Chapter Thirty-Three #2
My phone buzzes. It’s Roof, telling me I have a message from Johan. I’m coming over, he wrote two hours ago. It must have been delayed. I’ve just heard that you bumped into my mother, Carrie, I’m sorry. Please wait for me.
He crosses his arms and stretches out his legs.
I remember him loping around his flat, normally naked, those long legs always sticking out over the end of his sofa.
Johan had never worn clothes when he could avoid it.
If he got cold he’d just put a big coat directly onto his naked body and carry on padding around his flat, cooking and talking and working.
“So was this fixer the one who was worried about the dive permits? The guy who told you to lie low for a few days?”
Johan nods.
“Was that just a smoke screen?”
He frowns. “The permit thing was real. But it wasn’t a big deal at all. The real problem was that someone was onto the yaba supply chain. The fixer called me and told me there could be some trouble. That’s why I was freaking out.”
“Was that when we went to that go-go bar district? And you were off-kilter?”
He nods. “I still didn’t know exactly what I’d been carrying, but by then I knew it wasn’t good. Then he emailed saying everything was fine. And so I relaxed—I told myself I’d overreacted. We went down to Koh Samui and I put it behind me.
“What I often forget, though, is that while I was panicking about my twenty-five little pills, someone else was on their way with hundreds. They caught him too. Nigerian guy. Desperately needed the money. He was appealing a death sentence when I left Bang Kwang.”
I wrap my arms around myself. I’ve longed for this information for more than a decade, but now that it’s here I don’t want it at all.
“Did he survive?”
Johan pushes air through pursed lips. “He’s still on death row. I write to him every other month. Occasionally I hear from him, mostly I don’t. He doesn’t know what’ll happen.”
We both sit in silence. Two free people, at liberty to sit in a cabin by the sea, to take airplanes, buy bread, plan a future.
“I was just a tiny cog in a machine,” Johan says. “But these tiny cogs are the ones who go to prison. The big guys just carry on with their money and their supply of whatever it is that fuels their lives. They get what they want because there’s always someone who’s willing to risk everything.”
I look at the lines on his face, the scar on his hand. I wonder if he wakes at night, crying out. If Freja has to turn on the lights, or hold him until he feels safe.
“How did you get through it?” I hear myself ask. “How did you rebuild yourself?”
“I have mostly good days,” he says, carefully.
“Many more than I do bad days. But it’ll never leave me completely.
The depths you go to in those places…and I’m one of the lucky ones.
I was able to walk back into a family who had the means to support me while I put myself back together.
It’s only because of them that I was able to retrain.
Plenty of people get out of those hellholes and end up dead within a year. Overdoses, suicide, addiction.”
I want so badly to go over and put my arms around him. “I’m glad you’re OK,” I say instead.
He shrugs again. “Like I said, I was able to get a lot of help. I still see a therapist every week. I’ve been lucky.”
“So why did you retrain?”
“It turns out diving doesn’t go well with active PTSD. I started having panic attacks forty feet down. It was the sense of being trapped—I couldn’t take it. We’re trained to deal with panic attacks but it all went out of the window. I couldn’t sort myself out at all.”
I wait for him to go on.
“Architecture was actually Lucas’s idea. He wrote me this beautiful story about two boys making a whole town out of cardboard boxes. That was us, when we were seven and five. I was the boss. I spent hours designing and making those houses. He was right to suggest it. It’s been good for me.”
I smile, touched, and we lapse into silence, staring out at the darkened sea, grateful for a natural break in conversation.
After a while Johan gets up and takes two beers out of the fridge.
He turns off the main light and puts on lamps, like he always did, because—as he always said—there’s no magic in a room lit from above.
“I leave these for all my guests,” he says, opening both beers and putting one in front of me.
We drink. I’m not sure what to do with all this information. I’m not sure what it means for the decision I made back then to remove Johan Kullberg from my heart and never allow him back in.
“I can’t believe you’re here, in my summer house,” Johan says after a while. “I can’t believe we’re talking about this. I never really stopped imagining what it would be like if I gave in and contacted you.”
I close my eyes briefly. Those hours I spent awake at night, looking at the green stain of the squid boats from space, wondering if he was safe and well. If he ever thought about me.
My phone starts ringing. It’s Nicola.
I silence it. She’ll be calling to tell me the good news about Dad; she won’t know Maya’s already been in touch. Apparently Dad ate most of his lunch today and they talked for a couple of minutes.
Johan looks at my phone, flashing silently on the table. “How is Nicola?” he asks.
The call ends, and I put my phone in my pocket—just as it starts ringing again.
Nicola.
He watches me, with those steely blue eyes, as I answer the phone. As I hear the sound of sobbing, as I stand up, asking her sharply to tell me what’s happened.
Johan stands there at the counter, watching me as I learn that Dad, my beloved dad, went suddenly downhill this afternoon and died half an hour ago.
And because there is no mistaking what this call is about, he comes and stands with me after the call has ended, and he holds me while I sob.
I lean in and he smells just like he always smelled, and he feels just like he always felt, and even though my life is falling away under my feet I want to stay here, like this, until someone comes with a chisel to prize us apart.