The Boy at the Door

by Alex Dahl

  ‘She’s buried a few miles from Munkfors,’ said Ellen, very gently.

  ‘At... at my farm?’

  ‘No, sweetie,’ said Ellen. ‘I don’t know if you know it, but it’s a small village called Eckfors. There’s a little church there, on a hill overlooking the river. Your mother was christened there.’ I had to swallow many times, keeping my eyes on the tall trees towering above the road outside. ‘It wasn’t easy to find out, but the priest in Munkfors suggested I check with Eckfors since they didn’t have any record of Therese.’ I nodded, but felt like I was balancing on the edge of a precipice at this sudden, unexpected information. Therese Lucasson, née Severin, christened and buried in a little church overlooking the river at Eckfors. How could I not have known this? How could it be, that for all the years I was lost in the murky sludge of heroin addiction, I had never once wondered about what had happened to my mother’s remains? What kind of a person was that? Let her go, Dr Faber would say. You are not you then, you can only ever be you now. Still, I found it difficult in those moments to breathe, or think, or even just be.

  Ellen realized, because that’s the kind of person she is. She asked if I wanted to smoke a cigarette in the car before we walked up the hill to the church, but I said no.

  My mother is buried next to her own mother and father. This brought me some unexpected comfort, more than I imagined. That she is with them made me cry, and I decided there and then that one day I, too, shall be buried in that same plot in Eckfors, overlooking the river, next to my mother forever. I said this to Ellen, and her face went from careful and sympathetic to alert and serious. I guess I can’t blame her for always fearing a setback, a swift relapse to the shadowlands at the very edge of life. I told her that I didn’t mean now, but someday, and she nodded and I think she wondered whether she’d outlive me, in spite of the fact that she’s thirty years my senior.

  I keep rereading my words, both the ones I just wrote, and the ones from last year, and I can’t stop thinking about how it seems unbelievable that in this one year I have gone from that bench by the river when Ellen first spoke of the program, to that other bench by my mother’s grave in Eckfors, overlooking a peaceful, slow-flowing river, sober and relatively capable, crying but not broken.

  *

  With all of these improvements changes, I came to miss some things that many others seem to have that I just didn’t think could be an option for me. Like a partner. I had never had a boyfriend, or spent intimate time with a man other than for money or smack. It was always blatantly obvious that nobody could love someone like me. But then, Ellen does, and Josef, and Sofia, and a very small part of me started to think that maybe... maybe so could someone else. A couple of months after I finished the first stage of the program and began to feel that maybe I really could be squeaky clean, I sent Oliver, Sylvia and Roy’s neighbor, a postcard from Arvika. On it, I wrote my telephone number and asked if perhaps he’d like to meet me for a walk and a smoke (no crack) one day. He came, and we ended up walking really far upstream, just talking and talking in a way I don’t think we ever did back when I lived in the garage, and the thing is, Oliver is actually really funny. I don’t remember that so much either, but then, it is true what they say – a heroin addict is never really interested in anything or anybody else. It’s yourself and the smack, that’s it.

  Oliver is only twenty-one but he is so mature and knows what he wants his life to look like. We, he always says, like I’ll always be in his life. We could go back to school, get some qualifications, maybe go to Poland for medical school or veterinary school, whatever you want, babe... When he talks like that I sometimes just have to laugh, and he laughs, too, but his eyes are serious. Ellen and Josef still have their rule about boys and although they really like Oliver and think he is a good influence on me, he isn’t allowed to stay over at the house or join us on the weekends when we go to the country cabin and things like that. It’s okay, though, because whenever I think about it, I am always surprised that Oliver hangs around in spite of not getting any sex for it. He seems happy to hold my hand, solemnly running his fingers across the mesh of scars on my arms. We have all the time in the world, Anni, he says, but I wonder how he can be so sure about this – it’s like he doesn’t know that terrible things can happen to you at any time.

