Chapter Twenty-Four
Twenty-four.
There were a great many fights between Maya and my mother in those surreal first days back in London. Maya, who had flown over to look after me for a couple of weeks, felt I needed deep rest and relaxation. Mum insisted I needed to save my job first.
“I know it’s hard,” she told me the morning after we landed. “But you need to get your work situation under control. Then you can rest.”
She and Maya were drinking bottles of Johan’s Pucko from the fridge. I couldn’t eat a thing.
“Carrie’s job situation is out of her hands,” Maya said irritably. “She can’t just blast in there and ‘sort it out,’ Mum. This is medicine. Those decisions are made way above her pay grade.”
“You’re right,” I told her. “But showing willing and being visible go a long way in my world. A very long way.”
“Exactly,” Mum said triumphantly, which sent Maya into a silent rage. Thankfully, Dad called at that moment. I walked out on my mother and sister and went to meet him in Aldgate for a cup of Earl Grey.
“Don’t give up on your instinct,” he said. It was unimaginably comforting to see him, dressed in the same gray suit and yellow tie combination he’d been wearing for as long as I could remember.
“None of us could have seen it coming with Johan, Carrie. None of us—your instinct is still good. And if your instinct is to go back to work, then you go back to work. Ignore your sister and ignore your mother. Ignore me, even. But don’t ever give up on your gut.”
—
The hospital trust was reassured by my return to the UK.
I had to attend three further meetings in the first week, during which various officials asked essentially the same questions, but Mum sat with me through each one.
Yanika encouraged me to put together a presentation in which I laid out my exam scores, excellent portfolio, and some thirty references from consultants, junior doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff to show the trust “what an asset” I was.
I didn’t feel like an asset. For the first time since I’d started medical school, I felt like a highly visible liability. But something we’d done must have worked, because after a week, they told me they were satisfied that it was appropriate for me to continue at the hospital.
Autumn brightened the skies, and London felt fortifying and vital.
I clung on to my new routine as if my life depended upon it.
At 6:40 a.m. I’d be on the bike Johan had bought me, on my carefully planned route to work: Blackfriars, Embankment, the three royal parks, Edgware Road, done.
Then the oblivion of the medical day: awkward medical students, cocky medical students, post-take ward consultations, phlebotomist chasing, blood chasing, scan chasing.
Patients with loose cannulae and empty IV bags, patients wanting someone to bring them the slice of toast they requested three hours ago, patients wanting to know if they would live or die.
There was never enough time, and with my increased teaching responsibilities came new stress, but the hours I spent in that hospital were my survival.
Dad took me out for dinner every Wednesday night at the same Italian restaurant in Aldwych he’d been going to since he was a junior civil servant.
He messaged me every morning with quotes from some book Nicola had bought him about gratitude.
Dell was in touch daily, too; and Mum, although she’d gone back to her flat after a few days of trying and failing to coexist with Maya in mine.
My sister flew back to Colorado after two weeks. She compiled a list of therapists and made me promise to call one. I missed her the moment she left but was grateful to be on my own. It was the state I knew best.
Within five hours of my first emergency on-call shift, I’d taken out an appendix. On the cycle ride home that night, dodging Ubers and couriers and buses in the dark, I smiled.
But the grief bore down, day and night. It didn’t fade, and anger began to flourish in its foothills.
Dell started taking me running with her in the evenings.
“Keep you away from that bloody laptop,” she’d say, as we ran hard and fast into the night, breath fanning out above us as the temperatures dropped and dropped.
Not long before Christmas, I applied and was accepted for the job in Johannesburg. It would start the following autumn, when I finished my first registrar year at St. Mary’s. I should have applied last spring, like I’d wanted to. I should not have fallen in love and stayed in the UK.
—
Soon after my Johannesburg job was confirmed, Johan’s family flew over to London and emptied our flat. I learned of this only when I arrived home at eight in the evening to find the front door wide open.
His parents had already gone but Lucas was still there, vacuuming away the final traces of his big brother. My things were piled into a cheap suitcase that looked like it had been bought from Whitechapel Market that morning.
