The Therapist

by Helene Flood

  Sigurd’s appointment book is a physical book. This is how it is at FleMaSi Architects: no Outlook, no shared iCalendars – every man for himself. On the page for Friday, March 6 are the following entries: 11.30 a.m.: Atkinson. 4.30 p.m.: Mountains. I consider Sigurd’s characteristic handwriting – capital letters bent as if he was writing them cursively, uneven circles above the “i”s. O.K., then. Atkinson at eleven-thirty. Two hours after he left the voicemail saying he’d arrived in the mountains. I think of the evening before Sigurd disappeared, of all the details I can remember. I’m no longer sure whether this clarity is due to my recalling the evening so well or because I’ve gone over it so many times in my mind, but there’s one thing I remember with unwavering certainty: Sigurd looking up from the laptop resting on his knees and saying, “I’m going to try to get to Thomas’ by six-thirty.”

  I turn the page to view the week before. Two appointments with Atkinson. In the week before that: three.

  “He worked with Atkinson a lot,” I observe.

  “Yes,” Flemming says with a sigh. “Yes, they were strange. Not very good at paying their bills, either – they have a huge outstanding invoice. Sigurd was struggling to get them to cough up, especially the wife. There seemed to be endless disagreements about whether they’d agreed to this or that.”

  “Do you know why he was going to see them on Friday?”

  “No idea,” Flemming says. “He wasn’t here when I arrived.”

  “But might he – I mean – could he have been showing them the drawings, do you think? Would he have taken his document tube with him on a visit like that?”

  Flemming shrugs.

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought so. But there might have been something else they were going to talk about, it’s always hard to tell with people like them. Difficult clients. I have a few like that myself.”

  I glance up. Sigurd’s drawing board is bare.

  “Did the police take anything with them?” I ask him.

  “No,” he says. “Not that I know of. Listen, Sara, I have quite a bit of work to do. But feel free to stay as long as you want, and I mean, his things are yours now, so take whatever you like. And we can talk about the other things – the practical stuff, I mean – when you’re ready.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “I’ll speak to you soon.”

  He hugs me again.

  “It’s just so fucking unbelievable,” he mumbles, and shuffles out.

  I take photographs of Sigurd’s appointment book – the Friday, the rest of the week, and the previous three. I take pictures of this week, too – the first week Sigurd wouldn’t get to experience. His appointment book for this week is fairly empty; I notice he doesn’t have any appointments with Atkinson this week. I turn the pages, check a couple of weeks into the future – the name isn’t mentioned. The last two pages of the appointment book are filled with addresses – the Atkinsons live on a street I’m familiar with, just south of St Hanshaugen. I change my mind and put the appointment book in my handbag.

  I don’t know whether or not Sigurd met with Atkinson as agreed, but what I do know is this: he lied to me. He said he was going to pick up Thomas at six-thirty in the morning. When he spoke to me, he said nothing about meeting a client before heading up to the mountains.

  When I’m outside again, standing on the pavement, Mammod comes running after me.

  “Wait,” he calls.

  I do as he asks and he comes over.

  “There’s one more thing,” he says.

  He stands there in his blue overalls, his safety glasses in his hair, covered in a thin layer of sawdust.

  “I don’t know whether or not I should tell you this,” he says, “but Sigurd is no longer here and I think you should know. There was a woman who would come and wait for him sometimes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No, well, I saw her just twice, I think. The first time I saw her she was leaning against the lamp post just there, peering in through the window. It was one afternoon, around five or six o’clock, and I remember I was in Flemming’s office because he needed to show me something, and I noticed her because she was staring, y’know? And I thought, good God, I can understand why people don’t want offices on the ground floor of this city when people go around staring in like that. Had I not thought that, I wouldn’t even have noticed her, but then I thought, I wonder how long she’s going to stay there for, so I waited, and then I saw Sigurd walking towards her. They gave each other a brief hug, then they walked off together. I don’t know any more than that – that’s all I saw. And I just thought, jeez, that was weird – because it was. I don’t know. She could have been just a friend, or a cousin or something – what do I know? Another time, maybe around a month or so ago, he came to the office by car to pick something up. He stopped the car on the street right here – illegal parking, you know – with his hazard lights on, and I noticed a girl sitting in the car. And I, I mean, I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so I can’t be sure, but I think it was the same person. And well, I thought it was a bit odd, so when he’d gone I mentioned it to Flemming – that Sigurd had pulled up outside the office with a girl in the car – sort of . . . insinuating, you know how guys are?”

