‘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.
• • •
THIS 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.
The Truth about the Summer of 1963
I was fifteen years old. School had finished. Long summer holidays lay ahead of me. I had no plans beyond the usual entertainments and chores, helping on the farm, cycling to the lake, swimming, picking fruit, and exploring. Everything changed one day when my father told me that a new family had moved into the area. They’d taken possession of a nearby farm. It was an unusual family because it was made up of a father and a daughter but no mother. They’d left Stockholm to start a life in the country. The girl was my age. After hearing the news I was too excited to sleep and lay awake contemplating the prospect of a friend close by. I was nervous because she might not want to be my friend.
The Truth about Freja
In pursuit of her friendship I spent as much time as possible in the vicinity of the new girl’s farm. Too shy to knock on their door, I resorted to indirect methods that might seem odd, but I’d led a sheltered life and was socially inexperienced. In between our two farms was a clump of trees too small to be called a forest. It was an area of wild land impossible to sow or harvest because of several large boulders. I went there every day. I’d sit at the top of a tree, facing the new girl’s farm. Each day I waited many hours, scratching shapes into the trunk. After a week or so I began to doubt that this new girl wanted to be my friend.
One day I saw the father walking through the fields. He stopped at the bottom of my tree and called up:
‘Hello up there.’
I replied:
‘Hello down there.’
They were our first words:
‘Hej där uppa!’
‘Hej där nerra!’
‘Why don’t you come down and meet Freja?’
That was the first time I heard her name.
I climbed down the tree and walked with him to their farm. Freja was waiting. The father introduced us. He explained how much he hoped we could become friends because Freja was new to the area. Though Freja was the same age as me she was much prettier. Her breasts were already large and she styled her hair fashionably. She was the kind of girl every boy paid attention to. She was less of a child and more of an adult whereas I was still a child. I suggested building a shelter in the woods, unsure whether she’d scrunch up her face in disgust at the idea, because she was from the city and I didn’t know any grown-up girls from the city. Maybe they didn’t like building tree shelters. She said okay. So we ran to the clump of trees. I showed her how to create a roof by bending saplings and tying them together. If this sounds like a tomboy task for two fifteen-year-old girls, then maybe it was. But physical activity was natural to me. It was all I knew by way of diversions. Freja was more sophisticated. She knew about sex.
By midsummer Freja had become the friend I’d always desired. I imagined saying to her by the end of the holidays that she was the sister I’d never had and that we would be best friends for the rest of our lives.
The Truth about the Troll
I arrived in the forest one morning and found Freja sitting on the ground. Her arms were clasped around her knees. She looked up at me and said:
‘I’ve seen a troll.’
I was unsure if this was a scary story or if she was being serious. We’d often tell each other scary stories. I’d tell her stories about trolls. So I asked her:
‘Did you see the troll in the forest?’
She said:
‘I saw it on my farm.’
It was my duty to believe my friend when she told me something was true. I took hold of her hand. She was shaking.
‘When did you see it?’
‘Yesterday, after we’d been playing in the fields. I went home but I was too dirty to come inside the house, so I used the outside hose to wash the mud from my legs. That’s when I saw the troll, at the back of the garden, behind the red-currant bushes.’
‘What did the troll look like?’
‘It had pale skin rough like leather. Its head was huge. And instead of two eyes it had one enormous black eye that didn’t blink. The troll just stared at me and wouldn’t look away. I wanted to call out to my dad but I was afraid he wouldn’t believe me. So I dropped the hose and ran inside.’
Freja didn’t play that day. We sat together, holding hands, until she stopped shaking. After hugging Freja goodbye that evening I watched her return home through the fields.
The next day Freja was so happy she kissed and hugged me and said that the troll hadn’t come back, and she apologised for alarming me, it must have been her imagination playing tricks.
But the troll did come back and Freja was never the same again. She never felt safe. She was always afraid. She became another person. She was sadder and quieter. Often she didn’t want to play. She was scared of returning home each evening. She was scared of her farm.
The Truth about Mirrors
Some weeks after she’d first seen the troll I found Freja in the forest holding a mirror. She was certain that the one-eyed troll was using mirrors to spy on her. That morning she’d woken up and turned all the mirrors around so they faced against the wall, every single mirror in the house, except for the one in her bedroom. She suggested we smash it and bury the shards in the soil. I agreed. She hit it with a heavy stick and when it smashed she started crying. Freja returned home that evening to find all the mirrors turned the correct way round. Her father wouldn’t tolerate such peculiar behaviour.
The Truth about the Lake
My plan was simple. Freja had only ever seen the troll on her farm. What if the two of us ran off to the forests far away? We could easily survive for a few days if we saved up enough food. If we didn’t see the troll then we could be sure that the solution would be to leave her farm. Freja agreed to my plan and we met on the road at six in the morning and started cycling. We couldn’t stay in the nearby clump of trees because we’d quickly be discovered. We needed to reach the forests that surrounded the great lake. These were forests so big you could disappear and never be found again. My parents were accustomed to me being outside for the entire day. They’d only start to worry when I didn’t show up for dinner.
A rainstorm started at midday. The downpour was heavy. You had to shout to be heard. Quickly Freja was too exhausted to go any further. Dripping wet, we dragged our bikes off the road. Once in the forest we camouflaged them under leaves and twigs. I created a shelter under the trunk of a fallen tree. We ate sugar-iced cinnamon buns and drank redcurrant juice. The food I’d calculated would last for three days was almost f
inished after a single meal. Every couple of minutes I asked Freja:
‘Can you see the troll?’
She’d look around, then shake her head. Even though we were wet and tired we were also happy, wrapped up in our rain jackets. I waited until Freja fell asleep before I allowed myself to shut my eyes.
When I woke up Freja was gone and the forests were dark. I shouted her name. There was no response. The troll had come for Freja. I began to cry. Then I became scared because the troll might come for me. I ran as fast as I could until I reached the great lake and could go no further. I was trapped against the water’s edge, certain the troll was only a few metres behind. I took off my jacket and swam. I’d never read a story where a troll enjoyed swimming. They were dense, heavy creatures and I was a strong swimmer for my age.
That night I swam too far. When I eventually stopped swimming I was the furthest I’ve ever been from the shore. The giant pine trees on the sides of the lake were so far away they were just specks. At least I was alone. At first this thought gave me comfort. The troll wasn’t after me. I was safe. Then the thought made me sad. I remembered I’d lost my friend. Freja was gone and when I returned to the shore I’d be alone again. My legs felt heavy. I was so tired. My chin dipped below the water, then my nose, then my eyes, and finally my whole head. I was drowning. I didn’t make the decision to die. But I didn’t have the energy to swim.
I sank below the surface. I should have died that night. I was lucky. Even though I was many hundreds of metres away from the shore, by chance that area of water was shallow. I rested for a moment underwater on the silt bottom of the lake, then pushed up and broke the surface. I gasped, took a deep breath before sinking back down to the bank. I rested for a little while then pushed up, breaking the surface, taking a breath. I repeated this process over and over, moving closer to the shore. With this strange method I managed to return to dry land, where I lay flat on my back for some time looking up at the stars.
The Farm Page 9