Lucas was apologetic, but ultimately it had been his parents’ decision to terminate the lease, and he’d felt obliged to come and help.
“They are not being very well,” he said, not quite able to meet my eye. “My mother is very ill because of this events. I am sorry, Carrie.”
“They can’t do that! This is my home!”
He looked desperate. “I am sorry. But…well, oh dear.”
“Oh dear what, Lucas?”
“Ah…the thing is, Carrie, Johan wants you to leave this flat also. He has asked us to make this happen.”
“He wants…Why? What do you mean?”
“We have no choice. I am sorry.”
That was the last time I ever saw Lucas.
Dad wasn’t in London that week; he’d finished work for Christmas and was in Devon with Nicola.
Dell was on call. None of my other friends answered their phones.
A hidden hazard of having only medical friends in your phone contacts, I thought, as I dragged the suitcase toward Whitechapel, wondering what to do.
No help at hand when you find yourself thrown out of your home by the man you married a couple of months earlier.
—
My mother’s flat was five minutes’ walk from St. Mary’s Hospital, between Lancaster Gate and Paddington, but she’d only invited me inside a handful of times.
It was the place she’d gone when she left Devon and moved back to London, and I’d always suspected that having Maya or me there would have been too painful a reminder of her failings.
Tonight, even though she’d agreed to put me up, she still insisted we meet at a Malay restaurant nearby.
My cheap suitcase sat beside us at a small teak table, on which sat a great pile of my mother’s concern for me: rich, fatty bak kut te and a pork-rib stew with salty yau char kwai for dipping.
There was a bowl of nasi lemak, some sardine sambal, and cucumber and peanut salad.
I had to make Mum stop when she tried to order roasted okra and sambal potatoes, “just in case.”
Mum watched me trying to eat for a few moments before saying, “Carrie, I want you to have my flat.”
I put my chopsticks down, grateful for a chance to stop pretending I was hungry.
“I’ve been offered CEO of the Long Foundation.
They’re a women’s charity in Brighton. I’m going to move down there, and I want you to have my flat for the next year while you do this job in Paddington.
Your new hospital’s on the doorstep, and you need stability right now. You need somewhere to call home.”
“But…surely you can commute?”
She shook her head. “I want to give this project everything I have, and I can’t if I’ve got to spend three hours a day on public transport.”
She watched me for a while, then put down her own chopsticks. It was a Tuesday night, nearly 10 p.m., but the restaurant was full. Above us, a speaker was playing music that might or might not have been Malaysian. To me it just sounded like Thailand.
“I’ve failed you,” my mother said, to my astonishment. “I flew out to Thailand on a great white horse, convinced I’d be able to rescue Johan. But I failed abysmally. I failed him, and I failed you.”
“Mum, he was guilty! He openly admits to having done it! What could you possibly have done?”
“All I could think of was getting justice for him—for you. It didn’t occur to me that he might actually have done it. I didn’t pause. I didn’t think. I never do.”
“But you tried. I was on my own and desperate, Mum—you flew out to be with me. I’d have gone under if you hadn’t.”
Mum looked relieved. “I suppose it’s more than your father managed.”
“Mum.”
“Sorry. But I was disappointed by his absence. I’d have thought he’d set aside his loathing of me for at least a couple of weeks, given what you were going through.”
“He was in touch every single day. And he did offer to come to Thailand. He was only in Bangladesh; it wouldn’t have taken him long. But we both agreed you were the best person for the job.”
“Except I wasn’t,” Mum said, angry again. “I didn’t achieve a thing. I have never been a good mother, and yet here I am, having failed you again. I love you, Carrie. But I was never made for this job.”
I had never heard my mother speak in this way.
“Please try to forgive me. And even if you can’t, please take my flat. I want you to have somewhere safe and easy near your work. You need it.”
Mum’s eyes had filled with tears. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen this happen. She picked up a napkin and almost hit herself in the face with it. My mother and father could not have been more different as human beings, but both of them did nearly anything rather than cry.
I accepted her offer. What else could I do? And she was right: I did need somewhere to live that wasn’t full of my life with Johan.
She slept on the sofa that night so that I could have the bed.