  “Yes,” I say, breathless, thinking, no, I have no idea how guys are.

  “And Flemming said that, now that I mentioned it, he’d seen her once before, too. In much the same way as I’d seen her – hanging around outside, waiting – and then Sigurd went out to her, and off they went. So, I don’t know, I mean, it’s probably nothing – maybe you even know who she is?”

  He smiles – hopefully, I realise.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, what did she look like?”

  “Well,” Mammod says, scratching his head. A small cloud of sawdust rises from his curls.

  “She was blondish, like most girls – she looked a bit like you, actually. Average height, average build. A black coat. Maybe a bit younger than Sigurd? I don’t know – as I said, I never looked at her that closely.”

  I can feel how empty my gaze must seem as I look at him. I have no reaction to this. A woman waiting for Sigurd, not just once, but on three separate occasions. What women does Sigurd know, apart from me and Margrethe? My friends don’t live in the city. He knows my sister – Annika works in the city centre and could easily have stopped by his office, although I’m not sure why she would. And then, of course, there’s Julie. She’s a few years younger than Sigurd and does, indeed, have the stand-ard issue blonde hair. I linger on her for a moment – Julie, who Sigurd thought I should be friends with, perhaps even try to be a bit more like. Julie, who was snooping around in my house. There’s also Jan Erik’s girlfriend, if you want to get technical about it and include all possibilities. And a couple of friends from his student days, who I can rule out because Mammod and Flemming were in the same year as Sigurd and therefore know all the girls he was at university with.

  But what about clients? Do they know each other’s clients? And just as I think this, it occurs to me: Atkinson. The mystical wife with the often-absent husband – a beautiful woman with increasing demands but who refuses to pay. Who Sigurd found it necessary to lie about.

  Mammod looks at me, narrows his eyes in concern.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything,” he says. “Flemming thought so. But I don’t know. I just thought that – well, if I was you, I’d want to know.”

  “Yes,” I say, nodding. “Thank you.”

  Mammod nods, too.

  “There might be a reasonable explanation,” he says. “It might be, I don’t know, it could be anyone. But anyway, now you know.”

  He turns to go.

  “Mammod,” I say, and he turns to face me again. “Did you tell the police about this?”

  “No,” he says. “No, I mean, they didn’t ask. Maybe we should have.”

  “Yeah
. Maybe,” I say.

  “You can mention it to them,” he says, “if you speak to them.”

  He turns and hurries along the pavement. I watch him as he goes back into the office. “It could be anyone,” Mammod says – and given the description I agree with him. Blondish hair, fairly young, average height, average build. A description that would fit most Norwegian women under forty. Is he being deliberately vague? It seems I no longer trust anyone.

  As I walk back towards the station, I think: the police don’t know about this. Mammod didn’t give this information to Gundersen, although perhaps I should. But then I hesitate. I enter Majorstuen T-banen station and walk quickly past the kiosks with their tabloid newspapers, not wanting to see whether they’re reporting anything further about the “Krokskogen killing”, as my personal tragedy is now known. At any rate, I don’t want to read anything written in that worked-up, enthusiastic, bloodthirsty tone journalists use when covering a murder. Instead, I walk towards the platform. Lean my head back and squint at the screens, the tracks leading hither and yon, east and west, and imagine how the conversation with Gundersen would go. Me saying, “Sigurd met a woman with dirty blonde hair, in secret.” Gundersen’s faux-naif expression, his face artificially neutral, “Oh really, is that so?” As if he doesn’t understand what it means, a man meeting a woman behind his wife’s back.

