In the end I spent so long weighing up the situation that I missed his call. My mum gestured at the phone:
Call him back. Let him prove he’s a liar. He’ll claim to be concerned with how you’re holding up under the strain of listening to my sinister allegations. He’ll offer comforting certainty, there’s been no crime and no conspiracy, there are no victims, and there will be no police investigation. All that needs to happen is for me to swallow pills until these allegations drop from my mind.
• • •
M
Y DAD HAD LEFT A VOICEMAIL
. Despite numerous missed calls he’d never left one before. Wary of hiding anything from my mum, I said:
‘He’s left a message.’
‘Listen to it.’
‘Daniel, it’s Dad, I don’t know what’s happening – I can’t stay here, doing nothing. I’m at Landvetter airport. My flight’s in thirty minutes but it’s not direct. I fly to Copenhagen first. I’m due to land at Heathrow at four this afternoon.
‘Don’t meet me. Don’t mention this to your mum. I’ll come to you. Just stay at home. Keep her there. Don’t let her go . . .
‘There’s so much I should’ve told you already. The stuff she’s been saying – if you listen to it long enough it starts to sound real, but it’s not.
‘Call me, but only if it doesn’t unsettle her. She can’t know that I’m on my way. Be careful. She can lose control. She can be violent.
‘We’ll make her better. I promise. We’ll find the best doctors. I was slow off the mark. I couldn’t talk properly with the Swedish doctors. It will be different in England. She’ll be okay. Don’t lose sight of that. I’ll see you soon.
‘I love you.’
• • •
I
LOWERED THE PHONE
. By my dad’s own assessment, if he walked into the apartment, taking my mum by surprise, there was the possibility of a violent confrontation. My mum would turn against both of us.
My mum said:
‘How long do we have?’
My dad had set in motion a ticking clock, upsetting the already fragile calm. I felt no inclination to follow his instructions. In order to preserve my privileged status as someone she trusted, I handed her the phone. She accepted it as if it were a precious gift, cupping it in her open palms. She didn’t raise it to her ear, saying to me:
‘This show of faith gives me hope. I know we haven’t been close for many years. But we can be again.’
I thought upon my mum’s assertion that we weren’t close any more. We met up less frequently. We spoke less. We wrote less. Lying to her about my personal life had forced me to pull away, to limit the number of lies I’d need to tell. Every interaction carried the risk of discovery.
I was not close to my mum any more.
It was true.
How had I allowed that to happen? Not by design, or intention, not by a rupture or a row, but by careless small steps. And now, looking over my shoulder, certain my mum was no more than a few paces behind, I saw her far away.
As she played the voicemail I expected a powerful reaction, yet my mum’s face remained blank. Finished with the message, she returned the phone, for once unaware of my feelings, distracted by the news. She took a deep breath, picked up the troll knife and slid it into her pocket, arming herself against my dad’s arrival.
A man prepared to pay for his freedom with the life of his wife – what is that, not a man but a monster. Why give me a warning? Why not sneak over? I’ll tell you why. He wants me to lose control, to rant and rave. That’s why he left you the message. Ignore what he said about the need for secrecy. That’s a lie. He intended for me to listen to it. He wants me to know that he’s coming!
• • •
E
VEN THOUGH IT WAS MADE
of wood and blunt, I hated the knife being in her pocket.
‘Mum, please give me the knife.’
‘You’re still seeing him as your father. But he’s hurt me. He’ll hurt me again. I have a right to defend myself.’
‘Mum, I won’t listen to another word until you put the knife on the table.’
She slowly removed the knife from her jeans, offering it to me by the handle and saying:
‘You’ve been wrong about him so far.’
Using a pen from her satchel, she jotted down a series of numbers in the back of her journal.
We have three hours at the most until he arrives. I’ve based my calculations on him catching a direct flight. He claimed to be catching a flight via Copenhagen, but that’s a lie so that he can arrive early and catch us off guard. Time is against us! We can’t afford to waste a single second. However, there’s another lie to correct. The Swedish doctors spoke excellent English. It isn’t true that they couldn’t understand Chris – they understood him perfectly, they understood every weasel word. The point is that they didn’t believe him. Ring the doctors right now and marvel at their fluent English, speak to them in complex sentences, count how many words they don’t understand. The total will be zero, or close to it. Ring them at any stage, when your confidence in me wavers, and they’ll confirm my account. The professionals judged me fit to release and agreed to my request that Chris be told nothing, allowing me the brief window of time to make my escape to the airport.
As for the middle of the message, when Chris’s voice falters – that wasn’t the sound of love, or compassion, tears weren’t welling in his eyes. If it was real, it was the sound of a man on the brink, worn down by his scramble to cover up his crimes. It’s his state of mind we should question, torn between self-preservation and guilt. He’s a man with his back against a wall, the most dangerous kind of animal. We’re all capable of sinking to levels of intrigue that were once seemingly beyond our reach. Chris has gone so far as to use my childhood against me, secrets told to him in confidence, whispered at night after we’d made love, intimacies of the kind you’d only ever share with a person you trusted as your soulmate.
• • •
T
HIS DESCRIPTION OF MY DAD
didn’t ring true. He hated indiscretion. He wouldn’t gossip about his worst enemy, let alone manipulate a secret told to him by my mum. I said:
‘But Dad just isn’t like that.’
My mum nodded:
‘I agree. Which is why I trusted him completely. He isn’t like that, as you put it. Except when he’s desperate. We’re all different people when we’re desperate.’
I wasn’t satisfied. The argument could be applied to any characteristic that didn’t seem plausible. Uncomfortable, I asked:
‘What were these secrets?’
