The Therapist

by Helene Flood

  But in the autumn of 2013 the city’s architectural firms were being cautious about taking on new staff. They had just put a financial crisis behind them, but an oil crisis loomed. In his own mind, Sigurd was already a respected and renowned architect, but on paper he was a recent graduate with no experience. He spent his first two months as a jobseeker in a state of silent, uncomprehending wonder – how could this be? On Facebook he saw his classmates taking up new positions, and blurted out:

  “And even her – I mean, she’s never created anything original!”

  I got a job at a clinic for children and young people. Sigurd and I barely spoke about the fact that I’d changed job. We’d bought our first apartment; the Massimo affair was behind us. This was supposed to be a good time for us.

  And then one afternoon the competition announcement sails into Sigurd’s inbox. He immediately lights up. New Horizons. He draws; he speaks. This might be a way in. He works alone, from home. Who needs the big firms? Who needs the bureaucracy and bosses breathing down your neck? One man, alone at his drawing board, that’s all, no bothersome administration, pure creative force. Work on the project moves into our apartment. I’m just happy that Sigurd has something to do.

  The announcement comes in October. Eight submissions have been shortlisted for assessment. Seven are from the major firms, the eighth is from an experienced Dutch architect. I come home from work and the apartment smells of burning. The charred remains of Sigurd’s model are in the shower cabinet. In the spare room, Sigurd is clearing away his things, tearing pages out of sketch pads.

  “I’m sure it’s usual to get rejected,” I say. “Most people probably have to go through several submission rounds before getting selected for anything.”

  Sigurd stares at me, his eyes black – it’s a stranger standing before me.

  “Shut up, Sara,” he says.

  It’s a slap in the face – Sigurd never speaks to me like that. And I don’t know what to do with it – this wildness and rage that surrounds my fiancé like a foul smell. I don’t want to prod at it, don’t want to make it worse. Don’t want to know what I might find in there. This isn’t Sigurd. “I want no part of this,” I say. “I’ll be in the living room.” I leave the spare room; shut him in there.

  Half an hour later he comes out carrying some papers in his arms. He goes into the bathroom. Comes out to collect a bottle of whisky and matches. I say nothing.

  He takes the rest of the whisky into the spare room with him; burned paper lies beside the model in the bottom of the shower cabinet. I walk past it, brush my teeth as if it isn’t there. I want to wake in the morning and find that the man I’m engaged to has reappeared. I fall asleep with the firm conviction that this wish will come true.

  It works. The next morning Sigurd is silent. When I get home from work, he’s tidied up and bought food for dinner. Three weeks later he gets a job. We never speak of New Horizons again.

  Annika comes over to see me after work. I’m sitting there limply, sorting through boxes for something I can’t quite put into words. We’re still partly living out of boxes, Sigurd and me. One is labelled random stuff, sigurd, and it looks promising. Everything that was his is mine, Gundersen said – Flemming, too. Maybe there will be something to learn about Sigurd from his random stuff?

  Old photographs from his final year of secondary school: Sigurd and Jan Erik with young, soft faces and eyes half-closed in an unaccustomed drunkenness that still afflicts them to this day; mouths grinning, caps askew. Course reading lists from the Norwegian Business School, which Sigurd attended before he figured out he wanted to become an architect. Postcards of paintings in little paper bags, Klimt, Rodin, Chagall, Kandinsky, Pollock and Warhol. A wooden box containing a bone-dry cigar. Sigurd hasn’t touched any of this in the past five years. I’m groping around in the dark here, I know that, but I need something to hold on to. Who was Sigurd? The page of his appointment book is burned into my memory: 11.30 a.m.: Atkinson. I know I’ll throw myself into it at some point, hold it up against my own calendar, for every Atkinson entry in the book asking myself: what did he tell me he was doing?

  But the contents of these boxes tell me nothing. We have one labelled random stuff, sara, too, full of similar things: photographs, cards I received on my twenty-third birthday, the schedule for a language exchange programme I went on when I was fifteen, and so on. No-one would learn anything about me now by looking through what’s there, other than the most banal: she travelled a bit in her twenties, went to an exhibition in 2007 that suggests she likes photography.

  “Hi,” Annika says.

  She looks at me with pity. In my hands I’m holding a bright green teddy bear, the kind you might win as third prize in a competition at a fair.

  “Hi.”

  She stands there in the kitchen; I’m sitting on the living room floor. She sets a brown paper bag flecked with grease on the kitchen counter – I assume it’s today’s dinner, purchased at one of the many takeaways located between her office and where she parked her car. But I shouldn’t complain. She has a full-time job, works regular overtime, and has three children under the age of ten – and yet she still comes here every day to look after me. And I have to ask myself: would I have done the same? For her? For Pappa?

  “How’s it going?” she says.

  “Y’know,” I say.

  I look around me. Boxes, random stuff.

  “I brought food,” Annika says.

  “I’m not hungry,” I say reflexively, without thinking.

  “No,” she says. “But try to eat something anyway.”

