by Karen Swan
‘What do you mean, how?’ Tove asked him, sitting up herself now, her short skirt riding all the way up her thighs to flash her knickers – no one in the room caring, least of all her. Bell was just grateful she was wearing some. ‘Her husband was asleep and now he’s awake! He opened his eyes and woke up!’
‘Well, if it was that simple, you’d have thought he’d have done it before now, surely?’ Kris exclaimed.
‘Hmm.’ Tove conceded the point.
‘I’m not really sure how they did it,’ Bell replied. ‘It was a lot of different things combined, I think. Hanna said something about stimulating the vagus nerve . . .? It’s some pioneering treatment. I don’t think they thought it would actually work.’
‘Fuck,’ Tove whispered under her breath. ‘The vagus nerve.’
It was clear none of them had ever heard of this before.
‘How did Hanna take the news?’
‘She was very shocked. She collapsed, actually.’ Bell bit her lip, remembering how Hanna had paled and then fallen, her legs giving way, both of them sitting on the floor until Max arrived home.
‘Shit,’ Tove murmured, as though this was proof of the seriousness of the situation. She had met Hanna only once, but had rhapsodized afterwards about her skin and flashing aquamarine ring and good shoes. ‘She’s such a grown-up!’ Tove had cooed, and Bell hadn’t liked to point out that there was only three years between Tove and Hanna – and six years between her and her boss.
‘What happened to the guy? How did he end up in a coma in the first place?’
‘Traffic accident, I think. To be honest, she didn’t say much that was coherent, and I didn’t feel I could ask too much. She was so shocked; I’ve never seen her like that. Hanna never loses control.’ Bell took a swig of her beer.
‘So has she gone to see him?’
‘She can’t. Not tonight, it’s too late now. He’s in some clinic in Uppsala and they’ve got strict visiting hours. She and Max are going up in the morning.’
Kris put down the knife again. ‘Christ, that’ll be a head-fuck for him, won’t it? His wife’s first husband suddenly back on the scene again?’
‘Well, technically, he’s her husband, end of. Hanna and Max aren’t married.’
He hesitated. ‘I take it he knew about him?’
‘Yeah, seemed to. He was at this client dinner but I couldn’t leave Hanna in that state, so as soon as I rang and told him what had happened, he came straight back.’
‘And the kids?’ Tove asked.
‘They don’t know. Yet.’
Kris shook his head with a weary sigh. ‘Hell, Bell.’ It was his signature catchphrase to her but there was no laughter in his eyes today. ‘That’s one mighty mess.’
‘I know.’ She sank back into the sofa again, as though depleted by the message she had conveyed, and stared at the wall. But she was gazing far beyond the neon ‘love’ sign that sufficed as lighting in that corner of the room; she was trying to imagine how it must have felt to have been Hanna when the doctors had given her the prognosis . . . her husband alive, but to all intents and purposes dead. Hanna had said the doctors had told her that there was very little hope he would ever emerge from the coma.
She went to take another swig of her beer and realized she had finished it.
‘I’ll get you another one,’ Tove sighed, getting up and walking over to the fridge. ‘I’ve got to shoot anyway.’ She glanced at the clock and gave a small spasm of surprise. ‘Oh fuck. Not again.’
Bell glanced over. She knew Tove’s schedules well enough to know she should have come off her break twenty three minutes ago. She gave a small tut and a grin as Tove jogged over and handed her the fresh beer. ‘Thanks, hon.’
‘Laters alligators,’ Tove called over her shoulder in English – one of the more sedate phrases she had insisted Bell teach her – as she headed towards the front door. The door slammed shut a moment later, making the furniture vibrate; Tove was incapable of doing anything quietly.
Kris gave a sympathetic tut and frown as he picked up several nests of noodles and threw them into a pan of boiling water. Bell sat quietly on the sofa for a few minutes, enjoying her beer and the little moment of peace. She peered over the back of the sofa, towards the kitchen. ‘Hey, Kris, how long do you think it is to Uppsala from here – an hour-ish?’
He nodded in agreement.
