The Pursuit of Emma, Dave Moyer [best contemporary novels txt] 📗

doesn’t look right,’ I muttered audibly.

I rewound and played it again but this time found a way to step on each frame, making the footage play much slower. She is definitely communicating with him in some way, but it didn’t look like she was speaking. Did she just give a nod? I played it again. Yes, almost definitely. Her hand lifts up momentarily and joins with his inconspicuously but as hers slips away his palm is not empty. What was that? A note? Oh my God...

‘Money,’ I shouted. I was sure of it. It took me a while to work out what is was because it seemed to be rolled into a small cylinder shape, but the more I watched it I could see it was money. My mouth dropped open. Continuing the video confirmed it was money. The reverend slipped his hand gently into his pocket directly afterwards which in my mind was the first thing you would do if somebody gave you a wad of money. Put it somewhere safe. Time for another head-spin. Thousands of questions flooded my head, which by now was a familiar feeling, but one burning was at the forefront of them all. Why, on what should have been the happiest day of our lives, was she giving people money? I didn’t know a lot about organising a wedding but I was pretty sure it wasn’t common practise to give cash payments to reverends at the end of the service. Seems to take the sheen off the event somewhat for me.

At the very least this was a good lead. I finally had a place to start. Tomorrow I would go and find Reverend...I rummaged through the folder until I found the section marked ‘church.’ A few pages in I found the booking form for Rev. James P Crawley. It listed the church address underneath (as if I could forget) and times of his services.

Tomorrow I would ask him in person. Tomorrow.

*****

My sleep that night was even more interrupted than usual. I don’t remember my dreams as a general rule but I know Emma was in them. She always is these days. I could see her face and her piercing eyes, but they weren’t sad or worried. They were smiling at me. I woke up confused, a little shaken and more tired than when I went to sleep. I knew she had lied to me. Huge fat black lies had come out of her mouth probably in their hundreds, but I couldn’t blame her. I wanted to but I couldn’t. I knew there was no good explanation but I wanted her back. In my heart, I knew I would take her back in a second if I could only find her.

Slowly, I dragged myself out of bed. I seemed to ache all the time even though I had barely moved over the last few days. I couldn’t face breakfast so I stumbled to the bathroom where I could barely confront myself in the mirror. I hadn’t looked at myself for weeks, probably not since Emma had left and I had certainly fallen apart. My hair, which is normally short and styled, looked somehow longer and dishevelled. My face was gaunt and pale, and my eyes were sunken, one of them sporting a light bruising. I guessed it must have been a parting gift from my bar-fight experience two nights before. All in all, not the best I’ve ever looked. I have never been confident of my appearance but I knew I had a certain charm and winning Emma seemed to back that up as evidence. Emma was a '10' so I can’t have been that far behind. I used to run regularly and had been slowly training to run the London marathon. This put me in good physical shape and would boost my confidence when I felt awkward. I had never really appreciated what I had before, but looking at myself now, I prayed for it back.

After a shower and a deep scrub I felt a tad more human and was ready to find the Reverend. The church wasn’t far and remembering my way wasn’t difficult. I used to take Emma up there on warm Sundays and talk about the future; how many kids we wanted, where we wanted to live someday. Must stop reminiscing and focus.

The church was beautifully crafted and even seeing it from a distance brought back hundreds of memories. The grounds were manicured perfectly and whenever we would walk around them, I would suggest we try and find Rev. Crawley for old time’s sake. Emma had never seemed keen on the idea so I never pushed it. This time was different though, I needed to find him.

I could go on for hours about me searching for Crawley. I could tell you how I paced through the church and up and down the grounds. I could mention how many different staff I talked to when I was there. But I won’t. The inescapable truth is the only thing that matters. According to everyone who worked there, passersby on the grounds and all the reports and records I could find, there was not nor had ever been a Rev. James Crawley working there. Chapter Four

‘Do you feel better now?’

I drummed my fingers on the side of the sofa and smiled sarcastically. A week ago, I had been desperate to get back in this office but now...

Dr Davies peered at me blankly, allowing me to ponder her question longer. It seems standard practise for therapists to solely ask questions and provide no help whatsoever. If this is the case, Veronica Davies was very good.

‘Do you feel better?’ She repeated the question.