  She’s brought Indian – I don’t know what made her think that chicken tikka and garlic naan would be a good thing to serve to someone with no appetite, but nevertheless I manage to get some of it down. It’s not especially tasty, but my body quivers, pouncing on the tiny dose of nutrition I’m finally giving it, and some-thing loosens – I understand, I have to eat. I take another bite.

  “I went to see Pappa today,” I say to Annika between bites.

  “Oh?” she says.

  We sit in silence, chewing our food.

  “What did he say?”

  “The usual. What he’s been reading, what I should read. The house is full of students who wait on him hand and foot.”

  “I mean about what happened to Sigurd?”

  “Oh. That.”

  I tear off a piece of naan bread, glance out of the window. It’s foggy outside. The city lies there, just beyond the threshold, I know that, but I can see nothing of it now. Only fog and the closest trees and nothing else.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I didn’t tell him.”

  She looks at me, eyes narrowing, but she doesn’t ask why. Instead, she says:

  “I understand.”

  I imagine myself in therapy, imagine myself in a session with a friendly, older therapist, a man around my father’s age, but different – someone who listens and understands, who says: “What does it mean, do you think, that you visited your father and didn’t tell him that your husband has been found murdered? And what does it mean that your sister understands this choice without further explanation?”

  “I could call him and tell him for you,” Annika says. “If you want me to?”

  Do I want her to? I don’t know, don’t know anything, but why not? So I nod. But the comfort of letting go is tinged with a slight bitterness I know only too well – here comes Annika to clean up my mess once again.

  “Annika,” I say, “do you remember how I used to wet the bed when I was little? While Mamma was ill?”

  “Yes?” she says.

  I ask myself whether she’s being vigilant. Is this painful for her? We chew our food.

  “Do you think Pappa saw other people while Mamma was ill?” I ask.

  “Huh?” Annika says, and then, when I don’t answer:

  “Well, you’ve
heard what he says about adultery. The stocks have been mentioned.”

  “But towards the end,” I say, “when she was more his patient than his wife.”

  Annika thinks about this. The house is so quiet – the sound of our cutlery tapping on our plates seems to ring between the walls.

  We rarely talk about our childhood, Annika and I, although she would sometimes try to bring it up when I was a teenager. She invited me to have dinner with her in the flatshare where she lived; covered the table with a cloth and set it with candles, served me cheap red wine although I wasn’t yet eighteen, and asked: “How is it, really, living at home with Pappa?” and “What do you remember from just after Mamma died?” It made me nervous. There we sat, surrounded by pleasantries and niceties, and this was what she wanted me to talk about? Her questions were direct; loaded. There was so much expectation in the meal she had prepared, the candles she had lit: I was supposed to confide in her. I had no idea what to say – everything would have been wrong. I more or less ended up telling her what I thought she wanted to hear. Tried to steer the conversation towards safer topics.

  Later, I read about the fundamental significance of the early bond between parent and child, and reflected on how my childhood had shaped me: the loss of one parent, the twisted relationship with the other. I realised I’d like to know what Annika remembered, so I could compare her memories to my own. She was older, had understood more about the events as they were happening. But I never asked her – perhaps I didn’t quite know how. And anyway, I saw her so rarely – I lived in Bergen, and she was in Oslo. I thought it was better to leave it; something to be discussed in the future.

  Now Annika rubs her eyes. I wonder whether she’s been in court today. It seems so – she’s smartly dressed and made-up, her hair neat, in place.

  “Who knows?” Annika says heavily. “It seems as if his, what does he call it, his ‘moral codex’, shapes itself around whatever suits him at the time.”

  There’s no clattering of cutlery against plates now. In the distance I can hear the sound of the train rattling its way up towards Holstein station.

  “You think so?” I say to my food. “I don’t.”

  We eat in silence. Now isn’t the time to ask her these questions either, not when it’s only days since Sigurd disappeared. But perhaps another day, soon. I almost finish the whole portion, and it does me good. Annika tells me that her middle son has been to the dentist today, that he bit the nurse’s finger. We try to relax.

  I don’t remember much from when Mamma was ill. I remember her dying; remember her funeral and the period that followed. A few other things – spoons instead of forks, Mamma’s idiotic laughter, sick thoughts and healthy thoughts – but can recall little of how I felt. Was I sad? Was I afraid? Did it feel unsafe to me, that Mamma was no longer an adult I could depend on?

  But I do remember that I started to wet the bed at night. The feeling of waking and being wet, the sticky bed, and the feeling of shame – that I remember so clearly, the deep sense of regret, “how embarrassing, now that I’m such a big girl”. I remember waking Annika. Even then I must have understood that Mamma couldn’t be depended on, and I could never have woken Pappa with something like that – I wanted to be a good girl, someone worthy, for my father. So I went to Annika. Shook my sister until she woke, and then confessed with a lowered gaze. Reluctantly, she helped me. After a couple of times, she said I should be able to manage by myself. She was eleven or twelve, thought it was disgusting. I, too, thought it was disgusting. It made me disgusting. I didn’t want to have to tell anyone about it.

