Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-six.
Even though the only thing I want to do is run up to my children’s bedroom, I go straight to the Pig Shed, which is empty this week, and scrub myself down in the shower like a criminal.
My body reacted to Johan’s in ways that frightened me—I want to remove that energy.
I am happy here with my husband and children.
I don’t want any of this infected by my past.
Soon after, I’m in the children’s room, breathing in their sweet foggy breath, kissing their divine-smelling little heads.
Raffy bats off my hand in his sleep, whereas Maeve, unusually, is sleeping neatly and peacefully, her hair in two plaits like Pippi Longstocking.
Before I left for Sweden we read three Pippi Longstocking books.
The kids made me promise I’d take them to Stockholm one day, too, to see the Pippi house at the children’s museum.
Finally, I come to my own bedroom, picking my way quietly around the bed to my side, by the window that we never close, and the reassuring shape of Robin’s body in the bed. This is the end of it all. This is home.
“Hello,” a sleepy voice says in the dark.
When I called earlier to say I’d binned off the rest of the conference and was coming home tonight, he was delighted.
Had my car not been waiting for me in the car park at Heathrow, I think he’d have bundled the sleeping children into his and driven all the way up to collect me.
Explosions and fireworks are all very well at the start of a relationship, but there must be something solid and beautiful beyond that for it to last. My relationship with Robin has been a case in point; my relationship with Johan was not.
We had the fireworks, we had the explosions, but then—after the biggest firework of all—we had nothing.
“Hi,” I whisper, dropping a kiss into the dark. It lands in Robin’s hair. He reaches out a hand and manages to land it on my breast, which makes him chuckle sleepily.
I wish I’d just told him. The moment I found Johan on Roof, I wish I’d just bloody well gone to him, to my calm, practical husband, who’s always championed honesty, and told him that something truly crazy had happened. Now it’s far too late.
“You OK?” Robin’s muffled voice asks as I sit quietly on the bed, taking my earrings out. He gave them to me for our fifth anniversary. They look expensive, although I’ve never asked. Johan would never have bought expensive jewelry, but I feel special when I wear them.
A warm hand lands on the small of my back and my body unravels a little more. I lean back into the hand and then curl up next to him, still clothed, unclenching for the first time in many hours.
“Yes,” I say, and he kisses the back of my neck. A big bear arm hooks around me.
I don’t need to find out why Johan pleaded guilty more than a decade ago. He wasn’t willing to be transparent about the situation then, and he isn’t now.
This is where I belong.
—
Two days later, I drive over to help Nicola sort through Dad’s stuff before visiting him at his nursing home. Maya has gone to London for a couple of nights to see some old friends, and the kids are at school.
I have found the past few days hard. Pain and anger at Johan’s betrayal have been the foundation stones of my recovery all these years, and the loss of that firm footing is something I feel keenly.
I’ve developed a routine in which I get up and move my body the moment he creeps, spiderlike, into my mind.
The idea was that I got up and danced or did some exercise, but the reality is I mostly clean and tidy.
But whatever the movement is, I keep doing it until the thoughts are gone.
Maya would tell me I’m squashing down my feelings. She would probably be right.
It’s helped that the kids have been clamped to me like barnacles since I returned. “You were away for weeks,” Raffy whispered the next morning, after Maeve dive-bombed our bed, shouting Mummy! at the top of her voice. “Please don’t do that again,” he said.
“It was two nights!” I protested while he tore open the Brothers Lionheart jigsaw I’d brought from Sweden, but he wasn’t having any of it.
“Weeks,” he insisted, upending the jigsaw pieces on my duvet.
There’s nothing like the physical reality of children who couldn’t care less about what’s happening in your head to return you squarely to the present moment.
“We’ve painted you one thousand three millionty-five pictures,” Maeve said, dragging me down the stairs, circling her new Swedish dance ribbon vigorously.
She wasn’t exaggerating. Robin had dried each one and stacked them like poppadoms on the kitchen table.
One said MUMMY YOU ARE MY FAYVRIT, but another said I HAYT YOU MUMMY.
