Chapter Thirty-One #2
But I say nothing because she cannot, and will never, see past her work. She will always think that she’s right, even if the collateral damage includes her own child.
I walk outside and step onto the jetty, taking in a few deep lungfuls of sea air.
It’s bitingly cold now; dark is falling fast and the wind has picked up.
On an island a few hundred meters from where I’m standing, a series of garden lights have begun to glow but they’re an empty promise; the house is shut up and dark.
I wonder if it will snow overnight. I must not get stuck here.
Mum is still talking about Prawat’s charity, but I’m barely listening. Now, as then, it seems surreal that this should be my life. That a girl from Devon should find herself in a filmlike nightmare involving drugs and prisons, a nightmare that rumbles on even now, more than twelve years later.
“You should never have asked him,” is what I say when she lets off. “If there was any risk at all, you should have done it yourself.”
Mum takes a deep breath, as if trying to avoid losing her temper. “There was no real risk. It wasn’t strictly legal, but it wasn’t illegal either. Besides, Johan reassured me that some of the items in his dive kit were probably a customs gray area. Life is full of gray areas, Carrie.”
“Life isn’t full of gray areas for me,” I begin, but she’s not interested.
“I only thought of Johan because I heard Prawat was having a supply-chain problem and I realized I knew someone who could easily help.”
I sit up. “Hang on. We’d been in Bangkok for more than a week before you said you were going to call Prawat. You told me you hadn’t spoken to him in years. You said he’d broken your heart.”
My mother doesn’t say anything, and I know I’m onto something I won’t like.
“That’s right,” she says carefully. “I hadn’t been in touch with Prawat in a long time. I organized the antibiotics delivery with his brother. Not Prawat himself. They work closely together.”
I wait for her to carry on, which she does with obvious reluctance.
“As I said: I’d heard through the grapevine that they were having supply problems. I reached out to his brother and said I knew someone who was in Myanmar.
He said that even a small delivery would be helpful.
So I called Johan and asked if he’d be willing. ”
“Prawat had nothing to do with it?”
“No. I didn’t contact him until I realized I was getting nowhere with Johan’s arrest. I did it as a last resort.”
“So why did you organize the delivery, if you weren’t helping Prawat? If you weren’t even in touch?”
She says nothing, but I realize, with a slide of fury, that I know the answer. “You were trying to get his attention, weren’t you? Remind him you existed. Do something heroic so he’d notice you. Oh my God, Mum.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” my mother says, but her voice is soft now, bruised, and I know I’m right.
“So you used Johan as a pawn in your game. You used him to pick at the scab of a relationship you hadn’t quite been able to forget.” I feel a sob rising in my throat.
It takes me a while to realize that she, too, is crying. The last time that happened was more than twelve years ago, when we sat in the Malaysian restaurant and she signed over her flat to me for a year.
I listen to her cry for a while.
The ugly truth is that I am no stronger than my mother, no less attached to my work. I, too, am only here in Sweden because I picked at my own scabs.
“Why did he say yes?” I ask suddenly. “Johan was sensible. Why would he sign up for something like this?”
“Because he loved you,” Mum says. “And I am your mother and I asked him for help. Because he cared that innocent women were having their lives torn apart by treatable infections they should never have had in the first place. But I didn’t wear him down. If he’d said no, I’d have left it there.”
She takes a long breath. “And because you are so intent on blaming me, you are straying from the most important matter here, Carrie, which is that he was caught with methamphetamines, which neither I nor Prawat had any knowledge of whatsoever. You might want to focus your attention on that.”
“No. You don’t get to take the moral high ground here. You sent my partner into Thailand with something that you knew could cause harm. And then you kept this from me for all these years. Why, Mum? You just didn’t want to look bad?”
“See it that way if you like,” she says.
I end the call.
I stand there on the jetty, shivering. Nearby there are car lights moving through the trees; I decide against screaming. But once again, I have a strong urge to hurl my phone in the water, and the urge is only quelled when I run back into the house and throw a glass across the room.
It shatters against an old wooden blanket box that Johan’s telly sits on, and it does actually help, but not enough. I pick up another one, ready to throw, but as I do there’s a knock at the door, and Johan walks in.
—
He’s carrying what looks like a loaf of bread wrapped in brown paper. His body’s still as his eyes travel from me to the smashed glass.
He moves briefly as if to hold me, then stops, and for an unguarded moment I allow myself to imagine how it would feel if he did.
I still know exactly how he and his clothes would smell, how his chin would rest on the top of my head and I’d be able to feel his heart.
I long for that right now—from him or anyone—but even more strongly, my instinct is to stand alone.
We look at each other for a long time before he puts the bag of bread on the table and walks over to the under-sink cupboard for a dustpan and brush.
“I’ve just had a major confrontation with my mother,” I say.
“I’m not surprised.” He starts sweeping up the glass. “My own mother has called me three times since she bumped into you this morning.” He pauses for a moment. “I take it your mum has set you straight?”
“She says her only involvement was to ask you to deliver some antibiotics to a charity. Is that true?” My voice falters. “I have to know, Johan.”
He stands up, puts the glass into the bin. “Yes. That’s exactly how it was. I hope my mother didn’t imply that Adelina was involved in the serious stuff.”
“She didn’t tell me much,” I admit. I sit down at the table. “But she was insistent that your imprisonment was my mother’s fault.”
Johan frowns. “I had a feeling she’d have said that. I’m sorry.”
“So Mum’s only involvement was these antibiotics?”
“Correct.” He comes over, crouches in front of me. “You don’t really believe your mum’s a criminal, do you?”
I feel too vulnerable to have him this close to me, looking at me with those impossible eyes.
“No.” I shift away from him. “But I didn’t believe you were, either, and then you pleaded guilty and willingly received twenty-five years in a maximum security prison. I don’t feel like I can trust anyone, anymore apart from my husband and children.”
Johan thinks about this for a moment. Then he stands up. “I get it,” he says. “That’s why I came. Just give me a moment.”
He takes the bin and its shards of glass out into the evening.