‘What do you mean?’ I seemed to arrive at these sessions already angry, perhaps sceptical, and these questions do nothing to ease my temper. My answers tended to be short and irate.

‘Well,’ she started slowly, as if explaining something simple to someone simple. This didn’t help with my anger. ‘You left last week with questions. You said you needed to search for the answers. I’m assuming you did some digging and probably found something. So I ask again... do you feel better?’

I laughed coldly, chuckling like a psychopath does at the beginning of a Bond film. The thought that I might have finally crossed the realm into insanity crossed my mind briefly. It wasn’t me that was insane, it was this whole situation.

‘You have no idea,’ I muttered slowly, continuing my convincing performance of a psychopath. ‘The more questions I ask, the more fucked up this whole shit becomes.’ My voice had become shrill and high and I was losing control of my language. I blame the stress.

Dr Davies looked slightly taken aback by my outburst but kept silent, observing. I realised that after the monosyllabic answers she was accustomed to from me, raw emotion must have been like gold dust.

I calmed down, breathing deeply. She couldn’t understand what was going on in my head. Nobody could. ‘You have no idea,’ I said once more.

‘So explain it to me.’

I did. I told her everything. I went through every detail, dripping with tears as I processed the thoughts once more. I was shaking, falling between anger and disbelief. I could tell Veronica was struggling to believe any of this but to her credit, she let me finish. I finally reached the end of my tale, looking at her for the first time in minutes.

‘So basically...Emma left, I knew nothing about her, she was never a lawyer and to top it all off we were never even married,’ I summarised. ‘So you tell me just the how the hell I’m supposed to process that.’

She said nothing. I sympathised with her for once. I didn’t imagine this was covered in whatever training she had done. She was scrambling internally, desperate to come up with something to justify her ludicrous prices. She didn’t say any of this of course, but I could see it in her eyes. At last she spoke.

‘There is a technique we use where we mind map all the problems in our lives. If you can visualise your problems you can fix them,’ she finished weakly.

‘Is this really necessary?

She insisted and produced a folded-down frame from behind her desk. She proceeded to turn this into an easel of sorts and rest a large sheet on plain paper on it, like a make-shift whiteboard. This was not helping with my ‘teacher-pupil’ complex. The set was completed with a large felt tip pen, the type I had thrown at me once by an irate English teacher. She raised it, ready to rehash the same information I had just explained to her.

‘So from the start...’ she instructed efficiently, determined to persevere with this stupid idea.

Twenty minutes later I was staring at the paper, now coated in her neat handwriting. Still perplexed and confused. It made for pretty painful reading and seeing it in black and white was not easing my mind. It read:

Tom Sharpe’s Problems to Solve

1) Emma has gone.

2) I have no way of finding her.

3) She had an elaborate web of lies, including somehow convincing me and all our friends that she was a lawyer.

4) There is no way of contacting her parents – if they even are her parents.

5) She paid some man to pretend to marry us.

6) Our marriage was a complete lie.

7) I haven’t been to work for two weeks.

8) I will never see Emma again and get closure on this.

That last one was mine. I insisted she put it on there. So that was it. All this time I had been worrying that I had lots of problems to contend with, but it was just the eight. I hadn’t even mentioned how I was worried about paying the bills alone or how I was going to tell my friends and family about this. At a time like this, you would think futile human emotions like embarrassment wouldn’t matter, but you try telling your Mum (especially if she is anything like my Mum) you don’t have a wife and you have been conned for the last five years.

‘Why?’ I broke the silence, with a croak at the back of my throat. I coughed and continued. ‘This is what I can’t get my head around. Why?’

‘Why, what exactly? Which part?’

‘Imagine how much hard work it would take to set up the lies she did. I met her at work several times and I saw her coming down the stairs and never once suspected. There were files everywhere, which must have taken hours of work. For over three years she got up, went to ‘work’ really early and didn’t come home until the evening. She planned an entire fake wedding and somehow managed to fake documents like a marriage license. Then one day she disappears and doesn’t take a thing. Why go to that effort?’

As I spoke, I asked myself the same questions and came up with very few answers.

‘It does seem strange,’ whispered Veronica, more conservative than usual. ‘You are sure she didn’t take any money or items belonging to you?’

I was certain. Firstly, I have no money. I work for a small company (small for London standards) processing figures and details. A glorified accountant, without the ‘glorified’ bit. Truth