Page 13 of The One Day You Were My Husband
I sigh. Neither of us has an easy relationship with our mother—I don’t think anyone does—but Maya and Dad are particularly savage in the way they talk about her. Or at least, Dad was, until Mum became just a name in a sea of disparate memories.
“Mum only stopped helping Johan when we found out he’d lied to us all along. She was there for me, Maya. In my darkest hour—she came through. Don’t be so quick to forget that.”
Maya changes the subject. “What did she say about Stockholm? Does she think it’s a bad idea?”
“She thinks it’s a very good idea, actually.Meeting Yanika is far more important than a one percent chance of bumping into Johanwere her words.”
“Typical.” I can hear barking in the background. “Biscuit!” Maya yells. “It’s a squirrel! Stop it!”
I add milk to my Rice Krispies, even though I don’t want so much as a spoonful.
All these years, and Johan can still seep in. He can still control my mood, my actions, even my ability to feed myself.
I tip the cereal into the food waste bin. Nobody will know. “I won’t go,” I say. “I’ll cancel. I…Maya, thank God I talked to you. This whole thing is madness.”
“It is. Oh, Carrie. You poor thing,” she says, all sympathy now she’s successfully intervened. “This is so huge. I can barely take it in. Are you OK?”
“Not really.”
“Are you eating?”
“Not really.”
“Oh, Carrie.”
“It’s been a little too much, on top of all the stress with Dad.” I pause. “Although, actually, it’s dialed down the worry about Dad slightly, which I feel awful about.”
“Stop it. You’re allowed to think about other things. Especially things as big as this.”
“I suppose so. Anyway, I’ll sort it out in my head. Eventually. I’ll cancel my flights right now. If my brain doesn’t implode first.”
“You are going to be fine,” my sister says firmly. “And your frighteningly large brain is not going to implode. Especially not over Johan bloody Kullberg.”
I smile briefly, pleased to hear her still using British swear words, and move the conversation on to Dad. Nicola and I have found him a residential home and they want to move him in soon, between Christmas and New Year. Dad has been living ten minutes’ drive from me for years. I know it has to happen, but the looming reality of removing my father from his beloved home and taking him to a building full of strangers is simply agonizing.
Our proud, upstanding father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s twoyears ago, after fifty years in the civil service and local government. This disease has felled him like an old tree. His roots are torn out of the soil and his loamy underbelly is exposed, and it is this, even more than the prospect of his early death, that pains me most. He would be distraught if he could see himself. He cannot explain his thoughts to us and he shouts out in rage, or perhaps despair, when he can’t get out of the house to go to the corner shop for a newspaper, even though his nearest shop is more than an hour’s walk away and it’s the middle of the night. He often reacts to normal events like a child and when he’s in a bad way he treats everyone, even his beloved Nicola, with suspicion.
I miss my father. I miss him desperately, yet I see him nearly every day.
From the age of twenty-one Dad worked for the Department for International Development, mostly on water and sanitation programs. He met Mum when her charity put on an event about access to water.
Dad was blown away by Mum. Then and now, she had that effect on people. I still don’t quite know how such a quiet, compliant, typically British sort of a man managed to capture the heart of a rare bird like my mother—a woman for whom the wordnowas little more than an invitation—but I believe she really did fall in love with him, for a while. Possibly it was helped by Dad driving her down to Dartmoor for a weekend to show her the thatched cottage in which he’d grown up. It was in the most chocolate-box village of all chocolate-box villages, and that weekend on the moor was particularly wild and elemental. Mum was so entranced she decided, in her usual impetuous way, that she wanted to have children with him and buy a house there, under the dramatic and ever-changing sky. She was done with offices!
She was done with offices until I was eleven weeks old, when her board of trustees asked her to come back to work. At that point, Ibelieve some fairly heavy discussions took place that resulted in Dad resigning from his cherished job so that Mum could continue to commute to London. The scale of this sacrifice was great for Dad, who’d been a dedicated servant of the state from the moment he’d left university. But he made it for Mum, staying at home until Maya, who came two years after me, was old enough to go to nursery. Even then he had to spend the next eight years working in local government to enable Mum to buzz up and down between London and Devon as she pleased.
She had that kind of power over Dad back then.
Mum had begun losing enthusiasm for straight charity work by the time Maya started school and was becoming more and more committed to activism. I remember her disappearing, often without warning, to go and fight the good fight. I remember tremendous arguments between her and Dad, who just couldn’t get his head around the kind of things she was doing.This is not how society works, he would say, which did little more than make Mum laugh.
When I was seven and Maya was five, Mum took us to London on a coach full of angry people and chained the three of us to the railings outside a foreign embassy. She told us that there were some bad people doing bad things and that we were going to sit there to tell the world it was not OK. I remember getting thirsty and asking Mum for a drink and her admitting she hadn’t brought enough water, and a panic welling up in me that she seemed unable to understand. “Why can’t we just go to a shop?” I kept asking.
The fight after that was monumental. Dad banned Mum from taking us on a protest ever again. In Mum’s defense, she really was remorseful. She slept in our room that night and made us a beautiful breakfast the next day, with big glasses of Milo—the proper, imported stuff her Malaysian mother had given her as a child, rather than the “rubbish” they sold in Britain—and told us she was sorry. She criedmore in those few days than we’d ever seen her cry. But she also recognized the power of the photo of us, two young girls chained to railings, that appeared in so many newspapers. Two years later, when I was nearly nine, she took us to another march in London, telling Dad we were going to a museum.
I remember that vast movement of people, their drums and whistles, our calls, and then cries, for our mother when we realized we were lost. I remember the kind faces of the other placard holders, one sweet man putting Maya on his shoulders so that Mum could find her—but Mum didn’t come.
A police officer eventually noticed the two crying girls, alone in the crowd, and pulled us out. I have lost many memories of that afternoon, but I know we were moments away from being sent into temporary care. Dad made it to London from Devon just as we were about to be taken away. He tried to be calm for us, but I remember the sound of him sobbing into my hair as if it were yesterday.
Dad ended their relationship that night and immediately began a battle for sole custody. The way Maya remembers it, Mum put up no fight; she just left. But Maya is incredibly unforgiving of our mother, and she’s unable to remember that Dad gave Mum no choice. He made it his mission, from that point onward, to exclude her from our lives by every means possible. I remember Mum turning up at the front door more than once, asking to see us, and Dad telling her to go away. She was done with conventional family life, I understand that—but I don’t believe she was done with her children.