‘Right,’ she sighed. That would be an extra early start for her, then. Hanna had asked her to get in early tomorrow so that she and Max could head straight off to the clinic, before the commuter traffic built up.
She’d made light of it to her friends, but she felt rattled by the day’s events. It frightened her when life slipped off its rails like that, the straight tramlines of expectation suddenly hijacked by a too-sharp curve that sent everything flying. Lives could turn on a sixpence, she knew that only too well – the entire reason she was here and living in Sweden was down to one such curve ball – but it was just as unsettling to watch it happening from a close remove. She was near enough to care, but just outside of the involved circle.
‘Come. Eat,’ Kris said, draining the pan so that great plumes of steam billowed in his face. He tonged the food into colourful and artful heaps in the bowls, and slid one towards her on the island.
‘Oh, I’m not sure I ca—’ It was almost ten. Eating late was hardly conducive to whittling out that bikini body she was determined to find.
‘You can and you will,’ he said firmly. ‘You cannot spend all day looking after other people and neglecting yourself.’
‘I really didn’t neglect myself when I was serving the kids their dinner earlier,’ she said, getting up anyway as her stomach growled appreciatively. She took her bowl with a grateful smile and they sat down together at the small circular table that was only big enough for two, or a pot plant. Every third Friday, for Kris’s renowned and sought-after supper clubs, it was moved to the bathroom and set in the bath out of the way, as six trestle tables and benches were carried in, the rest of the furniture hidden in the bedrooms or pushed to the walls.
‘I thought Marc was coming over?’ she said, her mouth full, as they tucked in in appreciative silence, elbows out, heads dipped low, beers fizzing in their bottles.
‘He is.’ Kris’s gaze flickered over to the reclaimed train clock on the opposite wall. ‘After his shift, in twenty minutes hopefully.’
‘Ah.’ Marc was a junior doctor at St Görans Hospital. He was almost the same height and build as Kris, but where Kris was blonde and stubbled and rocking a chiselled indy traveller vibe, Marc was clean-shaven and preppy. Tove had said it was like choosing between Redford and Newman the first time she’d seen them together, and Bell had had to break it to her that she sadly wouldn’t ever get to choose either one of them. ‘Did his consultant apologize for screaming at him?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Outrageous,’ she tutted. Marc had been late to a meeting on account of sitting with a terminal patient, literally holding their hand as they died. She forked another heaped bite and gave an immediate groan of appreciation. ‘Ohmigod, so good.’
His eyes gleamed appreciatively. ‘So how about you? Was Tove right just now? Are you deliberately sabotaging your own dates?’
‘Kris, no one could have foreseen what was coming our way today. Not even Hanna. Long-forgotten husbands waking up from comas is not all in a day’s work for me.’
‘No, I guess not,’ he conceded, looking up at her from beneath his ridiculously long eyelashes as he twirled his noodles. ‘All the same, you really need to start insisting on extra pay if you’re gonna be doing extra hours. You help her out a lot. A lot a lot.’
‘I know.’
‘You know – but you won’t,’ he said, watching her, knowing her too well. ‘You’re too soft.’
‘It’s not a matter of being soft. I just . . . don’t mind if things over-run. It feels sort of wrong monetizing looking after children.’
Kris burst out laughing
. ‘But that is the very definition of your job!’
She couldn’t help but crack a smile. She had walked into that one. ‘You know what I mean. Those kids are so cute.’
‘Elise is not cute! She is a diva-in-training. Mariah Carey in miniature and fucking terrifying.’
‘Okay, fine, but Linus then – you haven’t seen his puppy-dog eyes. He didn’t win the times table test today and he was heartbroken. Big, fat tears rolling down his cheeks . . .’ She trailed a finger down her own cheek, her mouth downturned sadly to make her point.
Kris sighed and shook his head, looking entirely unconvinced, before suddenly stabbing the air decisively with his fork. ‘Give him a booty call.’
She frowned in disbelief. ‘Linus?’
He banged the ends of his cutlery on the table. ‘Ivan!’
