Chapter Twenty-Six #2
The sight of a +66 still agitates me now.
I study the phone bill carefully. The call goes on for nearly an hour, and it’s on the night Johan arrived in Thailand to meet me.
I google the exact time difference between the UK and Thailand during the month of August and discover that the call took place around ninety minutes after Johan landed, at the precise time I was sitting in Soi Rambuttri, wondering where he was.
I know that evening by heart. There was no mention of a call between Johan and my father.
And nor should there have been, either; they’d only met twice.
Johan had told me he was late because it had taken ages for him to clear passport control and customs, and I’d had no reason to doubt this until he was arrested.
Determined for there to be a reasonable explanation, I pick up my phone and start dialing the number. It rings out. I put the number into Google but nothing comes up.
With creeping disquiet, I scan through the rest of the month.
There are calls to Thailand starting from the very same day I told Dad what was happening.
I call and google these numbers, and they all correspond to the emergency appointments in his diary.
The phone answering services at the British and Swedish embassies are as familiar as they are sickening.
Every number checks out, apart from this one on the night Johan arrived.
A few times since returning from Stockholm, I’ve allowed myself to wonder who exactly Johan was referring to when he said he assumed I’d “been told” what had happened to him.
He was astonished when he realized that I was still in the dark all these years later, and I don’t believe he was making that up.
Who is this failed messenger? Johan and I didn’t have anyone in common when we came into each other’s lives. We’d met each other’s friends, of course; he’d met my parents in person and I’d talked to his on video calls. But none of us had developed independent relationships.
And yet, here is a call to Thailand from Dad’s number—an isolated, unexplained call, at the exact time I was on my own in Bangkok wondering where my boyfriend was.
Unwillingly, my mind returns to my meeting with Johan in the hotel bar last week, to the conversation we had about Dad.
Johan asked, very specifically, if Dad could still remember the details of what had happened in Thailand.
Why?
I get up and start moving again. I shred all of Dad’s work letters, then his old contracts, then his payslips. I keep going until I’m willing to put this phone call to the back of my mind, and then I drive to his nursing home with music on at full blast.
—
“Hello, darling,” Dad says when I come in. He smiles tiredly, then says, “Sorry,” gesturing vaguely at the room. He seems surprised and embarrassed to find himself in bed in the middle of the day, but pleased to see me.
I smile at him, although I’m on the verge of tears. I can’t remember the last time Dad knew who I was.
I hug him, carefully. He’s lost quite a bit of weight since having COVID. “It’s good to see you, Dad. How are you feeling?”
“Ah…well, not so good,” he says, trying to smile. The effort of this exchange has already been so great he has to close his eyes for a few moments. I wonder if he knows he’s had COVID. I wonder if he even understands where he is, in this unexpected shaft of lucidity.
“Can I help you get more comfortable?”
“Oh no, I’m all right.” His speech is slow, deliberate, as if he’s having to shape each word before speaking. “How is it all going? How many laparotomies have you got under your belt now?”
Dearest Dad. I had to get one hundred laparotomies under my belt before completing my training, and in two of my surgical reg jobs they’d only come about rarely.
When they had presented, I’d had to fight for the cases with peers and seniors alike, all the while pretending not to fight at all.
I explained this to him probably seven, eight years ago, yet it’s the thing he remembers first today.
“I got the full hundred by ST6!”
“Of course you did.” He smiles. “I always knew you would. Your mother will never admit she was wrong, but she was, wasn’t she? You were always meant to be a surgeon.”
Dad has always been the safer and more reliable of my parents, but he’s far from perfect. More than thirty years have passed since they split up, but he still needs Mum to be the bad guy.
“Listen, Dad,” I say. I know this is neither the time nor the place, but I don’t feel willing to pass up this opportunity. “Bit of a strange question, but did you—ah…were you in touch with Johan around the time he was imprisoned?”
Dad doesn’t say anything for a while, but he’s looking at me oddly. My diaphragm pulls up.
Then: “No,” he says. “I mean, I don’t think so.”