  And then I think: I don’t need to say anything just yet. I won’t make a secret of it, no – and of course I won’t lie. If they ask me, I’ll answer. But if nothing gets mentioned, I can at least wait a while. See how things pan out. I breathe more easily. The police don’t seem so terribly interested in what I might have to say right now, anyway. So isn’t it understandable that I would wait before sharing this information?

  I don’t go home. It’s too early in the day. I have no patients, so what business do I have being in the house? I take the T-banen to Smestad instead.

  I don’t visit my father as often as I should. If you were to ask me, I’d say that I visit him once a week, but the truth is that I often don’t bother if something else comes up – and I mean something else in the broadest sense: a good film on T.V., Sigurd wanting to take a walk somewhere, or me feeling too tired and preferring to relax at home. Annika is the same. But this isn’t something we ever speak about – on the contrary, we often tell each other how we visit him once a week. Pappa never calls. He’s too busy, he says and too bad at planning. He’s completely open about it. “But you’re always welcome,” he says to us, thereby handing over the responsibility for our spending any time together.

  He lives in a detached white wooden house between Smestad and Holmen – my childhood home. When I see it appear between the treetops I’m filled with a tentative hope and melancholy, a combination of emotions I remember from coming home from school wearing my rubber boots and down jacket; my heavy school bag with its metal supports that dug into my back.

  This is where Mamma died, but it’s also where I grew up. Here I lost my virginity, smoked my first cigarette, cried myself to sleep when Annika moved out to go to college, covering my pillows with tears I didn’t entirely understand because she’d be less than an hour away by train, and at the time we were forever arguing, anyway.

  Hope and melancholy seem to have been built into the very architecture. The house is old, built in the late 1890s in the classical style with oriel windows and the rest, but it looks run-down. A few years back Pappa paid some workers from Poland who had come to the door offering to paint it, so the colour itself is white enough – and upon closer inspection the house isn’t run-down to an extent that would indicate neglect. There are no broken windowpanes, no drooping casings, and the house doesn’t appear to be on the verge of collapsing or as if it’s simply hanging on until the next autumn storm. Rather, the house’s condition bears witness to the owner’s lack of interest. From this external inspection you might be able to guess that the owner of the house moves in the metaphysical world, rather than the physical one.

  These signs of decline are most clear early in the spring. As I walk up to the front door, I can see that the lawn wasn’t raked before the snow fell last autumn, so a layer of brown pulp from old leaves is strewn like a carpet across it. In a month or two, when the sun really starts to shine, this will begin to rot. Someone – perhaps Annika, or perhaps Pappa himself – will finally take pity on the lawn, give in and rake it. But by then it will be too late – perhaps it already is. Soil is strewn along the path from someone’s footsteps. Perhaps there’s no hope of the lawn becoming green and lush and inviting any time in the next couple of years. Annika says that’s how it used to be, when we were little and Mamma was still alive, but that’s not how I remember it. Maybe she’s right – when people talk about Mamma, they often say that she had green fingers. But I sometimes suspect Annika of seeing family life before Mamma became ill through rose-tinted glasses. Annika talks about Mamma more than I do, seems to need to keep her alive. “Mamma did it like this,” she’ll say, or “Mamma used to say such and such.” I didn’t know her the way Annika did, and for several years after she died would have preferred not to hear anything about my mother. If Annika or Pappa spoke about her, I’d change the subject. This made Annika angry – she’d try to force me to listen, but I’d refuse, either leaving the room or putting my hands over my ears. How could I know whether what my sister said was true? I was so young when Mamma first started to get sick. So many of my memories are tainted by the uncertainty caused by her illness. I would often wonder at the strange things she said and did; was she in her right mind, or was it the disease? How was I supposed to understand these anecdotes doled out by Annika when they were from a family life I couldn’t really remember?

