s sister-in-law Emma is babbling on the phone from London, her soft Welsh accent reminding her so much of Chris’s, it makes her feel wobbly. She’s been trying an experiment since Christmas – a form of denial, she knows – to force herself to stop disappearing into her memories and to try and remain present. Except that the past is so much more appealing it’s hard not to fall again into that bittersweet pit of reminiscence that’s so tantalisingly soft on the way in, but lined with cruel barbs on the way out.

She remembers now hearing Chris’s laugh across the hotel bar in Hong Kong all those years ago. She’d been about to go to bed. Her stopover there hadn’t been planned and she’d been exhausted after a trip around Australia doing a reccy for her holiday company and hiring branch staff. Chris had caught her eye and insisted on buying her a drink.

She’d been about to refuse, but then he’d smiled and had come over and introduced himself, apologising for his rowdy mates from the rugby club, who were here on holiday supporting Wales on their tour. He’d begged her to give him a few moments respite from their relentless banter. From the very first moment, he’d made her feel that she’d been recruited into team Chris. That it was the two of them against the world.

At the time, she’d been steadfastly single and had almost given up on dating, let alone love. She was forty, resigned to being childless after a botched operation on an ovarian cyst in her early twenties had rendered her sterile. Men found her height, her success, her confidence too intimidating, but Chris had seemed to see her in a way that made her feel that she could drop her guard and relax. She remembers that once-in-a-lifetime feeling of oh, there you are. I’ve been barking up the wrong tree all this time. Forelsket, she remembers thinking, recalling the Norwegian word describing the euphoric feeling at the beginning of love.

Towards dawn the following morning – probably still drunk – she’d told him exactly that and he’d said he’d felt the same way. Forelsket, he’d told her, was exactly it. He didn’t care about having kids. He just wanted to crack on with building the best possible life he could with her at his side. Within a month they’d been engaged. When their friends saw them together, not one person expressed a doubt that they were going too fast.

Chris had been desperate for her to meet his kid sister, Emma, who he clearly adored. After their mum had died when she was little, it was Chris who’d stepped into looking out for her. He was so proud that Emma wanted to be a doctor. Dominica never pointed out that he could have been a doctor himself, if he’d still had his parents around and had had the support he’d needed to study. He’d become a paramedic instead and it had suited him – being the first person on the scene of any crisis, his Welsh voice calming everyone down. Dominica wouldn’t mind betting he’d saved more lives than most doctors ever did.