My mum pulled from the satchel an official-looking manila file. There was a white sticker on the front with my mum’s name, the date, and the address of the Swedish asylum.
In order to convince an honest doctor that a person is insane, one of the first lines of investigation is the subject’s family. In my case there’s no history of mental health problems. However, many went unrecorded, so my conspirators aren’t beaten yet. They have another option. They turn their eye to my childhood, offering up an undiagnosed trauma, implying that my insanity predates any allegations against them. Such an approach requires one of the villains to be close to me, someone with intimate information, such as my husband. It becomes essential, if they’re to preserve their liberty, for Chris to betray me. Now you have some sense of the pressure he was under? It was an unnatural decision for him, but by that stage he was too far down the road to pull back.
During my period of incarceration in the asylum I was confronted by the doctors in a cell, two men who sat down opposite me at a table bolted to the floor armed with Chris’s account of my childhood, not a general account, but more specifically an incident that took place in the summer of 1963. I won’t call it fiction, it was something else, not manufacturing a story from scratch, no – subtler – an adaptation of the truth, ensuring their account cannot be categorically disproved. The doctors presented me with this cruelly crafted account as though it were fact and asked for my response. Fearing permanent imprisonment in that asylum, realising the importance of my reply, I asked for a pencil and pad of paper. You have to understand I was in a state of shock to find myself locked up. There was madness around me, genuine madness. I was terrified. I didn’t know if I’d ever leave. These doctors were judge and jury over my life. I doubted my ability to speak clearly. I was becoming confused between English and Swedish. Rather than rambling, I proposed an alternative. I’d write down exactly what happened in 1963, not speaking but writing, and they could judge from the careful document whether the childhood incident was relevant.
You’re holding the testimony I wrote for them that night. The doctors returned it at my request when I left the asylum. I believe they kept a photocopy in their files should you need to cross-check, or perhaps this is a copy—
Yes, I hadn’t noticed before, but this is a copy, they kept the original.
You and I haven’t spoken about my childhood in any depth. You’ve never met your grandfather. Your grandmother is now dead. In a sense she was never alive to you. From this you might deduce that my childhood wasn’t a happy one. Well, that isn’t true – there was happiness, a great deal of happiness, many years of happiness. At heart I’m a country child with simple tastes and a love of the outdoors. It wasn’t a life of misery.
In the summer of 1963 an event changed my life, broke my life and made me a stranger in my own family. Now that event is being misrepresented in order that my enemies might institutionalise me. To protect myself I have no choice but to lay out my past before you. My enemies have created a malicious version of events so disturbing that if you hear what they say it will change the way you look at me. And when you have a child of your own you’ll never trust me to be alone with them.
• • •
I
SIMPLY COULDN’T IMAGINE
an event so terrible it would change my entire understanding of my mum, let alone one that made me doubt her suitability to look after a child. However, I was forced to accept that I knew very little about my mum’s upbringing. I couldn’t remember any specific mention of the summer of 1963. Anxious, I opened the file. Inside there was a cover letter written by my mum before the main body of the text:
‘You want me to read this now?’
My mum nodded:
‘It’s time.’
• • •
Dear Doctors,
You might be curious as to why I’m writing using English rather than Swedish. Over the course of my life abroad my written English has improved while my written Swedish has been neglected. I left the Swedish educational system at the age of sixteen and have hardly used my mother tongue during my time in London. In contrast, I’ve worked hard to improve my English, bettering myself with the assistance of noble literature. Using English is not a statement against Sweden. It does not express ill feelings towards my homeland.
I’d like to state for the record that I feel no personal desire to discuss my childhood. It’s been introduced as a cynical diversion from the real crimes that have taken place. There’s no connection between the past and the present, but I accept that my denial will make you think that there is.
My enemies have described an event that took place in the summer of 1963. Their hope is to trap me in this asylum until I retract my allegations against them or until my allegations are of no consequence because my credibility has been undermined. I accept that elements of their story are true. I cannot claim it’s all lies. Were you to carry out an investigation into their version you’d find the broad details correct such as the location, names, and dates. However, just as I would not claim to be friends with someone who brushed past me on a crowded train merely because our shoulders touched, their story cannot claim to be the truth merely because there’s fleeting contact with real events.
What you’re about to read is the true account of what happened. Yet these are memories from over fifty years ago and I cannot remember word for word what was said at the time. Therefore you might conclude that any dialogue is being made up and consequently you’ll doubt the entire content of my statement. I agree, in advance, that the dialogue serves only to capture a rough spirit of the conversation since the exact words have been lost forever, and so have some of the people speaking them.
Yours sincerely,
Tilde
• • •
The Truth about the Farm
Our farm was no different from thousands of others in Sweden. It was remote and beautiful. The nearest town was twenty kilometres away. As a child the sound of a passing car was unusual enough to bring me outside. We didn’t own a television. We didn’t travel. The forests, lakes and fields were the only landscape I knew.
The Truth about Me
My mother nearly died during my birth. Complications left her incapable of having any more children. For this reason I have no brothers or sisters. My friends were widely scattered. I accept that sometimes I was lonely.
The Truth about My Parents
My father was strict but he never hit my mother and he never hit me. He was a good man. He worked for the local government. My father was born in the area. He built the farm with his own hands when he was just twenty-five. He’s lived there ever since. His hobby was beekeeping. He maintained wild meadows for his hives. His unusual mix of flowers created a white honey that won many prizes. Our living-room walls were covered with national beekeeping awards and framed clippings of the articles written about his honey. My mother helped with the work but her name wasn’t on the honey labels. Both my parents were important members of the community. My mother worked a great deal with the church. In short, my upbringing was comfortable and traditional. There was always food on the table. I had no cause to complain. This brings us to the summer of 1963.