Page 87 of The One Day You Were My Husband
I close my swollen eyes. I have been delusional about Mum, Maya was right. I have forced myself to overlook her abandoning us as children, forced myself to see the best in her because the alternative was too much to face. Again and again I’ve ignored, smoothed over, been bought off, but not even I—fool that I’ve been—can move past this.
“Carrie?”
“Of course I don’t want to believe it. But where would Kerstin have got this from if it wasn’t true? She’s a good mother, a real mother. And I trust her.”
I hear something that sounds like a snort from the other end, which makes me want to smash my phone through the windows, right out into the freezing sea.
“Carrie. I did not send Johan into the country with methamphetamine. Of course I didn’t. You can’t really believe that, can you?”
“I can.”
“I sent Johan into the country with antibiotics for a rape charity. Prawat’s charity, in fact. I did not ask Johan to transport illegal drugs. I know nothing of that world. I know only its victims, the lives that are destroyed by it. I have spent many years of my life advocating for them.”
I sit down on a faded velvet chair.
Mum carries on. “I sent him in with antibiotics, and, yes, there was a small risk attached to that. I knew he didn’t have a medical license, I knew there could be an issue at customs, but this is something that happens all the time and never amounts to anything once the intention is explained. I warned him of that. But, Carrie. The important thing for you to understand is that I did not send him in with anything illegal.”
She pauses. “I’m shocked you’d think I would.”
“Because you’re such a great mother?” My voice catches. “You walked out on us when I wasten years old. Why should I trust your maternal instinct now?”
She doesn’t reply and I know I’ve wounded her.
“The main question here is why you asked Johan to go into Thailand withanything. Even antibiotics. Thailand, of all countries. How could you?”
Mum is quiet for a long while. “I did leave when your father asked me to. I am not perfect. Do I regret it? Yes. But, it was the best I could do at the time.”
I press a hand on my chest.
“Please, just tell me what happened.”
Mum sighs. “A medical charity in Myanmar supplied the antibiotics that Johan took to Prawat’s brother’s shop in Chinatown. You were with him. Chinatown is an easy place to make such a transaction; Prawat’s brother handled a lot of the aid we used to bring in.”
I wait for her to go on.
“As I understand it, Johan was about to hand the parcel over to Prawat’s brother at his shop. Then a woman came and intervened. She knew there were illegal drugs in Johan’s bag; she’d been waiting for them. She took Prawat’s brother completely by surprise.”
“So you’re telling me you don’t know who that woman was? You don’t know about the other drugs?”
“I can only tell you about my part,” Mum responds stiffly.
“Well in that case, perhaps you can tell me why you couldn’t deliver these antibiotics yourself, if you cared so much about them? Why couldn’t it have been someone connected to Prawat’s charity? Why Johan?”
“Johan was coming from Myanmar,” Mum says. “They cost a quarter of the price there. He was right there in Rangoon, and he was coming to Thailand at precisely the time the charity was running out.”
“How convenient.”
She ignores me. “Johan had told me all about carrying his dive kit through an airport. How customs officials never knew what to do and normally just waved them through in the end. It was an easy solution to a serious problem. I have spent my life finding simple solutions like this; it’s what I do. This is what Prawat does; this is what thousands of people do every day to get help to those the system has forgotten. Prawat has had people bring antibiotics, emergency contraceptives, vaccines into the country for these women hundreds of times since, without incident. And he will continue to because he has been called to help others and so he does. It’s the same for me, too, Carrie.”
What a Samaritan, I want to say. And how inconvenient that the one time it goes wrong, it’s your daughter’s husband who loses everything.
But I say nothing because she cannot, and will never, see past her work. She will always think that she’s right, even if the collateral damage includes her own child.
I walk outside and step onto the jetty, taking in a few deep lungfuls of sea air. It’s bitingly cold now; dark is falling fast and the wind has picked up. On an island a few hundred meters from where I’m standing, a series of garden lights have begun to glow but they’re an empty promise; the house is shut up and dark. I wonder if it will snow overnight. I must not get stuck here.
Mum is still talking about Prawat’s charity, but I’m barely listening. Now, as then, it seems surreal that this should be my life. That a girl from Devon should find herself in a filmlike nightmare involving drugs and prisons, a nightmare that rumbles on even now, more than twelve years later.
“You should never have asked him,” is what I say when she lets off. “If there was any risk at all, you should have done it yourself.”
