Page 74 of The One Day You Were My Husband
The study smells of furniture polish and sun-bleached, aging paper. I stand in the doorway for a few moments, breathing deeply as tears fill my eyes. This room is my father and his good life. This yawning space is him.
I look at the shelves lining each wall. I remember Dad putting them up with a local carpenter called Biff. Dad and Biff had been in here for days: radio on, beers at lunchtime, great gusts of laughter. It’s silent now. Dad isn’t even in the building.
Dust motes sway lazily in a bar of light as I decide where to start. It’s a dizzying task. Dad kept every single appointment diary for the past forty years. Every phone bill. When banks stopped sending statements, he’d print them out each month and file them in his binder.
I begin with the appointment diaries. These were on the list of items he told us to shred without sorting, but I dip in and out of a few as I stack them up next to the shredder, ready to remove their stiff covers.
I open up 2010, which was the year I met, fell in love with and then lost Johan. I flip to the summer, when Johan flew to Myanmar. Dad had meetings with parliamentary secretaries, legal advisers, endless colleagues within the Department for International Development at the time, but there’s one mention of me:C flying to Thailandon August 30. Dad flew out to Bangladesh two days after I flew to Thailand to meet Johan. He was involved with a big water sanitation program out there. I remember clearly the moment when I called to tell him that my brand-new husband was now in police custody for drug trafficking.
Mum was already on a plane by that point, and Dad offered tocome, too, during the call. But what I really needed Dad to do was what he’d always done best: calm me down.
We talked for a long time on that patchy phone line. I believe that conversation was the only reason I got any sleep that night.
“I can’t believe the lovely young man I met could have done this,” he said before we ended the call. “I cannot and I will not, Carrie. I don’t think you’re mad.”
After that entry in Dad’s diary there are several emergency phone appointments with the British and Swedish embassies in Thailand, the British Foreign Office, a handful of other agencies Dad must have approached for help. The one thing uniting my parents during that time was that they both believed in Johan.
I get up and start moving, as per the terms of my agreement with myself. I dust Dad’s desk and all the objects on it. I manage to smile at the cheesy framed photo of me, him, Nicola, and Maya at Thorpe Park back in the nineties. We’d bullied him into that; theme parks were his worst nightmare. After a few seconds, I force myself to turn away from the picture and get back to my jobs.
I pile up the rest of the diaries and turn next to Dad’s phone bills. I start at the beginning, which is 1999, but within seconds I’m reaching for 2010. There’s a dangerous part of me that wants to experience that time again, to see the nuts and bolts of it on paper.
Dad was with the network provider Orange back then. The bills are printed on thick paper, in color: it’s oddly anachronistic to hold such a well-made record in my hands. I flip through to August.
There’s a long call to me the night before I flew out to Thailand to meet Johan, which I remember. Dad was in the Strangers’ Bar in the House of Commons, but it was so noisy that he left, talking to me all the way along Millbank to Vauxhall Bridge. I remember him trying to forbid me from taking any of my surgical study books awaywith me, and how we’d both laughed because we knew that was nonviable.
I scan on through the numbers. Most are landlines in London, although there are plenty of mobiles too.
Until, right there in the middle of them all, I see a Thai number.
The sight of a +66 still agitates me now. I study the phone bill carefully. The call goes on for nearly an hour, and it’s on the night Johan arrived in Thailand to meet me. I google the exact time difference between the UK and Thailand during the month of August and discover that the call took place around ninety minutes after Johan landed, at the precise time I was sitting in Soi Rambuttri, wondering where he was.
I know that evening by heart. There was no mention of a call between Johan and my father. And nor should there have been, either; they’d only met twice. Johan had told me he was late because it had taken ages for him to clear passport control and customs, and I’d had no reason to doubt this until he was arrested.
Determined for there to be a reasonable explanation, I pick up my phone and start dialing the number. It rings out. I put the number into Google but nothing comes up.
With creeping disquiet, I scan through the rest of the month. There are calls to Thailand starting from the very same day I told Dad what was happening. I call and google these numbers, and they all correspond to the emergency appointments in his diary. The phone answering services at the British and Swedish embassies are as familiar as they are sickening.
Every number checks out, apart from this one on the night Johan arrived.
A few times since returning from Stockholm, I’ve allowed myself to wonder who exactly Johan was referring to when he said he assumed I’d “been told” what had happened to him. He was astonished whenhe realized that I was still in the dark all these years later, and I don’t believe he was making that up.
Who is this failed messenger? Johan and I didn’t have anyone in common when we came into each other’s lives. We’d met each other’s friends, of course; he’d met my parents in person and I’d talked to his on video calls. But none of us had developed independent relationships.
And yet, here is a call to Thailand from Dad’s number—an isolated, unexplained call, at the exact time I was on my own in Bangkok wondering where my boyfriend was.
Unwillingly, my mind returns to my meeting with Johan in the hotel bar last week, to the conversation we had about Dad.
Johan asked, very specifically, if Dad could still remember the details of what had happened in Thailand.
Why?
I get up and start moving again. I shred all of Dad’s work letters, then his old contracts, then his payslips. I keep going until I’m willing to put this phone call to the back of my mind, and then I drive to his nursing home with music on at full blast.
—
“Hello, darling,” Dad says when I come in. He smiles tiredly, then says, “Sorry,” gesturing vaguely at the room. He seems surprised and embarrassed to find himself in bed in the middle of the day, but pleased to see me.
I smile at him, although I’m on the verge of tears. I can’t remember the last time Dad knew who I was.