  *

  Since the day I went to live with Ellen and Josef and Sofia, we travel every other weekend to their country house, a very basic torp an hour away, near the Norwegian border. The property consists of a small main house from the seventeenth century, painted a deep red with baby blue windows, and three tiny huts surrounding the main house. Inside the biggest dwelling – the hovudstugu, there is a basic kitchen with an open fireplace, and a living room with two ornate sofas handmade by Josef’s grandfather. The three small annexes stand around the main house, and in each is a small bedroom with built-in bunk beds. The beds are covered by white-and-red crocheted bedspreads, made by Josef’s grandmother. There is nothing on the plain pine-clad walls. The sparseness of the torp is quite incredible, and the first time I came, reeling with withdrawal, I just sat rocking back and forth on the bottom bunk in my annex, staring at the pine walls, itching all over. There is no running water, and the bathroom is a wooden shack with a hole in the floor. It doesn’t exactly sound like paradise, but to me it is. I know that the time spent at the torp, just focusing on the very basics of life; heat, food, water, breathing – contributed to my recovery. Josef and I sit for hours at the edge of a floating pier on the lake, waiting for the sudden pull on the fishing line, and though it quite often doesn’t happen and we end up eating tinned spaghetti by candlelight, there is something about the quiet beauty of the smooth, black lake water that reached me, even in the earliest days.

  At the torp, Ellen likes to make wicker baskets. She walks out into the forest and collects armfuls of birch roots, then sits on a crocheted blanket on the grass in between the little houses and coils the thin roots in and out of the stakes until sweet little baskets take form. At first, I found it meditative and almost hypnotic to watch her, and then I began helping by handing Ellen the next root, until one day I just started making a basket of my own. I didn’t think I’d be able to do it, because at first my hands shook so much it took a whole day to make a really small, ugly one, but it seems like it has actually helped with the shaking. Now, when we go there, I fish with Josef first thing in the morning and then I spend the afternoons coiling baskets.

  Ellen must have known that these were things that could help. She has talked before of when she was younger and worked for a year in the Alps in a small alternative school for troubled disadvantaged teenagers. Some of the methods used there became really important in her own work at Kungshemmet, she says. The kids, who’d come from all over the world, and had a range of issues, from addiction to PTSD to various autism diagnoses to a history of terrible abuse, came to the school to learn to live in themselves, as Ellen put it. It was not a traditional school that placed much focus on classroom learning; rather, the kids were given a lot of responsibility and learned by doing. The school was a small, self-sufficient mountain farm, and the students had to entirely run it by themselves, only overseen and observed by adult ‘guides’. They farmed vegetables, kept livestock, traded dairy at nearby markets, and so on. If they screwed up, they wouldn’t eat, was the understanding. But they didn’t screw up – they got better, and many of the former students have gone on to forge proper careers and live stable lives.

  I know the mountain farm must have inspired Ellen when she took on Project Annika, as I affectionately call it at home, because from the very beginning, she has insisted on me doing physical tasks every day. At first, it would be things like peeling potatoes or arranging the firewood in the hearth or making all the beds – things even I could master with my badly shaking hands. After a while, it became cooking full nutritious meals from scratch, and now even with vegetables Ellen and I have grown from seeds at the torp.

  There is also a little dog,
which is actually Ellen’s sister’s, but she is getting divorced, so little Billy stays with us quite often. He’s a schnauzer and a strange little soul. He doesn’t seem to be that interested in people generally but, for whatever reason, he loves me, and so now it is my job to walk him when he’s here, and the long walks by the river or in the forests behind the torp are my favorite times. Billy can’t see the aftermath of what I spent so many years doing to myself. He doesn’t care about scars, inside or out, or about my brown, crumbling teeth, or about the way my hands still shake a lot sometimes when I fasten his lead. He just loves me anyway.

  So these are some of the things that Ellen and Josef thought would work, but there is something else, too – something which I think is nearly as important as all the other factors combined: Sofia. She is seven years younger than me, nineteen now, and for some reason I feel like she is how I could have been if my mother hadn’t died, if I hadn’t had to live with Sven and Marie, if I hadn’t felt that the only way I could keep living was cocooned inside a drugged haze. She’s unsullied, sporty, kind and uncomplicated. We aren’t friends, exactly; she’s more like an older sister to me than anything else. I want to go back to having a chance, however slim, to be like her.