‘Ha, yeah right.’ Quickly she stuffed another overloaded forkful into her mouth, trying to distract herself from his words with a taste-bud explosion.
He dipped his head and looked closely at her. ‘Listen, I know you love that family, but you need to start imposing some boundaries. Puppy-dog eyes or not, Tove’s right – you’ve got a life to live too. You need to start saying no. Except when it’s to a guy – then you need to start saying yes.’ He reached over and put a hand on hers. ‘You know what I’m saying.’
She nodded. She knew exactly what he was saying.
He winked at her kindly, heart-stoppingly. ‘Remember – it’s just a job, and you’re just the nanny, Bell.’
It was exactly 5.28 a.m. as she closed the door behind her with a shiver, holding the bike steady with one hand as she tucked her trousers into her socks with the other. She glanced up and down the arm’s-width narrow street but no one else was around: a few bottle crates were stacked in a tower, ready for pickup, and the hand-painted A-frame advertising the craft beers in the Star Bar was propped against the wall. Quickly, she stepped on the pedal and swung her leg over the bike, gliding silently past the tiny, narrow antique shop selling ceramics and glassware, past the ancient wooden door of the rare comic emporium sited thirty feet below the street in an old wine cellar.
The cobbles glistened from the overnight rain. Her tyres sluiced through shallow puddles as she darted from alley to alley, cutting across the pedestrian thoroughfares that would soon be heaving with tourists looking for wooden Dala horses and bakeries to have fika in. In these long, thin alleys she was protected from the wind that came straight off the Baltic, but she knew that as soon as she took the left onto Stora Nygatan and over the bridge it would push at her back all the way to Ostermalm, until she closed the Mogerts’ garden gate behind her.
Traffic was light, with few commuters out yet. Small clusters of electric scooters stood poised by the bridge, outside the main station, at street corners and by bike racks. There weren’t even any drivers in the embassy cars as Bell powered up the colourful street, and she had a sense of suspension, as though the city was holding its breath – just about to exhale, just about to start up again. What would today hold?
She had slept well, awaking in the starfish position on her double bed, although she’d still wished she could stay there for another four hours. But one glance at her employers’ faces as she walked in, and it was clear they had had a very different night. Both of them were pale and tense, sitting stiffly and in silence at the whitewashed kitchen table as she shut the back door quietly behind her.
‘Hey,’ she said in a low voice, partly so as not to wake the children, but also in deference to the sombre mood in the house. She pulled off her beanie and automatically twisted her hair into the topknot, seeing that they had managed only coffee; the island was spotlessly clean and tidy.
Hanna was dressed but Max was still in his pyjamas, and his eyes followed his partner as she got up to rinse her cup.
‘Bell, thank you for coming so early. I really appreciate it.’ Hanna’s poise was in stark contrast to the sucker-punched disbelief of last night, but Bell could see the effort it was taking her just to present this veneer. Her mouth was pulled down at the corners, the sinews strained in her neck.
‘It’s the very least I could do. How are you both?’
She made a point of including Max in the question, seeing that Hanna was using manners as a mask, and he answered her with a weary nod that told her more in its fragile silence than words would.
‘Did you manage to sleep at all?’
A silence followed; they seemed to be deferring to each other to answer.
‘Not really,’ Max said finally. His voice, usually spry and infused with an untold joke, was flat and heavy.
‘No.’ She bit her lip, watching as Hanna cleaned the coffee cup vigorously before immediately drying it and returning it to the cupboard. Bell wasn’t sure any implement in this kitchen had ever been returned to its home without first spending at least four days on the draining board. She watched as Hanna stood, unseeing, at the cabinet for a moment, her shoulders pitched a good two inches above their usual setting, before turning around with possibly the most implausible smile Bell had ever seen – but one of the bravest.
‘Right. Well, we should head off then. Traffic will get sticky if we hit rush hour.’
‘Sure,’ Bell agreed, offering her most reassuring smile in return, although she felt a guilty wave of relief at the prospect of stepping clear of their suffocating gloom. ‘And I’ll take care of everything here. Don’t worry about a single thing –’
Hanna straightened her back. ‘Actually, Max and I have discussed it, and we think it would be best if you came with me.’
