part0077

The first couple of years I didn’t know anything about them. When we moved to the middle of nowhere – also known as Herstmonceux, deep in East Sussex – one came in the bundle of mail that was forwarded from our old house.

I thought it was junk mail at first because it was a Brighton beach picture and on the back it was blank, except for the typed label addressed to ‘Mr Okorie’. The original postmark said 14 July, a date I remembered well, but it had been posted in London. I thought nothing of it, really, until the next year, when it happened again. It came on a different day, this time not forwarded mail, but it was postmarked 14 July again – this time sent from Glasgow. The third year it happened, again a Brighton postcard with ‘Wish You Were Here’ on it, I went looking in Mummy and Daddy’s room for clues because although the postcards always disappeared, they never turned up in the bin.

In the bottom drawer, under Dad’s winter jumpers that he never wore, I found all the other postcards. Six in total by then. All of them Brighton postcards but sent from anywhere else.

I’m sitting at the kitchen table examining the postcard I ‘borrowed’ when we went to visit my parents a few weeks ago.

I’ve been too scared to get it out until now.

This postcard has five pictures of the Pier: the Pier from the front, the Pier from the beach side-on, the promenade leading onto the Pier, the Pier from a distance, and the telescope that sits halfway down the Pier. Across the middle it says ‘Wish You Were Here ’.

All the postcards say ‘Wish You Were Here’ somewhere on them. Daddy has kept them all in the same place, just adding the latest one to the pile.

I was about to go back downstairs after being to the loo, when I had the urge to look to see if they were still there. When they were, I had another urge to take one so I could examine it properly on my own.

Is it a message or a threat? I suspect it’s a threat. A sort of ‘I know what you did’ type thing. But that could just be me and my overactive, paranoid imagination.

‘Hey, good-looking, what you doing?’ Shane asks, coming into the kitchen. He’s reading his phone and not paying attention to me, but quickly I slide the postcard under my laptop and look up at him.

‘Right, don’t know if I believe that,’ he says suspiciously and finally glances up from his mobile. ‘Do you want me to pick up the kids today?’

I sneak a peek at his phone and see he has a sports page up. That’s pretty much all he does on his phone – read sports updates, check the news.

‘Yes, please,’ I say. ‘I have a lot of work on.’

‘Great.’ Shane comes to me and presses a kiss on my neck. ‘I love you, you know. Can’t wait to marry you.’

‘Hey! I still haven’t said yes, yet,’ I call after him as he leaves the room again.

‘You will!’ he calls back on his way upstairs.

When I’m sure Shane is upstairs for a while, I slide the postcard out from under my laptop.

The postmark on this, the latest postcard, came from Glasgow.

When Shane goes to collect the children, I’m going to do my own detective work on two things: (1) Clyde, (2) the postcard.

(1) Clyde: I’m going to search for Clyde. I’d rather not look for Clyde, but I need to get divorced. It’s always there, at the back of my throat, on the tip of my tongue, in the well of my chest – this need to tell Shane that I’m still married to the father of my children. Our children. Because they are his now.

Clyde was never really that interested in the children. Shane is all kinds of interested in them. It’s been an odd eighteen months, and now we’ve got our mojo back, now we’re connecting properly again, I think I do want to marry him. I do want him to know how much I adore him.

I just have to get divorced first.

Looking back, I cringe when I think about why I got married in secret. At the time I was convinced I couldn’t trust any of my family since I knew they all had these huge secrets. I was going to get myself a secret too, I was going to show them. So we got married in secret and I felt nothing. Not happy, not triumphant that I’d got one over on them. Just nothing. Well, maybe a bit silly because my plan had fallen flat. It made it worse when Clyde left and I couldn’t tell anyone about my husband leaving me. Well, I have to fix that. I have to find Clyde. Once I’ve started on that search, I’ll start on number two.

(2) The postcard: I turn the rectangle over in my hands. Once I’m done with Clyde, I’m going to see if I can find anyone in the Glasgow area – where this postcard came from – who has a similar name or description to Jude. And I’m going to have a proper look at the actual postcard, see if there’s any invisible ink, any impressions for rubbing, reactions to heat or something. Anything.

Because I suspect that the sender of the postcards knows what I know, saw what I saw, and they don’t ever want Daddy to forget about that night.