  *

  I haven’t written in a few weeks, because so many things have happened – good things. Oliver got into a program where you can redo your grades from school in six months and a medical school in Krakow has said he can go there next year if he manages to get at least a B in every subject. When Ellen heard about this, she telephoned the program and explained about me and how I’d managed to turn my life around and that I should be given all the help available to continue to progress in my life, and then they said I could come as well. Ellen is trying to find a veterinary school in Krakow that can take me if I manage to get my exams in May. So now I spend most of my evenings in my room with the books. Sometimes I miss the comfort of all the physical tasks Ellen encouraged me to do in the evenings, but I know that this is the only chance I have to make things even better, and I have a lot of learning to do. It isn’t as difficult as I thought, and lots of the things I’m reading are actually really interesting. It’s sad, too, how many things I didn’t know. Wars have been fought in my lifetime that I’d never heard about. Words that everyone else seems to know, I’d never even heard – you don’t need sophisticated language to shoot up. Apprehensive, atrocity, audacity, permeable, lucidity, theology, conceited, election, genre, mitigation: all words found in my textbooks today that I had to look up and copy down in my notebook. Ellen says I shouldn’t think of the notebook as a record of all the things I don’t know, but as a collection of things I have now learned. I didn’t even know who the prime minister of Sweden was until I read about him in my social studies book. It’s Fredrik Reinfeldt, for the record.

  Sofia asked at the stables where she rides whether I could volunteer to help with the horses, since I dream of becoming a vet. Every Thursday I go there and help muck out the boxes, brush the riding-school horses and change their water trays. There is one horse, an old Värmlandshäst called Spooky, who reminds me so much of Besta that it made me feel all choked up the first time I saw him. Then I started telling myself that it had all been a mistake and that it really is Besta, and so now, I whisper Besta in his ear, and it feels as though in the midst of this whole new life, I got to hold on to one small piece of the past, too.

  Annika L., Krakow, January 2013

  I imagine the experts would find it difficult to conclude whether it comes down to one massive wrong turn, or a series of minor bad decisions when it comes to a case like mine. I’m back on the smack, back on the meth, but on the upside, at least I’m still writing in this fucking journal, right? All is not lost – I’ve decided to write down some of the things that have led to what’s going on now, because then I might be able to read back and see more clearly what I should do. It isn’t easy to think clearly anymore. It’s not that I can’t think, but more that all the thoughts come at the same time. It’s very late in the night, well into the hours that some people call morning, but it’s still dark outside, because it is winter. I am standing by the window, resting this book on the window sill, because I’ve sold all of the furniture in the flat so there isn’t anywhere to sit. Even the bed is gone, picked up by a couple of hefty guys soon after I put it online. I can see a few spread-out lights, but most of the houses still lie quiet and dark. I think about all the people inside, snug in their beds, peaceful in the last hour before the alarm goes off. Well, I’m high as fuck and don’t intend to go anywhere tomorrow, so staying up all night isn’t really a problem for me.

  It’s always loss, isn’t it, that destabilizes everything and makes all the bricks inside of you come tumbling down. It’s always the beginning or end of love that changes everything, that makes all the difference between happy and sad, capable and completely incapable. Ellen would say that isn’t necessarily true, that we aren’t slaves to external circumstances, that it is possible to build spaces inside ourselves that remain untouched by others, spaces that are only ours. But it’s true for me.

  We made it to Krakow. I can’t be bothered now to read back all the entries in this journal from the early days here in Poland, because it’s mostly stuff about how excited I was, how long I’d been clean for, how great Oliver is, and so on. Even though I must have thought writing things like that was a good idea at the time I wrote it, it is now pretty obvious that it wasn’t. I must have thought that one day I’d read them back, happily remembering lots of little episodes of that new life with nostalgia, safe in my continued clean cocoon. I can’t have imagined, then, that I would be so broken and so bitter that even rereading my own words would be impossible. I’m high on heroin. I’ve smoked crack with one of the guys from the club, and I’m about to smoke some more, and while I feel as lucid and cool as ever, the truth is, I’ve never been as high as I was in the two years after Ellen launched Project Annika. That’s the truth. It’s worse now, much worse than it ever was when I didn’t know what it could be like, when I still thought smack was my friend. Some friend, I know that now. It’s a fucking death sentence.