Bell blinked at her, confused. ‘. . . Me?’
‘To Uppsala, yes.’
She looked across at Max, who was staring into his coffee cup.
Hanna stood stiffly. ‘It could be too . . . confusing.’ Her voice was as brittle as toffee.
‘Oh, yes,’ Bell murmured. ‘I can see how that . . . But what about –?’
‘Max is going to work from home today. He’ll take the girls to nursery.’
‘. . . And Linus?’
‘He’s coming with us.’ Hanna flinched, as though hating the indecision in her voice. ‘But we don’t know yet if . . . well, whether he should actually come in. That’s why I need you there.’ Her eyes flickered towards Max and away again without resting on him, and Bell understood they were at odds on this.
Bell went still as suddenly the maths presented itself. Linus was nine. The ex had been in a coma for seven years. ‘He’s . . . Linus’s father?’ She looked between them both. Max nodded.
Bell was stunned. In the three years she’d been working here, it had never been mentioned. She supposed she could have worked it out last night if she’d stopped to consider it, but she hadn’t thought to make mathematical calculations. ‘Does he know?’
Hanna whirled back to face her sharply. ‘No. And I’d like it to stay that way until we get up there and I . . . I know what we’re dealing with.’
Bell nodded, looking from Hanna back to Max again. He looked suitably bitten back too.
‘He’s awake, but we don’t yet know how cognizant he will be of what’s happened to him. It could upset him to see Linus so changed – he was little more than a baby when the accident happened.’ Her voice was brittle and hard, shining with jagged edges that could, at any moment, draw blood. She was a mother in defence. ‘On the other hand, he could be absolutely the man he was and the first person he’ll want to see is his son.’ She gave a helpless, exaggerated shrug and stretched her mouth into a grimace, tears in her eyes. ‘I have absolutely no idea what we’re walking into.’
‘Which is why you would be better to play it on the safe side and keep Linus here until you know the score,’ Max said to her back.
‘He’s been in a coma for seven years, Max!’ Hanna snapped, whirling round, and Bell could tell by her tone they had been arguing about this for hours. ‘What if Linus is all he wants? What if he’s distressed by his not being there? It could make things worse for him.’
‘I sincerely doubt he’s going to be that lucid.’
‘Oh, because you’re the expert?’
Max sighed, looking away with a shake of his head.
Hanna looked back at her. ‘I need to have options, Bell. I need to go in first and assess how he is. If he’s calm and lucid, Linus can come in. If he’s confused or distressed or . . . not right, he doesn’t.’
Bell nodded. ‘Okay.’
‘And if he is alert and okay, what are you going to say to Linus?’ Max asked, his voice sounding choked. ‘Are you honestly going to break it to him, in the doorway of that hospital room, that the man he’s about to meet is his real father?’ He stared at his wife with shining eyes. ‘How do you think he’s going to react to that? I mean, the shock – Jesus, the poor child! He needs time to process the facts before he’s presented with the reality! We always said we would tell him together, when he was old enough – the two of us, together –’
‘But we don’t have that luxury now! He’s woken up, and there’s no time left. He’s been nearer to being dead than alive, and we have to put his needs before ours – and before even Linus’s. It’s the very least he deserves.’
Max exhaled forcefully, his body rigid with anger and tension as Hanna suddenly dropped her head into her hands.
‘God, this is an impossible situation,’ Bell said quietly, walking over to her quickly and squeezing her shoulder comfortingly. It was a strange reversal of roles. Though her boss was only six years her senior, their very different lifestyles and choices often left Bell feeling almost adolescent in her company.
Hanna lifted her head again. ‘I just need options, Max, until I know what’s the best thing to do.’
‘Well, you’re his mother,’ Max retorted snippily. ‘So I don’t get a final say in it. I’m not even his adoptive father. When it comes down to it, I have no legal rights.’
‘This isn’t about legalities.’
‘Not yet it isn’t,’ Max said bleakly.
Hanna’s mouth parted. Bell’s, too. What exactly was ahead of them?