  Mamma had Alzheimer’s. It’s classified as early-onset when it starts before the age of sixty-five. People who develop the illness, even the early-onset type, are generally over fifty, but Mamma was only in her early forties. I’ve been told that it started with small things. She’d forget the odd appointment, or mix up names and places, but laugh when this was pointed out to her. It was written off as forgetfulness – a little excessive, perhaps, but when you’re the mother of children who aren’t yet even school-aged, you have a lot to think about. She forgot to turn off the stove. She forgot to send us to school with packed lunches. One day she set the table with only spoons instead of knives and forks. I can remember us sitting there, Annika and me – Pappa was away – with two soup spoons each, fish fingers and boiled carrots on the plates before us. I thought it was quite funny, but Annika was angry. “We can’t eat with spoons,” she said in a strict tone, and Mamma laughed and said, “Oh my, you’re absolutely right!” She laughed. I laughed. Annika gathered up our spoons and went into the kitchen.

  I suppose someone must have sat us down and spoken to us once Mamma had been diagnosed. I can’t remember having any such conversation, but I know that Pappa used to say, “Mamma has sick thoughts and healthy thoughts – she does sick things and healthy things.” Goodnight songs and kisses on the forehead were healthy things. Soup spoons for fish fingers and fizzy drinks for breakfast were sick things. I remember how she used to laugh in a special way when she was confronted with the sick things – a bubbling, idiotic laughter. I remember that I learned to fret about it.

  She did not, of course, become ill overnight, but I’ve worked out that I must have been five when Mamma was diagnosed. Her symptoms must have been evident for six months prior to this, perhaps even a year, and I therefore have few childhood memories in which I’m certain that she was well. I remember one day in my grandmother’s garden, Mamma and me playing with a red and white beach ball – I see this image in my mind’s eye and think, that’s when she was well, that’s when she was clear-headed, normal. I’m sure – almost sure – because it’s so hard not to let the tiniest doubt creep in: or was she?

  She would have become dependent on care; the disease progressed swiftly. Had she lived, she might have been admitte
d to an institution before I started secondary school. But as it turned out, she died much sooner. One unfortunate day when she was home alone, she mixed up the medicines she had been prescribed, a combination of anxiety and pain-reducing drugs, thinking they were her vitamins. It was Pappa who found her. I have no idea whether before this he was as distant as he was through the rest of my childhood, or if this incident – the act of finding his wife dead on the kitchen floor – marked him for life. I was seven when it happened. I don’t recall very much of my father, either, from before Mamma became ill. I could ask Annika about it. But I don’t know – we don’t talk about Pappa that way, and I’m not sure how I would bring it up.

  I ring the doorbell and wait. I can see that the lights are on inside, but it still takes a while before the door opens, which is typical enough. The girl standing there is a few years younger than me, with long brown hair and hard eyes. She looks at me with more than a touch of scepticism.

  “Yes?”

  “Is Vegard home?” I ask her.

  “What is it concerning?”

  I’ve never seen her before. They do whatever they like, these students he takes in. She can’t have been here long, but she obviously seems to think she’s some kind of bouncer – that she needs to protect him, the sensitive genius, from the bothersome outside world. Many of his students are like this. Of course, it may well be that those he attracts are of a certain disposition, but I also have to assume that he brings this out in them. The stories he tells them about his public and academic life are undoubtedly fashioned from the David and Goliath archetype: the little man’s fight against the system. While they swallow it, the students feel important. They’re his tireless defenders, whether for just a few months or a whole semester.

  “I’m his daughter,” I say.

  She says nothing more, but opens the door and lets me in. In the hallway I see shoes and jackets of various types and sizes. Many of them clearly don’t belong to Pappa – he must have a group here with him. I kick off my own shoes. The student walks into the living room and I follow her, before moving ahead of her so that I walk into his study first. My little act of overtaking irritates her, it seems, and I’m not above feeling pleased at this. This is my childhood home, and I won’t be led around like a guest. I enter the study without knocking.