  Krakow. Yes. We made it here, Oliver and I. It wasn’t entirely uncomplicated. By the time we were ready to go, Oliver’s parents had found out about our relationship, and were completely horrified. Before we sat for our final exams, we used to study together in my room (door wide open), or in Oliver’s (door firmly shut…). Every time I got off the bus across the street from Oliver’s house, I’d quickly glance up the road at Sylvia and Roy’s house, and shudder at the thought of that disgusting garage and the bloody mattress and how, almost every night, there would be a knock on the door that I’d have to answer, or no smack. How far I’ve come, I used to think, letting myself into Oliver’s basement room, which had a separate entrance. We’d kept our relationship secret from his parents, because he said they’d been aware of some seedy goings-on at Sylvia and Roy’s, and just wouldn’t understand if their son was involved in them. Maybe someday, Oliver said, when you’re a vet and I’m a doctor, and we come back home and build a house on Fritzgatan overlooking the river... I didn’t mind much, because I was still getting used to family life at Ellen and Josef’s, and didn’t really need having to adapt to another family.

  But then one day, Roy saw me leaving Oliver’s basement and he began shouting and swearing, right there on the streets, and saying things that weren’t true about me anymore, things like fucking whore and junkie bitch. It had never occurred to me that Roy would be angry with me for leaving, but then I suppose I hadn’t really given him or Sylvia much thought since that morning I’d woken up and Ellen had come for me. Oliver’s parents came outside, and at the sight of me and Oliver and Roy all shouting and crying on the lawn in front of their house, put two and two together and had a total fit. In the end, they refused to speak to Oliver and didn’t help him with any money even though they’d promised to, so he had to take a big student loan. As months went by and we got used t
o the new life in Poland, which was stressful and difficult but exciting, too, Oliver became almost obsessed about making up with his parents. Every attempt at contacting them would be met with the same cool rebuff, and even though he didn’t tell me exactly what they said, it was pretty obvious that there was no hope for reconciliation unless he got rid of the junkie bitch.

  So he left me. For another Swedish girl – preppy Åsa from Gothenburg, who’s slightly cross-eyed and speaks real slow, but who has never, ever smoked crack or shot up smack in between her toes. Did I care that much? I probably didn’t, in the grand scheme of things. If I’m honest, Oliver is probably far better suited to Åsa than he ever was to me, but what struck me hard was how loss seems to be so very random. Some people get to have everything and keep it, while some have very little and lose that, over and over. It made me angry. Looking back, I think what made me get clean in the first place had a lot to do with Dr Faber’s theories on acceptance. After all the years of impenetrable drug-haze, confusion and bewilderment, becoming clean was only possible because Dr Faber and I focused so much on acceptance. Acceptance of myself and my shortcomings, but also of the past and the fact that I could never change it anyway. It was a bit like prayer; it felt put-on and a bit silly, but it worked for a while in its simple innocence – Just let it all go...

  When I got angry, I wanted revenge. Because I hadn’t yet reached the next level on Dr Faber’s magic recipe for recovery – self-love – I directed the anger and hurt and feelings of revenge towards myself. By now, of course, I knew that smack was no friend of mine, and I didn’t have the nerve to go anywhere near it straight away, so instead I began to drink. Not a lot, but more than somebody like me could handle. I was doing well with my studies at that point, and had made a few friends, and instead of focusing mostly on my work and only occasionally socializing with them, I turned that balance around, and began going out drinking most nights. I’d wake up feeling terrible and hating myself, and I’d swear that I’d get it together and reach out and help someone else for a change. Ironically, that’s how I met Krysz.