There was a photo of me and Maya on her bedside table, two smiling girls on top of Hound Tor on a blazing summer day.
In her tiny bathroom, a picture frame holding little offcuts of our hair.
Carrie, December 1985, her handwriting said, next to one. Maya, April ’88.
I’d been too frozen to cry since coming back at the end of September. The hair was what finally brought the tears.
The next morning, as I walked the short distance to the hospital, Mum sent me her first ever text message. She believed mobile phones should never have been developed beyond their basic ability to make and receive calls. It was very touching to receive a communication like this.
I’m sorry, she wrote. I love you.
—
The call from Prawat came through two days before Christmas. I was in the on-call bedroom, checking the bedsheets for signs of prior use, when my phone rang.
I hadn’t actually talked to Prawat in Bangkok; Mum had done it all. So I didn’t know his usual tone, but I knew straight away that the news was bad.
“Johan’s trial took place over the past two days,” he said, after some hopeless pleasantries.
I peeled back the duvet and inspected the bedsheet.
It looked clean and stretched tight. Two nights ago, I had been in someone else’s dirty sheets for the three hours’ rest I managed to get between emergencies.
“We were not expecting such a quick trial. It is very unusual in Thailand. His lawyer was not prepared, and I think this was not an accident. I think they wanted his lawyer unready.”
I sat down. “And?”
“The lawyer did his best, but it was not a good trial. I am very sorry, Carrie, he has been found guilty and they have given him a twenty-five-year sentence in Bang Kwang Prison.”
He went silent, but I knew he was still there because I could hear mopeds and horns, a faint ribbon of music.
I had read about Bang Kwang. It sounded like the darkest place on earth. It housed Thailand’s highest-security male prisoners, along with the national death row and execution chamber. I distinctly remember one post on a forum that said the only way out of Bang Kwang was in a box.
I curled slowly down onto the bed, suddenly faint.
“Not Bang Kwang.”
“It is Bang Kwang,” Prawat said softly into my ear. Thousands of miles away. I pulled the synthetic duvet over myself. I hadn’t even removed my shoes. “I am so sorry.”
I didn’t speak.
“Carrie. I have to tell you that even though Johan’s lawyer was not ready, he would get the guilty verdict anyhow.
I am sorry to say that I have continued my inquiries, carefully and quietly, and I am satisfied that he did commit the crime.
There is no doubt. I also have learned that he was delivering for one of the biggest crime rings in Asia.
He was cooperating with them for a long time. ”
I lay down on my back, adjusting my phone. “Are you sure?” I asked. “You really believe this?”
“I know it,” he said gently. “I think you have made a very lucky escape. But I know this is very hard. I am very, very sorry.”
“Me too,” I said.
Prawat excused himself to speak briefly in Thai to someone nearby. The faint music I’d heard earlier got louder. The radio, or whatever it was, was playing “You’ve Got the Love.”
“I also have to tell you…ah…Johan had a girlfriend in the organization. I have heard this from multiple sources.”
I sat up again. “No. That’s—that’s not possible.” But even as I spoke the words, I recognized the naivety, the simple faith that had got me into this mess in the first place.
“It is,” Prawat said simply. “I don’t know if she was in Myanmar or here in Thailand, but I have heard from several people that they were more than just professional colleagues.”
After the call had ended I lay in bed, perfectly still. I breathed in the stale, recycled air under the duvet and listened to my urgent heartbeat. I felt my phone slip out of my hand and onto the floor.
I stayed there, unmoving, for thirty-four minutes, thinking about my husband the criminal, the liar, the adulterer. The man who had filled my gullible, lonely little mind with stories, right up until the moment he was taken away.
I stayed there, breathing this new version of my life in and out, until the screech of my bleeper propelled me out of bed.
Stethoscope on. Hair tidy. Phone on airplane mode. Pen in pocket, scrubs neat.
Fuck you, I said silently, even though my heart was shattered. Fuck you, Johan Kullberg.
Left foot, right foot, left, right. Back to my job. He could no longer take this from me. He could no longer take anything. I was a lone wolf now, just like I was always meant to be, and nobody would ever make me vulnerable again.