  During my studies I learned that bed-wetting, nocturnal enuresis, can be due to emotional stress. As I sat there in the lecture hall while a psychologist from the psychiatric service for children and young people whizzed through all the childhood disorders in the diagnostic manual, I felt a childish relief wash over me: maybe it was just stress. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with the child I had been. Maybe I was distraught because my mother was ill.

  Later, I also realised that it gave me a fixed point of reference regarding how I had felt. I remember so little pain, so little fear, very little emotion at all. I know only what happened; remember it in adult phrases, so must simply have accepted the things that others interpreted and explained to me. Know so little about how this huge event, this terrible childhood grief, actually felt.

  One night I woke up and felt warm and wet beneath my back-side and down my thighs, and I thought in confusion, oh no. I went out to the linen cupboard in the hall, found the bedding as Annika had taught me, and tried to put it on the bed. The sheet – one of the stretchy ones – didn’t quite fit the mattress. When I sat on the bed and fought with the corners, it too became damp as the fluid from the wet mattress soaked up into it. I started to cry.

  Why I ended up on the landing, I don’t know. I must have gone there after I couldn’t manage to make the bed. I didn’t dare wake Annika, but I remember that I pushed open the door of my parents’ room a crack. That I saw Mamma sleeping; felt an overwhelming despair at the fact that it would do no good to wake her. That my father’s bed was empty – and that this was strange, because I’d heard them go to bed together, earlier that evening. Had heard them talking. But now my father was gone. I felt so alone.

  I don’t remember how I ended up sitting there, only that I sat there. I cried, as quietly as I could so as not to wake anyone, and then heard the sound of a key in the front door. I could see the hallway from where I was sitting. It was Pappa. He didn’t see me, just took off his shoes. Stuck his hand into his jacket pocket to take something from it. He was fumbling around with something, but I couldn’t see what he had in his hands. As he hung up his jacket he saw me and said:

  “Sara? Is that you sitting there?”

  I nodded. Didn’t ask him why he had gone out, where he had been. I said nothing. He lifted me up; I rested my head against his broad shoulder. He smelled of cold air and his familiar aftershave. I never wanted him to leave, ever again.

  He followed me back into the bedroom, laid me down atop the new sheet. I didn’t dare tell him that everything was wet; didn’t dare tell him that I’d peed myself. I lay down on the wet bed and tried to sleep.

  Three weeks after Sigurd and I got married I was in my office at the clinic disinfecting my hands. I’d had a family in for therapy, and they had just left, so I had squeezed some antibacterial hand gel into my palm from the dispenser I kept by my desk. I was careful about it – had learned from working with my young psychotic patients always to shake hands, and then to wash them. I wasn’t yet used to wearing my wedding ring, so put the gel on first. It created a sticky layer around the ring’s edge. I took the ring off, put it on the desk and rubbed my fingers together. Then I wiped the ring on a paper towel, and it was only then, as I was putting it back on again, that what I had seen on the night I wet myself and sat on the landing of the house in Smestad and saw Pappa fiddling with something became clear to me. More than twenty years later came an experience that gave the memory meaning: my father had stood there, putting on his wedding ring.

  As we are clearing up after dinner, the doorbell rings. Annika and I look at each other, and I must look afraid, because Annika tells me she’ll get it.

  As Annika is walking down the stairs, Gundersen comes walking up them. This is the way things are now – my house is no longer mine, the police come and go as they wish, and Gundersen doesn’t have the time to wait for me to pull myself together and open the door.

  They come up the stairs together, Gundersen first, taking two steps at a time. He’s in his energetic mode, I see. Annika follows him, vigilant again, brows drawn together and eyes glued to him, as if she’s trying to communicate that he ought to watch himself – she has her eye on him.

  Gundersen greets me and sits down beside me at the kitchen island, without really saying anything.

  “How’s it going?”

  �
�Yes, well,” he says.

  He appears to think for a while, staring into space, in contrast to his energetic entrance.

  “How was the rest of that weekend, Sara?” he says. “You went to the gym, you went home, you drank some wine and deleted the message, and then you went to bed. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then what happened?”

  I think for a moment.

  “I woke up the day after,” I say. “Julie was here – she’s Thomas’ girlfriend, you know, Thomas – Sigurd’s friend. She wanted to see whether I was O.K. I don’t know. We . . . Yeah. She didn’t stay long.”

  It won’t look good, I think, if I have to tell Gundersen in detail about my encounter with Julie. Of course it has nothing to do with the case – semi-blonde hair or not, I can’t see Julie shooting Sigurd in the back. But to say that I quarrelled with the girlfriend of Sigurd’s best friend? And after I deleted the message?

  But Gundersen doesn’t seem interested.

  “Yes, O.K.,” he says. “And then?”

  “I went into town. I took the T-banen to Majorstuen, sauntered around for a bit, went to Annika’s in Nordstrand. There I . . . I told her what had happened, and she drove me down to the police station to report Sigurd missing. I had spoken to a woman from the police that morning – had called to report him missing – but she’d told me I should wait until at least twenty-four hours had passed.”

  “And then?”

  “Then we went back to Nordstrand. I slept at Annika’s place.”

  “That’s correct,” Annika says.

  She’s standing wide-legged with crossed arms, like a bouncer wearing a suit and leather boots.