I stare at my father, torn between my desperate need to know more and my instinct, as his daughter, to protect him from anything that might feel stressful or difficult.
“I know it’s a bit of an odd question, but did you speak to him while we were in Thailand?”
“It’s possible,” he says slowly. I look at him sharply. His tone has changed ever so slightly; he sounds a little more polite now, a little more wary. Oh, Dad. Please don’t go.
He’s got new pajamas. Blue and white stripes; they’ll be one of the many things Nicola has bought to distract herself from her grief.
“Would there be any chance of a teh tarik?” he asks after a pause. I’m pretty sure I’ve lost him.
“Of course. Do you have a mug?”
With some effort, Dad passes me a used mug. “There you go, dear. Do you know how to make it?”
I stare into my father’s mug and tears fill my eyes.
Teh tarik was what Mum made for Dad the very first time he visited her in her studio flat in west London.
Although he stopped loving her a long time ago, Dad never stopped loving teh tarik.
Frothy, sweet condensed milk tea, poured repeatedly from one cup to another; he’s been drinking this for decades.
His bedside cabinet here at the nursing home is full of cans of Nestlé Carnation.
Nicola’s trained all the staff to make it for him.
“Of course I know how to make it, Dad,” I say gently, but he’s gone—visibly uncomfortable that this woman in his room is calling him Dad.
And I’m not sure what feels worse: my selfishness in using this precious window to ask him about my ex-husband, or the prospect that this may be the last time he recognized me.
I go off to get his tea and come back to a man who has no idea who I am.
The sky brightens as we make small talk, this polite elderly gentleman with the stranger in his room, and long winter shadows creep through his window.
I tell him Maya will be back from London in a few days and he says tiredly that that sounds nice; I must be looking forward to seeing her.
By the time I leave his room, he’s close to falling asleep.
You and Yours babbles on in the background on his portable radio and he’s smiling as he begins to drift.
The scene is warm and calming, hard to parse with the reality of a slowly dying man at its center.
I don’t tell him I love him, because I don’t want to embarrass or confuse him, but I do tell him I’ve had a lovely time chatting to him, and he seems pleased to be signing off in this way.
—
I go for a walk near Dad’s care home. The drive back to my house is less than half an hour, but I don’t feel able to sit still for twenty-seven minutes.
I try the Thai number from Dad’s phone records again. This time, it’s answered.
“Hello?” a voice says, just as I say the same. Two or three times, same thing. Hello? Hello?
Eventually, I manage to ask who I’m talking to.
“Ah…this is Katerina,” she replies. She sounds like she’s from eastern Europe, although I can’t pinpoint the country. “This is a hotel room. Direct line. Who are you looking for?”
I apologize, calmly, but my heart is pounding now. “Which hotel?”
“Er…the River Paradise Lodge.”
“In Bangkok?” I ask.
“Yes!”
I get off the call as quickly as I can. For several minutes, I stand absolutely still on the path. I’m a few meters from a haphazard stack of granite slabs, rising from the mud that has been lightly churned by sheltering sheep.
Why was my father on the phone to Johan the night he landed in Bangkok? What were they talking about? And why did I never know about this conversation?
It’s a bright, cold February day and the land seethes with energy.
In all directions, tors topple their rocks like spilled lava.
Ancient, lichen-covered trees reach up on either side of my path, hungry for the sun.
I climb up the pile of granite slabs and look at the sky.
There are a few tiny knots of cloud scudding past the radio mast over at Princetown, but mostly it’s just me under a polished cold plate of perfect winter blue. I breathe deeply, arms outstretched.
And it’s now that Johan returns to my system.
It’s now that I’m flooded with that old longing, the great physical need he always roused in me.
I allow myself, finally, to feel him in my body, the sensation of his mouth touching the skin near my ear last week.
It lasted a second, no more, but it’s still imprinted, no matter how hard I scrub.
I allow and allow, and I feel the vibrations of him, us, the old wired-in desire in every cell.
Abruptly, I jump off the rock and carry on walking. I am vulnerable to all sorts of thoughts, if Johan isn’t a straightforward villain. I must keep moving.