I turn my phone off and on again, striding at unnecessary speed through arrivals. Outside, there is snow on the ground. As we came in to land we passed over endless pine forests and scattered archipelago islands in gray-black water. This place is already everything I imagined Sweden to be, and I haven’t even left the airport.
“They’ve really got their act together,” Robin said this morning at five thirty, as I was leaving for the long journey to Heathrow. “Everything works there. We think this island of ours is the last word in modern living, but go to Sweden and you’ll realize what a shambles this country is. And they’re all very good-looking. They speak incredible English…” He didn’t stop talking. I think he was nervous.
When I left he grabbed my hand and held it, tightly, for a long time.
“You don’t have to go,” he said. “If this feels like too much or if it triggers anything, just come back. I can drive to Heathrow to get you if you need me. OK?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Just please stay in touch with Nicola.”
Dad’s been settled in his care home for three weeks now, and because he has no real idea what is happening, he’s mostly quite peaceful. I don’t know what I would have done if he’d resisted or become distressed. It would have been too much to bear.
I have not found any peace with his move, no matter how entirely I accept its necessity. The thought of his books and pictures and piled-up newspapers with no Dad to read them or straighten them out, of his neatly rolled-up umbrellas and carefully polished shoes by the front door with no Dad to wear them, the knowledge that his day is filled with strangers speaking in bright, loud voices breaks my heart completely.
To make matters worse, he got COVID almost as soon as he moved and, although it’s passed, it has wiped him out. Having been there every day since he moved, I am really not OK about leaving him, but he has Nicola and Maya, who’s postponed her return to the States until he’s better, and a large team of trained professionals. I have to trust them, just like I hope patients will soon trust me. He’d have wanted me to go.
I check my phone again. Still no signal.
I follow signs for baggage claim and toggle to a different service provider. Robin told me to do this—I don’t know anything about travel anymore. He gave me adaptor plugs and a luggage padlock and a bank card that didn’t charge for international transactions. The world has changed while I’ve been in my bunker.
I spent time on the plane thinking about Robin. About why I haven’t told him about Johan getting out of Thailand, when our entire foundation has been built on trust. What would it matter to Robin, after all?Why would he care? Robin knows all about Johan and me. He knows I healed, eventually, that I came to hate the man for all he put me through. And he knows that I fell in love with him, Robin Carghill: honest and loyal in all the ways Johan had failed to be.
I’ve resolved to tell him when I get back. Speak to him face-to-face about finding Johan on Roof, about all the shock and resentment it’s brought up. I’ll apologize for failing to talk to him straight away but I know he’ll understand. As Dell said, he’d probably have had the same emotional experience if he were in my shoes.
I step forward with my new passport and say “Hej” to the man on border control, because that’s what it says at the entrance to Ikea, and I remind myself that all is well.
My phone finally starts working as the luggage belt lurches into life. We have a lovely FaceTime, the kids in pajamas, Robin scraping melted cheese off the floor in the background. Maeve is singing at me, upside down on the sofa, and Raffy is patiently waiting for an opportunity to talk me through all thirty of the pictures he did at school today. They have a falling out over dessert choices and I have to end the call because my bag is coming. “Sorry!” I call to Robin, who can’t even hear me. But he texts to wish me a good first night and to let me know that Dad seems to be holding up.I miss and love you so much, he writes. It is just too weird, you not being here. Go and be brilliant, then please come back. xx
And then I’m heading down to the airport train, way down underneath the airport, and I have nobody to look after, nobody to think about other than myself, for the first time in years.
Seventeen.
Thailand, September 2010
I arrived back in Bangkok at one o’clock the day after Johan was bundled into a police van by an armed task force. I had not yet been married twenty-four hours.
We’d only left a week before, but in that time the city seemed to have swollen to triple intensity: the volume and heat dialed up, the scale dizzying. Exhaustion and panic almost overwhelmed me as I loaded our bags into the back of a taxi at Suvarnabhumi. The driver watched me curiously as I sat in the back seat, trying to give myself a Yanika-style pep talk through parched lips. My eyes were grotesquely swollen. I looked amphibious.
I went straight to the British Embassy, because I had no idea what else to do. I was not a surgical registrar; I was a girl again, a girl longing for a parent to take charge of the situation.
My body calmed a little as the taxi drove up to the embassy entrance, its driveway flanked by pink flowers and tropical trees. Around us in every direction the city shot up hungrily, noisily into the sky: office blocks, shopping centers, and the enormous stilted bulk of theSkytrain. This quiet old colonial building tucked away next to a giant intersection, all white stucco and ornate shutters, was a small oasis of hope.
I will get help here, I thought, dragging our bags out of the taxi. The heat pressed in from all directions but I hauled the bags across the entrance veranda with renewed energy. Someone will tell me where Johan is and what I need to do to get him back.
—
Nobody was able to tell me where Johan was or what I needed to do to get him back. When I was finally seen, which took two hours, I was told that I needed to go to the Swedish Embassy instead.
I took another taxi to the Swedish Embassy. The journey took forty-five minutes and cost more than three hundred baht. When I was dropped off I realized I was about five blocks down the road from where I had begun. As I dragged our bags up to another entrance hall, I began to cry.
This time yesterday we had been dressing to get married.
“Can I help at all?” a man’s voice asked. I looked up sharply. He sounded just like Johan.
He was not Johan, of course, just a consular official, but he took me inside, sat me down in a small room, and went straight off to get help. I don’t remember his name anymore. He was the first of dozens of people whose names I knew for a few minutes, a few hours—days, in some cases. A wearying procession of people who wanted, but were unable, to help.
This man came back and told me that the embassy had already been informed of Johan’s arrest, which was a good start. Sometimes it took days or even weeks. A more senior consular official was due to visit him tomorrow.
“What? Where? Where is he?” I was high on sudden hope. “I have to go there! The diving permits were nothing to do with him—it’s his fixer they should be talking to! Johan didn’t even know about it until the other day!”