I haven’t yet broached the subject of me returning to Sweden for a two-week attachment, although I haven’t broached that subject with myself, either.
It’s an outstanding opportunity—Yanika will take me into every operation and I’ll get to observe robotic techniques I’d have no hope of witnessing at a regional hospital in the UK.
But it won’t make any formal contribution to my reorientation year and, far more importantly, I am no longer sure I can handle being in that city.
—
Nicola has red eyes when she opens the door but tells me she is fine.
She’s been dealing with Dad’s departure with a vigorous program of decluttering and sorting, which is something I can relate to.
I know from my own struggles with toxic productivity that the last thing she needs is for someone to tell her to stop and rest, because she won’t.
She’ll carry on doing it, only in secret.
The best thing I can do for her is help.
After making me a cup of tea, she sends me up to Dad’s study. There’s a lot of confidential paperwork up there from his years in the civil service, and he made us promise, when he was diagnosed, that we’d shred it all once he lost capacity to gatekeep it himself.
The study smells of furniture polish and sun-bleached, aging paper. I stand in the doorway for a few moments, breathing deeply as tears fill my eyes. This room is my father and his good life. This yawning space is him.
I look at the shelves lining each wall. I remember Dad putting them up with a local carpenter called Biff. Dad and Biff had been in here for days: radio on, beers at lunchtime, great gusts of laughter. It’s silent now. Dad isn’t even in the building.
Dust motes sway lazily in a bar of light as I decide where to start. It’s a dizzying task. Dad kept every single appointment diary for the past forty years. Every phone bill. When banks stopped sending statements, he’d print them out each month and file them in his binder.
I begin with the appointment diaries. These were on the list of items he told us to shred without sorting, but I dip in and out of a few as I stack them up next to the shredder, ready to remove their stiff covers.
I open up 2010, which was the year I met, fell in love with and then lost Johan.
I flip to the summer, when Johan flew to Myanmar.
Dad had meetings with parliamentary secretaries, legal advisers, endless colleagues within the Department for International Development at the time, but there’s one mention of me: C flying to Thailand on August 30.
Dad flew out to Bangladesh two days after I flew to Thailand to meet Johan.
He was involved with a big water sanitation program out there.
I remember clearly the moment when I called to tell him that my brand-new husband was now in police custody for drug trafficking.
Mum was already on a plane by that point, and Dad offered to come, too, during the call. But what I really needed Dad to do was what he’d always done best: calm me down.
We talked for a long time on that patchy phone line. I believe that conversation was the only reason I got any sleep that night.
“I can’t believe the lovely young man I met could have done this,” he said before we ended the call. “I cannot and I will not, Carrie. I don’t think you’re mad.”
After that entry in Dad’s diary there are several emergency phone appointments with the British and Swedish embassies in Thailand, the British Foreign Office, a handful of other agencies Dad must have approached for help.
The one thing uniting my parents during that time was that they both believed in Johan.
I get up and start moving, as per the terms of my agreement with myself.
I dust Dad’s desk and all the objects on it.
I manage to smile at the cheesy framed photo of me, him, Nicola, and Maya at Thorpe Park back in the nineties.
We’d bullied him into that; theme parks were his worst nightmare.
After a few seconds, I force myself to turn away from the picture and get back to my jobs.
I pile up the rest of the diaries and turn next to Dad’s phone bills. I start at the beginning, which is 1999, but within seconds I’m reaching for 2010. There’s a dangerous part of me that wants to experience that time again, to see the nuts and bolts of it on paper.
Dad was with the network provider Orange back then. The bills are printed on thick paper, in color: it’s oddly anachronistic to hold such a well-made record in my hands. I flip through to August.
There’s a long call to me the night before I flew out to Thailand to meet Johan, which I remember.
Dad was in the Strangers’ Bar in the House of Commons, but it was so noisy that he left, talking to me all the way along Millbank to Vauxhall Bridge.
I remember him trying to forbid me from taking any of my surgical study books away with me, and how we’d both laughed because we knew that was nonviable.
I scan on through the numbers. Most are landlines in London, although there are plenty of mobiles too.
Until, right there in the middle of them all, I see a Thai number.